Category Archives: The Art of Reviewing

What I’m Reading 2012 and Other Business

Posted on January 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

What I’m Reading 2012

Overview: I’m currently reading five books.  Each poses certain challenges (in some cases, self-imposed challenges) to me as a reader, reviewer, critic, historian, and aesthete.  While New Year’s Resolutions get broken seconds after they’re uttered, these challenges will form an informal backbone to my reading schedule.  As it stands, I want to increase the frequency of my blog posts from bimonthly to weekly.  (The same goes for my other blog, Coffee is for Closers.)  The positive responses from readers has really inspired me to do more.

As you’ll see with these challenges, I want to “raise the bar” with the Driftless Area Review’s content.

The Book: The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong

The Challenge: Woodward and Armstrong’s book chronicles the Burger Supreme Court from 1969 to 1975.  The Supreme Court decided on many significant cases, including the Pentagon Papers, Roe v Wade, and others.  Reading The Brethren has inspired me to write a multibook, deep-reading-style review, focusing on the Supreme Court.  For this review, I will also read The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin, and Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman.

As a historian, the review will pose a great challenge.  The nice thing about the three titles is how each reflects off each other.  The Brethren follows the decisions of Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, two long-lasting Justices and FDR appointments.  Black died in 1971, paving the way for President Nixon to nominate and appoint William Rehnquist.  The Nine examines the Court during the Dubya Years, including the consequences of Rehnquist’s death, Rehnquist having then been elevated from Justice to Chief Justice.  The three books reveal the slow movement from a liberal to a conservative agenda.  The differing genres will be interesting to evaluate, since Brethren and Nine are works of investigative journalism and Scorpions is popular history.  It should prove to be an interesting project.

The Book: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2, by Karl Marx

The Challenge: Currently back-burnered for more compelling books.  Unfortunately, some sequels are worse than the originals.  Unlike Marx’s first volume, Volume 2 is a slow, tedious, bone-dry work, more akin to an economics textbook.  In addition, Friedrich Engels edited the present volume following Marx’s death.  The work exists as an amalgamation of several of Marx’s notebooks.  While the work presents relevant material on the operations of political economy, it is almost too dull to read.  The challenge will involve trying to read it without falling asleep.

A further challenge involves me writing more essays in my series Essays on Capital.  I want to continue this series, since the first volume presented a rich seam to mine.

The Book: Shadows Walking, by Douglas R. Skopp

The Challenge: Douglas Skopp’s self-published novel is a revelation, a well-written exploration of two doctor’s lives in Nazi Germany.  I will review the novel on its own, but it will become part of a larger project.  This project involves reading three massive, controversial novels about the Third Reich.  Two specifically focus on the Eastern Front: Europe Central, by William Vollmann, and The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell.  The third novel – The Tunnel, by William Gass – is technically a “university novel,” but the subject matter associated with the protagonist feeds into the works of Vollmann, Littell, and Skopp.

The final challenge will be psychological, since these four novels survey the darkest aspects of modern history.

The Book: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama

The Challenge: This is the second history by Simon Schama that I’ve read.  I previously read Rembrandt’s Eyes, his magisterial double biography of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt von Rijk.  As with Rembrandt’s Eyes, Citizens is an epic account, mixing biography, pop culture history, visual culture, politics, foreign policy, and tax law into a compelling page-turner.

French history is a particular enthusiasm of mine.  The challenge will be tempering this enthusiasm with the disinterested eye of a historian and bringing to bear my previous knowledge in French literature, historiography, and pop culture.

Blog Feature Revival

This year will see the revival of blog features on long hiatus.  The first will be the return of The Art of Reviewing.  French theorist Roland Barthes and prolific Gnostic Bardolator Harold Bloom are the first two on the docket.

The limited series 5000 Pages of Kissinger will conclude with my review of Years of Renewal, Kissinger’s final volume of his memoirs.  I have the skeleton of a review in place that I wrote several months ago.  The Arab Spring of 2011 and the nascent Occupy movement have made it a challenge to contextualize Kissinger’s work without seeming immediately outdated.  Both Arab Spring and Occupy have overturned the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm of supporting US-friendly free market dictatorships and absolutist monarchies in the Middle East.  These movements, along with the Tea Party movement and Ron Paul’s Small Government Neo-Isolationism, present opportunities for the government that acts in our name (if you’re a US reader of this blog) to reassess its global strategy, foreign policy interests, and free market cheerleading.

For decades, the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm had operated as a given within the global foreign policy architecture.  That given is no longer true and no longer equipped to deal with the Middle Eastern calls for freedom and the end of economic inequality.  As of this writing, the Arab Spring has become the symbol for freedom and liberation from oppression.  The end-result of these protests and coups is still unwritten.

“The Best 80s Sci Fi and Fantasy Films” will continue with an installment on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Other Business

While I would like to this blog a major part of my life, creative projects and personal obligations inevitably get in the way.  These include a random assortment of personal and professional business.

I am getting married in early October and planning a wedding is a time-consuming endeavor.

On the reviewing front, I have a small pile of books from the Permanent Press I want to get around to reading.  I also have a couple novels from Archipelago Books I want to read and review.

My job is second shift and a temporary assignment.  Like many, many others who have been displaced, abandoned, or simply eliminated from the free market economy, I have a very real and very pressing goal of achieving full-time employment.  (The kind of employment associated with health benefits and paid time off.)  Working second shift has made it more challenging to post reviews, but with any challenge, it can be overcome.  On that note, if any blog readers like what they see and want to hire me as a writer, I’m all ears.  My contact information is in the Submitting Materials section.

Finally, I am working on the last round of revisions for a science fiction thriller.  I am planning to resubmit it to a small publisher who showed interest in the work.  In my query letter, I described my story as “The Sopranos meet Dune.”  I’m making this creative project a priority, since I am nearly finished with the revisions.  Overall, I have been pleased, since the revisions have strengthened the novel.

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part IV

Posted on June 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

Nathan Rabin and the Countercanonical Critique

The AV Club has carved out a niche of reputable pop cultural criticism.  Nathan Rabin has been profiled before in the Art of Reviewing.  It focused on his unique style and examined his ongoing series My Year of Flops.  Rabin’s bombastic style plays off his subject matter, whether it is a movie that bombed at the box-office or a hip hop review.  Rabin has expanded his critical eye to include country music (Nashville or Bust!) and pop ephemera (THEN! That’s What They Called Music).

Movie flops, the NOW That’s What I Call Music! compilations, and country music constitute a growing countercanonical critique of pop culture.  Each has a distinct relationship with “the popular.”  Rabin dissects the commercial flops, placing them in three categories: Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success.  The categories are terms lifted from the agonizingly whimsical rom-com Elizabethtown.  Box office receipts are misleading values, since film is a collective collaborative art form.  A work of genius (say, 12 Monkeys) could succeed in technical execution, but flounder from a mishandled promotional campaign.  Other works, like Bladerunner, become genre gold-standards even though they did not reap major box office sales.  Time has rewarded Bladerunner, it has not rewarded Battlefield Earth, a badly executed trainwreck whose only appeal lay with cinema fans with a masochistic streak.  Bladerunner could be considered a Secret Success, while Battlefield Earth is a Fiasco.  A work that lacks campy outrageousness is simply a Failure.  Fiascos have the morbid appeal of a car crash.  Failures are just boring.

In Nashville or Bust! Rabin brings his critical acumen sharpened by listening to hip hop and translates it into fascinating profiles of country music stars.  The connection is not an obvious one, especially since hip hop and country music suffer from being caricatured by mainstream pop.

Answering all the questions and cliffhangers from NOW! That’s What I Call Music 71.

Rabin explains his aims in THEN! That’s What They Call Music:

So I thought it would be interesting, edifying, and, yes, even a little arousing to listen to the entire NOW That’s What I Call Music! series in chronological order to see what the albums say, individually and collectively, about the way music has evolved and devolved, and to explore some of the weirder and more obscure nooks and crannies of pop culture.  …

A strange spirit of musical democracy pervades the CD. It’s a curious world where one-hit wonders like Marcy Playground breathe the same rarified air as Janet Jackson and Radiohead. For a brief period, they were peers, at least where Billboard and NOW That’s What I Call Music! is concerned.

Part of the train-wreck fascination of NOW That’s What I Call Music! involves seeing familiar songs in bizarre new contexts. To cite volume one’s most extreme example, Radiohead’s “Karma Police” is sandwiched between Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Everclear’s “I Will Buy You A New Life.”

(“Introduction,” February 16, 2010)

THEN! That’s What They Call Music! provides a countercanonical critique of pop music.  The NOW! series resembles a new Windows or Apple product, engineered for immediate obsolescence.  Rabin gives these disposable products a critical reading, albeit one loaded with jokes.  Unlike the movie flops, the NOW! CDs consistently sell out and remain popular.  The critique does not simply exist to attack and belittle, but is used as a means to parse the random assemblage of the ephemeral and the eternal in pop music.

The three series have Rabin championing unpopular causes – country music, movie flops, and NOW! CD compilations – and using the criticism as a means of examining the vagaries of aesthetics and industrial capital.

Up next, two personal favorites!

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The Art of Reviewing: Anthony Bourdain

Posted on May 7, 2010 | 1 Comment

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

“I write, I eat, and I’m hungry for more.” – Tag line of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2005 – Present)

The Foodie Revolution will be televised … again.  Anthony Bourdain represents another wave of popularizers.  With Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, he has made it cool to think about food in all its various guises.  But Tony is not the first to give the American TV audience a swift metaphysical kick to the forehead.  He continues the tradition begun by former-OSS op Julia Child to familiarize and popularize French cuisine and to make us think differently about our foodways and folkways.  Both Bourdain and Child entered the mass media in a roundabout manner.  Both authored books before becoming TV personalities.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Badass

Anthony Bourdain entered the pop culture consciousness with Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. It read like a cross between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  Insane adventures combining drugs, sex, and food blitzed across the pages, the cod-Hunter S. Thompson prose reflecting the barely controlled chaos of a modern restaurant kitchen.  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Badass.  The book traces his ascent from grunt work as a line chef to running his own Manhattan restaurant, Les Halles.  One realizes that the lives of chefs are hard.  Really hard.  Long, long hours and not the best pay.  In order to score the really fresh, really good ingredients, one has to wake up early and snatch the best stuff.  The haute cuisine restaurant world is as ferocious and insular as high finance and politics.  Old rivals join together; partnerships shatter; and restaurants rise and fall with the vicious regularity of faddish tech stocks and whatever Goldman Sachs can dream up to bilk investors.  If you read the book, either it inspired you to pursue a cooking career or it scared the crap out of you.  The bombastic style combined with the insider knowledge of the restaurant world created a winning recipe for success.

Besides detailing the inner workings of a modern restaurant, Kitchen Confidential allowed Bourdain to vent his spleen on various topics.  One of these is vegetarianism and veganism:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I’ll accommodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a ‘vegetarian plate’, if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.

It should be noted that Kitchen Confidential was not his first published work.  Bourdain wrote the Bobby Gold series, hard-boiled foodie noir novels.

More books followed and Bourdain eventually entered the world of TV.  His first show, A Cook’s Tour, aired on the Food Network in 2001 and 2002.  Published in 2001, A Cook’s Tour included extended background about the TV show’s segments and his dealing with the TV production process.  Bourdain had a falling out with the Food Network.  While A Cook’s Tour introduced America to Anthony Bourdain, the short running time made watching the program a masochistic exercise.  When he explored something as vast as the tapas scene in Spain or the syncretic cuisine of Singapore, by the time he scratched the surface the show ended.  It was not the best fit.

No Reservations and the Second Foodie Revolution

Bourdain’s second TV series, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations has aired on the Travel Channel since 2005.  Throughout the series, Bourdain has transformed from culinary badass to world traveler.  Hunter S. Thompson gave way to Sir Richard Francis Burton.  Like Burton, Bourdain has traveled the world, exploring little known folkways and sending his dispatches to a hungry TV audience.  The verbal bombast remains, but tempered by time, maturity, and comfort with the medium.

The series has explored his favorite locales including Vietnam and delved into areas one normally does not associate with foodie culture.  He has explored the Rust Belt, the elephant graveyard of late capitalism, Montana, Namibia, and Scotland.  In each episode, an hour rather than a half hour, Bourdain gives an overview of the region, styles ranging from the journalistic to the psychedelic.  He also gives equal due to street food and haute cuisine.

Bourdain has debunked the common mythology that food need to be expensive or rare to be good.  The cheap street food or little bodega has food as good as anything concocted by Thomas Keller or Mario Batali.  Haute cuisine just puts a nice frame around the same ingredients.  But both venues receive accolades when the owners bring creativity, fresh ingredients, and presentation to their food.  He has also advocated the best eating experiences occur when one is barefoot.  This reviewer concurs.

Bourdain, like Homer Simpson, also worships at the altar of all things pig.  No Reservations has become a treatise on how the global population uses that “magical animal.”  The pig, a generally humble animal that has provided income for farmers have, through the magic of the cook, turned the various cuts into more divine meals that one could comprehend.  His legendary gut-busting meal at the Restaurant au Pied de Cochon involved a decadent exploration of pork products and foie gras.  He out-Trimalchio’ed Trimalchio.

In The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, an essay collection fitting that description, a bawdy Rabelaisian mélange of fiction, non-fiction, reportage, and screed, Bourdain turns political.  He discusses the touchy subject of Latin American immigration and the very obvious contribution they have to our dining experience.

The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn’t it?  Who the hell is American if not everybody else?  We are – and should be – a big, messy, anarchic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones.  Like our kitchens.  We need more Latinos to come here.  And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women.

The recent temper tantrums of the Right yowl for an anachronistic vision of America that is racist, unconstitutional, and hateful.  Above all and this is the most important factor, that Ideal America, this Nativist wet dream, is unbelievably boring.  Everyone white straight and Protestant?  Ugh, change the channel.  What’s on Telemundo?  There’s a reason no one reads Henry James any more.  (Although they should because beneath the vapid WASPy exterior, the characters, heiresses and nouveau riche robber barons from the Reconstruction Era, play like Paris Hilton celebutantes chasing men.  There’s usually less cocaine use in Henry James novels.)

The horror!  The horror!

The books, shows, and magazine articles have enlightened Americans to rethink about what they eat.  The naked lunch at the end of their fork, to use William S. Burroughs’s phrase.  Food is sensual, elemental, reflects where we are and the ingredients were proud.  Food encapsulates history, capital, politics, and biology into tasty little packages for our consuming pleasure.  If Julia Child was the First Wave, Anthony Bourdain is the Second Wave.

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The Art of Reviewing: Cintra Wilson (Part One)

Posted on February 20, 2010 | 2 Comments

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

Cintra Wilson

Cintra Wilson was a columnist at Salon, retail reviewer in the New York Times Fashion & Style section (Critical Shopper), and lately political columnist (the C-Word), appearing in the New Haven Advocate, the Hartford Courant, and the Fairfield Weekly.  Wilson also authored the ferocious cultural commentary entitled A Massive Swelling: celebrity re-examined as a grotesque, crippling disease and other cultural revelations.  Imagine the bastard love child of Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag.  Imagine Antonin Artaud, but with better fashion sense.  Imagine Vivienne Westwood in print, both the Vivienne Westwood the punk rock fashion terrorist and Vivienne Westwood the Neo-Victorian artificer of haute couture.  If you can imagine these things, then you can imagine what reading Cintra Wilson is like.  She is a rara avis that can slaughter pop culture sacred cows with intelligence and wit fueled by genuine outrage while bringing the usually staid, incestuous maelstrom of contemporary political commentary cast through the darkly comedic lens of pop culture.  Whether it’s reading about an Ike Turner concert or about the latest idiocies of the Beltway, she possesses the singular talent to piss you off while making you laugh.

A Massive Swelling: Illuminations for the Ill Communications Set

My first encounter with Cintra Wilson was reading A Massive Swelling.  In the book, Wilson covers everything from the cultures of Las Vegas (“Las Vegas – Death Star of Entertainment”), Los Angeles (“As a Dog Returneth to Its Own Vomit, So Doth L.A.”), beauty pageants (“Jump Through the Flaming Tire, Honey … Thatta Girl”), and Bruce Willis (“Crossing Boundaries: Towards a New Hermeneutics of Dumb Pimps like Bruce Willis”).  Written in the halcyon year of 2000, the book is a “yowl in disgust” at the alleged superiority of the famous.

The outrage emanating from A Massive Swelling originates in neither the dour unimaginative conservatism (“The kids these days with their hippidy hop music and their iPods.”) nor the cautious, inoffensive, jellyfish-like PC rhetoric of liberalism (“We can’t judge, because we aren’t from their culture/lifestyle/society/etc. ad infinitum”.)  Hypocrisy, lack of talent, and bad taste face obliteration in her rhetorical salvos.  The bombastic style buttresses with razor-sharp wit.  Unlike the beige prose that characterizes what passes for journalism in this country (invisible style to match invisible commitment), Wilson’s prose is purple and glorious like a drag queen brandishing a switch-blade to a bullying cop.

In the essay about Las Vegas, she describes Siegfried and Roy thus:

“Siegfried and Roy seem to best typify the kind of bizarre, hydrocephalic celebrity life that is possible to have only in Las Vegas; they are completely freaked out on a vision of themselves as beautiful New Age twin-alien butterfly emperors, and they are, through rude will, able to sell this myth to a huge cross section of humanity.”

The sentences of the essay resemble the hotels of Las Vegas: gaudy monstrosities that go on forever and shine with a vicious brilliance.  “Deep in Nevada, just like everywhere else, the face of Big Brother is that of Ronald McDonald, saluting in front of a taut vinyl American flag.”

“The rhythm of the streets of L.A. is the soundtrack of Faust performed by Yanni and John Tesh, and it sells zillions and zillions of copies.”  She describes Los Angeles as the “Mexican prison of art.”

When she attended a concert by infamous rocker Ike Turner, she rendered the account of his duet with a talented female singer in terms both sacred and profane:

“While she and Ike sweatily pawed at each other with viscous bedroom rhymes from across the stage, we felt as if we were watching the wings of an angel being dipped in McNugget sauce and chewed off by a team of alcoholics in raincoats, her halo tossed like an ultimate Frisbee into a churning lake of Shame.”

The only other place I’ve seen verbal bombast welded to social outrage was in the fiction of Alexander Theroux.

Critical Shopper: Commodity Fetishism in the Age of Apocalypse

In Critical Shopper, Wilson lends her trademark style to the éminence grise of respectable journalism, the New York Times.  Granted, the column is relegated to the Fashion & Style ghetto, but Wilson, like former theater critic Frank Rich, brings together tremendous erudition and a singular approach to an otherwise disposable area of the newspaper.  Unlike A Massive Swelling, the writing is toned down and cleaned up for the “family newspaper.”

The column regularly has her exploring the wares and characters occupying high-end fashion boutiques.  It is writing both steeped in and aware of its commodity fetishism.  She begins her description of the late Alexander McQueen’s boutique:

“Alexander McQueen’s designs strike me with such terrible love, I avoid the place — it crowbars the knees of my financial intelligence. I was in the shop once, several years ago. In a fit of design intoxication, I plonked down $500 for a perfect black pencil skirt, a reckless expenditure that launched me into nosebleeding panic for months afterward.”

(“Metamorphosis has a Price Tag,” Critical Shopper, New York Times, October 9, 2008)

Tiffany and Co.:

“Tiffany’s roots run deep in our nation’s history. Tiffany is as American as guns.  …  To accommodate a retail area, they fit an angular modern interior inside the original walls, almost like a stage set, where it manages to look both discrete and harmonious: a 1960s, butch-romantic Burt Bacharach habitat of glass, wood and mirrors, under a canopy of curlicues set into the vaulted ceiling.”

(“If Bling Had a Hall of Fame”, Critical Shopper, New York Times, July 30, 2009)

Each column ends with vital information about the store and three bulleted points.  These points distill the shopping experience into little knobs of Beckett-ian minimalism.  For Tiffany, there’s “Stiffany … Spiffany … Epiphany.”  For Barney’s Shoe Department it’s “Barmy … Belfry … Barfly.”

Wilson should be commended for reviewing shops, but adding the necessary critical gloss.  She routinely finds herself ensorcelled by the beauty and design.  Unlike a lot of her fellow citizens, drowning in debt, she knows the alienation caused by capitalism is a two-edged sword.  The desire for conspicuous consumption remains closely related to feral instincts and psychotic bloodlust.

Continued with Part Two at Coffee for Closers.

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The Art of Reviewing Special Edition(TM): The 20 Minute “Avatar” Review

Posted on February 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

If you haven’t seen it already, it’s making the rounds on Ye Olde Nettertubes.  It’s a twenty-minute review of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar.

Here’s the review, in two parts:

***

COMMENTARY

This review is a bit long and a bit cynical, but it makes a number of valid points.  It is an artful combination of pop culture references, snark, and erudition.  The description of audience manipulation on the part of the filmmakers illustrates the power and seduction of the medium.  Making an analogy between Avatar and the Garbage Pail Kids Movie (Rod Amateau, 1987) shows a stroke of demented genius.

While I have not seen the film, I have seen Dances With Wolves, Titanic, and Aliens. I’ll probably see it once it is released on DVD and enters my Netflix cue.

In our media-saturated culture, one has to be aware of how audience manipulation works.  Every work — book, TV show, film, etc. — draws us into a world that is not our own.  Avatar, with its blue color, sexy panther-monkey aliens, and CGI, opts for the easy path.  The easy route includes villains too easy to hate and an alien culture too beautifully perfect. The film’s 18th century caricature of the military mirrors its 18th century caricature of “the noble savage.”  Add the tacked-on topicality (“Did he just say ‘Shock and awe’?”) and NSFW eroticism of the Na’vi and the result is boffo box office, despite the sheer obviousness of its crapulence.  Hence why the reviewer dubbed it an “effective movie” but not a “great movie.”  Akin to the difference between Dick Van Patton and General Patton.

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The Art of Reviewing: Nathan Rabin

Posted on January 26, 2010 | 1 Comment

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

Noted Nathan Rabin impressionist David Cross.

Nathan Rabin is the hip hop music reviewer for the AV Club.  He hails from Chicago and calls himself “the world’s most secular Jew.”  His other noteworthy contributions to pop culture criticism include “Nashville or Bust,” a long-term series exploring country music, and “My Year of Flops.”  With the latter, Rabin watches movies that have flopped at the box office.  Like an alchemist, he takes the mundane topic of cinematic failure and spins it into pop culture gold.

The AV Club possesses many reviewers, each armed with encyclopedic knowledge and attitude to spare.  Rabin stands out as a reviewer with a signature style.  “My Year of Flops” embodies that style.

“My Year of Flops” also carves out a new territory in the field of film criticism.  Beneath the overlong essays, laden with sarcasm and dick jokes, is a meticulous examination of the aesthetics of failure.  Rabin explains:

On Jan. 25, 2007, I began an online blog project called “My Year Of Flops.” I had a simple goal: to lay down the foundation for a series of lucrative PowerPoint presentations that would show small-business groups how life lessons from failed films could help them maximize efficiency, exploit multiple ancillary revenue streams, and explosify profits. To qualify for My Year Of Flops, a film had to meet four unyielding/slippery criteria: It had to be a critical and commercial failure upon its release. (Domestically, at least.) It had to have, at best, a marginal cult following. Lastly, it had to facilitate an endless procession of bad jokes, facile observations, and labored one-liners.

(from Pee-Drinking Man-Fish I Have Known: My Year Of Flops, The Year In Review, January 23, 2008)

Rabin divides the films into three categories: Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success.

Cameron Crowe fail.

As overly earnest protagonists played by callow Lord Of The Rings cast members will happily inform you, Failures are simply the non-presence of success. Fiascos, meanwhile, find a strange glory in failure. At the very tip top of the rating scale, meanwhile, are Secret Successes, legitimately good movies ripe for critical reevaluation.

(from Pee-Drinking Man-Fish)

The overly earnest protagonist (Orlando Bloom) is from cinematic failure Elizabethtown.  Elizabethtown is the first flop he reviewed, calling it “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy.”

Rabin’s archaeological excavation of cinematic commercial failure makes for entertaining reading.  It’s a wonderful guide to lesser-known films and a look into aesthetic masochism.  At over a hundred entries, “My Year of Flops” contains numerous gems.  Reading like a Bizarro World Pauline Kael, the reader comes across misunderstood classics (Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate) and cinematic atrocities (Bratz: The Movie, Mac and Me), and incomprehensible train wrecks / works of genius (Southland Tales).  The style of the essays is reminiscent of Cintra Wilson, fashion reporter for the New York Times, a finely balanced mixture of erudition, humor, and style.  Here is a random assortment of passages:

The girls’ bond and commitment to subverting the dominant paradigm threatens the school’s most popular and ruthless student, a pretty blonde tyrant that Chelsea Staub plays as a cross between Josef Stalin, Paris Hilton, and Tracy Flick from Election. Staub’s father, incidentally, is played by Jon Voight, though to be fair, he probably only took the role to pay back Bratz producer Steven Paul for giving Voight his career-making role in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, as an ascot-wearing, smoking-jacket-and-Hitler-mustache-sporting German businessman engaged in a decades-long, multi-continent struggle with a super-scamp who travels around in a flying car and never ages. Voight is, after all, loyal. And completely insane. (For further proof, check him out in David Zucker’s far-right-wing Christmas Carol spoof An American Carol. On second thought, don’t. You’d only be encouraging him.)

(from “My Year Of Flops Totally Tween Case File #118: Bratz: The Movie”)

It’s not hard to see why Scenes At A Mall failed. Its characters aren’t particularly likeable and it’s hard to muster up sympathy for pampered adulterers. Scenes also falls victim to the Parental-Sex Rule. Unless you’re a 17-year-old newly adopted by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, nobody wants to imagine their parents having sex.

( from “My Year Of Flops Case File # 57 Scenes From A Mall”)

From a creative standpoint, funding a movie like Heaven’s Gate was risky. From a financial standpoint, it was fucking insane.

But I imagine that if you went to a mall and asked people whether they’d rather see a violent, depressing, visually sumptuous, nearly four-hour-long Western about a class war between ranchers and immigrants in 19th century Wyoming from the creator of The Deer Hunter or a comedy about a robot that runs for President, 99% of the respondents would opt for the comedy. I suspect that even if you limited the polling sample to Cimino’s immediate family, the results would be the same.

(from “My Year Of Flops Case File #81 Heaven’s Gate ”)

Ah, but I haven’t even gotten to the whole bit about the stone-levitating lizard-man mystic guru. After his parents are brutally murdered, Prinze Jr. becomes a protégé of a Michael Clarke Duncan-voiced mystic capable of making rocks float in the air. Yes, making rocks float in the air. Duncan’s road-show Yoda spends much of the film explaining to his protégé that he must become one with the stones and attain a curious stone/hand/spirit communion if he wants to maximize his spirit force. Suddenly that whole foolishness about midi-chlorians in The Phantom Menace doesn’t seem quite so stupid.

(from “Floppiest Flop Case File # 126 Delgo”)

Rabin’s ongoing investigation into the cinema of failure brings to mind Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Both use comedy as an entry point to question, skewer, or praise “cheesy movies.”  And that is a Secret Success.

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The Art of Reviewing: Clive James

Posted on October 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

arts-graphics-2008_1130733aClive James and his many books

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

Clive James and the Spice Girls.  A fascinating interview.

Clive James has done it all.  He’s a poet, wit, lyricist, TV presenter, cultural commentator, author, and memoirist.  This Australian native represents the Old Guard, sharing a similar background with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.  His critical stance may be a little archaic, akin to that fellow Cultural Defender Harold Bloom, but he believes in preserving the good.  His anthology of cultural profiles, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007), stands as a milestone of erudition and passion.

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James made his career as a TV presenter, working in a medium looked down upon by his peers.  His work on television honed his talents as an interviewer.  My first experiences with Clive James came from his documentary series Fame in the 21st Century.  It examined the amorphous and sometimes sinister force we call celebrity.  The documentary remains remarkably prescient, especially given the new mutations of fame and celebrity with the rise of the Internet, “reality” programming, and the blogosphere.

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Before Jon and Kate, Survivor, and the rest of it.

With one foot firmly in television, his other foot remains firmly planted in journalism.  In Cultural Amnesia, he acts as a defender of Western humanism.  He profiles a diverse of performers, authors, philosophers, and filmmakers.  What other book would profile Tacitus and Tony Curtis, Thomas Mann and Michael Mann?  The collection is also a wide-ranging indictment of the totalitarian ideology.

He profiles Robert Brasillach, an Anti-Semitic writer who received execution for his provocative, incendiary prose.  While James remains disgusted at Brasillach’s Anti-Semitism, the precedent for a democracy to execute a writer leaves him conflicted and troubled.  Cultural Amnesia also includes literary martyrs like Anna Akhmatova and Paul Celan.

James has also reviewed everything from Formula 1 racing to literature to poetry to modern art.  He helped me discover poets like WH Auden and Philip Larkin.  Clive James is also important, especially to an American audience, that there are different perspectives fashioned out of a different national experience.  He helps us see beyond the American fishbowl.

clivejames.com (Clive James’s website)

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The Art of Reviewing: Special Case File #1: The movie “300″

Posted on September 20, 2009 | 1 Comment

300_banner

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

Special Case File #1: The movie 300

In this installation of the Art of Reviewing, the focus will be on a single cultural product.  The movie is 300 (Zak Snyder, 2006).  In the halcyon days of Dubya’s second term, the film adapted a comic book written by Frank Miller.  In the process creating a sensational CGI box office hit that seemed to make Michael Bay’s film work seem understated and tightly plotted.

One of the rare pleasures of cinematic travesties is the vitriol they unleash in critics.  Two examples in particular shine out, because of their honesty, writing style, and emotional firepower.

The first is not so much a review as a vicious indictment of modern cinema.  Entitled “Rants & Hyperbolic Ejaculations,” it remains true to its form.  It is a common misperception that a rant is badly written.  A good rant is like a cruise missile, aimed to fly straight into a target and leave nothing behind.  Just because the author gets emotional and wields words like brickbat does not mean they are wrong.  Read and make up your own mind:

Excerpt from “Rants & Hyperbolic Ejaculations” by Cliff Burns

(Visit the author’s website and blog, Beautiful Desolation.)

A trip to the video store is enough to send my blood pressure soaring. As I walk up and down in the “New Release” section I see:

-200 copies of the latest comic book adaptation (crap)
-100 copies of the latest installment of a slasher/horror/snuff film franchise (“Boogeyman VIII”, “Hacksaw VI”, etc.—utter and complete crap)
-100 copies of the latest romantic comedy starring the latest pretty faces (crap)
-20 copies of the latest indie film about twenty-somethings looking for love or meaning in a world largely indifferent to their angst and vulnerability (crap)

So, inevitably, I skip “New Releases” and wander back into the stacks, hoping I’ll spot some Walter Hill actioner I haven’t seen for awhile or grabbing a full season of “Deadwood” on DVD or “South Park”, if I’m feeling particularly frisky. I also look forward to our family’s monthly trips to Saskatoon (the nearest population center of any size) so I can pillage the shelves of that city’s Central Library, securing as many of the movies on my “Wish List” as I can find. Our last excursion to Toontown was particularly rewarding; I brought back the aforementioned “Mon Oncle” along with Nicholas Ray’s “In A Lonely Place”, Georges Henri Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear”, Chaplin’s “Limelight” and a couple of films in Val Lewton’s weird oeuvre. Not one movie was more recent than 1956. Fuck it, what’s the point?

CGI (computer graphics) has taken over the world. Now you can shoot movies without sets, without a coherent script, without expensive crowd scenes and there is no limit to what you can portray. You can propel your audience from one end of the universe to the other, from the far future to the distant past.

Take “300” for example. Yes, take it and stick it up your ass.

I know, I know, it was #1 at the box office for three weeks and everybody and his kid brother was telling you what a brilliant film it was. Funny thing that: you had high school students lining up at the movie theatres, inflating its gross earnings…and yet the film was supposed to be “18A”, wasn’t it? That means there were a whole lotta theatre owners looking the other way as pimply faced kids with fuzz on their chins ponied up the dough and went inside to see one of the most ultra-violent shows since Leatherface strapped on a chainsaw and went looking for fun. Where were the folks who are supposed to be guarding our kids against such smut…more to the point, where the fuck were their parents?

I think one reviewer put it best when he said the target audience for “300” was “emotionally disturbed fourteen year olds”.

You know, of course, that “300” was based on a comic book by Frank Miller. That’s right, comic book. Go ahead, defenders of so-called “graphic novels”, take me to task. I’ve read plenty of ’em (including offerings by Miller, Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon, etc.) and it’s my contention that the basic level of writing hasn’t much improved since I was a tweenie devouring Batman and Spiderman comics by the pound.

But the comic book/graphic novel is the perfect format for brain dead twerps who are daunted by all those words in traditional books. They need purty pictures to keep their attention. Ritalin, apparently, isn’t doing the job.

The sad thing is the story of the Spartans is one of the greatest ever told. I urge you to find a of copy of Stephen Pressfield’s amazing account of the battle of Thermopylae, Gates of Fire. You will be absolutely blown away.

The makers of “300” utterly fail to capture the human drama, the scale of the sacrifice, opting to slavishly adapt Miller’s comic book, subjecting every frame to computer tweaking, creating lovely, eye-grabbing tableaux…with nothing at the centre. “Visually stunning” is the term I’ve read over and over again in almost every review. Okay, it’s nice to look at but what about the stupid script, the histrionic over-acting, the inaccuracies? Mere quibbles, supporters sniff dismissively.

When I first saw the promo ad for “300” I was, alternately, enraged and amused. The “Matrix”-like choreography was ridiculous…but the Scottish brogue of the chap who was cast as the Spartan king Leonidas was hilarious. I mean, this fucker sounded like Willie, the janitor from “The Simpson’s”! I was soon entertaining friends and family by re-enacting my version of “300”: “Lissen, laddie, we Spartans are mighty tough people and dinnae think you Purrsian gits are gonnae walk over us…”

“300” is a movie made by people raised on video games for gamers whose brains have been devoured by years of hours spent battling virtual ogres, their thumbs swelling to an unnatural size (frontal lobes shrinking commensurately). If you liked the movie, you’re a moron; if you bobbed your head in eager agreement when that fathead Richard Roeper called Miller’s comic book the “Citizen Kane”(!) of graphic novels, you’ve obviously no idea what film he was alluding to. Mentioning “300” in the same breath as Welles’ masterwork is like comparing an “Archie Digest” to Moby Dick. So fuck you very much, Richard Roeper.

In “Kane”, Orson Welles revolutionized an art form and created a landmark film that sixty years later still tops critics’ polls as the greatest movie ever made. How will posterity treat “300”? As just another mindless blockbuster, a manufactured, computer-simulated experience in the tradition of “Titanic” and Peter Jackson’s overblown take on “King Kong”.

These films have no heart, no brains and, in the final analysis, none of the gripping human drama that makes great art resonate down through the ages. They are fluff, confections, deserving nothing from serious film mavens but our contempt and vilification.

“300” is cinema for the lobotomized.

The second review was written by Matt Christman for his blog, Worse than Hitler.  (Full disclosure: Matt and I were both teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.)  While Burns’s rant is a brilliant use of the long form to deconstruct 300, Christman takes the film out at the knees with verbal precision and snark.  For similar satirical wit and ferocity, one could examine the epigrammatic work of Karl Kraus and Ambrose Bierce.

From Worse than Hitler, a blog by Matt Christman

A Mathematical Movie Review

Triumph of the Will + God of War on Playstation 3 * The Tony Curtis and Lawrence Olivier scene from Spartacus / The messageboards at FreeRepublic.com = 300

Similar spectacles of critical hyperventilation have followed in the wake of controversial films, from The Last Temptation of Christ to JFK to the Golden Compass.  In all cases, astute readers should follow the simple dictum, “Consider the source.”  When reading reviews, you should know where the reviewer is coming from.  Who are these people that love 300?  Why do they love the movie?  Are those reasons valid?

Taste is a subjective phenomenon.  However, it should not be immediately dismissed because of its inherent subjectivity.  Varieties of internal and external factors make up every person’s sensitivities regarding taste.  The movie 300 is a good litmus test for assessing taste.

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The Art of Reviewing: Jeremy Clarkson

Posted on September 12, 2009 | Leave a comment

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Source: The London Times

Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

Jeremy Clarkson.  Depending on whom you talk to, mentioning his name usually follows adulation or vilification.  The tall, shaggy-haired presenter of Top Gear and Driving columnist for the London Times, brings a sensational edge to the staid world of automobile reviewing.

Prone to bombastic statements, dismissive of anti-pollution legislation, and worshipful acolyte of Ferrari, Clarkson is an equal opportunity offender.  Reading his reviews in the Times and watching his segments on Top Gear reveal someone madly, obsessively in love with the car and the combustion engine.

His review on the Spyker C8 is evidence of that:

Consider his review of the Bugatti Veyron:

Finally, his review of the Bentley GT:

Besides being solidly entertained, Clarkson offers pertinent information on each vehicle (horsepower, design, handling, etc.) and a few choice zingers.  The three segments are also miniature works of art, showcasing the cars in a worshipful fashion but never descending into the empty visual posturing of noted car commercial auteurs Michael Bay and Tony Scott.

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The Art of Reviewing: Introductory Remarks

Posted on August 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

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Every blog needs a large-scale project. The Art of Reviewing will explore reviewing as an art form and as a valuable element to understanding society.  During this project, I will profile specific reviewers of merit.  Several specific cases also explore other facets of reviewing.

What makes a good reviewer?

A review is only good as the individual reviewing the work.  But what is meant by good?  Good – like value, civilization, and culture – is a loaded term.  It should be not be used in a cavalier fashion or overloaded with moral baggage.  Does the reviewer have a technique, a perspective, and a knowledge base?  If any of these is found lacking, then the entire enterprise will become suspect.

Below are basic requirements for any review, regardless of length or intent:

  • Knowledge of genre/medium.

Every reviewer should have a basic understanding of what he or she is reviewing.  If not, they aren’t much of a reviewer in the first place.  One facet of this understanding is a general knowledge of the genre and/or medium.  While a complete understanding is impossible, since humans lack omniscience, a reviewer with the contours and trends of the genre is a valuable commodity.  The same goes for reviewers with a keen understanding of technological change and its impact on the audience as it relates to the work’s medium.

  • Knowledge of the author.

A reviewer should have a basic understanding of the author’s biographical details, including historical, cultural, and political information relevant to the discussion.

  • Critical wisdom.

Critical wisdom is conceptually vague, since it is hard to quantify.  A reviewer who misses a basic biographical fact or a major work in the genre can be slighted for the mistake, but how does one measure critical wisdom?  The nebulous nature makes it hard to quantify, but age, experience, and previous work may be helpful.  One gains wisdom not through the raw accumulation of information, but through the discerning use for that information.

  • Right to change his or her mind.

Humans, the ones writing the reviews, are fallible.  We all make mistakes.  Critics aren’t immune.  One of the risks of reviewing is speaking with confidence about a work and rendering judgment.  In the end, that judgment may be false.  A reviewer has a right to change his or her mind regarding any judgment rendered on a work.  This isn’t the same as bowing down to pressure from the mob or giving in to coercion.  Intellectual flexibility and humility are characteristics of a good reviewer.

  • Unique perspective.

Everyone has his or her own perspective.  A reviewer is no different.  With the plethora of information available in all kinds of media, there are hordes of reviewers out there.  Most are interchangeable and otherwise forgettable, evaporating mist on the critical landscape.  A reviewer with a unique perspective stands out among others.  A unique perspective also bespeaks of individuality and ownership.  “This is my opinion and I’ll stand by it.”  In the end, reviews are unique cultural products about another cultural product.  Even in the most perfunctory review, there should be more there than a mere rating and measurement.

  • Acknowledging biases/prejudices, etc.

Similar to the issue of critical wisdom, a quality reviewer recognizes his or her own biases and prejudices.  Every year, tons and tons of stuff get produced.  Reviewers see only a fraction of this.  Because of the impossibility to know every genre or author in totality, biases and prejudices are bound to pop up sooner or later.  This is another inevitability of humanity.  The reviewer should recognize the biases and prejudices within their work.  Readers should also be discerning enough to recognize them, since no reviewer is the absolute authority.  Reviewers should be questioned about their biases and prejudices.

The function of reviewing

Our culture easily dismisses the reviewer.  “Who listens to critics anyway?” is a common refrain.  What does reviewing offer?  The only difference is that the monetary investment may be smaller.  Before one buys a house, one should probably read up on sub-prime mortgages and reviews of the neighborhood.  Or one should read product reviews from Consumer Reports before buying a DVD player, TV, or some other essential appliance.  Why not do the same before buying a book or seeing a movie?  On the practical side, at least know the rating and bare outline of the plot to protect your children from any unwarranted swearing or nudity.

At root, the review is informative.  It should inform the reader.  Short reviews excel at this function.  Longer reviews can also be informative, going into more detail about the artist, adding historical context, and enlighten the reader are about similar works relevant to the discussion.  The function of the review is dependent on the needs of the reader.  Sometimes a reader needs a brief summary.  At other times, a more detailed discussion is necessary.

Blogcritics.org offers short informative reviews while the London Review of Books offers essay-length reviews.

The art of reviewing

Reviewing is writing and writing is an art form.  It is also a craft, but when a craft is well wrought, it transcends mere technique to become art.  A majority of reviews out there are craft.  They serve the function to inform the reader about pertinent information.

Automotive reviewing offers an example of technique versus art.  Purchasing an automobile is a serious investment.  MotorWeek, the public television staple, offers informative reviews of cars for the prospective buyer.  Profiled vehicles along with a voice-over and graphics listing off the relevant statistics offer an informative hour of television.  Then there is Top Gear and specifically Jeremy Clarkson, a loudmouth prone to saying sensational things.  Gone are the statistics and purchasing information, replaced by gorgeously produced segments that turn the sports or luxury cars under review into gorgeous baubles.  Infotainment at its best.

The value of reviewing

People should value reviews.  They offer insight into the products of a culture.  The practical side is being more informed before you go purchase a product.  The other side is that one is more informed about the contours and trends of the culture.  A reviewer should tell you why or why not a particular thing – book, TV show, automobile – is good and why.  A discerning reader or viewer will make up his or her own mind.

Reviewing is not a one-way street.  Reviewers are hardly the high priests, giving their audience information with unquestioned authority.  A nation without a strong critical press is in danger of descending into authoritarian madness.  People who didn’t read the reviews shouldn’t complain about their expectations being quashed.  South Pacific is not the same type of movie as Saving Private Ryan. If you don’t like being critical, stay home on Election Day.  Who listens to critics anyway?

Profiled Reviewers:

  • Jeremy Clarkson (Top Gear, London Times driving reviewer)
  • Clive James (author, columnist, polymath, wit)
  • Nathan Rabin (AV Club hip hop reviewer, My Year in Flops)
  • Special Case File #1: The movie 300
  • Anthony Burgess
  • James Wood (book reviewer for the New Yorker)
  • Anthony Bourdain (author, cook, world traveler, host of No Reservations)
  • Harold Bloom (critic, author)
  • Susan Sontag (critic, author)
  • Roland Barthes (author, theorist)
  • Joe Bob Briggs (film critic)
  • Joris-Karl Husymans (Against Nature, 1884)
  • Special Case File #2: The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
  • Walter Benjamin (cultural critic, theorist)
  • Michel Foucault (critic, theorist)
  • Special Case File #3: Reviewing Warhammer 40K fiction

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