→ December 1, 2012
→ By

A Sport and a Pastime.

James Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime is the book to buy for any miserable wretch in your life who thinks Fifty Shades of Grey is quality erotica. Salter’s book earned notoriety when it was published in 1967 for its explicit descriptions of imagined sex scenes between its two protagonists, the American ne’er-do-well Philip Dean and the young Frenchwoman Anne-Marie, scenes that have lost their power to scandalize readers but retain some of their shock value because of the contrast between those descriptions and the mundane passages that surround them. A Sport and a Pastime remains an erotic novel, but its greatness lies in its incisive, almost heartless look at the vacuous nature of any relationship built exclusively on sexual attraction.

Philip and Anne-Marie don’t even connect until the book is about a quarter of the way over, after various descriptions of the dissolute lives of American expats in France in the 1950s, many still capitalizing on the popularity earned by soldiers who helped liberate the country after World War II. Philip is the son of a wealthy crtiic and a mother who took her own life; he’s a Yale dropout who was bored by school yet able to learn anything he liked. He’s bumming around Europe and seeking excitement by driving too fast when he drops in on the narrator for a few days, which turns into a longer stay when he encounters the dim-witted Anne-Marie, pretty, seemingly innocent, with frequent bouts of bad breath. They embark on an affair, relayed by the narrator,

Yet their relationship is fundamentally an empty one, doomed from the start to die when Philip’s sexual infatuation with Anne-Marie fades. The early equilibrium starts to shift, and Anne-Marie finds herself increasingly obsequious in bed because she cannot hold Philip’s attention any other way. Philip, meanwhile, uses her to play out some of his sexual fantasies, but as they become more adventurous in bed, graduating from trying new positions to fellatio to anal sex (all of which must have been extremely shocking to see in print forty-five years ago), each new trick holds his attention for less time than the previous one. (While Anne-Marie performs oral sex on Philip, he never returns the favor, another sign of their relationship’s imbalance.) When his money runs out, he’s first willing to try anything to keep the sex coming, even selling his plane ticket home for cash, but eventually he chooses not to beg his sister or father for more money and lies to Anne-Marie that their separation will only be temporary, even though it’s clear she’ll never hear from him again. Anne-Marie’s mother warns her that she’s being used, but the girl is oblivious, thinking, incorrectly, that she can convert Philip’s lust into love. It spoils nothing to say that she can’t.

The unnamed narrator admits that much of what he’s telling readers is his own speculation on what the couple are doing when he’s not with them, in or out of the bedroom, raises a host of questions around why he would invent or even provide the details he does give us. He’s clearly jealous of his friend Philip’s success with women, but the jealousy doesn’t have any homoerotic overtones – nor does he seem to be jealous of Philip’s success specifically with Anne-Marie, to whom the narrator is attracted but in a distant, almost clinical way. His primary romantic interest in the novel is a divorcee closer to his own age (34), but he describes her and his half-hearted courtship of her in far less detail than he gives Philip and Anne-Marie, choosing instead to live vicariously through the younger, more charming man. The explicit descriptions of Philip’s sexcapades with Anne-Marie, possibly invented by the narrator, may show the narrator’s own fear that his time as a ladies’ man, if he ever was one at all, is passing him by, leaving nubile girls like Anne-Marie, far too young for him anyway, out of reach. Or maybe he’s just a pervert.

I’m not offended by literary depictions of sex – I’m much more likely to find them embarrasingly funny, as they often read like the imaginings of a teenaged boy who hasn’t lost his virginity yet – but Salter’s word choice for Anne-Marie’s ladybits was unfortunate (even if deliberate), because of the extreme negative connotations of that word. Some of the content in the book may be vulgar, but the c-word isn’t vulgar – it’s vile, reducing a woman to her anatomy with a term that is also one of the worst insults anyone can hurl. Perhaps Salter intended to use it to show that for Philip, Anne-Marie is little more than a sex object, reducing her to her genitalia; the way Philip uses her, or that the narrator says Philip uses her, indicates a clear lack of interest in her beyond the bedroom. Or perhaps the narrator intends to reduce both Anne-Marie and Philip to their sex organs, because their relationship wasn’t based on anything more.

If you’re not perturbed by sexually explicit content in a serious work of literature, A Sport and a Pastime is absolutely worth reading, as the parts between the naughty parts are thoughtful and starkly written, as if Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller collaborated while only using their best qualities as writers. Mrs. Shinn, however, would not approve.

Next review: Nicole Krauss’ 2005 novel The History of Love, which was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006, losing to another book I read on my trip, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

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→ November 6, 2012
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Umamicatessen & Intelligentsia Coffee.

The offseason buyer’s guides continue with today’s post on the outfield market and yesterday’s on middle infielders. Wednesday’s will cover starting pitchers.

Umamicatessen is the latest creation of Adam Fleischman, the man behind Umami Burger (which I reviewed in February 2010), folding a burger joint into a restaurant with a larger menu that also includes salads, starters, Jewish deli sandwiches (mostly featuring pastrami), artisan hams (including prosciuttos and two types of jamon serrano), various cooked pig dishes created by Top Chef Master Chris Cosentino, and doughnuts made to order. It’s over the top by design, and while some of the more decadent items were too rich for more than a few bites, every item we tried – I went with D-backs beat writer Nick Piecoro – was outstanding.

I focused on the Pigg menu, by Cosentino, ordering pork cracklins ($5) with smoked paprika, sage, and cayenne, as well as the Texas Toast, topped with an obscene quantity of barbecued pig’s tail and a small amount of vinegary cole slaw. The cracklins, one of three lard-fried items on the menu along with crispy pig ears and French fries topped with ham and “brainaise,” were highly addictive, with the crunchy, airy texture of puffed rice but the unmistakable tangy-salty flavor of pork skin. If they had a flaw, it’s that it would be too easy to eat the entire cardboard cone full of them without realizing just how much you were eating (including the sheer quantity of fat).

The Texas Toast ($11) is an enormous plate of food, giant chunks of pig tail that looked a lot like an oversized short rib, fattier on the inside than that cut of cow, and with a slightly tough skin that needed knifework where a short rib can be eaten with a fork (teeth optional). The flavor of the sauce itself was the star item on the plate, elevating the smokiness of the tail with red pepper, cumin, brown sugar, and dark flavors that reminded me of coffee or aged whiskey. Every part of the dish worked together, but the pig’s tail itself was a fair amount of work to eat and I’m sure I left some bits of meat in the middle because I was trying to perform liposuction with a steak knife.

The roasted baby carrots ($4) were a huge bargain considering the quality of the carrots – actual baby carrots, not giant factory-farmed carrots cut and tumbled to look like baby carrots – and the care in their preparation, leaving them ready to eat right up to the half-inch of green extending from the carrot-tops, as well as the smoky red harissa sauce beneath them. The beet salad featured yellow beets (I presume roasted and peeled) with truffled ricotta, wild arugula, and smoked almonds rested primarily on the flavor of the cheese, which was thicker than most ricotta, more like a soft goat cheese, with enough tang to balance the earthy truffle flavor and the pepper notes of the arugula – but the beet was a little lost in the mix, even though overall the salad was excellent.

We ordered two donuts, the tres leches cake donut ($4) and the yeast-raised beignets (two small ones for $4), with the tres leches the clear winner for both of us. The donut itself probably stood on its own, but the combination of milks, caramel, and cinnamon-topped whipped cream turned it into the best coffee cake you’ve ever had in your life. The beignets were a little dry throughout, although the burnt sugar-coffee-chicory dipping sauce was a clever nod to New Orleans-style coffee (and, to be honest, had a lot more flavor).

The draft beer selection included about eight or nine options, running the gamut from IPAs to the Deschutes porter I chose. Nick went with the Bourbon Pig, bacon-washed bourbon with sugar and bitters, topped with a few thin slices of crispy pig’s ear. He described it as “smoky but not too strong. Basically it was wildly dangerous and amazing.”

Speaking of LA, I owe a shout-out to Intelligentsia Coffee, where I had an espresso back in September and got a little free coffee as a gift from a reader. I do love coffee but find most espressos are too harsh to drink without either milk or sugar – and sometimes both. Intelligentsia is one of the very few that uses beans fresh enough and high enough quality that I can drink the resulting espresso straight, with their Black Cat producing a beautiful, viscous shot with bright fruity notes (stop laughing) and a little oak, but none of the bitterness from older beans or much darker roasts. They started in Chicago, with four locations there and now three more in greater L.A., along with roasting operations in both places, and an emphasis on a personalized coffee experience in the store, where you get a barista with his/her own station who takes your order (and offers guidance) and makes your drink. It’s expensive relative to the big chain espresso spots, but you are paying for quality of inputs and the expertise of your barista. I’d rather pay more for that than spend 30% less on battery acid in a demi-tasse.

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→ October 30, 2012
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Babel and An Awesome Wave.

Mumford and Sons’ second album, Babel, is a little better than more-of-the-same – not that that would be the worst thing in the world, since their debut, Sigh No More, was both good and commercially successful – but it doesn’t break much new ground, at least not musically. It’s not exactly predictable, but it feels very expected, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and likely, given its huge initial sales, to continue to spawn more bands attempting to mimic their fusion of country, bluegrass, and folk traditions with modern-rock production values.

Babel does vary from its predecessor in one specific way – the album’s music is more upbeat, feeling more like what you’d expect from a live concert experience, without as many of the funereal tracks that populated the first album. Sigh No More‘s high points were largely found in songs that picked up the pace, in whole or in part, with “White Blank Page” the main exception. Babel starts out with the title-track, a slightly formulaic barn-raiser that at least announces that this album will be more energetic than their previous disc, although it also lacks the strong hook that made singles like “Little Lion Man” and “Cave” into big radio hits.

It’s the third track and lead single, “I Will Wait,” that gets Babel going in earnest, an exemplar of what Mr. Carey Mulligan and company can do when they hit all their strengths – tempo changes, heavy bluegrass influences, strong harmonies, and concrete imagery (including the album’s first mention of eyes, which becomes a recurring metaphor through the rest of the disc). The song is as radio-ready as it gets on the disc, without sounding excessively commercial beyond the upgraded production quality. The song begins a five-track run of highlights, including “Ghosts in the Dark,” which veers about as close to straight American country as Mumford & Sons get due to the heavy use of finger-picking; and “Lover of the Light,” which combines several memorable hooks with an off-beat lyrical melody over a repeated piano riff that leaves the listener slightly askew before shifting to more conventional structure in the second half, in by far their longest track yet as well as one of their most layered. Even the later track “Hopeless Wanderer” manages to transcend the slow-fast-slow cliché from their first disc with more abrupt transitions between sections and the tempo contrast between the lyrics and the horse-race feel of the fast guitar riff behind the chorus.

Mumford himself shows some lyrical growth here, avoiding some of the stumbles of the first album and developing some consistent themes across the entire disc, without falling too badly into the sort of fake-profundity that characterizes far too much contemporary music. Several images are repeated across different songs in different context, especially eyes/vision and buildings/walls, while he also exhibits more of the spiritual yearning from the first album, such as a reference to the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich’s views of sin. He also gets five thousand bonus points for successfully using one of my favorite words in the language, sanguine, in a phrase on “Lover of the Light” that has two meanings, both of which work in context.

“Whisper in the Dark,” the second track on the album, feels like filler material to me, and breaks the flow between the title track and “I Will Wait.” “Broken Crown” might have been the second- or third-best song on the disc, seething with rage the way that “Dust Bowl Dance” did at the close of Sigh No More, but instead comes off as a calculated move to replicate the success of “Little Lion Man” through the unexpected use of the f-word – yet where “Little Lion Man” used it to maximum effect, here it’s awkward and even immature, turning a vicious attack into a teenager’s angry yearbook inscription. (Besides, that word alone didn’t make “Little Lion Man” great – it just made it greater.)

I’ll take this album as progress over the first disc, but I’d also like to see these four musicians push themselves further, maybe incorporating more genres, or perhaps continuing their experiments with song structures as they did with “Lover of the Light.” They’re going to sell plenty of albums no matter what at this point, and I have little doubt they can continue to produce memorable hooks, so they have the intellectual and commercial freedom to play around if they want to. I hope the next album goes more in those directions.

–

If you want experimental indie-pop, another British band, alt-J, might be on the verge of an xx-style breakout, perhaps after they win the Mercury Prize on Thursday, as they’re considered the odds-on favorites to do so. The product of five years of songwriting, and two years of recording, their debut album An Awesome Wave (just $5.99 to download) is a bizarre, textured, trippy perambulation across a broad swath of modern music styles. It might be genius.

alt-J, whose actual name, Δ, is produced on a Mac by pressing the Alt and J keys, draw on a wide tableau of influences that seems to span decades. Each listen to An Awesome Wave brought some other reference to mind, from Nine Inch Nails to Massive Attack to Television to Bollywood soundtracks, with hard swerves in style from track to track. Comparisons to the xx, who won the Mercury Prize two years ago, will be inevitable, since both albums tend toward quieter sounds and minimalist production, but alt-J is Faulkner to the xx’s Hemingway, rewarding multiple listens with greater complexity, crafting all-consuming soundscapes that suck you in with surprisingly catchy hooks.

The album contains three interludes and a short intro, but it’s track 3, “Tessellate,” that announces the band’s presence, with a haunting piano line quickly accompanied by a Tricky-like syncopated drum line, later joined by a disjointed base line that give a tremendous sense of movement and flow. “Something Good” begins with another off-beat drum pattern, joined by a sinister guitar and bass combination that belie the song’s title, only to have the whole thing stop for a Muse-like piano interpolation … and then we’re hearing Turin Brakes over the guitar before we return to the drumline of the opener. “Dissolve Me” fools you with a poppy synth intro that hints at the current new-wave revival, but the heavy, distorted bass line tramples over that sunny feeling like a drunken tuba player. And “Taro” follows its verse and chorus with a percussion and string (perhaps ukulele) line straight out of a Bollywood movie, yet one that fits perfectly in the song’s broader structure.

The biggest single from the album, “Breezeblocks,” remains among my least favorite tracks, with a J-Pop kind of lyrical repetition as well as a vocal delivery that sounds like a parent talking to a infant who’s just found her feet for the first time, although that’s the song that was stuck in my head when I woke up this morning. The lead singer’s style often makes the lyrics tough to decipher, but they are worth the effort, exposing a deeply intellectual and literary bent behind much of their songwriting. One song, “Matilda,” is about the film Léon (a.k.a The Professional), while another, “Fitzpleasure,” deals with one of the most brutal scenes from the scandalous book Last Exit to Brooklyn. The songs drip with clever imagery that will almost certainly leave you pondering hidden meanings and literary or film allusions.

Before this week, I would have tabbed Of Monsters and Men’s debut album, My Head Is An Animal, as the best new release of the year, but as amazing as that album is, it can’t rival An Awesome Wave‘s sheer ambition, packaged in shockingly tight songwriting and enough nods to melody to make this more than mere experimental music. It’s mind-expanding.

And, so I can justify reviewing these two albums together, here’s Mumford and Sons covering alt-J’s “Tessellate:”

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→ October 8, 2012
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Looper.

I loved Rian Johnson’s debut film, the neo-noir detective story Brick, which starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a precocious student trying to solve a murder in his cliquey, drug-addled high school, a film driven by punctuated, subtle dialogue, riding instead on the film’s core mystery and the tremendous charisma Gordon-Levitt brought to the lead role. Johnson’s newest film, the time-travel action flick Looper, also stars Gordon-Levitt, and once again leans heavily on how much he can bring to a role in which his lines are limited and his character’s personality is understated. But where Brick aimed fairly small, an indie film paying homage to a genre by nearly parodying it, Looper aimes huge, tackling standard time-travel conundrums while also getting after some of the general moral questions that a time-travel storyline will inevitably pose.

Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a “looper” who, in the year 2044, serves as a hit man for a crime syndicate that sends targets back from the year 2074 – in which year time travel has been invented and made illegal, so it’s only used by organized crime groups. A looper stands at an isolated place, blunderbuss in hand, and the moment a bound and gagged victim winks into their present time, blows him away. Eventually, the future employers will end the contract by sending the looper’s future self back, with gold bars strapped to his back (in lieu of the standard silver), “closing the loop.” As it turns out, the head of that crime syndicate in the future, known only as the Rainmaker, is closing all of the loops, so we know fairly early on that Joe will be confronted by his thirty-year-older self, played by Bruce Willis, and will, in one reality, let him live (since otherwise the movie would be more of a short film). As it turns out, Future Joe has reasons for wanting to come back, with eliminating the Rainmaker before he rises to power at the top of the list. Present Joe ends up in the middle of this battle, primarily opposed to his future self but conflicted by what remains of his conscience and by the fact that he’s pursued by the 2044 arm of the syndicate that employs him.

Time-travel stories in general are difficult to plot because of, no pun intended, the loops the writer must close: The connections between cause and effect are much more clearly laid out on screen, and loops left open or closed improperly are fodder for criticism and mockery from sharper viewers. Johnson’s script here limits the number of such loops he opens, and he’s extremely meticulous about maintaining the film’s internal logic, even at the risk of potentially clueing viewers in to the film’s eventual resolution. (Once it was over, I realized I’d missed one fairly strong clue.) This tight writing bears many other gifts for the viewer, such as the scene where Joe and his future self sit down for coffee and breakfast – left uneaten, which I have to say always annoys me when I see it on screen – in which Future Joe explains how he can remember Present Joe’s actions as they happen.

Emily Blunt is extremely compelling – not to mention incredibly gorgeous – in her supporting role as Sarah, the mother of one of the candidates on Future Joe’s hit list, and the woman who takes Present Joe in while he’s on the run from the syndicate. Five-year-old Pierce Gagnon is incredible in his role as Cid, Sarah’s son, articulate beyond most kids his age and able to manipulate his emotions as an adult actor would. Jeff Daniels is brilliant, by turns hilarious and menacing, as the syndicate’s main representative and local kingpin in 2044 – but one of his gunsels, played by Noah Segan (who played Dode in Brick), was mostly a waste of time, not developed enough to have an intriguing storyline, and scarcely necessary to the main plot. Piper Perabo plays a stripper because we just couldn’t have an action film unless there’s at least one woman walking around topless, and she’s maybe the fourth-best looking woman in the movie anyway. (Her character is about as irrelevant as Segan’s.) And there’s a fair amount of over-the-top violence across the film, which may seem like an odd complaint with a hit man and, well, the same hit man as the main characters, but when you see the movie you’ll probably know which parts I mean.

Looper has also spawned a fair amount of analysis online of its internal time-travel logic, with Johnson himself going on record (here and here) to discuss some of its mysteries, including the possible infinite loop created by the film’s ending. That kind of intensive commentary can be a function of poor writing, of course, but in this case I think it’s largely to Johnson’s credit that he can answer most of these questions and yet managed to leave so much extraneous material out of the film, helping maintain some of the mystery until the final fifteen minutes. What starts out as a psychological thriller branches out into both an action film and a morality story on the importance, of all things, of strong parenting, with enough suspense to keep you hooked even if you figure out some or all of where the film is going. It’s far more clever than your typical mainstream action or sci-fi movie, skipping the naked sentimentality of the similarly ambitious Inception without aiming any lower in its plot.

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→ October 1, 2012
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Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

The documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi has quietly been getting rave reviews from chefs and food writers but relatively less attention from mainstream film critics, probably because of its genre and language (it’s entirely in Japanese, with English subtitles) rather than its content. Following one of the most famous sushi chefs in the world and exploring his obsessive attention to detail and the demands he places on his employees and vendors, the film also features some of the most beautiful shots of food I have ever seen, the kind of cinematography that will have you pouring soy sauce on the floor in anticipation. (It’s available on Netflix Instant, which is how I watched it.)

Jiro Ono operates one of the world’s best-known and most exclusive sushi restaurants, a ten-seat establishment in Tokyo called Sukiyabashi Jiro that only serves sushi – no appetizers, no soba dishes, just the fish. He was 85 at the time the documentary was filmed, yet still works at the restaurant every day, usually serving the fish but at this point preparing relatively little of it himself, instead overseeing the rigid structure of the kitchen, where his eldest son, who will one day take over the business, is the de facto headmaster. Jiro’s obsession with quality and long track record have given him an inside track with key vendors, including a rice vendor who won’t sell Jiro’s favorite strain of rice to a large hotel that asks for it, while also making internships at his restaurant into ten-year apprenticehoods where anything less than perfection is unacceptable.

The film documents some of the more unusual kitchen practices at Sukiyabashi Jiro, although many of these are made possible by the restaurant’s small menu. They age their tuna for up to ten days, and they massage the octopus for as long as 50 minutes, nearly twice as long as other restaurants, to tenderize the meat. (I’ve had octopus sushi once or twice and hated it because it was rubbery. Now at least I know it doesn’t have to be that way.) Jiro and his son have exacting standards for flavor, texture, and preparation that I don’t want to spoil for viewers, as seeing some of these practices in action was among the highlights of the film.

Jiro’s two sons also play significant roles in the film as Japanese custom has placed them in very different roles of succession. His eldest son, Yoshikazu, runs Jiro’s restaurant now, while Jiro’s younger son, Takashi, apprenticed there but had to leave and start his own restaurant, a mirror image of Jiro’s, because the eldest son is the traditional successor in Japanese culture. Yet this subplot of sorts isn’t that dramatic because Yoshikazu doesn’t express any of the regret or frustration you’d expect a son in that situation to express – waiting for his father to retire or, more morbidly, to die, so he can take over the business. Yoshikazu didn’t seem terribly unhappy with his lot, and as it is, he handles much of the responsibility, something his father acknowledges.

One of those key responsibilities is acquiring the fish each day from Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market, forming by far the most informative part of the film for me. I’d read about this market before, including a chapter in Trevor Corson’s indispensable book The Story of Sushi, but had never seen an inside look at the institution or how buyers choose their fish. Watching Jiro’s primary tuna vendor walk around a giant warehouse space, poking at giant whole tuna, taking bits of flesh and examining them with a flashlight, wasn’t gripping – really nothing in this film is – but it was enlightening.

There’s a brief discussion at the end of the film about the future of sushi and of fish as a food source in general, mostly led by Yoshikazu, who blames the spread of what I would call cheap sushi – the crap you get at the grocery store, at non-sushi restaurants, or even at awful chain sushi places like Ra that specialize in bland, lower-quality fish dressed up with toppings like a damn ice cream sundae. Sushi shouldn’t be available in packages of eight maki for $7 at the supermarket. Yoshikazu doesn’t get too far into solutions, although he mentions his own vested interest in maintaining a supply of high-quality fish; given Japan’s refusal to cut down on or eliminate its harvesting and purchasing of bluefin tuna, I’m not surprised that he held back, but I imagine he and his father would carry significant weight if they came out in favor of broad bans on environmentally damaging fishing practices.

What Jiro Dreams of Sushi might lack for some viewers is drama; most good documentaries document something more than a man and his restaurant, running into some sort of conflict along the way or covering a past event that was inherently dramatic. This is an homage to a man’s lifelong obsession with his work, with approaching perfection asymptotically, with preserving an ancient cuisine while elevating it to its highest level. It is also pornography for sushi-lovers, with mindblowing images of nigiri made by Jiro, his son, and the three other men (only men – women don’t make sushi in Japan, another issue they neglected to address) who work there. I’ve never seen fish that looked like that. It’ll make you want to, say, find the next Yu Darvish to go scout over in Tokyo – as long as you have a month’s notice to make a reservation at Jiro’s place.

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→ September 28, 2012
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Lush Life.

I discovered Richard Price’s 2009 novel Lush Life on Lev Grossman’s list of the ten best novels of the 2000s, where it was one of only two novels I hadn’t read (the other is Neil Gaiman’s American Gods). Price’s novel was, and still is, just $6 new on amazon, and after picking it up I found out Price wrote the story and/or teleplay for five episodes of The Wire, which would have been enough to sell me on the book in the first place. (He even appeared as the leader of the prison book group where D’Angelo Barksdale gives his thoughts on The Great Gatsby, one of the best episodes in the entire series.) Lush Life does have a lot in common with that TV series, in its realistic depictions of the police and the criminal underclass, in outstanding dialogue that’s almost a little too sharp to be real, and in the deft weaving of multiple storylines revolving around a large ensemble of characters. It’s the best novel I’ve read this year.

Lush Life begins, after a brief prologue, with a murder, a mugging gone wrong in the small hours on a street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where three drunk white men are accosted by two teenagers in an encounter that leaves one of the men dead, another passed-out drunk on the sidewalk, and the third unable to tell a straight enough story for the police. From that starting point, Price branches the story further and further out, tracking the two surviving victims, the two assailants, the murder victim’s father and stepmother, and the various detectives investigating the case (and the higher-ups who either want the case closed quickly or forgotten entirely).

By setting the book in the broad tableau of Manhattan urban life, Price can touch on a vast range of themes without ever making one central or lapsing into preachy or pedantic prose. Race sits at the heart of the novel because the victims were white while the assailants weren’t, and because the white-dominated media loves a privileged white victim of urban crime. Yet Price avoids most explicit discussions of race or racism, allowing the story to unfold through dialogue and changes of perspective that also show scenes of the economically disadvantaged project kids, two of whom are responsible for the crime, most of whom are shown without much hope of upward mobility outside of theft or the drug trade. The media are largely shown as leeches. The higher-ups at 1 Police Plaza are more interested in results that keep them employed than, in this case, closing a difficult-to-solve case. Even the detectives who caught the body here – led by Matty Clark, a McNulty-esque character with less of a drinking problem – are far from saints, motivated to close the case and move on to the next one so no one breathes down their necks, even if they don’t get the right perp, while Clark becomes entangled with the victim’s family with unintended consequences.

The most remarkable aspect of the novel is just how much Price manages to pack into a book of about 450 pages, between the richly developed characters and the myriad plot threads that spread from the initial murder and in many cases come back together at the novel’s close. I finished Lush Life feeling like I’d just watched a six-episode season of a TV drama, something as intelligent as The Wire yet surprisingly fresh and compact. The dialogue sparkles and the characters never seem to sit too far to either side of the wide expanse of grey between the two stock extremes. It’s also darkly funny in places, sometimes with gallows humor, sometimes with the stupidity of the kids getting caught with cars full of marijuana smoke or the venality of the cops, lawyers, reporters, and business owners whose lives are indirectly affected by the murder. It’s not groundbreaking literature, but it is highly intelligent fiction that never talks down to its reader and possesses the narrative greed of a good detective story even though the reader knows who committed the crime and is less concerned with their capture than with the evolution of the story in between those two points.

Next up: Don DeLillo’s very strange novel White Noise, part of the TIME and Radcliffe 100 lists.

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→ September 26, 2012
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Homeland.

I’ll give the series Homeland, which just took four of the five major Emmy Awards for dramatic series on Sunday, the highest praise I can: For the first time ever, I’m now a Showtime subscriber, because I didn’t want to miss season two when it starts on September 30th.

Homeland, adapted from a ten-episode Israeli series called Prisoners of War, follows the return of a POW, long presumed dead, from eight years of captivity in Iraq as he readjusts to normal life and finds himself held up as a hero and used as a political pawn by the current Adminstration … all while a rogue CIA analyst believes that the soldier is actually a terrorist sleeper sent to the U.S. to carry out a major attack. The first season’s twelve episodes dance on the edge of implausibility but rarely cross it, with brilliant pacing that belies how much of the series’ action is happening in something approximating real time.

Claire Danes, playing the CIA analyst Carrie Mathisen, is the series’ ostensible star, but while her performance playing an obsessed workaholic who is hiding her bipolar disorder from her colleagues was superb, I thought Damian Lewis, as the former POW Nicholas Brody, was even more deserving of the postseason award. The viewer knows from the first moment on which side Carrie sits, but Lewis has to spend much of the season bobbing and weaving to keep his true intentions hidden from the viewer and, to some extent, from other characters. Lewis is practically asked to play three or four separate characters, if you include flashback scenes to his captivity as well as the different faces he shows to colleagues, to his family, and to Carrie. Danes’ performance might not have won if not for the difficulty level of the final two episodes of the season, although she was incredibly convincing as the just-barely-hinged obsessed analyst who is absolutely sure that there’s an imminent attack but can’t quite convince anyone in a position to do something about it. Mandy Patinkin is also superb as Carrie’s closest ally within the CIA, while Morena Baccarin, playing Brody’s wife, is gorgeous with or without her top on and I suppose she’s a pretty good actress too. (Obligatory Firefly plug here, from when Baccarin had long hair.)

Where Homeland succeeds most is in bringing realism to unreality: The basic premise is, at least so far, a fiction, an American soldier who might have been turned by Islamist terrorists and who is intent on causing harm to his own country. Moving forward from this starting point, however, the writers kept the series grounded with mostly realistic, or at least plausible, depictions of the the various plot threads, including Brody’s difficulty readjusting and the CIA often being a day late and a dollar short when trying to chase people who don’t want to be found. Absent are the mindless midday shootouts on urban streets present in most network police procedurals. Absent is the uberhacker who takes a few seconds to “break through the firewall” and cracks non-alphanumeric passwords with a few keystrokes. I don’t know exactly how the CIA operates, but at least I never thought that Homeland was insulting my intelligence with shortcuts and misused jargon just to move the plot along. And by making the possible antagonist a white American male, the series forces viewers to confront some of their own biases, even subconscious ones, where the subject is Islamist-based terrorism.

The series did slip into implausibility, for me, with the extent of the personal interactions between Carrie and Brody, a relationship that evolves very strangely over the course of the season, although there is a plot payoff to all of that in the season’s final two episodes. But I was more disturbed by the treatment of Carrie’s bipolarity as a critical plot point, especially that without her medication, she becomes an insane savant, barely capable of rational thought. It wasn’t even clear to me why the character needed to be bipolar, or needed to be shown going off her meds, to advance the overall plot, and I don’t like seeing mental illness trivialized through fictional depictions that show sufferers as cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

The season finale wrapped up many of the outstanding questions – I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who haven’t seen it – but left enough plot points open to create suspense for the second season. There is still a plot afoot at the end of the finale, although I won’t say how or why. We still don’t know who the leak within the government is, a detail I expect to see resurface in the second season. And some of the backstory remains untold; I still felt like the motivation for the threatened attack felt incomplete and am somewhat anticipating more flashbacks that fill in those blanks for the audience. This kind of episode-to-episode or season-to-season suspense was completely lacking for me in the first seasons of both Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire, two critically-lauded series that many of you love but that couldn’t hold my attention into their second seasons. To create suspense without forcing viiewers to suspend their disbelief is a rare skill for writers in any medium, but Homeland does so, making it, in my opinion, the best dramatic series currently on American TV.

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→ September 21, 2012
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A Separation.

My notes on Yu Darvish, Zack Greinke, C.J. Wilson, and Brandon Belt are up, as is a short piece on Baltimore promoting Dylan Bundy. I also chatted on Wednesday.

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The Iranian film A Separation won universal acclaim from critics on its release last winter, landing the top spot on Roger Ebert’s list of his favorite films of 2011, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and prompting Will Leitch to harass me to see the film. (He’s since moved on to taunting me about Trouble With the Curve.) I did finally see it this week and it is among the best movies I have ever seen, and had it been filmed in English it would have been a lock for a Best Picture nomination – and should have gotten one anyway.

The separation of the title refers to the dissolution of the marriage between Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (the beautiful Leila Hatami), a schism spawned by Simin’s desire to leave Iran permanently and raise their 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) in another country, while Nader refuses to leave his ailing father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and is rapidly fading. The film opens with Nader and Simin arguing in front of a judge who refuses to grant her petition for divorce, because Nader doesn’t consent and she lacks sufficient grounds. Simin moves out, so Nader hires a woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat, frumped up to appear less attractive), from a lower economic stratum to take care of his father during the day. Razieh struggles with the job, leading to an accident that draws her, her volatile husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), Nader, and Simin into a legal battle that threatens to tear both of their families apart.

The power of writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s script, which was nominated for Best Original Screenplay but lost to something written in English, is in its simple, unsparing realism. At several points the film seems to move as if in real-time, with painfully rendered arguments between Nader and Simin, Nader and Razieh, Hodjat and pretty much everyone in sight, and eventually Termeh, who naturally finds herself caught between the warring sides. The drama is organic, growing inevitably about of a few small misunderstandings, many of which are never cleared up (as they might not be in real life), each of which adds exponentially to the misery of the people involved.

This degree of attention to the mundane aspects of the conflict allows Farhadi to populate the film with small, intense details that punctuate the pervasive despair of the central characters. Nader doesn’t want to leave his father, who doesn’t recognize his own son but asks several times for his daughter-in-law, and feels her absence more than he would Nader’s. Hodjat’s fury is driven by his own unemployment and lingering resentment over the injustice done to him by his former employers. Nader tries to comfort Razieh and Hodjat’s young daughter, Somayeh, played by a first-time actress, Kimia Hosseini, who probably should have won the Academy Award for Best Eyes. And the final plot point hinges on something so small and so brilliant that a simple request unravels the entire resolution, leading to a final scene that may just rip your heart out for good, assuming you still had it after the first 110 minutes.

Truth, or the futile search for it, lies at the heart of A Separation, as every crime or offense that takes place in the film leaves room for doubt about culpability or even whether a crime was committed, with unreliable witnesses and dubious motives shading nearly every character’s words and actions. With the truth thus obscured, Farhadi gives us terrific portrayals of human responses to this uncertainty – usually interpreting events to fit their predetermined notions. The five principal actors are all superb in roles that demand that they show a broad range of emotions and convince the viewers that there is real empathy underlying much of the suspicion and the senses of betrayal.

It’s a small miracle that Farhadi was even allowed to make a film that is far from subtle in its criticism of life under an autocratic government in Iran. The oppressed status of women is central to the plot, in Simin’s inability to unilaterally leave her husband, in her (never fully elucidated) reasons for wanting to raise Termeh somewhere else, and in Razieh’s difficulties in finding and holding a job. The absurdity of the justice system and the stark differences between economic classes – especially Hodjat’s fear that he will be and Razieh will be treated unfairly by the authorities – also play significant roles in the story, and the overall picture painted of Iranian society is quite unflattering.

A Separation blows away most of the other 2011 films I’ve seen; of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, only The Descendants comes close, yet a head-to-head comparison makes the Clooney vehicle seem ham-handed and superficial. I don’t know if A Separation was the best movie to come out in 2011 – I still haven’t seen Shame, for example – but it is the best I’ve seen from that year by far, and the presence of subtitles shouldn’t deter anyone from watching such a precise, heart-wrenching work of art.

If you’ve seen A Separation already, check out Children Of Heaven, another Iranian film that shares this film’s subtle approach and deep empathy for its main characters.

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→ September 17, 2012
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The Worst Intentions.

I had two pieces go up late last week for Insiders – one on the Yankees’ dimming future and another on Josh Beckett and Lance Lynn.

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I’ve been blogging a little out of order (and often late) recently, but before I forget I wanted to throw a quick post up on Alessandro Piperno’s 2005 novel The Worst Intentions (Con le peggiori intenzioni), a huge best-seller in Italy that won several major literary prizes there and appeared in English in 2007. Piperno, an Italian writer and literary critic born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, has produced the Italian equivalent to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, equally crude and funny but without Roth’s trademark self-indulgence and with a more satirical eye turned toward the hypocrisy of the protoganist’s family members and friends.

Piperno’s narrator, Daniel Sonnino, is the sexually immature 33-year-old heir to a nonexistent family fortune, squandered by his extravagant and crooked grandfather, Bepy, who, along with Daniel’s father, believes in keeping up appearances over all else. The novel eschews the traditional narrative for a stream-of-consciousness approach to the family history of the Sonninos, chronicling their decline from his grandfather’s bankruptcy and flight from debtors, leaving his family to clean up the mess, to his father, mother (who views the Sonninos as frauds), uncle, and his grandfather’s one-time business partner, cuckolded by Bepy, and whose granddaughter, Gaia, becomes the object of Daniel’s puerile obsessions.

I’m not a fan of Roth’s writing, primarily because I find his central characters so self-absorbed despite their development being so arrested, but Piperno’s Daniel, while still immature both emotionally and sexually, is better able to observe his family from a detached perspective, and can even turn the lens on himself and recognize the impacts of his own failures and his inability to form meaningful relationships. His own worst trait is a sometimes-subtle misogyny that often bubbles over into not-subtle forms, particularly with Gaia, who enjoys having Daniel as a follower but dates the most popular boy in the school – one of the only other Jewish students and Daniel’s best friend. The entire final chapter is devoted to this triangle and its devolution, including Daniel’s own destructive action that follows him for years afterwards, which, given Gaia’s name, is fraught with metaphorical implications as well.

Piperno also separates himself from Roth by populating his book with enjoyably quirky side characters, similar to the way the TV series Arrested Development acquired such a devoted cult following – its narcissistic characters helped create a new genre of television comedy. Piperno’s characters aren’t all so awful; some are merely amusing, such as the Arab waiter who only reads Tolstoy’s War and Peace, over and over, reading nothing else over the last thirty years:

But every time, as he returned those old familly volumes [of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust], the Arab’s face displayed a slightly fastidious expression, as if to say: “Thank you for the suggestion, my friend, but, you see, once you’ve read War and Peace you are condemned to read nothing else all your life!” And who’s to say that he wasn’t right?

Piperno’s previous book was a work of nonfiction looking at anti-Semitic elements in Marcel Proust’s work, and the Proust influence is strong here both in word choice and in the meandering flow of the story, although Piperno’s sentences and paragraphs aren’t quite so endless as Proust’s. Here he’s taken Proust’s narrative style, merged it with the neurotic realism of Roth, and produced a slightly difficult but clever and incisive work that was worth the effort required to get through it. His subsequent novel, Persecution, was just released in English in July, and its sequel, Inseparabili, won this year’s Premia Strega, the Italian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so it appears that this book may just be a taste of his capabilities as a writer and satirist.

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→ September 4, 2012
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Bread and Tulips.

Bread & Tulips (Pane e tulipani) was a huge success in Italy when it was released in 2000, sweeping their version of the Academy Awards and even earning “official selection” status at Cannes and at the Toronto International Film Festival. Yet it’s actually a light, tender-hearted comedy about second chances in life and love, especially where kind souls are involved. (It’s available on Netflix Instant video as well.)

Licia Maglietta plays Rosalba, a harried, unappreciated housewife who, while touring ancient ruins in the Italian countryside with her fatheaded husband and their two sons, ends up left behind at a rest stop, for which her husband blames her even though he failed to notice she was missing for a few hours. (He’s a real peach, the lone one-dimensional character in the film, but at least one used to good purpose as the plot’s main punching bag.) On a whim, she hitchhikes to Venice, a city she’s always wanted to visit but has never seen, and through another series of misfortunes ends up settling there, taking a part-time job, and rooming with an Icelandic waiter, Fernando (played by Bruno Ganz), who has to delay his plans to hang himself due to his unexpected houseguest.

The film marries two old movie tropes, the bored housewife making her escape and the stranger in a town of lovable eccentrics, in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. The script’s beauty is that it presents these various oddballs as they are, in favorable lighting but without commentary and often without much definition. Fernando’s neighbor, the “holistic masseuse” (and perhaps lady of the evening) Grazia, ends up in an intrigue involving the hapless plumber-turned-detective Constantino, who should be the story’s main antagonist as an extension of Rosalba’s husband but ends up winning our affection because of his determination and ineptitude.

Bread and Tulips is sweet yet seldom sentimental, and if it’s a little unrealistic at times, it’s more to avoid getting bogged down in the mundane details of a woman just taking off without much cash or means of support. There’s a fair amount of slapstick humor along with some good situational gags, such as Rosalba’s husband asking his mistress to iron a shirt or two for him, while Giuseppe Battiston handles the clownish role of Constantino in a way that engenders sympathy for him as even he tries to ruin Rosalba’s fantasy.

The only false notes in the film, to me, were the dream sequences, in part because they’re not set off from the film in any clear way, and in part because they felt like a clumsy method of demonstrating Rosalba’s own inner turmoil at her abandonment of her family obligations. Awake, she seldom shows any guilt, and relishes her freedom, her independence, her ability to put herself first and revisit long-dormant dreams, including an apparent passion for music that resurfaces when she finds a disused accordion in the wardrobe of the room she rents. The dreams seemed forced, as if the writer or director felt that we needed a reminder that she’d fled her family or that she at least loved her two sons.

Roger Ebert’s review of Bread and Tulips praised the film, but contains one line in the first paragraph that I found shocking to the point that I was slightly offended by it:

Not a classic beauty, not a ”movie star,” but a 40-ish dreamer who’s just a little overweight, with the kind of sexiness that makes you think of bread baking, clean sheets and that everything is going to be all right. 

Man, I like Roger Ebert, but this is a seriously cracked view of beauty. Maglietti – who was around 45 when the film was made – looks gorgeous as soon as she gets to Venice and out of her frumpy-mummy clothes, spending most of the film in flattering sundresses that would certainly have exposed her as “a little overweight” if she had had any weight over. And I’m not even sure where to go with Ebert’s opinion on what’s sexy about an attractive 40-year-old woman (or about the type of women who bake bread?). Besides, if everything’s going to be all right, maybe you’re doing it all wrong.

What Ebert might have said was that Maglietti’s sex appeal is paired with a youthful visage that makes her seem more approachable, not just for the audience, but to lend credence to the idea that strangers in Venice would just take to this woman, offering her a place to rent, a part-time job, or help keeping her location a secret from her husband (who seems to want her back to take care of the house, not to be his wife or lover). Maglietti doesn’t look close to her age in this role, playing a woman in her late 30s with a cuteness that renders Rosalba’s personality as something even younger. She carries the film, with plenty of help from her supporting cast, in the kind of romantic comedy that would never be made by a major U.S. studio because it relies too much on tired tactics like strong writing and actors who bring their characters to life.

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