Curio: Best Films of 2005

Jotted on a piece of paper I've had in my files for a while (since winter of 2006, I'd suppose).

1. 2046
2. Brokeback Mountain
3. Crash (?)
4. Sin City
5. The Squid and the Whale
6. King Kong (??)
7. Broken Flowers
8. Skeleton Key
9. Aristocrats
10. Match Point

The backlash against Crash has changed my mind about it, and I have no idea what I was thinking about King Kong. Probably just being contrary. I'm glad to see Skeleton Key, but I clearly remember seeing both that and Red Eye on the same night, and think I like Red Eye better.

STL #93: Films of the Decade.

Top 25 movies of the decade: The first ten are ranked; the rest are roughly ranked but with the combinations there's some obvious slippage. All told I mention 35 movies: 22 date from 2000-2004, 13 from the second half of the decade. The top four years are 2001 (6), 2000, 2003, and 2009. The number from 2009 is probably due to recency inflation, and only Rachel Getting Married is a top 25 film overall. So was the first part of the decade better, am I seeing fewer movies, or does the retrospective nature of such a list privilege the earlier material? Another option is that I wrote more regularly about movies in 2003-4, and perhaps those movies have an advantage.

1. In the Mood for Love (2000). The most beautiful movie I ever saw, in depth and on surface.
2. Kill Bill (2003-4). Part 1 reviewed previously in STL #16.
3. Lost In Translation (2003). Reviewed in STL #14
4. Royal Tenenbaums (2001). I would like, sooner or later, to take on Anderson's work. This to me is not only the best of the decade but better than Rushmore. At face value, it seems to be an ambitiosly art-directed adaptation of Salinger's Glass family, but every time I watch it I get a little bit more out of it.
5. Almost Famous (2000). Pure charm.
6. WALL-E (2008). Completely unexpected--I simply had not liked the big animated movies of the preceding 10 years. In retrospect, Ratatouille's solidity was the beginning of a now 3 movie streak for Pixar.
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) Reviewed (poorly) in STL #38.
8. Etre et Avoir (2002) In STL #35 , my top 10 films of 2003, I said of this and Spellbound "some of the best movies of the last 10 years have been documentaries, because real life has a way of bucking against cliche and histrionics. Note the vivid personalities in these movies are achieved without actors."
9. Children of Men (2006). Has the gravity and composition comparable to any canonical classic. I would like to see this again.
10. The Wrestler (2008). Just like I lauded Lost In Translation's use of music, the music here is heartbreaking for its faded glitzy fragility: "Round and Round" in the bar, and the final entrance to "Sweet Child O' Mine" as a valediction/elegy.

Volver (2006)/Talk to Her (2002). Two Almodovars linger like dreams.

Amelie (2001): Its cuteness, which draws you to it at first, might be a liability.

Team America World Police (2004)/Borat (2006). They bring the funny, and they question the whole notion of taste. Team America might want to be in the top 10, but I couldn't quite get it there. Borat is fine with the lower 20's.

Momento (2000)/JCVD (2008): Two action-movies with fascinating formal features. Both cause us to question what we're seeing: Momento through the structure, JCVD by enlisting our own capacity for illusion.

Rachel Getting Married (2009)/Monsoon Wedding (2001). Both have great ensembles. Both are smart enough to let the intricacies of the occasion generate the action.

Up (2009)/ Waking Life (2001): Up gets it for the first 10 minutes, while Waking Life unfolds over the length of the movie, and even beyond a bit.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)/Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003). Two Asian movies with "Dragon" in the title. One is beautiful and orchestrated and rapid, the other beautiful in its glacial slowness.

Ocean's 11 (2001): In terms of attitude alone it makes the list.

A Christmas Tale (2008) The last of these that I watched so I'm a little wary of it. Seems like it might want to gravitate up the list in time.

Honorable Mention: Lord of the Rings and Napoleon Dynamite. In there different ways, both are two "big" to be ignored. Certainly impressive in their own ways, but neither are standing up for themselves and making a pitch in the way that the listed movies are.

Sundry lists:

Top 5 comedies

Team America

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

The Aristocrats

Zach and Miri Make a Porno

Action/Thriller

Kill Bill

Children of Men

Memento

Torque

Borne Identity

Documentaries

1.Etre et Avoir

2. Waltz with Bashir

3. Man on a Wire

4. Anvil:The Story of Anvil

5. Spellbound

Animated

1. WALL E

2. The Fantastic Mr. Fox

3. Up

4. Triplets of Bellevue

5. Spirited Away

6. Waking Life

7. Millennium Actress

8. Waltz with Bashir

9. Chicken Run

10. Kill Bill

Romance

1. In the Mood for Love (2000)***

2. Eternal Sunshine

3. WALL-E

4. Almost Famous

5. Before Sunset

Top 5 Performances of the Decade

1. Bill Murray in Lost in Translation

2. Heath Ledger in Dark Knight and Broke Back

3. Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler

4. Anne Hathaway in Rachel and Brokeback

5. Sasha Baron-Cohen in Borat

STL #92: The Year in Reading, 2009

Alas, another extended gap. Again I resolved to post more in the new year... we'll see. If I adapt the adage of "The Good is the enemy of the Great" to "the Horrible is the enemy of the Not Horrible," I may be able to make good on the resolution. I think you'll see what I mean with the following Year in Reading, 2009 edition. This list is presented chronologically by roughly when I started the reading.

Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances.* The first thing I started is actually the last thing I finished. I hoped to tackle all 36 Shakespeare plays as my big reading for the year, but faltered and finished only the comedies by summer. December I read the late comedies/"romances." My favorites: Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale. This year I started with the histories and plan on moving on the the tragedies.

The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross. I was surprised to see this on the list for this year, because I thought I read it two years ago. Even so, most informative and the kind of book I would like to write (on a different topic of course).

Batman and Robin #1-3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely/Popeye dailies. It was a frustrating year for me and serial comics. I dropped most of the series I had been following.The Batman GM/FQ Batman was mixed-up at its core--by design, since it's the story of a Dick Grayson Batman and a new bratty Robin. But of course Quitely's art is time-consuming, so I dropped it after his three-issue story. Popeye's appeal is evident. The tightly controlled cartooning, the verbal exuberance. Unfortunately, it does wear on.

David Copperfield. Ah, Dickens. I take some big thick 19th century novel with me every plane trip I take. If I don't take another plane trip, will I ever read Nicholas Nickleby? It really makes you wonder.

Parker novels by Stark (not Spencer by Parker). The most entertaining discovery of the year. I read four of the later ones and fully enjoyed the entwining of characterization and heist-planning.

Runaways/Twilight. I couldn't not mention that I read the complete Twilight series. I found out a painless way to do it--read 100 pages, skip 300, and read to the end. You get to skip the awkward telegraphing and repetition that way. Far far better is the complete Brian K. Vaughan Runaways. I'd started on it years before, but picked up recent installments at the library. This triggered a one-day binge on volumes 1-5

Master of Reality/Music From the Big Pink. Apparently, I'm the type of guy who reads books inspired by classic albums. I never wanted to be that guy, but there you go.

Weekend Novelist by Robert Ray. I haven't read that many how-to-write books. This one is okay.

American Born Chinese/Maus. Two not dissimilar books about cultural identity. ABC is much fresher at this point, using three stories and three modes=autobio, outlandish stereotypes with a sitcom, and a magic realist fable that eventually encompasses all three.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Nothing like the occasional YA near-future sci-fi thriller. It introduces its audience to some privacy tactics for computer monitoring. A kind of Edward Abbey manual of resistence for the surveillance age.

*I originally intended a history of my "big reading" project to be the topic of this STL, but along the way I got sidetracked. I do at least want to record the list:

1995 Ulysses
1996 Swann's Way
1997 Poetry of William Carlos Williams
1998 In Search of Lost Time
1999 Don Quixote
2000 The Divine Comedy
2001 The Cantos
2002 Middlemarch
2003 Bleak House
2004 Paradise Lost
2005 The Recognitions
2006 The Odyssey
2007 "A"

2008 Anna Karenina

2009 Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances

On 1 Jan 2010, I began rereading King John to kick off the completion of Shakespeare's dramas. Assuming I finish all of Shakespeare's plays in 2010 (and I might as well through in the longer poems since I've read the sonnets), I will have read 14 works (not counting Swann's Way for both '96 an '98 counting the collected Shakespeare as one), including 7 novels, 6 works of poetry, and 1 impressive body of drama.

STL #91: ATOP II Wrap Up: Line and Lineage

I'm going to begin by quoting a paragraph I wrote at the beginning of this second Test of Poetry, written over a year ago. In it I quote the wrap of the previous test, so some of this is three-times removed:

I've decided to undertake another "test of poetry," this time over Don Allen's seminal anthology New American Poetry 1945-1960... In worrying over whether I "passed" the last test, I noticed that in my reading practices, "I accept the [Poundian] model of melopeia, judged on criteria of suitability (sound that echoes sense), vigor, and mellifluousness; phanopeia, judged by resonance [and] freshness; and logopeia, judged by aptness, pacing, and soundness. I find that my taste responds to complicated surfaces, luminous details, competing systems (frames, registers, etc), slight shifts (when I can detect them), assonance and consonance, and reserved mystery" (STL#48). In this second test, I am seeking to deepen and enrich that framework. The anthology in question is well-suited for this purpose. The poets represented in all respond in some ways to Pound's poetics (sometimes to contest or reject it, but never in ignorance of it) and the anthology was the first to include a "poetics" section (it might mark the birth of that discipline, but that's a question for other scholars.) My question for this test is "In what terms, and by what terms, should poetry be judged?" I'll coordinate between the statements on and enactments of poetry and in each post develop some key terms of my poetics.

I didn't refer back to this during the reading project, and at times I felt adrift, picking up on random qualities to harp on. But in constructing a personal aesthetic, an ongoing if not life-long project for me, following your instincts and even the happenstance created by the juxtaposition of different authors and the selection of their poems can be fruitful. Having read back over the last 22 posts (and correcting the typos I saw), I have come to realize some more things about my tastes. Writing through poetry can be very helpful. Though my mode is generally descriptive of my response as I work through the poem, pausing to articulate that reaction allows the poem to linger longer in the mind.

Many of my comments fell into the category of line or lineage. I fell into the gravity of Olson's oracular commentary on the line as the unit of the poem's energy transmission. For those who work "in the open," the line whether or not thought of a unit of breath, is the graphic reflection of the poet negotiating his or (seldom, in this sample) her materials. I was particularly interested in the line in my first posts on the Black Mountain poets (who I spent the most time on), but it continued outside that boundary as well. The work of Larry Eigner and Robin Blaser in particular brought the interface of line and energy into focus for me. Both those poets are very interested in the surface of transmission--often the physical body, especially for Eigner.

Other of my comments were oriented toward the poet's self-constructed lineages and alliances. The structure of the anthology encourages these readings. In the Preface, the very first words of the book retrace three generations at work at that moment--the late flower of Pound and Williams and H.D. Cummings, Moore and Stevens; the mature works of poets who emerged in the 30s and 40s, including Bishop, Rexroth, and Zukofsky, and the emergence of this "strong third generation" into several loose geographically defined nodes. The back matter allows space for the poets to explicitly name their inspirations and co-conspirators, though these names crop up in the verse itself too. Creeley's expression "the company" focuses the concept of self-constructed lineages for me. Though these pacts sometimes encourage the datedness that comes through (the timeless is individualistic) occasionally, they are also nourishing for the field of poetry at large. That primary metaphor of the open field where these poets work is suggestive: the company is out working in this field, but the members' individualism is easily expressed in the very openness of the field. Ultimately, the concepts line and lineage come together. If line is an attribute of "how you sound" it's also a marker of who you sound with. The project of the anthology was in part to create a new nation of poetry out of the (American) earth broken by Pound and Williams and recently tilled by Olson.

I noted a number of poets I'd like to know better. The most surprising were Paul Blackburn, and Jack Spicer, along with Eigner and Blaser. I'm also interested in the bizarre work of Orlovsky and the obscure Stuart Perkoff, though I've a feeling these last two may backfire on me. Since I've some spare time this morning, I think I'll make a card of books to look for, and perhaps report back here later.

So, what's next in the world of STL? I have notes for a few topics that I could back to and finish, I began an album of the month project that I'd like to go back to (and a backlog of topics), and I could do a round up of summer reading (before it's over). Eventually I'll do another Test, perhaps on Copper Canyon's Gift of Tongues, an old favorite. I'll try to post once a week again, starting next Tuesday.

STL #90: New American

John Wieners, Ron Loewinsohn, David Meltzer

One of the innovations of the NAP anthology, is, I believe, the inclusion of the poetics section at the end. In basing so many of my readings on these statements I reveal the assumption that they matter, that codifiable (or at least articulatable) poetics underlie individual poetic projects (and further, that poems are moments in individual poetic projects) (and further-furthermore, that "codifiable" and "articulatable" are words). Allowing only poetics of selected poets is something of a disservice (as is my recent practice of 'group readings') to the unrepresented poets, though the poetics should be deducible from the poetry. But the assumption of individual poetics reveals a main theme in this anthology and in poetry influenced by it: that a poet's work is an individual negotiation of his or her world, however defined. This individualism might be what makes this anthology American poetry "American."

The last item in the poetics section is a poem by John Wieners "From a Journal." He argues against the idea of poetry as an exalted special category of universal knowledge. His poems are only his personal "salvation," or way of knowing himself, and a reader "can do with them what he likes." What can be shared in the reading of poetry is the "different techne a man uses to make his salvation." This is why some many of the poems in from this time going forward incorporate their own poetics as subject matter, either implicitly or explicitly. Wiener's "A Poem for Painters" does. This impressive poem is a meditation on knowing the world through art, starting with the portraiture ("Our age bereft of nobility/How can our faces show it?") and concluding with his own poems (which "contain no / wild beestes, no / lady of the lack, music / of the spheres, or organ chants" but "Only the score a a man's / struggle to stay with / what is his own, what / lies within him to do.") This heroic vision of poetics is immediately undercut by the qualifier "Which is nothing" but doing so gives a existential nobility to Wiener's work.

My other theory of what makes this the anthology American its expansive geography. It's organized into geographical sections, including the Beats whose home is "on the road" in the that "holy triangle" from New York to San Francisco to Mexico City. Poetics and geography aren't necessarily unrelated. The Wiener poem I just mentioned travels from coast to coast and Ron Loewinsohn (born in the Philipines) does the same in "Insomniac Poem." The title suggests the restlessness inherent in the generation that explored the nation (and the world) as they experimented with their writing. Loewninsohn describes being "awake, alone & aware / or our own absurdity" a dour precondition similar to Wiener's that likewise led to a kind of nobility--with this awareness, "we can begin to love & to give / to clothe ourselves in the color / of the Shasta Daisy." A massive enlightenment of the world population, perhaps through poetry, would create "Two & a half billion Gods / crowning the crazy world with sainthood." Some of this generation of wanderers eventually found 'home' some place, like Loewinsohn did in San Franciso, or through some enlightenment like he describes.

The last poet in the anthology, David Meltzer, also discusses the poet's work and travels far and wide in his work. "Revelation" travels through time and space to describe a meeting of himself and the Japanese master Basho. There short poem concludes with a meta-discursive formalist gesture: "The haiku will come later. / After dinner & / a Havatampa cigar." This stanza not only fits the spirit of the haiku but the 5-7-5 form. The Hav-a-tampa cigar plant in Tampa, Fla. actually just closed a month ago. The cultural and chronological non-sequitur rattles the formal cage that he set up, and once confirming and rejecting the overloaded communion with Basho, where they drink tea, eat soup, drink beer, and smoke cigars. This sensual cluttering might either delay the clarity of the haiku or constitute it, if not both at the same time.

In this last Test on Allen's New American Poetry anthology, I feel I've finally uncovered an area for academic research: did this generation entangle open field poetics and geographical mobility in a renewed definition of American individualism?

STL # 89: Outsiders looking in and insiders looking out

Ray Bremser and LeRoi Jones

My last post mentioned the impossibility of keeping my own knowledge about the poets, including their future careers, out of my reading of the anthology. However, the fact that Mike McClure served as a hippie icon as soon as the hippies caught up with him really isn't surprising. LeRoi Jones makes a more interesting case. After establishing himself as, essentially, a New York Beat, Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka and became a Black Nationalist. However, in this selection, there's barely any hint of what you'd generally consider "Black identity." Nor does the apparatus of the anthology provide his race as a context: his bio mentioned he attended Howard and his statement of poetics begins with a question in what could be heard as black vernacular ("How you sound?") The only direct reference to race in these 7 poems is in "To a Publisher": "I ride the 14th. St. bus/ everyday... reading Hui neng/Raymond Chandler/Olson.../I have slept with almost every mediocre colored woman/On 23rd St...." This is obviously denigrating to African American women, and the line's relation to his multicultural reading list suggests severely limited interest in his own cultural heritage. The poems are reference heavy to contemporary writers, European high culture (M.A. in German lit), and pop culture. Of course, it's short-sighted to make a generalization such a small sample (he did write articles about jazz in this period) and even stupider to say that Prokofiev, Gary Snyder, or the Shadow are not part of his cultural heritage. His poem "In Memory of Radio" makes clear that he spent his formative years listening to adventure serials which still influence his work. I mean, he says as much: "Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern & his undersea folk./At 11, Let's Pretend & we did we did & I, the poet, still do, Thank God!"The poem is based on an attachment to the hero The Shadow, who, in his secret identity of Lamont Cranston, possessed some kind of (divinity) that only he and Jack Kerouac knew about. The Shadow famously knew "what evil lurks in the hearts of men"--Jones emulates this quality and his position as an outsider who is able to formulate his own cultural identity out of the complete array of available material, picking and choosing from the 'high' and the 'low.'

That's very much the "Beat" position, which Bremser emulates in "Poem of Holy Madness." According to Bremser, the best poets of his generation include a few of the Ginsbery, Corso, Jones, and himself, so humility is not his strong suit. His poems seem to be standard issue Beatnikery, but the discourse over his cultural identity is interesting. He identifies with every conceivable category of outsider: criminals like the thrill-killer Charley Starkweather, blacklisted "traitors," prisoners on the "visionary journey out of jail," "tramps,/ and homosexual cats in drag," atheists, Jews, and especially African Americans. (He writes "give me a black / and miserable hide--and I will un-tar it!") This romanticization by white guys who "dig jazz" has become embarrassing, but that doesn't mean he didn't mean it. It is odd that Jones and Bremser both build outsider identities, but do it with different materials. In fact, Jones builds the outsider identity out of mostly insider materials--not only the references to pop culture and high culture, but in the domestic situations of scenes like watching his daughter pray in "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note." If you radically simplify things, it's as if the white Bremser is the insider looking to the outsider while Jones is the outsider looking in in order to be out.

STL #88 Sound Effects

 If it weren't for this project, I'm sure I'd never mention Edward Marshall and Michael McClure in the same sentence, or probably in separate sentences. Although my intention is to use the texts alone for my interpretation, I can't help but draw on my prior knowledge of the field. I've never heard of Edward Marshall, and while I know of McClure, I'm surprised by the role he's assigned here. McClure's stature has fallen while Marshall never really gained any. 

There are six poets in the NAP who are allotted 15 or more pages: Olson, Duncan, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Whalen, Snyder, and Michael McClure. These men (of course) are also all represented by a statement of poetics, so it is reasonable to consider them focal points in the new geography of poetry which Allen is mapping. From our vantage today, Olson, Duncan, Ginsberg, O'Hara, and Snyder clearly still deserve a special designation. Philip Whalen maintains a good reputation, though Snyder's old roommate now seems a less than major figure to SF Renaissance/West Coast Beats. The real odd man out to me is McClure. While not totally forgotten, he is seldom mentioned in discussions of the period. He's remembered for 60's shenanigans like his play The Beard or far out readings accompanied by Ray Manzarek.

This "test of poetry" I'm doing here is on my own sensibilities more than anything. In reading Marshall's one longish poem and the sample of McClure, I came across one passage of Marshall's that I rather admire and one in McClure's that I absolutely abhor. Marshall's "Leave the Word Alone" is a dark family narrative that I don't particularly care for, but one passage stands out. It's right justified, as you can see:

Sometimes I hear cries and cries when I go

through the center road to the far

farm where the blueberry

bushes are high

and the upper pasture and

fields--the sheep

nose apples wither and the pears rot--

the ice house turned about and no barn

with cupola

The barn burned down to get fire insurance--

never proven.

In a poem that describes mental turmoil, which intrudes even into this landscape. I've referred before to sonic effects knitting a poem together. That happens here in maybe too pronounced ways--the echoing "far/farms" and the alliterative "blueberry bushes." But check out how that plosive /b/ turns into a /p/ and the /r/ continues through "the upper pasture and/fields--the sheep/nose apples wither and the pears rot..." and then return back to the /b/ of the "barn burned." While overall the poem sprawls, this excerpt shows excellent craft.

That touch is missing from most of McClure. The McClure passage that really rankles me floats in the middle of the page: 

I am on a mesa of time and space.

!STOM - ACHE!

Writing the music of life

in words.

Hearing the round sounds of the guitar

as colors.

Feeling the touch of flesh.

Seeing the loose chaos of words

on the page.

(ultimate grace--

(Sweet Yeats and his ball of hashish.)

I won't even address the cliched diction ("space and time" "music of life" "touch of flesh"). I won't touch on the unresolved absurdity that is "!STOM - ACHE!" I won't mention the laziness of writing in sentence fragments either, but instead focus on the sonic qualities. He completely mismanages consonance. The "round sound" rhyme is cloying, and the clunky last line suggests seems to think it's doing something it isn't. The vowel sequence is cacophonous when it seems to strive for melifluity. The two long vowels and the start clash against one another, and the long /e/ is picked up awkwardly by the end of the last word. It's as if he wrote the line and thought "looks good" but didn't sound it.

The curious thing here is that McClure is one of the few poets in this lot to disavow the Pound/Williams tradition. In his poetics piece, he says he "despises" those primary influences most of the other five focal points, preferring Lawrence and Melville. Marshall, on the other hand, name checks Williams and Pound's main emissary to this anthology, Charles Olson. It could be that my modernist rearing has defined poetic competence for me. While I do seek to challenge that paradigm, the many offenses of McClure foreclose that particular path for me. Instead, I'm planning another reading test to challenge my reading practices, once I finish and analyze this one.