"THE REDEEMED SURREALISTS": I sort of review an art show, at Crisis...

In Norse mythology, the earth was formed from the body of Ymir, the father of the frost giants. His blood became the ocean, and his skull the sky. It’s a grim vision of life, and yet a strikingly anthropomorphic one: The world is shaped like a man and the man is dead.

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"SEEING LIKE A STATE": I review Collaborators, in which Mikhail Bulgakov meets Joseph Stalin and hijinks ensue....

I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.
--Djuna Barnes, quoted in Philip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes; I'm against seeking dignity for oneself as a general rule, but I liked this line a lot and I think it explains some of why I speak much more freely in fiction than in my occasional attempts at memoir-type writing.

THE IMAGINATION OF MAN'S HEART IS EVIL FROM HIS YOUTH. A few more thoughts on Black Swan and its reviews.

First, here's Kindertrauma, with prose as OTT as the movie itself! Much love, but as with the movie, you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate the review. I wonder if our mutual appreciation for this flick and Frozen (otherwise vastly different horror-shows) is because we were willing to watch two desperately flawed movies for what they did right? It's so hard to make recommendations, in general, because nothing is perfect, Nina, so it's a question of whether the misses will overwhelm the hits for any specific viewer. For me Black Swan hit hard. (Like this guy!)

Commonweal's review did one thing right, in comparing Black Swan to Repulsion. I wish I'd thought of that! But what's bizarre to me is that the review accused Black Swan of being cold, compassionless, unable to take the audience into empathy with a disturbed mind. And that's a criticism I'd make of Repulsion--despite its astonishing imagery--whereas I thought, as I tried to indicate earlier, that Black Swan actually has a lot of sympathy for all of its characters.

Repulsion also has a much more simplistic underlying psychological theory than Black Swan, I think. (Black Swan's dialogue appears startlingly on-the-nose, which is why I called it "crude," although I do appreciate that no one who speaks about Nina is actually right.)

OH, ROMANCE IS NOT A CHILDREN'S GAME: A review of Black Swan, finally. [lightly edited bc I initially posted an unedited version--fixed some typos and rhetorical fumbles, but substantively this is the original post--sorry! A bit more on this movie later tonight.]

I saw this movie I think more than a month ago, but had a hard time figuring out how to talk about it. So this is my flailing attempt to describe why it completely worked for me despite often being crude.

I think The Vault of Horror is really on to something in labeling the movie "expressionist." Black Swan is almost a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for women. I know some viewers were disappointed that the movie pulled its punches on "body horror"; for me, Natalie Portman looking at herself in the mirror was vastly more terrifying than any H.R. Giger-influenced scuttling creation. I explained it to a friend by saying I thought Black Swan had achieved balletic body-horror: camp, because camp is always the razor's edge where tragedy meets parody. Loveless, cruel, and longing: that's how Black Swan woos its audience, all femme-fatale.

Black Swan gives us both repression-is-horror and self-expression-is-horror. I'm not sure I can think of a horror movie which managed to stay en pointe so completely. (For example, and I get that other people have other experiences of this movie, I thought that the hippies [eta: pagans, but you know what I mean!] in the original Wicker Man were so gross and silly that the movie's central conflict never felt real to me. I almost think that a horror movie, to succeed, needs you to love two conflicting sides [cf Juno and Beth in The Descent, for a case in which the obvious enemy is, for the audience, really just a way of raising the stakes and illuminating the conflicts between the women?].) Anyway, I loved Nina, I loved her naive idiot director, I loved her rivals, and I think if I were a better person I would have even loved her mother. I thought TVOH's line, "Nina's startling transformation into the black swan is the transformation of an individual who can only find release in the acceptance of that within her which also has the power to destroy her," was exactly not the point of the movie. Free to Be You and Me was not what this movie is about. More like, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

One reason I didn't post about this movie before is that I wasn't sure how to talk about the fact that there are at least two, maybe three, scenes in which Natalie Portman simulates masturbation. And I'm kind of intensely ambivalent about that, even beyond the part where I did actually look away from the screen for certain moments of the movie. First, I was reminded of how censorship breeds creativity. If the makers of this movie knew they couldn't get an actress, a human person, to deploy her sexuality in this creepy diffused poly- and abstracted-erotic way, I think they would have found some metaphorical ways to make their point.

But that point would always have been masturbation, I think. Black Swan is actually aligned with Catholic sexual morality insofar as masturbation is one manifestation of Nina's spiral down into herself. Even her fantasies about connection with another woman are presented, by the movie, as masturbatory hallucination. Nina is never granted eros. All she has is self--the hated self, the perfect and exalted self, but never anything or anyone but Nina.

Soldiers, this solitude
through which we go
is I.

When you tell somebody, "Express yourself"--you'd better be pretty sure you know who she really is inside. Black Swan, with its rage against both repression and self-actualization, is a movie against our times.

...AND NEW THINGS TO HIDE: My review of "Hide/Seek," the *~*controversial*~* gay-themed exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, is up at the Commonweal website. I'll post some notes which didn't make it into the final draft in a bit. The exhibit runs through February 13 so you really, really should go if you're interested in the subject matter and you're in the area.

A CHRISTMAS WISH LIST FROM GEEK CORNUCOPIA: "But there are things that are either in legal limbo or hard-to-find (even on the gray market or in archives) that I'd like to see...." Oh man, that second one sounds amazing.

THE LAUGHING SUN:

I know I just got finished explaining that biology is destiny in the Palomar stories. But what struck me upon rereading the material collected in this volume, dominated by the titular story of a serial killer’s stay in the town, is the power of ideas. Not emotional or sexual drives, even, like the web of lust and unrequited love surround Luba’s mother Maria in the suite of stories that forms the second half of the collection, but actual honest-to-god ideas. Tonantzin is literally driven mad — broken — by the late Cold War political apocalypticism of her criminal boyfriend. (He himself is freed from nihilism’s grip by a jailbird religious conversion, for all the good it does anyone.) Humberto is thrown so far off-kilter by his discovery of the avant-garde artistic tradition from the Impressionists onward that the impact, combined with his fear of the killer, drives him to abandon notions of right and wrong entirely in favor of the truth art can express. In both cases, this ends in disaster.

But there’s a counterpoint to the damage these ideas do.

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I said, "My novel is purely autobiographical. Everything in it is exactly as it happened, moment by moment--sometimes even written down moments after the event. The main character bears my name. I'm writing it in order to persuade the love of my life to come back to me; I'm afraid it's going to be a very long book. That's the avant-garde technique I've invented: it's called realism."
--Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony

DECADENCE AND THE A.M.E. CHURCH: A few thoughts, not a review, about Passing Strange. It's the story of a young black man from LA who seeks himself, or meaning, or something, through Amsterdam and West Berlin and finally home. ETA: It's at the Studio Theater through August 8.

1. I loved this! I loved it well beyond reason. I loved it in part because it really connected with the audience Friday night. I get that it's easy to be cynical about whitefolk toe-tappin' at musicals about black identity. But that isn't what happened here. What happened was more like when I went to see Marlon Riggs's film Black Is/Black Ain't, and at the end credits we heard the opening strains of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"... and the whole theater, black and white and read all over, started to sing.

If this city is your heart then this play will take you home.

2. The insistent decadent aesthetic was amazing! I don't know if I've ever seen such a complete assimilation of decadence to the American experience, which is so often presented as sincerist, outside a specifically gay narrative... with one exception. The fact that the exception is Invisible Man should tell you how thrilled I was by the way this play and this production negotiated the ways in which masks melt into the skin, culture can but can't be rejected (one of the characters makes the point I made somewhat idiotically here!), and America is an absent but inescapable parent.

I loved that even the complacency and hypocrisy of the mainstream black church was presented as a possible vehicle for becoming "real." It didn't work for the narrator, but I genuinely didn't feel like the play blamed Mr. Franklin (the PK, who uh... maybe I think plays the organ, if you see what I'm sayin' here) for being a halfway house rather than a home for the narrator. There was just a lot of generosity in this script. Everyone's masks were honored even though the show also acknowledged the genuine poignancy and power of the rhetoric of "realism."

It's really fascinating to compare this play to Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, which I also saw at the Studio. Christianity is a named thing here, a live option in a certain sense, which it never is for Stoppard's characters. And yet the specific form of Christianity is kind of intriguing: Words like identity, meaning, and love are very much central to the Christian possibility, but words like sin, grace, redemption, forgiveness, and salvation are totally absent. That's in no way a criticism of the show! I mean it says so much and works so well.

3. Oh Lord, the pastiches were so perfect! This is a musical, so yeah okay it gets sentimental in the end. But before then, the pastiches of bougie church life ("Baptist Fashion Show") and '79/'82 punk (wow I don't even know which song this was, but the lyrics "I'm a business motherfucker" probably help you remember it!) and '80s West German punk style are just so loving and forgiving.

4. Rock 'n' Roll is much more cross-generational than this play. There is no next generation here. There is no pregnancy, no child, no humiliation as our own rebellions are deployed against what we really do think is now our greater wisdom as adults! There's no need to show what it feels like to grow up.

And yet unchosen obligation is still the throbbing heart of this show. When it gets sentimental, which believe me, it jumps into with all its musical-theater gross Grizabella make-it-cute heart... even so it's at least sentimental about unchosen loves. In fact, the play is adamant that the most blunt forces in love are most powerful, love without understanding, mother and son beyond any kind of intellectual or even intelligible connection. She is his and at last he is hers and and no one can tell anybody why. Motherhood is handcuffs locked on both ends. (There's no mention of the protagonist's father. I honestly didn't notice this until at least the intermission, even though it's my actual job. I think that speaks to a level of realism in the play itself; it isn't playing to the skybox.)

But yeah, I kind of missed the depiction of what might happen to this guy, with his complex relationship with unchosen obligations in general and parenthood in particular, if he became a parent. Why is this play so contracepted? Aren't there more interesting stories to be told in the unchosen future?

If it were any more real, it'd be fictional.
--Passing Strange (now at the Studio Theater!), Stew and Heidi Rodewald; the line recurs but it's always earned

"BLACK AND WHITE": I have a review in the current Weekly Standard, of the Phillips Collection's exceptional show, "Man Ray, African Art, And the Modernist Lens," through 01/10/10. The show is really terrific; and I think actually this review is pretty good, too. Subscribers-only for now.

FACTORIES THAT MAKE FACTORIES: I really loved (Untitled), even though I went in to the theater with a lot of skepticism. Basically, I expected the movie--no wait, I mean "film"--to beat up on experimental art from a fairly basic "my kindergartner could make that" perspective. Instead, I got a complicated, even humanist (not my favorite philosophical stance--I'm a personalist, not a humanist--but still) fable in which both commercial success and boundary-pushing were simultaneously celebrated and interrogated.

So here are three points/questions about the movie.

1) It's so funny! I mean, I'd already seen the line, "Harmony is just a capitalist plot to sell pianos!" in ads for the flick (and using that line in ads is kind of adorably recursive); but there were so many other great lines and moments. I think the sex scene, in which the classic "How does a bra come off?" puzzle was made vastly more complex by the lady's baroque clothing, might have been my favorite.

And I note that many of the satirized characters are also humanized. Not all--the Damien Hirst caricature, for example, doesn't get more than a comeuppance, and ditto the easily-snowed male collector. But this movie is more a debate or dialogue than a treatise: Lots of perspectives get their say, and get to be human.

2) I love how the movie draws out the bluntly literal bent of so much avant-garde art. This isn't art you experience, or even art you endure; it's art you solve. Possibly the most blatant expression of this fact comes early in the movie, when the hot haute collectrix says that the rattling of a bucket on the end of a chain signifies "the unchaining of desire," or some such. I will always stand up for abstraction and stylization as a way of representing a truth behind "realist," Naturalistic human experience; but this movie showcased the ways that abstraction can become childish, an alphabetic relation of image to concept in which the image adds nothing to the concept.

I think that's one reason that the movie manages to show so much terrific avant-garde art, and contrast it with the art being mocked. I mean, I personally didn't care for the shimmery-glasses music of the Avant God at the end--I thought it was pretty and twee. But I did nonetheless get that it was attempting to be music, something nonliteral, something unspeakable, something more lovely and complex than a chain falling into a bucket to represent the unchaining of desire.

3) Freddie's old post about Damien Hirst made me think about one question. I mean, I think Freddie is wrong on at least five different levels!, lol (what is actually wrong with fifty beautiful pictures of water lilies?), but the thing I most want to question right now is the idea that art has been emptied of meaning.

I think the responsibility of the modern artist is to recognize the inability of symbols to signify.

Look. In the modern era, wherever you'd care to place that, there was a crisis of representation. (I should say that this next bit isn't mine alone but rather is boilerplate undergrad art history. It's still true.) Everywhere, traditional structures of certainty and meaning were being subverted. Religion, science, government, civic society were all facing new and frightening challenges. Into this maelstrom came the popularization and eventual universality of the camera and the photograph, a direct and insurmountable challenge to the preeminence of the artistic image as the primary mode of representation. In the face of this challenge, the response of many artists has been to abandon the notion of representation at all. Just as literature in the modern era was the literature of exhaustion, art in the modern era was the art of a tradition that had, in a small but significant way, admitted defeat. Art itself fails, in the modern era.

--Freddie

Because I agree with Freddie that "beauty" isn't the only aim of art. And (Untitled), I think, does as well: It gives the stellar line, "When did beauty become so [redacted] ugly?!" to a pretentious painter of pretty corporate sunbursts. (One of the movie's many triumphs is that my self-confessed Philistine friend said, afterward, "You know--I really liked his paintings!" They're likable! They're pretty and pleasant, and I actually don't mean that with any degree of contempt; I would think well of a hotel or office which had these lovely, balanced abstractions on its walls. Anyway, point is, I get that art can go beyond beauty; I just want it to go beyond beauty into sublimity.

But even that isn't the fight I want to pick right now. The thing I'm curious about is... why some media and not others? Why are painting and "orchestral" or non-pop music so incredibly conflicted and self-doubting, so willing to accept narratives about the death or dearth of meaning... while novelists continue to churn out adultery stories, and movies continue to do more or less everything, and even comics seem to be recovering from a late-'90s period in which they were swallowed up into the maelstrom of their own navel? Seriously... if the Weakerthans are doing something new-enough; if The Wire did something new enough; where does anyone get off saying that painters, sculptors, and non-pop musicians have exhausted the possibilities of meaning?

Maybe "fine artists" are living in the world of The Last Unicorn--where most unicorns have been captured, it's true; but every time they see a real unicorn, they think it's merely a strange white mare.

WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN?: The second disc of "Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s" was bizarrely water-themed. It was also vastly less awesome than the first disc! Was this just me and my obsessions, or did the jesses really slacken on this disc?

Anyway, there was one short movie so amazing that it was absolutely, three hundred percent, worth sitting through everything else on the disc. Skip to H2O if you want to know about the only awesome flick herein reviewed.

Review of the first disc, part one; two.

Second disc:
Uberfall: Police report of an assault; plotty, doesn’t strike me as wildly experimental--? There’s a funny parallelism bit where a man paints a face on an egg and then breaks it in an egg-cup. …OK, it gets experimental (distorted faces, dice and other bits from earlier in the film looming up eerily) after he actually gets assaulted, to show the effects of the blow to his head.

La Glace a Trois Faces: French-accented English voiceover, lol. Three men in love with the same woman; their stories presented one by one. Bright Young French Things running around being champagne-y. Experimentalism limited to montage fade in/fade out techniques so far. …Oh ok, now there’s some neat stream-of-consciousness stuff with lampposts. …Wow, people in the 1920s really did not like lips! There are some aggressively-framed shots with geometric backgrounds—kinda obvious, but I like that stuff. In the same scene, there are some lovely bits of choreography e.g. a woman being pulled into the camera shot by her hand, or two men almost waltzing into frame as they light one another’s cigarettes. A great, creepy, low-slung shot of an elevator rising, making it look as if it’s traversing some kind of post-apocalyptic blasted warehouse landscape. Second segment: a monkey! There’s some great (original?) music, like a reverberating jew’s-harp; then, in the third segment, a more traditional skirling, longing sound, which apparently is a Vivaldi piccolo concerto. Great horror-movie music while the “intruder” (?) speeds past a danger marker… and then the Vivaldi again. And then possibly at the end all three men were really one man??? Do not understand that part.

Le Tempestaire: Seasick shakycam credits. Painterly shot-by-shot, like a Viewfinder, of a seaside village and its inhabitants. Low-key, slow-moving “she fears for her man at sea, so she goes to persuade the old witch doctor to work his weather magic once again” tale; some really cool shots of the sea reversing and calming. Several missing subtitles (including the last line!).

Romance sentimentale: Sergei Eisenstein. Intense, dramatic shots of the sea and falling trees, with the crash of branches paralleled to the crash of waves. Really great use of reflections and water-distortions. The music is original and mostly traditional with interruptions. Then we cut unexpectedly between a drawing-room with sculptures and a woman and a clock, and the leafless autumn forest. Then cheesy fireworks and more intense intercutting! …And then it’s spring for some reason. This is why I wish they’d translated the Russian song the lady sings. (Despite the Yalien colleague who always laughed, "Just learn the f***ing language!")

Autumn Fire: Ehhhh, (nearly-) wordless love poem.

Manhatta: Sentimental-modernist ode to NYC. Tall buildings and little anonymous ant-people. Some nicely-industrial piano music, but otherwise, no.

La coquille et le clergyman: Slow movie is sloooooooooooooooow. Koyaanisqatsi is the freaking Micro Machines Man compared to this. It does seem to have a plot, but I truly can’t be arsed to figure out what that plot is—and bear in mind that I’m already the kind of person who will watch six and a half hours of “experimental cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s.” This is what you feared silent movies would be like.

There’s a bit where the clergyman is crawling around all scrunched up like something out of Freaks or Uzumaki. I really liked that part.

Regen: Rain in a small city, with pretty (new) music. At its best, the music sounds like if the Raincoats circa “Honey Mad Woman” seriously mellowed out and had no instruments but a guitar and bass, but there are noodly bits which don’t really go much of anywhere. Deeply nonessential, but painless.

H2O: Again with the rain! And then other forms of water, actually photographed in a striking, dynamic way, where each shot looks very different from the previous even though it’s all just… you know… water. People as obsessed as I am with sea metaphors might really get a kick out of this. Also people who want a lovely alphabet of textures and shapes, different forms of motion. …Wow, I love the series of cuts showing different kinds of rippling. It’s a primer on “how to film,” sure, but it’s a beautiful and compelling one. Ooohh solarization now! …Oh my gosh, I literally caught my breath just now. The solarized-Japanimation-silken-Rorschach-realist-staticky-molecular intertwining sequence of shots is just too much.

The (new) music is country-fried and demi-menacing.

This is by far my favorite from this disc. Again, if you’re less obsessed with this particular kind of image than I am, it may be your equivalent of “Manhatta,” but man, this was sublime. It’s the only film on both discs where I knew I had to watch it again because I’d missed things. (Update: I totally had. I was mesmerized the second time through; it was even better than the first.) And y’all: THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS MOVIE EXCEPT WATER. That’s talent.

It’s by Ralph Steiner, a name I do not know.

Even—As You and I: Holy cats, is that the Harry Hay? YES YES IT IS. The “Boy Meets Girl” stuff at the beginning becomes more satirical when you know this, though I have no idea whether that is the filmmaker’s satire or God’s.

Unfortunately this struck me as an otherwise-unremarkable “Surrealism comes to America” piece. He’s reading the paper upside-down! And when he turns the page there’s a bra! And he has a swastika and a hammer-and-sickle over his eyes! Yeah, no. I did like the bit where the high-heeled shoe gets stuck on the cactus.

ANTI-IRONY CHARMS: Some rambling thoughts on "sincerism" and why it's no fun. So a couple times here I've growled at sincerism, without ever telling you what it is! Which... is certainly not the sincerist way, so props for consistency, but I do think at some point I might explain myself. Here are some partial notes.

Sincerism means--probably among other things--requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions. It opposes irony, misdirection, self-protection (which, to be fair, I also oppose in most cases!), exaggeration, agent-provocateur behavior, unspoken understandings, WASPish complicity in one another's secrets, and your mouth writing checks your ass can't cash.

Think of it as American newspapers' claim to "objectivity," by which we mean mainstream conformity, vs. European newspapers' tabloid partisanship. Think of it as realism vs. "genre."

Sincerity, as a mode, has its good points. If anything, I think I tend to be much more sincere than I should be! The world does not care about the sparklyhearts authenticity of my feelings; nor does it really need every idea chewed into obviousness and pablum. But there are times when withholding sincerity from another person is prideful and/or cruel. If they need you to say, blatantly and without regard for your own self-image, "I love you," or, "I think you're amazing," you should do that. You don't always have to disclaim it or quote it ("I've known you longer than anybody, Eddie, and anything you do is all right by me--can I borrow the car?") or make them work for it.

But here are just a few of the many problems with sincerism.

* It's a genre which thinks it's the whole of art; it's a perspective which won't acknowledge its contingency. If I speak in aphorisms or jokes or provocations, I am actually conveying something about both myself and my view of the truth, just as much as if I *~*bared my heart*~*.

* It's the privilege of those whose beliefs are basically mainstream to think that "realism" and sincerity are good ways of conveying the truth. Only those whose experiences and interpretations line up with mainstream culture can be guaranteed that their sincere heart-baring tales will be believed; and they're the ones for whom this language of sincerity was made. To take the boringly obvious example, if I want to talk about Gay Catholic Whatnot, I need to somehow entice or bully straight people (and non-Catholics, for that matter) into learning my language; I can't convey what I need to say in theirs. And I strongly suspect this is also true of other kinds of privilege, which is why Invisible Man is one of the greatest American artworks ever created.

It's never joking all the way down.

* Sincerism is the opposite of camp. Camp, as far as I can tell, only works if the thing parodied has some real emotional and personal resonance. Camp is never loveless or rationalist. Sincerism divides the world into "serious" and "oh but you don't really mean that"... when our actual hearts and lives are much more conflicted, complex, and complicit than that.

If I can think of more to say, I'll say it; and I do apologize for the deeply sincerist nature of this post! It's a Mobius strip of ridiculous.

MAN RAY? I'LL WAIT UNTIL THEY MAKE A WOMAN RAY...: I'm watching a Netflixable thing called "Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s: Disc 1." It's three hours long and you couldn't pay me to watch that much indie-film at once, so I'm taking it in bits and pieces. Here are some thoughts on the first six movies--all but two highly recommended. I make no attempt to provide accent marks, because "that's the way Dad did it, that's the way America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far!"

And also, I'm lazy.

Man Ray, "Le Retour a la raison": This is a great teaser for the rest of the disc. It's maybe two or three minutes long?--yet you'll find yourself catching "future echoes" of everything from Sesame Street to Hitchcock. (Seriously, I'd need two hands to count the times this disc has reminded me of children's television--from Pinwheel's opening sequence to 3-2-1-Contact's, from ZOOM's cheapness-equals-existentialism to Looney Toons' expressionism.)

The music, so far on every movie, has been amazing. It's new--created for this release, I think?--and so it creates a completely new viewing experience from the one contemporary audiences would have had. But then, my experience would never be what a contemporary audience might've had; and this new experience is so fantabulous that I can't wish it were different. I'd play this every day just for the music. Imagine... maybe the Raincoats, muddled with Herrmann, dragged a few feet leftward to Messaien, about a quarter-mile east toward Mozart, and a mile south toward Bizet??

Man Ray, "Emak-Bakia": Suspense music plus adventure-movie visuals! Pilotesses in earflaps! Sheep and pigs! The ghosts of women's legs stride out of a jeep again and again, memory, until they resolve into the Charleston. A lady has eyes painted on her eyelids. Daggone that's uncanny.

White buildings and film-white skies.

Man Ray, "L'etoile de mer": Surrealist sex! The clash of symbols (Cybele, Impressionism); perversity (she strips to her skivvies, then tells him to leave!); mad science; the permeable boundary between nature and culture. Oozy beauty.

I loved this like cake.

Man Ray, "Les Mysteres du chateau du De": ...The music is bouncy and hilarious, and for a long time this feels like a Beckettish, Goreyish comedy of meaninglessness. But then it settles down to portentous talk of MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN and Venus Astarte, and I can't do it anymore. Fans of The Prisoner might like it more than I did. Also, I wonder how much the opening of The Exorcist owes to this piece--if anything.

Robert Florey Y U NOT MAN RAY?, "The Life and Death of 9413": Bog-standard Hollywood disillusionment, barely redeemed by some lovely acting. MEH. If you're enough of a film buff to watch this disc, you're enough of a film buff to have seen this movie five times already, only better.

Someone I forget, "Menilmontant": WOW, shivery horror piece. Fans of Heavenly Creatures, Doctor Faustus, and especially Picnic at Hanging Rock shouldn't miss this. I felt like it lost steam relatively quickly, but there are some frightening moments here even in silent film, and I'd absolutely watch a remake of this. I'm not sure if it was genuinely a bit conventional for an "experimental" disc, or if it merely highlighted how many avant-garde techniques carried over into genre filmmaking. Highly recommended either way.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE POLS: Reviews of this and that.

Christopher Bram, Gossip. A New Yorker and a Washingtonian meet in a gay chatroom. (We call them "Washingtonians" when they're not from 'round here.) Their sex life flourishes even though one is a left-leaning ex-activist and one is a rising-star Young Republican type. But how long can you sleep with an enemy who doesn't even know he's the enemy?

This is nearly perfect summer reading: just intelligent enough to give savor to its lurid, trashy elements. (Bram's narrator bashes the New York Post, but this book reminded me more of that tabloid than of any other literary production.) I enjoyed it until the very end, when its suspense turned into melodrama via a too-neat (though well-foreshadowed) resolution.

Here I reviewed Bram's Exiles in America, a much better book. Gossip did hit on one of the major themes of that book: the stark, sociologically-inflected differences between how a couple looks from the inside and how it looks from the outside. Exiles takes as its epigraph Robert Frost's line (from memory, too lazy to look up, sorry) that marriage is "a type of friendship recognized by the police." Gossip shares that sensibility, though the nature of marriage itself isn't at issue in this book the way it is in Exiles.

I'll note that while the leftists in Gossip were recognizable human types, the right-wingers resembled exactly zero right-wingers I've ever met. But I'm willing to posit that I have not met a representative sample. It didn't keep me from enjoying the novel until it was over, at which point I did start to feel a bit curdled.

Kings, episodes 6 - 10: I reviewed previous episodes of this "It's about King David only alternate-universe only we're not going to tell you any of that because we don't want you to watch this show, apparently" NBC drama here. The first ten episodes are up at IMDB.com.

In the later episodes, some things are better: The David actor is growing on me. "Chapter One" is tense and intriguingly meta-narrative-y; the final twists of "Javelin" left me wanting to know what happens next. They've continued to pepper the show with lines and speeches which come from within a monarchist worldview, which fascinates me! This is one reason I like the Saul-figure's ruthless action at the end of "Brotherhood." It feels alien, old, simultaneously human and eldritch: personal.

The romance between the king's aide and the guardsman is both endearing comic relief and poignant character shading.

Other things, though... not so much. All the other younger actors still bother me, especially the Jonathan one. It would kill you to move your face? Express an unspoken emotion or an internal conflict, now and then?

During "Pilgrimage," in which various nonmarital sex scandals threaten, I found myself saying out loud, "Why is it so easy to make liberalism sound saccharine?" Whenever the series touches the intersection of sex and publicity it tends to sound contemporary-bien-pensant rather than alien-monarchist.

I still really, really hate what they're doing with the David/Jonathan relationship. They've chosen to prettify David (in "Chapter One," the Saul-figure does to show-David what the Biblical David did to Bathsheba's husband, so the show's David remains an overperfect farmboy with no need for penitence) and make Jonathan a conflictedly-gay conflictedly-villainous waffler with an obvious redemption arc in sight. I hate every one of these changes! ...There's also still little sense of God as a moral force rather than merely a source of power, although I admit we're getting subtle outlines of God's commandments as the series progresses. I wish David, rather than Silas (=Saul), had become the focus of God's moral attention earlier on--I get why they're doing it this way, but again, it makes David look cute rather than astonishing.

I should maybe note that I can't be rational about the "Sabbath Queen" episode because it depicts a family dealing with a critically-ill daughter. I have no idea if that episode is good or not, and I don't plan to watch it again.

Batman: The Animated Series, all seasons. I hate Batman comics; I loved this series!

Batman as a genre tends toward sickly child-abuse storylines and exploitive portrayals of mental illness. (I know why you'd mine mental illness for metaphors, and that can really work; I just want it to be completely cartoony, or much more realistic, or unruly genius... not the Uncanny Valley into which a lot of Batman stuff falls for me.) In comics which purport to be Serious Business, I really cannot handle that stuff. For the most part, this show didn't hit those buttons for me, although there were occasional moments when the bottom dropped out and I couldn't help but remember that Arkham Asylum is scary because we're supposed to fear "the weak and the wounded."

But the thing I loved about this series--the reason I Netflix'd it, and the thing on which it completely delivered--was its look. This is a hot, gorgeous show. It's all angular and expressionist and deco and... basically honey for the bears, where I'm concerned. It's dark and spooky-fun and stupidly beautiful.

I loved basically any show with Harley Quinn. I was expecting to like her and ended up adoring her. She's having so much fun! "Harley's Holiday" might be my favorite of those, although the one with the Joker Fish, which I think is her first or second appearance, is also adorable, as is "Harley and Ivy." I liked Poison Ivy's eps generally as well. I love that they paired the clown and the femme fatale, and kept both of them recognizably noir-girl types!

I think you'll know immediately whether this show is for you, since as I said, its look is its main appeal. (At least for me.) Most of the special features are commentary tracks, which I love!--the most fun for me were the ones for the first episode, where they laughed at how dark the coloring is (it's really startling), and for "Critters," which is apparently one of the most reviled episodes of the series. I liked it! And I liked it even more after the commentary track. I think they actually avoided the problems of making a dark deco Batman fight a giant chicken, you know? It's an incredibly creepy chicken! On the other hand, it's part of a weird run of episodes where Batman fights dumb stuff--there's a dinosaur in the previous episode, and later we get gorilla-villains. ...Speaking of villains who don't work for me, I hated all things Ras al-Ghul except for the one which is really a Jonah Hex episode.

The later discs are a "revamped" version. Og like: I think they use a lot more red in the revamp? Not sure. If I'm right, it made the show even hotter; if I'm wrong, something else made it look extra spectacular. Og no like: People's faces mostly became more masklike, whiter and more acutely-angled, and I missed the curves.