The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman

When I was young, I loved scary books.  I even remember being home alone one afternoon while reading Amityville Horror, and being so scared that I had to go sit in my mom’s car in the driveway to finish a chapter.  My fascination with horror was relatively short lived, but in the past year, I’ve picked up a handful of titles veering toward horror, gothic, and the supernatural.  Doctor Sleep (Stephen King), Night Film (Marisha Pessl), Prayer (Philip Kerr), We Have Always Lived In The Castle (Shirley Jackson).  It’s been fun.  With that in mind, I took a stab at Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean At The End Of The Lane.  It’s a short tale about a middle-aged man who returns to his hometown for a funeral.  To escape the family for a bit, he wanders to the end of the lane where, by chance, he runs into an old acquaintance. Long forgotten memories of his childhood come flooding back. The bulk of the book takes place within those memories, where, as a 7 year old, he is imperiled by a shadow world that is using his body as a doorway into our world. The Ocean At The End Of The Lane is quite moody, though not particularly frightening.  Amazon tells me that it’s geared toward adults, but to me it feels like it’s geared toward the young adult market.  I’ve got no problem with that because Gaiman is an excellent writer and the novel flows along quite nicely. For me the highlight was the frame story.  His middle-aged interactions within the adult world and his grappling with fragmented memories of his past rang true and strong with just the right amount of sadness and melancholy.

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry

I just finished tearing through People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry, a fascinating true crime read. The book recounts the case of Lucie Blackman, a twenty-one year old British woman who moves to Japan to become a hostess at a club in Tokyo. The book dives into the world of the Japanese “water trades”—the range of nightlife establishments, from refined to grubby, that cater to sexual exploration.  Blackman disappears a short time later, swallowed up by the Tokyo underworld, and Parry follows the case. People Who Eat Darkness is a great read, giving a glimpse into Lucie’s motivations for taking on such work in Japan. 

The book also spends considerable time exploring the trauma that her family and friends undergo as they search for Lucie in a foreign country with vastly different customs than their own.  As an American, one of the most compelling elements of the book is the insight into the Japanese criminal justice system. The path that the investigation takes and how the subsequent trial plays out are a far cry from how such a case would be handled in America or Western Europe.  People Who Eat Darkness was truly eye-opening on many levels.  Highly recommended.

The Lime Twig by John Hawkes

As a college professor, I expose my students to a lot of culture (films, music, books, art).  From time to time, a plucky student insists that I must read a book or see a particular movie.  I’m glad to oblige, if it doesn’t involve too much of a time suck.  Recently, one student insisted that I read John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig.  He went as far as to procure it from the library for me. I’d read Hawkes’ Second Skin when I was in college, liked it enough, plus The Lime Twig was only 170 pages, so I was in.  

No question Hawkes is an excellent writer, laying out beautiful passages and turns of phrase.  The Lime Twig sets quite a mood amidst the desperate class of horse racing folk and petty criminals in post war England.  The Lime Twig is a caper about a stolen horse and the criminals and hangers on trying to get a piece of the action. For chunks of the novel however, the narrative is bit too opaque. Character motivations are often fuzzy and it’s hard to discern what’s driving the main characters.  Ultimately, I was left with beautiful scenes, but I’m not sure I always cared.  As I get older, I’ve become a little less enamored by experimental lit and novels that seem to go out of their way to hide the story.  An easy enough and intriguing read, but at times, unnecessarily frustrating.

The Monuments Men

I approached The Monuments Men with a bit of trepidation.  I’m not the hugest fan of George Clooney, the director.  I love the politics of his films.  I love the intentions of his films, yet I don’t love the films.  To me they’ve come across as a bit preachy without the cinematic chops.

That said, I looked forward to a war movie about art and the importance of art in society an culture.  What’s not to like about that premise?  Ultimately, The Monuments Men experience was an odd one.  Am I glad I saw the movie?  I guess I am.  The story, about an international troop of artists and art scholars trying to save European classics from the hands of the Nazis was not a story I was familiar with.  I learned a lot.  But the movie?  Oy, what a mess. 

It was a movie that could not figure out what it wanted to be.  The tone and tenor of the piece was all over the map.  A plucky, feel-good 50s war movie? A witty, rapacious comedy a la MASH?  An emotional, Spielbergian drama?   It was a real mish-mash of styles that sadly never found its footing.

The editing was equally sloppy. There was lots of narrative confusion. In the big picture, characters are spread out over Europe on certain missions, yet they continually rendezvous and meet up.  As a viewer there’s no sense of timeline.  Did those missions take days, weeks?  Why do they reconvene only to spread back out again?  Was there a purpose to the rendezvous other than to have all the stars back together again?   And many individual scenes also seemed devoid of finesse, leaving potentially dramatic scenes flat and uninspired. I don’t want to hand out any spoilers, but one particular scene that was poorly handled was a scene in which a main character dies.  I’ll only say that there was basic narrative confusion as to the set up of the death, the circumstances of the death, and ultimately no drama to the death. 

The film was devoid of tension, which is just not acceptable for a war movie.  There should have been tension.  The Nazi occupation of France, the Nazi retreat and their scorched earth policy, the brewing showdown between the Americans and the Russian, death on the battlefield.   All those plot points are broached in the movie, but none seemed particularly urgent.  

A frustrating film to be sure.  At the end of the day, I felt like I often do when I see well-intentioned docs that aren’t well put together.  I’m glad I saw it, but I just wish there was more art in the filmmaking. 

Dream #9 and Other Thoughts About David Mitchell

I like David Mitchell. Of modern writers, I think, hands down, he is one of the best.  Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet are two of my favorite novels of recent time.  Black Swan Green is a fantastic British coming of age novel set in the early-to-mid 80s and The Thousand Autumns, is a historical fiction of epic proportions that reads like a beautiful classic.

That said, I found Cloud Atlas quite frustrating. Cloud Atlas was composed of vaguely related stories that hopscotch across time and space.  Each story, in and of itself, was stellar.  However, the way the novel jumps from one story to the other, I found frustrating and unnecessarily difficult.  No sooner would you sink into a gripping story, then you would get whisked away from it for hundreds of pages. Eventually you would return to it, but the momentum was shot.  

As I get older, I’m not as interested in these challenging, post-modern styles of writing.  I want me some old-fashioned page turning.  Challenge me with ideas. Challenge me with stories and plot lines I’ve never before seen. Challenge me with daring thematic concerns.   But flashy, stylistic flights of fancy leave me cold and distanced from the story.

 
For me, Dream #9 falls into the Cloud Atlas camp of Mitchell’s work. There are flashes of brilliance, but ultimately it was a slog to get through.  The first 80 pages were particularly frustrating. I would have bailed if weren’t Mitchell.  The book opens with the main character, Eiji Miyake, camped out in a café at a Tokyo business complex.  He’s been estranged from his father and is now set to drop in on his father unannounced. He’s moved from rural Japan to Tokyo to bring this plan to fruition.  For 80 pages he fantasizes about how this meeting will unfold.  The fantasies are endless (80 pages worth). It’s a novel that refuses to get started.  Given the dream like nature of the opening, one doesn’t actually learn that much about the characters, their conflict, or their back story. I had to keep reading the dust jacket to assure myself I’d get out of this never ending scene. Ultimately the novel does move on.  There are some great scenes, but the book moves in fits and starts.  Similar to Cloud Atlas, I enjoyed it while reading it, but I never had much desire to pick it back up once I set it down.

I still think Mitchell is an excellent writer and look forward to the next novel, but as far as Dream #9 goes…I read it, so you don’t have to.

Blue Is The Warmest Color/Ender's Game

Took in a double bill of the much hyped, Palme D’Or winning Blue is the Warmest Color and the adaptation blockbuster Ender’s Game yesterday.  Couldn’t pick two more polar opposite films if I tried.  I was on the fence about Blue.  Parts of it I loved.  Parts of it were problematic.  Ender’s Game, I thought, was outright sucky.  Seeing them back to back was an interesting study in contrasts, Blue was quiet, thoughtful, and European, giving the audience plenty of time to study the characters and think about their inner lives.  Ender’s Game  was awash with a heavy-handed score, intent on telling the audience what to think.

Proceed with caution: Minor spoilers ahead!

Let’s start with Blue.  The film’s lead, Adele, is a high school student whose friends are obsessed with boys, sex, and dating.  From the outset, it becomes clear that Adele fancies girls.  I love the way the film captures that awkwardness of budding sexuality.  Adele swings wildly from cockiness to insecurity.  It has a natural feel in that regard.  She is a riveting character in the early goings.  She comes across as someone fully engaged with the world.  She’s bursting with enthusiasm for literature, philosophy, music. She attends political rallies.  She chides a fellow classmate for not reading books.  She does have insecurities, but those stem from her confused feelings about her sexuality. The only part of her life where she treads cautiously, revolve around sex.  She can’t fully be who she wants to be amongst her boy-crazy, narrow-minded girlfriends.  This is a person, who presumably will blossom when she meets the right mentor.  And meet the right mentor she does.  Emma is an art-school college student with a shock of blue hair.  They fall deeply in love.  They have lots of hot sex and then the film skips ahead several years. For me, that’s where the problems arise in the film.  Once we skip ahead a couple of years, Adele is no longer the girl we met at the film’s open.  Instead of being fully realized, she’s become a shell of her former self.  She lives only to please her hotshot artist girlfriend.  She has no life outside their relationship.  She lives to cook, clean, and entertain for Emma and her friends.  She can’t converse with Emma’s friends, because she knows nothing about art.  I just don’t buy this transformation from vital youth to dependent lover.  Yes people change and relationships can do screwy things to people, and yes Adele fell in love with an older woman, but Adele was ready to take off.  She’s set up as someone ready to fully embrace the world.  She meets the right person, and then she backslides into a stereotypical school girl in love.  It was a puzzling transformation for me.   And when the relationship goes south, she turns into a blubbering mess, producing mounds and mounds of snot.  As the film skips further ahead in time, the relationship has been over 3 years, and Adele is still pining away and blubbering for Emma.  Her life is an empty void without the love of her life.  I just didn’t buy it.  It bugged me. 

Were there things I liked about the movie? Absolutely.  I loved the early goings.  The navigation of youthful feelings.  The quiet, contemplative European styling’s of the film.  I love that the film discusses art, literature, and philosophy. And I love that the director presumes his audience will understand and embrace these topics. I loved the scenes of Adele feeling awkward around Emma’s friends. I thought those scenes expertly captured being around those who one can’t relate to.  But for such a controversial film, I was a little disappointed by the somewhat conservative and stereotypical turn the movie takes when delving into the world of relationships.

As for Ender’s Game, I just plowed through the Orson Scott Card book to get ready for the movie.  The problem with Ender’s Game is one that plagues many adaptations.  It simply moves too fast, trying to cram too much plot into a 2 hour time frame.  The result is a lack of character development.  The book expertly tracks Ender’s state-of-mind, his slow realization at how he’s being used and manipulated, and how he comes to terms with his fate.  The movie blasts through the subtleties as the movie blitzkriegs from major plot point to plot point.  Also, one of the main tropes of the book focuses on how those in command, especially Colonel Graff (played by Harrison Ford), continually isolate Ender, leaving him to fend for himself.  While the movie hints at that, too often Graff and associates come across as paternal, nurturing, and working with Ender.  That’s a big shift and one I didn’t like.  The book drips with Ender’s isolation and the resultant frustration and internal conflict Ender experiences.  His friends are hard-won and don’t materialize right away.  In the movie he finds his posse quickly and they have an all-for-one and one-for-all mentality right from the start.

So there ya have it.  Short, oversimplified, with much less angst and isolation than the book.  I was pretty bored.  But still, who doesn’t love sitting in a movie theater for 5 hours over the course of the day.

Lucking Out by James Wolcott

I'm a sucker for reading about NYC in the 70s.  It's an endlessly fascinating era.  The dirt, the crime, the art, and the culture have an amazing allure.   That fascination drew me to James Wolcott's memoir, Lucking Out.  Wolcott cut his teeth in the art and culture world of New York City in the 70s.  He got a break from Norman Mailer, wrote for the Village Voice, was part of Pauline Kael’s inner circle, and was on the ground floor of the CBGB universe.  Wolcott also turns his attention to the sleazoid universe of Times Square before falling in love with the ballet. 

The book is most exciting as Wolcott recounts his time with Kael, going to press screenings of countless seminal films from the 70s.  His view into Kael’s universe is worth the price of admission for the book alone.  But from that point forward, Lucking Out covers material already covered in greater depth in other NY 70s memoirs/scene overviews.  If you’ve already read Please Kill Me, Just Kids, Love Goes To Buildings On Fire, Tales of Time Square, The Other Hollywood, then you are already pretty familiar with the material covered here.  Maybe I'm hitting my saturation point with hearing about this era.

At a personal level, I've definitely reached my saturation point on the glorification of Patti Smith.  Don't get me wrong, I love Patti Smith.  I love her book.  I love her music.  I love what she stands for.  But I don’t need to hear anyone else deify her in print.  I'm over it.

As far as Lucking Out goes, not a bad read, but not a mind-blower.