By David Ross. Celebrity avarice doesn’t get any lower than this. Rolling Stone reports (here and here) that numerous stars have received massive paychecks to perform for the family of Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Over the past few years, Muatassim Qaddafi [the colonel’s playboy son] has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring prominent western performers to provide music for his private events. In 2008, Mariah Carey accepted a $1 million fee, according to WikiLeaks cables and news reports, to sing four songs for a New Year’s Eve party. 50 Cent has performed at Qaddafi functions in the past. Beyoncé was the main attraction at the New Year’s Even party, which took place on at Nikki Beach, on the Caribbean island of St. Bart’s party. Usher, according to reports, also performed there, and Lindsay Lohan, Jay-Z, Jon Bon Jovi and other celebrities were in the audience.
Nelly Furtado, meanwhile, received $1 million to perform a forty-five-minute show in Milan in 2007. What next? Justin Bieber coming soon to an Afghan cave near you!
It’s hard to know which is more deplorable: celebrity greed or Qaddafi taste. In the attempt to shake the desert sand from their robes, rogue dictators seem to have looked no farther than US magazine and Cribs. I suppose it’s helpful intel that our geopolitical adversaries are holed up in their bunkers with the complete Laguna Beach on DVD. Maybe Selena Gomez can pitch in and do some role playing with Hilary Clinton – you know, to give her a feel for what Middle Eastern tyrants are into.
Rolling Stone, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Shepard Fairey Inc., cannot resist a final ludicrous insinuation of moral equivalency:
Artists have long taken money to play private shows for clients whose political agendas might be offensive to their fans, from B.B. King jamming with the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater in the Eighties to Elton John singing at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding last year.
This dig appears in the print edition of the story, but not on-line. Good call. The blogosphere would have fed like piranhas on this.
By David Ross. I saw only a few Hollywood films this year. Among Oscar contenders, I caught The Social Network (a well-told tale within narrow parameters), Toy Story 3 (a film our great-grandkids will revere no less than we do), How to Train Your Dragon (Avatar without the brainless politics), and Inception (ludicrous spew of egomaniacal director).
What to say about Inception, a film so self-enamored that it twists itself into knots the better to quaff the fragrance of its own rear end? It’s just bad. Badly acted, badly directed, badly written.
Science fiction is supposed to trace the arc of human possibility and send us postcards from our own future, or at least from a conceivable future. Inception, like the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, imagines a factitious technological development and spins a strictly arbitrary tale. There’s no reason to give a damn. Inception is not about the implications of our present reality but about itself. It’s fixated on the superficial dazzle of its own self-enwound idea. Dr. Apuzzo’s review in these pages appeared upside down (see here), but it might equally have appeared in mirrored reverse, to indicate the film’s narcissus gaze.
Fair-haired Golden Boy: Leonardo DiCaprio in "Inception."
And then there is Leonardo DiCaprio, the baby-faced siren who lures directors to their artistic deaths. DiCaprio’s fatal attraction is one of the great mysteries. Do directors remember Titanic and see nine zeros where a performance is supposed to be? He’s lumbering, puffy, and nerveless, genetically closer to Keanu Reeves than to Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro. Christopher Nolan is taken in – okay, we expect as much; but Martin Scorsese four times? DiCaprio has laid waste a whole generation of potentially good films, starting with Danny Boyle’s The Beach. Brad Pitt has also ruined his share of films, but he has not gotten his mitts on nearly as many prestige projects.
Ellen Page is cute enough, and I enjoyed Juno as much as the next nerd who likes to see his own kind hold its own on screen, but no actress is less destined to be the next Sigourney Weaver. She jumps, she runs, she shoots, all the while conveying the sense that she’d much rather be reading Zadie Smith in some nice coffeehouse of the mind or maybe working on her grad school applications.
Same pretzel-logic, with more at stake.
I did see one more Oscar nominee, come to think of it. Exit through the Gift Shop is a strange piece of work: a documentary about an aborted documentary about street art. It follows the director of the aborted documentary, Thierry Guetta, as he evolves from vintage clothing store owner, to illicit street-art videographer, to daredevil street artist called Mr. Brainwash, to celebrity artist in his own right, despite having no training or experience whatsoever. Guetta now sells his Warhol-style lithographs for large sums at the highest strata of the auction world. Complicating matters, there’s speculation – probably correct, if I had to guess – that Exit through the Gift Shop is an elaborate prank perpetrated by its director, the legendary street artist Banksy, and that Guetta is merely a Banksy frontman. The Times of London floats this theory here.
Whether documentary or mockumentary, Exit through the Gift Shop is, at the very least, a postmodern artifact to be reckoned with. It begins by celebrating the authenticity of street-art heroes like Shepard Fairey (creator of the red, white, and blue Obama icon) and Banksy himself; it morphs into a deconstruction of postmodern inauthenticity as the putatively talentless Guetta manufactures a vast body of work in no time and successfully sells himself as the latest phenom to emerge from the streets; it morphs again into a vindication of Banksy on the assumption that Guetta has become rich and famous selling art that is, after all, Banksy’s.
What to make of this? Exit‘s pretzel-logic is no less involved than Inception‘s, but we find ourselves implicated in it; its maze is our maze, and we have a vested interested in finding our way out. Something, for once, is at stake.
[Editor’s Note: Mad Men Season 4 , reviewed in full here at LFM by Jennifer Baldwin, will be released on DVD/Blu-ray March 29th.]
By David Ross. Our own Jennifer Baldwin has written stylishly – very stylishly in my opinion – on Mad Men. I share her admiration for the glamour of the era, and I particularly share her instinct that the Eisenhower generation in some sense enabled the mayhem of the 60s:
The reason AMC’s original series Mad Men was such a sensation when it debuted four seasons ago, and what continues to make it one of the best shows on TV, is that it approaches the 1960s from a somewhat different angle. It’s the angle of men in suits, women in tasteful and elegant clothing, cocktails and business meetings – in other words, the world of grown ups. This is the 1960s from the point of view of the adults. What makes the show so brilliant is that by focusing on the adults of the era it shows where the real breakdown of society occurred in the 60s: not with the kids, but with their parents.
Kids will always rebel, in any era, in any time period. It’s part of our adolescent development to test boundaries and question our world. But it’s up to the adults in a society to maintain civilization in the face of this adolescent upheaval. Where the 60s went wrong – where the rot set in – wasn’t that the youth started tuning out and turning on, it’s that the adults did as well.
This is well put: it is indeed “up to the adults in a society to maintain civilization in the face of [… ] adolescent upheaval.” As I see it, however, the essence of the sixties dysfunction was not that the adults tuned out and turned on, but that they did not entirely trust in their own culture and world view. Their liberalism was too relativistic, pluralistic, urbane – too unsure of itself at root – and they had become unconsciously estranged from the tradition that should have functioned as the great countervailing force: the ‘culture’ that should have thundered in refutation of the ‘counter-culture.’ Too tentative to muster the necessary ferocity or tenacity, they failed to acculturate their own children, and they suffered the patricidal consequences.
Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway.
The ultimate origin of the problem is hard to identify. Could it be that having won World War II and vanquished the most monstrous manifestation of evil in the history of the world, the Eisenhower generation let its guard down? Assumed that the culture needed no further defense? Or was this generation simply – and forgivably – a bit weary at the core?
There is a subtle point to be made, but Mad Men – of which I have seen only the first season – does not seem to make it. Instead, the show depicts the culture of the 50s and early 60s with a heavy-handed Baby Boomer bias, turning a complicated and often brilliant era of American art and culture – the era of Nabokov and Coltrane – into a flimsy straw man of political convenience, as if to say, “You see! This is why we had to wreck the world in order to save it!” I have previously aired something of this complaint in my “Defense of the 1950s” (see here).
I simply don’t accept the clichés in which Mad Men tirelessly traffics. My grandparents belonged to the exact generation of Mad Men and occupied a Jewish version of the same milieu. My grandfather was a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, a drinker of good Scotch, an amateur photographer (I have his lovely old Leica), a dapper wearer of Burberry coats and felt homburgs, a weekend golfer with a second house in Westport, Connecticut. Mad Men‘s revelry in boorishness and chauvinism – its excited finger-pointing at sexual naughtiness and latent dysfunction – seems utterly detached from my grandparents’ unselfconscious sophistication and from the real elegance of their world. This world was sober, thoughtful, and ordered. It was perhaps a bit passive and naively broadminded, but it was not stupid and never crude. It was a middle-brow world, but middle-brow, in 1960, encompassed the Museum of Modern Art, The New Yorker, and the New York City Ballet.
Daniel Mendelsohn, writing in The New York Review of Books, weighs in with a lengthy and devastating critique along my own lines. He derides the show as cheap soap opera, an obligatory point in the pages of NYRB and one that the show’s defenders are likely to concede with a shrug. He may touch a nerve, however, when he denies “the special perspective [the show’s] historical setting creates, the graphic picture that it is able to paint of the attitudes of an earlier time, attitudes likely to make us uncomfortable or outraged today.” Mendelsohn continues:
To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. In Mad Men, everyone chain-smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues, every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It’s not that you don’t know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist movement; it’s just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal ‘sexism’ doesn’t work – it’s wearying rather than illuminating.
Here, as with Don’s false identity and (literally) meretricious mother, Mad Men keeps telling you what to think instead of letting you think for yourself. As I watched the first season, the characters and their milieu were so unrelentingly repellent that I kept wondering whether the writers had been trying, unsuccessfully, for a kind of camp, for a tartly tongue-in-cheek send-up of Sixties attitudes. (I found myself wishing that the creators of Glee had gotten a stab at this material.) But the creators of Mad Men are in deadly earnest. It’s as if these forty- and thirty-somethings can’t quite believe how bad people were back then, and can’t resist the impulse to keep showing you.
This impulse might be worth indulging (briefly), but the problem with Mad Men is that it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts.
This critique is reasonable as far as it goes, but it misses the show’s water-carrying tendency in the larger campaign of the kulturkampf. The show does not represent the failure of the anthropological eye, but the triumph of the revisionist strategy by which the Baby Boomers have always justified their berserk torching of the culture. The show fails because it’s not fundamentally interested in its own subject matter except as the premise in a political syllogism. It has no real curiosity. No real affinity. Too often its portrait is an effigy brandished at a show trial.
January Jones in "Mad Men."
It’s true that Mad Man depicts the nascent counterculture somewhat caustically, but I wonder whether this merely reflects the show’s implicit alignment with the perspective of the older generation. It seems to me we are supposed to understand that we witness the birth of the counterculture through Don’s eyes, and that the putative inadequacy of his comprehension is one more point against him and his generation.
I wish there were a corrective to adduce, but films like George Lucas’ American Graffiti and Barry Levinson’s Diner are a bit patronizing in their own way, envisioning an aimlessness and harmlessness that has nothing to do with the complexities that were roiling through the culture in a late efflorescence of modernism. For me, the defining tableau is an auditorium at Cornell, Nabokov at the lectern, Pynchon seated amid the crowd.
By David Ross. Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) is a marvel: a ninety-six-minute movie consisting of a single unbroken tracking shot. With a sensual fluidity unmatched except perhaps by Ophuls’ La Ronde, the camera follows two ghosts – one Russian, the other European, one earnest, the other ironic – as they stroll through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
The centuries swirl gracefully about them, the twentieth century suddenly giving way to the nineteenth, the eighteenth suddenly giving way to the twenty-first, as if time itself were a gently shifting breeze. The film is pregnant with a wonderful faith that time is not an erosion, but an accretion, that some great memory catches the falling drop of the individual moment, that all is somehow gathered to the breast. As they make their tour, the ghosts maintain a patter of wry commentary and affectionate observation, humanists mingling in the parade of humanity. They have no urgent message to deliver and nothing to teach, thankfully; their pleasure is the film’s essential communication, though there is also a clouding of elegy. Meanwhile the camera makes a tour of its own, lingering on the splendid details of the palace: molding, gilding, ironwork, marble-work, drapery, china, crystal. The camera provides an implicit object lesson in the tradition of disciplined form that has made the beauty of the West, and this aspect of the film can only seem a terrible if inadvertent reproach. In comparison to the door handle or to the lace of a tablecloth, calmly wrought for the eye of God, whose discernment is infinite, our contemporary masterpieces – a Jackson Pollack, say, or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – flail hysterically, as if the soul itself were abandoned and drowning.
To promote and honor the film – one of the greatest ever in my opinion – I have fully transcribed the dialogue and annotated some of the artistic and architectural detail. This task required perhaps fifteen hours of truly tedious labor. I drew upon and sometimes cribbed directly from Paintings in the Hermitage by Colin Eisler and The Hermitage Collections (2 vols.) by Oleg Yakovlevich Neverov, Dmitry Pavlovich Alexinsky, Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky (who possibly figures in the film; see here and here).
It is sometimes difficult to identify who speaks what words, and I can’t vouch for the accuracy of my transcription in every instance. I look forward to receiving corrections and additional annotations from our conscientious and knowledgeable readers. Please consider the script below a first attempt to map the fluid, elusive drama of the film. Hopefully somebody will find it useful in its present, rough form.
By David Ross. I wonder how much of my sensibility is traceable to the 1982 edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide, edited by Dave Marsh and John Swenson. I was a twelve year old oddly drawn to what Greil Marcus calls the “old, weird America,” and the guide pointed toward an American shadow culture of the swamps, the back roads, the cotton fields, the mountains, the bordellos, the late-night clubs on the wrong side of the tracks. The music was important to me, but even more important was the writing of critics like Marsh, Marcus, and Lester Bangs, which seemed to model a nerdy cool that was not entirely beyond my powers of imitation and which excitingly presupposed an American vitality and mysteriousness invisible to the teenage suburban eye.
Picasso's "The Tragedy."
With the guide in hand, I felt sure that the Brit-boy synth pop then dominating the charts – remember the Human League’s massively annoying “Don’t You Want Me”? – represented a momentary masochistic derangement (rather like communism) and not the human norm. This notion turned out to be only partially true – the great age of American music really was over – but it allowed me to grit my teeth and get through sixth grade.
I particularly remember the guide’s entry on Skip James (1902-1969), a Mississippi bluesman whose music had a strange ethereality and almost modernist abstraction, reversing the usual earthiness of the blues and turning it into something elegant and almost formal. These days his music puts me in mind of paintings from Picasso’s blue period. Wrote Marcus: “James’ high, ghostly voice pierces the night air – it always seems like night when these albums are playing – and his guitar shadows the moon.” This line thrilled me as a kind of poetry, and Skip James became – and remains – one of my touchstones. It really does seem like night when his albums play; his guitar really does seem to shadow the moon.
Here is the best of what little footage exists of James, from the film Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966. And Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World pays homage to James here.
By David Ross. Writing in The New Republic, Andrew Butterfield guts Steve Martin’s new novel, An Object of Beauty (see here), a racy and putatively biting satire of the modern art scene in Manhattan.
A dealer and scholar of real standing (see here), Butterfield accuses Martin’s novel of lazy preening and cliché mongering. In these regards, the novel sounds very much like the Hollywood movie that it will eventually become. Martin has merely saved his film adapters the trouble of dumbing things down and turning to pap whatever had personality.
Butterfield delivers a good number number of vicious but presumably merited groin blows, of which this is characteristic:
The Object of Beauty masquerades as a social satire – a sort of Bonfire of the Vanities, updated to cover the recent bubble in contemporary art – but really the book is a just a drab soap opera about the doings of one superficially hot but deeply unappealing young woman. Martin is too lazy or too diffident to try to describe this universe freshly or in any detail. Instead he lazily relies on knowingness. He drops names of famous people and famous restaurants without bothering in the slightest to tell you anything precise or new or imaginative about them. They are merely brands; shorthands for chic. If you already know what Sant’Ambroeus looks like, or who Bill Acquavella and Larry Gagosian are, you do not need to read the book. If you do not know who they are, or why they might have a claim on your time and attention, Martin will not tell you anything that will enable you to picture them. He does not even tell you why you should find them humanly interesting. All he makes you feel is that your ignorance should arouse your envy – that you, poor thing, are less fortunate than he and the fancy people in his book. The reader of this novel is like a tourist banished to the outside of the velvet rope.
Jennifer Tilly at the poker table.
Nothing is more gratifying than to see Hollywood pretension pricked upon the pin of genuine expertise. Celebrities insist on putting on their wire-rim glasses and taking “courageous stands” and opining about art and literature and world affairs. Sometimes they even wind up on the Council on Foreign Relations, as did Angelina Jolie back in 2007. Apparently being a former self-mutilating, heroin-using goth-girl counts as a resume point.
None of this buttoned-up activity impresses me. This is yet more acting and not even good acting.
The only celebrity extracurricular activity that I have ever been able to respect is Jennifer Tilly’s poker career. It takes mettle to plunge into one of the few activities in which you cannot trade on your looks or fame, and in which there’s no possibility of taking cover in the fuzziness of subjective and decadent standards, and in which you’re likely to wind up tainted with the faint stench of the Red States. Jennifer Tilly at the poker table is far more impressive than Angelina Jolie delivering “prepared remarks” at a lectern.
On June 27, 2005, Tilly won a World Series of Poker bracelet (and $158,625) in the Ladies’ No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em event, outlasting 600 other players. She followed up this accomplishment on September 1, 2005, by also winning the third World Poker Tour Ladies Invitational Tournament held at the Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles. Tilly has appeared in the GSN Poker Royale series. She appeared in the third season of Poker Superstars but was eliminated in the preliminary round. Tilly played in the Celebrity Poker Showdown which aired June 14, 2006, on Bravo. Tilly was knocked out in third place by Bravo’s online poker champion Ida Siconolfi (the first non-celebrity to appear on the show) when her A♣K♥ failed to improve against Ida’s starting hand of K♣ K♠. Tilly appears as a celebrity, rather than a poker pro, in ESPN’s Pro-Am Poker Equalizer. Tilly also appears in the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions 2007 Edition video game (along with boyfriend, Phil Laak) that was released in 2007 by Activision.
In a television interview in 2005, Tilly stated that at that point in her career she was more interested in pursuing poker than acting.By December 2008, Tilly announced her retirement from poker as a career. In her monthly column in Bluff Magazine she said: “I love poker but greatness in poker is an elusive dream. There are too many variants. Trying to find validation in poker is like trying to find a virgin in a whorehouse. I’m not giving up poker entirely – gambling is an addiction after all. I’m just going to treat it more like a hobby and less like a career.” Since January 2010, Tilly appears to have resumed her poker career. As of 2010, Tilly’s live tournament wins exceed $660,000.
