Books: The Origin of the Brunists, by Robert Coover

I saw Coover’s name for the first time recently, when reading a lengthy New Yorker article on the passing of my favorite author, David Foster Wallace. The article’s author paired Coover with another of my favorites, John Barth, to illustrate a point (calling them both “postmodern trick[sters],” so of course I immediately added Coover to my reading list, choosing The Origin of the Brunists because it was his first novel. I found the Brunists much more like Oakley Hall’s Warlock than anything by Barth, though. In this book at least, Coover isn’t a trickster at all; he tells us a great story about a small town, and lays it out in a surprisingly clear, direct way. His writing is highly intelligent without ever engaging in the literary gamesmanship of Barth or the totemic Pynchon.

Hall’s book is a Western and Coover’s is not, but it is equally American, the story of a mining town struck by disaster that is quickly stormed by religious fanaticism. An explosion in the mine kills 97 out of 98 workers. The only survivor, Giovanni Bruno, was an inscrutable introvert prior to the explosion, which only makes him more sickly and strange. He is, nevertheless, proclaimed a prophet-messiah by a number of different fanatic female constituents—one stranger in the town who communicates with a spirit called Domiron in what she calls “the seventh aspect” via ESP, one Christian woman, the widow of a preacher-miner who dies in the same explosion, a telltale, half-scrawled note in his hand foreboding something of import on the 8th, and Bruno’s possibly half-wit sister, a winsome beauty who doesn’t speak much and is easily convinced by these two stronger women. A few other lonely widows, impressionable teenagers, and kooky spiritualist men join the small group, meeting in weekly circles around Bruno’s bed, and then on the hill near the mine, using specious numerology to calculate the impending end of the world.

Coover’s own voice of amused reason manifests in Justin “Tiger” Miller, the owner and, it seems, sole generator, of the town’s newspaper. Miller was a high school basketball star, and left the town after graduation to accomplish big things in the world; failing to accomplish them, he has come back, bought the paper, and lives the shambly life of a journalist—drinking, womanizing, and working all night to put a daily paper to bed. Miller joins the cult for a while, not believing in any of it, of course, but hoping to get the story and to bed Bruno’s lovely sister while he’s at it. He succeeds in getting the story—in fact, publishes so much material on the Brunists (which he first calls them, and they then begin to call themselves) that the town fractures into three angry factions: the Brunists and their supporters, the non-Brunist Christians, led by a raging minister who whips his many children in secret, including in that area between the legs where no child out of diapers should be touched, and the “Common Sense Committee,” a group of “concerned citizens,” if you will—the mayor, the banker, and the thick-necks—who mean to put a stop to this embarrassing madness. Meanwhile, the town is also beset by a series of ominous pranks—a pile of poop in the pulpit of the church, a dog fed ground glass, a widow’s house set on fire—all with the signature of “The Black Hand.” These crimes are perpetrated by two of the angry minister’s children, the older of which has stolen a charred, black hand from the mine explosion, but the frenzied residents interpret them as acts of the devil.

In the end, the Brunists cannot be contained—in fact, the fever pitch increases until the chosen night, when they join at the top of the hill, and all of the town comes out to watch them. Because of Miller, the story has gone national, and groups of Brunists around the world ascend hilltops as well. Foreign press floods the small town. A thunderstorm comes. There is a stampede, a few injuries, one death. Miller is trampled, beaten, and then trampled again. The end of the world does not come. Miller does not die (or, if he seems to, he is resurrected, coming back to consciousness in a hospital bed. As in all post-modern novels, the writer, certainly, is exploiter and redeemer, revelator and everyman, holder of the trump card: reason plus fancy.

Books: Wolf, by Jim Harrison

It must have been smut week, because after I finished with Innocents, I moved onto Wolf, a dime-store paperback a friend gave me last Christmas as a gag gift, which featured a svelte, long-haired couple embracing, topless, on the cover. A kind of On the Road (the book) meets Into the Wild (the movie), the thing turned out to be much less smutty than I expected, and it turns out that Harrison is actually a viable author (whose short stories became the film Legends of the Fall, and whose Wolf became a Jack Nicholson movie in 1994). Wolf, furthermore, is subtitled A False Memoir, a thing in which I have a special interest.

This is a fairly typical 1970s semi-fictional beat novel, except that Harrison’s narrator is a loner, so there are fewer instances of the madcap, freewheeling adventurism of Jack Kerouac or Henry Miller or Tom Wolfe’s book about the Merry Pranksters. The introspective narrator is camping alone in the woods; the passages shuttle back and forth from his swimming and fishing and fire-building to his memories of girls in cities, job applications he couldn’t bother to fill out, strangers in whose cars he hitch-hiked across the country.

There are far fewer sex scenes than promised (newer editions of the book do not feature the same cover photo), but that’s fine. The other deception is that no wolf ever appears, and while the narrator does mention the animal two or three times, he does not seem to be in search of it in the way the cover text suggests. Instead, the narrator himself is the lone wolf, a bit hang-dog in appearance, unwelcome in society, hungry, horny, but mostly wanting to be left alone, in the woods.

Books: Innocents, by Cathy Coote

I don’t know how Cathy Coote’s Innocents made its way onto my reading list, but whoever recommended it is a damned fool. Coots was 19 when she wrote the manuscript, and it shows. It’s precisely the kind of melodramatic smut that we would expect from a sensually precocious high-schooler who has read Lolita only once, and for content rather than form (i.e., the wrong reason).

The story is of an introverted, sixteen year-old orphan being raised by her unassuming aunt and uncle. Something of an artist, she spends her nights drawing sadist portraits of her friends at her girls’ school, attaining release from this visual masturbation. When her uncle walks in on her drawing one night, she runs away, to the home of the awkward male teacher who clearly has an interest in her. She seduces him, moves in; he quits his job and, for a time, they live as lovers, though she remains in many way a child, even consciously exacerbating her childishness to keep him ensnared.

The book is confessional, written in first person in the form of a letter from the girl to the teacher, after he has moved out (his attentions have inverted her sadism to masochism, and her games inspire him to anally rape her; she locks herself in the bathroom and cries, and, overcome with guilt, he leaves, dropping a packet of money on the door step each week). Coote writes with the appropriate hyperbolic self-criticism of a high-school girl’s diary, but the book lacks any additional layers to demonstrate that this isn’t just Coote’s own young voice. The vague characterizations and clichéd plot turns suggest that, indeed, Coote’s creative powers are weak. Frankly, this book should never have been published. I’m all for smut (and Coote’s success clearly lies in her willingness to milk the reader’s sexual desires with coy physical descriptions and steamy sex scenes), but of a literary, intelligent kind (see Portnoy's Complaint). If I wanted writing this cheap, I would buy Barely Legal.

Open Letter to New York City on the Topic of Libraries

After closing the Donnell Library, and planning to close the Mid-Manhattan, the city now plans to cut library funding as well. This is completely unacceptable and I have written my representative as such. You should do the same here. I wrote the following:

Dear Sirs:

I do not need the library. I am by no means poor. I have a Midtown corporate job and own an Upper West Side Co-op (and therefore pay a variety of taxes). I am an insatiable reader, but based on my income there is no reason why I couldn’t purchase my books at Barnes and Nobles, or buy a Kindle and subscribe to Amazon’s eBook service.

The person who taught me to use the library is the same person who taught me to be an insatiable reader: my father. As a child, every Saturday included a trip to the library, where I would wander the stacks (first the children’s, then the young adults’, then the adults’ science fiction, reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine while still in grade school, when my peers were hanging out in the school yard, braiding each other’s hair and kissing boys behind parked cars). Perhaps I missed out on one kind of socialization, but I gained another kind of skill and knowledge, ultimately far more important. My parents, I would like you to note, could not have afforded to buy any book they pleased, much less the literally hundreds of books I devoured. If it had not been for the library then, I likely would have found some other kind of lonely dissipation, far less constructive than the social criticisms of Wells and Bradbury (another childhood favorite).

As an adult and a graduate student at Columbia University, I was shocked by the shabbiness of that institution’s libraries. I obtained and Access card and did most of my research at the NYPL’s main library, which, without fail, had the books and periodical issues I needed. I wrote much of my thesis under the soaring ceilings of the main reading rooms, inspired by the generations of great thought surrounding me.

Now that I work in the MetLife building, I go to the Mid-Manhattan branch on my lunch breaks to return old books and check out new ones. My reading list is over 100 volumes long, and, the more I read, the longer it seems to get. But imagine my surprise when, last summer, at a meeting of the WNYC Community Advisory Board (of which I am a member), an audience member asked why the station hadn’t done any coverage of the closing of the libraries. I didn’t know what she was talking about—it seems there was very little coverage indeed of the proposed sales of the Donnell and Mid-Manhattan libraries (there seemed instead to have been a cover-up!). A Google search turned up only one New York Times article, one or two mentions on the development blog Curbed.com, and a short press release hidden away on the NYPL’s website. It seems that Mayor Bloomberg, who is also by no means poor, and who can afford to purchase all of his books, decided to dispense with the two main branch libraries in the city—they only circulating libraries in Manhattan that offer any chance of having the book you’re seeking, if you’re seeking something more erudite than a best-selling murder mystery or romance (for the branch libraries, forgive me for saying it, have unpardonably shabby collections).

Mr. Bloomberg’s offense is unforgivable. His role as mayor is custodial, one of stewardship, not ownership. The libraries, and the land on which they stand, belong to the people of this city, for their betterment. The Donnell is to become a hotel, a thing of which Manhattan offers hundreds. And the millions of dollars received in exchange? Funneled to some other, undisclosed project, since Mr. Bloomberg now proposes to cut library funding. It seems to me that with the imprudent auctioning off of the NYPL’s most precious asset—Mid-town real estate—there would be plenty of liquid funds available to not only maintain the remaining library services as-is, but in fact augment them! Was that not the stated plan, when hedge fund mogul Stephen A. Schwarzman pledged $100 million for the refurbishment of the main library, so long as it featured his name engraved on the stone façade?

Generally, I walk the streets of my city, overflowing with pride and gratitude. But every time I think of what is becoming of our libraries, I am filled with shame and disgust. The closure of libraries is not something that happens in America’s most intellectual and cosmopolitan city—it is a story belonging to the dark history of the Soviets, to totalitarian regimes operating by the backward, feudal principle that the people live to serve the government. In America, the government is for the people, and so are the libraries.

The tumbling down of the economy because of the past decade’s wanton profligacy points to one reason why I’ve always favored libraries to bookstores. As a recent installation at the Guggenheim proposed, we possess books in our minds, not our hands. The purchasing of books wastes two kinds of paper—the stock on which the words are printed, and the green-printed, cotton stock for which they are exchanged. After one’s bought a book, what does one do with it? I’ve found that many people don’t even read the books they’ve bought, but assuming they have, then what? It’s either stacked on a bookshelf at home to collect dust, or thrown into the trash heap. The lucky ones get passed onto a friend. Library books, conversely, are shared, read again and again. Nothing is more “green” than a library, which recycles knowledge through the community and reduces ignorance and thus despair, all by enabling books to be reused.

I ask your forgiveness if this letter has meandered; I’ve aimed to give you full access to my thoughts and feelings about this issue. In exchange, I hope that you will reconsider your plan to restrict access to libraries for me and my fellow New Yorkers, many who need that access much more desperately than I do. Every weekend I volunteer at 826NYC, which offers free drop-in tutoring for students ages 6-18. Every weekend I take a crash-course in a different topic, since students come in with projects and essays on topics about which, for some reason, they have no knowledge. I find myself saying, so often, “let’s find a book and look it up.” Without the library, where would these students go to find the answers to their questions about Ancient China, World War II, and Acids and Bases (three topics I’ve helped students research this April)? Wikipedia, as commendable a project as it is, cannot be the sole purveyor of knowledge for the next generation.

The city needs more from its libraries, not less—especially now, when fewer people can afford books from the bookstore and have internet access at home, when people desperately need help putting together resumes and finding work. New Yorkers, myself included, have chosen you, with our votes, and pay you, with our tax dollars, to care for our city and its institutions. You do not have our permission to cut library funding further.

With greatest sincerity,

D-

Books: Balkan Ghosts, by Robert Kaplan

I don’t know why I never enjoyed World History or Social Studies or The News when I was younger, but find it so fascinating now. The result is that, when picking up a book like Balkan Ghosts, a kind of travelogue that explains the various political crises of Eastern Europe in the 1980s through the varied histories of those countries’ vying constituencies, I constantly need to refer to maps to see how the geography fits together. Kaplan’s basic argument, deceptively simple, is that the constant political unrest over borders in the Balkans is based on each religious-ethnic group’s desire to “restore” borders to the dotted lines established when that group was at the height of its power. The natural borders of rivers and mountains won’t do; because there are a variety of conflicting historical precedents, thanks to nearly 1,000 years of rising and collapsing empires (the Byzantine, the Ottoman, the Austrio-Hungarian, etc.), each constituency can construct a semi-credible argument for its cause.

The other, perhaps more insistent reason for strife is a history of poor leadership. America is filled with vying constituencies, but these are not “tribal”—each will identify first as American. That said, ours is a nation of relative wealth and comfort. If we had leaders such as Carol I, the Romanian king who escaped his own country in the dead of night with nine train cars of national art and treasures, or the Greek Papandreou, who harbored terrorist organizations that systematically did away with voices of dissent—inept and power-hungry men of breeding, or military power, or mere charisma—who destroyed our economy (*ahem-Bush-harrumph*) we would, hopefully, oust them and then more forward, together. But bad leadership in the Balkans doesn’t seem to have ever unified people across religious or ethnic borders, instead serving to deepen the rifts between factions. There is a massive problem of grudge-holding. In the same way that the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, and some extremists deny the Holocaust, certain groups are at fault for refusing to admit that atrocious things happened in the past. That said, other groups are at fault for clinging to that past, for reenacting victimization and holding the descendants of the wrong-doers responsible for their ancestors’ cruelties.

America seems completely ahistorical in comparison to the Balkans, and this is likely a blessing in disguise. Though Kaplan writes with an incredible romanticism about crumbling palaces and Byzantine monasteries, trains without heat or food, and people who are perfectly happy to share their life history with a stranger, this is a world much more fun to read about than to live in. Reading this book made me wonder whether I had misread Gruz 200 (which doesn’t take place in the Balkans, but in the equally bleak Soviet-proper), for I at last had insight into Soviet-block desperation. The obscene nightmare of that film’s fantasy suddenly seemed highly probably. The Soviets are but one of the many fingers that stirred the boiling Balkan pot—England was another—but while Her Majesty’s role was one of distant slice-and-dice, the Soviets, through proximity and concomitant political domination, had a stronger economic impact—a negative one, of course.

Books: The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria

In the introductory pages of this book, published one year ago, just months before the onset of the “Financial Crisis,” Zakaria outlines various contemporary political crises and asks whether it is strange that the economy is so robust in spite this turmoil. He then explains that this is not strange at all, that the economy has often before charged forward in spite of political strife, citing World War II and Cold War as examples.

While recent history has revealed Zakaria’s crystal ball to be cloudy, it certainly has not rendered the main thrust of his argument—that America is no longer the “center” of the world—moot. Indeed, the title, however catchy, reads a bit more dramatically than the actual book; Zakaria is not writing about a world without America, merely one in which the American economy is no longer the only driving economy. Our singular, monopolistic power is being decentralized by the rising economic powers of China and India.

Zakaria is not the first to make this argument; in fact, it is a truth that seems to be as plain as day to a person at all engaged in current events. Like many political science hard covers, The Post-American World is a quick, easy read filled with easily digested bite-sized morsels of fact. That said, a number of sound-bites are valid arguments, especially when he wanders into more academic territory and acknowledges that a unified “Asia,” as the West understands it, is a construct. (I found this particularly vindicating given my recent experience at the Guggenheim.)

Perhaps as an Indian, or perhaps as an American, Zakaria is far more forgiving in his descriptions of India than of China (he suggests that growth in India is slower than in China because it is more organic; in China, decisions are made from the top down, and implemented based on efficiency and profit maximization, whether or not hundreds of people lose their homes in the process. This is not the case in democratic India.)

Ultimately, the “American way of life” is not in any particular danger; if we are losing economic hegemony, we continue to maintain firm cultural hegemony, so that progress to China and India means making those countries look more like our own. Frankly, I find the so-called “aspirational” tendencies of contemporary “emerging” nations rather tragic, but from a strictly protectionist, American standpoint, it is something over which to gloat, or in which to simply take comfort. In the Post-American World, strangely enough, more of the world looks like America—for better or for worse.

Books: Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry

Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué. 5

Generally, the books that take me a long time to read—the “difficult” books, which have paragraphs and pages I must read two or three times, whose prose isn’t limpid, so that the meaning doesn’t lie on the page, but must be extracted—are books that I cannot enjoy. Not so Under the Volcano, whose opening pages I read four times before progressing further, trying to penetrate the filmy scrim of Lowry’s astonishing but obfuscating prose.

This is a gorgeous book in which the difficulty serves the character, the plot, the theme, for in it, we walk with the Consul, a colonial Englishman and a drunk, through hot, dusty Mexican towns, searching sometimes for his wife Yvonne, sometimes for his next drink, be it whisky, tequila, or the hallucinogenic mescal. The towns are called by their pre-Columbian names (like Cuauhnahuac), and the country is accordingly ancient and inscrutable. There is a filthy woman in the corner of a dark cantina who holds her chicken against her chest, inside her shirt, and a little girl who plays with an armadillo in the sand. There is a dead Indian on the side of the road, his head bashed in, and a ragged vagrant on the bus who steals the corpse’s purse. Events are random, ugly, but slightly distant, without urgency, however oracular.

The Consul’s struggle, like the plot of the novel, is and isn’t tangible—alcohol has hung a haze. He seems to wonder less whether he can quit than whether he should; if he were to quit, it would be for his wife Yvonne, who has divorced him, left Mexico, but now come back. As readers, we can never quite touch her (or the Consul’s brother Hugh, with whom she seems to nurse another waning romance). Nor, it seems, can the Consul; we only know he longed for her because we read a letter he wrote (which Lowry discloses by placing it in the hand of another character, as a found object in a borrowed book). Mescal, in fact, is the truly desired lover; the Consul dreams more and more of El Farolito (the purposefully named “Lighthouse”), the cantina which guides his step to his last drink.

Under the Volcano seethes with that oppressed, colonial heat of Jealousy and Out of Africa, but roils with the further besotted despair that comes from drink alone. And yet, it doesn’t read at all as a cautionary tale. Instead, like Beckett, like Kafka, Lowry wonders why we’re here, and never quite figures it out. Not for love, that is certain.

Leon Morin, Priest

I’d yet to enjoy a Jean-Pierre Melville film, but went to see this one in spite of that fact, for Jean-Paul Belmondo. Melville’s films tend to be slow, monochrome, and pedantic—but while this one technically fits that description, I was mesmerized. Perhaps this is because the film is less a movie than a Socratic consideration of Catholicism. And while I am an adamant atheist (with a small-a!), I attended thirteen years of Catholic school, was baptized, made first communion, and was confirmed, and went on many a retreat as a young person who hadn’t yet challenged her faith. Though the film’s heroine’s character arc is the opposite of mine (she starts out a wisecracking atheist who pops into a confessional for a lark, blurting to the priest “religion is the opiate of the people,” and, after many long discussions with Morin/Belmondo, and long nights spent reading theology, she converts to Catholicism), I appreciate this film for what it is: a balls-out challenge to armchair Christians who don’t know the first thing about their religion’s demands.

Morin at one moment makes a comment to the affect that any person with the potential to be a good Christian will be turned away from the Church by the actions and attitudes of the people who claim to be good Christians (and who aren’t). This is so true that I couldn’t quite believe I saw it being said—this screenwriter knows his theological stuff. Rare is the Christian who realizes just how radical, how completely opposed to the workings of our society, Christ’s message was. In Christianity, there is no room for ownership of anything. I doubt that there is even room for the family (didn’t Christ tell his Twelve Apostles to leave behind not only their possessions, but their loved ones?) There is, in fact, no room for anything but God and service to others, building God’s “Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.” The only person who has ever been honest about this to me was one high school theology teacher, studying to become a Jesuit priest. And now, Jean-Paul Belmondo, as Leon Morin, who, like that teacher of mine, always stoked the intellectual flame, happily engaging in dialogue with a jaded, pragmatic mind, and nevertheless insisting on the highest level of devotion, the complete subjugation of the self, the turning over of everything to God.

Melville never stoops to staging mysticism or miracles—in fact, the only remotely “magical” sequence is a dream our heroine has when she actually falls away from god, suddenly consumed by lust for Morin, dreaming that he comes to her bed, that she unbuttons his cassock, that they embrace passionately. And this moment, salaciously included to interest the less philosophically-minded in the audience, it seems, is also the first moment the film losses my riveted focus. Certainly, it’s meant to be sordid, and there’s a strange thread of dark sexuality running through the film—overt admittance of lesbian desires, a too-strong overture by an American soldier (we are in France during and immediately after the Nazi occupation)—but our heroine’s melodramatic reaction to her dream—an actual, if half-hearted attempt to seduce Morin—is out of character and a bit cheap. That aside, the film is a fascinating and fascinatingly candid treatise on the Christian faith. Not a film for those completely uninterested in theology or philosophy, it should be required viewing for students at Catholic high schools and colleges, and anyone else who calls himself a Christian. Never mind that the average person who calls himself a Christian wouldn’t be able to comprehend or tolerate the film, much less drudge up the willpower to commit to the demands of his faith.

Charulata (The Lonely Wife)

Satyajit Ray is supposedly the master of Indian cinema, but based on this film, he’s not much worth any investment of your time. This film is about a woman married to a wealthy man who spends all of his time working on his pet project, a political newspaper. She wanders the wide, gusty rooms of their house, moping, reading, and doing the occasional bit of embroidery. She is terribly bored, and so are we. Finally noticing this, her husband brings his brother and his wife to live with them, putting his brother to work on the newspaper, while the wife, who’s not terribly bright, plays card games with Charulata. Charu is still bored, as are we.

Then, another brother—the youngest—moves into the house as well. He’s fresh out of school and uncertain what vocation to take up, until he settles on writing—he and Charu have a shared affinity for novels and poetry (neither of which Charu’s husband can abide, living only for politics). The rich man decides that he can entertain his wife, though, by having his young brother inspire her to write. She refuses, insisting on playing only the supportive, traditionally feminine role, making him a painted notebook and serving as a muse. They seem to be falling in love, although their interactions are childishly innocent. When his story is published, though, she is, for some undisclosed reason, livid (there seems to be some kind of jealousy as the other wife, who doesn’t understand a thing about literature, has also been serving as a kind of muse for the young man, constantly bringing him culinary treats). In a frenzied fit, Charu writes an essay on the village in which she grew up, and it is published in the preeminent literary journal. She doesn’t tell her husband; only brings the article to show her new friend. He compliments her writing—tells her how much better it is than his own—but in another inexplicable fit of tears, she runs away angrily.

Soon, the young man knows he must leave and start his own life (and take his own wife). He goes in the night, leaving a note behind. Charu is livid, but she and her husband have the house to themselves again—his other brother and wife also absconded in the night, but less righteously so. They stole money from the newspaper, so that now it’s gone under.

For a moment, there is hope for Charu and her husband. They sit on a bright beach and hatch a plan to start a new paper, one that contains cultural as well as political pieces, with roles for them both. But when they get back home, there is a letter from Charu’s young brother-in-law announcing his marriage, and Charu takes it to his old room where she clutches it, sobbing, her head against the bed. Her husband sees her and, rather than reacting with tenderness, burns with a jealous rage, which he bottles silently. At the film’s conclusion, Charu, knowing that she’s been “caught,” dries her tears and goes to find her husband, extending her hand to him. He hesitates before he takes it. This is the film’s most interesting sequence: a still frame of Charu with her hand extended in an offering of peace; a still frame of her husband with his fingers tentatively reaching, but with an expression of loathing and distrust on his face, followed by a still of the entire frame, the two of them together, their hands nearly but not quite touching. Then, a large caption flashes onto the still: “The Spoiled Nest,” and all of the delicacy of the moment is wasted, and the film, for me, gets tossed out the window onto the trash heap.

Bonus fact: Every artistic nuance that could possible be construed as interesting in this film was lifted from Alain Resnais Last Year At Marienbad, which came out three years before Charulata.

Movies: Anvil! The Story of Anvil

This is a movie rather like The Wrestler, only more depressing, since it’s a documentary about actual people. Anvil is a metal band to whom many of the greats—Metallica, Slayer, etc.—readily admit they owe a debt. And yet, success has not come their way. This is not for lack of effort; Anvil has managed to stay together (at least, it’s lead man and drummer have) from childhood friendship up to their fifties. They have released more than ten albums, and play regular gigs for die-hard fans in their Canadian town. But they all keep day jobs (front man "Lips" delivers lunches from a warehouse to public schools) because fame and fortune both have shunned them.

The film follows the band on what hopes to be a promising European tour, but which is instead a string of fiascoes including missed trains, unpaid gigs, and audiences of less than 25 people at dive bars. The constant reality of failure drives a wedge between the strangely faithful front man (who has the best attitude I’ve ever seen in a metal head—constantly optimistic and willing to grab for the brass ring, and then willing to discuss his emotions when it doesn’t work out) and the more quiet, pragmatic drummer, who seems to enjoy hanging out in his basement painting just as much as he enjoys playing with the band. One refuses to give up the dream; the other already has, and is just playing along to keep his friend happy.

The disastrous tour is only the beginning of the end; there’s also a trip to Transylvania for a rock festival in a stadium that seats thousands (perhaps a hundred attend). The front man is certain that their constant commercial failures can be attributed to the low production values of their albums and the band’s constant mismanagement, so he gets a loan from his sister to enable the band to cut a new record with the most famous and capable metal producer alive, who seems to be doing the project for nothing but good karma. They shop the record around to all the major labels, but no one will take it. From what we hear, it’s obvious why; Anvil’s sound hasn’t evolved at all, but metal, which has been around for more than twenty-five years now, has. The tragic thing is that the band does not realize this, and no one tells them, either.

Apparently, the release of the film has given them quite a bit of good publicity, and their new album is therefore starting to sell (likely more as hipster kitsch than as serious metal). This is the kind of scenario that would lead a self-aware person into a negative spiral of self-loathing and depression, but for the completely unconscious members of Anvil, it’s probably quite a boon.