Author: David Ross

Springsteen In Excelsis

By David Ross. Rock has become such a ludicrous synergy of boobs without brains and b-schoolers without balls that it’s hard to remember why one ever cared. Springsteen’s Hammersmith Odeon London ’75, a sweating, writhing, heaving tent revival of an album, will remind one. When the album appeared in 2006, I knew instantly that my ears feasted on one of the supreme live albums: not a marginal addition to the giant Springsteen oeuvre, but a core masterpiece materialized out of nowhere to rival the likes of Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard (1961), James Brown’s Live at the Apollo (1963), the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East (1971), and Bob Marley’s Live (1975). When I discovered that the concert had been released on DVD – that full footage existed – I felt as if the earth had split open and coughed up something like a 39th Shakespeare play or a 10th Beethoven symphony. Indeed, the DVD revealed what may be the greatest concert ever captured on film (a musical judgment; the film itself is pedestrian). I found myself entertaining the fantastic notion that the 1975 incarnation of the E Street Band is the greatest band ever – not remotely the best assemblage of individual musicians, but the best band, absolutely cohesive, committed, and co-equal, with a jazzy adventurism that it would eventually purge in favor of the irritating thump of Born in the U.S.A. The Odeon concert represents Springsteen at his very height, as much a deity of the American spirit as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.

The record company, Rosie, gave me a big advance! This line, from “Rosalita,” of course, explodes not merely with the sense of release from tribulation but with the affirmation of the inevitability of release. It embodies what President Obama fails to understand when he says “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” etc. There is such a thing as American exceptionalism: it is rooted in an amalgam of joy (sometimes tragic joy), energy, freedom, and providential faith. Socialism fails in American not least because everybody expects their own big advance to arrive at any moment, and the damnedest thing is that it does tend to arrive, not always in the form of a fat check from New York, but in the form of a realized dream: a kid in college, a small business that turns a corner and starts to pay the bills. Though he has lately become a celebrity leftist, Springsteen understands this entirely; indeed, he understands America far better than the president does. He understands as well, in a song like “Racing in the Streets,” which may be his most moving and profoundly perceiving, that while dreams do not always become glittering realities, our glory nonetheless is to have dreamt, and to have passed through the fading of the dream into a deeper reconciliation and grace.

YouTube used to be awash in footage, but the abovementioned B-Schoolers have had it all purged. Sony might have let this one slip in the simple interest of disseminating something wonderful and assisting the efflorescence of the national spirit, but, of course, no. In any case, for the price of half an oil change you can buy the DVD.

Additional preferred rock and rock-related concert films, with dates of performance:

  • Miriam Makeba, Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm, Sweden, 1966
  • The Complete Monterrey Pop Festival (1967)
  • Jimi Hendrix, Live at Monterrey (1967)
  • Stax/Volt Revue: Live in Norway 1967
  • Elvis Presley, Elvis: ’68 Comeback Special (1968)
  • Jimi Hendrix, Live at Woodstock (1969)
  • The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter (1969)
  • Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (1969) – deplorable generation, unmatched concert
  • Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1970)
  • The Beatles, Let it Be (1970)
  • The Who, Isle of Wight Festival 1970 (1970)
  • Led Zeppelin, Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1970 (see the compilation titled Led Zeppelin)
  • Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall (1971)
  • The Band, The Last Waltz (1976)
  • Patti Smith, Live in Stockholm (1976) – not exemplary, but I’ll take it.
  • Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Sting, et al., The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (1981)
  • Stevie Ray Vaughan, Live at the El Mocambo (1983)

Sorry, but Stop Making Sense doesn’t interest me in the least; irony is to be transcended, not indulged. The raison d’etre of rock is conviction, with all its potential for foolishness and pretension.

Elvis, from his '68 Comeback Special.

On YouTube:

Posted on November 21st, 2010 at 12:06pm.

In the White Room

Designs by Karim Rashid.

By David Ross. Gary Hustwit’s Objectified (2009) is a cerebral documentary about industrial design. It considers everyday products we don’t usually think about as solved physical puzzles – peelers, garden sheers, computers, cars – and presents the thought processes of those who do the solving. The documentary is articulate, but also tendentious and leading. It purports to explain and defend ‘good design,’ but what it actually defends is a stringent minimalism and futurism. Its approved objects are clean lined, smooth surfaced, mono-tonal, ergonomic, and – in its dreams – ‘sustainable.’ This is the design philosophy of Apple, IKEA, and OXO – the spirit of molded plastic chairs and cell phones everywhere – in direct descent from the manifestoes of the Bauhaus. Continue reading In the White Room

Moppets and Scamps

From Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (1959).

By David Ross. Directors usually make the worst of children, treating them as objects of pedophilic lust (Lucrecia Martel’s Holy Girl, for example) or as spunky mini-adults (Paper Moon). The most fatuous movies – your standard Hollywood fare – share the romantic conviction that children are uncorrupted vessels of purity and innocence and embody a spiritual grace that can alone redeem the fallen world of adults. This notion derives from Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807), and specifically from the eighth section, which addresses the child in these terms:

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul’s immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, readst the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave.

Any parent who’s attempted to wrestle a crying kid into a car seat will immediately recognize the nonsense of these lines. Wordsworth began the poem before he had any children, but, amazingly, carried on with it after his first son had been born.

The films below represent a far more serious attempt to understand and to poeticize the experience of childhood, and constitute a kind of hall of fame of the genre. They are not films for children, but films about children with profound implications for adults.

  • Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray)
  • Aparajito (1957, Satyajit Ray)
  • Good Morning (1957, Yasujiro Ozu)
  • The Four Hundred Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut)
  • Murmur of the Heart (1971, Louis Malle)
  • Spirit of the Beehive (1973, Victor Erice)
  • Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese)
  • Small Change (1976, Francois Truffaut)
  • Cria Cuervos (1976, Carlos Saura)
  • Fanny and Alexander (1983, Ingmar Bergman)
  • My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Hayao Miyazaki)
  • Nobody Knows (2004, Hirokazu Koreeda)

Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) and Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003) deserve a different kind of mention. These films are not easy to stomach, nor great in the world-cinematic sense, but they bring a sharp anthropological eye to our present post-moral (post-human?) degeneracy. It would be nice to write them off as sensational and lurid, but there’s the sneaking, disconcerting suspicion that the world they depict actually exists.

From Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen" (2003).

I should offer a caveat about My Life as a Dog (1985), whose loose narrative of semi-humorous and psychologically pat anecdote more or less created the template for the consideration of childhood in contemporary cinema. The film has a vivid sense of physical and social detail, admittedly, but it’s a tad precious, and more than a tad dependent on the kind of schematic psychology found in college textbooks. I’m sure it’s true that the son of an emotionally withdrawn and intellectually preoccupied mother will tend to act out, and that plenty of warmth and attention is just the cure – but none of this is particularly the stuff of arresting art.

For my discussion of films for kids, see here.

Posted on October 27th, 2010 at 10:36am.

Conservative Film

From Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others."

By David Ross. Ever since National Review published this list of conservative films (see here), I have been thinking about the matter. Nearly all great films have conservative elements – one might say that all art is conservative in its greatest moments – but this is cheating; by ‘conservative film’ we mean a film that explicitly and purposefully articulates some aspect of conservative philosophy. By this definition, there are few great conservative films. Jean Renoir’s Grande Illusion (1937), Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2007) seem to me the greatest. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) is a monumental aesthetic achievement, but one hesitates to call its romantic hero-worship – its Miltonic Satanism – ‘conservative’ in the contemporary American sense of the word.

Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994) are fine if less exalted examples of conservative filmcraft. Lively, droll, and not in the least doctrinaire, these films are models for a conservative film movement. Metropolitan is a sequence of chatty interludes set in the dying world of Park Avenue gentility. It is a lament for lost manners, ritual, and social order, even as it concedes a degree of snobbery and attenuation and acknowledges a certain placid decadence. This is the movie’s strength: it understands that its own fondness is not an arguable position or even a position at all; it is a kind of savor for one’s own experience and one’s own kind. The essence of the film’s conservatism is this casual disregard for the utilitarian calculus – the grinding guilty math – that underpins liberalism and orders the modern mind. The entire film seems to speak the words: “Traditions have their charm, and charm is enough.” Barcelona, about American cousins making a hash of things in Spain, is a snappy romantic comedy that skewers anti-Americanism and European smugness generally. Any American who’s lived in Europe will cheer the film’s defense of hamburgers and related metaphysical principles.

For Barcelona’s famous “ant farm” analogy, see here.

For the Telegraph’s list of ‘great’ conservative films, see here.

Posted on October 26th, 2010 at 11:52am.

Idiot in Exile: The Ghost Writer

Kim Cattrall and Ewan McGregor in "The Ghost Writer."

By David Ross. Defenders of Roman Polanski say in effect, “Great artists give the world so much that they deserve the right to engage in a bit of pedophilic sodomy.” The Ghost Writer (2010) should discomfit this chorus. You can argue that great artists should stand above the law, but you can’t argue that Polanski is anything like a great artist these days. With The Ghost Writer, the elderly roué sinks into the second childhood of incompetent left-wing conspiracy mongering and leaves you wondering whether you’ve overestimated him all along. How bad is The Ghost Writer? I remember once wandering into my dad’s kitchen and taking a big swig of milk from the carton and my mouth filling with rancid cottage cheese. The Ghost Writer is the filmic equivalent.

The plot – something like the Manchurian Candidate in reverse – is a snitty little exercise in historical distortion (I won’t bother with the usual spoiler warning because there’s nothing to spoil). Ewan McGregor plays a ghostwriter hired to help a recently retired British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) write his memoirs. While investigating the mysterious demise of his predecessor, McGregor discovers that the prime minister’s wife is – what else – a CIA mole. This explains the brainless and biddable prime minister’s otherwise incomprehensible support for America’s War on Terror. In the end, the prime minister is assassinated by the forgivably deranged father of a British soldier killed in Iraq, and McGregor is murdered by the CIA before he can breathe a word of his secret (I hadn’t noticed that the CIA was this competent – well done, men, keep up the good work). So we now have a Tony Blair assassination fantasy to complement Hollywood’s bevy of Bush assassination fantasies (see here). Just in case we somehow miss the analogy to the Bush-Blair axis of evil, Polanski throws in a Condi-esque secretary of state, a Cheney-esque vice president, and a confused sub-conspiracy that links the CIA to a Halliburton-like defense contractor (it’s called Heatherton or something).

Polanski’s demonization of the the CIA is leaden and mechanical and ultimately unwatchable; the entire film has the air of the liar sullenly brazening out his lie. Give guys like Michael Moore and Markos Moulitsas some credit – they at least bring a zany bounce to their programmatic misunderstanding of the world. Polanski does not even bother to make his film superficially credible. Why does his retired PM live in a concrete bunker on a remote island off the coast of what – …Maine? I hadn’t noticed that the graying lions of European politics make a beeline for Yankee fishing villages, nor have I noticed much Brutalist domestic architecture round Bar Harbor way. I suppose Polanski filmed these scenes in Sweden or Norway, having no clue and not caring what New England actually looks like. And, of course, it takes McGregor only twenty-four hours to unravel a CIA conspiracy at the heart of the Atlantic alliance that the anti-American world media has somehow missed over the previous twenty-five years. How does he do it? Google! By gum, that’s clever. Why didn’t someone else think of that?

There is a weird autobiographical subtext to the movie, by the way. The Blairish PM can’t return to Europe because he’s been indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. Polanski, of course, can’t return to America, having helped himself to a drugged thirteen year old. The Ghost Writer is Polanski’s fantasy of a world in which celebrity pedophiles can cross borders and neocons – the real bad guys – can’t. In my own opinion, the International Criminal Court should bring charges against directors who invent listless alternate realities vaguely meant to confuse and propagandize. For punishment, they might be set down in the desert with only their broken moral compasses to guide them back to civilization.

For more CIA derangement syndrome see here.

Posted on October 17th, 2010 at 10:06am.

A Reasonable Nobel Season

Mario Vargas Llosa.

By David Ross. Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize in literature — a laudable, long overdue selection — and Chinese democratic activist Liu Xiaobo has won the Peace Prize. This was an unusually reasonable and gratifying Nobel season. The Nobel establishment was evidently trying to perform emergency reconstructive surgery on its own reputation after giving President Obama the Peace Prize.

Vladimir Nabokov.

I read Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World (1981) twenty-five years ago. I was a fifteen-year-old intern in the Washington office of Congressman Bill Gradison (R-Ohio). One of my fellow interns lent the book to me. I was enraptured. The plot long ago evaporated from memory, but I still have certain tableaux fixed in my mind; I still recall a certain mood of welling apocalyptic energy. I haven’t read Vargas Llosa in the intervening decades, but I have long meant to give his work a further try. I now have my impetus.

Vargas Llosa is a rare conservative among winners of the literature prize. The Nobel committee has notoriously blackballed conservatives and non-progressives since the 1960s. Pound, Borges, Nabokov, and Updike had undeniable claims on the prize but were all criminally denied. Solzhenitsyn and Saul Bellow were the exceptions to the rule. Note however that the committee’s official commendation of Vargas Llosa exudes academic left-wingery (“for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”) as if to make clear that the committee observed the usual bien pensant considerations. “Cartography of structures of power” may be the clumsiest phrase ever employed by the Nobel committee, and that’s saying a good deal: some of its commendations read like thesis statements plucked from overly earnest high school term papers.

There were, admittedly, reasons to snub Pound, but the snubbing of Borges and Nabokov was an outrage against intellectual honesty. Updike had two strikes against him: he was an non-self-loathing American and he was a quiet conservative (see his brilliant essay “On Not Being a Dove” here). He was the only haute-novelist who did not vocally oppose the Vietnam War, and he consistently defended the religious sensibility against the galloping secularism of the age. When the Twin Towers were struck he did not, like Susan Sontag, rail against American imperialism, but wrote in a mood of deep and genuine heartbreak (here). Other Americans whom the Nobel committee has ignored, in order of victimization:

  • Wallace Stevens
  • Thomas Pynchon
  • Marianne Moore
  • William Carlos Williams
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Philip Roth
  • Richard Wilbur
  • Norman Mailer
  • Edmund Wilson
  • Cynthia Ozick
  • John Barth

Had she lived into middle age and realized her great genius, Flannery O’Connor would have been another conservative whom the Nobel committee could have boasted of snubbing.

The Wall Street Journal comments on Vargas Llosa’s ascension (here) and interviews the Nobel hero (here). Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker sends fluttering our way the usual clever nothings (here).

[UPDATE: Read here how Swedish leftists are apparently outraged that Llosa won the award, because he isn’t “one of us.” Thanks to LFM’s Patricia Ducey for the heads-up.]

Posted on October 13th, 2010 at 9:06am.