Fight Club-The Book

Fight Club. The book.  Have never read.  Maybe that’s because I’ve read Palahniuk before.  Choke. Snuff.  Liked. Never loved.  But there’s always been that nagging feeling that I’ve never read the book that put him on the map.  So I did.  I loved it.  No need to go into a plot recap, since most people have seen the movie.  But here are some quick impressions.

It’s reeks of the late 80s and early 90s.  The book is swimming in the influence of of Pranks! (Re-Search), Sabotage In The American Workplace (AK Press), and Apocalypse Culture (Feral House), all of which were underground, small press classics from the post-punk grunge years.  In a way, reading the book in 2012, gives it a strange, nostalgic quality for me.

The book has a great, distinctive style. Spare, economic, post-modern, driving. It is so much more rough-hewn than I anticipated.  I’m kind of shocked someone thought it could be a big budget Hollywood movie.  Granted, it’s a weird movie (and one I haven’t seen since it came out).  But it strikes me as a bold move to turn it into a movie, and a pretty adventurous adaptation at that.  I’ll have to watch it again.

Glad I finally got around to reading it.  It was downright invigorating. Big thumbs up.

Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime

I’m heading to France momentarily and have been reading a lot of French-themed books.  At the height of my crime fascination I picked up this memoir by famed criminal turned informer turned police chief, Francois Eugène Vidocq. It’s sat on the shelf for over 2 years, perhaps due to my reluctance to read a memoir of the late 18th/early 19th century.

I finally picked it up and the writing was actually strong. No question that Vidocq was a fascinating chap, and one who could weave a pretty interesting yarn.  He tells of a life of crime, and in his case the ability to be one of the top escape artists.  The man could master a jailbreak.  Eventually, Vidocq goes straight, becomes a police informer, and is such a skilled detective he becomes Chief of the Paris Sûreté.  The book is definitely an interesting look at the back alleys and low-lifes from a different era.

All of that said, the book definitely drags on. The books biggest problem is that it reads more like a series of anecdotes and episodes rather than a memoir with a conventional arc.  Vidocq is a transformed man by the end, but you never really feel that transformation. It happens as a matter of course.  The book just bulldozers on with one anecdote following the other. After awhile, no episode seems more important than the next.  A hundred pages shorter and I would have loved it, but at its length, I was kind of waiting to be done with it.  And I imagine I could have just stopped reading it and not missed a thing.

So there you have it.  Some good. Some bad.  Absolutely fascinating.  Mildly longwinded. 

LEMMY: 49% Motherfu**er, 51% Son of a Bitch

Saw the Lemmy doc, LEMMY: 49% Motherfu**er,  51% Son of a Bitch, last night.  I heard it was good.  Not entirely sure what I thought.  

Here’s what I learned.  Lemmy is rock and roll.  Everybody says so.  The thing is, watching the film, Lemmy seems like he’s kind of dead. If not dead, he certainly seems like a very, very tired man. Everybody interviewed in the film, from Metallica to Joan Jett to Alice Cooper to Peter Hook, talks about Lemmy with more oomph and energy than Lemmy brings to the proceedings.  It’s one of those weird docs where your main character is a suck hole of energy and the film lags a bit for it.

As for a doc, there are a lot of potentially great story arcs and the film just doesn’t go there.  Is Lemmy a genius who never quite got his commercial due?  If Lemmy is such a superstar why does he live in a Sunset Strip apartment that should be featured on an episode of Hoarders?  Is it cool to sacrifice your family and personal relationships in search of the rock and roll dream?

Lemmy has stuck to his rock and roll guns and, by all accounts, is successful and worshipped. And while everyone seems to say how awesome that is, it just doesn’t seem that awesome.  Lemmy grunts and claims triumph, but he just seems so damn tired and emotionless, it’s hard to feel like he's really won.  Everyone seems to bask in his presence, enthused by the presence and concept of Lemmy.   But the pictures paint a slightly different story, leaving the viewer in a little bit of a nether world about what to think.  Lemmy has no regrets, and I believe it, but the movie just doesn’t make me feel it.

And the movie doesn’t even dig that deep into the music.  The section on Hawkwind is pretty awesome, but then the film barely talks about the transition to Motörhead.  How did Lemmy get from space rock to buzz saw metal?  That’s not even broached.  Motörhead has been around for over 30 years. The arc of the career, the ups and downs, the rock and roll hills and valleys are never much seen or explored in the film. Very little archival material comes to the fore.  The movie is vaguely reminiscent of the Patti Smith doc from a few years back.  Lemmy 49% MF is more of a glimpse into the world of the artist today, but not much about how the legend came to be.   

It’s not bad, but it’s not as hard hitting as the Anvil movie, the Metallica movie or the Brian Jonestown movie, all films, which really dive deep into the trials and tribulations of the protagonists.  Lemmy is truly one of a kind.  He is a rock and roll hero.  No doubt that he is 49% motherfu**er and 51% son of a bitch.  It’s just that a film about a total rock and roll mothefu**er should be an amped up, celebratory wild ride, and this movie is just not that.

Experimentation & Inspiration: The World of Wonder

It's funny how creative projects come about. Sometimes you know exactly what you want to do. You have a set plan. You have a killer idea, which begets a script, which begets storyboards and so on and so forth, down the line. Other times, ideas materialize in an unexpected way—various ideas are floating around your brain, waiting to come into alignment, waiting for a spark that allows you to see the connections between seemingly unrelated ideas.

I just finished up a video for Alison Faith Levy’s beautiful new kid’s record World of Wonder. I’m pretty excited about it and it’s definitely an example of a film that materialized unexpectedly.

Thoughts of science, music and experimental film were buzzing around my brain, and in one moment they all fused together and the project was born.

I’ve been doing some corporate video work, as of late, and the company I’ve been working for developed a super electron microscope. Pretty awesome. As a result, I found myself with access to a library of images taken with the super electron microscope. Ants, spiders, pollen, metals, all blown up to 5,000 times their size. Beautiful stuff.

I’ve also spent the last several months prepping for an experimental film class. I’ve been wading knee-deep into the ephemeral and abstract world of those types of celluloid wonders. Because I had Brakhage and Baillie on the mind, as soon as I saw the super electron microscope footage, I immediately thought those images could be woven together in an interesting way. I looked at those images not as science, but as art.

When things got slow at work, I just grabbed those images and started playing around with them in After Effects. No set plan. No set design. Not even thinking I was going to make any film. I just wanted to see what could happen. What the possibilities could be. It was experimentation in it’s truest form.

When I sat down to play around with those images, I wasn’t setting out to make a music video at all. Now, to be fair, I should mention that Alison is my wife and I had been thinking about a video for Alison’s new record. But this song wasn’t on my radar, nor was this style of collage. But clearly, the notion of a music video was floating around my noggin.

As I began to dive into the After Effects project, I decided I wanted some music so I could have a rhythm to work with. I went to the iTunes library on my work computer, which has almost nothing on it. It did have World of Wonder on it.

I saw the World of Wonder track listed and, in a flash, realized that the song spoke about exploring the natural world with fresh eyes. Conceptually that resonated with what an electron microscope does—it looks straight into the heart of the natural world. And boom, just like that, in that instant, I knew what I was doing. I was making a music video for that particular song.

I hadn’t set out to do that, I just set out to experiment and mess around with some images, no end game in mind. And sometimes that’s how things work. You never know where inspiration is going to come from or what will pull your various ideas and thoughts into sharp focus.

As a teacher, I was thinking about experimental film. As someone interested in science, I was excited to get to check out an electron microscope. As a filmmaker, I was actually planning on making a music video for Alison in the very near future.

All those ideas were out there, floating around like dust motes, and in a specific moment in time, they all came together in my field of vision, and voila, a film got made.

Strangely, only one image, the frame that surrounds the video, remains from the electron microscope, but that's where the inspiration started.

1980s, I Apologize To You, Pt. II

NOTE: Lots of problems with my blog lately, particularly in Safari. I recommend reading it in Firefox or Internet Explorer. I'm re-posting this post, since it only appears intermittently in Safari. Sorry for the inconvenience. But I did add two more films!

More and more I see a certain reverence of and fascination with the 80s. Nostalgia for the 80s has been cropping up in movies and tv with increasing frequency. Certainly, some of my college students are seeking inspiration in that particular rear view mirror.

I think I’ve written about this before, but I can’t help feeling that my experience in the 80s has nothing to do with this current house of mirrors reinterpretation of the 80s. The entirety of my high school and college experience, as well as my move to San Francisco all happened in the 80s. Three significant life moments all went down, yet I don’t see a stitch of my world view represented by the current wave of 80s nostalgia. I suppose nostalgia is about reducing an era down to its main signifiers and amplifying their importance at the expense of the margins and bit players from said era. If you head down the path of subculture, your experience gets weeded out even more as the decades pass.

In any event, I didn’t like Thriller, MTV was not that important to me, I’ve never seen Top Gun, and I never cared for Hall and Oates. And while there are certainly some John Hughes movies I like, I can honestly say I don’t hold any of those dear to my heart.

So why bring all this up now? For some reason, I got to thinking about movies from the 80s that impacted me. And whenever I think about the 80s and movies, my immediate reaction is to put the decade down. My kneejerk reaction is to think it a somewhat barren decade from a cinematic perspective. I can easily pick out films from every era that I love, that moved me, and that I hold in high regard. Yet when it comes to movies of the 80s, I usually draw a blank.

As a little exercise to myself I decided to quickly come up with a list of movies that had an immediate impact on me when I saw them in the theaters in the 80s. Not films that I discovered later on vhs or dvd. I wanted to focus solely on films I saw in a movie theater while the decade was unfolding. And I kept it fairly above ground as well. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a bunch, but here they are.

I’m sure I could write a lot about how many of these films have not resonated in the public consciousness much beyond their release date. I could talk about how this selection of films sheds a lot of light on why I’m not on board with the current 80s nostalgia train. But for now, I’ll just list them.

Altered States (1980)
The Last Metro (1980)
Breaker Morant (1980)
Stardust Memories (1980)

Stripes (1981)
Body Heat (1981)
Das Boot (1981)
Gallipoli (1981)
URGH: A Music War (1981)
Dance Craze (1981)
Montenegro (1981)

Blade Runner (1982)
Eating Raoul (1982)
Fanny & Alexander (1982)
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Time Stands Still (1982)

Zelig (1983)
Baby, It’s You (1983)
Star 80 (1983)

Paris, Texas (1984)
Brother From Another Planet (1984)
Broadway Danny Rose (1984)
Streetwise (1984)

After Hours (1985)
Fool For Love (1985)
Hail Mary (1985)
Kiss of The Spider Woman (1985)

Aliens (1986)
River’s Edge (1986)
Down By Law (1986)

Matewan (1987)
Hope and Glory (1987)
Evil Dead II (1987)

Hairspray (1988)

Do The Right Thing (1989)
The Cook, The Thief, The Wife, and His Lover (1989)

As I look at the list, it’s pretty solid. Maybe they don’t all hold up and maybe it’s still not the greatest film decade ever, but I apologize to you 1980s, you're not all leg warmers and spandex.

1980s, I Apologize To You

More and more I see a certain reverence of and fascination with the 80s. Nostalgia for the 80s has been cropping up in movies and tv with increasing frequency. Certainly, some of my college students are seeking inspiration in that particular rear view mirror.

I think I’ve written about this before, but I can’t help feeling that my experience in the 80s has nothing to do with this current house of mirrors reinterpretation of the 80s. The entirety of my high school and college experience, as well as my move to San Francisco all happened in the 80s. Three significant life moments all went down, yet I don’t see a stitch of my world view represented by the current wave of 80s nostalgia. I suppose nostalgia is about reducing an era down to its main signifiers and amplifying their importance at the expense of the margins and bit players from said era. If you head down the path of subculture, your experience gets weeded out even more as the decades pass.

In any event, I didn’t like Thriller, MTV was not that important to me, I’ve never seen Top Gun, and I never cared for Hall and Oates. And while there are certainly some John Hughes movies I like, I can honestly say I don’t hold any of those dear to my heart.

So why bring all this up now? For some reason, I got to thinking about movies from the 80s that impacted me. And whenever I think about the 80s and movies, my immediate reaction is to put the decade down. My kneejerk reaction is to think it a somewhat barren decade from a cinematic perspective. I can easily pick out films from every era that I love, that moved me, and that I hold in high regard. Yet when it comes to movies of the 80s, I usually draw a blank.

As a little exercise to myself I decided to quickly come up with a list of movies that had an immediate impact on me when I saw them in the theaters in the 80s. Not films that I discovered later on vhs or dvd. I wanted to focus solely on films I saw in a movie theater while the decade was unfolding. And I kept it fairly above ground as well. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a bunch, but here they are.

I’m sure I could write a lot about how many of these films have not resonated in the public consciousness much beyond their release date. I could talk about how this selection of films sheds a lot of light on why I’m not on board with the current 80s nostalgia train. But for now, I’ll just list them.

Altered States (1980)

The Last Metro (1980)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Stripes (1981)

Body Heat (1981)
Das Boot (1981)

URGH: A Music War (1981)

Dance Craze (1981)

Montenegro (1981)

Blade Runner (1982)

Eating Raoul (1982)

Fanny & Alexander (1982)

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

Time Stands Still (1982)

Zelig (1983)

Baby, It’s You (1983)

Star 80 (1983)

Paris, Texas (1984)

Brother From Another Planet (1984)

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

Streetwise (1984)

After Hours (1985)

Fool For Love (1985)

Hail Mary (1985)

Kiss of The Spider Woman (1985)

Aliens (1986)

River’s Edge (1986)
Down By Law (1986)

Matewan (1987)

Hope and Glory (1987)

Evil Dead II (1987)

Hairspray (1988)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

The Cook, The Thief, The Wife, and His Lover (1989)

As I look at the list, it’s pretty solid. Maybe they don’t all hold up and maybe it’s still not the greatest film decade ever, but I apologize to you 1980s, you're not all leg warmers and spandex.

In The Garden Of Beasts/Berlin Noir

Erik Larson’s The Devil in The White City stands as one of the most compelling non-fiction books I’ve ever read. Weaving together stories about the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and a series of murders plaguing the Chicago-area, the book reads like the most compelling of novels. Amidst the drama and intrigue, the book is a stunning look at the world of technology, science, politics, and pathology at the turn of the century.

Larson’s follow up Thunderstruck, about the race for wireless communication, was a goodie as well, though not as stellar as Devil. I just finished his most recent, In The Garden of Beasts, telling the tale of William E. Dodd, the American Ambassador to Germany in the years leading up to World War II. The book focuses on Dodd and his family as they navigate and try to make sense of the politically charged climate of pre-WWII Berlin. Hitler and his cronies are on the rise, Germany is filled with a rising bloodlust, and the country teeters on the precipice of sanity.

While I certainly enjoyed the book and gained a much greater insight into those shadowy years, the book is simply not as riveting as it should be. The main characters, Ambassador Dodd and his daughter Martha are just not dynamic enough to carry the weight of the book. In an era filled with monstrous villains and those trying to stand up to them, the Dodds are simply not that compelling. Ambassador Dodd comes off as the eternal, misguided optimist, who feels his presence can help bring Germany back from the brink. Martha is by far more interesting. She’s young, saucy, and filled with naive thoughts about revolutionary movements. At first she finds the Nazis and their revolution exciting, but as her time in Germany progresses, she realizes how badly she’s judged the situation. She flits through social situations with key German and Russian players, but she’s so slow to realize the looming danger presented by the Nazi regime, that the book loses a certain oomph as a result.

In The Garden of Beasts does do a nice job charting the rise of the Party and the internecine squabbles within. But the book lacks the pervasive Nazi creepiness exhibited in the work of Phillip Kerr. I recently got turned onto Kerr’s Berlin Noir series. Berlin Noir is a series of taut crime novels featuring private eye Bernie Gunther exploring the dark passageways of pre and post war Berlin. Those books are fantastic, and to be frank, do a better job capturing the psychosis of a nation about to go off the deep end. It’s a world clouded by long shadows—an environment of paranoia where nobody trusts anybody, where neighbors turn against neighbors, and where people go missing everyday. The politics are thick and it’s impossible to know which way the wind will blow and how long it will continue blowing.

All of this is alluded to in In The Garden of Beasts, but, perhaps, because our two leads are somewhat Pollyana-ish in their view of the Reich, that sense of paranoia gets muted.

Ultimately, Berlin Noir and In the Garden make for excellent companion pieces. Same time, same place, same set of ghoulish characters. In the Garden feels a little more PBS in its delivery, while Kerr captures the darker psychology at play.