Grandmaster Flash

Sampling, in which old songs are spliced into new musical numbers, is not only the province of rap and hip-hop, where mythic DJs like Grandmaster Flash have embellished its notoriety. It has also occurred through the history of world literature. For instance, James Joyce’s Ulysses is an essay in sampling, primarily in its exploitation of Homer. Shakespeare sampled Holinshed big time, and then there are those influential anonymous works of world literature, from the The Book of J (which Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg depict as the antecedent to the Old Testament) to Beowulf (which recently was reinterpreted by Seamus Heaney) to La Chanson de Roland. What parts of Indian culture did Herman Hesse sample in Siddhartha, and where did Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Faustus, titles that are part of the vocabulary of human thought, find their common roots? Talking about provenance is a little like asking when being actually commenced. Oh yes, there was a documented Big Bang, but if time existed before matter, where do we place the idea? Did something actually come from nothing, or must there at least have been the idea of something? And if we believe in a subjectivity freed from any possible object, can it only exist if we accept the notion of the divine? All of this is a long way of saying that there is nothing new under the sun. As people used to say about perversion, “If it’s been done, it’s been said, and if it’s said, it’s been done.”

The Committee Against Obligatory Happy Holidays Salutations

The Committee Against Obligatory Happy Holidays Salutations met on Christmas Eve at the Columbia University Sundial, which was the site of many of the great demonstrations of the 1960s. Old members of the Committee remembered the bearded student leader Mark Rudd handing out screeds as the winds blew across the Hudson over forty years before. The turnout was so great, the response so enthusiastic, that Committee members agreed to hold a congress in Yalta, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had met in the waning days of the Second World War. The Committee elected officers and a treasurer and then began writing a charter, based on the Magna Carta, which would deal with the rights of citizens to refrain and even resist Happy Holidays salutations. Despite the invidious associations with the tea party, “no taxation without representation” was repeatedly evoked in addressing these verbal assaults, which are so taxing. It was agreed that the first clause of the charter would read, “No holiday is worth celebrating,” under the theory that the absence of value would preclude any need for positive reinforcement. A holiday spirit inadvertently prevailed, to the extent that there was no shortage of volunteers willing to participate in outreach towards victims of Happy Holidays salutations all across the world. It was decided that determining how to remove Happy Holidays salutations from electronic media, including e-books and Kindle, would be on the agenda for the next meeting of the Committee.

ABC's Wide World of Periodontics

Network television appeals to an older audience who remember the halcyon days when the big three dominated the news and the Oprah Winfrey channel was just a glimmer in Oprah’s mother’s eye. But if network television execs want to take advantage of its demographic, they should produce sitcoms, soaps and particularly reality shows based on dental themes. We had General Hospital and Marcus Welby, M.D. and Dr. Kildare, but we’ve had no series devoted to dentistry and its attendant arts, even though a dentist’s office is most likely the place where a majority of television watchers will spend their time and money over the last years of their lives. You may have decided to give up treatments for scads of chronic ailments, but if you have a toothache on your last day on earth, you’re going to the dentist’s office. Pain is a great motivator, and dentists reap their rewards from the discomfiture of rotting teeth—which are one of the most potent symbols of the body’s decline, along with the losses of memory, hair and libido. Think of it—dental soaps brought to you by toothpaste advertisers. How about ABC’s Wide World of Periodontics, narrated like Monday Night Football, with leading experts on gums? How about Sixty Minutes doing an expose on gingivitis or cavities? Everyone knows that tooth decay results from the failure to brush and floss (together with an insouciance about tooth care, a hubris resulting from fluoridation), but what really is inside a cavity? Is it literally a hole or cave, as the word suggests, or something more profound? And what about the radical technology that brought about implants and made dentures and denture creams a thing of the past?

Cluny Brown

“He’s creating a new and better world,” Andrew Carmel (Peter Lawford), the son of English Aristocrat Sir Henry Carmel (Reginald Owen), tells his father about Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer), the Czech professor who is symbolically seeking refuge on an English estate. It’s 1938, the eve of Hitler’s Anschluss, at the beginning of Ernst Lubitsch’s last film Cluny Brown (1946), currently in revival at Film Forum. “What for?” Sir Henry replies. The banter of English drawing room comedy is the palette from which Lubitsch is working, and the verbal play centers on class conflict in English society as a metaphor for the domination that threatens the world. In the English context alone it’s a seemingly beneficent condition epitomized by Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) herself, a plumber’s niece whose irrepressible personality defies the strictures of class. Domination in the extreme of course leads to the fascist attempt at hegemony that would lead to the Second World War. The constant verbal play of the film—“feeding squirrels to nuts,” doing “the wrong thing at the right time”—refer to resistance to the social order, and the humor is disconcerting, since the lightheartedness of the reversals will soon have implications that go far beyond the elegant parlors, stately gardens, horses and quaint English village life that constitute the movie’s settings. 

The Black Swan

Films choose particular arenas or settings in which to establish their plots. Baseball and basketball are the backdrops of Field of Dreams and Spike Lee’s He Got Game, respectively. The famously haunting Kubrick film of the ‘50s, The Killing, was about a heist at a racetrack, and then there were Airplane and Airport and Wall Street, and The Devil Wears Prada. But no setting is as conducive to portraying the human body as the world of ballet, where the discipline of muscles and the regimen of eating and exercising become a kind of narration apart from the choreography of the works performed. The necessarily obsessive nature of the ballerina’s concern with body image is one of the themes of Darren Aronofsky’s The Black Swan, and the disorders that the movie presents, from cutting and biting to bulimia, are often associated with a search for perfection that the body eludes. The other element that the movie powerfully underlines is how we do to ourselves what we fantasize doing to others. “Perfection is letting go,” Thomas (Vincent Cassel) tells his newly anointed star Nina (Natalie Portman). But how does a ballerina whose whole life is predicated on control gratify such a diametrically opposed impulse without becoming victim to the kind of schizoid state that the film ultimately depicts? The melodrama of the plotline might easily be discountenanced if it weren’t for the way the film employs it to call attention to this confusion between the inner and outer worlds. Many of the scenes in which terror results from the labile nature of the reality are reminiscent of the stomach-churning suspense in films like The Shining and William Friedkin’s masterpiece of supernatural horror, The Exorcist, in which the world literally seems to be on fire. 

The Grapes of Wrath

The imagined traffic jam of Godard’s Weekend, the imagined dispossession of Empire of the Sun, the Spielberg classic derived from the novel by J.G. Ballard—we have become the repository of these two images. In a massive traffic jam filled with cars loaded with goods from foreclosed homes, where will the traffic go when it’s finally gotten off the highway? Steinbeck imagined the refugees of the Dust Bowl traveling from Oklahoma to California in The Grapes of Wrath, but now the ground is shifting under our feet, and there are whole populations that have become unseated from their once familiar worlds. What will be the fate of Floridians who have left acres of deserted condos? What will become of itinerant Katrina victims, whose lives were turned upside down by nature just in time to meet up with an economy that is as unresponsive to stimulus as a patient suffering from flesh-eating bacteria is to the most potent intravenous antibiotics? California, under constant threat of defaulting on its borrowing, has its own problems, and no longer holds out the hope it did during the Depression. Meanwhile, a new tax package that will add over $900 billion to the debt over the next two years competes with a federal judge’s rule about the unconstitutionality of compulsory insurance. The safety net of social security is under siege, and what will be the fate of Medicare and Medicaid in our deficit economy? The Joads were Steinbeck’s archetypical family. Who will rescue their contemporary counterparts? Who will make a place for them at the table? 

Accent Grave

The South Boston accent came into its own with Good Willing Hunting, in which Matt Damon plays a street-tough math prodigy, and has most recently reared its head not in Boston but on the gritty streets of nearby Lowell, the setting of The Fighter, which tells the story of the welterweight champ Micky Ward and his addict brother/trainer Dick Eklund. Accents, street argot and private languages have always been a big part of books and particularly films. We identify colorful film characters by their accents. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent was immortalized in Pumping Iron and The Terminator, and along with his muscles became the signature of a charismatic personality that eventually ascended to the governorship of California. Of course, accents have played their role in politics, an arena for some of the ultimate performances. Who can forget Orville Faubus of Arkansas, George Wallace of Mississippi, Huey Long of Louisiana, Jimmy Carter of Plains, GA, and of course that other Arkansan, our 42nd President, Bill Clinton? Without John F. Kennedy’s famed version of the Boston accent, aped by Vaughn Meader’s First Family album (“let me say this about that”), how would we ever have conceived of Camelot? Then of course we had Crocodile Dundee and Alfie and Marlon Brando’s famed mugging as the aging Mafia don in The Godfather, not to mention On the Waterfront, in which Italian street and Irish street coalesced in the character of Terry Malone. The difference between Terry Malloy and Micky Ward lies not only in their respective New York and Boston accents, but in the fact that while Terry “coulda been a contender,” Micky really was, only losing to Arturo Gatti at the conclusion of a trilogy that could have been written by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides, all of whom undoubtedly walked the walk while talking the talk.