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In the current issue of Publishers Weekly, Andrei Codrescu, poet, NPR commentator, editor of Exquisite Corpse, learned gadfly and now Luddite, urges his readers, in the style of a biblical jeremiad, to “Leave cyberspace. Go back to Ohio!” (“Promote This! Forget Facebook,” PW, 1/31/11). “Oh, but woe is unto us!” he exclaims. “The social networks aren’t selling books! They are giving away stupid prose for free!” Being friendly is not the way to sell books, Codrescu argues. “Not only do you not sell books by being friendly, you won’t sell any because everyone in your ‘social network’ thinks they know you. Why buy your books, since you’ll tell them everything they want to know for free.” For Codrescu, Facebook is not even a good place for writers to search for material. “Even if a novelist, let’s say, mined a social network for stories, he’d find nothing but lies and fake grins. There would be no smells and no skin.” Codrescu’s point about the one-dimensional view of human personality perpetuated in the pages of Facebook and other social networks is something that is also discussed by Zadie Smith in her recent essay/review in The New York Review of Books of the film The Social Network and of Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget
(“Generation Why,” NYRB, 11/25/10). Smith, who foreswore Facebook after just two months of status updates, writes, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Sensibility.” Bravo Andrei and Zadie! Let’s have a Fahrenheit 451
moment in which all the iPads and Kindles are burned, in which hedge funders short Facebook and in which friends parse each others’ essence through the complex characters in the novels they browse in their local independent bookstores.
“Travelling to funerals was once an important family rite, but with greater secularity and a mobile population increasingly disconnected from original hometowns, watching a funeral online can seem better than not going at all.” Thus writes Times reporter Laura M. Holson in a front-page story in this Tuesday’s paper (“For Funerals Too Far, Mourners Gather on the Web,” NYT, 1/25/11). Event by Wire, Funeral One and Service Corporation International, the company that controls “2,000 funeral homes and cemeteries, including the venerable Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,” represent some of America’s hearty entrepreneurial spirit harnessed to this effort to add a cybernetic dimension to the mourning process. It’s all so simple when you read the Times piece, it almost no longer makes sense to attend a funeral at all. For busy Americans who already multitask around the clock, funeral attendance may turn out to be just one more app on their iPhones. “Two weeks ago a friend of Ronald Rich, a volunteer firefighter in Wallace, N.C., died unexpectedly,” Holson goes on to explain in her Times piece. “When Mr. Rich called the mother of his friend to say he could not make the eight-hour drive to the funeral because a snowstorm threatened to close roads, he said the mother offered to send an e-mail invitation so he could watch the service online.” But the question is, will those who avail themselves of these funeral webcasts simultaneously pay their bills, check their Facebook accounts, and go into seedy chat rooms with dominatrixes who tantalizingly offer to shove their stiletto heels into their mouths and listen to the Dead Kennedys, all while friends and family members are being eulogized?
Daniel Bell, who wrote The End of Ideology
, which was a forerunner of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
, and Bruce Gordon, who played crime boss Nitti on The Untouchables
, both received obits that together took up a full page in Wednesday’s Times. Another Untouchables regular, Paul Picerni, who played Ness’s sidekick Lee Hobson, was also memorialized in the Times several days earlier ("Paul Picerni, Actor in ‘Untouchables,’ Dies at 88," NYT, 1/20/11). Curiously, the Times’s description of how Bruce Gordon played Nitti was also a fitting description of Bell, if you switch the criminal enterprises for intellectual journals such as The Public Interest and The New Leader. "As played by Mr. Gordon, Nitti was memorably in control, presiding over an illicit network of late-Prohibition era breweries, drug running, gambling and much else…. Yet because of Mr. Gordon’s essential warmth as an actor, his Nitti had tremendous rough-hewn charm" ("Bruce Gordon, TV Mobster, Dies at 94," NYT, 1/25/11). The Times describes Bell’s rise from City College, "where he had no trouble finding his way to Alcove No. 1 in the cafeteria, where, among the anti-Stalinist socialists who dominated that nook, he found a remarkable cohort that challenged and sustained him for much of his life as it helped to define America’s political spectrum over the last half of the 20th century" ("Daniel Bell, Ardent Appraiser of Politics, Economics and Culture, Dies at 91," NYT, 1/25/11). One man was born from immigrant stock (Bell’s original name was Bolotsky) and one man played an immigrant on the rise in America. One man rose through the ranks of New York intellectuals and one played a character who worked his way up in the Chicago Syndicate, becoming a crony of Al Capone’s. But the two personae had much in common, emerging as they did out of the blood politics of Depression-era America.
Jack LaLanne, the fitness freak who died on Sunday at age 96, was the product of a school of thinking that actually began in the Middle Ages and was known as alchemy. Alchemists turned dross into gold, a subject the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson wrote about in The Alchemist
. Alchemy was what LaLanne did with his own body after being “a self described emotional and physical wreck while growing up in the San Francisco area” (“Jack LaLanne, Founder of Modern Fitness Movement, Dies at 96,” NYT, 1/23/11). In a quote that sounds like a passage from Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
, La Lanne said, “I can’t afford to die. It would wreck my image.” It’s no surprise that the origins of LaLanne’s philosophy go back to the outlandish worlds of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, in which outsized characters carried out outlandish plots. “At 60 he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf handcuffed, shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat,” Richard Goldstein wrote in his Times obit. “At 70, handcuffed and shackled again, he towed 70 boats, carrying a total of 70 people, a mile and a half through Long Beach harbor.” Though LaLanne “maintained that he disliked working out,” he once did 1,000 push-ups within 23 minutes on “You Asked For It,” a TV program popular in the ’50s.
Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, currently in revival at Film Forum, begins with Da Vinci’s Last Supper, ends with a reference to El Greco, in a desolate shot of burned-out ruins, and nods to Mantegna’s famous painting Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Actually, from the beginning, Pasolini’s second film establishes two of the director’s central obsessions—the low life of Rome’s pimps and prostitutes and Christianity, if not the passion of Christ himself, which puts the director in good company when you think of Augustine and Dante’s Divine Comedy, also mesmerizingly evoked in a tragic prison sequence. But the really great art historical reference is Anna Magnani (she, like the Madonna, will likely go down as one of the great subjects for all the artists—in this case filmmakers—who tried to embody her), who plays a majestic whore and lush who wants the best for her son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo). In the first scene she leads pigs into her pimp’s wedding while celebrating her freedom by swinging her then little boy in the air. It’s the bags under Magnani’s eyes—with their world weariness, their lust, their rapture and compassion—that leave such an indelible imprint. Guilietta Massina played a prostitute in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria
with an almost Chaplinesque mixture of humor and pathos, and years later there was Sigmone Signoret’s Madame Rosa
. But Magnani is the ultimate whore, strolling through Rome’s underworld in a series of literally death-defying soliloquies—only why did she have to shave her armpits?
Go down to Banjo Jim’s on Avenue C on a Monday night and listen to a group named Lichtman’s Brain Cloud. They call what they play Western Swing and have one or two fiddles, a bass, a single drum and an electric guitar, amongst other instruments, including the electric mandolin. The group is presided over by a lead singer named Tamar Korn, a petit, dark haired young woman with a charismatic, startling voice. She can dance in a country music kind of way, but the voice is mesmerizing. It sounds like Billie Holiday as heard through an old-time radio, only turned up loud and clear. It’s distant yet creates vibrations that could make a string ring. It ignites your inner harmonics. Tamar can also use her voice to mimic the sounds of instruments. When she takes a breather, Brain Cloud plays instrumental numbers all on its own. The group has a small following, but some day they are going to make it to the big time. Garrison Keillor’s talent scouts should head down to Banjo Jim’s to hear Tamar and Brain Cloud one Monday. They’d be wonderful guests on A Prairie Home Companion.
Hugh Hudson, the Academy Award winning director of Chariots of Fire
, has signed on to direct a sequel called Chariots of Shit. The year is no longer 1924, but sometime in the second decade of the 21st Century, and the arena has changed from competitive running in England to politics in the United States. Two candidates are running for election, one is a conservative Republican who believes that no American should receive health care, that aborted babies should be stuffed back into their mother’s uteruses and that the rich should pay little or no taxes while their employees support the few public programs that remain, such as work-placement making coins at the U.S. Mint. The film will highlight the importance of coins even in the age of electronic transfers, since the American economy will be in such dire straits that begging for them will be one of the few employment opportunities for graduates from elite colleges. The Democratic opponent is a hedge fund manager whose guilt over the enormous profits and tax breaks she has received has turned her into a progressive. She owns an island in the Caribbean to which she retreats on her private plane, but she is the female version of Prince Hal, making forays into the real world and playing the part of everyman in disguise. No, Chariots of Shit will not be a remake of Preston Sturges’s classic Sullivan’s Travels
. Instead, our idealistic Democrat learns little from what she sees when she ventures out into the real world, loses the election and simply retires to her island, where in a culminating scene she is shown reading Plato’s Republic
, as her Hawaiian “Man Friday,” wearing a lei (and little else), brings her a tall, exotic drink with an American-flag stirrer.
