When writing non-fiction, the author must make assumptions about his audience, so that he conveys the right depth and detail of information. Denis Noble, though, seems not to have asked himself whether he was writing for a scientific or lay audience. Sometimes, he gives maddeningly obvious information, reminding us, for example, that the four bases comprising the DNA molecule are known in shorthand as A, T, G, and C, and that DNA is shorthand for deoxyribonucleic acid. This I learned in school when I was sixteen. He tells us that a millisecond is one-thousandth of a second. Then, perhaps forgetting that we readers are too uneducated to understand simple power prefixes without his assistance, he launches into a description of how the heart's pacemaker function works by a feedback system of electrical charges, showing us graphs of cell voltage in milivolts against potassium, mixed ion, and calcium channels in nanoamps, which are nearly illegible to a layperson.
I think that Noble's trouble is that he's not writing science for the layperson or the scientist; he is a scientist with strong humanist tendencies, railing against his less-humanist colleagues, at anyone who will listen. Noble wants badly to present his philosophical ideas in a way that seems scientific, so he uses one of literature's staple techniques: the extended metaphor, which allows one to build two parallel columns of data that correspond one-to-one, preserving the clean, linear aesthetic of science. Life, he tells us, is like music.
But things get messy, because Noble neglected to draw a schema for his one-to-one correspondences before he began. He presents DNA as information that gives rise to a human in the same way that a compact disk contains information that gives rise to music—but only when inserted into the correct stereo system. Thus, as a CD is silent without its player, DNA creates no life without a womb and its chemical inputs.
This is fine, but things fall apart when he tries to build the correspondence from the bottom up. DNA codes for life in the same way that a score codes for music; a score exists, but without the musical instrument and musician, the score is silent. In my lay understanding of biology, the correlate for the instrument would be pre-existing tissues, the cells that surround the DNA, and the musician would be the chemical signals that flush these cells and drive DNA to do its work of dividing and coding and protein-building. But I haven't taken biology for more than ten years now.
Noble tells us no: "If there is a score for the music of life, it is not the genome," [italics mine] because "DNA never acts outside the context of the cell." And yet, as I've worked it out above, neither does a score "work" outside the context of the instrument. So, what is the problem? Likely, there is none, for Noble then flips back to the original construct, describing how "protein and cell machinery works to stimulate and control transcription. . . this is what 'plays' the genes." So DNA is again the score. But then, in the chapter on the Conductor (how does a Conductor fit in?! Certainly, music can be played without one. . .), Noble reminds us that "we have also developed the metaphor of the genome as a [pipe] organ, which needs someone to play it." So, wait. Now, the genome is the instrument? What is the score? Noble attempts to clarify: "We should think rather of a 'virtual conductor'—the system behaves 'as if' it has a conductor. The genes behave 'as though' they are being 'played' by this conductor—rather like some orchestras that play without a separate conductor." But Noble had told us that "the organ is not a program that writes. . . the Bach fugues. Bach did that." So corrodes our tidy one-to-one correspondence.
Clearly, what Noble means by the sentence quoted at the beginning of the preceding paragraph is that "the genome itself is not the music of life." It is in his penultimate chapter that he clarifies this, realizing his true goal: to demonstrate that "the self"* can not be located in one isolated part of our being, be it DNA, a section of the brain, or any other proposed lone location. "The self," he tells us, is "an integrative process that can be deconstructed;" not a mere "neurological object." This is his reason for insisting on an integrated "systems" biology, which doesn't assume bottom-up or top-down causation, but, in a much more Zen way, understands life as a feedback loop of being. The messy music metaphors, it turns out, were completely unnecessary in the making of this point.
*philosophically speaking
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Dance: Christopher Wheeldon's Estancia at the New York City Ballet (with Danses Concertantes and Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet)
Tuesday, June 1st was the second showing of Estancia, one of seven new ballets commissioned this season by the New York City Ballet under the "Architecture of Dance" rubric, for which Santiago Calatrava has created the sets. I expected something modern, kinetic, and minimal. I've seen Wheeldon's work before, and while he is too much of a traditionalist for my tastes, for the antiquarian NYCB, he's a young Turk, more interested in static shapes than traveling jumps. Estancia is the first time I've seen him revert to one of ballet's most cloying traditions: plot. Though it can't be much longer than 20 minutes, this ballet proposes a love story in the Argentine Pampas, between a city boy and a country girl, the latter rejecting the advances of the former until he proves his manhood by conquering one of the region's wild horses.
Strictly choreographically, Estancia offers a few stunning passages. The five dancers in the roles of wild horses embody that particular equine breath, the trembling chest, pawing feet, and tossed head of the wild creature that first refuses to be conquered, until its spirit is broken, and its feet fall into a measured trot once the bridle is fitted. In partnering horse-dancers with people-dancers, Wheeldon creates exceptionally fresh and captivating pas-de-deux, impressionistic sequences of shapes describing not only the physical interaction of the human and equine body, but the exchange of power between the two. This break from the standard pas-de-deux, in which the male dancer supports the female as she turns innumerable circles around herself, is very welcome.
That said, the piece is not so modern as we might have hoped. I would have happily watched 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour of plotless human-equine interactions, but this wouldn't satisfy the typical NYCB audience. But, because this is a piece set in the country, the jeweled and feathered pomp native to the theater would not suffice either. Wheeldon takes recourse, oddly, to the free-wheeling sun-and-dust palette of Rodgers & Hammerstein. Estancia has the feeling of a ballet sequence in a Broadway show staged in the 1950s, Carousel or Oklahoma!; Estancia! would in fact be a title more fitting in tone.
As for Calatrava, what is his contribution? Not the kinetic, architectural sculpture I had expected, but a watercolor-esque painted backdrop of swaying grasses and a few stark palms. The show is beautifully lit, and as the action occurs over a 24 hour period, the backdrop does glow beautifully with the first pink light of dawn, when the city boy and country girl wake up to find themselves lovers, and discovered.
I can forgive Estancia for not meeting my expectations, for it interested me nevertheless, but cannot forgive NYCB for sandwiching the piece between two antiquated Balanchine pieces, the first a parade of harlequin-like trios who present us with their "charming" escapades as if we were royals and they our court entertainers, and the last an example of that airless jeweled and feathered nonsense, an interminable series of emotionless drawing room postures better suited to a fancy-dress photo shoot than the stage of art or entertainment. What is the point of commissioning new works, bringing together contemporary artists, if you are going to then subject your audience to offensively outmoded selections both before and after, poisoning both any anticipation and any lingering sweetness from the piece that is new? Fie.
Strictly choreographically, Estancia offers a few stunning passages. The five dancers in the roles of wild horses embody that particular equine breath, the trembling chest, pawing feet, and tossed head of the wild creature that first refuses to be conquered, until its spirit is broken, and its feet fall into a measured trot once the bridle is fitted. In partnering horse-dancers with people-dancers, Wheeldon creates exceptionally fresh and captivating pas-de-deux, impressionistic sequences of shapes describing not only the physical interaction of the human and equine body, but the exchange of power between the two. This break from the standard pas-de-deux, in which the male dancer supports the female as she turns innumerable circles around herself, is very welcome.
That said, the piece is not so modern as we might have hoped. I would have happily watched 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour of plotless human-equine interactions, but this wouldn't satisfy the typical NYCB audience. But, because this is a piece set in the country, the jeweled and feathered pomp native to the theater would not suffice either. Wheeldon takes recourse, oddly, to the free-wheeling sun-and-dust palette of Rodgers & Hammerstein. Estancia has the feeling of a ballet sequence in a Broadway show staged in the 1950s, Carousel or Oklahoma!; Estancia! would in fact be a title more fitting in tone.
As for Calatrava, what is his contribution? Not the kinetic, architectural sculpture I had expected, but a watercolor-esque painted backdrop of swaying grasses and a few stark palms. The show is beautifully lit, and as the action occurs over a 24 hour period, the backdrop does glow beautifully with the first pink light of dawn, when the city boy and country girl wake up to find themselves lovers, and discovered.
I can forgive Estancia for not meeting my expectations, for it interested me nevertheless, but cannot forgive NYCB for sandwiching the piece between two antiquated Balanchine pieces, the first a parade of harlequin-like trios who present us with their "charming" escapades as if we were royals and they our court entertainers, and the last an example of that airless jeweled and feathered nonsense, an interminable series of emotionless drawing room postures better suited to a fancy-dress photo shoot than the stage of art or entertainment. What is the point of commissioning new works, bringing together contemporary artists, if you are going to then subject your audience to offensively outmoded selections both before and after, poisoning both any anticipation and any lingering sweetness from the piece that is new? Fie.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Movies: Two in the Wave
I've long felt obligated to like Godard, and I've struggled with that sense of obligation, because I've not really found his films enjoyable. Thanks to the documentary now showing at Film Forum, I have a better understanding of why: my tastes are too entrenched in the petit bourgeois.
Two in the Wave follows the rise of the Nouvelle Vague through the growing friendship, and after 1968, the growing rift, between Godard and Truffaut, the filmmakers who most defined the movement. Godard himself was petit bourgeois, Truffaut a poor miscreant, and they met writing criticism for André Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma in the late 1950s. Certain they could do better than their stuffy, tired countrymen, they seduced producer Georges de Beauregard into backing Breathless (written by Truffaut, directed by Goddard, assisted by Chabrol). From that point forward, the movement was fairly well-defined: rules were for breaking (jump cuts during tracking shots? Of course!), and cinema was of, by, and for the youth.
As 1968 changed everything for everyone, so too it changed the relationship between these two men. Let's be honest now: Godard is a total prick. You feel it watching La Chinoise, one of the most pretentious pieces of crap ever made, which might actually be good if it was edited down into a 20-minute ironic short. This is a pre-1968 film, and we already see Godard rejecting completely his bourgeois upbringing. The famed student-worker uprisings made him even more political. He wanted another new cinema, a cinema of the worker, and so he torched his friendship with Truffaut on political-aesthetic grounds. Truffaut still believed in art for beauty's sake, quoting Matisse, who lived through three wars but painted windows, women, and fishbowls nevertheless.
The Truffaut films I've seen (Jules et Jim, Shoot the Piano Player, and the post-'68 The Man Who Loved Women) I've found less unbearable, but still not particularly compelling. The fact is that I'm too stodgy for the New Wave, and I'm okay with that. I want elegance, efficiency, and most importantly, craft. If Breathless works, it's because of Belmondo's charisma, not because Godard used a wheelchair as a dolly.
Two in the Wave follows the rise of the Nouvelle Vague through the growing friendship, and after 1968, the growing rift, between Godard and Truffaut, the filmmakers who most defined the movement. Godard himself was petit bourgeois, Truffaut a poor miscreant, and they met writing criticism for André Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma in the late 1950s. Certain they could do better than their stuffy, tired countrymen, they seduced producer Georges de Beauregard into backing Breathless (written by Truffaut, directed by Goddard, assisted by Chabrol). From that point forward, the movement was fairly well-defined: rules were for breaking (jump cuts during tracking shots? Of course!), and cinema was of, by, and for the youth.
As 1968 changed everything for everyone, so too it changed the relationship between these two men. Let's be honest now: Godard is a total prick. You feel it watching La Chinoise, one of the most pretentious pieces of crap ever made, which might actually be good if it was edited down into a 20-minute ironic short. This is a pre-1968 film, and we already see Godard rejecting completely his bourgeois upbringing. The famed student-worker uprisings made him even more political. He wanted another new cinema, a cinema of the worker, and so he torched his friendship with Truffaut on political-aesthetic grounds. Truffaut still believed in art for beauty's sake, quoting Matisse, who lived through three wars but painted windows, women, and fishbowls nevertheless.
The Truffaut films I've seen (Jules et Jim, Shoot the Piano Player, and the post-'68 The Man Who Loved Women) I've found less unbearable, but still not particularly compelling. The fact is that I'm too stodgy for the New Wave, and I'm okay with that. I want elegance, efficiency, and most importantly, craft. If Breathless works, it's because of Belmondo's charisma, not because Godard used a wheelchair as a dolly.
Movies: All the President's Men
Nothing soothes the burn of a trans-Pacific flight like 1975 Pacino and 1976 Hoffman: the best actors the decade had on offer. Hoffman as Carl Bernstein shares his limelight not only with Redford as Bob Woodward (or Woodstein, as their editor at one point calls them), but with a killer screenplay based on those author's book on the Watergate scandal—something I never found very interesting until this film.
I don't find Nixon a particularly interesting character and haven't enjoyed any Nixon movies, but he's wisely left out of this film, which is really an investigative procedural more than a political drama. We already know that Nixon is at the bottom of the Watergate break-in, so are more concerned with whether or not our heroes at the Washington Post will finally get front-page exposure for their story, and whether they'll be able to find a source willing to go on the record. In short, the movie is as much about news room politics as it is about national politics, and, perhaps strangely, I find the former far more interesting, so appreciate that indulgence.
It's interesting to see how State of Play, another of my airplane movies, basically ripped off its entire strategy from All the President's Men. One would have thought, after more than 30 years of innovations and achievements in filmmaking, SoP would have been more compelling, but it's unfortunately not. I found it disappointing when I saw it, but now having seen what so clearly inspired it, I find it insulting.
I don't find Nixon a particularly interesting character and haven't enjoyed any Nixon movies, but he's wisely left out of this film, which is really an investigative procedural more than a political drama. We already know that Nixon is at the bottom of the Watergate break-in, so are more concerned with whether or not our heroes at the Washington Post will finally get front-page exposure for their story, and whether they'll be able to find a source willing to go on the record. In short, the movie is as much about news room politics as it is about national politics, and, perhaps strangely, I find the former far more interesting, so appreciate that indulgence.
It's interesting to see how State of Play, another of my airplane movies, basically ripped off its entire strategy from All the President's Men. One would have thought, after more than 30 years of innovations and achievements in filmmaking, SoP would have been more compelling, but it's unfortunately not. I found it disappointing when I saw it, but now having seen what so clearly inspired it, I find it insulting.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Movies: Dog Day Afternoon
Wait. What is going on in this movie?! At first start, this appears to be a classic much entrenched in a traditional genre: the bank robbery gone wrong. Big-eyed, baby Pacino, smooth of face and trembling of hand, is Sonny, the classic no-good greaser set to rob a bank with a pair of skittish and incompetent companions; the sweaty bank manager and the tellers are taken hostage, and like all good 1970s hostages (see the original Taking of Pelham 1,2,3) well represent their types: the mouthy one who takes control, the quiet one who calls her husband, the vivacious one who is found in the bathroom putting on her make-up. The semi-competent cop comes to talk Sonny down, and Sonny demands that they bring him his wife. And who shows up? Not the fat mother of Sonny's two kids, but a frail, trembling homosexual in a bathrobe with painted nails and a Jewfro, whose most recent residence is Bellevue.
The fact that Sonny is a homosexual who married Leon in a traditional ceremony (in which Leon wore a floor-length white gown—we are shown a picture), in spite of already being married with children (i.e. not divorced, but still married), and that Leon's desire for a $2,000 sex change is one of Sonny's incentives for robbing the bank (which, by the way, has no money, since the truck has already come and picked up all but the petty cash) is treated surprisingly casually, considering that this film was made in 1975. Perhaps we are expected, since it's based on a true story, to just accept facts as facts, but it's hard for me to imagine audiences 35 years ago, going to see a bank robbery movie starring Al Pacino—the Al Pacino they already know from The Godfather—and not balking at his playing a homosexual. . . aside from the fact that he's not a very convincing homosexual, and relates to Leon more like an indulgent older brother.
The fact that Sonny is a homosexual who married Leon in a traditional ceremony (in which Leon wore a floor-length white gown—we are shown a picture), in spite of already being married with children (i.e. not divorced, but still married), and that Leon's desire for a $2,000 sex change is one of Sonny's incentives for robbing the bank (which, by the way, has no money, since the truck has already come and picked up all but the petty cash) is treated surprisingly casually, considering that this film was made in 1975. Perhaps we are expected, since it's based on a true story, to just accept facts as facts, but it's hard for me to imagine audiences 35 years ago, going to see a bank robbery movie starring Al Pacino—the Al Pacino they already know from The Godfather—and not balking at his playing a homosexual. . . aside from the fact that he's not a very convincing homosexual, and relates to Leon more like an indulgent older brother.
Movies: Boy
New Zealanders were mad about Taika Waititi's new film*, probably because they have pride for their own. For them, it seemed to be a sweetly honest depiction of life in the East Cape; to me, it was more of a charming appropriation of Wes Anderson's signature, featuring imaginative Maori children living in a poor, dysfunctional family rather than imaginative Caucasian (grown) children living in wealthy, dysfunctional families.
Boy is our hero (my first bone to pick is the blatant everymanism of his moniker, which I find flat and aesthetically displeasing, despite the irony that the character is more a man than his father, the film's real boy (in the term's most negative sense)). He introduces us to his small, warm world: his quiet, creative little brother, his cousins, his friends, his crush, his bully, his mother's grave, and his grandmother, who leaves him in charge of the household to go to a neighboring town for a few days. As soon as she's gone, Boy's father (played by the director), a mythical creature, blows in with the wind, bringing two no-good friends, a crappy muscle car, and a hunger for a plastic bag of cash he buried somewhere in the yard before going to jail years ago. Boy is transfixed, blind to his father's lazy desperation, until a series of sweetly sad events bring about his disillusionment.
James Rolleston, Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu, and the other kids cast in the film are brilliant, shifting from exuberant to wary to deflated with natural ease, and they make the film worth whatever it's worth. Waititi, though, like the character he plays in the film, will need to grow up a bit, and do his own creative work, if he's going to make something of himself.
*See, for some reason, "Taika Cohen" on IMDB, even though Taika uses the surname Waititi in Boy's credits.
Boy is our hero (my first bone to pick is the blatant everymanism of his moniker, which I find flat and aesthetically displeasing, despite the irony that the character is more a man than his father, the film's real boy (in the term's most negative sense)). He introduces us to his small, warm world: his quiet, creative little brother, his cousins, his friends, his crush, his bully, his mother's grave, and his grandmother, who leaves him in charge of the household to go to a neighboring town for a few days. As soon as she's gone, Boy's father (played by the director), a mythical creature, blows in with the wind, bringing two no-good friends, a crappy muscle car, and a hunger for a plastic bag of cash he buried somewhere in the yard before going to jail years ago. Boy is transfixed, blind to his father's lazy desperation, until a series of sweetly sad events bring about his disillusionment.
James Rolleston, Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu, and the other kids cast in the film are brilliant, shifting from exuberant to wary to deflated with natural ease, and they make the film worth whatever it's worth. Waititi, though, like the character he plays in the film, will need to grow up a bit, and do his own creative work, if he's going to make something of himself.
*See, for some reason, "Taika Cohen" on IMDB, even though Taika uses the surname Waititi in Boy's credits.
Movies: Wall Street
Thanks to Air New Zealand's personal entertainment devices, which offer 78 films, contemporary, foreign, and classic, I was able to do some catching up on the '70s and '80s. Wall Street was likely on offer in anticipation of the sequel due this fall, and I chose it based on a poorly recalled exchange between two of my best and smartest friends on Facebook (they were actually discussing Glengarry Glen Ros, which I've not seen, so therefore cannot say whether my mis-recollection was forgivable).
That said, I don't know whether any film more completely epitomizes the '80s: it thinks its hot stuff, but its all flash and no content, just like the blond and leggy Daryl Hannah's Darien, whose hero is Laura Ashley. Forget Gordon Gekko's speeches, Martin Sheen's working class exhortations; no scene in the film is more telling than that in which Darien renovates hero Bud Fox's Upper East Side apartment (a hideous post-war monstrosity in a building that no contemporary financier would condescend to enter) with false exposed brick, gold leaf-flecked moldings, and Keith Haring-meets-Jean Michel Basquiat canvasses, after which they make passionate love in silhouette. Shoulder pads and perms you can get in Die Hard, but only Wall Street demonstrates clearly the 1980's perspective on how to hook a big fish. Oh, how I would love to write a paper on gender, sex, and space in the filmic 1980s, contrasting Wall Street with She's Gotta Have It: so much fodder! White/black, masculine/feminine, Manhattan/Brooklyn, big studio/indie. . . it never stops!
That said, I don't know whether any film more completely epitomizes the '80s: it thinks its hot stuff, but its all flash and no content, just like the blond and leggy Daryl Hannah's Darien, whose hero is Laura Ashley. Forget Gordon Gekko's speeches, Martin Sheen's working class exhortations; no scene in the film is more telling than that in which Darien renovates hero Bud Fox's Upper East Side apartment (a hideous post-war monstrosity in a building that no contemporary financier would condescend to enter) with false exposed brick, gold leaf-flecked moldings, and Keith Haring-meets-Jean Michel Basquiat canvasses, after which they make passionate love in silhouette. Shoulder pads and perms you can get in Die Hard, but only Wall Street demonstrates clearly the 1980's perspective on how to hook a big fish. Oh, how I would love to write a paper on gender, sex, and space in the filmic 1980s, contrasting Wall Street with She's Gotta Have It: so much fodder! White/black, masculine/feminine, Manhattan/Brooklyn, big studio/indie. . . it never stops!
The Royal Family, by William T. Vollman
This dark, degenerative epic is clearly Vollman's submission to the big-boy's club; clocking in at around 750 pages, it strides in scope alongside the works of Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster-Wallace. That said, it's contents are classic Vollman: location: San Francisco, particularly the Tenderloin; cast: prostitutes, pimps, johns, junkies, vagrants, with plenty of double- and triple-dipping into categories; plot: a man (at first possibly and increasingly likely of unsound mind), searches for a lost love, which search masks his true pursuit: a reason for living.
In a sense, then, this is a more developed version of Whores For Gloria, or perhaps a kind or prequel. We first meet private investigator Henry Tyler smoking crack with a prostitute while he questions her about the Queen of the Whores, whom he has been tasked by a client to find. But this is not a pulpy P.I. novel, a contemporary, seedy Dashiell Hammett. Although Tyler frequents the TL, pays prostitutes, and takes the occasional hit of rock, like WFG's Jimmy, he's less interested in the physical than emotional payoff of these activities; what he wants from these women are their stories, their companionship. If he shares their drugs or sex, it's only to gain their trust by entering their world.
One gets the sense early on that this won't be a detective novel; the simple search for the Queen won't support so many pages of text, and indeed, less than a third of the way into the novel, Tyler's client fires him, certain that the Queen is just a myth. Tyler continues the search anyway, driven by something he doesn't quite understand, but knows must be related to his illicit desire for his brother's Korean wife, Irene (Irene will, to Vollman insiders, reprise Jenny of The Blue Wallet in The Rainbow Stories). Irene, pregnant and unhappy with her unaffectionate, type-A husband (who, incidentally, has no love for his brother), commits suicide, sending Tyler down the chute of dark desperation. Along the way he will find and fall in love with the Queen of the Whores, who will ameliorate his pain by pissing* down his throat. Soon enough, though, she too will disappear, and Tyler will become a freight-train riding vagabond, traveling from squat to squat, asking once again if anyone has seen the Queen.
The height of the novel is the middle, in which Vollman develops the "royal family," the Queen, a small but strangely powerful black woman, ageless, whose breath is more potent than crack smoke, and whose saliva serves as a drug to the group of girls she cares for. These prostitutes—a violent blonde called Domino, a Mexican runaway whose street name is her real name, a girl called Strawberry who has a boyfriend (the Queen's right-hand-man Justin) in spite of her line of work, amongst others—stay together in a network of squats around the TL, the Inner Mission, South of Market, and occasionally across the Bay in Oakland when the heat is on, paying 10% of their take to the Queen's fund, which in turn helps them get well** when they don't have the cash, bails them out when they're arrested, and buys them protection—or at least retribution—when they are done wrong. Think of it as a union.
I've always felt that Vollman deals rather fairly with the subcultures he explores; the book is graphic in the extreme (sensitive readers, for example, will be horrified by the unflinching presentation of the character Dan Smooth, a child molester who goes long unpunished because his connections are of use to the police department in pursuing bigger criminals of his ilk), but Vollman never writes to condemn, nor does he write to titillate (though there may be slightly more titillation here than in his earlier works). Ultimately, the obsessive love that Tyler transfers from Irene to the Queen is a manifestation of his isolation, his sense that he doesn't fit in the world his brother so facilely inhabits. He lacks an internal driving force, and thus seeks it in a series of impossible affairs (cf. The Green Dress in TRS). And so, Tyler's crumbling world is quite tangible, and our feeling for it is pure tenderness. The demons here are not the prostitutes, nor the kindly if sloppy-drunk johns, but the justice system, which unjustly sets bail arbitrarily (Vollman proposes a prison triage system that sends junkies to rehab and the insane to asylum, rather than throwing them in a cell with actual criminals), and the capitalist abusers who parade as wholesome while hypocritically indulging their dark side (Tyler's brother John becomes Domino's customer; Tyler's client Brady, who instigates the search for the Queen, opens a Vegas casino called Feminine Circus, in which men hire "virtualettes" for sexual abuse; these virtualettes are said to be unreal, but they are, in fact, actual women, mostly mentally and physically disabled, who are bought into sexual slavery by Brady and used until they die).
Unquestionably, the work is dark, but it's not the smut for which one might mistake it, reading the first few pages. In pushing toward the epic, Vollman does indulge in a few excessively broad strokes, but if you look past the sequins on the street whore's miniskirt, you'll notice the dirt under her chipped fingernails.
*I considered using the more delicate "micturating," but it wasn't in keeping with Vollman's tone.
**in the narcotic sense
In a sense, then, this is a more developed version of Whores For Gloria, or perhaps a kind or prequel. We first meet private investigator Henry Tyler smoking crack with a prostitute while he questions her about the Queen of the Whores, whom he has been tasked by a client to find. But this is not a pulpy P.I. novel, a contemporary, seedy Dashiell Hammett. Although Tyler frequents the TL, pays prostitutes, and takes the occasional hit of rock, like WFG's Jimmy, he's less interested in the physical than emotional payoff of these activities; what he wants from these women are their stories, their companionship. If he shares their drugs or sex, it's only to gain their trust by entering their world.
One gets the sense early on that this won't be a detective novel; the simple search for the Queen won't support so many pages of text, and indeed, less than a third of the way into the novel, Tyler's client fires him, certain that the Queen is just a myth. Tyler continues the search anyway, driven by something he doesn't quite understand, but knows must be related to his illicit desire for his brother's Korean wife, Irene (Irene will, to Vollman insiders, reprise Jenny of The Blue Wallet in The Rainbow Stories). Irene, pregnant and unhappy with her unaffectionate, type-A husband (who, incidentally, has no love for his brother), commits suicide, sending Tyler down the chute of dark desperation. Along the way he will find and fall in love with the Queen of the Whores, who will ameliorate his pain by pissing* down his throat. Soon enough, though, she too will disappear, and Tyler will become a freight-train riding vagabond, traveling from squat to squat, asking once again if anyone has seen the Queen.
The height of the novel is the middle, in which Vollman develops the "royal family," the Queen, a small but strangely powerful black woman, ageless, whose breath is more potent than crack smoke, and whose saliva serves as a drug to the group of girls she cares for. These prostitutes—a violent blonde called Domino, a Mexican runaway whose street name is her real name, a girl called Strawberry who has a boyfriend (the Queen's right-hand-man Justin) in spite of her line of work, amongst others—stay together in a network of squats around the TL, the Inner Mission, South of Market, and occasionally across the Bay in Oakland when the heat is on, paying 10% of their take to the Queen's fund, which in turn helps them get well** when they don't have the cash, bails them out when they're arrested, and buys them protection—or at least retribution—when they are done wrong. Think of it as a union.
I've always felt that Vollman deals rather fairly with the subcultures he explores; the book is graphic in the extreme (sensitive readers, for example, will be horrified by the unflinching presentation of the character Dan Smooth, a child molester who goes long unpunished because his connections are of use to the police department in pursuing bigger criminals of his ilk), but Vollman never writes to condemn, nor does he write to titillate (though there may be slightly more titillation here than in his earlier works). Ultimately, the obsessive love that Tyler transfers from Irene to the Queen is a manifestation of his isolation, his sense that he doesn't fit in the world his brother so facilely inhabits. He lacks an internal driving force, and thus seeks it in a series of impossible affairs (cf. The Green Dress in TRS). And so, Tyler's crumbling world is quite tangible, and our feeling for it is pure tenderness. The demons here are not the prostitutes, nor the kindly if sloppy-drunk johns, but the justice system, which unjustly sets bail arbitrarily (Vollman proposes a prison triage system that sends junkies to rehab and the insane to asylum, rather than throwing them in a cell with actual criminals), and the capitalist abusers who parade as wholesome while hypocritically indulging their dark side (Tyler's brother John becomes Domino's customer; Tyler's client Brady, who instigates the search for the Queen, opens a Vegas casino called Feminine Circus, in which men hire "virtualettes" for sexual abuse; these virtualettes are said to be unreal, but they are, in fact, actual women, mostly mentally and physically disabled, who are bought into sexual slavery by Brady and used until they die).
Unquestionably, the work is dark, but it's not the smut for which one might mistake it, reading the first few pages. In pushing toward the epic, Vollman does indulge in a few excessively broad strokes, but if you look past the sequins on the street whore's miniskirt, you'll notice the dirt under her chipped fingernails.
*I considered using the more delicate "micturating," but it wasn't in keeping with Vollman's tone.
**in the narcotic sense
Friday, May 21, 2010
Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Eight
It poured rain all yesterday afternoon, all last night, and so far today, all day today. Being in this country without my love is no good. Outside, the chickens are huddled under their blue chicken house, which is where I saw them yesterday. Why don't the chickens go inside the chicken house? I would hate to spend today huddled underneath our shack, where there is indeed a roomy hollow crawl space, where I could squat and shiver just like the chickens.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Seven
This afternoon, I drove Aldo to the airport for his flight back to the states (my flight isn't until tomorrow). Pulling his suitcase out of the trunk at the curb, the rubber seal around the inside came loose. We were in a hurry, so I shoved it back into place, kissed him goodbye, and got back in the car to park it while he got on the check-in line. We heard a honk from behind; the trunk was open. He closed it and ran inside. As I pulled away from the curb, I saw the open trunk bouncing behind me. I pulled over (into a bus stop) to fix it and a smoking man jumped up from his bench to close it for me. A bus behind me honked. The man closed the trunk, but it flew up again. He closed it again. It flew up again. He closed it hard and it stuck, and I drove to the parking lot without further trouble.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
