Happiness
By Will Ferguson
Canongate; 309 pp.; $24
From the very opening line of this novel’s disclaimer, the reader knows where he
or she stands:
“This is a book about the end of the world, and as such, it involves diet
cookbooks, self-help gurus, sewer-crawling convicts, overworked editors, the
economic collapse of the United States of America and the widespread tilling
of alfalfa fields. And I think one of the characters loses a finger at some
point, too. This is the story of apocalypse: Apocalypse Nice. It tells of a devastating
plague of human happiness “
In other words, this is satire with a capital S. It’s the kind of book
Tom Robbins used to write when Tom Robbins was still funny.
Will Ferguson, who lives in Calgary “in the foothills of the Canadian
Rockies,” is the author of several nonfiction
titles, including Why I Hate Canadians. In
this, his first foray into fiction, he has created a protagonist who is an assistant
nonfiction editor at Panderic Press (adversary of HarperCollins and Random House):
cynical, jaded Edwin de Valu, a man who kicks cats and hates most of what he
edits. When a monstrous self-help book called What I Learned on
the Mountaintop by Tupac Soiree appears in his slush pile,
he sniffs at it, belittles it, fumes over it, and junks it. Then his boss surprises
him, demanding that Edwin fill a hole in the fall catalog with — guess what — a
self-help book. Edwin promises him the very manuscript he just threw
away, only to discover that it’s already gone to the city dump.
What follows is a hilarious send-up of publishing, self-help books, authors,
editors, wives, mistresses, sages, seekers, get-rich-quick schemes, and
save-the-world dreams. But as Edwin bounces around unproductively, Fate waits in the
wings with a mission for him.
Bitter Edwin’s life isn’t going so well. He hates his boss, Mr. Mead, an
ex-hippie whose whole generation Edwin disparages, saying, “The sixties never
died, they just got really, really boring.”
Edwin’s also ghostwritten an unpublished book called
Die, Baby Boomers, Die! He calls his wife Hun, not short for honey but as
in Attila. And he’s in love with a co-worker, the ever-dieting May, who
alternately adores and hates Edwin.
So when he’s responsible for publishing that self-help book, a book that
changes the world, he is, at first, elated. But as
he comes to see the vapidity behind it all, he is, eventually, appalled. He says, “It’s
like reading the mad ravings of a lunatic. Someone locked away in a padded
cell, someone who has read far too many books. Or maybe the mad ravings of a
genius.” The book’s mind-numbing simplicity, its “Live! Love! Learn!”
message, of course, catches on like a cure for
headaches. Chaos ensues. First the tobacco industry then the alcohol distilleries
then the 12-step programs are put out of business. Business is put out of business.
And Edwin, poor schnook, believes he has to do something about it.
Edwin, who loves a good Latin quote, quips that the country’s rallying cry
has become “Credo quia absurdum.” I
believe because it is absurd. He calls it the basis
of every religion and the New Ager’s article of faith. Edwin despairs. Is he the
only rational man left on the planet, the only one who sees through
What I Learned on the Mountaintop? He sets out to
find Tupac Soiree, who has sequestered himself away from the world under
armed guard. The book’s denouement is unpredictable, in keeping with the plotline.
It’s hard not to admire the author’s sustained inventiveness. The book
never flags but rolls along, cockeyed and wobbly, on its own outrageous course.
Will Ferguson is not the greatest stylist among writers, but the comic verve
of Happiness more than makes up for it. This is an inspired, occasionally
mean-spirited, anything-goes satire that is so over-the-top, there is no top. If
Monty Python collaborated on a book with Terry Southern, this might be the result.
“Nemo saltat sobrius,” Edwin says. Sober
men don’t dance.
Which makes just about as much sense as the “wisdom” in
What I Learned on the Mountaintop. — Corey Mesler
Letters To a
Young Novelist
By Mario Vargas Llosa
Farrar Straus & Giroux; 128 pp.; $17
Why is it that human beings are drawn to storytelling? Whatever the answer, it
seems to be an inherent need that can be traced to the very origin of human society.
Arthur Koestler, in Acts of
Creation, suggested that audience and creator
alike long for a place “remote from
self-interest” where they can transcend the
limitations of space and time. Jean-Paul Sartre, in
What is Literature?, posited that writers are driven by the need to see themselves
as “essential in relationship to the world.”
Now comes Mario Vargas Llosa, the esteemed Peruvian novelist, who, in
this short collection of essays, Letters To a Young
Novelist, argues that creation is a form of protest against the way things
are. Audience and storyteller alike seek to escape the hard road that inevitably
reduces life to a tearful journey.
With this motivation in mind, Vargas Llosa takes us, step by step, through
the issues that confront the would-be storyteller. He is an able teacher. A
successful author, most recently of The Feast Of
the Goat, Vargas Llosa has tackled this subject matter before. In
The Writer’s Reality, he explored the work of his
favorites, writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Sartre. This
latest work puts that foundation to good use as he tackles the technical issues
of storytelling. He devotes each “letter” to
a single topic — the use of time, for example, representations of reality,
what has traditionally been called “point of view” (the perspective of the
storyteller within the context of the novel).
Vargas Llosa draws on the breadth of his reading to illustrate the creative
power of these ideas. One interesting example is what he calls the shortest story ever
written — a one-sentence classic by Augusto Monterroso: “When he woke up,
the dinosaur was still there.” (Imagine waking from a nightmare only to find
the nightmare breathing on your face. Terror is followed not by relief but by
more terror. There is no escape from the haunting if fragmented imagery that lives in
the subconscious.)
Good storytelling can take you to these fantastic levels, as Kafka and Borges,
the most renowned of the fantasists, often did. Then there is the issue of time,
sometimes only an element of a story and other times the focal point. Vargas Llosa
illustrates using the Ambrose Bierce short story “An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge,” in which a Civil War saboteur
is about to be hanged. At the moment of his execution, the rope breaks and the
man drops into the river below. The rest of the story follows his flight back to home
and wife. He is just about to embrace his wife when — shocker — the rope tightens
around his neck and the man dies. The entire story, then, has unfolded, in a matter
of seconds, only in the mind of the doomed man.
If nothing else, this little book will introduce readers to some writers
not widely known to an American audience. And for those ambitious enough to
tackle writing a novel, it might contain some helpful hints on how to navigate
the many issues that can make or break your creative effort. —
George Shadroui
Republic Of Dreams:
Greenwich Village:
The American Bohemia, 1910-1960
By Ross Wetzsteon
Simon & Schuster; 617 pp.; $35
Greenwich Village is thought of as that place where the misunderstood
gather and others (the understood?) look in from the outside. Few writers have tried
to pierce the curtain surrounding the Village, perhaps because similar
communities, once shed of mystery, begin to resemble blocks of overpriced
apartment buildings with Starbucks coffee shops downstairs. Or perhaps because
the Village’s history is too long and complicated to attempt, what with its who’s
who of literary lights like Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, William Carlos
Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Stephen Crane, and Allen Ginsberg among the dignitaries.
A Village history would also have to capture its frenetic energy, its
multiple personalities, and its dynamic between the hip and the commercial. Luckily,
the late Ross Wetzsteon, who was with The Village
Voice for 35 years as a writer and editor, shows himself capable of just
such a feat in his Republic Of Dreams,
which focuses on the Village from 1910 to 1960.
Wetzsteon summarizes much of the Village’s history in the introduction
and spends the majority of his book concentrating on the major players in
Village folklore. He spends chapters on Williams, Wolfe (and Wolfe’s lover,
Aline Bernstein), abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, and Joe Gould,
whom Wetzsteon calls “The Last Bohemian.”
Gould, a Harvard man who graduated with T.S. Eliot, was a Village
bum who “remained an unchanging fixture on the scene mumbling to himself
as he scratched his ribs and armpits and rummaged through garbage cans,
leering at old friends or strangers as he asked for a handout. [Gould]
fascinated Villagers with the purity of that
achievement, his rejection of middle-class life, refusal to adjust or compromise or
even ‘make a living.'”
Wetzsteon uses Gould (among others) to highlight one of his more
interesting ideas: that the culture of the bohemian
is necessarily one of failure, not so much in that the bohemians produced bad art,
but because “rejection by the middle class
has been regarded as the surest validation of vision, acceptance as the surest sign that
it has failed to achieve its goals.” That the work of the bohemians is not
mainstream and, therefore, all non-mainstream (and non-profitable) work must be
bohemian, Wetzsteon is quick to point out as a fallacy, and he also shows how this culture
of failure both validated and detracted from Village culture.
A major strength of this book is that the author refuses to romanticize the notion
of the pauper artist or the unappreciated genius. Rather, his tone throughout the text
is playful, pointing out the ridiculousness of failure as a virtue. “Joe Gould wasn’t just
a bum,” he writes, “he was a bum of a
certain genius.”
While Republic Of Dreams
successfully captures the richness and color of
Village life, the litany of names and characters
can unfortunately become monotonous. Wetzsteon uses the scene of poor drunk
but good-hearted poets passionately spinning bad verse more than once, and his brief
appraisal of each artist’s work does not always
give justice to the artist.
But maybe I’m missing the point. Because, after all, if the Village
is about dedicated but poor artistry, then perhaps Wetzsteon didn’t want
to be too harsh a critic. Instead, he wanted to
shine some needed light on America’s most famous
village, Greenwich.
— Chris Przybyszewski
Reporting Back:
Notes
On Journalism
By Lillian Ross
Counterpoint; 292 pp.; $25
“This book is about the journalism that I love and work at. Journalism to me
is factual writing, and the highest kind of it
comes in the form of good writing, and often writing that, at its best, is witty. But I
also enjoy the challenge of pushing traditional structures. For me, there has always
been satisfaction and joy in finding or even inventing new ways of telling a story,”
writes Lillian Ross in her latest book,
Reporting Back: Notes On Journalism.
Here, Ross, who has worked for The New
Yorker for more than half a century, gives us a glimpse into her life as a
writer. It is as much a piece of history as it is
a book about observing and revealing.
“I have consistently learned more and more about writing from all the great
writers I admire. … One learns from them but is never compelled to imitate them. When
an original piece of writing is imitated, the telltale imitation hangs on that writer
the way a string bikini would hang on Mother Teresa,” according to Ross.
But Ross doesn’t write for writers only. She is a journalist through and
through: “Creating a story, especially about real
people and real events, is as necessary a part of
my life as breathing, eating, walking in Central Park.” And this makes her a storyteller.
She writes for readers first. And she wrote about Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy,
Bill Clinton, Chaplin, and Hemingway, to name a few. What makes Ross’ stories unique
is her angle on them.
“I believe that every new story a reporter takes on about any subject
— especially about famous world figures about whom millions of words of
one kind or another are published daily — should be fresh and alive and
worth doing,” she writes.
How did Ross do it? She pretty much stayed away from the important
people until they weren’t that important anymore, and then she wrote about
them. She tried to get “past the image of a
public person, no matter how fixed it might
be” and see where her own curiosity would take her. She doesn’t try to compete
with the journalists from The New York
Times or other major newspapers; she admires them, and she uses them for background,
but her stories lead away from mainstream reporting, which makes them truly timeless.
Reporting Back is for anyone who likes
to read good nonfiction and who’d like to discover just what makes it good.
— Simone Barden
Confessions Of
a Street Addict
By James J. Cramer
Simon & Schuster; 339 pp.; $26
Terry Keeter, a fine and crusty reporter at The Commercial
Appeal for many years, used to have a scathing putdown for anyone
who ventured a first-person story in the newspaper. His suggested headline for such
offerings was “My Amazing Story, As Told To Me By Me.”
That wouldn’t be a bad title for James J. Cramer’s book
Confessions Of a Street Addict. Cramer, whose burning eyes and full
mug grace the cover, loves action, loves Wall Street, loves trading stocks, and loves to
talk about himself in newspaper columns, on CNBC and
CBS Market Watch, on TheStreet.com,
and now in this book.
I’m sorry to say that I liked it in spite
of myself. Cramer was on the cutting edge if not over the edge of financial journalism
for 15 years as both a reporter and a money manager and trader. To an avid
Wall Street Journal reader like me, Cramer’s career
is interesting. Granted, the same could be said for bank robbery or prostitution, but
those things are not the foundation of American capitalism.
Cramer was early to see the possibilities of business journalism and
financial punditry as well as the Internet as a way
to peddle stocks and investment advice. He got in some trouble with the Securities
and Exchange Commission. He is a very good writer. Add all that up and it makes for
a book very much in tune with today’s headlines about corporate scandals and
crashing stocks.
I did not, however, find Cramer’s personal story of addiction and
redemption entirely persuasive. He describes his
temper fits, compulsiveness, and neglect of his family life in detail. There is an
especially memorable description of his getting drunk and throwing up all over
his friends at his surprise 40th birthday party. In the concluding
chapter, Cramer reflects on the friends he lost in the attacks on the World Trade
Center and their obituaries in The New York
Times. “I can tell you that had it been me in those towers, up until this
year there wouldn’t have been anything about me in my thumbnail that
anyone could be proud of,” he writes.
A market bull for years, Cramer turned into a bear last year. “You can knock
me for thinking that stocks had replaced baseball as America’s pastime. They
can’t; they lose you much more money than baseball can and they can break
your wallet and your heart even more than the Red Sox can.”
Now he tells us.
The James Cramer I remember goes back another 10 years. I was a
charter subscriber to a magazine called Smart
Money, which was connected to The Wall Street
Journal and was full of useful advice about investments, travel, and
spending money. Cramer was a columnist. After a couple of years, I dropped my
subscription for two reasons. One was the magazine’s cloying way of dressing
up mutual-fund managers as celebrities and rock stars. The other was Cramer’s
column.
To anyone with the slightest background in journalism ethics, it was
clear that Cramer was using his podium as a columnist to
tout stocks in which he owned large positions as a trader
and fund manager. In thinly traded small companies,
Cramer could and did move the price of the stock upward.
His personal stake was not always disclosed. That is what
got him in trouble with the SEC and cost him his
credibility with many of his peers. His explanation is lengthy,
self-serving, and unconvincing.
And, to me at least, so is his inner nice guy.
— John Branston
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
By Catherine Millet
Grove Press; 209 pp.; $23
“Today I can account for forty-nine men whose
sexual organs have penetrated mine and to whom I can
attribute a name, or at least, in a few cases, an identity. But I
cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity.”
This confession is made in the first pages of
The Sexual Life Of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet, editor of the
French magazine Art Press and author of several books on art.
Millet writes autobiographically and as if she were talking to
her therapist — at times coherently, at other times interrupted
by a sudden train of thought, which may or may not lead us
back to the main event. She describes these events in a
highly analytical tone, emotionless, like someone writing a report
on the mating behavior of frogs, and it’s disturbing.
Millet divides her narrative into four sections, and sex
is the focus of all of them — Millet screwing or being
screwed by countless men. Millet at orgies with “up to about
150 people.” Millet taking it from the front, from the back, in
her mouth, and up the ass, a practice she preferred until a
painter made a point of teaching her to put herself to better use.
“He talked to me,” Millet writes. “He told me extremely
persuasively that one day I would meet a man who would know
how to take me from the front and bring me to orgasm that
way, and that it would be better than the other.”
Nothing too unusual here, though. Nothing too
shocking, really. Millet could be your next-door neighbor,
your sister, or your best friend, someone who likes a lot of sex.
But there are only so many variations on this subject and only
so many ways to write about it, except perhaps for
one variable: men’s “members” — small, hard, large,
full, filthy, limp, and so on and so forth. Boredom creeps
in halfway through the book, and after an
unspectacular ending, you may well wonder, What does Millet
want to tell us? And why?
The author, now married, has been
monogamous for eight years. She has closed one chapter of
her sexual life, and this book is its lid. As to the
book’s value, you can get out of it what you want out of
it. And if you’re not totally desperate for sexual
revelations, you can read between the lines and pay
attention to Millet’s true confession. What you’ll
discover is a very sad book written by an
intelligent, well-educated woman who was carried through
her sexual life like a leaf in the wind.
“I feel more like a driver who must stick to
the rails than a guide who knows where the port
is,” Millet writes. “I’ve fucked in the same way.”
Completely available all the time, not so much
wondering about her own pleasure but far more absorbed by
the fantasies of men.
“I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that until I
was about thirty-five, I had not imagined that my
own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter,”
Millet goes on to write. “I had never understood that.”
This is no “look what these bastards forced me
to do” book. Millet wasn’t forced to do anything.
This was her life, her sexual life. This was what she
wanted. Why is she telling us about it? In an interview in
a German magazine, Millet said that books are
mostly read by women and, at last, she wanted to talk
to women about sex. The Sexual Life Of Catherine
M. is her attempt to talk to as many women as possible.
— Simone Barden
This Dark World:
A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost
By Carolyn S. Briggs
Bloomsbury; 304 pp.; $25.95
Sometimes, it just withers and falls away. Religion,
that is. That’s the story here. What remains is life and
the occasional nonspecific religious feeling. For
Carolyn Briggs, who spent over two decades pursuing a
very rigid Christian identity, that’s enough now.
How she fell into fundamentalism and how
she eventually drifted away is not a dramatic tale but
more a story of cycling in and out of a faith that no
longer seemed believable or functional. Her book
This Dark World gains impact by not dwelling on the
dramatic but by opting for a gradualist approach more in
keeping with the chronology of what she went through.
If you’re looking for a born-again atheist rant,
look elsewhere. Briggs was what they call a
committed Christian. She may no longer be one, but that
doesn’t mean she excoriates her former beliefs by writing
a Christian-bashing book.
However, there are plenty of surreal and funny moments from her life
among the true believers described here. She doesn’t caricature or exaggerate to
make the point that some of her thoughts and actions during that period were, well,
a little extreme. Perhaps the book’s funniest moments come when she recounts
a session she had with a Christian couples counselor (get thee back under the
sacred yoke, unfaithful woman) at a time when she was separated from her husband
Eric because she no longer held the same beliefs as he. (That, plus the fact that
she simply couldn’t stomach him anymore.) This anointed therapist was not
only appallingly sexist but also a complete doofus, a ripe target for
lampooning. Again, Briggs didn’t have to do any
stereotyping. The counselor himself took care of that.
The author was not your typical candidate for conversion to radical
Christianity. Neither of her parents was a rabid churchgoer, and Briggs’ church
involvement as a child and teenager was kind of spotty and vague. It just didn’t seem
like she was headed in a born-again direction. As a high school student, she and
her music-playing boyfriend, yes, Eric, experimented with alcohol and
premarital sex, and Briggs eventually got pregnant after finishing her senior year. She
and Eric agreed on a kind of genteel shotgun wedding and ended up living in a
trailer park on the edge of Des Moines, Iowa, in the mid-1970s. A high school
chum “turned her on to the Lord” in a mild
way by witnessing to Briggs on a few occasions. Out of curiosity, one day
Briggs bought a paperback paraphrase of the Bible,
The Way, at Walgreens, and both she and Eric started reading it in
their little trailer.
With that simple purchase, they were off and running: Bible study, forming
a church, speaking in tongues, the whole “Jesus trip.” What finally led her out
of the light and into rational doubt was a confluence of factors — her crummy
marriage, leaving Iowa, attending the University of Arkansas, and, finally, simply
paying attention to the things that didn’t make sense. In that sense,
This Dark World’s more a coming-of-age story
than a tragic tale of lost faith.
— Ross Johnson
Portrait Of a Burger As a Young Calf
By Peter Lovenheim
Harmony Books; 263 pp.; $23
My Fine
Feathered Friend
By William Grimes
North Point Press; 85 pp.; $15
In his office in Rochester, New York, Peter Lovenheim takes a container
of cottage cheese and dips a spoon into the as-yet-unmolested curds. With the
first spoonful swallowed, Lovenheim wonders if he knows the cow who was the source
of his snack.
South to Queens in New York City, William Grimes sticks his fork into
an omelet he’s made in his very own kitchen. No doubt where the eggs came from
for his breakfast: They’re from the chicken in his backyard.
The former is a scene from Lovenheim’s memoir
Portrait Of a Burger As a Young Calf, a story of a dozen or so cows and
a moral dilemma. The latter is from My Fine Feathered
Friend, an extended anecdote from Grimes, a
New York Times restaurant critic, that is simply, and
happily, about a single chicken.
Lovenheim, a mediator by trade, stumbled upon the idea for his
book while watching his young daughter eat a McDonald’s Happy Meal
hamburger while playing with the toy that came
with it — a Beanie Baby cow. He realized she didn’t have a clue where her burger or
the billions sold came from, and neither did he. So Lovenheim decided to buy a
cow and follow it from “conception to consumption.”
Meanwhile, there are no decisions for Grimes. The chicken, whom he
ends up calling the Chicken, just appears one day. No note, no nothing. He first
suspects his Bangladeshi neighbors because of the smells from their feasts. But
it wasn’t them. Go figure. Grimes has a chicken.
Bonanza, Lovenheim’s semen donor, delivers, as does #4923, and it’s twins,
a girl and boy. Lovenheim buys the pair plus a backup in case one of the calves
dies before slaughter. And he watches them. The backup dies, and the girl and boy,
#7 and #8, respectively, shiver in their hay bunkers during the winter and are
kept out of the pasture so they won’t run and develop muscles, which would make
their meat less desirable.
And Grimes? The Chicken holds his own against the neighborhood cats.
His family gets written up in the newspaper for having a chicken in Queens. He
looks into chicken history and has his mother send feed all the way from Texas.
Lovenheim’s book is hell on meat-eaters, not to mention dairy
consumers. He watches as cows are poked and burned, killed at just days old or
because they produce only 30 pounds of milk a day when 32 is the
break-even point. He considers the farmers’ lives; those who do very well with 1,000
head and those who have to have food stamps to get by. Lovenheim’s only crime is
the effort he makes to look like a good guy. He is, but who cares about him
when cows are being stuffed with corn to fatten them up to be slaughtered at
less than 2 years old, though they might as well be killed, since the corn diet
plus the antibiotics and growth hormones would surely do them in around
the same time anyway?
And speaking of caring the Grimes book? The author’s fans will be
happy, serious readers will be perplexed, and everyone else will surely be none the
wiser of the restaurant critic and his chicken.
— Susan Ellis
Castaways Of the
Image Planet
By Geoffrey O’Brien
Counterpoint; 256 pp.; $26
The editor-in-chief of the Library of America, Geoffrey O’Brien is one of
our finest contemporary pop-culture critics, a competitor to Greil Marcus who is
more rigorous and less given to hype and whose myriad interests are rooted in film
rather than rock-and-roll. Castaways Of the Image
Planet collects short-ish criticism (pieces ranging from two to 20
pages) written by O’Brien over the past 16 years and originally printed in publications
such as The New York Review Of Books,
The Village Voice, The New Republic,
Film Comment, and The New York Times.
O’Brien maintains that all writing on film and related fields is “shifting
and unreliable,” a subjective enterprise
affected by the vagaries of time, place, and mood. Given that, the writer must contend
with his or her own relationship to the “unstable past” that film and television
create. “Those people keep being alive back there,” O’Brien muses, “with no
visible diminution of energy; it is only we who have edged away, perhaps, from the
intensity of the primal moment when our eyes first made contact with them.”
“A century ago nobody knew what it would be like,” he later writes, “this
curious long-term connection that the sciences of reproduced image and sound have
made inevitable for us. We become the creatures of fictions that were made for
other eyes than ours.”
With this overriding ethos in place, Castaways Of the Image
Planet traces a “series of encounters” with a variety
of subjects, including filmmakers (Orson Welles, John Ford, Michael
Powell), films (The Searchers,
Vertigo, A.I.), performers (Marlon Brando, the
Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby), and other forms
(Mad magazine, Seinfeld, Bill
Clinton’s “Show Trial”). O’Brien’s essays
are open-ended and exploratory, scholarly yet extremely readable.
Brilliant essays on Preston Sturges (“The Sturges Style,” 1990) and
Seinfeld (“The Republic of
Seinfeld,” 1997) unintentionally comment on each other
and together illustrate O’Brien’s talents. O’Brien nails the wonder that
Sturges’ 1940s comedies (and other films of the milieu) inspire today by remarking
on their “Elizabethan richness and strangeness.” The article offers a detailed
description of the way Sturges uses dialogue, identifying an “unbroken
undercurrent of gathering hilarity” that is
“indistinguishable from the onset of an
anxiety attack” and concluding that “what
lingers finally from his movies is not their wildness but their unsentimental rigor.”
“The Republic of Seinfeld” begins
with a lengthy consideration of the show as cultural touchstone and obsessively
covered media topic. Then O’Brien refreshingly segues into an in-depth,
detailed consideration of the show’s art that is
as termite-like as the show itself. It is here that the tremendous focus and depth
of O’Brien’s criticism is apparent, going so far as to analyze the facial comedy of
Julia Louise-Dreyfus in slow motion: “Her shifts of expression are revealed as a
complex ballet in which eyes, nose, mouth, neck, and shoulder negotiate hairpin
turns or spiral into free fall. The smirk, the
self-satisfied grin, the effusion of fake warmth, the grimace of barely concealed
revulsion: Each is delineated with razor precision before it slides into a slightly
different shading.”
And all of these essays are marked by a similar obsessiveness, an intensity of
concern that O’Brien explains beautifully in the book’s introduction: “Together
we construct a history of our lives as we go, and, whether we wish to or not,
turn movies and comic books, exotic postcards and billboards and television
commercials into materials for that unfinishable and never quite settled chronicle.
They haunt us because they don’t go away, and we do.” —
Chris Herrington
Trash:
The Graphic Genius
of Xploitative
Movie Posters
By Jacques Boyreau
Chronicle Books;
144 pp.; $19.95 (paper)
The poster for Black Cobra — an
attractive blonde wearing little more than a boa constrictor and carrying the tagline
“How Much Snake Can One Woman Take?” — is indeed eye-catching. And the
colorful one-sheet for The Thing With Two
Heads, which helpfully explains, “They
transplanted a WHITE BIGOT’S HEAD onto a SOUL BROTHER’S BODY!”
(the former played by Ray Milland; the latter played, inexplicably, by Los Angeles
Rams star Roosevelt Grier), certainly suggests a high-water mark in American cinema.
But the trouble with Trash is that
too many of the posters (or the movies themselves) don’t come across as all that
trashy. After all, what is exploitative — oops, I meant Xploitative — about such cult
classics as Vanishing Point, Willard,
Bullitt, Deliverance, or even Clint
Eastwood’s The Gauntlet?
Perhaps part of the problem is that author Jacques Boyreau, co-founder of
a cult-movie theater (and “beatnik space lounge”) in San Francisco called
the Werepad, doesn’t really explain what Xploitation means. At least I don’t
think he does. “Xploitation offers a naiveté
and dependability I find fascinating,” he
writes in a brief introduction. “Seek its
silly charms and cheap passageways, its many jugs of innocence, and the way it
pops your guts.” Later, when introducing the section on horror-trash movies, he
adds, “It pours over our body politic and through the dams of our
subconscious, continuously tapping who knows what except it must scream or snort
moistly.” Snort moistly? Huh?
The 150 or so posters in Trash, described as “masterpieces of twisted
brilliance,” are culled from Boyreau’s own collection and arranged into five
genres: sex-trash, action-trash, horror-trash, groovy-trash, race-trash, and
docu-trash. Text is kept to a minimum (probably a good thing). Except for
half-page introductions to each section, all written in the same breathless,
I-just-took-LSD style as the quotes above, the
only information provided is each film’s title, date, and production company. A
little more commentary would have been interesting, if only to point out, for
example, that Larry Hagman, perhaps best-known for starring in the hit
TV series I Dream of Jeannie and
Dallas, at a low point in his career directed
and starred in a 1972 horror-trash thriller called
Son of Blob (“It’s Loose Again Eating Everybody!”). Or that
Jonathan Demme, who directed Silence of the
Lambs, was responsible for the 1974 sex-trash women’s prison movie
Caged Heat (“White Hot Desires Melting
Cold Prison Steel!”).
Despite these quibbles, there are enough great posters here to: 1)
keep you entertained for a half-hour or so, and 2) make you want to rush to
the nearest video store. I, for one, won’t rest easy until I take a peak at
Six Pack Annie (“She’s The Pop-Top
Princess With The Recyclable Can!”).
— Michael Finger
