two dumb to play with themselves, part 3

1. The Present: Farhad Manjoo Is a Humorless Nincompoop

Farhad Manjoo has been on my radar for kind of a while, ever since I heard him come on the radio and make the following argument.

1. People are buying Apple products.
2. Those people notice that Flash is kind of, well, fucking ubiquitous on the web.
3. Those people notice that Apple products don't support Flash.
4. Those people are upset with the lack of support.
5. Those people are stupid and wrong, because Steve Jobs says Flash is BAD and Steve Jobs is smart--remember the time he shipped those funny-colored computers with the mice that didn't fucking work like at all because they were round but those funny-colored computers didn't have floppy drives and everybody thought he was nuts but here it is 10 years later and no computers have floppy drives anymore, so Steve Jobs is smart and Flash is probably doomed.
6. Also there is HTML 5, so who needs Flash.

(Farhad Manjoo at work)

1 through 4 there I think are pretty inarguably true. 6 is debatable, but I'm willing to have the debate. 5, though, I found a truly annoying illustration of at least two logical fallacies: post hoc ergo propter hoc and wildly overreaching analogy. (Might not have the Aristotelian terminology down on that second one there.)

And then I kind of kept on living my life without paying all that much attention to Manjoo, somehow. Pity me. But then he dropped this impassioned screed on the topic of Two Spaces After a Period Is Fucked Up and Wrong and Important.

I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces.

Yes, these truly are the issues that exercise the journalists of my generation: I feel excellent about the future. So I weighed in. Since I am a complete prick bastard, I clued him into my in-weighing.

Apparently nobody needed a stooge to mindlessly mouth their talking points for them yesterday, and all the local paint chips had already been munched, b/c Manjoo got all het up and decided to spend the bulk of the day angrily claiming levels of integrity and involvement his career has never at any point displayed.

(Farhad Manjoo interacting on Twitter)

Collision: Pretty heavy-handed for a guy who breathlessly reads Apple press releases for a living. @fmanjoo http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/
@fmanjoo: This was the best Apple PR note ever, by the way: http://www.slate.com/id/2260619
Collision: Yeah, I liked better the time you forecasted the death of Flash b/c we don't use floppy disks anymore.
@fmanjoo: That wasn't the reasoning. But I just disproved your baseless claim, and I'll do it again, free: http://slate.me/fufxrb
Collision: Yes, two spine-filled articles DO make baseless my claim that on the radio you gush so thoroughly that I reach for the dial.
Collision: And your reasoning went: Apple doesn't like Flash; Apple didn't like floppies; Apple will win vs Flash. Piffle.
@fmanjoo: On the radio? What are you talking about? Here's a third. http://slate.me/cPgj1T I could go on all day.
Collision: Apparently you can go on all day. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyID=130244142
Collision: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyID=125588123
@fmanjoo: You asserted that I'm never critical of Apple (reading press releases). How many articles would it take to prove you wrong?¹
Collision: Actually, I accused you of "breathless gushing". I see now you have other modes, including humorless pedantry.
@fmanjoo: So you'll concede I'm not exclusively positive about Apple?
Collision: I'll "concede" that you take timeouts from breathless gushing to act like a jilted lover. Having not devoted myself to yr work?
Collision: (2/2) Somehow I had missed those frantic screeds. My mistake.
@fmanjoo: Ah, in other words you're inconvincable. You've got your opinion and by golly nothing's going to change it, not even facts.
Collision: Right: like you on Apple. ;) Are you a fanboy? No. Did I say you were? Also no. Have you breathlessly gushed? YES.
@fmanjoo: You accused me of reading press releases. If that's not an accusation of bias nothing is.
Collision: No, no, sorry: was my mistake to single out the Apple press releases (the ones that stuck in my head).
@fmanjoo: So you're objecting to my offering praise for any company, ever.⁴
Collision: It's not just iPad YAY on your resume: I was wrong. On Slate you've also cosigned PowerPoint, Firefox, Chrome, Google, & Office PR.
@fmanjoo: Let's get this straight: You're not a accusing me of never being negative, because I've already shown you examples of that.
@fmanjoo: You're also not accusing me of being hopelessly biased toward one company, because you've already seen that's not true.
Collision: Hey, man, if that's what you think your job consists of? Carry on, my wayward son. But I do prefer your challenging of lies, yes.
@fmanjoo: So you're asking me to never praise anything, but I'm the humorless pedant.
Collision: RT @cfCollision So you're asking me to never praise anything, but I'm the humorless pedant.
Collision: Ooo! That one was a good one! That's the spirit--now try it on a claim made by a tech CEO! It'll feel *great*!
Collision: (I would say 'never praise anything' is a poor reading of my position, but I'm enjoying yr last tweet way too much to quibble.)
Collision: Oh, I don't think you're biased. I think you're a 'journalist' like Nintendo Power's staff members are.² You're an industry flack.
@fmanjoo: Yes, an assertion you're making while holding your hands in your ears and ignoring evidence to the contrary.⁵
Collision: I read your 2 counterexamples.³ You wrote my 5 examples.
Collision: You know what? Fuck it. You're super. You're wonderful. Hard-hitting work, thy name is Farhad Manjoo, scourge of the second space.

2. The Past: Farhad Manjoo Is a Dangerous Lunatic

The universe might be finite, so I cannot take on the project of arguing with every preposterous piece of nonsense Manjoo has signed off on. As a synecdoche, however, I would like to interact with the following excerpt.

Every Office app satisfies two important demands for Microsoft's large and diverse customer base: It's simple for novices to grasp but offers enough deep features for people to develop undying bonds of affection and expertise.

Let's...let's stop and think about this, just for a second. Because I'm not a tech journalist--one step straight sideways from the automotive section liars and scumbags, apparently--it's okay for me to think about claims other people make.

Imagine someone, a novice, firing up Excel or Outlook for the first time.

Does this imaginary cat--let's call her Ferdinande--say

Ferdinande: "wow! user friendly! as a novice, I feel comfortable with and welcomed by this program! I'm grasping it simply and, golly, I surely do hope I can continue to build expertise with this program!

Imagine a long-time user of Excel or Outlook. Or, fuck, Word.

Has any long-time user of Outlook, Excel or Word--let's call her Gottlobe--ever said

Gottlobe: "man, my expertise with this program sure feels good--I particularly enjoy how the program isn't bloated, sluggish and crash-prone! Microsoft, you've really made a product for which I feel undying bonds of affection!"

In Manjoo's universe, novices and power users alike apparently think and say things like that. In the cube farms I've worked in? Outlook is inescapable, spreadsheets are pressed into service in dozens of bizarre ways, and I have never at any time heard a single human express any pleasure whatsoever in their relationship with these products. I will go farther: short of deeply problematic levels of masochism, or maybe an advanced case of Stockholm Syndrome, it is in fact not possible to enjoy interacting with any aspect of Office. And anybody telling you otherwise is either barking fucking mad or lying right to your fucking face.

3. The Future: Please Anticipate the Following Asinine Farhad Manjoo Advertorials!

My main man Canada and I riffed on this for a while, and we expect the following kick-ass compensated pieces in the next couple months. (Note that Canada regards all of this as a waste of my powers, on account of Manjoo "ain't worth it".)

• 11 Reasons to Fall in Love with Bing
  It's suave, supple, robust, and surprisingly fun to use!
• Don't sleep on Corel Draw, folks: the old pony's still got a few tricks in her!
• Do You Know Juno?
  The world's first free email service is arguably still the best!
• Nintendo: Profit on every hardware sale + massive penetration of new market(s) = a colossal failure in strategy--a conversation with David Sony
• New physical formats for media: essential and useful upgrades or completely necessary innovations you can't live without?
• Xbox 360: 360 guaranteed days of pre-failure fun!*
  *Not guaranteed
• Product Set Itself on Fire, Killing Three: 7/10
• Early Zune Adopters Clear Winners in Long Run
• Closed Formats, Open Arms: How--and Why!--Microsoft Is Saving the Net
• Criticism Is Like Unto Raping to Murder: A Tech Journalist's Manifesto
• Hotmail, wow! The Innovations!
• PSP2 & PS3: Sony Finally Hits Their Stride!
• America's Most Delightful processors: Why you should certainly settle for second (-ish) in the processor space
  Because note--AMD gives you good value...and...uhm...less heat

4. In Conclusion: Farhad Manjoo Is Decadent and Depraved

This is America, so it's not like being incredibly inept and uninterested in doing your job is a crime. In fact, a guy like Manjoo, with three entire examples of effort, is probably better than most, at least in the stunningly offensive field of tech journalism.

However, my five examples--which, even in J-school, is a number bigger than three--were taken from the first 25 hits returned on a search of Slate. His three counterexamples were not to be found there--maybe he's been phoning it in of late? Braces for the kids?

Furthermore, those five-of-25 were the only five that actually expressed a viewpoint of any kind. The other 20 were just bog-standard effulgences of tech...uh..."news".

And if we were to examine Manjoo's self-selected pieces purporting to exercise the journalistic impulse, applying a strong intellect and unparalleled access to information to reveal unexpected truths improving the knowledge base and lives of the reading public? What do we find?

• One instance of piling on a well-established fuck-up.
  Which is to say, you know what you don't get credit for? Opinion pieces that express the opinion of literally everyone with an opinion.
  Agreeing stridently and trenchantly with everyone on the planet that the iPhone needed to make phone calls better than it did doesn't exactly set you up to displace Woodward and Bernstein.
• One impassioned and somewhat baffling howl about not suing people for patent infringement.
  Which, for the record, contains damn-the-torpedoes criticism like

  [Apple] rightly claims ownership over the ... specific way in which the iPhone marries software and hardware to do what it does so well.

• One lengthy whine about ads, which demonstrates his keen understanding of capitalism, as he says "wait, what? companies are gonna inconvenience me, the end user, by advertising at me? and they're doing it just to make money?" (The man has apparently never watched broadcast television.)
  The issue is that advertisements apparently are annoying on Apple device applications.⁶
  Other highlight: "I don't begrudge Apple any of this" written after 994 words of him begrudging Apple all of this.
  The main problem, of course, is that, as a bought-and-paid-for industry shill, Manjoo desperately wants tech advertising dollars to continue to flow to his domain, what in reputable fields gets called "editorial"; as he sees dollars go to things that are explicitly ads, rather than financing junkets for him to go on be impressed by MS Office's rich aroma and tender fillings, he realizes that he's got to up his shameful game and assault the new competition.

Is he a bad person? Probably not. But I think he's terrible at his job and I will go out of my way to avoid reading anything he writes in the future, bolstering my semi-long-standing campaign of avoiding listening to him fawn over consumer goods on the radio.

So let me admit it: Farhad Manjoo, you did make me change my mind. I admit: at the beginning, I thought you were just a silly Apple enthusiast. I was wrong. Then I thought you were a craven toady, as terrified of writing an interesting sentence as you are of finding and presenting a novel fact. I was right.

And before you unleash another instance of your interesting argument--that I must read everything you've ever written to have an opinion about your work--let me give you some basic truths, drawn from the realm of Moral Mathematics. You keep asking "how many [awful] columns and articles will it take to convince you of [the opposite of whatever point you're misascribing to me]?". Well, none. Because having read 10 of your pieces, I may have your stance wrong? but I'm certainly entitled to the opinion that you're a world-historically shoddy excuse for a journalist and that my life will be richer and better informed for your absence. Your position seems to be that I can't judge the meal of Shit Cake and Piss Tea you're feeding me until I've chewed every chunk and swallowed every drop: but I don't like the Shit Cake, I don't like the Piss Tea, and I'm not going to consume any more of your mush-headed corporate boosterism.

Am I trying to get him fired? Fuck no. Jobs for everybody, I say. Do I have a potent, throbbing desire for him to get a job he's actually good at, preferably in some arena I'd never under any circumstances enter?

Fuck Yes I Do

--Fat

¹Note that this is literally false. Nowhere did I say he was "never critical". How many articles would it take to disprove my actual claim--the claim that he does, at least sometimes, give uncritical lip service to preposterous PR claims? Well, it would take a review of all his articles to disprove that claim. Alas but that a cursory review of his articles demonstrates that the claim I actually made is inarguably true.

The illusory claim he tries to weasel out of? Sure, okay: Farhad Manjoo can certainly argue that literally several times in his career he has done something approximating his job.

To be so clear that even Farhad Manjoo in full-on defensive weasel mode can't misinterpret:

My claim is that Farhad Manjoo frequently abdicates both the potential and the responsibilities for analysis and criticism that are inherent in his position and chooses instead to function as a cheerleader for the industry, thoughtlessly reiterating the talking points of Information Officers and lending whatever weight his position possesses to the misleading and disingenuous horseshit spewed by liars attempting to mislead consumers and improve their standing in the marketplace.

²This was a cheap shot and I regret it. The staff members of Nintendo Power are intelligent and enthusiastic practitioners of their craft. I've been reading their work for years with enjoyment and increased understanding of the topics they cover. I regret associating them with Farhad Manjoo.

³It was three counterexamples. I regret the error.
To be fair to myself--which is easily my favorite kind of being fair--I found not five examples of him sucking, but in fact six. Which is more than five examples. Also more than two counterexamples. Or three.

⁴Note the move here is "you claim to be a journalist but default to reading press releases" becoming "I am not allowed to give praise ever". Ahem. No, it is not that you are never allowed to give praise; it is that you are always required to deploy intelligence and the insight your position grants you.

To put it a different way: you are required to not praise everything all the time.

To put it in his formulation: I object to Farhad Manjoo praising essentially every company essentially all of the time.

⁵I literally have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I have small hands and big ears, this is true, but I truly cannot hold anything with my ears, certainly not my hands. Maybe he means I was maintaining a position with my hands such that my hands were in my ears? But that's silly: not only do my hands not fit in my ears, the idiom is "plugging your ears with your fingers". Surely he couldn't make such a mistake.

⁶Sorry: reading this shit is deathly dull, and I've had to resort to typography to keep myself interested.

"River's too low to get my boat through the narrows."

Among the late silent period of Frank Borzage's films at the Fox Film Corporation, The River (1929) stands out as bearing an anomalously erotic charge to the point of a hot and heavy fever--of the sort which Alan John Spender (Charles Farrell) happens to fall victim to in the final act.Plot summary: A tall young riverboat driver docks his barge at a dam that has closed for repairs when he meets and becomes enamoured with a dark sultry seductress (Mary Duncan), alone waiting for her possessive boyfriend to serve his prison term--for murdering a man she was getting too personal with.

This film marks the final collaboration that Borzage worked with cinematographer Ernest Palmer and production designer Harry Oliver (or as I like to refer to them, PalmOlive, excuse the quip). The locale is bucolic this time and there aren't as many crane and dolly acrobatics performed by the camera. But the exotic settings again are magnificent: a river with a fatal whirlpool, a dam, rows of cabins to house dam workers (that look too real to tell how small they actually are, if in fact they were constructed for perspective), and an integral perspective train that runs along a bridge above the camp. Perspective sets are one of the treats I enjoy from the PalmOlive collaborations, and as a staple of German Expressionism and likewise influenced Hollywood studio productions, I feel I should add a brief definition: in this context it means building something small so that it appears to represent something much larger in the background (or executing the contrary effect). Perspective set design from this era is just really neat to me.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm also getting a huge kick out of the animals Borzage uses. In The River, Rosalee, the woman left alone for the winter, has a pet crow given to her by her murderous boyfriend to keep an eye on her while he's locked up. The trained crow is quite a performer.

The first of the two main points I'll call attention to is the psychoanalytic subtext. I realize I am watching this more than eighty years after it was made, but I can't help but point to a few items that seem appropriately viewed through a Freudian context. As I was saying this thing is smoldering with sex. Allen John has apparently never seen a woman, until swimming nude he encounters Rosalee. He then explains how he is on his way to the city, only to keep finding reasons to linger. During his unbearable pull to the attractive woman she first asks him "Get me some wood." Throughout the film wood is a symbol of his virility, as evinced by: his initial ignorance as to where to put the wood (she is frustrated she has to point to the "wood box"), and Rosalee's subsequent frustrated accusation "I don't believe you could chop enough wood to keep anybody warm." From a modern standpoint obviously the "wood" could be analyzed with an even more overtly sexual connotation. Another occurrence of symbolism happens after Rosalee first seduces Allen John physically (after suggesting they compare heights, she stands with her back pressed against the front of his body). He then leaves frustrated. But she gives him a lantern and says "You may need it to find your way back." There is a gorgeous shot of Allen John waiting for the train to the city completely surrounded by darkness, hovering over his lantern.

All I can say about the second main point I have is that Rosalee possesses a typically ambiguous set of motivations for a Borzage character. Whereas Allen John just wants one thing: her body, she vacillates between being repelled by all men, to having a fancy for Allen John, then back to deflecting his advances. She seems to object to being possessed by men, but wants a man who will treat her right; maybe that's the key to understanding her?

To close with I'll briefly describe what has to be the most flagrantly erotic scene in the film (without spoiling more than the advert above gives away, there's also an instance where Rosalee has to come up with a way to save Allen John from freezing using her own...). The lengthty scene where Allen John gets into Rosalee's cabin for the night results first in an attempt on his behalf to play checkers. Rosalee flings the board away violently, then cups her breast, sprawled out on her bed in a negligee. After she pleads for him to feel her heart, he can't resist, and it takes off from there!

There is also a "deaf mute" named Sam who rounds out the cast. This campy Love Story has marvelous production values, but I find its narrative a bit flat and hokey. But it also proves Borzage has talents that eliminate any criticisms about his Love Stories being chaste.

01/10/2010
--Dregs

"Love makes people unhappy. Why should I seek trouble?"

In 1927 Frank Borzage directed 7th Heaven, the technically impressive Love Story about two destitute wayward souls bonding amid a tragic WWI backdrop, and in 1928 he returned to the stuff that made that Fox Film Corporationi release so successful with Street Angel. Borzage also brings back his romantic leads from the prior year, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell for a second time along with key members of his production team, cinematographer Ernest Palmer and set designer Harry Oliver--Borzage only worked together with both Palmer and Oliver twice, with the exception of The River from 1930, prints of which do not survive in its complete form.

The exotic opening shot shows two uniformed Italian cops conversing in the foreground of a terrace with the foggy Naples evening entrenching them in the far off distance as the camera slowly dollies backward up a steeply inclined pathway.

As the dark tone is set it builds quickly to unbearably grim. Angela (Janet Gaynor) must devise a way to come up with 20 lire to fill a prescription or her mother dies. Her only options are prostitution or robbery.

Plot summary: A travelling circus star specializing in high-rise acrobatics meets a vagabond painter. The two fall in love until secrets from her past threaten the happiness they have found with each other.

As the story begins in Naples the ominous tone of tragedy is complemented by elaborately staged sets photographed using various crane and dolly shots, augmented by deep expressionist shadows. This familiar Borzage territory of poverty and famine is only temporary however. The narrative soon reveals a bright segue into the countryside where the Circo Napolitano has stopped to perform.

When the painter Gino Roberti (Charles Farrell) meets Angela, he is working on a portrait of a young woman posing with a goat. Around this part of the film one is able to appreciate how well the comedy works. (Earlier there is a trained monkey who makes a vulgar gesture at a cop.) When Angela confronts Gino for drawing away her crowd, she provokes the onslaught of the violent goat (the attack from the trained goat kills me every time) and is left on the ground with a torn dress.

But the animals are not only empolyed as gags. (Well, the bear cub is.) Elsewhere throughout the film one notices numerous occurences of wildlife: the doves outside Gino's flat in Naples, and later a cat there for instance. This may not be worth bringing up, but it is a subtle touch that I strongly appreciate towards kindness and the pleasant qualities these moments evoke.

Toward the end of the film, Gino and Angela are both in Naples and the ominous mood returns. The film presents a dichotomy of women as either saints or sluts. And Gino will eventually be driven to the brink of madness trying to figure this dilemma out.

The Bohemian lifestyle shared by Gino and Angela before they meet is a refreshing variant in Borzage's late silent period and allows the film to breath during the open aired circus interlude--the perspective background sets are a feat to behold. "O sole mio" becomes the refrain that haunts each of the fleeting moments when one senses that life can never be that easy and complications are imminent for the two lovers.

There's a sequence late in the film that occurs at the wharves where the music cue that underscores the boiled clam/soup line montage is so wrenching; and I think it is the only place in the film where the piece is used. So Borzage again won me over with his majestic sympathy toward bums (and I can't think of any other instances where Borzage's used montage either?).

Are these films overly sentimental? Of course! A point I've been struggling to articulate for a while now has been how I am biased toward a certain type of film that meets my highest standards of enjoyment and rewatchability. Here with the late Borzage silents I must admit I have become smitten with their artifice and over the top melodramatic shmaltz because of the eye candy and decor of lighting and the way that I am so moved emotionally by all of it; and the themes just happen to coincide with my own worldview: life is tough at times but there's always the fluttering moment when you realize it's all worth it; the fun of creation in Street Angel is hard to pin down, but it delights where many other movies fail--it doesn't take itself too seriously, but there are serious feelings at stake.

Angela's cynicism is quickly abandoned. From the beginning she claims that lovers disgust her. But her saintliness is on the line for Gino, which brings me to a curious point: the more I think about it the more I realize Angela practically ruins this dude's life and lies to him, then leaves him in the lurch; but in the end she proves her virtue how exactly? Well I'll also add that Angela's life is going well until she falls in love with Gino. So I guess my point is that these two pay a price for their love, and Borzage's again developed a maudlin Love Story which is nuanced and complicated in ways that are interesting and ring true for me.

If you think too much about details like these they don't hold up necessarily--the point is not whether they hold any veracity for real people, but that they can move us with real emotions while we watch a movie with constructed characters viewed as works of art created through the artifice of projected light and nothing more.

01/05/2011

--Dregs

FreeDarko's New Book Is the 801: It Is the Central Shaft

FreeDarko's New Book Is the 801: It Is the Central Shaft

We made it. We won.

0. By way of an introduction

Back when Reviewiera was a going concern, we loved us some pro basketball. Over the years, the Tinzeroes-hometown Blazers went from insane congeries to dull competence to injury-dominated semi-tragedy; a trajectory only sensical when plotted on axes of time advancing and relevance declining, as they now slot niftily into unfathomably stock narratives of opportunity equally missed and denied. I moved to Oakland, where the Warriors' appeal is that of miso: a thin soup that may nourish but will never satisfy. And yet, though I'm undeniably estranged from the league these days, and from the game herself, there is that with which I must contend, always: premierishly, FreeDarko: an collective.

We've made no bones about that in the middle of the last decade, Bill Simmons and FreeDarko male-enhanced our NBAppreciative endeavours; indeed they seem twinned/entwined--though perhaps this is merely an artifact of (my) biography: one would churlishly negate any connect, the other, having fucking well won the war, modestly, modishly, shyly withdraws to the unassailable fortress (Mt. Critical Acclaim? only partly--mostly it's Mt. Fuck, We're Like a Lot Smarter Than This Guy) of the high ground. And yet I still have trouble reading one without the other. Often I want to call one punk, the other metal: Simmons:Metallica::FreeDarko:Nirvana, but this is likely inapt. Christgau/Bangs, perhaps, one airily contextual, issuing forth pronuncianatos, the other doubling back, changing position and revising claims, listening--always listening--and seeming actually interested in both the matter under discussion and the world as such. All this is oblique strategy (at best).

But the point: there's now room for both. That Simmons is now the de facto mainstream¹ represents a real, and qualitative, change from before, say, 2001 or -2.³ Think of Hunter Thompson's off-the-cuff hit piece on sportswriting of the Grantland Rice school⁴, a school, that, when it comes to roundball, seems now without an exponent. Or anyways 'tis in eclipse.⁵ To come with a brutally apt pun: though Simmons is now the establishment, FreeDarko is at least thoroughly established.

0.5 May I disclosure?

1. I still:
   • read skim Simmons
   • check in on the occasional podcast (depending upon guest/mood/whim/degree to which work has flayed & denuded soul & spirit)
   • find him unutterably lazy
   • recognize he's trying to get away from writing as such and transition into other mediums (& good luck to you, sir)
   • can't remember the last thing he did I actually cared about or that made me laugh/think--okay, the Elgin Baylor piece and the Donald Sterling article⁶
   • acknowledge the power of the gesture he made to anoint Kareem the 2nd-best player of all's time
     But note! That gesture's potency depends precisely upon the extent that 1 is familiar with his shtick: a face turn only works when you bought the character as a heel.
2. I have been an occasional gadfly of the FreeDarko cats. The time Shoals told me "I actually think I hate you, Fat." thrilled and sickened me (srsly: I was horripilated & my stomach was weird all day that day) and I think comecleanwise I should explicit the following: I think that:
   • I consider them [FD] to be fellow travellers of ours [R]
   • they prolly think I'm a (n old) putz who often misses the point⁷
   • I only ever argued with them because I was so impressed by their project (and their product). And, occasionally I would beak them b/c I found their analyses genuinely lacking or problematic; mostly of course I was jealous and slay-the-fatherish, which they gracefully never called me on.

1. Reviewing The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History, 2010, FreeDarko High Council, Bloomsbury: New York

A person could say

"saying 'we made it; we won' really amounts to saying the once-revolutionary FreeDarko maxims of (1) Liberated Fandom + (2) style/psychology have both become axioms (viz, of fandom)"

without being wrong.

So now here's this book.

(I didn't read the first.) Partly I acquired it because, fuck, when one of your peers hits, you gotta support that shit. (YES I usually pay to see my friends' bands--call me an idiot if you will: I care not.) Partly as a look back as I walk (finally?) away from basketball.

It's a history, and it's a good one. If you're steeped in lore, it'll seem like a sherpa-guided trek through mainly peaks, high point after high point indicated, depths and valleys nodded allusively to but rarely penetrated. I claim I am steeped in lore. 1 year we moved and we knew we were moving again after that year, (so) I had/made no friends & would go afternoons to the downtown Reno library & read their entire shelf of basketball books, including, among the ones used by FreeDarko, Willis Reed's, Halberstam's epoch-defining The Breaks of the Game and the gave-me-a-chill-to-see-namechecked God, Man, and Basketball Jones--which I discovered only recently had Charly "Phil's Axes to Grind" Rosen's imprimatur.

Like any guide, The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will invariably occasionally baffle or infuriate a native.

• With full, rich sections devoted to both Charles Barkley and the 1992 Dream Team, it's unfathomable that nowhere is it noted that Barkley--not Bird, Magic, Jordan--was the dominant performer on the squad.
• Though facial hair gets a couple arty pages (96-8), nobody notes the greatest quote like ever in the history of the NBA: primordial Duke big white stiff, while a Net, showed up with a beard somewhere between '84 and '87; when asked, Mike Gminski did quip "black guys are afraid of white guys with beards".

I devoured this book; this is not the proper approach. I think it will bear coming back to, will reward return(s). It's not quite a reference, neither a snapshot; it's just a book you come back to because it's heartening, and interesting.

Impressive but a little disappointing is the degree to which this is a real history, one which plays it straight. There's not a whole lot of the interpretive flights--Eric Hobsbawm on playbyplay, Fredric Jameson on color and a breathless, starfucking Pierre Bourdieu roaming the sidelines--that made FreeDarko's bones. Here they prove they can get the facts down, get "the" story straight; they play the game according to the (man's) rules, & argue by means of facts you've overlooked, not by more-compelling-than-yours subjectivisms in & of interpretation. & it's undeniable, the skill of their argumentation, the quality of their research. Some will want to quibble, saying "that's not what I'm here for, not what I expect from them" & I say noted, & perhaps not unreasonable, but--metaphor fail alert!--going electric didn't kill Dylan stagnancy is revolting.

1.1 There are glories
1.1.1 Books

• Kareem's brilliant Giant Steps goes maybe a little underrepresented--and maybe it's too obvious/pedestrian for the collective to note the Coltrane nod, despite an explicit engagement with the notion of NBA's relating to jazz?
• Like I said: God, Man, and Basketball Jones, which I had long thought long-forgotten.
• The Walt Frazier book--which, several years ago, I found being sold on the sidewalk (hardly common in Portland), & gave to Tinzeroes, who found it without merit in style or substance.
• The Debusschere book--which I remember reading, but little else of.

These references and callbacks warm.

1.1.2 Race

Particularly important is the quiet but firm insistence on the importance of racism in Oscar Robertson's life (and career). Particularly enjoyable is the sidelong debunking of the pernicious myth of the 'soft Euro'--this reader hopes that this wonderful Guest Lecture is included as an appendix in the second edition. Particularly inspiring is the accounting of Bill Russell: Robertson + Russell here would form an excellent supplement to Eyes on the Prize: it's real history, it's important, and it's done well.

1.2 There are cavils

On cocaine, the narrative is that by this powder was the league ravaged and rejected.

"blame it on narcotics" (99)
"cocaine scourge" (92)
"rampant powder sniffing" (108)

But this drug had a hold on the culture of the time, and again explicitly over the last couple years. Hell, even Simmons--property of Disney, remember--gets to let his mailbags have stories about doing blow. James Crumley said somewhere "the judges and the lawyers, they never gave up cocaine", so I'm not sure the league was threatened by much more than standard sportswriter punditry. One last note on this: the Phoenix Suns had a massive coke scandal in like 84 or 85--apparently Walter Davis rolled over on literally half the team--and that's a story I'd like to see told somewhere, with a larger-scale examination of the actuals of coke in NBAmerica...

The collective bargaining agreement (CBA) discussion (104-9), while sober and detailed, would benefit muchly from context. The following sentence makes a union man like me Deeply Upset:

Collective bargaining agreements don't exist solely in the world of sports. (109)

And the discussion of the "equitable NBA trade" that's used to illustrate the CBA manifests little power for a reader who knows that:

• the NBA CBA dictates that every trade must exchange salaries that are roughly equivalent (within 10% +/- $100,000 or something, if my Ripple-ravaged memory serves)
• every team must on player salaries spend between a specified minimum and specified maximum amount of money
• the second bullet point logically obviates the necessity of the first, given that, if a GM has to spend above the salary floor and under the salary ceiling, she has to accomodate salary exchanges anyway, and thus
• player trades are radically reduced/constrained by the first bullet point, along with GM flexibility, since, say, a savvy GM with a low payroll and (thus) lot of dough to spend under the cap could take on a bunch of salary from a cap-strapped team for a low-cost asset; helping both teams, possibly

Which is all to say that the NBA's business practices demand some interrogation; this is not FreeDarko's favorite mode of analysis; I wish it were.

1.3 More goods and greats

One must note the production values. As an artifact, this is an attractive and thoroughly appealing book. I know the corners will one day crumble, the pages crease; soil is always everywhere and nothing good can stay, but out of the box? this is a triumph. The art is lovely. I wonder if it will date. I have no clear idea. The Knicks and Celtics pieces are both quite wittily observed and executed; the ABA poster I would put on my wall.

I note one large wish. A few times, there are lengthy--and, yes, clear--references to photographs that do not appear. While their descriptive gifts and ekphrastic skills are undeniable, some of these passages left me desperate to turn the page and see the image.

The graphical displays of information I have given short shrift here: I will be working with those for quite some time; they are magnificent, and valuably high-content. A small wish. Wish there had been one chart of the rise and preponderance of the 3-pointer, perhaps with a small explication of "true shooting percentage" (going 2-6 from 3-point-land = 3-6 from two = 1-6 + 4-4 [from the line]).

2. Let us now praise famous bloggers

The book isn't authoritative--more a quiet off-campus one-on-one with your favorite professor than a lecture--but it's so gravely assured that the occasional misstep or mistake⁸ hits hard: more than a distraction, each one seems to founder the whole project, or threaten to--this, the peril of playing history straight. But really, these are easily forgiven, as the book, and indeed the entire FreeDarko enterprise, are so intelligent, earnestly playful, warm-hearted and fine-spirited.⁹ Just some smart boys men realizing (in the sense of making real) that some kinds of dumb fun can actually be smart fun. Or, to use their words, the men's,

The NBA is a far more interesting place when we also take the time to both note these similarities and be accurate about their differences. (132)

Fuckin' A.

This book_i is the Spurs, taking a challenge_j and beating it_j on its_j own terms by being exactly what what it_i is in the right way for that circumstance. & if that--beating somebody, their way, at their own game, by bringing yourself maximally to bear--isn't one kind of greatness, then what the fuck is?

I took myself down to a local bookstore and paid full retail for this book: you should do the same.

-Fat

Notes:
¹At the same time, both FreeDarko and Voice of the Mouse Ric [sic] Bucher (on Simmons' worst podcast since his last bad one) anointed Contradiction-favorite Monta Ellis a "sublime" and "unique" (respectively) and a must-watch. Well...duh: people who like basketball have to like Monta Ellis; and yet I claim it is a modern affectation of weakness development that supreme talents on off-the-radar rosters relegated to the second rank of the standings are non-condescendingly celebrated.<sup>2

2</sup>Nobody really took latter-day Saint Dominique Wilkins seriously until he had a playoff run cum head-to-head duel with Larry Bird's almsot unfathomably superior Celtics. Only then was it okay to like The Human Highlight Film, having attained (brief) competitive bona fides. It's the acquisition of strictly competitive achievement that used to matter, seems. Cf the standard hip-hop argument: who-sold-more-records AKA shouting "scoreboard", versus punk rock's "no sellout--integrity maaaaaan" yawp.

³I first heard of him when college buddy fellow traveller Day Sleeper Erin P. forwarded me "Basebrawl Fever--Catch It!". I think, actually, she may have printed it out and put it on my desk. Selah.

⁴A school now represented only by Sports Illustrated's redoubtable in that I doubt him every time he opens his mouth corny but not ineffective Michael Farber (nee Dickie Dunn), who truly captures the spirit of the thing. I actually like his het-up prose, and failed in an attempt to channel it t'other day.

⁵Some possibility "school in eclipse" is not my load-bearingest metaphor.

⁶Why I remembered this excellent article as by Simmons I will never know.

⁷My shoulder'd hurt with the effort required to type "they think of me" save for the one time I done got namechecked--after a dick move, natch. (Let me say publicly now that I regret the dickishness of my presentation there while sticking with the argument I was advancing.)

⁸A few mistakes, cataloged:
"strength" spelt wrong (111)
claiming Robert Horry checked Steve Nash into the scorer's table here (191) and that 'twas Bruce Bowen here (204)
The man was hardly always "World B. Free" (101)--he began Lloyd Free, went for the bog-standard brag "Lloyd 'All-World' Free", and only after that made the move to call for universal liberation.

⁹Stolen, this phrasing, from David Foster Wallace "large-hearted and fine" (169), from "David Lynch Keeps His Head" [1996] reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again 1997: 146-212.^10
10Photo credits:
Fat Lever
Alex English

Akira

by Katsuhiro Otomo (1982-1995)

The first three volumes of Akira are more than impressive artistically, both at face-value and as "sequential art" or whatever comic-lit-crit hot-button term you prefer, but they also comprise the main source material for the animated feature film (1988), so if you seen the movie, or, if you're like me and have watched the movie repeatedly, with religious attention and devotion (this would be about 1993-1995), then the first three volumes are not going to do a lot for you.  Rather, they read more like curio, as there's a constant meta-narrative at play in your head comparing the pages to their filmic counterparts, both in terms of accuracy as well as elements dropped from the film.

Its not until you transition into the final three volumes that Otomo gets his hooks in you.  The film, it turns out, only really covers the first half of this really, truly fantastic story.  Furthermore, the second half ramps up  Akira's radical sci-fi cred.  What starts as an excellent cyberpunkian conspiracy story about telekinetics (with a great melodramatic backdrop) shifts to a post-apocalyptic struggle of a demi-god's half-baked empire against black-ops spooks and telekinetic templars leading to a revolutionary twist ending (with a great melodramatic backdrop), complete with destruction writ large of Tokyo, an Olympic stadium, a U.S. carrier group, and the moon.  I read the first three volumes piecemeal over the course of a week or so.  I read the last three in one sitting in one night.

Furthermore, the Kaneda character, the clear protaganist in the film, takes on added depth in the manga.  It seems absurd at times but Kaneda's drive to stop Tetsuo has little to do with saving the city or stopping Tetsuo's sociopathic Imperial aspirations, but has everything to do with a sort of teen-gang violation of a code of honor.  Kaneda's use of a stolen special-ops laser rifle is one of the most memorable scenes from the film.  What's more memorable in the manga is Kaneda making no bones of setting out to simply beat Tetsuo with his own two fists.  The absurdity is of course that these attacks should be meaningless to Tetsuo by virtue of his telekinesis, yet there Kaneda stands before on the pages, surviving Tetsuo's wake of destruction again and again.  Kaneda's continuous horn-dog pursuit of Kai throughout the pages of the epic further underscore the degree to which this entire story might actually just be about teenage boys gaining the upperhand in what was originally an adult spook conspiracy. 

Little surprise the film is as good as it is, seeing as its ink-and-paper basis is an exemplar of the form.

-dd

City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff Vandermeer (2006¹)

City of Saints and Madmen collects 16 novellas, short stories, phamphlets, adverts, guidebooks, and notes sharing the setting or subject matters of the merchant city of Ambergris (the most valuable part of a whale), including its festivals, its original inhabitants (a strange race called the Gray Caps, or Mushroom Dwellers), its history, the giant freshwater squid native to the River Moth, the Silence (a epochal event wherein 25,000 citizens vanished without a trace while the whaling fleet was out of port), the death of Voss Bender (the city's composer-dictator, kinda) and subsequent unrest, authors who insist Ambergris is a work of thier own fiction, the Hoegbottoms - the city's preeminient merchant family, and much and many more details regarding this Queen of Fantastical Cities for the reader's delight. Quite unfairly sets an impossibly high standard for the depiction of urban environments in a fantasy setting, and may well come assume a sort of biblical status in one's mind for the myriad ways in which the simple exploration of a place can be a sum experience using different styles, approaches, tone, voice, etc.

The collection starts wonderfully strong with the novella "Dradin, In Love" followed by an about-face in style with the novella-length phamphlet "The Hoegbottom Guide to the Early History of Ambergris." A third novella-length story, "The Transformation of Martin Lake," rounds out what I consider the three pillars of the book as a whole, the remaining short stories informing (and countering!) the novellas and the other stories. "The Strange Case of X" is a veiled auto-biographical novella by Vandermeer about writing about Ambergris and a fantastic valentine (and hate mail?) to the creative writing life.  Then follow 11 shorter pieces which approach Ambergreis from any which angle, concluding with a 71-page glossary.

As each story hits your reset button its easy to forget how much you enjoyed an earlier installment. As mentioned, "Dradin, In Love" is a great kickoff, giving you a first-person seat to the major elements of Ambergris: Albumuth Boulevard, the Religious Quarter and the Living Saints, the Mushroom Dwellers, the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, Hoegbottom & Sons, Ambergris' industrial past (this is one of many subtexts - the presence of great, derelict railyards littered with engines, and other allusions to a lost 'modern' era), but this followed up with the indepth background of "Early History" and by the time you finish the marvellous "Martin Lake" (regarding a painter and the passing of Voss Bender) you've forgotten how much you liked 'Dradin.'

You will leave City of Saints and Madmen with a ripe image of Ambergris' damp, muddled, dispicable-history-laden winding streets and dumpy, moldy buildings.  You will be left with lingering questions about the gray caps, the Silence, and the equally everpresent freshwater squid.  Its violent festivals and art-intwined-politics will leave you more than a little mystified.  But forever after the words "Albumuth Boulevard" will bring a smile to your face.

Required reading from a perspective of another-way-to-do-it, and from world-creation-101.  Highly recommended to anyone needing a shot in the arm of faith in the viability of fantasy.  Best if served with Mieville's Perdido Street Station and Swainston's The Year of Our War.

-d.d.

¹ City of Saints and Madmen has enjoyed multiple printings under different publishers, the first few go-arounds seeing the addition of content.  This review is of the 2006 Bantam paperback editiion, considered the final edition.  The first edition was published in 2002 by Prime Books.

The Borribles

by Michael de Larribeiti (1976)

I became aware of de Larribeiti's Borribles trilogy when I saw that China Mieville called it an influential favorite.  Borribles are children who leave home and never come back.  As they become self-sufficient and street smart thier ears become pointy and they cease to age.  They live exclusively in abandoned buildings and steal for a living.  They despise adults, material wealth, and the police (called the "Woolies").  They are fiercely independent and frown on the idea of leaders, but also have a strong code of honor usually cited in the form of quotes from a book of proverbs.

Borribles have to earn thier names by completing or participating in some sort of notable adventure, and some older (as it were) Borribles actually possess more than one name.  The telling of name-stories is highly valued.

The first book involves the discovery that the Borrible's rivals, the Rumbles (a play on the at-the-time popular children's TV show "The Wombles"), a race of child-size mole or hedgehog-type things, who live in 'Rumbledon,' (Wimbledon) have been making incursions into the Borrible's London territories (Battersea, in this case).  Multi-named and famous Borrible Knocker decides to assemble a 'magnificent eight' elite squad of Borribles to strike out to Rumbledon and slay the Rumble 'High Command' (of which there are also eight).  These eight are given names correlating to the High Command member they are supposed to slay.

The trek to Rumbledom is a gritty journey across London, featuring real locations (see this Flickr set of Borrible locations, right down to particular houses!).  As such its a lovely valentine to both London and to cities in general, from hoity-toity neighborhoods to industrial scraglands.  The Borribles, in turn, are revealed to be city creatures born and bred - and are in turn made ineasy in open places such as parks, or underground - where one 'tribe' of Borribles called the Wendles live.  The Wendles live on the borders with Rumble territory and are as a result barely considered Borribles at all, living as they do in the sewers, being fiercely warlike, and doing such un-Borrible things as having a chief.

There's a flippant disregard for authority running throughout which gives The Borribles its deeper appeal.  Although all Borribles are technically children, they curse, drink beer, and wreak creative and violent deaths upon thier enemies.  Still, make no mistake, the Borribles possess a very strong moral compass, one which is tested as the book draws to a close.

Keeping in mind this is a young adult book (no doubt part of the cause for relatively recent republication), I want to recommend The Borribles to adult readers generally because of the above-stated reasons, but the Rumbles/Wombles gag (A) was totally lost on me because I'm American and not British, and (B) seems to have aged poorly to begin with. This recurring joke constantly threatens to undermine the story's credibility, even though it forms the clearest intention of de Larribeiti's intentions: slaying lame-ass commerical children's television with his rough-edged Borribles.

Followed-up by the far superior The Borribles Go for Broke.

-d.d.

"I'm not used to being happy...it's funny--it hurts!"

The first scene in the film gives a look into the lives of Chico (Charles Farrell) and Rat (George Stone), which finds the two men tending refuse floating downstream in a vaulted underground sewage system known as “The Hole in the Sock”. Here the production design by Harry Oliver may be appreciated along with Ernest Palmer’s cinematography, sublimely capturing the labyrinthine gauzy, high contrast imagery created with the contours of the perspective set’s cobblestone tunnels, steel-bar grates, flowing river of sewage, and the luminance of the manhole—ceiling as peephole to civilization.

This bygone era of filmmaking owes the advent of sound for its demise. But this 1927 film has left an indelible, high water mark in the Love Story genre which no modern motion picture has yet to achieve. Released the same year as The Jazz Singer, Underworld (Josef von Sternberg), Napoléon (Abel Gance), Metropolis (Fritz Lang), Sunrise (FW Murnau) and King of Kings (Cecil B DeMille), Borzage has distinguished his own personal masterpiece by finding themes which were universal for contemporary audiences still reeling from the devastation of WWI yet also timeless due to an effusive, expertly-crafted romanticism which should be the envy of any aspiring filmmaker.

As the opening scene proceeds, Rat, whom Chico loathes, gawks up the skirts of women who pass above the manhole cover under which the two work. Rat also appears to have been so named due to a crooked overbite and other rodent features (eating habits? scraggily whiskers?) So when Rat invites Chico to share a glimpse, Chico becomes outraged and it is this virtue which identifies his character. Perhaps stereotypical, this opening scene is of immense interest because it literally casts characters “from the sewer”.

And it is at this point what becomes clear about 7th Heaven, as hinted by the opening intertitle:

For those who will climb it, there is a ladder leading from the depths to the heights—from the sewer to the stars—the ladder of Courage

What potency! Borzage’s mapping out of his themes, in this telegraphing fashion, proves his awareness of what emotional manipulation is going on from the outset. It is soon learned that the film’s central protagonist, Chico, has a singular motive, or external desire, or more commonly referred to as a “want” (vs a “need”): to make the career jump from sewer worker to street cleaner. Who else but the Coens¹ have ever given a central protagonist such a dire existence?

It is Borzage’s nurturing of society’s dregs which is what gives his romanticism such uniqueness. But Borzage’s idiosyncratic charities extend into the realm of morality even further. He has not only gone to the sewers for his principal leads, he’s given them the only hope—courage—and simultaneously skewed his entire representation of Parisian society throughout the rest of the film to include nothing but impoverished stereotypes who are either “all good” or “all bad”; and the “bad” are identified so due to avarice, invariably.

Onscreen, the couple who finds romance is sewer worker, Chico, and Diane (Janet Gaynor), a prostitute. Diane may be Hollywood’s first hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. Again, to describe the power of the themes’ universality in 7th Heaven, it is the couple, Chico and Diane, whom the audience finds as the quintessential embodiment of maudlin heartbreak. Society has shit on Diane. Everyone thinks she’s worthless. Even after Diane cops absinthe for her alcoholic-whore sister, Nana, her earlier transgressions (honesty) result in Nana chasing Diane through the streets, lashing her with a bull whip! So, Diane the prostitute is literally on the brink of death once she’s introduced, and even though Chico saves her life, his first words after are “[her life] wasn’t worth saving, Papa Boul, [a] creature like that is better off dead.” This is about as manipulative a tearjerker as movies can get².

It is the film’s archetypal protagonists, again, which are the emphasis of this article. So, Diane, it should be said, actually carries the drama and embodies the greater moral lesson: virtue alone will not provide a solution to a horrible, impoverished existence³. Diane is the one to pay attention to.

If one rides along with Diane for the ride, life is made to be comprehensible and there are lessons: do not abandon virtue for money; if you are good, SOMEONE will value you; as long as you have courage, you can make it. Chico, on the other hand, does not value Diane initially, or even Rat for that matter; Rat even saves Chico’s life, and doesn’t even get a thank you! Chico only wants Diane eventually when she proves her worth—that’s inexcusably selfish—and learns how much she can do for him.

After the dust settles, it becomes apparent that women are virtuous, beautiful, long-suffering creatures and men are bullheaded brutes who better appreciate what they’ve got before it’s gone. Ahhh, romance. Furthermore, the film’s message, if the viewer is attempting to read for one, is not only will courage take you from the sewer to the stars, but that there’s nothing in between. Most of the audience is meant to learn that they can climb up out of their own respective “sewers” and manage to win over life’s unfair limitations—but these limitations need to be identified, and it is here where monetary affluence unduly colors the possessor with a greedy spirit of avarice. Can rich people be virtuous? Yes, but in the discourse of 7th Heaven, as is the case in The Bible, it’s the age old “easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle…” logic which becomes priority. (Are Col Brissac and Nana anything more than evil? And aren’t they the only characters who seem to afford comfortable qualities of living?)

Indeed 7th Heaven’s success is as a Love Story. While Diane, the film’s heroine, carries the entire arc of the narrative, it is actress Janet Gaynor who transcends the average performance and establishes verisimilitude for viewers. Yes, she won the first Oscar for this role, but it is her reaction to hearing about the news from The Front near the end of the third act which proves Gaynor’s talent. Gaynor’s projection of raw emotion in two particular scenes after receiving devastating news about her husband’s fate on The Front is a feat to behold. Here also, it should be mentioned that the film dares to mount some very ambitious WWI battle scenes.

Unfortunately, there are not many opportunities as of the writing of this article to watch 7th Heaven on a big screen in a theatre. It is to our disadvantage, because one only has to imagine what the taxi scene would look like on the big screen to get a sense of how inferior TV viewings are equipped for appreciating a film like this. Also let it be argued here that usually the miniature sets look BETTER on the big screen. (Personally, I discovered this phenomenon only six days ago, watching Metropolis on a big screen and it seemed counter-intuitive.) Since the film depicts the end of WWI in Paris, the film features utterly magnificent large-scale unit photography of epic battles where all Parisians use their own automobiles to transport every available garrison to The Front. The endless ant-trails of model Ts choreographed on their way into battle are striking.

Ultimately the discovery of 7th Heaven reveals a tearjerker Love Story adorned with an ambitious, technically formidable command of epic battle sequences and perspective sets photographed with the same ambition as UFA. There is also an illustration of the overlying sewers-to-stars theme which is boldly expressed visually in the subtle affinity of Chico and Gobin going from hose washers to hosing napalm in WWI. Borzage makes the lowliest people believe they are destined to be heroes through his commitment to the entire craft of this film. Bums are born to be War Heroes. Prostitutes are the most delicate flowers, and should be loved.

Borzage’s visuals truly must be attributed to the symbiotic nature of what he is able to achieve with Palmer’s cinematography through Harry Oliver’s sets. This film is entirely set-piece driven. Compared to John Ford’s silents of the same era, also filmed at Fox Film Corpotation’s Edendale lot, Borzage’s superiority is revealed. Ford’s compositions are wooden and clumsy, his priority is dramatic realism, whereas Borzage’s priority is the set and he dramatizes within the space. Paying attention to 7th Heaven’s set pieces will prove this point. Oliver’s sets include: The Hole in the Sock sewer network, the titular seven-story high flight of stairs leading to Chico’s apartment overlooking the stars, and finally, The Front or “Maginot line” battle in the film’s third act.

Ernest Palmer’s tracking shots are similarly marvelous. Imagine an early twentieth century Paris in black and white with people walking down a cobblestone street, if they were filmed with a Steadicam the size of VW Bug, and you may begin to appreciate what the effect is like.

In closing, the film’s finale is always the most important aspect of a film, and here we have one of the greatest—Borzage really raised the bar. But, the characterization of WWI Parisians at the bottom of their luck who end up saving each other through romance is noticeably as, if not more important to this film’s power. And the way God is dealt with cynically is also important. God, or, as is more common the term used to denote a higher power in this film, Bon Dieu, is indicted and held responsible for the hardships of the couple from the beginning. Most often the characters are avowed atheists, and at the end no one thanks God. This is more realistic than a heavy handed Christian tendency to establish causality of fulfillment to God and God alone.

I guess in a sense I applaud Borzage’s Heaven, as opposed to the usual heaven associated with Christian dogma. And I admire his optimism and faith in individual worth. What these characters wanted was salvation, but what they learned they needed more was courage. Frank Borzage has caused me to learn what power the Love Story has, but more importantly who can have it. And Borzage isn’t a coward—while indicting God and society, he still gives his heroes the courage to make it. (And we all know “courage” is Borzagespeak for True Love.)


¹On the commentary track for The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001, Coens) Billy Bob Thornton emotionlessly describes his character as “a barber considering going into the dry-cleaning business”.

²This plot is one of my favorites. For other instances of a brute having a loyal, waif, love interest who he abuses for the duration of the film, until it’s too late and she’s gone, upon which moment the schlub is devastated and broken internally, see Anthony Quinn in La Strada (1954, Federico Fellini) or Sean Penn in Sweet and Lowdown (1999, Woody Allen).

³Diane reminds me of Justine, the central protagonist in the novel I’ve called my #1 favorite my entire adult life—Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791 by Marquis de Sade)—which depicts a similar premise involving a virtuous sister and a sister who leads a life full of vice who are both left to fend for themselves after they lose their parents.


09/26/2010
--Dregs

Liquid Solution is decadent and depraved

Around here, we pledge allegiance to Some Stuff Is Better Than Other Stuff. That's old news. We pledge thus, though, with a purpose:

Axl Does It with a Porpoise

we want to identify that Better Stuff, because it helps us live a better life. When it comes to living a better life, I drink coffee. A lot of coffee. And I never--ever--make coffee at home, because it's not just the drug I crave and require, it's the being not at home of it all.

Since I don't hate our mother the Earth--much--I don't support the cutting down of like every single fucking tree in the entire world. So I carry--everywhere I go--a go-cup. Been carrying them since around '98. Usually they get replaced after I lose one, or lose the lid. Occasionally, I'll flat-out break one. But I always have one on me.

Couple months ago, I decided to retire my old model. A battle-scarred old soldier, I'd had 'er since since at least 04. She needed replacing because...well, I'd become uncomfortable showing up at job interviews with a toothless, incoherent old veteran. Same principle as wearing long-sleeved shirts to work: it's not whether or not they see that I have a bunch of tattoos, it's about whether or not I have enough savvy to make the right moves, send the right signals in and for the environment. So I did betake myself down to the Berkeley Bowl, after striking out at like three drugstores, and ended up with a luminous little number from Liquid Solution.

How is the Liquid Solution? Let me be as clear as I can be:

• Liquid Solution Travel Mugs Are Wretched Products

• The Company Making Liquid Solution Travel Mugs Is a Criminal Enterprise

• Avoid Buying This Product

The main problem is the lid. I would describe its fit as "poor". Or anyway, I would if I were a better person. As I am not a better, or even good, person, I would describe the lid's fit as "incredibly fucking sloppy" and "entirely unacceptable"; I would further suggest that a "Liquid Solution" is precisely what you will have spilling down your chin and onto your shirt if you trust this cup's lid to keep liquids from exiting the cup except at and from the duly appointed portals.

Your expectations for a cup may mirror mine. I want the device to: contain liquids; release liquids; do these things in predictable ways that are controlled by me. This Liquid Solution cup, being garbage, fails to meet my expectations. Therefore, it is garbage.¹ Somehow, there is always some coffee² left in the mug, which cannot be gotten out of it by normal use or special attentions on my part. No, the only way I can get that last bit of brew out is by tossing the mug into my bag and riding my bike around for a while. That procedure invariably extracts...call it a metric fuckload of coffee from the apparently empty vessel, then deposits that substantial quantity of load onto my papers, my clothes, my drugs, whatever happens to be in my bag that day.

Oh, also the handle is already inexplicably cracking.

Liquid Solution, you are either inept makers of things or you are savage, chiseling monsters of fraud. For ten fucking bucks, do I have the buyer's remorse? No. I have the buyer's rage.

Would not buy again; would not recommend to friends.

Four stars out of five.

Rest in peace, old mug, ancient warrior. You were twice the cup at half the price today's world e'er will know.

¹This is a Warlock Pinchers joke. About mimes and France, originally.

²"Coffee. Black coffee. Then I do some pull-ups and masturbate."

Matt Scandrol, after Henry Rollins (circa 1994)

pale kings and princes

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