Books: Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk

Reading a book after seeing the movie—especially after seeing the movie five or six times—can be a challenge, especially when the movie follows the text so closely as it does in this case. Reading, I heard Ed Norton, Brad Pitt’s voice. I saw their faces. The only marked departure at first was Marla Singer, who seemed in the book quite other than Helena Bonham Carter’s character—the filmic Marla is isolated and alone; Marla-in-the-book has a mother (a mother, in fact, whose liposuctioned fat provides the first batch of soap-making material, rather than the biohazardous waste dumpster our heroes raid in the movie), though we never actually meet her.

But a bigger difference emerges quickly—the Tyler-is-Tyler (i.e. the Brad Pitt-is-Ed Norton) truth reveals itself sooner; is, dare I say, over-foreshadowed. And rather than buying into Fight Club the way I think director David Fincher does, writer Chuck Palahniuk knows from the start that it’s a sick joke—the book is completely without the film’s dark optimism, Nietzschean (positive) nihilism. Instead, Tyler (the Ed Norton-Tyler) is sick, insane, and therefore just sort of sad. The book ends not with the dark and glorious explosions of the film, but with Ed-Tyler padding around a hospital for the insane, swallowing pills from a cup. There remains a very slight sense of menace—some of the orderlies sport black eyes and tell Tyler that they miss him—but all-in-all, the nation-sweeping reclamation of individual power championed by the film just isn’t as promising in the book. I finished it feeling a little mopey, rather than completely charged and ready to grab my life by the hair.

Movies: Two Seconds and Little Caesar

Two Mervyn LeRoy movies featuring the unmistakable Edward G. Robinson showcase the actor's favorite roles, at two extremes—the schmuck condemned to suffer eternally for one bad decision (we know this guy from The Woman in the Window) and the hard boiled gangster determined to claw his way to the top of the city's bloody ladder. Either way, his performance seethes with the mealy-mouthed pathos that made him famous. Me? I can take it or leave it; Robinson's schmuck is almost too much to bear (Two Seconds could put an edgy person over the brink), and I like my villains leaner and meaner—I'll take Richard Widmark any day over Eddie G.

In Two Seconds, we see the man's demise in lengthy flashback, supposedly all recalled in the two seconds it takes him to die in the electric chair. He had started out as an okay guy, a riveter who worked on a skyscraper's steel skeleton, rooming with his co-worker and best friend, just looking for the right girl. After another botched double date, he wandered into a taxi dance hall (oh, how I wish these still existed!), where he met a conniving vixen who played to all desires. Against his roomie's warnings, the schmuck took her out again, and she got him so drunk that she was able to bribe a justice of the peace to marry them. Arguing about the situation up in the sky, the idiot raises his hand against his well-intentioned friend, sending the man plunging to his death. This sends our man into a permanent nervous state; he can't work, so his new wife goes back to the dance hall, against his insistence. She buys herself dresses and pays their rent, along with grocery and doctor bills, with this "dirty" money, while her husband sits at home with the shakes. When he comes into an unexpected windfall, he really looses his mind. He goes to the dance hall and finds her there, in the arms of another man. Paying back his debt in cash, he pulls out a gun and shoots the woman dead. We see him briefly in front of the judge, pleading for clemency in his famous whine, insisting that he deserved to die while he lived off the dirty money, but that he should be free, now that he's paid his debts. Of course, the judge can't abide by this logic, and we return to the chair, where the crank is pulled: the necessary two seconds have passed, and he's dead now.

What a delightful ending! Little Caesar's is no brighter. This time, Robinson is Rico, a small-time crook who decides to up his game after reading about a famous gangster in the paper. He joins a small gang of organized thugs and quickly takes over the operation, winning the boys' approval by joining them on the front lines, unlike their previous leader. His next target is the head of the neighboring territory; he and his gang quickly knock off their casino and when The Big Boy (!)notices Rico's hunger and ability, he makes him the new head of the North territory. Rico is suddenly living large (though we never see him with a nice dame); he has a swanky pad, his picture in the paper, and the city vice squad following his every move. Too bad he slips when the real heat comes on—his buddy's girlfriend, who loathes him for keeping her man in the gang, traps Rico and calls the police, insisting that her boyfriend testify against him. Rico's friend silently refuses, but Rico is long-gone, jumped out the window and run away. His old landlady, who has hidden all his money, hides him over night in a secret room, but won't give him more than $125 to escape with, and he can't kill her because she's the only one who knows where the stash is. Stranded, Rico finds himself drunk and unshaven at a flophouse, listening to a group of bums read a newspaper out loud. Hearing his name, he springs to life—his ego is more important than his safety, and he doesn't like hearing himself called a chicken in the papers. He calls the head of Vice and starts running again, but they find him, and shoot him down dead. The End, dead, again. Poor Eddie G.

Movies: Mills of the Gods (1934), Ex-Lady, Female

Last night's line-up at Film Forum's "Breadlines and Champagne" Depression/Recession festival featured pre-code films at their best—not because they are racy (though Ex-Lady is, a bit) or because they're racist, but because they all featured high-powered career women who run their sex lives as efficiently as their businesses. Of course, the final minutes of each film flips back on its promises and silences the woman with a wedding—pre-code audiences, it seems, for all their delight in debauchery, couldn't stand the precedent of a single girl having a happy ending all to herself.

Mills of the Gods is the only exception to that rule, perhaps because its didactic intentions are more pointedly about class than gender warfare. A nerves-of-steel matriarch who has run a mill since her husband's death finally decides to retire, but none of her family members—a lay-about son, a fur-collecting daughter, a saucy granddaughter, and a weakling grandson—want to take over; they are having too good a time spending her fortune in Europe. When the Depression threatens business to the point that the mill may close, and the workers rise up in revolt, she sends for them all, and they return to the states. But they refuse to give up their personal trust fund to keep the business going, and plan their return overseas. Before they leave, though, the leader of the labor rabble seduces the saucy granddaughter; she drives him up to a woodland hideout and then spends the night (though he cooks the dinner and she invites him to her bed). After that, she's a convert, and convinces her brother to vote along with her and grandma to release the trust fund and reopen the mill. Her one-time lover refuses to remain with her (her only punishment for transgressing society's sexual morays) because of their economic differences, but she and grandma ride off happily ever after, career women to the death.

Ex-Lady, conversely, sees a career girl married off. Bette Davis, luscious in long white silks in a grand apartment of her own, makes her living as an illustrator and gets her kicks having a secret affair. When her lover insists that they get married, she refuses. When her parents drop in one morning, uninvited, and catch her with her lover, and insist that she get married, she refuses. But when her lover threatens to leave her because of it, she yields. They marry, but she's soon frustrated; every fear she had about the arrangement has come true. Both partners are unhappy, bored, jealous; her husband flirts openly with another woman; to get back at him, she successfully pursues a business account that he himself lost. They decide to separate, and try to live as lovers again, but the "open" arrangement only feeds the fire of jealousy. Ultimately, they decide to move in together again and live as husband and wife, certain that a little tedium is better than burning suspicion. I think I prefer the "unhappy" ending of this movie's contemporary version (The Break-Up), in which the parties move on instead of settling. I'm not ready, personally, to accept that being bored together is better than being lonely apart; the first option has less potential for redemption than the second.

If Ex-Lady reminded me of myself in a relationship, Female reminded me of myself out of one. The super-powered heroine runs an entire automobile company (having taken over after her father's death—family business seems the only way for girls to get their start in the '30s), barking orders to her boardroom, her secretaries, and her phone by day. Each night, though, she's invited another intriguing young man from the company to her home for dinner. There, she's dropped the suit for something slinky, and the postprandial discussion turns constantly to romance, rather than business. She pages her staff to bring vodka, incapacitating her victim, and when the man shows up at work the next morning, with flowers and promises of devotion, she has him transferred to a far-away department where she'll never have to see him again. She goes on in this desperate way, having less and less luck, when she meets her match—a new engineer who won't have any of it. They'd already met one night when she went out into the streets "in disguise" as a nobody—she picked him up at a shooting gallery, they went dancing, ate a hamburger, and then he got away. When he finds out that he's working for her, he won't give her the time of day in a romantic way, instead preferring his fawning, doe-eyed secretary. Our heroine takes her male secretary's advice, and plays at being girlish and silly; this works to a degree, but when she laughs at his proposal of marriage, he storms off again. It's not until she's caught in the middle of work and love and chooses the later—blowing off a meeting with bankers to follow the engineer once he's run off—that he takes her back. To cement their love, she insists that he take over the company's operations so that she can have nine children, and driving off to the bank together, the man back behind the wheel, those cheerful letters spell out The End.

The End! The end of her freedom and desperation: why do these things always come hand-in-hand? It's reassuring for a girl to see that her 2009 problems infuriated girls 75 years ago, but disappointing to find out that 75 years haven't brought about a better solution.

Music: An Evening of Opera Scenes

When people ask me what kind of music I like, I honestly answer "everything—except opera." I'm snooty enough that I really should like opera (I don't think that classical music is boring, I go to see lots of performance arts, and I sang soprano in all eight semesters of high school chorus. But I tend to prefer chamber music to orchestral, and contemporary to traditional ballets—I don't do well with performative hyperbole (though I like it in literature and painting), and what is more hyperbolic than The Opera?

But this evening of opera scenes, which I attended to see a co-worker do what she really does (how weird is it to see a girl who walks past your desk all day with stacks of presentations, headed to the binding machine, on stage in a floor-length white gown and madly-teased hair, wailing in Greek?) reminded me that, just like there are ballets quite unlike Swan Lake, their are operas quite unlike those of Mozart and Puccini. It's true that the plots were still a bit "big" for my taste (melodrama, again, only works for painters), but the music—it was different! It was beautiful, lean, voices plus piano swooping in and out of each other, almost experimenting, rather than showing off. . . groping, feeling, and blindly finding bliss.

What were these delicious pieces of music? The end of the second act from Gian Carlo Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street (Karen Suarez's low, foreboding voice so atypical, wonderfully strange), the aria from Kurt Weill's Broadway opera Street Scene (which made me cry), Clytemnestra's murder scene from Richard Strauss's Elektra (a fantastic struggle between female voices), and the opening scene from Jonathan Dove's Flight (the best piece of the show for its humor, its unapologetic contemporaneity, and the brilliant physical drama of Courtenay Symonds, who supports her hysterical performance with full-speed-ahead vocal achievements), amongst others. Now I can't say I don't like opera. When people ask me what kind of music I like, I'll have to say "everything—except Puccini."

Art/Performance: FLUXCONCERT 20090220-21

After Mr. Garvin’s last FLUXCONCERT—epic on a Fluxus scale—this evening of Brecht event scores, pulled at random from a surprisingly ornate vase, and enacted by an unrehearsed group of performers (the usual crowd), felt a little small, incidental, mild. As most of the chosen scores give little—if any—specific instruction, responsibility for the audience’s engagement rested with each performer. Because this is a creative group of fellows, those scores with the least-specific instructions generated the most interesting events (although the audience was in surprising good spirits and applauded avidly after each event (perhaps too avidly)).

One score, Suitcase, which instructs “from a suitcase” and nothing else, somehow inspired Anthony Clune to roll onstage in a wheelchair and pop the longest wheelchair wheelie I’ve ever seen (have I ever seen a wheelchair wheelie?) while telling a story about a night spent at a bus station. The literal suitcase never appeared. Another score, called Smoke, instructing “(where it seems to come from)/(where it seems to go)” brought Ethan Wagner on stage with an elaborate candelabra plugged with unlit burgundy tapers. But rather than light the candles, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and stuck one in his mouth. But rather than light the cigarette, he struck an elegant wooden match with a flourish, watched it burn a bit, and blew it out. He held the smoking match to the bottom of the cig, and then left the stage.

These open scores made me wonder what could have been for those scores listed on the program that were not performed (the program adhered to a time limit, rather than a certain set of scores, and the surprisingly long Winter Event, expressed simply as “antifreeze,” for which Wagner melted an ice cube in his right hand (refusing to transfer it to his left hand, or his mouth, as the audience occasionally demanded) burnt up a good amount of performance time). What, for example, might a person do to enact “-yellow/-yellow/-yellow” as part one of Three Yellow Events?

Alternately, Mr. Garvin chose to include a few of Brecht’s very specific scores, including Comb Music, Recipe, and Concert for Clarinet, Fluxversion 1. These fail to interest, despite the performer’s flourishes (in Recipe) and determination (in Clarinet), because the scores explain almost precisely what the performer will do. They leave little room for the visual punning, the surprise physicality, and the threat of the unknown which make Fluxus events worth watching, rather than just reading (because they do have a particular lean elegance on the page*).

Two events staged by Ryan Anthony Donaldson, which all engaged the audience, came off particularly well: Event Score (“Arrange or discover an event. Score and then realize it.”), for which he staged an impromptu three-minute birthday party, complete with invitations, silly hats, and a cake, and Position (“an insect nearby”). Position, in particular, got a delicious rise out of the crowd; Donaldson released a small spider from a Tupperware container onto an upper riser in the audience. Responses ranging from detached interest to embarrassed fear rifled the audience like an unseen breeze for the rest of the show; the older woman sitting next to me, who had often checked the time and jangled her jewelry with boredom, bent down and picked her handbag up off the ground. Fluxus can teach us to fear the ground! Later, when the creature reappeared near the stage during Winter Event, I shouted “Kill it!” and the vegans sitting in front cried “No!” in various tones of ecological self-righteousness. Too bad I was too far away to stomp on it; the ensuing brouhaha would have been another version of Event Score.


*Less so, again, the longer, more specific ones, which begin to read like technical manuals, whose jargon shoots your interest on a trajectory away from the text.

More about FLUXCONCERT at http://www.fluxconcert.org/

Movies: Three on a Match

Brutal! Movies from the thirties (this one from 1932) always make me wonder why they don’t make them like they used to—lurid, cruel, and unapologetically cautionary. In only three minutes over an hour, Joan Blondell, Betty Davis, and Ann Dvorak grow from their eighth grade classroom (where their destinies are already pre-determined—the flirt will grow up to be a showgirl, the valedictorian a secretary, and the popular beauty the wife of a rich lawyer), to adults on a roller coaster ride.

The beauty, bored with her husband and three year old boy, runs off with a no-good man and is quickly on skid row, dark circles under her eyes from an unfed cocaine addiction (we never see any powder, just her raving and a few twitches of the nose). Her concerned girlfriends divulge her whereabouts to her husband, only so that he can rescue his son. In gratitude, the wealthy lawyer marries the showgirl the day his divorce is finalized, and gives the secretary the job of governess.

When the no good lover needs more money for her habit and to pay off debts to a gangster (whose right-hand man is a young Humphrey Bogart), he kidnaps the toddler for ransom. Smelling a profit bigger than two grand, the gangsters take over, and try to kill the boy when the heat comes. To save her son, the socialite, who had never been satisfied with life anyway, jumps out the window, a message about the boy’s whereabouts scrawled on the front of her dress in lipstick.

Because of time (or budget?) constraints, the movie marks the passage of thirteen years with newspaper headlines, on everything from the optimism on Wall Street (ha) to the shortening length of dresses to the explanation that the old saying “Three on a match means one will soon be dead” did not originate in war (where a match lit long enough to light three cigarettes could provide too good a target for enemy gunfire) but from a manufacturer of matches, who enjoyed increased profits when more matches were used. But the film’s closing scene rings ominously: the two remaining girls share a match to smoke in front of their mansion’s fireplace; the third, who shared that match at a reunion luncheon just a few years ago, is now dead.

Particularly in these times, it’s good to see the ungratefully wealthy go punished onscreen, and it must have been even more delicious for audiences in the 1930s.

Movies: Dead End

A super surprise treat on New York’s East River in the 1930s (shot on an unrecognizable corner perhaps located near today’s Sutton Place), where a grand new apartment building has brought the hoi polloi in direct contact with the tenement slums. The local kids (the real stars of the movie, who give it genuine vibrancy with their loudmouth clowning and physical antics, fighting and throwing each other into the river) watch the drama unfold: an old neighborhood boy (golden Joel McCrea) who took the straight route versus big-time gangster Babyface Martin (Humphrey Bogart), who’s come back to see his mother (who slaps him across the face and says she hopes he’ll die) and his old girlfriend (who now makes ends meet as a prostitute).

Refusing to leave empty-handed, Babyface hatches a plot to kidnap the same rich kid the local kids have just beat up, but the good guy senses that something’s up, now that he’s no longer big-eyed over the rich girl who had been leading him on (he sees her disgust at the roaches in his apartment building). After a great chase scene in the shadowy hallways and across the dark rooftops and fire-escapes of the slum, our hero shoots Babyface dead, winning rights to a $4800 reward. His rich girl comes back, thrilled that they can live on the money in style for a year (and after that? Who cares, at least she’ll get one year of happiness, she says), but he sends her away, at last seeing the beautiful but poor local girl as his honest match, and pledging his reward money to hire a lawyer to keep her little brother (one of the local kids, under arrest for the most innocuous knifing you’ve ever seen) out of reform school.

Bogart’s heart-broken tough-guy is fantastic, but the movie belongs to the rag-tag kids, who make their own rules and seem to be having a pretty good time, despite their lack of future. Stripped to their shorts for swimming in the filthy river, their narrow chests are big with bombast as they do mocking impressions of the doorman and the rich men and women coming in and out of the fancy-pants building, plunked right in front of their hangout. I’d love to see this movie remade today, in gentrifying Harlem or East Williamsburg, though I suppose I’m the bad guy now.

Books: Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov

It is rare that I admit I’m not smart enough to enjoy a book—usually, I simply dismiss the author as too obtuse. But Nabokov presumes too much. In Ada, at least after its introductory and obfuscating thirty pages (enough to turn away even the most committed of readers), a legible tale of young (and incidentally incestuous) lust promises genuine quality—somewhere behind the bandied phrases in French and Russian (only a few of which anagrammatic Vivian Darkbloom deigns to translate in a set of arch end notes*). Not only does the author demand a minimum of trilingual fluency, though, he also expects us to be intimate with Anna Karenina (the Veens, the family to which our lovers belong, seem distant relatives of both Tolstoy and the Karenins, if such a thing is possible), the works of Chekov (and a few other Russian literati), and the oeuvre of Proust.

Not that I haven’t dipped into these novels, and fairly recently, but my gosh! Nabokov also assumes that we’re familiar with his own oeuvre, Ada being in a way an extended reworking of the introductory section of his most well-known novel Lolita. The term “nymphet,” coined in Lolita, appears repeatedly without definition, the reader's comprehension taken for granted. The word “Lolita” appears as well, explained in the footnotes by “Darkbloom” once as a city in Texas, and another time as a long, full skirt. Ada is a Lolita herself, a vixenish, pubescent twelve year old who doesn’t wear underpants, who immediately becomes fourteen year old Van Veen’s lover, heedless of their consanguinity.

In fact, because this tale spans the lovers’ entire lives, during which they are often separated, both by circumstance and, eventually, family intervention, there is ample time provided (seventeen years) for Van to pose as Humbert Humbert and diddle the actual, poor Lolita—the entirety of that novel could fit between Ada’s parts two and three.

But it’s unquestionable, though I’m not clever enough to catch half the man’s inside jokes and references, that this is a brilliant man’s novel for other brilliant men, for insiders. It’s a comp lit PhD candidate’s wet dream, tightly packed with fodder for research and investigation. Nabokov swings from epic Russo family history to pants-wetting lusty eroticism (with bonus x-rating for double pedophilia) to wandering philosophical tome (a challenge of Space by Time—dare I say he is writing a parody? If I could penetrate it, I might! But perhaps that is the point. . .) to, yes, a memoir, in which the book collapses on itself, with editorial notes throughout by Ada Veen, who we see is revising the manuscript as an aged Van Veen writes it (awkwardly, both in first and third person). All of this cleverness distracts us from any apprehension we might feel about Nabokov’s creepy-old-man-ness.

Most readers love Nabokov for his glittering gem sentences, but tire of his full-scale work; Ada is no exception to the rule. And so, I can never list him as one of my favorites, even though I keep reading his darned books. Too bad he didn't decide to just be a poet.

*Note: I positively loathe end notes, particularly those that are not indicated. I do, on the other hand, love footnotes.

Books: Middlesex, by David Eugenides

I didn't expect this book would be good because everybody reads it. I expected it to be good because I loved The Virgin Suicides, and because gender issues are interesting (if you managed to miss it, despite Oprah's best efforts, it's the epic tale of an intersex narrator, a child raised as a girl who develops facial hair, a too-large clitoris, and no breasts during adolescence, who is painfully attracted to a redheaded girlfriend, and whose parents follow a doctor's recommendation for "corrective" surgery, causing the narrator to run away, hitchhike across the country, and start a new life as a man).

Indeed, this sounds like a fascinating story, with immense opportunities (to both titillate and increase social awareness). But Eugenides gets bogged down in family history; half the book is spent deploying two generations of love stories (repeated incestuous marriages are the reason for the narrator's condition). The lusty, live intensity of The Virgin Suicides—which allows for a total immersion in that 1970s suburban Americana of AM Radio and homemade prom dresses, of teenagers' constant struggling for more, of parents' fear and silence—is exchanged for a sentimental romp across continents, filled with whimsical incidents and cherished traditions.

Accidentally reading Nabokov's Ada (another epic tale of an incestuous love affair) immediately after Middlesex, it's easy to see where Eugenides goes astray—Nabokov goes astray himself in the exact same way. However, the master of childhood sensuality keeps his (obfuscated, unreadable) family history limited to thirty pages, while Eugenides runs on for nearly 300, culminating in a kind of wooden, sexless narrator too estranged not only from his body, but from from his inner self, to engage the reader.*

*Of course, Nabokov's characters are very comfortable in their own gender roles, and so his challenge is smaller (or greater—he writes an as-long novel with only 1/3 of the potential intrigue).

Movies: Red Cliff 2

"This is the emotional part," the elderly Chinese woman said to her husband in Shanghainese, as translated to me by my friend and tour guide.

Zhao Wei, who has spent the majority of the movie dressed as a male soldier, spying on the enemy, reunites with her only friend from the other side, right on the battlefield. He doesn't recognize her since she's no longer in costume, but she reminds him "I'm Piggy!" and, at the moment joyous recognition spreads across his face, he freezes, his back shot with arrows.

And indeed, it was the emotional part: we both burst into spontaneous tears. She was sniffling, and I was sticking my fingers up behind my glasses to wipe at my running makeup.

That was the only emotional part in this epic war film, based on the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history (a good reminder that I know too little Chinese history), in which a group of regional warlords band together to overthrow the Emperor's power-hungry Prime Minister Cao Cao. The natural leader, played by Tony Leung, is the classic Chinese epic hero, well-versed in war and sword-dancing, but also music and love-making (we intimate, based on his wife's fluttering attentions (Xiao Qiao, the consummate fetish object). His partner to the death is the mystical reader of the winds, played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, who helps the cause with his cleverness (not only tricking the enemy into giving them the hundred thousand arrows they need to fight by sending straw-covered ships in the foggy night masked as attackers, but also predicting a shift in wind that allows them to burn Cao Cao's entire fleet). We know both of these actors from Wong Kar Wai movies, in which their performances are far more subtle, but director John Woo is hardly the master of the same—particularly not in movies for Chinese audiences.

Yes, I saw this movie in China, at an IMAX theatre where you are assigned seats when you buy tickets, and where people talked (not loudly, but still) and texted throughout the feature. I hadn't expected to be able to follow the movie at all (it being in Mandarin), but the theatre kindly (or unkindly, if you are Chinese, as most of the audience was) provided subtitles, in both languages. So much for my experiment in total language immersion. . .