Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

Drawn & Quarterly · 1980

The Comics Journal saved my life.

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

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

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

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

I began to steep myself in the history of cartooning, haunting used bookstores and snapping up old New Yorker cartoon collections, old newspaper strip collections, old comic books that did notfeature superheros. I read allusive European art comics, flashy Japanese sci-fi comics, dry Canadian autobio comics and the weird, gross effusions of the underground. Most of the places I got my education from are no longer in existence; but one of the books that most thoroughly reoriented my outlook, and marked a subtle sea-change in all of comics even at the time, I bought at a national chain store which still does a roaring trade today. The store was Borders; the book was Ethel And Ernest by Raymond Briggs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***Yes, him again.

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

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

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

1. L’Atalante
(France) Jean Vigo · 1934

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

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

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

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

2. Pépé le Moko
(France) Julien Duvivier · 1937

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

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

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

3. La règle du jeu (The Rules Of The Game)
(France) Jean Renoir · 1939

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

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

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

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

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

6th June, 1987

There are three emotional cycles I went through on encountering this song, over the several listens it has taken me to assimilate it. As best as I can reconstruct them, they are:

1. Goodness, you can tell without looking that whoever sings this is a Star.

2. Nevertheless it is like the most boring drippy ballad evar.

3. Holy shit these lyrics are amazing.

Julio Iglesias is the first name I’ve encountered on this journey that I know I’ve heard before beginning it. (The only other challenger, Juan Gabriel, is a more doubtful case; I might have heard of him, but it’s kind of a generic name). He is, to put it in as offensively reductive a manner as possible, real-world famous in addition to being Latin Pop famous, and in 1987 had been so for nearly a decade, a man who had breached the Top Ten in the company of Willie Nelson (of all people), who titled an album after the home he subsequently sold to Quincy Jones, who even went to number one in the UK — and it was the Popular crew’s discussion of that number one, with its predictable reliance on the British institution of continental package tours as the only lens through which Latin music makes any sense, that first gave me the small inkling of a desire to tackle a project like this, and talk about Latin music from a provincial, blinkered Americanstandpoint.

And here he sounds like the megastar he is, with the most expensive-sounding production we’ve encountered to date. Listen to it on headphones and marvel at the miles of room in it, with guitars and keyboards and drums and harp and accordion separated out in a mix that creates a soft, glossy pillow for his golden, infinitely tender voice. We’ve been talking about vocal styles here, perhaps somewhat incoherently; but if Iglesias doesn’t have the greatest voice from a technical standpoint, he’s a master at deploying his cracked baritone to the maximum emotional and sensual effect. (I’d compare it to Neil Diamond again, but only because pop singers who sound like men are so rare in American pop that he’s about the only game in town; and Iglesias is way better than Neil Diamond.)

But after marveling at the surface effect of the song’s presentation of That Voice (you couldn’t possibly have a production like this for an unknown singer, it would be laughed out of court), I grew restless; it was a slow song, a ballad, and repetitive as all hell. I caught fragments of the lyrics, but my Spanish is Central American vernacular (I’m still not used to Castilian pronunciation), and what I did catch didn’t impress me; the phrase repeated at the beginning of each verse translates dully as “You were mine, only mine; mine, mine.” I’ve never liked ballads on first acquaintance, and even today it’s rare for one to push through my low attention span to really get across to me.

But then I looked up the lyrics — as I do for every song here, to check them against my ear — and translated them on the fly, and sat staring. They couldn’t possibly be that poetic! I looked up the words I was uncertain of. No; they were even more poetic than that.

Manuel Alejandro, the song’s composer, has been one of the premier ballad composers in Latin music since the 1960s, and he’s worked with Julio Iglesias since the early 70s. Un Hombre Solo, the smash hit record from which “Lo Mejor De Tu Vida” (“the best [years] of your life”) was taken, was entirely written and produced by Alejandro. His lyrical style is highly romantic, even extravagant, and I’m still a bit puzzled by at least one metaphor (is “colina cerrada” an idiomatic phrase in some version of vernacular Spanish? its literal translation, “closed hill,” defeats my powers of analysis), but his choice of a simple, even basic, structure allied to vivid, poetically-expressed imagery is inspired: the result is a song with a folk-like structure but layered with a patina of García Lorca-like lyricism.

And all this is without getting into the meaning of the lyrics. He sounds tender, but there’s an undercurrent of possessiveness, of predation, even of coercion, that mitigates against the common image of Iglesias as some kind of standard “passionate but honorable” Latin lover. But it’s also more than just a rape fantasy; there’s genuine emotion (sorrow? regret? revulsion?) in his performance. I don’t rate these songs (I don’t as a rule believe in ratings), but this is thegreatest song, in whatever sense of the word you choose to apply, that we’ve had yet.

My translation of the lyric follows; let me know if I’ve gotten something wrong. Also, please let me know if you’d like me to include such translations from here on out. I’d most likely be doing the work anyway; would it be useful enough to you that the additional scrolling is worth it? The comments box works.

THE BEST YEARS OF YOUR LIFE

You were mine
Only mine
Mine, all mine
When your skin was fresh
Like dewy grass

You were mine
Only mine
Mine, all mine
When your mouth and eyes
Overflowed with youth

You were mine
Only mine
Mine, all mine
When your maiden’s lips
First encountered mine

You were mine
Only mine
Mine, all mine
When your womb was still
An unopened hill

The best years of your life
I have carried away
The best years of your life
I have enjoyed

Your first experience
The awakening of your flesh
Your savage innocence
I have drunk it all
I have drunk it all

You were mine
Only mine
Mine, all mine
When your body was the shoot
Of a newly-planted palm

You were mine
Only mine
Mine, all mine
When you barely closed your eyes
I stole in close beside you

You were mine
Only mine
Mine, all mine
When your hands trembled
If they were only touched

You were mine
Only mine
Mine, all mine
When your yesterday did not exist
And you thought only of tomorrow

The best years of your life
I have carried away
The best years of your life
I have enjoyed

Your first experience
The awakening of your flesh
Your savage innocence
I have drunk it all
I have drunk it all

Washington Square · 1990

Oh, man, is that more like it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anxious · 1992

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

I don’t like Garbage either.

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

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

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

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

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