Yee-ha! Time for Part 2 in our Western movie marathon week. Hold on to your chaps, people!
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
A Western rare for its setting in the Pacific Northwest, fully built mining town set, and Leonard Cohen (!) soundtrack, McCabe and Mrs. Miller stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as a hustling gambling man and a prostitute madame with big ambitions and a discreetly nasty opium habit. Directed by Robert Altman of M*A*S*H film fame, we're treated to lush cinematography, random passing shots of groups of people talking (an Altman trademark, I guess), and a dark, violent ending that goes well with some brooding Leonard Cohen. There are several parallels to the TV show Deadwood in this film (which is based a novel of the same name) and I couldn't help wondering if David Milch had seen this baby.
Shane (1953)
Hey, it's Shane! Shane! Shane Shane Shane Shane! Yeeee-ha! Yes, sir, this classic mutherfucker stars Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, and Van Haflin. Directed by George Stevens, this is another beautifully filmed movie (the first wide screen color Western of them all) and is set in the gorgeous flat plains near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with generous shots of the Grand Tetons in the far background (which I visited and hiked about a few years back). There's something about the saturated colors of this film that make the scenery hyper-beautiful and the setting nearly dominates the action-which involves a weary gunslinger (Shane!) trying to start a new life while working for a homesteading family, only to be brought out of retirement to help save them from a greedy cattle baron (a classic, if a bit worn, trope of the Old West, prominent in many tales penned by the likes of Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey).
SHANE!!!!!!!!!!!
Saddle Up & Ride Hard!
This week...this week...why this week we here at Blogagaard have been left to our own devices while our ladybug traipses around the East Coast singing and raising seven shades of hell. We've decided to use this time to catch up on seven great western movies we've never seen before. We used a couple different websites to narrow down our selections and shall give a brief overview/review of each on this here very blog.
Stagecoach (1939)
Directed by John Ford and staring (among others) a young John Wayne, this movie above all others helped Westerns blow up big time and stand on their own as pieces of good old film craft. A bunch of strangers are crammed into a stagecoach and sent through perilous country while Geronimo is on the war path (for some reason). I enjoyed this rollicking little diddy quite a bit and you can watch the whole film online for free.
Here's the trailer (remember when they were like small movies themselves?)
Once Upon A Time in the West (1968)
A big old plate of spaghetti western, this baby stars Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, and Jason Robard. Directed by Sergio Leone (The Good, The Bad, and the The Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, etc.) Once Upon a Time in the West was ranked on one list as THE greatest western of all-time. It's big, bold, and comes in at a little under three hours. The soundtrack incorporates a scorching harmonica, the set is elaborate and inspired by John Ford's love of Monument Valley, and there's plenty of crossing and double-crossing and some great sets and lots o gun fights. Yeah!
Stagecoach (1939)
Directed by John Ford and staring (among others) a young John Wayne, this movie above all others helped Westerns blow up big time and stand on their own as pieces of good old film craft. A bunch of strangers are crammed into a stagecoach and sent through perilous country while Geronimo is on the war path (for some reason). I enjoyed this rollicking little diddy quite a bit and you can watch the whole film online for free.
Here's the trailer (remember when they were like small movies themselves?)
Once Upon A Time in the West (1968)
A big old plate of spaghetti western, this baby stars Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, and Jason Robard. Directed by Sergio Leone (The Good, The Bad, and the The Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, etc.) Once Upon a Time in the West was ranked on one list as THE greatest western of all-time. It's big, bold, and comes in at a little under three hours. The soundtrack incorporates a scorching harmonica, the set is elaborate and inspired by John Ford's love of Monument Valley, and there's plenty of crossing and double-crossing and some great sets and lots o gun fights. Yeah!
The Strange Effect of Don DeLillo
We here at Blogagaard have read us some Don DeLillo over the years and have various strange memories of the process of reading said novelist. There's just something about DeLillo's work that brings out the weird in us (and I wager we are not alone, my sparrows).
Ok, check out this list of his works if you'd like to play along at home!
We believe the first time we read DeLillo was our senior year of college- we read Americana for a class. We mostly don't remember this novel except for it having something to do with a road trip and how it contained a transcendent, college class outside philosophy scene near the end that rose up out of nowhere and suddenly resonated greatly with us (we were graduating from college! We were taking an Asian philosophy class!).
Next we read White Noise, loved it, and then we were read the entire first part of Underworld (the baseball part) while driving to and from the Francis Ford Coppola vineyard in Nappa Valley, California, which by the end of the day generated a stupefying, exhausted state in our minds that was not unlike mid-level hypnosis (we listened, we could not sleep nor ask the reader to stop reading).
Next, we listened to Mao II on headphones while picking up trash for St. Paul Public housing, in the middle of a hot, hot goddamn summer day, which created an even stranger, near-boderline psychotic state in our minds (why was everyone getting married, en mass, in a stadium? Why? WHY!).
Then we read, or tried to read, The Body Artist (a slim novella) in one sitting at the Highland Park Barnes & Noble. It was so dull we only made it twenty pages.
Then we read Falling Man, his 9/11 novel, and thought "Eh."
Then we reread White Noise and realized the first part was still awesome, but the ending was pretty weak and not so good.
Then we read Point Omega (2010) as soon as it came out and rather liked it. From the Scribner catalog: "In the middle of a desert "somewhere south of nowhere," to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war adviser has gone in search of space and time." Not too satisfying of an ending, but at least it was short!
And finally we come to The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (2011) which, as it turns out, is somehow DeLillo's first short story collection. We'd only read one of these stories previously ("Midnight in Dostoyevsky") and have mostly enjoyed it.
So, what have learned from DeLillo?
Art is strange and should be put in nearly every story/novel and described for dozens of pages.
The Media is Us and We are the Media and MEDIA MEDIA MEDIA!
We are all terrified, secretly or not so secretly, because our lives are really modern and shit nowadays.
Terrorism is connected to terror.
Everybody is disconnected from everybody else.
Plot is overrated, especially if you throw in a lot of big ideas and big words! Weeeeeee!
Who Wants To Be Insulted By Martin Luther?
I know what you're thinking-my life is not nearly embarrassing and terrible enough. How can I be insulted MORE? And not just insulted by the living-NO! I WANT TO BE INSULTED BY SOMEBODY DEAD AND FAMOUS, TOO!
Thankfully, the Internet is here to help, with this handy-dandy insult generator courtesy of the famed Martin Luther, author of those Ninety-five Theses that shook up yea olde Catholicism so much.
Get Thee Insulted!
I'd like to point out here that modern day Lutherans are much more subtle if they want to insult you. Either they will A) compliment you in some way that's not really a compliment B) ask you what you do for a living and then sort of wince as you expound or C) they will give you a sweater.
Also, kudos to m'lady Melissa for finding this sweet site.
David Foster Wallace On the Terror of Silence
Here's a fitting excerpt from David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King for the 900th Deep Thoughts With Blogagaard post:
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy distracting ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy distracting ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.
The Future As Past and Winter as Boring
We here at Blogagaard Inc. continue to chuck books into our faces and shove words into our brains, perhaps in opposition to mid-February and general pal of boredom that has settled over our land. Our Loft class was canceled for the spring, due to lack of enrollment (though the Loft has picked it up again for the summer, so hope springs infernal). Our job is fine, but when your job entails making sure nothing happens all day, every day, you don't exactly come home invigorated. You come home calm and silent and ready for a nap and to wake again in the darkness of six o'clock, hungry for dinner and to experience something that means a goddamn thing.
Thus we read! And what have we been reading, now that War & Peace is behind us?
Well, there's the short story collection Things We Didn't See Coming by Steve Amsterdam. A collection of tales following the life of man who comes of age as the world falls apart and goes all-apocalyptic, we delve into a world decidedly more literary than fantastical. A fine effort, with some shimmering moments, but it's hard to pull off a work that feels like a novel in scope and comes up, well, short story. I still haven't read a short story collection with intertwined stories that was completely fulfilling-perhaps that's simply the nature of such a strange beast?
And how about Memories of the Space Age by J.G. Ballard? Another intertwined short story collection, though this one is more a thematic connection: "This collection brings together Ballard's 'Cape Canaveral stories,' eight in all, written between 1962 and 1985, and set in a future when the space program has ceased and civilization itself seems on the wane." I enjoyed the first story in this collection, "The Cage of Sand", but around the middle of the second story my mind started to wander and I started to realize each additional story was basically the same story told again in a different way and I pretty much skimmed the rest. Yet, you have to give some kind of hubris props to a writer who uses three epigraphs at the beginning of a story collection, one in Greek (from Homer), one in German (from Kant? Or some famous, smarty pants German, anyway), and one in English (from...himself!).
And then there's my current read, Oryx and Crake by Margret Atwood. While The Handmaid's Tale is a classic, I think we can all agree it's a rather dry story, well-crafted but not always super exciting. Oryx and Crake, however, is much zippier and punchier, as if the Atwood I'd read long ago and had now been merged with the mega-zippy George Saunders. More speculative fiction than science fiction, we follow Snowman/Jimmy as he forages in a strange, post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by genetic mutations, flooding, and other bad stuff. Much of the story is told in flashbacks, where we slowly learn how things got so bad, and while so many flashbacks often drag, overall it's been a pretty fun read so far (I'm at around page 200, if you're keeping score at home-and if so, are you on drugs?).
Yeah. So...reading!
Thus we read! And what have we been reading, now that War & Peace is behind us?
Well, there's the short story collection Things We Didn't See Coming by Steve Amsterdam. A collection of tales following the life of man who comes of age as the world falls apart and goes all-apocalyptic, we delve into a world decidedly more literary than fantastical. A fine effort, with some shimmering moments, but it's hard to pull off a work that feels like a novel in scope and comes up, well, short story. I still haven't read a short story collection with intertwined stories that was completely fulfilling-perhaps that's simply the nature of such a strange beast?
And how about Memories of the Space Age by J.G. Ballard? Another intertwined short story collection, though this one is more a thematic connection: "This collection brings together Ballard's 'Cape Canaveral stories,' eight in all, written between 1962 and 1985, and set in a future when the space program has ceased and civilization itself seems on the wane." I enjoyed the first story in this collection, "The Cage of Sand", but around the middle of the second story my mind started to wander and I started to realize each additional story was basically the same story told again in a different way and I pretty much skimmed the rest. Yet, you have to give some kind of hubris props to a writer who uses three epigraphs at the beginning of a story collection, one in Greek (from Homer), one in German (from Kant? Or some famous, smarty pants German, anyway), and one in English (from...himself!).
And then there's my current read, Oryx and Crake by Margret Atwood. While The Handmaid's Tale is a classic, I think we can all agree it's a rather dry story, well-crafted but not always super exciting. Oryx and Crake, however, is much zippier and punchier, as if the Atwood I'd read long ago and had now been merged with the mega-zippy George Saunders. More speculative fiction than science fiction, we follow Snowman/Jimmy as he forages in a strange, post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by genetic mutations, flooding, and other bad stuff. Much of the story is told in flashbacks, where we slowly learn how things got so bad, and while so many flashbacks often drag, overall it's been a pretty fun read so far (I'm at around page 200, if you're keeping score at home-and if so, are you on drugs?).
Yeah. So...reading!
War and Peace
I finished reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy today. Take that, rapidly spreading illiteracy! Somebody, in the United States, finished reading War & Peace today! HAHAHA! And it wasn't even an e-book, book on tape, or graphic novel representation! Hoo-YA!So. Big book, big ideas. Big names. Big epoch (1805-1819, with the meat of the book focused on 1812, when Napoleon decided to really invade the fuck out of Russia with a 600,000 man army and managed to occupy Moscow for a few fun, looting-filled weeks before he apparently freaked out and decided to head back east again and pretty much destroy his already deteriorated army along the way). Big rep for this book-War & Peace is often thought of as one of the great, if not greatest, novels of all time.
Well, it's not. According to Tolstoy, it's not even a novel:
"(I)What is War & Peace? It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed." -"A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace"
What War and Peace is, I suppose, it the biggest and baddest attempt at experimental/historical fiction ever attempted. I read the more recent Pevear & Volokhonsky translation (Oprah made them famous when she picked their Anna Karenina for her little book club), and in his introductory notes Pevear claims to have felt as if he were editing two different novels at the same time. "One is a very deliberate and self-conscious work, expressive of the outsize personality of the author, who is everywhere present, selecting and manipulating events, and making his own absolute pronouncements on them" and "The other is an account of all that is most real and ordinary in life, all that is most fragile and therefore most precious...and can be grasped only by a rare quality of attention and self-effacement."
As you might expect, we here at Blogagaard, being modern readers, much preferred the more "literary" moments of the work and were forced to slog through many of the more pedantic, history-book like sections. When you think of Tolstoy, you invariably think of the God-like, omniscient narrator (at least I do) and for good reason: the man had a lot of opinions and he enjoyed opining, over and over again, until you the reader wants to holler back, "I get the point already! History is not easy to pin down!" Especially, I suppose, since he usually shifts into this mode when describing a war that's now two hundred years old and just as idiotic as any other war, if not more so.
That said, I really got into reading this massive, 1,200 page tome. I sort of rediscovered my inner bookworm, reading no longer out of a sense of writerly duty but reading because I really wanted to read, wanted to know what happened next (on weekends, I woke up and reached for the book). When Tolstoy puts away his own voice and focuses on his characters, and all the many revelations that occur to them, all the heat of their lives and personalities, you feel delighted to be along for the ride. Think of it as playing chess with a gruff old chessmaster-he might be a little dry and off-putting at times, a little wind baggy, but if you pay close attention to what he's doing you learn a lot, you learn about chess and something about the force that lies behind it, the force that drives creation.
