Television
Bob and Ray! (And Chris, and Keith Olbermann)
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 04:52 pm1. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC is my favorite TV news reporter, not just because he was among the first newscasters to bravely speak the bitter truth about the incredible ineptitude of our current national leadership, but also because he always delivers his strong words with such a likable smile.
I'd always imagined his good-humored style to have originated in his early years as a football commentator, following in the witty tradition of Howard Cosell and John Madden. But I was pleasantly surprised, upon attending an event at the Paley Center for Media in midtown Manhattan and chatting with a curator named Ron Simon, to learn that Keith Olbermann cites early-television personalities Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding as his formative influences, and that Olbermann will be appearing at the Paley Center with Bob Elliot and his comedian son Chris Elliot to celebrate the Bob and Ray legacy on March 31.
This is bound to be something special, and I wouldn't miss it for the world. Ron Simon explains more, and offers a good video sample, on the Paley Center's blog. Literary content? Well, hmm, Chris Elliot is a writer. The Paley Center, formerly the Museum of Broadcasting, has great literary material in its media archives (at the event I mentioned above, we screened the classic Dick Cavett/Gore Vidal/Norman Mailer television dust-up). And whenever I think of Bob and Ray, I think of the first time I encountered them -- it was inside a book.
2. Other New York stuff I'm going to? I'm not sure but I'll try to catch Tom Wolfe at Barnes and Noble "Upstairs in the Square" Thursday night. And the Happy Ending show on March 26 features Tod Wodicka, Fiona Maazel and Samantha Hunt.
3. My verdict is finally in on Jennifer 8 Lee's cultural history of chinese food. Here's a typical sentence from this book:
General Tso's Chicken is probably the most popular chinese chef's special in America. What's there not to like? Succulent, crispy fried chicken is drenched in a tangy, spicy sauce and sauteed with garlic, ginger and chili peppers until it bursts with flavor.
This is utterly conventional writing. And the book's beginning sequence, which goes into way too much detail about a lottery won by a large number of people who'd taken the numbers from a fortune cookie, will similarly turn off anybody looking for in-depth coverage of this interesting topic. There are good ideas in this book, but the level of cuteness is fatal. Too bad.
Something good has come from this exercise, though. I mention in the blog post above that I first heard of this book while chatting with a Psychology Today writer on a train a year ago, and since posting that last week I heard from this writer, Jay Dixit, who recently wrote about his friend's book himself on the Psychology Today blog. Naturally Jay likes the book more than I do, but that's besides the point. I'm happy to learn that a Psychology Today blog exists (as my mother is a psychologist, I grew up reading Psychology Today magazine), and it's now in my RSS reader.
4. Some have asked me: when am I going to complain about dysfunctional book pricing and promote alternative publishing/packaging ideas again? Soon, soon. Till then, here's Evan Schnittman on a real-life success model, and here's an argument that books should cost more, not less.
5. The Filthy Habits Human Smoke roundtable continues, and you'll notice I managed to shoot my mouth off in every installment of this conversation so far. Meanwhile, the book has been harshly slammed by William Grimes in the New York Times and referred to as "bad", "delusive" and "stupid" by Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun. Both adopt a condescending tone towards Baker, who they depict as a playful postmodernist out of his depth in the fields of war. William Grimes dismisses Baker's sense of history entirely, citing the Holocaust as the clearest reason World War II had to be fought.
Did the war "help anyone who needed help?" Mr. Baker asks in a plaintive afterword. The prisoners of Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald come to mind, as well as untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles. Nowhere and at no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest, in any serious way, how their liberation might have been effected other than by force of arms.
This doesn't hold up, since Baker is clearly not trying to explain how millions of starving concentration camp prisoners might have been liberated, but rather how they might never have been put there in the first place. Grimes takes comfort in the idea that the Allies fought to liberate persecuted minorities, even though this cozy bedtime story has never corresponded with historical fact. USA and Great Britain never made it their policy to combat Hitler's openly racist domestic regime, instead standing by as Germany established and enforced horrifying racial laws several years before World War II began. Both nations refused frantic pleas to allow Hitler's victims refuge. Once World War II began, the Allies did not make liberation or protection of oppressed minorities any part of their strategic agenda, and in fact Allied starvation blockades designed to frustrate German citizens unfortunately claimed oppressed minorities as unintended victims. When an enemy government is already intent on oppressing its minorities, are long-term starvation blockades really the best way to fight this enemy? Think about it.
I don't usually quote myself, but I'd like to refer to a post I wrote a few months ago on a similar subject:
The hyperbole that surrounds America's glory in World War II was really made clear to me when I was recently arguing with a friend about why I should love the American military unquestioningly. "The American military saved your ass in World War II!" he said. "The Jews would have been slaughtered if it wasn’t for us!"
I had to remind him that actually the Jews were slaughtered.
6. How do you segue from that? You don't. Here's a Moby sighting. Okay, it's an orca, not a sperm whale. But it is an albino sea mammal, and that's rare enough.
7. Speaking of white whales ... Melville House is publishing a third Tao Lin book! Tthis time it's a poetry textbook, whatever exactly that might mean. We'll find out soon.
I'd always imagined his good-humored style to have originated in his early years as a football commentator, following in the witty tradition of Howard Cosell and John Madden. But I was pleasantly surprised, upon attending an event at the Paley Center for Media in midtown Manhattan and chatting with a curator named Ron Simon, to learn that Keith Olbermann cites early-television personalities Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding as his formative influences, and that Olbermann will be appearing at the Paley Center with Bob Elliot and his comedian son Chris Elliot to celebrate the Bob and Ray legacy on March 31.
This is bound to be something special, and I wouldn't miss it for the world. Ron Simon explains more, and offers a good video sample, on the Paley Center's blog. Literary content? Well, hmm, Chris Elliot is a writer. The Paley Center, formerly the Museum of Broadcasting, has great literary material in its media archives (at the event I mentioned above, we screened the classic Dick Cavett/Gore Vidal/Norman Mailer television dust-up). And whenever I think of Bob and Ray, I think of the first time I encountered them -- it was inside a book.
2. Other New York stuff I'm going to? I'm not sure but I'll try to catch Tom Wolfe at Barnes and Noble "Upstairs in the Square" Thursday night. And the Happy Ending show on March 26 features Tod Wodicka, Fiona Maazel and Samantha Hunt.
3. My verdict is finally in on Jennifer 8 Lee's cultural history of chinese food. Here's a typical sentence from this book:
General Tso's Chicken is probably the most popular chinese chef's special in America. What's there not to like? Succulent, crispy fried chicken is drenched in a tangy, spicy sauce and sauteed with garlic, ginger and chili peppers until it bursts with flavor.
This is utterly conventional writing. And the book's beginning sequence, which goes into way too much detail about a lottery won by a large number of people who'd taken the numbers from a fortune cookie, will similarly turn off anybody looking for in-depth coverage of this interesting topic. There are good ideas in this book, but the level of cuteness is fatal. Too bad.
Something good has come from this exercise, though. I mention in the blog post above that I first heard of this book while chatting with a Psychology Today writer on a train a year ago, and since posting that last week I heard from this writer, Jay Dixit, who recently wrote about his friend's book himself on the Psychology Today blog. Naturally Jay likes the book more than I do, but that's besides the point. I'm happy to learn that a Psychology Today blog exists (as my mother is a psychologist, I grew up reading Psychology Today magazine), and it's now in my RSS reader.
4. Some have asked me: when am I going to complain about dysfunctional book pricing and promote alternative publishing/packaging ideas again? Soon, soon. Till then, here's Evan Schnittman on a real-life success model, and here's an argument that books should cost more, not less.
5. The Filthy Habits Human Smoke roundtable continues, and you'll notice I managed to shoot my mouth off in every installment of this conversation so far. Meanwhile, the book has been harshly slammed by William Grimes in the New York Times and referred to as "bad", "delusive" and "stupid" by Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun. Both adopt a condescending tone towards Baker, who they depict as a playful postmodernist out of his depth in the fields of war. William Grimes dismisses Baker's sense of history entirely, citing the Holocaust as the clearest reason World War II had to be fought.
Did the war "help anyone who needed help?" Mr. Baker asks in a plaintive afterword. The prisoners of Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald come to mind, as well as untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles. Nowhere and at no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest, in any serious way, how their liberation might have been effected other than by force of arms.
This doesn't hold up, since Baker is clearly not trying to explain how millions of starving concentration camp prisoners might have been liberated, but rather how they might never have been put there in the first place. Grimes takes comfort in the idea that the Allies fought to liberate persecuted minorities, even though this cozy bedtime story has never corresponded with historical fact. USA and Great Britain never made it their policy to combat Hitler's openly racist domestic regime, instead standing by as Germany established and enforced horrifying racial laws several years before World War II began. Both nations refused frantic pleas to allow Hitler's victims refuge. Once World War II began, the Allies did not make liberation or protection of oppressed minorities any part of their strategic agenda, and in fact Allied starvation blockades designed to frustrate German citizens unfortunately claimed oppressed minorities as unintended victims. When an enemy government is already intent on oppressing its minorities, are long-term starvation blockades really the best way to fight this enemy? Think about it.
I don't usually quote myself, but I'd like to refer to a post I wrote a few months ago on a similar subject:
The hyperbole that surrounds America's glory in World War II was really made clear to me when I was recently arguing with a friend about why I should love the American military unquestioningly. "The American military saved your ass in World War II!" he said. "The Jews would have been slaughtered if it wasn’t for us!"
I had to remind him that actually the Jews were slaughtered.
6. How do you segue from that? You don't. Here's a Moby sighting. Okay, it's an orca, not a sperm whale. But it is an albino sea mammal, and that's rare enough.
7. Speaking of white whales ... Melville House is publishing a third Tao Lin book! Tthis time it's a poetry textbook, whatever exactly that might mean. We'll find out soon.
Fortune Cookie Chronicles: What Happened To General Tso?
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 12:08 am
I was on a train last year reading a review copy of Boomsday by Christopher Buckley, which was not yet out in stores. The guy next to me noticed it, and told me "My friend's book is coming out from the same publisher next year." His friend turned out to be Jennifer 8. Lee, whose amusing name I'd occasionally noticed in New York Times bylines. Her first book was going to be about the history of Chinese food in America.
I had a long talk with the fellow, a writer for Psychology Today magazine. We talked about publisher Jon Karp's unique business model for Twelve (they publish exactly twelve books a year, apparently skipping all the mediocrities and aiming for a single success each month), and he told me all about Lee's book, which was called The Long March of General Tso. I liked the idea immediately, and I told him so. It's history, it's immigration, it's sociology ... The Long March of General Tso just sounded to me like a real corker in every way. Hilarious title, too.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this ad in this weekend's New York Times Book Review:
One consuming obsession.
Forty thousand restaurants.
THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES
Author Jennifer 8. Lee has
taken a remarkable journey
into the secret world
of Chinese restaurants:
a cultural phenomenon with
far greater influence and
intrigue than we realize.
"An addictive dim sun of
fact, fun, quirkiness, and pathos.
It's Anthony Bourdain meets
Calvin Trillin."
-- Mary Roach, author
of "Stiff" and "Spook"
What the ... what happened to our history book? The Fortune Cookie Chronicles sounds like the kind of cutesy, chatty fluff I'd never read. I wouldn't even notice a book like this. I'm expecting Mark Kurlansky and I get ... Emeril.
Is this what happens when a publishing company needs every book it publishes to be a power seller? Well, I notice Lee says so directly when she writes about the title change on her blog:
Many people are sad about this, I among them. This brilliant title was conceived by my colleague Michael Luo. But the logic by my editor was this: If you already know the book is on Chinese food, then you will think it is incredibly witty. But if you saw it in a book store though, would you think it’s about Qing dynasty military strategy?
I also see that Gawker had a good time with this ("Jennifer 8. Lee Gets Blog, Immediately Adorably Overshares"). Pretty funny. Well, if I were Jennifer 8. Lee I would have stuck up for the better title. Is it really a publisher's valid role to dumb down a good book in a bid for bigger sales? If so, I don't think Jennifer 8. Lee got a great deal with this arrangement.
Well, for all I know Fortune Cookie Chronicles may be a good book -- I haven't seen it yet, just the ad. I'll let you know, or you can let me know if you know.
2. Sarah Weinman on the debut of TitlePage.tv, an upscale "books" webcast. It's hard to improve on Sarah's analysis, except to offer the observation that Charles Bock deserves some kind of points for showing up decked out like a backup dancer in the video of Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl". I don't really get it, but it's kinda cool.
3. My dad (the cartoonist) on William F. Buckley.
4. A much-written-about early collaboration between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs called And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks is surfacing. Honestly, I can't say I'm expecting much, but we'll see. I am more excited about two upcoming Beat Generation films: Corso: The Last Beat (it's about time we saw a film biography of Gregory Corso) and One Fast Move Or I'm Gone, about Jack Kerouac in Big Sur, featuring David Amram, John Ventimiglia, Michael McClure, Patti Smith, Sam Shepard, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Carolyn and John Cassady.
5. The new Quarterly Conversation is out!
Screenings
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 12:05 am1. From the website of fictional politician Charles H. P. Smith, apparently on last year's Mark Foley scandal:
It seems to me that, at issue here is not the morality of the Legislators, but that of the pages: can we not fill these positions with young folks who can just say “no”?
On immigration:
We might note that Illegal immigrants, are, as the term implies, first and foremost, immigrants, which is to say, that they forfeited any claim on our compassion even before they broke the law.
Charles H. P. Smith is the creation of Pinteresque playwright David Mamet, author of confrontational plays like Glengarry Glen Ross, Sexual Promiscuity in Chicago and Speed-The-Plow and films like Wag the Dog, and will be played by Nathan Lane in a Broadway play called November (it's now in preview at the Barrymore Theatre). The blog, written in Smith's character, appears to be Mamet's own handiwork.
2. This was unexpected: a film called G, directed by Christopher Scott Cherot, transposes F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to the modern-day Hamptons, where a P. Diddy-like hip-hop mogul named Summer G. Jones (Jay Gatsby) pines for an old girlfriend named Sky Hightower (Daisy Buchanan) who is married to a high-rolling cad named Chip Underwood (Tom Buchanan).
The film captures some of the book's details well. We see the tawdry love story unwind through the eyes of a semi-involved narrator like Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway (here he's a smooth Toure-like hip-hop journalist named Tre), and this device provides the same wry distance here as in the book. The crowded love triangle between Gatsby, Daisy and Tom remains at the core of the story, and the actors play the roles with some conviction. There are a few attractive harbor shots of boats beating ceaselessly against the current.
But then the film unconsciably changes the ending, so that the wrong major character gets shot and dies. This is a bizarre choice and a major violation of the story's integrity, especially since it cheats the story of the great final sequence: the arrival of the downtrodden father, the discovery of Jay Gatz's notebooks, the desolate funeral. A fatal mistake, I say, but you still may want to check this film out. Here's another review of the film.
3. I caught a documentary tribute to the great ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music on late-night TV. This documentary combines a collage-form summary of the eclectic cultural anthropologist's life as well as a series of stirring performances of folk songs by the likes of David Johansen, Nick Cave, Philip Glass and Lou Reed. This film is directed by Rani Singh, who worked with Harry Smith (and is also an old friend of mine, though I haven't seen her in years). She does great work with this fascinating material.
Speaking of David Johansen, I wish he'd put out a third Harry Smiths CD, because the first two were damn great. Here's an article about him by Tom Watson at NewCritics.com.
And, speaking of folk music, you also won't go wrong with The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, featuring performances from 1963 to 1965 in crisp picture and sound. The much-discussed electric coming-out in 1965 is an anti-climax; the many acoustic performances before it are a revelation. Anybody who still thinks Bob Dylan has an inferior voice, rather than one of the most expressive voices in popular music, needs to listen to this version of Only A Pawn In Their Game.
4. On public television this month: Today's Man, a brave, funny, upsetting and raw cinema verite look at a modern upper-class New York City family that revolves around an adult with severe Asperger's Syndrome. Nicky Gottlieb is brilliant, joyful and strangely as self-aware as any New York City adult (which may not be saying much) ... but he can't commune with the outside world without breaking every unwritten rule the rest of us naturally understand. As his sister Lizzie Gottlieb's cameras roll, Nicky tries to get a job (that doesn't work out well at all), tries to convince his Mom that watching Mr. Rogers Neighborhood is still good for him (she gives in), and sings Gilbert and Sullivan. It all adds up to an enlightening look at a growing psychological phenomenon of our time, and a highly meaningful phenomenon for anybody interested in examining how an individual reacts to society.
There's also a big literary tie-in here: Nicky Gottlieb's father, who appears quietly throughout the film, is Robert Gottlieb, one of the most influential book editors of the 20th Century (and, for a short time, the editor of the New Yorker).
5. Good news for Burroughsians: a filmmaker named Jonathan Leyser is moving towards completion of a major documentary on the life of William S. Burroughs. I met Leyser and got a good feeling about this project. There are successful documentaries of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac out there, and I think a film that explains WSB to curious viewers will similarly fill a real need.
Leyser would like to hear from anybody with relevant contributions regarding the life of William S. Burroughs; his email is journalist2@mac.com, and here's an article about his project.
It seems to me that, at issue here is not the morality of the Legislators, but that of the pages: can we not fill these positions with young folks who can just say “no”?
On immigration:
We might note that Illegal immigrants, are, as the term implies, first and foremost, immigrants, which is to say, that they forfeited any claim on our compassion even before they broke the law.
Charles H. P. Smith is the creation of Pinteresque playwright David Mamet, author of confrontational plays like Glengarry Glen Ross, Sexual Promiscuity in Chicago and Speed-The-Plow and films like Wag the Dog, and will be played by Nathan Lane in a Broadway play called November (it's now in preview at the Barrymore Theatre). The blog, written in Smith's character, appears to be Mamet's own handiwork.
2. This was unexpected: a film called G, directed by Christopher Scott Cherot, transposes F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to the modern-day Hamptons, where a P. Diddy-like hip-hop mogul named Summer G. Jones (Jay Gatsby) pines for an old girlfriend named Sky Hightower (Daisy Buchanan) who is married to a high-rolling cad named Chip Underwood (Tom Buchanan).
The film captures some of the book's details well. We see the tawdry love story unwind through the eyes of a semi-involved narrator like Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway (here he's a smooth Toure-like hip-hop journalist named Tre), and this device provides the same wry distance here as in the book. The crowded love triangle between Gatsby, Daisy and Tom remains at the core of the story, and the actors play the roles with some conviction. There are a few attractive harbor shots of boats beating ceaselessly against the current.
But then the film unconsciably changes the ending, so that the wrong major character gets shot and dies. This is a bizarre choice and a major violation of the story's integrity, especially since it cheats the story of the great final sequence: the arrival of the downtrodden father, the discovery of Jay Gatz's notebooks, the desolate funeral. A fatal mistake, I say, but you still may want to check this film out. Here's another review of the film.
3. I caught a documentary tribute to the great ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music on late-night TV. This documentary combines a collage-form summary of the eclectic cultural anthropologist's life as well as a series of stirring performances of folk songs by the likes of David Johansen, Nick Cave, Philip Glass and Lou Reed. This film is directed by Rani Singh, who worked with Harry Smith (and is also an old friend of mine, though I haven't seen her in years). She does great work with this fascinating material.
Speaking of David Johansen, I wish he'd put out a third Harry Smiths CD, because the first two were damn great. Here's an article about him by Tom Watson at NewCritics.com.
And, speaking of folk music, you also won't go wrong with The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, featuring performances from 1963 to 1965 in crisp picture and sound. The much-discussed electric coming-out in 1965 is an anti-climax; the many acoustic performances before it are a revelation. Anybody who still thinks Bob Dylan has an inferior voice, rather than one of the most expressive voices in popular music, needs to listen to this version of Only A Pawn In Their Game.
4. On public television this month: Today's Man, a brave, funny, upsetting and raw cinema verite look at a modern upper-class New York City family that revolves around an adult with severe Asperger's Syndrome. Nicky Gottlieb is brilliant, joyful and strangely as self-aware as any New York City adult (which may not be saying much) ... but he can't commune with the outside world without breaking every unwritten rule the rest of us naturally understand. As his sister Lizzie Gottlieb's cameras roll, Nicky tries to get a job (that doesn't work out well at all), tries to convince his Mom that watching Mr. Rogers Neighborhood is still good for him (she gives in), and sings Gilbert and Sullivan. It all adds up to an enlightening look at a growing psychological phenomenon of our time, and a highly meaningful phenomenon for anybody interested in examining how an individual reacts to society.
There's also a big literary tie-in here: Nicky Gottlieb's father, who appears quietly throughout the film, is Robert Gottlieb, one of the most influential book editors of the 20th Century (and, for a short time, the editor of the New Yorker).
5. Good news for Burroughsians: a filmmaker named Jonathan Leyser is moving towards completion of a major documentary on the life of William S. Burroughs. I met Leyser and got a good feeling about this project. There are successful documentaries of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac out there, and I think a film that explains WSB to curious viewers will similarly fill a real need.
Leyser would like to hear from anybody with relevant contributions regarding the life of William S. Burroughs; his email is journalist2@mac.com, and here's an article about his project.
I Hit The Huff
by Levi Asher on Monday, January 7, 2008 01:09 am1. I like the way 2008 is going. I woke up New Years Day (just a little groggy) to find my first-ever newspaper book review in the Philly Inquirer, and tonight I am very proud to have written a short article about Pakistan and USA television news coverage for the Huffington Post. The headline is 'Inanity Still Rules The Airwaves'.
I'm especially thrilled about this because I have long wanted to write about political issues, and have even been "practicing" on a not-very-well-publicized political blog, which I call The Cherry Orchard. I find political writing much more hazardous than literary criticism or creative writing, but the ideas I want to express feel very important to me. That's why I'm honestly very pleased that the Huffington Post (which is, in my opinion, the most lively source of raw up-to-the-nanosecond political news and analysis available, and is the first place I always check when I want to know what's going on) considers a few paragraphs of my political pontification worth publishing. Okay, enough of me blubbering about this; please go check me out mouthing off about Pervez Musharraf and American television journalism and tell me what you think.
2. Fish gotta swim, bloggers gotta blog. Countless fans of the exemplary literary analyst Ed Champion are glad to see that he has resurrected his blog, which is now going by the name Filthy Habits. Indeed.
3. Poets: our Action Poetry section will be back in action this week.
I'm especially thrilled about this because I have long wanted to write about political issues, and have even been "practicing" on a not-very-well-publicized political blog, which I call The Cherry Orchard. I find political writing much more hazardous than literary criticism or creative writing, but the ideas I want to express feel very important to me. That's why I'm honestly very pleased that the Huffington Post (which is, in my opinion, the most lively source of raw up-to-the-nanosecond political news and analysis available, and is the first place I always check when I want to know what's going on) considers a few paragraphs of my political pontification worth publishing. Okay, enough of me blubbering about this; please go check me out mouthing off about Pervez Musharraf and American television journalism and tell me what you think.
2. Fish gotta swim, bloggers gotta blog. Countless fans of the exemplary literary analyst Ed Champion are glad to see that he has resurrected his blog, which is now going by the name Filthy Habits. Indeed.
3. Poets: our Action Poetry section will be back in action this week.
My Dinner With Briony
by Levi Asher on Thursday, December 20, 2007 01:25 am1. I went to see Atonement, the film based on Ian McEwan's great novel. It wasn't nearly as bad as I was worried it would be.
I was most impressed by director Joe Wright's treatment of the book's first sequence, the chaotic and ultimately disastrous dinner party at the Tallis household. The film follows the book closely in these early scenes (the actress playing Briony Tallis even looks exactly like the girl on the paperback cover), but embellishes the story with lush photography and languid summery pacing. The younger actors aren't great (it actually is possible for a child actor to cry realistically; just watch Little Miss Sunshine), but the male and female romantic leads James McAvoy and Keira Knightley are quite good, and the sexual chemistry between them is palpable.
The Dunkirk battle scenes and London hospital scenes are captivating and well-intentioned, though they draw short of capturing the full wartime horror depicted by Ian McEwan in the book. The story's big finish is then completely blown off, inexcusably, by this film version. Vanessa Redgrave is fine enough, but what Hollywood lunkhead made the decision to replace that great family party with a cold, mechanical television interview? The family party ending certainly struck the better note. Still, every movie is allowed to make some mistakes, and overall I'll happily recommend Atonement to anybody who either has or has not read Ian McEwan's novel. Please let me know what you think if you've seen it.
2. On a far, far, far less refined front, the innovative comic writer Jonathan Ames is premiering a Showtime series, What's Not To Love? (based on this book and other writings).
The first episode seems to aim for a Larry David/Sarah Silverman kind of vibe -- quirky through the roof, sexually outrageous -- and actually Jonathan Ames seems to have a good shot at following in Curb Your Enthusiasm's wake and finding an enthusiastic audience for this series. I won't judge the show based on the first episode (which involved a "mangina" and a boxing match) except to say that I didn't like it as much as Wake Up, Sir!. But the television screen presents Ames's unique rodent-like visage to memorable effect, and I have a feeling future episodes of this show will grow on me.
3. Ed Champion, easily one of the best litbloggers on this planet, is closing up shop. I trust that this is more of a rethinking than a retreat. I think it's a good idea to shake things up every once in a while, so I applaud Ed's resolve to seek his muse to the fullest here, and I eagerly await his next moves, whatever they turn out to be.
4. A revival of Harold Pinter's play The Homecoming, a tense, puzzling and deeply discomforting look at family and sexual politics, is getting rave reviews.
5. The first phase of the return of Action Poetry on LitKicks is about to begin! I'll be putting up a review of all the poems published on LitKicks in 2007 in the next couple of days. New poems will be accepted again shortly after New Years Day.
I was most impressed by director Joe Wright's treatment of the book's first sequence, the chaotic and ultimately disastrous dinner party at the Tallis household. The film follows the book closely in these early scenes (the actress playing Briony Tallis even looks exactly like the girl on the paperback cover), but embellishes the story with lush photography and languid summery pacing. The younger actors aren't great (it actually is possible for a child actor to cry realistically; just watch Little Miss Sunshine), but the male and female romantic leads James McAvoy and Keira Knightley are quite good, and the sexual chemistry between them is palpable.
The Dunkirk battle scenes and London hospital scenes are captivating and well-intentioned, though they draw short of capturing the full wartime horror depicted by Ian McEwan in the book. The story's big finish is then completely blown off, inexcusably, by this film version. Vanessa Redgrave is fine enough, but what Hollywood lunkhead made the decision to replace that great family party with a cold, mechanical television interview? The family party ending certainly struck the better note. Still, every movie is allowed to make some mistakes, and overall I'll happily recommend Atonement to anybody who either has or has not read Ian McEwan's novel. Please let me know what you think if you've seen it.
2. On a far, far, far less refined front, the innovative comic writer Jonathan Ames is premiering a Showtime series, What's Not To Love? (based on this book and other writings).
The first episode seems to aim for a Larry David/Sarah Silverman kind of vibe -- quirky through the roof, sexually outrageous -- and actually Jonathan Ames seems to have a good shot at following in Curb Your Enthusiasm's wake and finding an enthusiastic audience for this series. I won't judge the show based on the first episode (which involved a "mangina" and a boxing match) except to say that I didn't like it as much as Wake Up, Sir!. But the television screen presents Ames's unique rodent-like visage to memorable effect, and I have a feeling future episodes of this show will grow on me.
3. Ed Champion, easily one of the best litbloggers on this planet, is closing up shop. I trust that this is more of a rethinking than a retreat. I think it's a good idea to shake things up every once in a while, so I applaud Ed's resolve to seek his muse to the fullest here, and I eagerly await his next moves, whatever they turn out to be.
4. A revival of Harold Pinter's play The Homecoming, a tense, puzzling and deeply discomforting look at family and sexual politics, is getting rave reviews.
5. The first phase of the return of Action Poetry on LitKicks is about to begin! I'll be putting up a review of all the poems published on LitKicks in 2007 in the next couple of days. New poems will be accepted again shortly after New Years Day.
Harsh Blow: Ken Kalfus’s PU-239
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 02:38 pm
HBO's new feature movie PU-239 is based on a short story by Ken Kalfus, whose dark comedy A Disorder Peculiar to our Country was one of my favorite novels of 2006. PU-239 is no kinder to its characters than Disorder, but this time the setting is post-Soviet Russia and the stakes are higher: a young husband and father is exposed to a toxic dose of radiation in a nuclear power plant accident, and when the bureaucrats who run the plant refuse to compensate him so that his wife and son can survive his eventual death he steals a tube of plutonium and travels to a city bazaar to attempt to sell it -- he doesn't care to whom -- by holding up a cardboard sign reading "PU-239".
A local black marketeer and amateur criminal sees him and demands "Pu? What is Pu?". This obnoxious young criminal seems hardly capable of handling a nuclear sale, but other options are slim, and the radiation-sickness victim and the young thug begin working together to find a buyer. The horrific results are funny to watch ... until you think about how much damage is done. That combination of wit and utter human devastation appears to be a Ken Kalfus signature, and while some reviewers of this new film have compared it to A Clockwork Orange (because of the brutality of the prowling thugs who work the local black market) a better reference point might be Harold Pinter. As in a typical Pinter play, the characters are so morally isolated that they can barely communicate with each other. The plutonium seller wants $30,000 for his stash, and his criminal associate naturally increases this to $50,000 but then eagerly attempts to complete a sale for $8000. Nothing matters, nobody is listening to anybody else, and by the end of this movie nothing is solved and a whole lot of terrible new problems are created.
New Books Report: November 2007
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 02:12 amI'll be writing about some good new books I've been checking out over the next few weeks. Let's get started:
A Field Guide to the North American Family by Garth Risk Hallberg
This novella is made up of vignettes, illustrated with vivid photos of a suburban milieu and arranged in the form of a guide to some form of exotic wildlife. Which, after all, modern suburban existence actually is, and so Hallberg's quirky and artistically fragmented narrative makes perfect sense. From page to page, we drop into the thoughtstreams of various members of two families from Long Island, each page serving as the glossary definition of a term like "Angst", "Divorce", "Heirloom". There is an appealing philosophical sweetness underlying the glancing surfaces, as in the "Love" entry where it is pointed out that love is actually not, despite popular misconception, a rare commodity in modern families.
My only complaint is that Hallberg sometimes breaks out of the "field guide" format, thereby mixing the metaphor (as when, for example, one glossary definition parodies the book of Genesis, which works fine except that field guides don't talk like that). But this is a very minor complaint about an unusual and original book, a book about regular people.
If you buy this book as a Christmas present for everybody it reminds you of, you'll be buying a lot of copies, and why shouldn't you?
Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About The Game by Cor Van Den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura
Cor Van Den Heuvel is a haiku expert (as well as an expert on American and Beat poetry) and I've enjoyed performing with him at several New York City readings. His latest book, Baseball Haiku tells the surprising story of a famous Haiku poet named Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) who became fascinated with American baseball and began writing the first baseball haiku. Strangely, this was before baseball was well known in Japan, and in fact Shiki's haiku about baseball helped to inspire Japan's fascination with the sport. Here are three of Shiki's haiku:
the young grass
kids get together
to hit a ball
the trick
to ball catching
the willow in a breeze
like young cats
still ignorant of love
we play with a ball
The story doesn't end there; baseball haiku was picked up in America by Jack Kerouac, who is represented by two poems in this volume. Many American haiku poets are introduced here, along with the older and newer Japanese masters. Here are three haiku by Cor Van Den Heuvel:
first warm day
fitting my fingers into the mitt
pounding the pocket
baseball cards
spread out on the bed
April rain
conference on the mound
the pitcher looks down
at the ball in his hand
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus, once a regular rock critic, has written several successful books that tie together odd cultural topics and specific moments in the history of rock music. I've been most impressed by his Invisible Republic, a meditation upon Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes" and on the ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, who inspired Dylan's recordings.
The Shape of Things To Come seems to follow closely upon the Bob Dylan/Harry Smith volume with a specific focus on the American voice as manifested by its prophets: John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Allen Ginsberg. Marcus also names David Lynch, Philip Roth and David Thomas of the punk band Pere Ubu as American prophets, which certainly adds up to a strange combination.
I found the "theory" side of this book too thorny to penetrate, but as soon as I dove into the individual chapters I found plenty of edgy and original ideas. A large fraction of the book is devoted to David Lynch's serial masterpiece Twin Peaks, which Marcus has obviously studied with the attention of a museum curator examining a Van Gogh. I agree with Marcus that Twin Peaks should be studied as three primary sources: the TV series (up until the death of "Bob" in the second season, at which point it is no longer necessary to watch), the underappreciated film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Jennifer Lynch's book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. I love Marcus's refusal to be embarrassed as he goes completely overboard for several chapters with enthusiasm for David Lynch and Twin Peaks, and in fact he could have written three more chapters on the subject and I would have kept on reading them, because his observations are lively and smart.
The rest of the book doesn't work as well for me, but maybe that's just because I'm not in the mood right now to read about prophets (whose messages, after all, are written on the subway walls). I'm not sure I get the whole "voice of the prophet in the wilderness" concept, but I'm also not sure if that matters. If any of the specific subjects covered in this book appeal to you, you are likely to find good reading in The Shape of Things To Come.
A Field Guide to the North American Family by Garth Risk Hallberg
This novella is made up of vignettes, illustrated with vivid photos of a suburban milieu and arranged in the form of a guide to some form of exotic wildlife. Which, after all, modern suburban existence actually is, and so Hallberg's quirky and artistically fragmented narrative makes perfect sense. From page to page, we drop into the thoughtstreams of various members of two families from Long Island, each page serving as the glossary definition of a term like "Angst", "Divorce", "Heirloom". There is an appealing philosophical sweetness underlying the glancing surfaces, as in the "Love" entry where it is pointed out that love is actually not, despite popular misconception, a rare commodity in modern families.
My only complaint is that Hallberg sometimes breaks out of the "field guide" format, thereby mixing the metaphor (as when, for example, one glossary definition parodies the book of Genesis, which works fine except that field guides don't talk like that). But this is a very minor complaint about an unusual and original book, a book about regular people.
If you buy this book as a Christmas present for everybody it reminds you of, you'll be buying a lot of copies, and why shouldn't you?
Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About The Game by Cor Van Den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura
Cor Van Den Heuvel is a haiku expert (as well as an expert on American and Beat poetry) and I've enjoyed performing with him at several New York City readings. His latest book, Baseball Haiku tells the surprising story of a famous Haiku poet named Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) who became fascinated with American baseball and began writing the first baseball haiku. Strangely, this was before baseball was well known in Japan, and in fact Shiki's haiku about baseball helped to inspire Japan's fascination with the sport. Here are three of Shiki's haiku:
the young grass
kids get together
to hit a ball
the trick
to ball catching
the willow in a breeze
like young cats
still ignorant of love
we play with a ball
The story doesn't end there; baseball haiku was picked up in America by Jack Kerouac, who is represented by two poems in this volume. Many American haiku poets are introduced here, along with the older and newer Japanese masters. Here are three haiku by Cor Van Den Heuvel:
first warm day
fitting my fingers into the mitt
pounding the pocket
baseball cards
spread out on the bed
April rain
conference on the mound
the pitcher looks down
at the ball in his hand
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus, once a regular rock critic, has written several successful books that tie together odd cultural topics and specific moments in the history of rock music. I've been most impressed by his Invisible Republic, a meditation upon Bob Dylan's "Basement Tapes" and on the ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, who inspired Dylan's recordings.
The Shape of Things To Come seems to follow closely upon the Bob Dylan/Harry Smith volume with a specific focus on the American voice as manifested by its prophets: John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Allen Ginsberg. Marcus also names David Lynch, Philip Roth and David Thomas of the punk band Pere Ubu as American prophets, which certainly adds up to a strange combination.
I found the "theory" side of this book too thorny to penetrate, but as soon as I dove into the individual chapters I found plenty of edgy and original ideas. A large fraction of the book is devoted to David Lynch's serial masterpiece Twin Peaks, which Marcus has obviously studied with the attention of a museum curator examining a Van Gogh. I agree with Marcus that Twin Peaks should be studied as three primary sources: the TV series (up until the death of "Bob" in the second season, at which point it is no longer necessary to watch), the underappreciated film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Jennifer Lynch's book The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. I love Marcus's refusal to be embarrassed as he goes completely overboard for several chapters with enthusiasm for David Lynch and Twin Peaks, and in fact he could have written three more chapters on the subject and I would have kept on reading them, because his observations are lively and smart.
The rest of the book doesn't work as well for me, but maybe that's just because I'm not in the mood right now to read about prophets (whose messages, after all, are written on the subway walls). I'm not sure I get the whole "voice of the prophet in the wilderness" concept, but I'm also not sure if that matters. If any of the specific subjects covered in this book appeal to you, you are likely to find good reading in The Shape of Things To Come.
Don’t Underestimate The Quills
by Levi Asher on Monday, October 29, 2007 01:09 pm1. The three-year-old Quill Book Awards don't get a lot of respect in the book biz. Among my favorite litblogs, only GalleyCat begrudged last week's ceremony at New York City's Lincoln Center any attention at all, and the only print or online news outlets I found providing any real coverage are two organizations directly involved with the awards organization, Publisher's Weekly (owned by Quills co-sponsor Reed Elsevier) and NBC, which broadcast a one-hour highlights show this weekend that I only found out about because I happened to be flipping through the channels.
If so many news outlets are ignoring these awards, I figure there's got to be something good about them, so I watched the entire NBC broadcast to find out.
As entertainment, the show was pretty rotten. Host Stephen Colbert was surprisingly uninspired; I think even Rich Little would have showed up with fresher jokes. However, the architects of the Quill Awards may be smarter than they look, and I'm guessing the show will improve in quality and visibility every year and will reach the prime-time television bracket soon. Once the show is broadcast on prime time, people will start to care about the Quill Awards. Here's why I think this will happen: the Tony Awards (which celebrate Broadway plays and musicals) are broadcast on national prime-time television every year (even though far more people care about books than about Broadway plays) and largely manage to attract a viewing audience by inviting whatever popular celebrities and movie stars are currently starring in Broadway plays that year. It happens that the same trick will work fine for the Quill Awards, since a certain number of movie stars and celebrities will always have new books out in any given year, and will happily accept invitations to appear on this show to plug their books. It works for the Tonys, and it's already starting to work for the Quills.
This year, the celebrities at the Quills included a few Sopranos cast members, Stephen Colbert, Al Roker and Brooke Shields, none of whom managed to make the event feel exciting. But the formula is right, and I'm betting the Quills will get better every year. Hell, I'll even rent a tux and go to the 2008 show, if the Quill folks wants to invite me. By 2009, it'll be the hottest ticket in town.
So, the awards themselves? Well, I'm happy that Al Gore won, not at all impressed that Cormac McCarthy won, pleased that my former co-worker Walter Isaacson won, and surprised, pleased and impressed that Matthew Sharpe (whose edgy Jamestown is the latest Litblog Coop selection) snagged a nomination (of course, he didn't win).
Hardly a riveting hour of television, but let's wait and see how it improves next year.
2. I agree with Scott Esposito about this. J. K. Rowling may say that Dumbledore was gay, but unless she put it between the covers of her book, that's just one more opinion. Rowling seems to agree, since her exact quote was not "Dumbledore was gay" but rather "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay".
3. Check out the Most Anticipated Books by Garth Risk Hallberg, whose own Field Guide to the North American Family is worth anticipating as well (unless you already have a copy, in which case you don't need to anticipate one).
4. Via Kenyon Review, Rick Moody on Ubuweb.
5. Time Magazine couldn't find the source of T. S. Eliot original title ("He Do the Police in Different Voices") for The Waste Land in 1968, but John Holbo of The Valve found it, in Dickens of all places. As for the speculation as to Eliot's intentions, well, I have always interpreted the original title as a nod to Eliot's own habit of "doing different voices" in his poems. He was always a cut-up artist, decades before his fellow St. Louis experimentalist William S. Burroughs popularized the term.
6. Bad Women in Literary Fiction from Words Without Borders.
7. I say the blogosphere can stand a lot more etymology. Good clean fun.
If so many news outlets are ignoring these awards, I figure there's got to be something good about them, so I watched the entire NBC broadcast to find out.
As entertainment, the show was pretty rotten. Host Stephen Colbert was surprisingly uninspired; I think even Rich Little would have showed up with fresher jokes. However, the architects of the Quill Awards may be smarter than they look, and I'm guessing the show will improve in quality and visibility every year and will reach the prime-time television bracket soon. Once the show is broadcast on prime time, people will start to care about the Quill Awards. Here's why I think this will happen: the Tony Awards (which celebrate Broadway plays and musicals) are broadcast on national prime-time television every year (even though far more people care about books than about Broadway plays) and largely manage to attract a viewing audience by inviting whatever popular celebrities and movie stars are currently starring in Broadway plays that year. It happens that the same trick will work fine for the Quill Awards, since a certain number of movie stars and celebrities will always have new books out in any given year, and will happily accept invitations to appear on this show to plug their books. It works for the Tonys, and it's already starting to work for the Quills.
This year, the celebrities at the Quills included a few Sopranos cast members, Stephen Colbert, Al Roker and Brooke Shields, none of whom managed to make the event feel exciting. But the formula is right, and I'm betting the Quills will get better every year. Hell, I'll even rent a tux and go to the 2008 show, if the Quill folks wants to invite me. By 2009, it'll be the hottest ticket in town.
So, the awards themselves? Well, I'm happy that Al Gore won, not at all impressed that Cormac McCarthy won, pleased that my former co-worker Walter Isaacson won, and surprised, pleased and impressed that Matthew Sharpe (whose edgy Jamestown is the latest Litblog Coop selection) snagged a nomination (of course, he didn't win).
Hardly a riveting hour of television, but let's wait and see how it improves next year.
2. I agree with Scott Esposito about this. J. K. Rowling may say that Dumbledore was gay, but unless she put it between the covers of her book, that's just one more opinion. Rowling seems to agree, since her exact quote was not "Dumbledore was gay" but rather "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay".
3. Check out the Most Anticipated Books by Garth Risk Hallberg, whose own Field Guide to the North American Family is worth anticipating as well (unless you already have a copy, in which case you don't need to anticipate one).
4. Via Kenyon Review, Rick Moody on Ubuweb.
5. Time Magazine couldn't find the source of T. S. Eliot original title ("He Do the Police in Different Voices") for The Waste Land in 1968, but John Holbo of The Valve found it, in Dickens of all places. As for the speculation as to Eliot's intentions, well, I have always interpreted the original title as a nod to Eliot's own habit of "doing different voices" in his poems. He was always a cut-up artist, decades before his fellow St. Louis experimentalist William S. Burroughs popularized the term.
6. Bad Women in Literary Fiction from Words Without Borders.
7. I say the blogosphere can stand a lot more etymology. Good clean fun.
Don’t Stop Believing
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 06:39 pm1. Well, my Sopranos predictions didn't come true, but I wasn't too far off on most points. I loved the fade-out ending, which is of course the classic The Lady or the Tiger ending as originated by short story writer Frank R. Stockton. The tense final episode also gave us another "Yeets" (Yeats) recitation by the fitful and hilarious young A. J. Soprano, and we were also treated to a few verses of Bob Dylan's "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" before A. J.'s CD player melted and his S.U.V. blew up.
Overall, this finale was worthy of the best moments of the series. And Paulie had the best line in the whole show: "Dey can take 2007 and give it back ta da Indians".
2. So, who the hell had the scoop on the Clark Institute's attempts to strike a revealing book from the Met's bookshop? Well, I'm glad the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore is now stocking The Clarks of Cooperstown by Nicholas Fox Weber, and I think it's great how an organization's attempt at silencing an art historian backfired so publicly in this case.
Which is why I have to say that Ron Hogan totally misses the point when he defends the Met's bookshop's original decision not to stock the book . Ron says:
I'm not inclined to see a bookstore's refusal to stock an individual title as an act of censorship. I have a very narrow view of what constitutes a genuine First Amendment violation, and a bookstore's seeing fit not to stock a given book just doesn't meet my standard.
I agree with Ron that this is not a case of censorship or constitutional rights, and as far as I know nobody has suggested threatening the Met bookshop with criminal charges or litigation. But any book lover will be offended at the idea of a wealthy family estate or endowed organization placing pressure on a store not to sell or promote a highly reputatable (published by Knopf, in this case) non-fiction book. And I don't know why Ron, a book lover, doesn't think readers and customers have a right to be offended by this, and to make a lot of noise when it happens.
It's not a legal issue, Ron, but it is an ethical issue. Anyway, the protest was successful, and wasn't it nice to see blogs and newspapers working together to blow up a story?
3. A San Francisco revery by Ed Champion. San Francisco has got to be a hard city to leave.
4. An interview with the irrepressible Grace Paley
5. The library made of water.
Fade to black.
Overall, this finale was worthy of the best moments of the series. And Paulie had the best line in the whole show: "Dey can take 2007 and give it back ta da Indians".
2. So, who the hell had the scoop on the Clark Institute's attempts to strike a revealing book from the Met's bookshop? Well, I'm glad the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore is now stocking The Clarks of Cooperstown by Nicholas Fox Weber, and I think it's great how an organization's attempt at silencing an art historian backfired so publicly in this case.
Which is why I have to say that Ron Hogan totally misses the point when he defends the Met's bookshop's original decision not to stock the book . Ron says:
I'm not inclined to see a bookstore's refusal to stock an individual title as an act of censorship. I have a very narrow view of what constitutes a genuine First Amendment violation, and a bookstore's seeing fit not to stock a given book just doesn't meet my standard.
I agree with Ron that this is not a case of censorship or constitutional rights, and as far as I know nobody has suggested threatening the Met bookshop with criminal charges or litigation. But any book lover will be offended at the idea of a wealthy family estate or endowed organization placing pressure on a store not to sell or promote a highly reputatable (published by Knopf, in this case) non-fiction book. And I don't know why Ron, a book lover, doesn't think readers and customers have a right to be offended by this, and to make a lot of noise when it happens.
It's not a legal issue, Ron, but it is an ethical issue. Anyway, the protest was successful, and wasn't it nice to see blogs and newspapers working together to blow up a story?
3. A San Francisco revery by Ed Champion. San Francisco has got to be a hard city to leave.
4. An interview with the irrepressible Grace Paley
5. The library made of water.
Fade to black.
My Sopranos Predictions
by Levi Asher on Friday, June 8, 2007 09:29 am
As has been well established, The Sopranos is a highly literary show, and as far as I'm concerned that case is closed. So, let's talk final episode predictions.
Everybody's got a theory. Some people I work with think Janice is going to kill Tony, but I can't agree with this. I think Janice and Tony's brother-sister bond goes deep, and I believe they truly like each other. You don't kill someone you've sung karaoke with. This ending would not make sense to me.
Others are saying Tony will kill himself, but I don't see that happening at all. Or Tony might actually pull his resources together and prevail over the Leotardo gang. But a surprise "happy ending" would not mesh with this season's ominous forebodings, and it would also fail to provide any real sense of closure. Phil Leotardo only recently emerged as Tony's key nemesis, and it's hardly satisfying to end a show's entire run with a surprise victory against an enemy who wasn't even around during the show's formative years. This ending is not good enough; we have to dig deeper for something that would make sense.
My friend John at work made an apt observation that resonates with me: the show's finale might finally give the series title a double meaning if Tony Soprano decides to sing. I think this will happen. He's already been getting chummy with a federal investigator, and he's got few options left. After much thought, I'm going with this theory: I predict that Tony Soprano will attempt to save himself and his family by turning government witness in the final episode.
But he won't get off that easy. Sopranos auteur David Chase will have made the decision as to the final disposition of his beloved characters according to his own ideals about what the modern mafia lifestyle means, and the Sopranos basic moral outlook is very much in line with that of the two previous masterpieces of this genre, Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather movies and Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas/Casino twofer. Chase certainly has earned the right to stand next to Coppola and Scorsese, and it's not for nothing that he's been dropping references to The Godfather more than ever lately.
This season's opener delivered a big hint when we saw Tony puttering around in his tomato garden (a sure nod to Marlon Brando's great death scene in One). Let's face facts -- before this season, Tony didn't even have a tomato garden. You better believe this means something. You don't open a season with a Godfather reference unless you're going to close it with a Godfather reference, and since the season began with a nod to One I am guessing the season (and the series) will end with a sad reference to Three. Which means that, at some point in his flight to federal protection, Tony is going to watch in horror as poor Meadow gets gunned down. Maybe even on the steps of an opera house.
That's my prediction. Tony will survive, but without his honor or his family intact.
By the way, Yahoo slipped up in its story about the the upcoming last episode, saying Bobby Bacala was murdered in "a toy store". Wrong, yahoos, it's a train shop (but what the hell do they know in California?). Bobby was shot to death in Trainland, a famous store in lovely Lynbrook, Long Island, which happens to be just about a block away from where I punch the clock every day at my day job. I took the picture at the top of this page just a few minutes ago.
Poor Bobby went down in style. I have a feeling the whole show will go down in style too, but it won't be a happy ending.
