jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Marcy and I will be editing the Spring issue of the Mississippi Review Web. Here’s the call for submissions. Please feel free to forward this to any and all interested parties, and to post wherever appropriate.

24 Words Per Second: The Movies Issue
We are writers who watch a lot of movies. Maybe it’s no surprise that the films we see have a way of seeping back into our fiction: plots that echo silent film, narrative gimmicks borrowed from the French New Wave, characters who spend too much time at the multiplex or model their lives after movie stars. For the MRW Spring issue, we are looking for short stories with a cinematic bend. What that means, exactly, is up to you. Perhaps your story references Aki Kaurismäki, moves like a screwball comedy, or features cinemaniacs trying to kick the habit. Maybe it’s narrated from the perspective of Natalie Wood’s ghost. As long as it’s inspired by the movies, we’re interested.

The deadline is March 15. Send submissions (3000 words max) to mississippireview.movieissue@gmail.com.

A booby-trapped tale of wartime love and guilt, adapted from the great Ian McEwan, who has been mining the darker recesses of desire since First Love, Last Rites (1975). Joe Wright directs an excellent cast — Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, and newcomer Saoirse Ronan — in what begins like a standard period piece but ends up transcending the format with a sharp-eyed inquiry into the power of fiction to destroy and redeem; I haven’t been able to get this movie out of my head. Atonement opens on December 7; if you haven’t read the novel, I highly recommend staying spoiler-free.

Atonement. Joe Wright, 2007. ****

Instead of the spoilerish trailer for Atonement, here’s a clip from Andrew Birkin’s 1993 movie based on McEwan’s The Cement Garden, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg:

At muckworld, we’re so bleeding edge that some of what we do goes straight from experimental to museum piece, without ever hitting that crucial middle phase of widespread success. Der Brennende Busch, an German-language online lit mag I founded and edited sometime in the last century, has been archived at Deutsches Literatur Archiv Marbach — you can now search for and dig through the proto-blog design, artwork by Dusty Domino, and a collection of stories, essays, poems, and multimedia pieces I’m still proud of.

Speaking of art work: my uncle-in-law Frank Ettenberg, an artist living and working in Vienna, sent along this painting, which I liked quite a bit. It’s called ‘Sea Swoosh’, approx 8 x 10″, acrylic on enameled composition board, and you can click it to enlarge. Frank’s portfolio.

Finally, news from everybody’s favorite red-headed guitar hero, Trey Anastasio. After his recent run-in with the law, Trey’s been holed up at an upstate rehab facility, but he just came out of hiding last Saturday to play a show with the latest incarnation of Phil and Friends. Every song on the setlist somehow referred to his troubles, but the extended arrest joke suddenly gave way to naked sentiment with the second-set appearance of the heavyweight Garcia ballad “Wharf Rat.”

You can download the whole show via bittorrent or watch some shaky videos. Let’s hope Trey gets to go on another furlough when Phil comes to the City next week for an 11-night-run at the Nokia, starting on Halloween. Here’s “Friend of the Devil” from Glens Falls:

From highly enjoyable exercises in pop style (8 Women) to over-conceptualized constructs that left me completely cold (5×2), Francois Ozon’s films are hit-or-miss. Misgivings about his adaptation of the novel by Elizabeth Taylor arose the moment the snooty Berlin box office dude made fun of our choice of movie — was this really going to be “Rosamunde Pilcher hoch zehn,” a terrible melodrama that we hadn’t packed enough tissues for?

Yes and no. The story of Angel Deverell (Romola Garai), the precocious grocer’s daughter who transforms herself into a successful writer only to lose it all to love, war, and the unpredictable currents of taste is indeed what we used to call a Schmonzette, an overblown melodrama that should be the object of our ridicule, and that of ticket takers everywhere. Anybody with a hankering for rustling fabric, lavish sets, trembling bosoms and tragic turns of events is certainly welcome to enjoy Angel at face value.

But Ozon manages to keep a generally winking attitude even while he’s presenting a fully functional romantic epic. Through the use of rear-projection, a lush score, and especially Romola Garai’s finely tuned performance, Angel has its melodramatic cake and keeps its post-ironic distance, too. The movie itself very much resembles the preposterous stories with which Angel Deverell makes her fortune — and is thus also a target for the snide comments of smarter people within the movie. With the help of an editor’s wife played by Charlotte Rampling and grim painter Esmé (Michael Fassbender), Ozon provides sophisticated commentary on the film from within the film. As recreation of a (mostly) defunct genre, Angel feels less self-conscious than Todd Haynes’ faux-Sirk Far From Heaven; thanks to Romola Garai, it is also more engaging.

Angel does not have a U.S. release date yet.

Angel. Francois Ozon, 2007. ****

The trailer:

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.

Billy Wilder’s timeless noir about the tragedy of fame attained and denied provides up-to-the-minute commentary on the Passion of Lindsay and her latest closeup, but that’s not the angle I’d like to pursue today. Instead, let me draw your attention to a connection that took me by complete surprise last night (yes, I screamed.) Compare and contrast:

Sunset Blvd.:

INLAND EMPIRE:

The film-within-a-film Gloria Swanson and William Holden are watching is a 1929 silent called Queen Kelly. The actress in the movie is in fact a younger Swanson, and Queen Kelly is directed by Erich von Stroheim, who also plays Norma Desmond’s storied butler Max in Sunset Blvd. It’s a delicious bit of recycled cinema that functions as inside joke and helps deepen Norma Desmond’s character.

Lynch’s reasons for quoting both movies halfway through INLAND EMPIRE are more obscure. Because the character, known as the Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka), is speaking Polish, the caption from Queen Kelly is rendered in subtitles. Without knowing anything about its provenance, I found that it summed up the dark undercurrents of INLAND EMPIRE so well that I used it as a title for my original review.

On frieze.com, Kristin M. Jones writes that “[the Lost Girl] may represent the souls of ambitious actresses stolen by their dreams.” The intrepid interpreters on the INLAND EMPIRE forums believe that the scene is a good starting off point for theories about the film — after all, both Sunset Blvd. and INLAND EMPIRE concern Hollywood stars in spectacular houses with strange butlers, champagne and caviar, and movies that have the power to kill. Like Nikki Grace, Norma Desmond is “a woman in trouble.” Come to think of it, so is Linsday Lohan.

Sunset Blvd. Billy Wilder, 1950. *****

• INLAND EMPIRE on DVD
• Ten minutes of Queen Kelly on YouTube
• Sunset Boulevard on Wikipedia

Incredibly engaging documentary about the writer’s writer, composer, traveler, expatriate, existentialist, kif connoisseur, husband to Jane Bowles, translator of Jean-Paul Satre, and friend of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, and Gertrude Stein. First Run Features is releasing the DVD on July 24.

Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider. Catherine Warnow and Regina Weinrich, 1994. ****

• Paul Bowles - Wikipedia
• Jane Bowles - Wikipedia
• The Authorized Paul Bowles Website
• The International Paul Bowles Society
• On YouTube, John Malkovich and Debra Winger have sex in the desert in a key scene from Bertolucci’s adaptation of The Sheltering Sky. In Italian.