Monday, April 5, 2010

March Media Round-Up

Books took a resounding lead over movies this month, with fifteen books read and only seven movies watched. So after only three months, I have read thirty five books toward my goal of fifty-two this year.

I'm reading more than the required pace for a simple reason: I love reading. More specifically, I love reading good books. When I read books that aren't good, my desire to move on to better ones compels me toward that last page.

That said, here's a list of this month's books:

The Castle by Franz Kafka - This book was slow going, and the main character, K, was a bit of a non-character. But the humor, the imagery, and the painful truth of the story took center stage. I was bummed that Kafka never got to finish writing it.
Body Piercing Saved my Life by Andrew Beaujon - A writer for Spin investigates the world of Christian Rock. I expected all my Christian embarrassment to come flaming back up to the surface, but Beaujon is fair, funny, and gracious, even giving DC Talks props for being innovators in the rap genre.
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates - My one complaint about Oates is that she is usually humorless. She seems intent on not alleviating the suffering of her characters or her readers with any tender moment until everything has run its course. As a result, a very profound, well-written book ended up feeling a bit agonizing and manipulative.
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor - Keillor does his usual sentimental satire thing here, which is a great thing, which is why I keep going back to his books. The one memorable feature of this book is the way he relates an adolescent's early encounters with pornography and lust, addressing them with warmth and humor.
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence - It's hard to believe that this is a British novel written in 1913. While it's not lurid by today's standards, the book deals with a series of complex relationships and addresses sex and all its accompanying complications with frankness and insight. It's a direct, fast-moving, beautiful novel. Lawrence is now on my to-read list.
In the Presence of my Enemies by Gracia Burnham and Dean Merrill - I guess I'm not the target audience, but I was really hoping to like this story. My family knew the Burnhams, I had met them, and the story takes place where I grew up. But the writing was so sloppy, the prose so limp and artless, the moral lessons so blunt, that I just wanted to be finished.
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner - Say what you will about Faulkner, and I'll probably even agree with you, but this little book is a powerhouse. It got me inside some demented minds, whipped me through some crazy scenarios, and told one heck of a story. Faulkner touched all the emotional and intellectual bases so lyrically and effortlessly.
Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers - Good enough, but not quite up there with The Member of the Wedding and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I felt a little less interested in the characters, a little less engaged by the flow of events, and a little less haunted when it was all over.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - I understand why Chinua Achebe hated this book and called it racist, but I felt like Conrad was doing something quite different. To me, the book seemed blatantly critical of imperialism, and seemed to show Western incompetence and racism in a horrific light. And it's a great yarn.
The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and Other Stories by Franz Kafka - Kafka is becoming a hero to me. He treats his absurd premises with deep compassion, insight, and seriousness, leaving the stories open to pretty much any reaction except indifference. My writing has been changed by reading this book.
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan - I've had my eye on this book for a while, and since it's only 166 pages long, I figured it would be a good way to come back to earth after Conrad and Kafka. What a book. I've never read such a powerful book about the things we don't say, and how they change us.
Something Missing by Matthew Dicks - The remarkable feature of this book is its premise. An OCD burglar treats his marks like clients and takes great care to steal only the things that won't be missed. Dicks is obviously heavily informed by Stephen King's On Writing, creating a straightforward, often clever novel that goes down easy.
Native Son by Richard Wright - A good, revealing story turns suddenly into an essay on race relations. Perhaps this was an effective wake-up call in its time, but I don't like it when authors go all Ayn Rand on me, getting me into a story just so I will read a 100 page-long sermon on their political opinions. It's a shame, because I really enjoyed the narrative.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov - Hard to believe this was Nabokov's first novel in the english language. It's so complex, savvy, and rewarding. His plays on criticism, narrative, and syntax fit beautifully within a portrait of a man on the trail of his genius brother's legacy.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky - Granted, this does have a bit of the sermonizing that I complained about in Native Son, but Dostoevsky does a good job of embedding his ideas in the psyche of his characters so it doesn't feel cheap. I felt alternately bored, engaged, and exhausted by this book. In retrospect, it's a beautiful story and well worth the work, but it didn't always feel like it while I was reading.

And now for the movies, of which I didn't see many this month:

The Full Monty - A tastefully done comedy about some out of work blokes in a steel town who decide to strip to earn some money. It was not a great film, but it was well-conceived and extremely likeable.
Shine - This film felt a bit like a Ron Howard biopic, which is heartwarming and inspiring until you learn about the liberties they took with the story. The acting and technique were top-notch, but I wondered why they didn't address the main character's mental illness or suggest that his relationship with his father wasn't the only thing that plagued him.
Precious - It's unfair to a film to hear its hype for months before you get to watch it. I felt moved by parts of this, repulsed by others, and bored by some of the techniques it employed. All in all, it was pretty good, but I couldn't get into it as much as I wanted to.
Billy Elliott - I guess this month was "Acclaimed British Films from the Nineties" month. Billy Elliott was my favorite of the bunch. It was funny, convincing, kinetic, and it earned the joyous feeling it left me with.
Cecil B. Demented - Either I've been desensetized or John Waters has lost his edge. This film was certainly vulgar, but it seemed to be lacking in the charm or warmth that marked his earlier movies. I did enjoy all the shout-outs to other, better directors like Sam Fuller and Sam Peckinpah.
Touch of Evil - This was no Citizen Kane, but it was one whiplash-inducing, twisty piece of noir. Orson Welles does a great job as a corrupt, alcoholic sheriff in a small border town across from Charlton Heston as an upstanding Mexican narcotics officer.
Palindromes - I loved this movie. See previous post for more.

On to March!

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Aviva Goes Around





In casual discussions about a given film, there is one word which alerts me to the fact that the person with whom I'm speaking did not understand the piece, or does not possess the vocabulary to interact with it. The word is weird.

In fact, with the exception of Hunter S. Thompson, no one seems able to artfully use the word. Given the chance, I'd gleefully scratch weird, along with its companions, beautiful and something, from the American vernacular. I think that doing so would force my countrymen to think a little more specifically about what they want to communicate.

Point in case: Todd Solondz' weird film Palindromes, which features five different actresses as its main character, Aviva. Aviva, more than anything else, wants to have a baby. As a young teenager, she couples with an awkward young man to achieve this goal. Upon learning of her pregnancy, Aviva's parents force her to abort. After recovering, Aviva hits the road.

Aviva's own name is a palindrome. It starts at the same place it ends up. You can turn it around, travel it backward or forward, start and finish it at either end, and you get the same character. What's more, you can swap ages, actresses, races, places, families, times, and opportunities, and you still come around to the same person: Aviva.

Even if you haven't seen Solondz' other films (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Hapiness), you can probably guess from this cyclical concept that Palindromes is not going to be a story that ends up any happier than it begins. And it begins with a suicide.

So early into the film, as the actors wavered between dramatics and realism, seeming to recite lines, but then seeming to do a good job of acting like the type of characters who would recite lines that way, the word weird came to my mind, and it most certainly fit.

But gradually, as the character became real, as she acted in pursuit of her dream, and as she stumbled from one calamity to the next, I began to realize that every oddity was in the movie for a purpose, and that the film is as artfully symmetrical as its title would suggest, and that, despite the deep despair inherent in its message, this movie is something beautifully weird.

In pursuit of comedic tragedy or tragic comedy (the emphasis chosen might merely reflect the mood of the viewer), Solondz runs from sorrow to sorrow, swapping scenarios, liberally discarding conventions to say to his audience that, despite the conventions of our stories, despite their arcs and twists and reversals, we are who we are.

It would be hard to explain why I felt uplifted by this movie. Perhaps because the vitality of the artistic voice outweighed the gloomy message for me. Perhaps because I enjoy intellectually challenging art. Perhaps because these days I feel so free from the despair the movie plumbs.

Either way, backwards or forwards, tragedy or comedy, Palindromes is a challenging, original, and decidedly weird movie. And I love it for that.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

On African Music

So I've been into African hip-hop lately, which I touched on briefly in my recent post on K'NAAN, but a recent YouTube search turned up some great results. I tend to like the artists that employ African-sounding instrumentation and melodies, and my favorite videos show Here are a few of the videos I most enjoyed.
I can't vouch for lyrical content or quality, since I don't speak Swahili or French or whatever language these cats are rapping in.

Monday, March 1, 2010

February Media Round-up

February 2010 - probably the first month of my lifetime where the books I read outnumbered the movies I watched. The reason for the drop in movie viewing was James Joyce's Ulysses, which consumed so much time and energy that it began to feel like an obsession, which left very little room for cinematic exploration.

Without further delay, books and movies for February...

Books read in February (with brief reviews):

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - often agonizing, occasionally touching, and always always funny, Nabokov's novel deserves every bit of praise and outrage it evokes. It's wonderfully offensive.
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order by Robert Kagan - An interesting argument that postmodern, antiwar Europe was able to thrive because America's military did the dirty work of protecting them. I didn't buy it wholesale, but at least now I know a bit of the history of the tension between the US and Europe.
After Dark by Haruki Murakami - This little book felt like a minor work by a major author. It was intriguing, but not all that powerful.
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - Cather created an interesting web of relationships, but in the end, there were too many melodramatic monologues and boilerplate plot devices for me to really enjoy the book.
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories by Carson McCullers - I think McCullers loses a great deal of her impact in the short story arena, and out of the South, which she evokes so well in the novels I've read.
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A lyrical, incisive little novel that explores connections between human sensuality and spirituality. Stuck with me long after I put it down.
No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe - A bit of a disappointment after Things Fall Apart. While it uses idiomatic language, the folktale tone of this book's predecessor is replaced by what feels like a conventional morality tale set in the third world.
Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken - This book, while difficult to get through and occasionally preachy, opened my eyes to the power of grassroots, community-based movements to create positive change. Very inspiring.
Ulysses by James Joyce - So much has been said about this book, but I'd like to add that I felt like reading it reshaped my brain. I plan to revisit it regularly.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - Did this book seem a bit lame to me because I read it right after Ulysses? Probably. But still, I get tired of Vonnegut's contempt for his characters, and his snarky tone. Sure, it's funny and insightful on occasion, but I was glad to be done with it.
A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham - Cunningham is one of my favorite contemporary novelists, and this is one powerful book. The characters, rich, broken, and utterly believable, are rendered in such rewarding prose.
Miami by Joan Didion - Poetic journalism. This book is compact, eye-opening, and masterfully written.

Movies watched in February (with brief reviews):

The Hurt Locker - This movie may make it into my top 25 movies of all time. It was visceral, emotional, and ultra-realistic in its portrayal of a squad assigned to diffuse roadside bombs in Iraq.
The Lady from Shanghai - A pretty good film noir from Orson Welles.
The Band Wagon - a musical which my friend recommended to me as one of the best, directed by Vincent Minelli. It was enjoyable, but musicals just aren't my thing.
Journey from the Fall - A Vietnamese-made movie about the plight of refugees and political prisoners. I found it very moving and totally believable.
Paul Robeson: Portrait of an Artist - A short documentary about what it cost a black performer when he spoke out against racism in America.
Casino Royale - A perfect reinvention of Bond for the new millenium. Casino Royale was a popcorn movie of the highest order.
My Darling Clementine - One of the great westerns. Epic, engaging, and character-driven.
Goodbye Solo - Director Rahmin Bahrani might become one of my favorite. Goodbye Solo and Chop Shop both surprised and uplifted me with their unflinching look at what it takes to keep going, and what happens when you give up.

The End.

Monday, February 22, 2010

A Few Thoughts from Nabokov

Just this morning, I read a 1964 Playboy interview where author Vladimir Nabokov discusses, among other things, his book Lolita. I thought the following quotes were noteworthy:

"But when I was young, in my 20s and early 30s, I would often stay all day in bed, smoking and writing. Now things have changed. Horizontal prose, vertical verse, and sedent scholia keep swapping qualifiers and spoiling the alliteration."

"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me."

And finally, in response to a question about whether or not he believed in God, Nabokov replied:

"I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more."

The interview, which is quite good if you've read Lolita and potentially inscrutable if you haven't, can be read in its entirety here.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

A Call to Freedom




A good friend recently loaned me a mixtape by Lil Wayne, supposedly his best, called Dedication 2. Critics seem to love this guy for his passion and playful approach, which are notable.


While the general public may complain about the violence and obscenity, I take it the same way I'd take a western or a Schwarzenegger movie. It's there for entertainment. If kids wouldn't take it so seriously, I wouldn't really have a problem with gangsta rap. That said, I have a hard time being entertained. Most of the radio hip-hop around (with some notable exceptions, eg Jay-Z) seems flat, unfun, and repetitive. Between mundane, bragging skits, rappers find time to grunt out cliches about the streets where they grew up or how much money they have.


That said, I don't think hip-hop is anywhere near dead. With artists like Jay Electronica and Lupe Fiasco dancing around the edges of the mainstream, and The Roots enjoying their tenure as Jimmy Kimmel's band, there's plenty of fresh material for those willing to dig a little. That's not to mention a lively underground, where all sorts of good stuff goes on, whenever rappers can get past rapping about their distaste for the mainstream.


Thankfully, the scene is also getting a boost from Africa. While former child soldier Emmanuel Jal is not very visible in the US, he's been getting nods worldwide for his harrowing story, and his courage in telling it through hip-hop. My wife and I run an afterschool program for international kids in a poor neighborhood, and they love this guy's stuff. It's hard for me to listen to his War Child CD without getting cloudy-eyed.


This week, I learned about another African rapper, this one from Somalia, and after a single listen, I ran out to pick up his latest album. K'NAAN claims that english is not his first language, but he wields it with such precision, playfulness, and fierceness, that I find his claim hard to believe. From his opening track "T.I.A." K'NAAN drops his listeners into a complex, violent Africa, where he grew up dodging grenades, bullets, and thugs that make america's hood seem placid.


While his story (my block is way worse than yours), could get boring in lesser hands, K'NAAN spins it into a funny, tragic, enlightening hip-hop journey which takes seamless turns into rap-rock, reggae, and the anthemic song which has become the theme for the 2010 World Cup, Waving Flag.


The thing that makes Sojourner such a powerful album for me, and the reason it merits play after play, beyond its brilliant musical range, is the view of violence that he takes. While American rappers seem to relish the beefs, guns, and street warfare because they give street cred, K'NAAN dreams of a world without terrorism and piracy, without refugees, where young lovers can grow up without being torn apart by violence.


He celebrates the kinds of love that survive in a war zone, and the brilliant album examines the way all people act under dire circumstances. His music breaks through Western comfort and shows me the chaos that waits at its edges. On Monday, after my first listen-through of this album, I felt awakened. I could barely stand the excess, the false comforts, the glitzy lies that we surround ourselves with here in America.


The world out there, the world we hide from in our big expensive fortress of a country, is bustling with life, and has some things to teach us. Thank God hip-hop provides a voice to that experience.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

One Month Down

I have been following two New Years' resolutions. One was to read one book per week this year- while some books will take months (Ulysses, Infinite Jest and Moby Dick, all of which I hope to read in 2010), there are other books I'll blast through in one sitting. The goal is to have it all balance out to at least 52 books when 2011 rolls around.

The other goal is to track the books I read and the movies I watch this year. I have two pieces of paper taped to the wall above my desk, one listing books read and one listing movies watched. January was a good media month, with 18 movies watched and 8 books read.

Books read in January (with brief reviews):

Dubliners by James Joyce - may end up being the best story collection I read all year
Wobegon Boy by Garrison Keillor - no one does sentimental satire like GK
Sanctuary by William Faulkner - his language is masterful, but I'm not sure he speaks to me
Emma's War by Deborah Scroggins - one heavy, masterfully written true story. See the previous post for my thoughts
The Best of Roald Dahl - while clever and funny, Dahl's mean-spirited shorts got on my nerves pretty quickly
Light in August by William Faulkner - this is undoubtedly a masterpiece, but Faulkner's storytelling can distract me from the story sometimes
A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton - I was shocked by how rich, relatable, and well-paced this novel was
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers - i found this book far more focused and affecting than her more famous The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. McCullers is becoming a favorite. I hope to read the rest of her novels in next few months.

Movies watched in January (with brief reviews):

Merrill's Marauders - I can see why director Sam Fuller was ticked about the final cut of this movie, but there were enough signature Fuller moments to make it worth the watch.
Dancing to New Orleans - There wasn't anything special about the way this doc was put together, but I love NO and its music scene so much, I didn't care. It was great to see musicians talk about the scene, and to see them perform.
The Stunt Man - One of my mentors loaned me this film, saying it was "kinetic filmmaking at its finest." It's a b-movie masterpiece, with terrible acting adding to its odd, delightful impact.
The Orphanage - The farther away from America a horror movie is made, the better it is. This film was great as drama and as horror. I found it creepy, rich, and touching.
Elizabeth - Brilliant Eastern take on European history. One of the most visually rich movies I've seen in ages.
Zombieland - The gory, super dark humor in this movie worked for me, despite a few boilerplate romantic moments. I like actor Jesse Eisenberg more every time I see him.
Too Late for Tears - This classic Noir film has some great twists, but I had a hard time getting past the dated acting style
Elizabeth: The Golden Age - While it was just as visually stunning as its predecessor, I found this sequel less nuanced than the first Elizabeth, although my wife thought it was the better of the two.
Casino Royale - A hilarious send-up of all things James Bond. Admittedly, this movie was weird, but it worked for me.
Where the Wild Things Are - I was told that this movie was a confused, depressing mess. I disagree. I found it to be wholly original, culturally fascinating, and beautifully directed.
Zatoichi 1: The Tale of Zatoichi - I knew that an old Japanese movie about a blind swordsman was gonna be good, but I had no idea how complex and tormented the main character would be, nor how masterfully the cinematography would engage me in his story.
Synechdoche, New York - Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman proved that he can direct his own bizarre metanarratives just as well as the directors who helmed his other screenplays. SNY is funny, insightful, and unnerving in the best possible way.
Zatoichi 2: The Tale of Zatoichi Continues - Anyone involved in making a series of movies needs to study Zatoichi. The sequels manage to keep getting better as they delve deeper into this fascinating character.
Zatoichi 3: New Tale of Zatoichi - See last review.
Zatoichi 4: The Fugitive - See last review, but imagine an even better film than the preceding three.
Chop Shop - Joined the ranks of City of God and Gomorrah as one of my favorite hyper-realistic, beautifully composed expose films about people living in the slums.
Ichi - Although I'm a huge fan of the Zatoichi franchise, this melodramatic, exploitative spinoff was disappointing. The female lead was less compelling than the original actor, the voice-over narration was annoying, and pretty much everything was overdone.

That sums up my media consumption for January. I'm going to try to do these monthly recaps as we go along to a) keep me accountable for my resolutions and b) draw traffic and comments to this side-project blog of mine.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

To What End?

I first heard of Emma McCune while cruising the internet for African music. A Sudanese rapper named Emmanuel Jal credits her with his rescue, and his song "Emma" is a moving tribute to her compassion and to the fruits of her work.

When I searched for Emma online, I learned that not everyone shares Jal's adoration for her.

To learn more about this controversial crusader, I ordered a copy of Emma's War, by Atlanta-dwelling writer Deborah Scroggins. This thorough, beautifully-written book chronicles not only Emma's life, but the long history of Western involvement in Sudan.

A low-level aid worker, Emma worked building schools for children in the war-torn south of Sudan, among the warring Dinka and Nuer tribes (among others). She was one of hundreds of Western expats caught up in a movement to bring relief to the suffering in Africa.

In her travels, she met a charismatic rebel leader, fell in love, and married him. She fell into bad repute when her husband, a ranking official in the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), rebelled against his commander, starting a bloody war that multiplied already alarming levels of famine and violence in southern Sudan. Soon Emma was acting as a press secretary and political advocate for her husband, clearly taking a side in the conflict and apparently turning a blind eye to some of the most offensive atrocities in the history of a long and atrocious war.

Scroggins uses Emma's story to exemplify what she sees as an often well-intentioned, but misguided, delusional, costly, and ultimately ineffective effort to bring our type of peace to Sudan. At first, I thought that this might be an unfair way to use a woman's life, especially in light of the impact it had on Jal, one of my favorite musicians.

However, the book gives voice to those who felt that Emma had done good work. Scroggins acknowledges the high regard with which the Nuer people viewed Emma, and she recounts how Emmanuel Jal was smuggled out of Sudan to Kenya.

I felt depressed all day yesterday after reading the book. It mounted a significant attack on my ideas about helping the poor, and displayed tragic consequences to some of the most well-intentioned, well-planned aid efforts. Scroggins seems content to lament the tragedy, and she offers little hope for improved models and positive results for Western aid efforts.

In the world of cross-cultural ministry, we can rarely foresee the results of our work. We can plan carefully, step cautiously, and respect boundaries, but sooner or later, to do any good, we must act, and we can't always know what will happen as a result. It may sometimes be better not to act at all- Emma's story, at least Scroggin's telling of it, seems to imply this.

But who knows? The bloodshed probably would have happened with or without Emma there, and even if one disregards all her other relief efforts, the saved life of Emmanuel Jal and his subsequent impact on his home country seem worth the venture.

This is where I have to place my mind if I am to continue this kind of work. The poor will always be with us. I can't even solve one kid's problems, much less those of a whole community. I am responsible to plan as well as I can, but in the end I am acting in good faith- faith that love, tempered with as much wisdom as is available to me at this point- will bear good fruit.

If Emma McCune, with all her missteps and her moments of blindness and romantic delusion, was able to influence one Nuer kid to turn his life around and reach back to his own people, then I have to believe that something good can come of our work here.