jürgen fauth’s muckworld

None of the movies I saw this week thrilled as much as the conclusion to the first part of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. After 200 pages of young Wart’s education, we finally get to the part about the sword in the stone. It’s Merlyn’s final lesson, presented in a hallucinatory passage that feels as if Walt Disney adapted Revelations and laced it with zen wisdom:

“Oh, Merlyn,” cried the Wart, “help me to get this weapon.”

There was a a kind of rushing noise, and a long chord played along with it. All round the churchyard there were hundreds of old friends. They rose over the church wall all together, like the Punch and Judy ghosts of remembered days, and there were badgers and nightingales and vulgar crows and hares and wild geese and falcons and fishes and dogs and dainty unicorns and solitary wasps and corkindrills and hedgehogs and griffins and the thousand other animals he had met. They loomed round the church wall, the lovers and helpers of the Wart, and they all spoke solemnly in turn. Some of them had come from the banners in the church, where they were painted in heraldry, some from the waters and the sky and the fields about–but all, down to the smallest shrew mouse, had come to help on account of love. Wart felt his power grow.

“Put your back into it,” said a Luce (or pike) off one of the heraldic banners, “as you once did when I was going to snap you up. Remember that power springs from the nape of the neck.”

“What about those forearms,” asked a Badger gravely, “that are held together by a chest? Come along, my dear embryo, and find your tool.”

A Merlin sitting at the top of the yew tree cried out, “Now then, Captain Wart, what is the first law of the foot? I thought I once heard something about never letting go?”

“Don’t work like a stalling woodpecker,” urged a Tawny Owl affectionately. “Keep up a steady effort, my duck, and you will have it yet.”

A white-front said, “Now, Wart, if you were once able to fly the great North Sea, surely you can co-ordinate a few little wing-muscles here and there? Fold your powers together, with the spirit of your mind, and it will come out like butter. Come along, Homo sapiens, for all we humble friends of yours are waiting here to cheer.”

The Wart walked up to the great sword for the third time. He put out his right hand softly and drew it out as gently as from a scabbard.

I also enjoyed a Greek feast at Zenon Taverna with Jordan and Ann, ramen at Menchanko-Tei, swung a cow in Rayman Raving Rabbids, and installed a brand new operating system. Saw a few movies, too:

Blind Mountain/Mang shan. Li Yang, 2007. ***
Funny Games. Michael Haneke, 1997. **
Funny Games U.S. Michael Haneke, 2007. **
Love Songs/ Les Chansons d’amour. Christophe Honoré ***
My Blueberry Nights. Wong Kar Wai, 2007. ***
Sleep Dealer. Alex Rivera, 2008. **
Water Lillies/Naissance des pieuvres. Céline Sciamma, 2007. **
plus The Wire. Season 2 **** and Prime Suspect 5 ****

I shelve my Alan Moore books next to Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, and I am sure all three postmodern masters would get a healthy kick out of this wildly imaginative third book to Moore’s Gentlemen series, which draws on a vast storehouse of influences and blends them into an ecstatic new whole. The last time around, I wrote “Just when you thought you understood the parameters of where the story can go, Moore pulls another fast one” — and that was when we were still with the original Victorian group of heroes (Allan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, and Mr. Hyde) and happily confined to Kevin O’Neill’s clear, appealing artwork.

Black Dossier explodes all that. Framed by a storyline set in an alternate version of the 1950s, the book concerns the theft of a book that, in the comic, looks like the one you’re holding in your hands. Along with the comic book adventure, the Dossier also contains a facsimile of a lost Shakespeare play (Fairie’s Fortunes Founded), fascist propaganda booklets warning of sexcrimes, the life of Viginia Woolf’s Orlando in nine illustrated chapters, a sequel to the erotic classic Fanny Hill, a few pages from a Beat novel featuring our heroes, reprinted postcards from Shangri-La, cutaways of the Nautilus, and section in 3-D (goggles are provided.) While the first two books concerned a Victorian team of heroes, Moore uses Black Dossier to sketch, through the various fragments, the history of several British incarnations as well as French and German teams that included the likes of Fantomas and Rotwang.

The ease with which Moore accesses high and low culture is truly mind-boggling: Ian Fleming, Herman Hesse, Charles Chaplin, H.P. Lovecraft, and George Orwell are added to the already impressive list of influences (and I’m pretty sure I missed a good third of them.) Any imaginary creation is fair play for Moore’s ambitious tale, and the density of ideas is absurdly high, as if Moore was cramming an entire series’ worth of characters and storylines into a single book.

A word about Moore and the movies: he’s famously taken his name off all adaptations, and rightfully so — most of them have been dreadful (worst of all, incidentally, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Moore’s best effects are always inextricably bound up with the medium of comics, and this holds especially true for Black Dossier, which is essentially unfilmable (and wouldn’t work as a novel, either.) I positively dread Zach Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen.

Like The Tempest, Black Dossier ends with a monologue by Prospero (himself an Extraordinary Gentleman), who celebrates one of Moore’s grand themes: the power and paradoxical reality of imaginary characters. “If we mere insubstantial fancies be, how more so thee, who from us substance stole? On Dream’s foundation matter’s mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou’ve fashioned fashion thee. Intangible, we are life’s secret soul.”

The League of Extraodrinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, 2007. *****

• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
• The 2003 Movie Adaptation
• Wikipedia: LGX
• Discussion on Barbelith
• Salon review by Douglas Wolk
• PopMatters

What good is having your own blog if you can’t brag about your girl? In a piece about MySpace and the book world in the New York Times Book Review, Pagan Kennedy devoted a paragraph to Marcy and her pioneering use of MySpace to promote Twins. I confess I used to hide the occasional sneer when she was compulsively befriending strangers instead of, say, writing the next book, but we all have our own ways of procrastinating, and hey, it worked for Lily Allen. Authors weren’t dime-a-dozen on MySpace at the time, and making people with her characters’ names into her “top friends” was pretty clever.

We’re about to embark on a longish trip, so expect the emphasis on muckworld to shift to photos and tidbits from the road for a little while. While we’re packing our bags and staying on the line with our cell phone providers to work out the kinks in the international roaming plan, let me catch up with last week’s viewing:

Children of Men
The incredible long takes at the heart of this film look slightly less impressive on the small screen, but there can be no doubt that it’s one hell of a movie. Stories set in alternate realities often rely heavily on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, probably because the familiar stations of the Hero’s Journey allow us to better absorb the unfamiliar world surrounding it. Children of Men is a particularly potent example, a fully realized dystopia in which hope is hard won indeed. In honor of Theo’s ongoing footwear problems, here’s Cavern, which features one of the truest lines you’ll ever find in a rock song: “Whatever you do / take care of your shoes.” Alfonso Cuaron, 2006. *****

Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe’s sweetly romanticized memories of his early days as rock critic are anything but dystopian, but William Miller’s adventures with Miss Penny Lane and Stillwater are yet another Hero’s Journey, with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs taking over the Magician/Hermit role that Michael Caine plays in Children of Men. It’s one of those movies I find impossible to turn off, no matter how many times I’ve seen it. Cameron Crowe, 2000. *****

Camp
Poorly paced and predictably told, this movie about teenagers in a performing arts summer camp failed to engage us. Todd Graff, 2003. *

The Gymnast
Feel the fabric! Wolfe Video is releasing this festival favorite about two aging gymnasts who find love while they’re swinging from the rafters. As much as I want to like true independent films like this, you’re bound to be underwhelmed unless you’re particularly fascinated by the world of gay aerialists. Ned Farr, 2006. **

Follow My Voice
Portrait of a group of gay teenagers at the Harvey Milk School in New York who are the beneficiaries of a cover album of Hedwig songs. With Frank Black, the Polyphonic Spree, Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, Yoko Ono, Jonathan Richman and John Cameron Mitchell. Earnest and likable, if overlong. Katherine Linton, 2006. ***

2 Days in Paris
The less said about Julie Delpy’s dreadful directorial debut the better. Julie Delpy, 2007. *

Persepolis
The second book of Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age graphic novel memoir doesn’t quite have the impact of the first (which is set in Iran), but anybody who has ever suffered culture shock will find plenty to recognize and love. I’m very much looking forward to the movie. ****

In the Shadow of the Moon
The real wonder here isn’t the Apollo program or the digitally restored footage from the NASA vaults, but the spirited and witty memories of the septuagenarian astronauts telling their unique stories. I’ll have a review by the time this opens on September 7. David Sington, 2006. ***

Initially, I was quite smitten with this slim volume because Colin McGinn’s central thesis–that movies share essential qualities with dreams–is intuitively convincing and inviting. Why is it that nobody has to learn to watch a movie, that the free-roaming eye of the camera and the time-and-space-dissolving qualities of montage don’t disorient us (unless they’re meant to)? What is the key to the movies’ powerful emotional hold over us?

In somewhat clunky prose, McGinn, a philosopher, diligently unpacks these questions. The first half of the book, where he investigates “the metaphysics of the movie image” and the way we perceive it, is required reading for anybody trying to get a better handle on what it is, exactly, those flickering shadows do to us in that dark room. He lays out a theory he calls “film mentalism,” which asserts that the movies present us with “consciousness externalized,” a highly charged way of seeing straight into the minds of other people. In the process, he reveals realism/formalism debates as a false dilemma. (Ken Wilber calls this strategy “transcend and include.”)

In the final stretch, though, McGinn loses himself in conjecture and pursues all the wrong angles. The psychological similarities between film and dreams he painstakingly ferreted out leads him to conclude that dreams must be subject to a production process that’s similar to that of a movie–written, produced, and edited ahead of time, stored up until triggered by emotional necessity or external stimulus. Unfounded assertions like these are dubious and somewhat beside the point. A quick excursion into lucid dreaming contradicts most of what I have read on the topic. Some of the most interesting conclusions to be drawn from his thesis are dismissed with brief paragraphs that miss the point entirely: if McGinn’s thesis is correct–and I believe it is–wouldn’t it be worth paying special attention to the movies’ immense power of suggestion and the shared nature of the experience?

Colin McGinn. The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact. 2005. ***

The last word on Leni Riefenstahl seems always just out of reach. After her Memoirs, Steve Bach’s new biography provides a desperately needed corrective to Leni’s own lies, evasions, and half-truths. Anybody who has seen The Wonderful, Horrible Life knows what an extraordinarily maddening, talented, obsessive, domineering, and flirtatious creature Leni was even in her nineties–and she lived to 101. For artists anywhere–but especially Germans–Leni remains endlessly perplexing. The questions raised by her life go straight to the core of history, morality, ambition, power, and cinema. The dry statement issued after her death by the German government barely scratches the surface:

Leni Riefenstahl symbolizes a German artist’s fate in the 20th Century both in her revolutionary artistic vision and in her political blindness and infatuation. No one would deny that with her talent she developed cinematic methods that have since become part of an aesthetic canon. Her career also shows that one cannot lead an honest life in service of the false, and that art is never apolitical. (297)

Steven Bach. Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl. 2006. ****

• Reviews: New York Review of Books, Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker
• Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism.”
• At GreenCine: Leni, Obits.
• Jodie Foster’s Riefenstahl project
• Previously on Muckworld

Speaking of true friends and good writers: this week marks the release of Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen, an anthology of cinematic shorts that features a story by my friend and fellow Center for Writers graduate John Minichillo. John’s story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” is called “Blind Man in the Halls of Justice.” Editor Steve Cohen pitches it as A Civil Action meets Scent of a Woman, but I see it as 12 Angry Men crossed with Half-Baked. Alexander Payne could do a fine job directing it.

The official site for Next Stop Hollywood hosts excerpts, information for writers who want to be in the next edition, and a list of great movies based on short stories, including Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Killers, Freaks, and Animal House. (They should add Away from Her ASAP.) My copy’s on its way.

Seen Anything Good Lately?
Whenever this question gets asked, either the music’s too loud or I’m preoccupied with chasing down hors d’oeuvres, so here’s a more considered answer. For my money, the best current releases in New York are Once, Away from Her, and Day Night Day Night — and The Host is still playing, too. You might also like The Wendell Baker Story, Severance, and Hot Fuzz. (I haven’t seen Brand Upon the Brain!, 28 Weeks Later, or Rolling Like a Stone.) If you happen to find yourself in Germany, you must not miss INLAND EMPIRE. Also, Ray Pride informs us that Nicholas Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread premieres on TV next week.

This Week in Dead History
Much thanks to Daniel A. and Ace Cowboy for reminding me of the Taper’s Section, where Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux releases new mp3s every week. I’ve just barely scratched the surface but so far I’ve dug The Music Never Stopped (4/27/78), Dark Star (5/7/72), and Estimated Prophet>Uncle John’s Band (4/12/82.) Tons more where that came from.

Must Be A Good Cause If They Have a Button
You might have noticed the button on the sidebar enticing you to support the National Book Critics Circles’ efforts to save book reviewing. More from Lizzie Skurnick, AWFJ, and Salman Rushdie on The Colbert Report.

Rebel without a Pause
As you can see, the new camera appears to be well-suited for bones, skaters, and strange brides. It has also been indespensable in our ongoing attempts to solve the Mansion Mystery:

Speaking of the neighborhood: for those who like to order in, Joey in Astoria’s Floozgrl maintains a Flickr pool with handy Astoria menus.

Extreme Navelgazing
Google Book Search reveals that through the magic of MySpace, Lauren Cerand and myself have now become characters in Twins.

The Graphic Novel Was So Much Better
GalleyCat found the trailer for Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. The first comic book adaptation I can get behind since Ghost World.