on the MBTA Green Line B this very AM

When I first moved to Boston, the Green Line had old cars. They had some rust, and they weren't particularly sleek, and they had green paint that was flaking some, and the encrustation of many winters and the application and removal of advertisments, and they weren't particularly easy to get in to, or get out of. But they had character. Especially, the conductor would, (and a lot more often than in the sleek new actual subway cars on the Red Line or the Blue Line or the Orange LIne) lean into the mike, about halfway between the stops, and grunt "Blandford" or "BU east" or "Copley." You had to pay attention. You'd miss it, and he wouldn't repeat it. Other than that, the conductor was silent, except he would occasionally hector passages to "move to the back" or inform folks that "this train will be running express" but the central interaction was the calling of stops in a curt, barely-bothered, fashion.

Then, the winter came, and new trains. They were sleek, had slab sided expanses of sheet metal, little "designed by Pininfarina"logos, since they were, after all, designer trains, and they came equipped with little LCD screens in the cabin that would tell you where the train was going (inbound or outbound) and, most disastrously of all, a calm, computerized voice that was didactic and intrusive.

"The destination of this train is..Government Center," the voice would opine. "The next stop is..Arlington. Doors open on the right. Entering..Arlington."

And, because it was the green line, and there wasn't very much space between stations, the voice would be back, within seconds.

"The destination of this train is..Government Center," the voice would say, taking no notice that it just said it, "The next stop is..Bolyston. Doors open on the right."

What was the most irritating was the obvious vocal stitching. These cars had come replete with a program to announce stops: you could pick if the doors opened on the left, right, or both sides, you could designate when the train would tell you if it was entering or leaving a station, you could designate destinations. Then, you'd program it to say "Government Center" or "Park Street" or "Griggs St. Long Ave." and it would, with this barely perceptible delay:

"The destination of this train is..Government Center." Just a slight catch, but so noticable, and so obnoxious.

Killed me slowly, it did.

Today, though, was different.

The voice, my personal Big Brother, was gone. And the conductor was yelling it out, again, with a slight tinge to his voice, the wry humor of repeating what everyone knows: this is Harvard Ave. You should move to the back of the train. Don't smack people with your bag. Yep, the next stop is Packard's Corner. Today, this morning, there was human touch.

And then, around Copley, our conductor started giving the directions in a perfect, lilting, Irish brogue. "The next stop," he said, giving full reign to the poetry of the statement, "is Arlington." It was hillarious, subtle and hillarious, and we all looked around, at eachother, us long-suffering commuters, and we smiled.

"This guy is funny," I said, looking across the way at a man in a maroon dress shirt and a broad grin. "Good accent, too."

So I ask, nobody in particular, but a question nonetheless: why not let conductors announce the stops? Let them use funny accents, if they want. Everyone knows where they are going, and this morning, although it was a packed car, the commute wasn't so bad, wasn't compounded with mechanical sterility and pointless repetition. Give the conductors a voice again!

You'll make me happy, at least.

lies and promises

Readers:

I must apologize for my lack of blogging at present. I've got a lot of posts in the pipeline, and I've even promised a ditty on "Adaptive Reuse" for the fine folks over at EphBlog. In any case, these must largely wait for vacation, which is upon me tomorrow, not quite like a ton of bricks, but not really like the wolf in the night, either.

I can promise a few things, though:

1) I'd like to see this blog do more sponsored reviews. I'm working on that, and I'd hope to be able to bring that to you guys.

2) I'd also like to provide some more arts coverage. I'm working on getting tickets to both the David show at the Clark Art Institute as well as seeing Cezanne and Pisarro at the MoMA (plus some notes on the architecture).

3) I'd like to see a greater balance in coverage. I feel that I've been doing a lot of arts and entertainment coverage to the neglect of my other interests. There's some interesting articles in the Journal that are out or coming out, so I am thinking about preparing some review on stem cells (always a popular field) and other scientific issues.

When I resurrected this blog, partially at the behest of Zachary R. Blume, one of the most ferocious critics I've ever met, I was somewhat apprehensive. Looking back in the archives, you'll see that I alternated between the sublimely nasty, intensely local and concerns with important issues that impact everyone. I got into this whole business after the cessation of the ADD, something that everyone still misses, to varying degrees, and I'll be honest: I didn't always have a firm vision for what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go.

And I still don't.

But, I'm feeling a lot more comfortable doing some of the things I get to do here: arts criticism, science writing, political opining, and the descriptive vignettes of the day to day. I'm feeling much more comprehensive, now, and I have you, readers, to thank.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please leave them below or email them to me. I'd hardly shun any advice!

a couple thoughts on apartment hunting

I'm sure most Bostonians and most everyone, flung out in post-collegiate diaspora, have dealt with apartment hunting. Sure enough, this process centers around the suspiciously indespensible website Craigslist, which offers, in plain text: jobs, apartments, gigs, dating, rants and raves, and almost every city worth living (and many that are not) in America and the world.

Now, in my opinion, Craigslist apartment hunting is a bit like dating. You go to CL, fire up the search engine, put in your key terms ("tall," "brunette," "loves to laugh") and hit go. You then are presented with a list of places with descriptions.

"Gorgeous model-quality 25 year old with expensive habits, collects men who collect post-impressionist art."

Yep, like you'll be able to rent that place. That's first, last, security and fee!

So, you email the people via the anonymous contact email:

"Hi, I'm a 27 year old financial consultant with a coke habit. I'd love to live in your place because I owe $274,357 in back taxes to the IRS and $26,457 a month in child support to three or four women, I forget how many, and I drive a bimmer, so my car payment is killing me. So, moving in with you schlubs will help me cut costs, and goddamn, you know I need to do that. My ex is killing me slowly, and I'd love to have a shorter commute. I don't smoke and I hate pets."

You hear back:

"Hi, this is John, I've been living here for 2 years, and all my roomates are moving out, so I'm scoping out some new people for 3 ratty water stained bedrooms that look like they were used to film scenes from a zombie movie. You can come by between 745-845 on Tuesday, and wipe your feet, because we have snakes. You aren't allergic, right? Oh, my cell phone number is 555-423-7887, call me if you have problems."

So you traipse over there. Sure enough, "about 10 minutes" from the T means "Carl Lewis could sprint there in 10 minutes, maybe, with a tailwind." You wander around a little. Boy, this neighborhood seems run down. No wonder it is 475 a month. And then you ring the doorbell and meet the folks. Your host is usually wearing socks:

"Hi, John?"

"Hi, Carl?"

"Hey, nice to meet you, c'mon in."

"Is this the bedroom?" you innocently inquire, looking at what seems to be a laundry hamper mating with a closet. "Yes, this would be the 475, it has a window," your John replies.

"And here's the kitchen. We don't really cook much, but it has a range." "Gas?" "Electric."

"Here's the door to the roof deck, but we don't go up there much."

"The TV is staying, but Alan, he's moving out, well, he's taking the x-box. Hey, say hi to Brian."

And because Boston apartments are tiny, generally, it doesn't take much tramping to see a couple bedrooms, the inveterate mess of slobby men, and the fact that 600 a month isn't going to get you corian countertops, let alone faux marble. But that's fine, we can't all afford to live in Swellesley right out of college, anyway.

Here's the kicker though: everyone in Boston is doing the exact same thing you are, at the same time, with the same places, the same listings, the same people. Except, most places would rather have a girl, not a scruffy guy, or even a clean-shaven "professional" with a steady job. And that's the battle you're fighting, over and over again: there are 5 people looking at every listing, and you're always in competition.

"Who else is looking, (if I may ask)" you'll inquire.

"Oh, we've got a couple more tomorrow, and then we'll pow-wow with the roomates. I didn't really like one of the guys, so there's only really 3 or 4."

"Oh yeah? And then what's the timeframe?"

"Well, we'd need first and last, and then you could start moving in whenever."

"So when will you let me know?"

Tomorrow, or Thursday, or maybe early next week, see, we're looking at a couple more people, and one of our deadbeat buddies might finally move out of the Parental Manse up near Andover and join the fun in the big city, and really, we're hoping for a cute girl so we can oggle her in the morning when she's making pancakes, but seriously, we are kinda needing someone, and you look reliable...so we'll call you, don't call us.

But we're all doing it, because what's the alternative? Calling a relator and getting led around by a Rico Suave type who has simultaneously cornered the market on (hair) product, Davidoff's Cool Water pour Homme, and is sporting some gold chain ala boyhood hero Curt Schilling (or was that Gary Sheffield?) and who will be taking 10% for a finder's fee even though he just fucking looked the place up on Craigslist like you did?

Yeah.

Enjoy the rat race, that's what I say. At least you get to meet new people. I looked at a palace last night, hardwood floors, good looking roomates, nice room, solidly middle-class clapboard in Davis, near Tufts, replete with an American flag and potted roses on the porch. And I knew that there was no way I was going to live there, with the gold-plated toilet bowl and the leather couches and the faintly monied roomates who were upper-crustier with a hardly detectable hauteur ameliorated by the potpourri of their noblesse oblige and I was standing outside, afterwards, talking to another petitioner, and we shook hands, and he got in his Blazer, forest green, and he's half in his seat, leg dangling in the road, and we exchange stories, job boilerplate: "I work in cancer research" and he shoots back with "I'm a social worker for disabled kids" and the consensus is clear though I say it anyway, "keep up the good work" and he concurs, and at that moment, us do-gooders, standing in the street in front of that palace, we realized that we weren't going to live there, that we weren't female enough, or endowed with wildly renumerative positions, and that we were going to keep searching and find something, but not this nice. He drove off, and I walked to my car, and what more to say?


Good luck, and keep hunting!

On the parties of the damned

Sometimes, in an effort to remember what the master Jean-Paul Sartre presciently said about Hell (for those who haven't read No Exit simply that "Hell is other people"), I treat myself to an encounter with the damned. I suppose there a couple camps on Hell. There are the Sartreans, who see it as rather existential and undoubtedly personality based. There are the Boscheans, who see it as a garden of the most profound and perverted delights. And, I suppose, the Jews, who doesn't believe in it, even though they are all going there for having killed Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."




(details, Garden of Earthly Delights, H. Bosch, Prado, Madrid)

I've always loved Bosch in a very weird way. His visions of hell were intense, pictorial, and endlessly inventive. Look at the bottom detail: we've got a demon molesting a defenseless girl, two men throwing up, in the middle ground a man with a recorder jammed into his cornhole, all overseen by a bird-headed figure that could pass for Horus in any bad Cairo hookah dive bar. But, even though most of this imagery is pretty fantastic, even frightening, there's the odd humorous moment, like the demon on skates, or water skiis, above Horus' hat.

When I was a kid, reading, for some reason, the profoundly overrated C. S. Lewis' Perelandra series of turgid, allegorical science fiction novels, I always remarked on their trippy, very '70s jacket art.

Yeah. There you go, you've got some white hand, holding an apple, under some stylized awning, and strange celestial bodies in purposeful conjunction. Cover art that is a '70s LSD-ridden take on our dear Bosch. But, I digress.

@@@

I walk into this party in the aptly named Grendel's Den, a basement bar named by some Harvard Square Beowulf fan. Grendel's is a good place, little out of the way, decent drink selection, and apparently it is never visited by its namesake, which is definitely just as well (I hear he's presently employed as a bouncer by the Liquor Store, one of Boston's too many "meta-named" bars.)

The damned have a table, against the wall, with the little placards that Grendel leaves about to designate how large your party must be to play: "5 or more." The table was filled to this level. Out of respect for the dead, I'll not identify the damned. Suffice it to say, there were two ladies, one nursing a tall Paulaner Heffewizen and the other stubbornly attacking a Sammy summer. The ladies occupied the wall seat. They were faced by three gentlemen, one wearing, inexplicably, gym shorts and the others attired more respectably, at least wearing t-shirts and shorts.

It was a sorry scene. My companion, the infamous and occasionally humorous Eric Engler, lept into action, offering to buy a round and even summoning the old waitress, blue-shirt, horn-rims, and white hair to go with her skeptical eyes, to effectuate his claim. The nearest girl, who seemed to be, in some small way, the target of his affections boldly ordered another Sammy summer, and I requested the Paulaner, perhaps out of a desire to feel emasculated by such an imposing glass. Earrings bobbing, she had slim silver shafts that suspended, pendulum-style, a little shiny ball, she engaged the ever-charming Engler in conversation, but soon, Engler's attention was engaged by the man sitting to my left. Because this is not a logic game, I'll explain. Grendel's has a wall-bench, wall-seat, whatever you want to call it along its perimeter. I had taken the first wall seat at the corner of the table, covered with what seemed to be thinly beaten copper but was probably less expensive. Engler was to my right, next to the girls, who were in the wall seat in the alcove proper. To my left were two chairs, filled with the reasonably attired gentlemen, and directly across from me, in a chair, was gym shorts.

Doing my part to facilitate interaction, I started asking what people do. We had a sorry bunch: the man to my left had some sort of non-profit gig and played online poker. The man to his left was unemployed. There was, as seems to be de riguer these days, a disaffected grad student (gym shorts) and the two girls had meaningless volunteer or slightly paid labor positions in the non-profit sector as well. Yet, "poker," the word spoke by the man to my left, was the elixir of the Gods to Engler's fairly avaricious ears. "Poker," he started, and then commenced a verbal torrent that included the key phrases: "world series of poker, made a couple thousand dollars, made a couple thousand dollars in a few hands, Las Vegas, poker tournament, placed 3rd in a field of 470, world series of poker, got kinda nervous but still cleaned up." In short, our dear Engler hasn't changed at all.

While this conversation was furiously being waged in front of me, both men leaning towards eachother with a type of ferocious intensity (the man to my left being surprised that someone of Engler's obvious skill wasn't playing more, Engler explaining he found online poker to be desultory and dull, fit only for beasts) I began to study the other speaker.

He was particularly ill-favoured, so much so that I imagine in less enlightened times than our own he would have been consigned to circus work. His face was dominated by a chef's knife sized nose, thin and sharp and as dominant a rock-face as I've ever seen. His eyes were set below the browline, and his forehead was short and sloped at an acute angle towards a suspiciously flat skull. He was exacerbating his good looks by shaving his head, and the overall effect, with the wide-set, beedy, eyes and the prominently sharp nose and the flat head, was like that of a hammerhead shark. He was extraordinarily ugly, yet almost sympathetic, grinding his teeth a bit as he talked (weak jaw to go along with this) as he was some sort of antediluvian reptile masquerading as man. His companion had a frattish shock of brown hair and didn't seem to do much beyond smile blankly.

I began to realize where I was. I was sitting between Engler, ostentatiously advertising the apparatus of wealth and privilege, and a shark-man, some sad circus freak with flippers, a veritable Oswald Kobblepot for our time. The girls were smiling, talking idly of past hookups--who, exactly, had hooked up with whom while at a certain undergraduate college--oh, how naughty, you're such a skanky ho, oh my no, you, you were a skanky ho in college, titter. I was at a party of the damned, a short look at the most plausible Hell of all: other people.

I began drinking with furious intensity, hoping to escape. I dashed back my beer and , having moved away from Sharkface and Pokerchamp, began talking to Gym Shorts, who seemed marvelously insensible and afflicted with a maudlin concern for nostalgia. Oh my, I realized, time to go.

How dreadful.

On Thucydides

There comes a time in a man's life, when he's riding the train next to some untouchables--some vile, smelly, unshaven, ritually unclean maths geeks from MIT, reeking of desperation and talking loudly of their inane pursuits--when he realizes that there really is a certain level of necessary civilization. At least, that's what the girls across from me said when our intrepid Math-nauts, chortling to themselves about "sluicing," departed the train, leaving only their foul miasma behind them: "God, those guys make me want to really achieve something!"

"I was trying so hard to tune them out," her friend responded. They were sitting two seats apart, bracketing a blonde in a white top who had been spared it all by virtue of her earbuds. "They really did seem to be happy," the original interlocutor stated, after further reflection.

And that was that. The end of The History of the Pelopenesian War, with some smelly math geek invading my personal space just as surely as Spartan hoplites did the fields around Athens...

***

As I admitted earlier, I had never been able to stomach Thucydides. I read Seutonius at an early age (he's so delightfully risque) and was able to handle Livy and even Tacitus (hardly the most straightforward of Latin prose stylists, but a magnificent historian). I read my Herodotus, and was unimpressed with the "Father of History's" rampant credulity, which, literally, knew no bounds. Homer, of course, and Virgil, and some Caesar and some servicable, redoubtedly British general histories of the Punic Wars, Alexander's conquests, Marathon, Augustus' disastrous German campaigns (you know, banging the head against the door and yelling "Varus, give me back my legions!" because what else can you say after the greatest Roman military disaster since Cannae?) which led into schoolboy admirations for the dark Phoenician and his doomed enterprise but a bracing young imperial respect for the great Scipio Africanus, the winning general who is merely a footnote...

Thucydides isn't much of a romantic. He's hard-nosed, rigorous, honest. He's unspairing, seeing clearly, even as a contemporary, the incalcuable stupidities, arrogances, overreaches of the power-hungry Athenian mob or the enthusiastically block-headed Spartans. He finds no easy solace in oracles or the accumulated obediences of Greek religion. They are, for Thucydides, arbitrary and irrelevant.

Well, I realize, in retrospect, that I simply wasn't ready for such an adult work. I might have been a happier kid, or at least someone that only understood despair, disapointment, and loss in an intellectual sense. That's not going to do it, when confronted with the self-immolation of a glorious situation, the wasteful abandon of the flower of Greek youth, all for more talents, a couple more ships, greater prestige.

Thucydides: a masterpiece of history, calm, dispassionate, boldly analytical, and magisterially comprehensive. Highly recommended.

Happy Independence Day!

Just wanted to wish a happy Independence Day to all my readers out there in America and the world. It may come as no surprise that the 4th, along with Thanksgiving, are my two favorite holidays. They both, in their own way, center on drinking, food, and public recognition of our central cultural values: fireworks and football. They are also, I increasingly realize, unique. My friends from Britain or the Netherlands have Christian holidays--Christmas, Easter, Mardi Gras. They do not have national holidays.

We're fortunate to live in a country that offers us so much: Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. These are not, I'll aver, overdetermined. They're aspirational.


Here's to dreaming big, cool fireworks, and beer! Here's to the good old USA!

on spending 7:53-8:01 PM at Kendall Square

The Marriott hotel in "Cambridge Center," roughly located above the Kendall/MIT T stop, looks remarkably crystaline, as if some quartzite, docahedral, suddenly splintered into brick and glass. The Marriott towers corrugate, stepping forward and back, and are, in their own way, midly imposing, slightly sterile.

I was sitting in Kendall Square, the courtyard outside the Marriott, waiting for friends. The T regurgitates you from the earth onto a brick-paved courtyard, neatly decorated with some street trees hemmed into planters, a sprinkling of metal benches, enough to make sitting possible. At almost 8, on a Saturday, the square was empty, a small knot of a group, chatting animatedly, and some stragglers, obviously waiting for people.

I sat down, resigned to waiting. The Longfellow was to my left, the curve of Broadway sweeping onto the bridge. To my right, cooly animated in the greying light, was F. O. Gehry's generically post-modern Stata Center, a post-Bilbao crazy-quilt for the prestige of MIT.

The square was largely deserted. A woman walked up to the inbound Kendall T stop, across the street, and then down the stairs. I kept looking around, secure under my tree. Sun was setting, more or less, not with any great alacrity, but in the steady ebbing of a summer's day. Because of the silence, the breeze was making most of the noise. Main Street, Cambridge, which divides the inbound and outbound pavillions of Kendall/MIT, features a row of festive flags, advertising "Cambridge Central," in variegated, multi-colored resplendency. Each flag, suspended from a boom, was also anchored with chain. The flags, catching the wind, were producing a variety of harmonics: the taut flapping of the cloth, the dull thunk of the wooden booms smacking against the flagpoles themselves, the chink of the chain being grated against metal.

Remarkably symphonic, really, but comforting, the varying tones, flap, chunk, bang, flap, whistle, pivot, bang! There's a pleasing sibilance to hearing flags or sails twist in the wind, to make their own quiet, accidental music. This is, incidentally, mirrored by the "Pythagorean" organ, downstairs, in the Kendall/MIT station. Hollow pipes, tuned to varying tones, can be "played" by getting an appropriate frequency, waveform, however you want to put it, to register in suspended mallets. You rock a handle, back and forth, building up amplitude, until the "organ" sounds, melodic chimes in a subway station.

Right before my friends arrived, I was approached by two tourists, a lovely asian woman and her (middle aged) daughter. They produced a map, jabbed an emphatic finger at where they wanted to be, and asked me, in effect, how to get there. I told them, using my best tour-guide demeanor, that they should walk down Vassar, and moreover, one of the side benefits of such a route is that they'd walk by MIT's new Stata Center, see Frank Gehry's latest. "Who's Frank Gehry," the grandmother asked. "The architect, famous architect, did the Guggenheim in Bilbao," I replied, "you should really see it, plus, it is a great walk, get to see a lot of MIT." This seemed convincing, and they walked off, parting with a sincere "thank you," in the direction I had indicated.

It was, I'll say, a lovely quiet bit of evening, even without the flagpole seranade.

***

In my attempt to see more films from the '70s that couldn't or wouldn't be made today, I had procurred the early Al Pacino vehicle Dog Day Afternoon (1975) from Netflix (Ebert, Camby). Sidney Lumet directed, with a tight budget; lot of great shots inside, framing a very sucessful evocation of claustrophobia and media mania. For those of us, weaned on OJ that believed that media-saturated crimes began after the MTV age had killed the radio star, this film's effective portrayal of a brouhaha was telling. Police helicopters hover next to news choppers, high channel camera men scaled out on the landing skids for a better shot, all the while the police, using green army surplus schoolbuses, pump in a full media contingent, cameras, photographers, notepads and all.

This film is, thoroughly and unabashedly, Al Pacino's. Playing a ruthlessly charismatic "Sonny," and robbing a bank to (it turns out) pay for his gay lover "Leon's" (played with aggrieved camp by Chris Sarandon) sex change operation. This sordid, domestic, plot doesn't overshadow Pacino's white hot rage. He paces, twirling the bank's keys on a metal chain with scarely contained fury, shouting at the assembled officers with the name of the recent police massacre: "ATTICA!" As he strides back in forth, in front of the bank, white hankerchief in one hand, key chain in the other, dishelvelled, straining, you are filled with unremitting awe. This, this is acting! This is electric! You can't take your eyes from Pacino, since he's sparkling, magnetic, the beating heart of this movie. Late in the film, in two phone conversations, filmed one after the other, Pacino pours out his heart to Leon, who effectively betrays him by having the cops listen in, and then hangs up, in disgust, at the ineffective keening of his insensible wife, mother of his children. This is great, intrusive, film-making. Sidney Lumet bores to the heart of the issue, letting us explore someone who is unabashedly complex, a real man, a killer, a lover, someone confused about gender issues, full of bravado, but ultimately aiming just to help.

It goes without saying that they wouldn't make this film today. The relevant issues are a little raw--in our heavily over-focus-grouped Hollywood what actor would dare to play a gay man?--and the performances are too complex, shaded, for the modern jump cut. I can't imagine this movie today, with jump cuts, rock soundtracks, and various heroics; it would be too far from the urgent, cheap, desperate cinema verite of the '70s where stars were still permitted to sweat and suffer.

The film's conclusion, at the airport, was borrowed, slightly, by the masterful Michael Mann film Heat (1995), a cops and robbers film that ultimately recognized craft as the token of respect between professionals for whom the career meant everything. Pacino's cop, in Heat, pursues DeNiro to LAX, and in the shifting, liminal space between city and air, nationality and freedom, light and dark, kills him.

Violence at airports--we instinctively understand they're appropriate places to end protean narratives--and Lumet delivers, even recruiting Lance Henriksen, chiseled and largely immovable features, for a contributing cameo. Lance achieves fame, a relative term, for an experienced character actor, in James Cameron's Aliens as an android. That's an effective use of that face.


Dog Day Afternoon: highly recommended.

Film Review: Pumping Iron (1977)

Watched the '77 documentary Pumping Iron last night. The documentary, for those who don't know, was directed by George Butler and Robert Fiore, based on a book by Charles Gaines and starred the amazing Arnold Schwarzenegger and many of his bodybuilding contemproaries in the Gold's Gym in Venice, California. It is, I assure you, clever and very much worth a viewing.

A couple thoughts, in no particular order:

a.

Arnold, unlike his more meathead compatriots, is fully in command of the psychological aspect of professional bodybuilding (which is essentially intensive weight training followed by "posing" for judges). Arnold cripples his opponents mentally, subtlely sabbatoging their confidence and hamstringing their posing. He explains this method in a couple scenes:

Franco [another top bodybuilder] is pretty smart, but Franco's a child, and when it comes to the day of the contest, I am his father. He comes to me for advices. So it's not that hard for me to give him the wrong advices.

Moreover, one of Arnolds competitors, the monstrous Lou Ferrigno is especially supceptible to his barbs. Sitting with him and his family the day of the competition in 1975, Arnold jokes that Lou isn't ready, would rather have the competition in a month. Lou, his slow-wittedness emphasized by his bulk, visibly blanches. Later, Arnold ruins his pre-show warmup by mocking his audible weightlifting:

Arnold: What did you say Lou? What did you say?
Lou: I'm training Arnold! Gotta get a good pump!
Arnold: You make too much noise! Has to be very quiet in here, like in a Church!

When the actual competition comes up, Lou fails to pose well, poses shyly, and is defeated. In any case, Arnold's psychological advantage in the competition is acute, and he makes his eventual victories seem expected or even normal.

b.

Arnold's a natural showman, a patron of the sport, to borrow a French cycling term. He's supremely confident without being more than mildly arrogant. Moreover, he sees his training as more than just drudgery, or the necessary evil of the job. Arnold loves to lift, in a supremely visceral way:

The greatest feeling you can get in a gym, or the most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is... The Pump. Let's say you train your biceps. Blood is rushing into your muscles and that's what we call The Pump. You muscles get a really tight feeling, like your skin is going to explode any minute, and it's really tight - it's like somebody blowing air into it, into your muscle. It just blows up, and it feels really different. It feels fantastic.

He says his, wearing a checked shirt tight around his massive biceps, proud teutonic jaw jutting with a brilliant smile. He's a charming barbarian, a willing sybarite.

It's [the pump] as satisfying to me as, uh, coming is, you know? As, ah, having sex with a woman and coming. And so can you believe how much I am in heaven? I am like, uh, getting the feeling of coming in a gym, I'm getting the feeling of coming at home, I'm getting the feeling of coming backstage when I pump up, when I pose in front of 5,000 people, I get the same feeling, so I am coming day and night. I mean, it's terrific. Right? So you know, I am in heaven.

Arnold gives these lines with great gusto and palpable enthusiasm. He's loving his youth, being a 28 year old 6'2, 240 pound Greek god, the easy women, the thrill of lifting, the absolute lion-king hold he has on everyone around him. These annecdotes reveal how preternaturally comfortable Arnold is in his skin, his real, engaging personality, and his control of his narrative. There's no moment in this film where you see anything of Arnold you don't mean to see. That's breathaking poise, and I'm not surprised, seeing him as a younger man, that he has done so spectacularly well.


c.

Arnold's sucess can be understood through a couple of dimensions--personality, talent, psychological advantage--but mainly through his perspecacious understanding of himself as sculpture. He says as much, in an interview:

Interviewer: Do you visualize yourself as a living sculpture?
Arnold: Yes, definitely. Good bodybuilders have the same mind when it comes to sculpting, than a sculptor has.

This is amply demonstrated in the course of the documentary. Many of these men have large muscles, firmly established deltoids, but Arnold seems especially atuned to the sculptural qualities of his form, that he is statuary sprung to life, carved in living flesh and not hewen from marble. He intuitively sees himself as art:

I don't have any weak points. I had weak points three years ago, but my main thing in mind is, my goal always was, to even out everything to the point... that everything is perfect. Which means if I want to increase one muscle a half inch, the rest of the body has to increase. I would never make one muscle increase or decrease, because everything fits together now, and all I have to do is get my posing routine down more perfect, which is almost impossible to do, you know. It's perfect already.

There's an engaging Greekness to his form, the finely muscled back resembling that curved Greek discus thrower, tensing.




More than just "looking" like greek statuary, Arnold understands that movement between the proscribed poses, each emphasizing different aspects of human musculature, should also be smooth, flowing, and statuesque. The other bodybuilders have their poses down, straining, flexing, neatly muscled, but their interstitial movement is choppy, poorly planned. Arnold understands, intuitively, his body as sculpture, as three dimensional moment, and he moves from pose to pose with fluid power, never breaking from the illusion that he's animated marble.


Remarkable. At the end of the competition in Pretoria in '75, Arnold pauses, after it is clear he has won (the other men have already taken their places on the podium as #2 and #3) and places, with wistful playfullness, his fist under his firmly jutted jaw. Visual quotation: "the thinker!" It is just a moment, but it is sly, and canny. Arnold gets it: he's sculpture, animated, living in the round, perfect as can be through training, and his poses aren't artificial exercises in showing muscle groups but are organic, merely angles of his perfection.

A sight to see: the perfect body, animated volumetrically, with a keen understanding of aesthetic line. Watch this documentary and you'll understand why he won so many competitions and why his career has been so outstanding.

a couple thoughts on the Schiavo autopsy and two film reviews

One.

There's been a good deal of backtracking, preening smugness, and obstinate defiance in the aftermath of the Terri Schiavo autopsy. Although hardly comprehensive, I have a couple directions in which readers could go:

1) CNN, autopsy findings, key quote:

Jon Thogmartin, medical examiner for Florida's District Six, which includes Pasco and Pinellas counties, said the cause of death was "marked dehydration." Thogmartin said that the autopsy did not determine the cause of her collapse.

He said his examination turned up no sign of abuse or trauma -- allegations leveled by Terri Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, against her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo.

A report from a neuropathologist who served as a consultant to the autopsy said Schiavo's brain was "grossly abnormal and weighed only 615 grams [1.35 pounds]."

That weight is less than half that expected for a woman of her age, said the report written by Dr. Stephen J. Nelson.
'Irreversible' brain damage

Schiavo's brain damage "was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons," Thogmartin said.

"Her brain was profoundly atrophied," he said.

The vision centers of her brain were dead, he said.

2) NYTimes, initial editorial. Key quote:

The autopsy results released yesterday should embarrass all the opportunistic politicians and agenda-driven agitators who meddled in Terri Schiavo's right-to-die case. There is no evidence that Ms. Schiavo's husband did any of the awful things attributed to him, and no hope that her greatly damaged brain would ever have recovered. The courts were right to conclude that she should be allowed to die after 15 years in what her doctors described as a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery.

2) National Review, editorial, with the key quote:

About the main arguments against killing Terri Schiavo, the autopsy had nothing to say. Many people believed that it is wrong deliberately to bring about the death of innocent human beings, whatever their condition; that it is especially wrong when there is doubt about what that person wanted, and when her family members are willing to provide care for her; that Mr. Schiavo was too compromised to make this decision; that a law enabling the killing of people in a “persistent vegetative state” should not be stretched to cover people who might be “minimally conscious”; and that the Supreme Court should not have established the current lax standards for denying incapacitated people food and water. Nobody who believed these things has any reason to change his mind based on this week’s evidence.

4) Bill Frist, backpedalling, furiously:

WASHINGTON, June 16 - The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, who drew criticism earlier this year after reviewing images of Terri Schiavo on videotape and then suggesting that she was responsive, defended himself on Thursday, a day after an autopsy report showed that she had suffered irreversible brain damage.

"People said: 'Bill Frist, you're making a diagnosis. Doctor, you're trying to wear your white coat on the floor of the Senate,' " said Dr. Frist, a heart-lung transplant surgeon. "I never made a diagnosis. I wouldn't even attempt to make a diagnosis from a videotape."

(the inimitable Jon Stewart observed the other night that Frist acts like he's unaware CSPAN has cameras on the senate floor...)

5) Jeb Bush, not giving up, dammit!

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) -- Gov. Jeb Bush said Friday that a prosecutor has agreed to investigate why Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, citing an alleged time gap between when her husband found her and when he called 911.

Bush said his request for the probe was not meant to suggest wrongdoing by Michael Schiavo. "It's a significant question that during this ordeal was never brought up," Bush told reporters.

In a statement issued by his lawyer, Schiavo called the development an outrage.

"I have consistently said over the years that I didn't wait but 'ran' to call 911 after Terri collapsed," Schiavo said in the release.

In a letter faxed to Pinellas-Pasco County State Attorney Bernie McCabe, the governor said Michael Schiavo testified in a 1992 medical malpractice trial that he found his wife collapsed at 5 a.m. on Feb. 25, 1990, and he said in a 2003 television interview that he found her about 4:30 a.m. He called 911 at 5:40 a.m.

"Between 40 and 70 minutes elapsed before the call was made, and I am aware of no explanation for the delay," Bush wrote. "In light of this new information, I urge you to take a fresh look at this case without any preconceptions as to the outcome."

So, basically what you'd expect. The "pro-lifers" are in their bunker, the pro-autonomy folks are dancing around with rifles, everyone's still fucking pissed. Except, I guess, poor Terri Schiavo who is at peace. In any case, there's nothing I could add to any of this commentary that hasn't already been said, much more elegantly, by the fine William Saletan,, writing for Slate. Saletan's valedictory article about Terri, written after the autopsy and focusing on the primary videotapes, is superb:

According to Terri Schiavo's autopsy report, her "lateral geniculate nucleus (visual) demonstrated transneuronal degeneration with gliosis." Or, as the medical examiner put it in plainer English, "Her vision centers of her brain were dead. Therefore, Mrs. Schiavo had what's called cortical blindness. She was blind, could not see."

That isn't what Schiavo's parents, pro-lifers, and congressional Republicans told us all these years. They said videos showed her eyes following people and objects. "In the video footage, which you can actually see on the Web site today, she certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist declared three months ago as he spearheaded a congressional invasion of the case.

To pro-lifers, the meaning of the videos was as plain as the eyes on your face. "Streaming video of Terri Schiavo apparently glad to see her mom," one Web site advertised. "Terri looks over, sees her mom and gets a huge smile on her face," reported another. "As you can readily see, Terri is obeying commands," said a third. Several sites posted a common list of video links that began with Terri watching a balloon and Terri's alert eyes. "Seeing is believing," they concluded. "Now that you have seen, do you believe that this woman deserves to be starved and dehydrated to death?"

But now we know she was blind. She didn't see her mom. She didn't see the balloon. Her eyes weren't alert. We didn't see in her what we thought we saw.

Saletan, it seems to me, is positing a King Lear moment: the triumph of love over reason.

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives. (V.3.303-309)

I feel a little strange using the greatest tragedy in English for such a petty, Floridian, moment, but bear with me. Shakespeare is addressing the primal nature of grief, the obstinate refusal to accept death. Cannot poor Cordelia, be, perhaps, PVS?

This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt. (V.3.313-315)

Played properly, we identify with Lear's refusal to coldly face facts. He has, after all, through his blindness, destroyed his kingdom and caused the death of those near, dear (and true) to him. "She lives!" is the triumphant exclamation of delusion. We know, through the stage direction, that Cordelia is no more. What do we make of Lear's conviction, then? We pity him; Saletan argues convincingly we should also pity the Schiavos:

Let's look back at some of those videos. Start with Terri watching a balloon. It shows her eyes gliding up, down, this way, and that as a doctor entreats her:

Look over here. Terri? Terri—there you go. Can you follow that, Terri? There you go. Can you follow that at all? Terri? Come on. Terri, no, no. Over—come on. I'm using both sound and—can you follow that? Huh? Can you see that? Okay. Look over here. Look over here. That's fine. Look over here. Okay. Look over here. That's it. Look at there. Now, come on over here. Now, come on over here. Oh, you see that, don't you, huh? You do follow that a bit, don't you, huh? Okay. Look up here. That's good.

You can watch the video and draw your own conclusions. But what's striking in retrospect is what you can't see: the balloon. Without it, you can't tell whether she's following it. In fact, her eyes dart back and forth too quickly to reflect the movements of a balloon, even if it were jerked by a human hand. It's easy to overlook this, because your brain succumbs to the audio: "You see that, don't you, huh? You do follow that a bit, don't you?" You didn't see her eyes following the balloon. You heard that you saw it. And when you see the full text of the doctor's words—"Terri? Come on. Terri, no, no. … I'm using both sound and"—you can catch the warning signs you didn't initially hear.

Then there's the clip Schiavo's parents made, edited, and released two years ago in violation of a court order. Pro-lifers said this video "shows Terri apparently interacting with her mother and trying to speak." But watch it closely. Schiavo's mother stands off to the left, pleading with her daughter: "Can you look over here? … Come on. Over here. Look over at Mommy. Hi. Can you look this way? Huh? Can you look this way? Hey." The reason Schiavo's mom keeps pleading is that Schiavo doesn't respond.

Isn't this a refusal to see? From the begining, the Schiavos were being fed what is obviously (now) a cock-and-bull story about their daughter's health and prospects for recovery. Because of the extensive legal wrangling, there hadn't been a decent evaluation in years. In the overheated political climate these (heavily edited) video clips were being used as ammunition to bolster claims that Terri was just a few hours of PT (cruely denied her by her "husband") from health. Yeah. Some doctors are villians in this story: Bill Frist, pompous former heart surgeon, pontificating outside of his specialty by observing selective video clips; the doctors that kept the Schiavo's hope alive instead of providing realistic diagnosis. The judges, especially Greer, are vindicated by the autopsy, shown to have reviewed the available literature carefully and made a measured and intelligent ruling. In the end, we should just be sad it all had to end this acrimoniously:

Same thing with the balloon clip. The judge in the Schiavo case notes that elsewhere on the hours of videotape her father "tried several more times to have her eyes follow the Mickey Mouse balloon but without success." The Times reports that at one point

her father gets gruff while trying unsuccessfully to get her to follow [the] balloon. "Come here, Terri, no more fooling around. No more fooling around with your dad." He pokes her in the forehead to make sure she's awake. "No more fooling around with your dad. Listen to me. You see the balloon? You see Mickey?" Later, he apologizes, telling her others have admonished him for his tone.

This is what happens when you deny reality. First you lose your senses, then your mind, then your soul. It isn't Terri Schiavo who's refusing to see what's happening in that awful scene. It's her dad. And it isn't her defect, or her husband's sin, that's revealed in the autopsy report. It's ours. We were blind. We could not see.

Maybe the best commentary about the whole, sordid, affair was offered by the smartasses at South Park. Kenny, in a PVS, had a living will that stipulated that if he ever ended up in such a state he wouldn't want to be exposed to national media attention. Perhaps the truest epitaph to the whole situation has been the general stampede towards getting finalized, legally-binding, living wills. Whatever people thought about Schiavo, they don't want oleaginous politicians scumming around their deathbad or showing video of them on the Senate floor. Good for them.

Two.

Saw two films today, viva Netflix. I've heard from several sources (including my colleague Nealus) that the new Batman Begins is excellent. It has certainly garnered a wide spectrum of critical praise, including the lovely Manohla Dargis praising the film for star Christian Bale's noblesse oblige:

As sleek as a panther, with cheekbones that look sharp enough to give even an ardent lover pause, Mr. Bale makes a superbly menacing avenger. ...What Mr. Keaton couldn't bring to the role, and what Mr. Bale conveys effortlessly, is Bruce Wayne's air of casual entitlement, the aristocratic hauteur that is the necessary complement of Batman's obsessive megalomania.

I can't wait.

Two Aye.

I did not, of course, see Batman Begins today, although I did catch the end of Batman on tee vee along with the climaxes from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade, but I did have a great day at the (home) cinema. I saw both Zulu, the kind of populated with British stage royalty kind of action picture that nobody would dream to make today, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three which is a pardigmatic, lean, '70s movie that also wouldn't be made today, unless it was made with Vin Diesel, a 150 million dollar budget, and a lot of "edgy" jump-cuts.

Zulu is a 1964 Cy Endfield production, and has a voiceover from (Sir) Richard Burton and the debut of Michael Caine as the aristocratically fopish (but tremendously brave) Lt. Gonville Bromhead, VC. For those unfamiliar with the Anglo-Zulu war, it was a smashing bit of imperialism that had some spectacular battles (Isandlwana, Rorke's Drift, and Ulundi) and ended up the way everything seemed to in late 19th century South Africa, with a lot of dead black people. (Those searching for more information on Rorke's Drift or the Anglo-Zulu War should consult the linked material.)

It would be an injustice to the superb Zulu to flippantly describe it as Blackhawk Down 1878, but superficially the films show similarities: hordes of black folk, few brave white folk, lack of reinforcements, lot of dust. However, unlike (Sir) Ridley Scott's dreadful bit of war porn, Zulu is explicit in its respect for the bravery and humanity of the Zulu enemy, even including an extra-historical scene in which the braves return to salute the (victorious) British survivors. The film takes some time to set up the Zulu assault, allowing enough time for character development and some (semi) good-natured feuding between the commanding officers. Although Caine's Bromhead had been in command, he was outranked on pure seniority by the engineer John Chard who assumed control of the garrison. Their interaction, as it moves from resentment to admiration, is one of the highlights of the film. In any case, it is a stirring war film, packed full of great performances (James Booth as the malingerer-turned-war-hero Henry Hook, VC, for one) and truly spectacular cinematography. Zulu was filmed on location in Natal, and the setting is breathtaking. When the film concludes with Burton listing the eleven Victoria's Cross recipients from the battle (the most awarded in a single engagement in British military history) you feel exhausted, as if you endured the siege right along with the men. A hell of a good show, and highly recommended.

Two Bee.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is a delightfully lean '70s action film, starring the wonderful Walter Matthau. Four terrorists hijack a subway car and 18 passengers in the hopes of getting one million dollars from New York City. This film has been obviously influential on several careers, not least the fine Quentin Tarantino who borrowed liberally from this gem to make Reservoir Dogs. Yeah, the bad guys have color code-names: Blue, Green, Grey, and Brown. Brown's got a stutter, Grey's a sociopath, and there might be a undercover cop onboard! Yeah, Quentin, Joseph Sargent wants some royalties, alright.

In any case, I loved it. Matthau was memorable, wearing some hideous plaid shirt with a bright yellow tie, a much-younger-looking Frank Costanza was playing a deputy police chief, and there were gobs of bad language, racial epithets, stereotypical Japanese tourist-types (one had a Nikon, obviously) played broadly for laughs, and a great evocation of a dirty, dangerous, and barely livable New York City. After all, the deputy mayor, convicing the mayor to pay off the hijackers, barks out that "we're trying to run a city, not a goddamn democracy!" Splendid. Really. Two thumbs up for a lean, suspenseful, and new kind of action film. It is neatly claustrophobic in all the right sorts of ways, and the ending will surprise you. They really don't make 'em like this, anymore.

Two Cee.

All of this leads me to my big question for the night: why don't they make 'em like this, anymore? Why can't you get a dark, aggressive, taught action film without pretensions, anymore? Take John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, recently remade as some large-budget disaster with Ethan Hawke. There was such a casual economy to the Carpenter flick, a level of zombie-esque brutality on the part of the bad guys--they just keep on coming--relatively bland characters, sure, but it was gritty and a hell of a lot of fun. Most of all, there's just a level of reality in '70s cinema. They didn't have much in the way of special effects, so they either had to hint at it (use your imagination) or do it live action, best of their abilities. Makeup, not CGI. Feels more real.

Great article, this week, in Slate on the decline and fall of the Shark Movie. Even though Jaws gets a lot of bad press, it is still a great '70s movie, lean, and frightening. You don't see a lot of the shark, for one, and what glimpses you catch are more terrifying for that. There's also an incredibly vivid performance from Robert Shaw as the Ahab-esque "Quint" that certainly transcends anything that follows it. The article concludes, pessimistically:

With this kind of excess, it's not a surprise that an authentic, low-budget shark movie would be hailed as a revelation. Open Water was supposed to be the big scare film of the summer of 2004, but at the end of its paltry 79 minutes, the man sitting behind me got up and said to his wife, "That was it? I'm going to ask for my money back." He spoke for the nation. Real sharks, like the gray reef and bull sharks used in Open Water, are smaller and less impressively toothed than Hollywood sharks. Perhaps seeing them on the screen reminded the public that real sharks are disappointingly benign. They don't normally eat people or have vendettas against island towns or underwater research stations. As the old saw goes, we are far more of a threat to them than they are to us.

Not that this will stop Hollywood, which has now tried big sharks, smart sharks, freshwater sharks (in the Lou Diamond Phillips/Coolio 2003 TV movie, Red Water), and real sharks. All considerations of pacing and characterization aside, Jaws' success seems like a matter of timing—the movie worked because technology was just good enough to make the shark, and pre-CGI audiences were just green enough to scream at him.

I don't think that's it, though. Jaws suceeded where Deep Blue Sea didn't for one overriding reason: Jaws was a great movie, suspenseful, and ultimately character driven. The shark, scary though it was, was there to be hunted by rich, complete, complicated human characters. In later, glitzier films, the CGI is reason enough. I leave you with David Edelstein, who I love:

Let me change gears here. I want to tell you about the day I saw Jaws—the first day it opened in 1975. I was 15, staying at my friend Richard's house on Long Island, and we headed to the theater (not a multiplex) with a third friend, Craig. There were still tickets, but the line went around the theater twice. Despair. Then the ballsy Craig casually strolled up to the third guy in line, pointed at the marquee, and said, "Richard Dreyfuss—you see him in American Graffiti? He was great. I love that movie." The two chatted for a minute about American Graffiti and then Craig said, "Hold my place a sec, will ya?" and waved us over. I was cringing as Craig, Richard, and I became the fourth, fifth, and sixth people in line—but it was better than having to sit in the front row. When we got inside, we planted ourselves dead center in the huge theater, the perfect spot to experience the full kinetic effect of the film and yet be totally aware of the crowd. And so I guess, in a strange way, I owe my prime seat at one of the great nights of my moviegoing life to George Lucas (and Craig).

Jaws is still one of my favorite movies. I didn't know I could be manipulated like that—so wittily, so teasingly, in a way that made me laugh at my own fear. (The only Hitchcock film I'd seen in a theater was Frenzy, which was too sick to appreciate in the same vein.) What clinched it was that unbelievably brilliant sequence that begins with a high-angle shot of Roy Scheider dropping fish entrails in the water as shark bait. He was resentful; he said to Shaw and Dreyfuss, "Why don't you guys come down here and shovel some of this shit?" And we started to laugh—he said "shit!" heh-heh—and then the head of the shark appeared in the water (no music, no foreshadowing), and I felt my mind detach from my body and my laugh turn into a shriek and merge into the collective shriek of everyone in that huge theater. I literally shook for the rest of the movie: Every cut by the late Verna Fields had me poised to leap out of my seat. (I really learned to appreciate editing from Jaws.)

Yeah. I haven't felt like that in a while, and I certainly didn't feel like that at Lucas's antiseptic ROTS. I haven't been at a movie that really felt real in quite some time.

sins and expiations

I've been busy. Well, that's only partially true. I've been busy, yes, but I've also been not writing. That isn't to say I haven't been doing anything. I've been really after Netflix again, and in the past week I've racked up Kurosawa's magesterial Kagemusha, Polanski's superb Chinatown, and Scott's brilliant Blade Runner. I also watched Lucas's poor excuse for a film, Revenge of the Sith, today.

Naturally, I've got strong opinions on all of these. Kagemusha is superb (Times, Ebert, Ruthless), of course, although perhaps not getting the attention it deserves by the nature of it being (in Kurosawa's words) as merely a "dry run" for Ran. I don't deny that Ran is a superior film, ranking as it does as one of the best films of the master, but I'm telling everyone that Kagemusha is amazingly good. A lesser director would count it his finest moment; only the transcendent genius of a Kurosawa would consign as mere rehersal. Kagemusha is dark, dealing with Lear-ish themes such as performance, simulation, identity, and the ultimate nature of man's interaction with the universe. I'd say that Kagemusha and Ran are as darkly nihilistic as anything in Lear, the most devastating of tragedies, and that there's an unrelenting hostility to paliation that marks these late films. The activities of mere men are foolish, inconsequential, and perhaps more damning, easily forgotten. See it, if you have the opportunity. Unlike lesser directors, Kurosawa is able to frame meaningful, memorable characters in the midst of great tableux. He's a fluid director of state activity and battle, but when he zooms in, the individual players are not squashed by their scenery but enliven it. George Lucas, who with Francis Ford Coppola helped finance Kagemusha could have learned a lot from the master.

What more to say about Chinatown (Times, Voice, Ebert) that has not already been said? Perfect, really, one of those movies (like Fargo) that has not a hair out of place, just a satisfying amalgamation of great shots and greater acting. Jack Nicholson caries the film with his bored, drowsy detective work (with his schnauze ensconsed in gauze, to boot). Great movie, taut and exciting, with a cruel nihilistic edge and a superb gut-punch of an ending, too.

Revenge of the Sith? I'm sure everyone's been waiting to hear what I think. It was lousy, poorly written, stupidly plotted, and did the great injustice to the franchise to forever link the inky black knight, Darth Vader, the menacing dark father, with the sun-kissed curly Californian locks of Hayden Christensten. Hayden can only pout, he lacks all dramatic range to hoist a tale of betrayal and violence upon, and he's undercut at every turn by Lucas's excerable script (reportedly doctored by no less than Tom Stoppard which can only make us wonder how bad it was before). In the end, Lucas's failure will net him billions of dollars and greater creature comforts at Skywalker Ranch but the rest of us, having sat through one leaden, groaning, unfunny movie after enough, will have to ponder how, exactly, he caught lightning in a bottle with the original Star Wars. All of Lucas's later sins are still under wraps in Star Wars. The dialog is crisp and often funny, the picaresque inventiveness of locations like Mos Eisly and Tatoine stands as a stark contrast to the arid, hermetic space interiors, especially on the Death Star. There's particularity. There's human interest. There's the sense that actors acted on sets, actual plywood sets built on sound stages, and didn't have to act in green rooms and imagine whole cloth where they would be standing. Episode III feels artificial, pinioned down under glass, beautifully crafted on a computer, but lacking verve...

At the end of the day, Darth Vader was a great villain. He might not have had the chops or pure malevolence of Iago or the sadistic excess of a Macbeth or even the psychological baggage and furious hatred of a Richard III, but he was big and he was mean and he cut off his son's hand when he wouldn't take out the trash. There was something majestic about Darth Vader and something mysterious. You got the sense through the snippets that he had this old life, as Annakin Skywalker, that he had a familial name, and parents, and kids, and that he walked towheaded and barefoot on a planet, too. But that was just hints, just whispers and inferences, and that was enough. The reality was plain: black suit, demanding boss, and that breathing. Great villains don't have exhaustive backstories. Nobody wants to know that Buffalo Bill was picked on as a kid, or maybe got rejected by a chubby girl at prom time. Nobody cares that Dracula was picked on for being pale at recess. Nobody cares! That's the point--villains need a chip on their shoulder above and beyond what is reasonable, beyond what can be explained by happenstance alone, beyond what is orderly and just. That's, I'm afraid, why they are villains. Lucas, in his idiocy, sets out to explain exactly why Skywalker went to the dark side: he was worried about his wife's pregnancy and he didn't get a promotion. Sounds like a reason to go to the bar, not join the dark side and start slaughtering everyone. Sheesh.

At the end of the day, after 3 crappy movies, I'm just left thinking, "why couldn't have George just left well enough alone?"



That's the difference between being a hack and being transcendentally brilliant. Kurosawa he ain't. But then again, financing Akira just might be the good deed George needs to get into heaven.

a few thoughts on romantic love...

In the interests of posing perhaps stupid commentary on issues near (and dear) to the hearts of my readership, I've got, perhaps as advertised, a couple thoughts on romantic love. There are usually a couple things people point out before considering such a subject, namely: (a) the genre was invented in 1949 by officers of the Hallmark Corporation, (b) before this stationary revolution, all marriages were arranged by meddlesome aunts, and (c) the divorce rate was much lower. I'm not sure, in a very impressionistic way, that this subtle concoction of nostalgia and misinterpretation really leads to anything. Sure, Foucault invented human sexuality whole-cloth, and sure, before Valentine's Day became a commercial holiday, nobody "dated" per se, but I'm not sure if these floating facts somehow serve as a rigorous proof for the rise of the divorce rate. Then again, I'm abundantly naive on this issue myself, so I'm approaching these concerns with an open mind.

A.

In any case, it seems to me that the concept of "transformative romantic love" belongs in no small part to film. Film permits the close personal observation (and intimate access to emotional state, read out upon the planes of the face) that certainly mythologizes (reifies) our terms. Take, for example, everyone's favorite French art film, Amelie. Amelie is the perfect French art film because it isn't weird, it is benignly "quirky." Nope, Jeunet, our director, isn't abducting children or eating boarders. He's toned it all down, reducing his passing strangeness into a tasty broth, let's cycle madly through the streets of Paris and love!

Now, I don't want to argue that every film, or even every decent film (I'm going to ignore whole swaths of swill that are heaped before the plebes every October before Oscar season...) has these themes. Take Terrance Malick's superb Badlands, where the landscape, lovingly shot, becomes the perfect backdrop for an appealing amoral couple. Their love ain't redemptive, I'm afraid, and it is all the better for it.

But I want to concentrate, for a second, on the myth, not on the rank misery Ang Lee captures so evocatively in The Ice Storm or the deliberately cruel direction of Tom Solondz or Neil LaBute, reveling, in a small, sick, way, in the suffering of their characters. Don't we, for a second, want to love? I find a similar motivation in Tom Tykwer's work. Both Lola Rennt and The Princess and the Warrior (using the powerfully beautiful Franke Potente) deliver such redemptive promise. Lying in bed with "Manni," her dull German boyfriend, "Lola" delivers a penetrating line of questioning, wondering what she'd do if he was dead. Perishable memory versus the enthusiasm of youth? Cynicism aside, we believe "Lola"--we believe her youth, her sincerity, we believe in the transformative power of her love.

B.

Are we cynics, though? I've found, in my own short career, that Bob Dylan is the man to listen to while falling in and out of love. Depending on where you are (wistful, lustful, saddened, pained) there's a couple of tracks with your name on them. Take, for example, "Boots of Spanish Leather" from The Times They Are a Changing, which I had the privilege to hear live a couple of years ago.

Oh, how can, how can you ask me again,
It only brings me sorrow.
The same thing I want from you today,
I would want again tomorrow.

Perfectly put, I'd say. Dylan gets right to the heart of lovesickness, here, both the repetition and the continuous exercise of the same emotions. Like any repetitive conversation, there's a solemn rhythym to it. Repetition, emotion, constancy.

Take, for example, two Dylan songs dealing with his marital troubles. "Idiot Wind" (Blood on the Tracks) becomes implicitly autobiographical. Dylan follows the strange combination of affection and bitterness with an explicitly autobiographical appeal, "Sara" (Desire). In fact, scuttlebut has it that Dylan called Sara into the studio to perform it for her, live, first audition. Gutsy move, I'd say. "Idiot Wind" careens into biography from narrative towards the end of the song:

I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind
I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes don't look into mine.
The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while the building burned.
I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime
turned Slowly into autumn.

[chorus]

I can't feel you anymore, I can't even touch the books you've read
Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin' I was somebody else instead.
Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy,
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your ragin' glory.

I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I'm finally free,
I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.
You'll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above,
And I'll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love,
And it makes me feel so sorry.

This is a hell of a transition, to say the least. Leaving the narrative frame (priests, fire, season changes) we find ourselves radically abased, unworthy of love. After all, how angry can you be if you can quote their "holiness?" This is superb writing here, capturing perfectly the disconnect with a relationship that doesn't communicate. Dylan sings an unbridgeable gulf that cannot be crossed by mutual esteem.

"Sara," on the other hand, is a plea: "don't ever leave me, don't ever go."

I laid on a dune, I looked at the sky,
When the children were babies and played on the beach.
You came up behind me, I saw you go by,
You were always so close and still within reach.

...[chorus]...

I can still see them playin' with their pails in the sand,
They run to the water their buckets to fill.
I can still see the shells fallin' out of their hands
As they follow each other back up the hill.

Simply put, the song is an appeal to shared memory, to common history, and to parenthood. This isn't, I'm afraid, the kind of music we'd be wanting to listen to, if we were looking for a soundtrack of transformative romantic love. This is the kind of song that plays in our heads if we consider old flames, the wisdom of reuniting with exes, the calculation of whether it is better to move on or keep on keeping on. This is, I think adult music, and lacking in the kind of youthful fervor that we see in the unadulterated joy of Amelie.

Real joy, I think, is hard won, hewen from life through suffering. You've got a live a little to write a plea, and mean it. You just have to be in the first blush of emotion to be unreservedly joyful.



Something, perhaps, to ponder. Growing older means, I'm convinced, coming to terms with complex emotions:

I'm sick of love; I wish I'd never met you
I'm sick of love; I'm trying to forget you

Just don't know what to do
I'd give anything to
Be with you

conflicts d'interest

Kids,

happy tax day to all ya'll. My understanding, from having this conversation with a room of slightly inebriated foreign researchers speaking from their boundless experience with the vernaculars of the American south, is that "ya'll," while technically a corruption of "you (plr)," can in fact be seen as a you (sng) in less than polite conversation and thus "all" is needed as an intensifier to truly communicate that the speaker, in fact, means everyone present. Then again, I'd be the first person to admit that this reasoning sounds suspect, and that I really have nothing in the way of southern heritage, and furthermore, I got this information from foreign postdocs. So, what the hell do I know?

Settled down upon my couch tonight for some channel surfing. Caught the end of a mediocre Simpsons episode (is there any other kind? As they continue to dilute the quality of their product, the few superb seasons are being lost in the wave of shit that has followed. If only they could be more like Seinfeld, the greatest syndicated sitcom ever...but I digress) and then switched into the begining of Mr. Deeds, the 2002 Adam Sandler turd that I heard from Seymour Hersh was part of the "torture" package at Abu Ghraib. Then again, being a free man, I didn't have to watch the limp performance of Mr. Sandler and halfway to rehab daze of Ms. Ryder, and so I didn't. It was truly dreadful, though, but I thank the Fox Corporation, the "Id of America," for paying good money to air it on Friday night. I'm glad everyone who thought the extremely poor box office reciepts would prevent friends, family, and former fans from seeing the "performance" that were mailed in (and I'm looking at you, Messirs Sandler and Buschemi, you Peter Gallagher for having a terrible dirt 'stashe, and of course, you, Winona for really not even pretending to care to give a shit) was proved wrong by the appearance of this film on national television. I hope a lot of people won't go to see another film by you assclowns.

But I digress.

Switched to the vastly superior film The Fugitive (1993, Mr. Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, kicking off his career of playing hard-bitten federal agents) which was showing on TNT. I feel, for me, anyway, that The Fugitive is really "a film that time forgot" (to use TheOnion's rubric). Superb, great pacing, solid performances, real suspense, effective use of Chicago locale and public transit: what more can you ask for? Perhaps I'll answer my rhetorical question. Well, you can ask for a relevant story. This, surprisingly, The Fugitive delivers, dealing with medical ethics, the nature of Big Pharmaceutical money in clinical trials, academic honesty versus consulting cash. Just look at the new NIH rules (here) or the story of Dr. Trey Sunderland who recieved over $500,000 in consulting fees from pharmaceutical corporations (especially Pfizer). Check, for example, this Forbes opinion:

NEW YORK - From breast implants to pain pills, the perception that top U.S. medical experts have been paid off by drug and medical device companies is tarnishing debates that should be about science and patient safety.

...

The FDA can always overrule its panels, which are merely advisory. But patients shouldn't be left feeling that commercial interests played any role in the decision. Matters are only made worse when it seems that potential conflict of interest problems weren't made public. At the Bextra panel, which also dealt with Pfizer's Celebrex and Merck's (nyse: MRK - news - people ) Vioxx, the FDA decided not to read potential conflicts of interest aloud, as is its custom. (Panel members say they did go through tough background checks.)

Similar snafus have come up elsewhere. When new U.S. cholesterol guidelines were announced that would put many patients on powerful drugs like Pfizer's Lipitor and Merck's Zocor, critics pointed out that most of the authors had done work for the drugmakers. The problem is that research medicine generates financial conflicts by its very nature.

It takes some 60 pages to list all the authors who presented studies at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in March, and another 30 pages to list all their financial conflicts. Many academic researchers serve on the speakers' bureau of one company or another, helping to educate other doctors. Others work as consultants, often a necessary step in bringing drugs to market. Still others work on company-funded clinical trials, the main way that medicines are studied for safety and efficacy.

All of these are lucrative gigs that can make or break a career in medical research. If a researcher wants to run a clinical trial on a Genentech (nyse: DNA - news - people ) cancer drug, it's unlikely to happen if the company doesn't want to pay. (The National Institutes of Health funds relatively few trials.) Speaking can help raise an expert's profile among his peers.

All true. Welcome to the brave new world of Modern Medicine. Welcome, perhaps, to the world of The Fugitive, a film from 1993 that isn't dated, not one bit.

watch it again. You'll be impressed.

on spring

It is remarkable, I find, that one's attitude improves so remarkably with spring. I insist that this (spring) is a joy that the benighted denizens of more salubrious climates will never truly experience. What, after all, is the real difference between the mid 50s of a SoCal winter and the mid 60s to low 70s of a SoCal summer? Merely a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. It takes the real purgatorio of a New England winter to be able to truly appreciate the return of Robin Redbreast, herald of seasonal change. Though, more than vegetable budding and warm, zephyrus breezes, spring is the "deepest freshness deep down things" returning (apologies to G.M. Hopkins, the finest sonnet-writer in English) and reminding us all that life is indomitable, unquenchable, and back!

(That, and the irrepressible pulchritude of nubile young women, changed back into their pleasing spring atire from winter drab. Like the ptarmigan...)

I know, I just wanted to say ptarmigan. In any case, this is a light post, a little sorbet after a hefty meal of meat and potatoes. Sadly, I can't blog at impressive length every night, as much as I'd like to. In any case, hope that all's well with everyone, out there in bloggerland. Enjoy the weather! (Except for you California kids, because you'd just take it for granted anyway.)

Some kind of Metallica

Rock documentaries are an interesting bunch. Inevitably, in our glossy age, they take the confessional form, following the narratological arcs so favored by programs like E "True Hollywood Story" or VH1's "Behind the Music." We're all modern-day Hegelians with the lather-rinse-repeat regularity of rise, sucess, excess, hubris, catastrophe, repeat. (Perhaps this explains the inexplicable popularity of Scarface among members of the recording industry and professional athletes, at least as documented by MTV's "Cribs." There is certainly a gleeful, hyperkinetic exuberance to Pacino's meteoric rise and unimaginative decline into cocaine addiction, paranoia, and violent murder. But I digress.) Invariably, criticism of rock documentaries focuses on how glamorous the band's life is made out to be, what a petulant bunch of idiots the band's members are (not enjoying their fame enough for our taste, are they?) or how much the events in the documentary resemble events in the fabled, now nearly mythical 'mockumentary' This is Spinal Tap. To paraphrase Mr. Dylan professors and great lawyers feel obligated to regurgitate inane quotes from Spinal Tap at particularly inopportune moments. Haven't we, as a civilization, heard enough times already that "it" (whatever it is, a new car, a new cuisinart, a material posession of some merit and consumptory pleasure) "goes to 11?" But again, I digress. You will, I aver, see what I mean.

I.

The much maligned heavy metal band Metallica has a rabid and terribly nostalgic following. Any conversation with a serious Metallica fan (and I don't mean dainty poncers like Curt Minerd or Eric Engler who labor under the amusing delusion that their crapulent S&M classical-art-rock collaboration with the poor San Francisco Symphony Orchestra is the pinacle of their career) will inevitably devolve into pointless bickering about exactly when the bastards sold out. Some will say it was when Dave left. Some will say it was when they softened up and made the melodic piece of crap Ride the Lightning. Some will be smartasses and claim, post-modernly, that they had always already sold out. In any case, everyone will agree that the Black Album was a definitive selling out (especially when they hired the Bon Jovi producer and haplessly named buffoon with great hair Bob Rock). In any case, the '90s were a decade of disapointment for the true, the proud, the tattoed folk with eardrums hammered flat from listening to "Whiplash" too many times (turned up to 11, yes, and I'm not sorry at all.) Metallica was treading water, getting fat from having sold 90+ million albums, and doing all that conventional stuff people tend to do when they get rich and happy, like having children and accumulating extensive land holdings.

So what's the point? Not much except to say that the band, in 2001, was pretty rudderless. James Hetfield was a pretty soused alcoholic, Lars Ulrich is an overgrown man-child who is simultaneously petulant and demanding, and Kirk Hammett is some kind of Buddhist saint, rather spacy but clearly a genuinely nice guy. How do I know this? Well, for the whole production of the aggressively mediocre St. Anger disc Metallica was seeing a shrink (charging a cool $40,000 bones or clams or whatever you call them a month) and letting a documentary team film them.

The result? Some Kind of Monster, the real-life documentary that just might, on balance, end up being a better rock documentary than This is Spinal Tap! I've got a compendium of various reviews to follow: Slate, A.O. Scott, TheOnion AV Club, and the Village Voice. David Edelstein of Slate begins his review thus:

It sounds like a swipe at Metallica to compare the smashing new documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (IFC Films) to a nonfiction remake of This Is Spinal Tap (1984). But it's more of a testament to how smart that landmark mockumentary was.

A.O. Scott pays tribute to the mockumentary in his second body paragraph:

Early in 2001, Metallica, one of the longest-lived and most popular heavy-metal bands, went into a converted military barracks in San Francisco to begin working on a new album....

At first the idea of a rock band in therapy sounds unlikely, if not downright comical, like ''This Is Spinal Tap'' with a screenplay by Janet Malcolm. And hearing James Hetfield, Metallica's ferocious, sometimes fearsome lead singer, talking about his feelings with Lars Ulrich, the band's baby-faced drummer, can be a little jarring. But Metallica's music is rooted in strong, unruly emotions, and it has been, for many fans, a kind of therapy in its own right.

Thankfully, Nathan Rabin is able to write a couple of paragraphs without referencing the albatros Spinal Tap but the same cannot be said of Chuck Eddy at the Voice:

Lars deserves bonus points for being shorter than his wife, and his remark that the band's "in a bit of a shit sandwich" wins the most-blatant–Spinal Tap–reference award....

Psychobabbling $40,000-a-month shrink Phil Towle occupies the David St. Hubbins's girlfriend role; he never quite draws Zodiac-sign portraits of band members, but his implicit suggestion that they try being Kraut-rockers in "meditative mode" would've made him a more useful producer than biz-sucking slimeball Bob Rock.

I want to put away my hammer for a minute and do some close reading, though. The reviews all hit upon a common point: Metallica isn't a bunch of rock gods but just a couple overgrown kids who have been sufficiently insulated by money, power, and prestige that they've never really had to grow up. Hetfield, before he goes into rehab, ditches his son's birthday to go bear hunting in Siberia and his lame attempts to justify the fact that he was downing stoli shots--you know, for the birthday--instead of actually being there begin to verge on the pathetic. Lars is hardly a shit-kicking metalhead but rather a wealthy art collector and former tennis star, and one of the more amusing sequences in the film feature him knocking back cocktails with his wife (easily 6 inches taller than him) while his excellent modern art collection (including a Basquiat that sells for 5 million) goes on the block at Christie's. In some ways the finer grain that the film gives you of these rock stars illustrates just how accidental their fame is. They're just a bunch of guys with some talents, some synthetic potential, and their mega-stardom is inexplicable. There's no reason, as Dave Mustaine (Metallica and Megadeath) seems to think, that there's anything besides luck in what separates a modestly sucessful band from a hugely sucessful band. Them's the breaks, I guess. But that's what's humanizing about the film: it adds transparency to rock musicianship, reveals the squables and sulking and arguments and powerplays that occur behind the curtain and before METALLICA struts out on stage in front of 100,000 watts of amplification.

II.

Back to Edelstein again.

The documentary was intended as a relatively straightforward look at the making of an album (it would be St. Anger), the first in years for a group that, in its 20-year history, has sold nearly a hundred million records. But as the film begins, that old black magic isn't there. The longtime bassist, Jason Newsted, has decamped after feeling artistically suffocated, leaving producer Bob Rock to fill in. More important, there's something eating the singer, James Hetfield, who's quarreling incessantly with the drummer and cofounder, Lars Ulrich.

The band members engage a therapist, Phil Towle, to help them talk through their problems, but Hetfield can't rise to the occasion—can't manufacture the adrenaline or endorphins or whatever it takes to make kick-ass heavy metal at age 40. There's a nasty exchange about Hetfield's guitar-playing, which Ulrich calls "stock," and then Hetfield takes off, slamming the door conclusively. The next thing anyone hears, he's in rehab—for, like, nine months.

That's a hell of a scene, Ulrich and Hetfield bickering like a married couple. It later turns out, as Ulrich engages in a bit of drum confessional, that Ulrich had always felt alienated from Hetfield and that he thought Hetfield was not only closer to Dave Mustaine but also unable to express any deep feelings of emotion for Ulrich unless it was after "42 beers." This, I'm afraid, is the real emotional center of Metallica and their problems--this tryptch of Dave, James and Lars. They're all disparted, now, no longer whole, aching, in an impossible way, to be together again, at the begining.

Will Hetfield be strong enough to endure the camera's scrutiny, now that he's so undefended? It's quite a contrast, this quiet, clean-and-sober fellow, sunk deeply into himself—his image intercut with shots of him in his prime as a Dionysian long-haired boozy metal titan. Suddenly, Hetfield's life is structured, his Metallica participation limited to four hours a day. But it's Ulrich who chafes against the restraints. He hates that Hetfield controls the recording process even passively, by his absence. The scene in which they have it out is a triumph of the therapeutic process: We see that this conflict goes so deep that it's like we're watching a marriage unravel. A marriage and a big, big business.

At some point, all successful rock bands must confront what Max Weber called "the bureaucratization of charismatic leadership." But isn't that bureaucracy what metal generally rails against? And what to do about that touchy-feely therapist, who starts to pass them lyrics and to fancy himself (they think) a part of the band: Must they shed him to regain their potency and be able to swagger on stage as true Metal Men? Hetfield raises the ultimate question in a climactic performance before inmates at San Quentin: Can you have aggression—the kind of head-banging fury that gave birth to heavy metal—without negative energy?

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is loose and uninsistent, yet these questions are always in front of us: The movie is brilliantly structured. (The structure is brilliant because it's barely visible.) It's about a youth culture that makes all aging graceless, a therapeutic culture that makes all aggression suspect, and a capitalist culture that makes the potential collapse of a zillion-dollar enterprise like Metallica the stuff of high drama.

Scott picks up on these threads as well. How, exactly, do you grow up when your fans want you to continue to channel their very adolescent rage? Hetfield poses these questions, more or less rhetorically, when the band films/plays at San Quentin. He tells the inmates, ferociously tattoed in tank tops and orange prison garb, held back by a thin line of uniformed guards with rifles, that he sucessfully channeled his rage into music, that he was angry enough to be in here with them. This reads as almost inauthentic but Hetfield is sincere, after his rehab, and learning freshly music as vocation and not just avocation.

For nearly 20 years, Mr. Ulrich, Mr. Hetfield and their various band mates have channeled the basic adolescent experiences of alienation, frustration and rage into melodramatic, at times self-consciously mythic squalls of sound. One of the insights ''Some Kind of Monster'' offers is just how much work this transformation requires, perhaps especially when it is undertaken not by teenage rebels but by family men in their early 40's.

The film takes for granted that rock 'n' roll, while it remains the soundtrack of youthful disaffection, has long since become a respectable middle-aged profession. Both Mr. Ulrich and Mr. Hetfield, the band's founding members, who started playing music together in the early 1980's, are married men with young children. They also behave, with each other, like a long-married couple who find themselves bored, dissatisfied and on the rocks.

Mr. Berlinger and Mr. Sinofsky have uncovered the mysterious dynamic of their collaboration, a relationship that is, superficially, both an artistic bond and a business partnership but that is also a deep, bubbling source of identity and anxiety for each man. Mr. Towle, a bald, platitudinous fellow who has soothed the battling egos of professional sports teams, thus becomes a kind of couples therapist for Mr. Ulrich and Mr. Hetfield. They are not the only people in the room -- Kirk Hammett, the band's guitarist, and Bob Rock, the producer and acting bassist, also participate in the sessions and have their own concerns and grievances -- but the band's genius, as well as its dysfunction, seems to grow out of the tension between the drummer and the singer.

Eddy's column is far less reverent than either Edelstein's or Scott's. He begins by attacking Metallica for becoming staid "has-beens."

Which is kinda true; once broken-childhood-surviving singer James Hetfield finally goes through rehab and starts insisting on working only four hours a day so he can make his daughter's ballet lessons, you feel sorry for the dork. But then you remember how crappy Aerosmith got after they knocked the monkey off their backs. Not to mention that Metallica haven't made a decent album of original songs for 16 years.

And you remember that "therapy rock" has been the dullest cliché on earth ever since Nirvana inspired emo, and that the whole idea that we're supposed to care about rock stars as people (as opposed to, say, makers of songs and riffs) is ridiculous, and that rare-vinyl-collecting tennis-prodigy geek turned Basquiat-collecting drummer Lars Ulrich and Buddhism-spoutingly mild-mannered half-Filipino hippie guitarist Kirk Hammett had never seemed remotely threatening in the first place, and that Lars's Napster-baiting period absolutely justified Metallica's recent legacy as the most hated band by their own fans in rock history, and that this group has been obsessed with suicidal tendencies and sanitariums and sundry other mental health issues ever since their beautiful "Fade to Black" in 1984, and it clicks: This flick is almost all old news.

Eddy's opprobrium reaches delicious heights:

In fact, from an opening blurb calling them the top touring band of the '90s through a concluding one where the album tops charts all over the world, much of Monster is just a two-and-a-half-hour puff piece about how "important" Metallica are and, worse, how much "integrity" they have. ("We've proven that you can make aggressive music without negative energy," gawd.) The first 45 minutes drag; things picks up once old-married-couple control freaks Lars and James start acting like they're gonna beat each other's brains out.

James is pleasingly paranoid once he's on the wagon; earlier and more vodka-marinated, after bragging about shooting a constipated bear in Russia, he returns to the studio and sings like a constipated bear, and nobody notices!

This is spicy, and I enjoy the right of younger, more aggressive critics to find fault in a band that has grown old enough to be (not just serve as) loco parentis for their fanbase. That's the essential conflict here, between growing older and growing up, between maintaining youthful intensity with a lifestyle that no longer permits group sex with groupies, cocaine, and destructive alcoholism. It is true, perhaps, that rock and roll is a young man's game and that any bands that survive into elder-statesmanhood are forever going to be seen as lame. This next paragraph is delightful:

But he's [Lars] not nearly as lovable as his ancient Danish dad, Torben—a bucktoothed, troll-bearded ex-Wimbledon third-rounder, jazz muso, painter, poet, filmmaker, and arts journalist who looks exactly like the wizard-of-the-rings mountain man inside Led Zep's Zoso gatefold. He's also the only person brave enough to tell Metallica their music sucks.

Eddy decries the Metallica marketing machine, though it is hard enough to believe that the band would comission a documentary actively critical of them, and through his delightfully acidic commentary he reaches the same conclusion that Edelstein and Scott have about the new, reformed, refashioned, post-therapy, Metallica: they're a bunch of middle-aged men.

Another dumb personnel decision occurs during new-bassist auditions: Metallica pass over impressive unknown Elena Repetto and perfectly doom-toned Unida/Kyuss stoner Scott Reeder for Suicidal Tendencies klutz Robert Trujillo, apparently for his rap-metal cred. Pretty amusing, though, when Trujillo, stuck in a room with all these lonely men discussing "feelings," suddenly realizes he joined a new age band. And pretty tragic when Kirk Hammett, clearly the movie's good guy despite badly needing assertiveness training, argues for guitar solos, to no avail.

Yes, that's the true marvelousness of the video, seeing the coming of age of a rock band.

III.

Chuck Eddy did point me at this hysterical review of St. Anger by a disgruntled fan, Colin Tappe.

With St. Anger’s hype machine working overtime inside my brain, I was gratified to say the least when I finally saw the video to the album’s single “St. Anger”.

The video is a fucking GEM, lemme tell ‘ya. Metallica are playing at San Quintin, and in between the band playing the single to a bunch of entertainment staved prisoners (Pick one of two of the following useless parenthetical interjections: a) talk about a CAPTIVE AUDIENCE! Gua-hu-hu OR b) “hmmm, should I get gang raped in woodshop or go and see the filming of the new Metallica video?”) there’re these short skits of minorities committing crimes and going to prison which resemble all those straight-to-video gang themed films that were so popular when Boyz In The Hood first came out.

As if Metallica finally tapping into the oft-neglected “incarcerated gang member” demographic isn’t good enough, the song, St. Anger is one of the biggest pieces of shit you’ll EVER hear on any airwaves. My jaw dropped when I first heard how AWFUL the thing sounded. I mean, I honestly can’t recall the last time I heard a single from a “Major Artist” like Metallica with such shitty production! Even the cable access Christian video shows would blush at the not-even-demo-worthy sound quality. Needless to say, “St. Anger”, and thus St. Anger were now weighing HEAVILY on my mind.

Hmmmm. Delightful.

The guitars are not only tuned way low, but mixed super quiet, so needless to say the bass is completely obscured in the non-mix. All you can hear is DRUMS, and VOCALS, which is fucking ABSURD because, as the cover of the CD indicates, THIS IS A FUCKING METALLICA ALBUM, and maybe it’s just me, but when you buy a FUCKING METALLICA ALBUM, you’re supposed to be able to hear the FUCKING GUITARS!!! What’s more is that, as you may have guessed, the drums and vocals are the worst fucking part! Completely ignoring Hetfield’s now-AWFUL pseudo (or is it post?)-Vedder et al. vocal style, the way which the vocals were actually recorded on the CD make them sound even WORSE, if one can imagine! Take the legitimately laughable vocal build on the opening cut “Frantic”; with each repetition of the chant “Frantic, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tock” Hetfield’s voice goes an octave higher and higher than he’s comfortable singing, so that by the end of his ranting Hetfield’s voice sounds as pubescent as his core audience. What’s more is that on closer examination, namely by watching the accompanying DVD of the rehearsals for St. Anger where Hetfield’s vocal build DOESN’T crack like a 13 year old Phil Anselmo, it seems that Bob was the one egging him on to go for those high notes.

...

Lyrically, it can only be expected to be written at a 6th grade reading level, with the emotional development of the writer not going too far out of that age range, but these guys must have been some pretty fucking stupid 6th graders, man! Some random excerpts; “Shoot me again/I ain’t dead yet”, “Can’t you help me be uncrazy?”, “Kill, kill, kill, kill”, and of course, one of the most baffling lyric to get actual radio airplay in a LONG time “I’m madly in anger with you.” Jeezis, I’ve heard of attempting to sound intellectual, and I’ve heard of pseudo-intellectual, but these guys must be TRYING to sound pseudo-intellectual. Like, ain’t these cats something like a half a fucking century old a piece? And they’re still wrestling with thesauruses to voice their “pain”? Christ, I hope if I ever get to this state of living off of fumes of nostalgia for my youth my retrogressive trip won’t be so fucking SQUARE sounding as these assholes.

So, that's a fan. Then again, Colin Tappe is so meta-post-Metallica that he doesn't even like their old stuff!

The thing is I’m not even a fan of Metallica’s old shit. “Those who can’t Slayer, Metallica” I’ve said on more than one occasion.

Truly, he has to be their ultimate fan. I bow before his superior intellect on this one. If to be a real fan of Metallica is to prefer their early work over their post 1991 stuff (somewhat analogous to having a preference to Van Halen over Van Hagar) then to be an ultimate fan is to not even like their old stuff at all. This is all so very delightful.

IV.

Speaking of Van Halen...I know that Neal C. Hannan (last seen on this blog with Buckethead) is a eu-fan, or at least as much of a eu-fan as someone that was in utero for their early work or as someone that confesses to taking pleasure in solo Sammy could be, and I'm fully aware that Van Halen will never get back together, and in all likelihood couldn't even be assembled in the same room for any appreciable length of time, but oh my, wouldn't that be fantastic? I do believe that our trusty filmmakers Berlinger and Sinofsky might have a calling in following around other great bands and just being the fly on the wall, so to speak. I'd love to see a Van Halen documentary in which the absolutely soused (speaking of someone that needs to go to rehab) Eddie Van Halen could tell the booze magnate (Cabo Wabo Tequila!) Sammy Hagar or the overly corpulent aging egomanic David Lee Roth that he was his favorite frontman. What a battle royale would ensue! That would make the glaring and pouting and pacing of Lars Ulrich seem so positively emo compared to the real rage that great enemies could incite.

I'd love to see John Paul Jones tell Jimmy Page that he was a fathead. I'd love to hear what Sir Paul McCartney really thought about John Lennon and Yoko. I'd be very curious what Tommy thought about Ozzy or if Daltrey thinks Pete is a pedophile (I mean, we've got an interview where he supports him, but what does he really think?)

I'm afraid, though, that this will all have to play out in the theatre of the mind. Then again, I don't mind that, all that much. The popcorn's cheap and nobody ever stands up in front of me to go to the bathroom. That, and the floor is always clean. Good times.

And Metallica? I've never been their biggest fan. I've enjoyed some of their stuff, less so others. I enjoyed Some Kind of Monster though, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. I'm a big fan of schadenfreude, myself. Maybe I enjoy it a little too much. But it was a good time watching Metallica grow up and sort through their issues. Maybe they won't rock quite as hard as they used to. But they'll be able to reduce albums that their fans hate and compare unfavorably to what they did in the golden years and they'll continue to able to afford great art and horses to ride around their ranches on and expensive cars and all will be well.

What more can you really ask for?