Best Actor

How do you know if somebody is good at acting like somebody else who isn't real? That's why actors who play people that were real are constantly being given awards (witness the last three best actors in a row - Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Phil Hoffman as Truman Capote, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles ... and with the ladies SIX out of the last EIGHT - Helen Mirren as the Queen, Reese Witherspoon as June Carter, Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Julia Roberts as Erin Brockavich, Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena). NOW I know the fact that these were real people doesn't mean that the traits brought to the surface by the actor aren't new to us (I bet you had never seen an Aileen Wuornos impression), but still there's something going on here. [Honorable mention for Cate Blanchett's killer Dylan in I'm Not There and Johnny Depp's Hunter Thompson]

What's more, you know the performance that people often cheer for the loudest are those portrayals of disability, craziness, etc. "Hey, Sean Penn isn't really mentally retarded! That's acting!" (I've never seen that movie, but you know what I mean).

The occasion for this post is a salon.com article about Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. The article quotes a professional actor puzzled by all the lauding of Day-Lewis: "Weird how so many people confuse 'acting that you can see' with great acting," he says. NOW I'm pulling for DDL on Sunday ... that performance was one of the most stunning, memorable, most enormous things I've ever seen in a film. Perhaps rivaled only by DDL in Gangs of New York. But I think the article might be on to something.

But really, the problem is that I don't truly understand acting. This is something that I've thought about for a while. I mean I have actors and performances that I love and they often coincide with the actors and performances that critics think are great too. And while I'll go in for the BIG performance like the next guy, I can think of a number of counterpoints in smaller movies that blow me away just as much (for example Laura Linney in You Can Count On Me or Ryan Gosling in Half-Nelson). But I've never been sure how to spot bad acting. Anyone can see that Keanu Reeves is programmed to robot through every role with the same monotone and squint. So I solicit not only your opinion on the BIG performances, but what are some BAD ones (preferably bad ones that come from decent movies ... too easy to say Paris Hilton wasn't all that good in "The Hottie and the Nottie.")

Dolor Bin

Consider these two places: the VFW Hall and the itunes store. One is creaky, brownandyellow, smells like freedom's sweat. The other is virtual. But if it were a real place the itunes store would be spaceage designed. Whitelit.

Maybe some of those veterans from the VFW grew up crewcutted and wanting to be astronauts. Wanting to be spaceage people.

I went to a record show at the VFW. A record show is clutter, collector's clutter in crates and boxes, sheathed, marked, priced. Eyes and hands run over the goods, years of fingerprints get in the grooves, help make the sound you hear on needle contact. To shop for records you have to flip through fast with your index finger. Among the special pressings and the dollar bins, I got some good things but it was taxing. All those old vinylphiles, the vanguards of taste. Looking at what you're looking at.

Last night late I went to the itunes store. It was open and nobody was looking. I could dragnclick research, dragnclick download. I made myself a mix called "Dolor Bin." Garage pop punk soul. Some of my finest work. And gotten with pajamas and beer.

I have one foot in the dollar bin and one foot in the digital ether. I'm a convert to the brave new i-world. All my songs on a pod (how spaceage sounding is that ... a pod?) indexed and organized. Virtually spread out and mobile. When I used to make mix tapes, I'd write the songs on paper and then arrange them. When I do that now on itunes, the work is 90% done already. And you can SHUFFLE. Which is reinvigorating to your catalog ... that song from the back of your head. You didn't know that's what you wanted to hear.

But I won't be hocking the record collection for a googlephone anytime soon. I still want to live in a world made of things. The record is what holds the soul, lest we download those too. I'm like Derek Zoolander in that way (and a few other ways) ... I'm not sure how my songs are "IN" the computer and I might tear it apart looking for them one day.

The Devil and Brian P.

When we were in high school, there was this kid Brian P. and he had something. Not "had something" like a talent scout says you have something, not an x factor or a je ne sais quoi. He had something like he walked a bit funny, talked a bit funny, was in some kind of way differently abled. But bright enough to be in the "regular" classes and, I suppose, bright enough to be made frequent sport of without guilt pangs too acute. And when he was teased and tousled he would grin crooked and say things like "Alright, that's enough."

When we were seniors someone thought it would be funny to nominate him for class president. But Brian P. didn't think it was funny, he took it serious. He gave a speech in the cafeteria. He won and he revelled in the job, giving over-the-top morning anouncements over the intercom. Everyone seemed to be having a swell time - laughing with, laughing at ... who cares? But it always made me a bit uneasy.

I brought something like that feeling to First Avenue the other week to see Daniel Johnston - the autistic, bipolar singer/songwriter whose already formidable cult following was bolstered by a 2005 documentary. [and a good one ... I recommend The Devil and Daniel Johnston if you haven't seen it. But not some of the crazy / tragic talent docs it spawned like the ones on Roky Erickson and Townes Van Zandt.]
Johnston has a tremendous gift for melody, which is evidenced by how many amazing artists have covered his songs (one recent covers album features Tom Waits, Clem Snide, M. Ward, Flaming Lips, Sparklehorse, Bright Eyes). And his songs can be powerful because of (or sometimes in spite of) what one Onion AV Club writer called Johnson's "crushingly naive" lyrics. So he's not like Wesley Willis (the late schizophrenic cultstar singer) - his songs feel more like songs than like crazy.

But I wonder at what we hear when we listen to DJ, what we consume when we buy his records. And the show didn't really help me with those questions. He came out with a tshirt tucked into sweatpants and joked (I think) about being in "Indianapolis." His hands shook when he wasn't holding a guitar and he played a pretty short set. Moments of it were funny, moments of it were gorgeous. But when an anonymous hipster yells "I love you Daniel" from out of the dark, why do I hear the cheers at Brian P's campaign speech? Of course he loves playing music, but I hope he loves playing shows ... he might not. He might even need the money. Or just want to get out of his parents' house (he's 47).

I'm not saying anyone should feel bad about listening to or going to see DJ. And I'm not saying DJ has anything substantive in common with Brian P. (who I hope is doing well). I'm just saying there can be a rather complicated transaction when you look at stuff, depending on what you're looking at.

You Can't Kill a Ghost

[It's been a while. Smoke: clear. Dust: settled. Here is a haiku to mark my return]

You can't kill a ghost
(I can hear the chains rattlin')
It's already dead

Metaphoria #2: The Metaphor Store

So I just got back from the metaphor store, where I purchased a lot of "cleaning products," so I can "clean up" my "living space."

Last summer I "shaved my head," so I'd have a "new" "look."

I'm trying to implement some bigpicture changes in my lifestyle. But so far I'm a lot better at symbolism than actual change. Better at rites than passage.

Fingers crossed.

Just in case take two doesn't take, I'm going to need some more metaphors. Let me know if you got any or I might wind up getting a tattoo or baptized.

13 Ways of Looking at a Frozen Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich on Your Windshield

The other day, I found a frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwich, once-bitten, on the windshield of my car, parked outside of my building. I have questions.

1). Was this some kind of silly "tween" hooliganism? [There is some serious grownup sketchiness that happens on my block, but sandwich-throwing could be the sort of spontaneous chicanery that lowercase g's get into before their eyes go dark.]

2). Let's assume that no one would make a sandwich for the sole purpose of throwing it or resting it on someone's windshield (I think we are safe assuming that). SO THEN: Who eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich outside on the street in Minnesota during the coldest week of the winter?

3). Maybe someone somehow was dumb/weird enough to do so - is it possible that they then commenced their preposterous picnic with a hopeful bite into their PB + J, only then being forced to face the (literally) cold, hard facts about winter and sandwiches ... and then, frustrated by their incredible lack of sense, tossed the sandwich blindly over their shoulder?

4). CONFESSION - there is an elementary school right across from my building, so kids do go there and they likely bring lunches with them. SO it is possible that some kid walked out of a bad Nickelodeon sitcom and inspected his lunch on the way to school and said "Peanut Butter and Jelly AGAIN?," made a funny face and then tossed it skyward, accompanied by that cartoon sound effect for tossing things.

5). What is the onomatopoeic equivalent of that sound effect?

6). If we go with the disgruntled schoolkid scenario, we still haven't accounted for the bite ... could someone, vagrant or just curious, have come along, noticed the peanut butter and jelly sandwich on my windshield and put aside all of their questions for a taste, taken a bite, been sated or unimpressed, and then put it right back where they found it?

7). Perhaps the sandwich contained some sort of GPS device slathered over and constituting THE LEAST well thought out way of tracking me possible. How stupid can these spies be - what, do they think I wouldn't notice a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on my windshield? Or that I would notice but just shrug and leave it there, assuming there's no way it could conceal a tracking device? You'll have to wake up a bit earlier in the morning to outwit me, gumshoe.

8). Or maybe I'm thinking a little bit too locally here ... maybe the sandwich fell from above and came from afar - some winter bird that had toted it beakwise a long ways, ever so carefully, and then lost it to a lapse in concentration.

9). Or maybe it presages an imminent event of biblical proportions (biblical contortions?), like the frogs in Magnolia and this is some kind of cosmic false start or a test run ... maybe it will rain peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Minneapolis with the kind of screwball wrath that I've always thought the bible was missing. You laugh? Well, the book says "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." Think about it. Think about it and watch your head.

10). Or what if, WHAT IF ... I put it there? What if I've been taking that Ambien sleeping drug, the one that makes people sleepwalk, sleepeat, and sleepdrive. And I got up and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my sleep. And then went out to the car, but I had to put the sandwich down on the windshield in order to de-ice it and then I just forgot because, hell, I'm asleep anyway. And then I drove somewhere.

11). Where? Maybe I have some secret second life that I conduct in the early morning hours while being entirely asleep. Maybe I have a torrid affair with a woman whose husband was recently rendered quadriplegic after crashing his car (distracted by a peanut butter and jelly sandwich hitting his windshield). Maybe she loves him still and cries when she makes loves to me and the fact that I'm asleep the whole time gives me a silent, passionless demeanor and a surprisingly precise motor ability both of which help us conduct the affair with ruthless efficiency. Oh, hold on, wait ... I don't take Ambien.

12). I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
Are one.

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is involved
In what I know.

[apologies to Wallace Stevens, the insurance salesman poet, Connecticut-born]

13). You're reading this laughing at me, aren't you? Here I am, spending time, spending effort thinking about how the peanut butter and jelly sandwich got on my windshield and all the while, YOU put it there. You put it there as a test, as a puzzle. It's a symbol. I totally get it. It means everything, but it means everything by virture of its utter meaninglessness. I'm with you. Heavy stuff. Have you been reading Chinese philosophy or listening to adult contemporary alternative music? You know what we should do? We should make a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bite them and go around the city putting them on people's windshields in the middle of the night. It's like concept art - like a "happening" or something. Then they'd all wake up and find the sandwiches on their cars and sort of doubletake and think for a minute and then eventually that enlightenment thing, that "a-ha" would happen to them. And things would all be totally different.

Epitomize Yourself - A Long Ride On The Precious Limited

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes." -- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

(Do I predict myself...)

Bear with me. I'm going to glue some things together.

FIRST: Concerning the Eminent Directors Anderson

It was a banner year for those of us softcore cinephiles (and I don't mean fans of "Emmanuelle in Rio") who prefer Contemporary American Indie/Auteur films to the French New Wave, which laps quietly at the southern shore of our Netflix queue: there were new films by young stalwarts Wes and P.T. Anderson (Darjeeling Limited and There Will Be Blood, respectively).

Both films are good. But PTA's TWBB is better. You can prefer apples to oranges.

And I wonder whether it's because Wes is building model ships inside of bottles, if his career isn't shaping up to be a Russian Nesting Doll with less and less room to move, so that he is relegated to constructing curios in miniature.

precious, adj.
1. a. Of great moral, spiritual, or other non-material value; beloved, held in high esteem ...
3. Aiming at or affecting refinement in manners, language, etc.; fastidious, particular. Now usu. depreciative: over-delicate, over-fastidious; affectedly refined in matters of taste, language, etc. (Oxford English Dictionary)

I propose that Wes Anderson Phase One ends after the first three films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) and that those of us who were so shook by those have to come to grips with Phase Two, in which some of the merits of those earlier works - elaborate set design, exhaustive soundtracking, and oceans of whimsy - are inflated at the cost of ... something. WA was always bothways precious, cool, at some distance from us. But there seemed to be blood pumping through those stories. And I'm beginning to surmise that there won't be blood anymore. Darjeeling was, well, limited. A train in vain.

Now PT Anderson's films up to this point had all been very similar (the non-essential Hard 8, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch Drunk Love, where he admittedly took a couple of big swings, cutting his usual 3hr runtime in half and casting Adam Sandler). But TWBB is really nothing like them. And what it leaves behind is this sort of meta-ironic gimmickiness - which I loved but was very "of its moment" in the sense that Dave Eggers is of his ... the kind of thing you'd expect to be surprised by. But this new one, love it or like it, has a full head of steam. It's epic without frogs, without Aimee Mann, without ensemble, without prosthetic dongs.

Though each director / film deserves much more time, I'll train my untrained eye elsewhere, because this isn't a review from a hill, it's a question: what do we make of artists of all stripes trapped in their own style? AND SUBQUESTION: what does stylization do to what we'll call (for lack of better phrase) substance - the flesh, the bone, the hangnail, the teeming viscera of recognizability?

ADVOCATING FOR THE DEVIL, I'll proffer that the deservedly lauded No Country For Old Men is not very human. Before you hit me, let me say that I loved it and I think it might be the Coens' "best" film, but (and I can't testify whether this follows from McCarthy) it felt like allegory to me ... all about forces (pitchdark ones), violence in the abstract. Yes, Brolin and Jones seemed to be lit from within despite their heroic stoicism, but still.

(And it's a good and related question that's been asked about where the women are in these muscley works of art - TWBB and NCFOM. Even the new Apatovian regime, which I think has done a service to mainstream comedy, is blatant homosociality. The women are straight man to the male patter. Heigl said so herself.)

((Yes I realize that I have populated this post with pictures of men. Men I have straight crushes on. Certainly not part of the solution. Very well then ... ))

OFFSCREEN, this links to other conversations.

LISTEN: we played a game at the bar where you have to name the album that "epitomizes" the band's sound. For instance, despite your (and everyone else's) affection for The Bends, the answer for Radiohead is OK Computer. But is it a valid question? A good one? Do we resent bands extending themselves?

TANGENTIALLY:

lyric, adj.
1. Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung; pertaining to or characteristic of song. Now used as the name for short poems (whether or not intended to be sung), usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and directly expressing the poet's own thoughts and sentiments (OED, my emphasis)

What of lyrical obscurity? What in the hell is Stephen Malkmus ever talking about?Shaggy locks and crooked smile, we hardly knew ye. Dylan is the ur-sphinx here. But still there are claims that some of his albums are v. personal. Is it braver to strum with heart put to sleeve? Or the narrative songwriter, like The Decemberists' Colin Meloy ... can we find him amidst the wags and swains of his erudite period pieces? Do we prefer our indie rock lyrics so far underground, populated by erstwhile pomo poets? Then again, what's the alternative ... emo?

(FOOTNOTE - BEYOND EMODOME ((Emodome is a palindrome)) the most "emo" song I've ever heard might be the Bee Gees' "I Started A Joke")

ENDING THE JOKE: A really ready model for this question of access / stylization is the stand-up comedian. I have said that Patton Oswalt is better than Galifianakis or Mitch Hedberg because he comes across in his monologues, they work from a sort of very familiar racounteurism. I don't know if he would agree, but he seems to be him. The other guys tell jokes, often one-liners. Funny things they thought of, not stories. To me, the analogy is that the Simpsons will always be a better show than Family Guy though Family Guy is funnier. On FG the stories are a place to hang the gags. And this divide plays out both ways with the titans of standup. Both Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor made material of their real lives and problems. Then again, Andy Kaufman made a kind of performance art out of never being there, all guises.

Who do we want them to be?

Metaphoria #1

Today's Metaphor Challenge:

QUOTATION MARKS

" "

MY ENTRY: Surgical Gloves - To carry something hazardous or potentially infectious from a foreign textual corpus, picking it up carefully at both ends and incorporating it in a sanitary manner. Conversely, to handle something precious and fragile with due care and to avoid infecting it in the handling.

Yours?

Do Good-Looking People Have Souls?

Alright already. Enough of the Annual Holiday Introspectacular. Let's talk about good looking people.

I wonder if they don't see the teeming mess of population. If they have a kind of infra-red vision for attractiveness, a glaze that relegates the rest of us to the blurry background. They operate on the slick surfaces of the world. The construction of inner life becomes a necessary effect of our secret automatic banishment from this world.

Or something. SO I ASK THEN: ARE THERE ANY HOT GENIUSES? I'm trolling and polling for hot geniuses. This is hard ... try image searching the names of philosophers and scientists. Yikes. Granted, most of them are old men, but I'm beginning to wonder whether genius has lain dormant in the good-looking because they had no use for it. Let me know if you got any. One of my professors said that Nathaniel Hawthorne was "dishy." Made Melville want to Moby Dick his Scarlet A-hole. Made Herm's Billy Budd for Nate's Young Goodman Brownstar.

There's definitely something Bogarty about Albert Camus: But that's mostly his boho posturing, no? Put him in a Cosby sweater and khakis and he's a French-looking highschool teacher. But this is no boys' club. Dig poet Anne Sexton as Mrs. Robinson: She is trying to seduce me.

Bring me your good-looking geniuses. I've got kind of a humanities bias going here, so I welcome other disciplines. But NO ACTORS or MUSICIANS. That's way too easy.

That said, for the first time in a long while, I have a celebrity crush. You might know her. Her name is Zooey Deschanel. Not just because she is cute (which she WAY is); lots of actresses are cute. But you might not know that she sings and has been playing out and recording with M(att) Ward. Here is their version of Sam Cooke's Bring it on Home to Me And here is Stormy Weather accompanied by a photo montage. Here is me blushing.

Forever and Ever Okay

During the drive to grandma's house my dad told me that he had seen a show about the Kennedy assassination on the History Channel that refuted all the conspiracy theories with a neatly assembled menagerie of experts and some snazzy digital animation that showed straightarrow sense where Oliver Stone sees magic bullets. He's convinced. Casket closed. The commies will keep yammering because that's what commies do. Yammer.

I tried to tell him that I thought that that's all well and good but it's one story and you could easily tell the opposite story with experts whose credentials are equally well laminated. In fact it's been done. Many many times. Conclusion, in this case, is a choice ... the shadow of one doubt or another covers the whole field of possibilities. So you can get aboard with one of the two bigger, older, warring stories 1). The individual is a threat to the system (the crazed, godless, and ill-intentioned can emerge from any crowd at any time, flout the rules, and kill our symbols ... this is why we need government in the first place) 2). The system is a threat to the individual ("a" man is no match for "the" man).

But it's hard to communicate these things through a fog of familial emotions, to stand watch on poor-lefty-effete-ivory-tower-patrol and still have a constructive conversation with patriarchs and patriots.

But that's where my nephew comes in. My nephew is almost two.

At Christmas mass at Catholic church, where the the Lord's prayer comes out like muscle memory and sounds like a mono-chant from a bad dystopian novel and the priest's homilizing is staler than Eucharist but still delivered in that serene "priest voice" with pretense to something more than wisdom - beatitude? ... there after the droning was done and everyone's supposed to say "Amen," my nephew, with what I can only retro-project to be baby Vonnegutian pith and brio, says "Okay." Like a beat after everyone else, really loud and clear in the echo-y acoustics and in his naturally adorable voice.

So I think that's the answer - "Okay." That might be a model for keeping an open mind - being thoughtful, not dismissive or arrogant, but resisting a verdict. The priest recites the prayer and your answer ("okay") means to convey something like this:

"Alright, sounds good. That's one of the many things I'll consider. I'm completely fine with you believing that ... in fact part of me is envious of that certainty of yours. If that sounds condescending, like 'I wish I could be blissfully ignorant' well then I apologize. I don't mean it like that. Or maybe I do. Maybe this hypereducated secular humanism is just another doctrine and I'm an unholy warrior. Anyway I don't mean to offend. This isn't a glib critique. I know someone, maybe Ben Folds, had an album or song called "Whatever and Ever Amen" and, though I think that's very clever, that's not what I'm going for here. Not 'whatever' but 'okay.' It's respectful. And not in a sort of hippie way either, where everything everyone believes is beautiful and it's 'your trip' and the sound of intaking breath coincides with bobblehead-nodding vapid approval. Not like that. Something in between. I don't think I'll ever pick a side but I want to think about the sides and PARTS of the sides. Like I really like the sound of the organ up there with all of the pipes. I don't like how you insist on reminding us that Mary was a virgin - that's creepy to me that people put on sweaters and fold their hands and get reverant and then participate in a story that's overly concerned with a teenage girl's virginity. Basically, I want to listen to as many stories as I can."

Okay?