John Prine (1946–2020)

Of coronavirus. From The New York Times obituary:

After graduating from high school, he worked for the Post Office for two years before being drafted into the Army, which sent him to West Germany in charge of the motor pool at his base. After being discharged, he resumed his mail route, in and around his hometown, composing songs in his head.

“I always likened the mail route to a library with no books,” he wrote on his website. “I passed the time each day making up these little ditties.”

I can’t claim to know his music well, but I’ve never forgotten this song from my folkie youth.

Sincerity

Ezra Pound: “I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity.” Let’s say a writer’s sincerity. Pound’s point is that there’s no genuine art without an absolute care for words and their implications. The cheap ornament or facile figure of speech won’t do.

When it comes to spam comments, one might think of sincerity as the test of a writer’s technique. Sincerity is crucial. Once you can fake that, &c., as the saying goes.

A useful exercise for novice students of writing might be to examine a spam comment closely and figure out all the ways in which its attempt at sincerity fails. Here’s one I received earlier this week:

That’s great! Just pumped up. You always give your best! Super useful and awesome information here. I thank you! Thank you very much!

Obviously, it’s a fake, and you can tell in an instant. But how much evidence can you assemble to make that case?

Twelve movies

[Or nine movies and three Netflix series. One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

The L-Shaped Room (dir. Bryan Forbes, 1962). Leslie Caron as Jane Fosset, a young Frenchwoman, unmarried and pregnant and living in a London boarding house. Jane’s dilemma — to have the child or not — is at the center of things. But the film is also a portrait of Jane among the boarding house residents — a struggling writer (Tom Bell), a jazz trumpeter (Brock Peters), an aging music-hall performer (Cicely Courtneidge), and a prostitute in the basement rooms (Patricia Phoenix). A great understated story of life amid bedbugs and thin walls. ★★★★

[A friend who had last seen this film in 1965 asked if it was available from the Criterion Channel or Kanopy — no, but I found it on YouTube. Also by Bryan Forbes: Seance on a Wet Afternoon, which I also recommend.]

*

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (dir. Marielle Heller, 2019). A story, I’d say, of a spiritual master and an unlikely, unwilling disciple, based on the friendship that grew between Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) and an angry, cynical journalist (Matthew Rhys) who came to do an interview. One of the best things about the film in its use of the elements of a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood episode to tell the story. Another is, of course, Tom Hanks: even if he can’t get Daniel Tiger’s voice right, he is uncanny in his ability to suggest Fred Rogers’s way of being in the world. Watch for the moment when Hanks, seen from behind, walks across the television studio: it’s like seeing Mister Rogers again. ★★★★

*

Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at “The New York Times” (dir. Samantha Grant, 2013). Watching this documentary (which I’d watched in 2014 and forgotten about) is what comes of browsing the the F shelves in the library. Blair was an accomplished fabulist and plagiarist at the Times, where the uncovering of his many deceptions led not to a grade of F but to his resignation and the resignations of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd. Like so many plagiarists, Blair seems a cipher, unwracked by guilt, amused to be asked the obvious question of why he did what he did: “This one again!” The director never pushes hard enough to produce cracks in the facade, but that may be because the facade is, indeed, so obviously a facade. ★★★

*

I Wake Up Screaming (dir. H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941). Forget Betty Grable; forget Victor Mature. This is Laird Cregar’s finest hour, as psycho-cop Ed Cornell. As a shadow in an interrogation room, as a starkly-lit profile outside a cafeteria window, Cornell is an ultra-creepy figure, even more so when he utters tough-guy lines with soft-spoken elegance: “I'll follow you into your grave.” In 2020 this film looks like a cautionary tale about social media and sudden fame. ★★★★

*

Wicked Woman (dir. Russell Rouse, 1953). I found to this movie on YouTube after seeing Percy Helton in a Zippy strip. It’s Helton’s finest hour, and one of the seamiest movies I’ve seen — a masterpiece of seaminess that makes, say, The Postman Always Rings Twice feel wholesome by comparison. Beverly Michaels is wicked Billie Nash, living in a crummy rooming house, working at a bar, and making a play for Matt the bartender (Richard Egan) as his wife Dora (Evelyn Scott) drinks her life away in a corner. Meanwhile, little old rooming-house neighbor Charlie (Helton) makes an ever-more threatening play for Billie. ★★★★

*

Bombshell (dir. Jay Roach, 2019). The lives of women at Fox News. Front and center: Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and a (fictional) young evangelical, Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie). John Lithgow is a monstrous Roger Ailes, humiliating women in his office. The most powerful scene in the movie has Ailes doing just that, directing Pospisil to lift her skirt ever higher: “It’s a visual medium, Kayla.” ★★★★

*

The Ballad of Fred Hersch (dir. Charlotte Lagarde and Carrie Lozano, 2016). Fred Hersch is an extraordinary pianist, a jazz pianist, to be sure, but his repertoire extends to improvisations on folk songs, Billy Joel, and Joni Mitchell. Hersch’s music is both intensely heartfelt and intensely cerebral, mixing romanticism and abstraction and requiring an audience’s full attention (when he plays at the Village Vanguard, listen to how intently the audience is listening). This documentary, now free at Vimeo, is part performance, part biography, the story of an openly gay, HIV-positive musician who’s survived harrowing health challenges. Listen closely — in this age of the coronavirus, you can do so via Hersch’s daily live-streamed performances. ★★★★

*

Netflix days

Unorthodox (dir. Maria Schrader, 2020). A loose adaptation of Deborah Feldman’s memoir of fleeing a Brooklyn Hasidic community for a life in the larger world. Shira Haas plays Esther Shapiro, a young wife who tries to live up to her community’s norms before leaving Brooklyn for Berlin, where she falls in with a cheerful, cosmopolitan group of music students. But Esther doesn’t know that her husband Yakov (Amit Rahav) and his thuggish cousin Moische (Jeff Wilbusch) have set out to find her and bring her back. “So much damage done in Brooklyn in the name of God.” ★★★★

Tiger King (dir. Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Goode, 2020). A bizarro world of feuds and criminality among devotees of big cats, each of whom, depending upon whom you believe, a.) exploits or b.) cares for tigers and other species (including the human) in private parks. All I can say is that Joe Exotic, Jeff Lowe, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, Carole and Howard Baskin, and their associates are quite a group of unsavory personalities. (Which raises the question: is there such a thing as a “savory” personality?) My favorite line mixes the mad and the mundane: “I already knew he was batshit-crazy from our conversations at Wal-Mart.” ★★★★

Wild Wild Country (dir. Chapman Way and Maclain Way, 2018). A bizarro world of spiritual seekers, Rolls-Royces, Learjets, and semi-automatic weapons. At its center: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a spiritual leader who went to Oregon with his followers to live on a massive ranch, develop businesses thereon, and wrest political power from the local community by any means necessary. Interviews with followers are scary testimony to the power of belief to sustain itself, by any means necessary. One of the locals: “These people are crazy.” ★★★★

*

Blind Alley (dir. Charles Vidor, 1939). A story that made me think of Key Largo and Spellbound: Ralph Bellamy plays a professor/psychiatrist whose weekend retreat is taken over by an escaped convict (Chester Morris) and his henchmen. As the night wears on, the man of reason helps the man of unreason understand the dream that has tormented him for years. More brutal than the 1948 remake The Dark Past (dir. Rudolph Maté). As always, I take perverse pleasure in movie versions of academic life: here it’s a lakefront getaway, servants, no papers to grade. ★★★★

*

Angels Over Broadway (dir. Ben Hecht, 1940). It gets labeled as film noir, but it feels to me more like a fable or fairytale, or perhaps film noir directed by Ernst Lubitsch. A embezzling clerk, Charles Engle (John Qualen), falls in with a con artist (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), a showgirl (Rita Hayworth), and a failing playwright (Thomas Mitchell) who’s determined to rewrite the embezzler’s life and give it a happy ending. Snappy dialogue and strong atmosphere help offset a disjointed plot. Hayworth has the best line: “We’re all nickels and dimes, you, me, and Engle.” ★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

“Try it”

Exceedingly weird: “But hydroxychloroquine. Try it, if you’d like.”

For a moment I thought that the pharma-rep-in-chief was going to lapse into the catchphrase from a memorable commercial.

Pessoa now

A New York Review Books newsletter asked what people are reading now. I sent these paragraphs:

I’m reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Richard Zenith’s translation from the Portuguese). I found my way to it by tracking down an unidentified passage in Spanish from a book that appears onscreen in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory. And then a friend mentioned that Pessoa’s book and Almodóvar’s film are two of his favorite things. So one translation led me to another.

The Book of Disquiet seems like appropriate reading for these times. It's a book of fragments, short or shorter commentaries on life both real and imagined, the work of a solitary man — Bernardo Soares, a Lisbon bookkeeper (one of Pessoa’s heteronyms) — who travels between his fourth-floor apartment on Rua dos Douradores and his workplace on the same street. “Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness,” he says. He writes of tedium, of his obscurity, of his co-workers, of what he sees from his fourth-floor window, of his own efforts to write. “If our life were an eternal standing by the window”: that seems to be most of us right now.

Here’s a post with the passage from Pain and Glory that started it all. George Bodmer mentioned Pessoa’s book in a comment. Elaine and I are a third of the way through.

Reader, what are you reading now?

[Heteronyms: Pessoa created a great many authorial identities for his writing — not aliases but imaginary selves with distinct styles and interests. Pessoa called Soares a semi-heteronym, an identity closer to Pessoa himself.]

Please don’t laugh at my recipe

Or “recipe.” It’s appropriate for tough times, a way to make a can of baked beans into four sweet and spicy lunches. It’s my memory of Western Beans on the Range, a recipe I read on a can of Heinz Baked Beans back in my student days. I loved this dish then and still do. Like liverwurst, it’s something I must have at least a couple of times a year:

Chop one medium onion. Brown in a pan with a little oil.

Add one large (28 oz.) can of vegetarian baked beans, after pouring off the sauce at the top.

Add some ketchup and chili powder, stir a bit, and let everything heat up. I have found that it’s impossible to add too much chili powder.

Serve with cheese, American or cheddar, and buttered bread. For added elegance, substitute potato chips for bread.

The Art of Quarantine

“If the subjects of the world's most iconic paintings can practice social distancing, you can too”: The Art of Quarantine.

Screwballs

From Blind Alley (dir. Charles Vidor, 1939). Hal Wilson (Chester Morris), an escaped killer, sneers at learning and letters: “Teachers, writers — screwballs!”

What a great line. When Elaine and I watched this movie the other night, I wrote it down. And then I thought, Wait a minute, wait a minute.

We had realized, just minutes into the movie, that we had seen its remake: The Dark Past (dir. Rudolph Maté, 1948). I didn’t realize until I searched these pages that I had liked the 1948 utterance of this line enough to make a post about it in 2017. I am nothing if not consistent.

So many

Manu Dibango. Ellis Marsalis. Bucky Pizzarelli. Wallace Roney. Adam Schlesinger. Bill Withers. All but Bill Withers from the coronavirus.

A related post
Bill Withers and John Hammond

[If you can find it, Still Bill (dir. Damani Baker and Alex Vlack, 2009) is an excellent documentary.]

“Bedtime”

[Chris Ware, “Bedtime.” The New Yorker, April 6, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

Chris Ware writes about his cover:

As a procrastination tactic, I sometimes ask my fifteen-year-old daughter what the comic strip or drawing I’m working on should be about — not only because it gets me away from my drawing table but because, like most kids of her generation, she pays attention to the world. So, while sketching the cover of this Health Issue, I asked her.

“Make sure it’s about how most doctors have children and families of their own,” she said.