The Best American Poetry

'Howl' and James Franco: A brief review

Newsweek has already hailed Howl as "a great film," which is exactly what it is not. Now, a great performance -- that's more like it. James Franco (above, right) captures the Allen Ginsberg we hear in our heads and know in our bones. The actor lowers or raises his diaphragm and pitch to achieve Ginsberg's soul-vibrating chant-recitations of the movie's title poem. Franco never once relies on his own crinkly-eyed smile to charm or wink at his audience. Instead, he looks at the camera with Ginsberg's cock-eyed, moist deadpan, or reproduces the Elated Allen Grin -- an ear-to-ear face-splitter that can vanish in an instant.

Howl is a sentimental disappointment whenever Franco isn't front-and-center. Filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman can justify the animation sequences by Eric Drooker by saying that Ginsberg himself collaborated with Drooker, but that doesn't make the cartoon sequences any less maudlin.

As for the restaging of the Howl obscenity trial, Jon Hamm and David Strathairn give good, understated performances in search of dramatic reinforcement: They're reduced to reciting court transcript, staged with all the immobility of a grade-school pageant.

No, at bottom, Howl will survive most usefully when some adroit techno-lit-phile inevitably recuts the film as a YouTube video consisting solely of Franco's recitation of "Howl." Maybe with a split-screen of Ginsberg own readings. "Great YouTube video" doesn't have the same ring as "great film" (yet). But it's truer to the spirit of both Ginsberg's great poem and Franco's great homage to it.

--Ken Tucker

Post-Emmy Haiku

Kyra Sedgwick, what

the hell? Connie Britton, you

were robbed, football muse.

1 TV Haiku

MAD MEN II

Peggy peeks into

Don's office sees his despair

No schadenfreude, kid

2 TV Haiku

MAD MEN

Betty slaps Sally

Children are playing outside

Don drinks in the pain

EMMY AWARDS THIS WEEKEND

Jane Lynch will win prize

Great glee splurge through cameras

If Conan wins, too

The Mystery of Mom by Ken Tucker

My mother died a few years ago. I’ve discovered what many people already know: that you can’t predict how you’ll remember someone after she or he is gone, what memories will bob to the surface again and again.

I’ve found that I’m frequently reminded of my mother just before or after I read a book. As I was growing up, my mother was the reader in the family. The only books in the house were my mother’s, and they were almost exclusively mysteries: Ellery Queen, Rex Stout,and John Dickson Carr (and Carter Dickson) were favorites. Kids imitate their parents, and so I spent many pre-teen and adolescent years alternating whatever books I was reading for school, before I developed stronger reading preferences of my own, devouring the adventures of Nero Wolfe, Ellery Queen, and Gideon Fell.

My mother had a difficult marriage. What a coincidence: I had a difficult father. For her, I’m sure these books were escapes, and they overlapped with her fondness for puzzles. (She also did the Times crossword puzzle every day of the week.) Sometimes I’ll be in a library or a used bookstore and see the exact edition of a copy of, say, The Roman Hat Mystery or Too Many Cooks that my mother read, and I’ll be so overcome with emotion that I’ll have to hide in the stacks for a moment. I can picture my mother in so many different times and settings, thoroughly absorbed in reading, unaware of my gaze. Or maybe she was.

Wanting to know what my mom was so interested in: That’s as good a reason as any to become a reader and a writer. Thanks, Mom.

"What's the name of this gal? Oh, yeah -- Emily Dickinson... "

Bill Murray reads poetry while wearing a hard-hat:

 

'Breaking Bad' tonight: Walt reads Walt: White on Whitman [by Ken Tucker]

I urge you to watch tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, which finds Bryan Cranston’s Walter White adjusting to the dissolution of his marriage while declining to abandon one big reason it dissolved: He still wants/needs to make meth to pay the bills. He goes to a new location to ply his chemistry-teacher skills and acquires a new assistant, played by David Costabile (the scruffy villain from last season’s Damages, among many other credits).

New Assistant finds it comforting to quote Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer” to justify his illegal, and let’s face it, immoral ways to God and to himself. Cut to our Walt sitting in his new cheap apartment, a copy of Leaves of Grass on his lap, poring over the pages silently.

It’s a terrific moment in a terrific new season of Breaking Bad, which digs deeper, with each succeeding episode into questions of what makes a man or woman “bad,” what needs to be done to protect one’s loved ones, and constantly asks the viewer: “How far would you go? Not here, you say? You’re lying to yourself, then.”

Breaking Bad airs on AMC, home of Mad Men, which returns with a new season in July, it was announced earlier this week. Me, I can easily await MM when there are new hours of Breaking Bad to watch. The two shows could not be more different. If Mad Men is a novel of manners for TV (John O’Hara meets Louis Auchincloss in Updike/Cheeverville), Breaking Bad is working thriller territory mapped out by the likes of Charles Willeford, David Goodis, and Jonathan Latimer.

It’s lean and mean (a cop takes an axe to the back of the head in the opening minutes tonight), but thanks to the inspiration of creator Vince Gilligan to insert a middle-class nebbish into the role usually occupied by the cynical sharpie in most thrillers, it never lets ordinary folks like you or I to step back and say, “Oh, I’d never do that.” Breaking Bad is all about what you’d do if you were desperate enough. “And from time to time,” as Whitman writes, the show makes sure that you have “look’d up in perfect silence at the stars,” contemplating the full measure fate.

--Ken Tucker

'Mad Men' dolls: Barbie and Ken get some competition

Not content to daydream about the scenarios in which you'd like to place your favorite characters from Mad Men? Bored waiting for the new season to begin? Play with dolls. Barbie dolls. Barbie dolls of Don and Betty Draper, Roger Sterling, and Joan Holloway. (That last one isn't really fair, since Christina Hendricks is a living doll, isn't she?)

Mattel is releasing what it calls a "Mad Men Barbie Collector doll collection," and even the redundancy within that phrase cannot prevent it from sounding like an unholy cross between John Fowles and Thomas Harris.  

The limited-edition collection has a "suggested retail price of $74.95." I'd like to think I haven't been contemplating buying them... but then I realized I'd read no fewer than seven different news items about these toys trying to figure out whether Mattel meant 75 bucks for one doll or all four. (I think they mean the set.)

I admire Betty's impeccable housewife finery even as I know the Betty we saw at the end of last season is rebelling against just such stereotyping. (Mattel should be offering an alternate Betty in a horse-riding outfit, complete with crop.) And the more I stare at the men, I think they should switch suits; wouldn't Roger be wearing gray, and Don the black? As for Joan, well, she puts the lie to the old complaint that Barbie's measurements are unrealistic. 

Are you tempted?

Kate McGarrigle: Heartbeat Accelerating [by Ken Tucker]

The death of singer and songwriter Kate McGarrigle, at age 63 on Jan. 18 of clear-cell sarcoma, is an awful loss. As recently as Dec. 9 of the year past, she performed with her sister Anna and her children Rufus and Martha Wainwright -- one of the annual "family Christmas" shows that the McGarrigles and the Wainwrights liked to put on, this one at the Royal Albert Hall in London but more frequently at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Her debut album with her sister, entitled Kate and Anna McGarrigle, was released in 1976. It set the template for every album they recorded: folk music influenced by pop and country, filtered through their French-Canadian Quebec upbringing. The stark, often staggering beauty of their harmonies could not hide the fact that Kate and Anna were always playful misanthropes, capable of sarcasm, bitterness, and a detachment that allowed Kate, in a song on their second album, Dancer With Bruised Knees (1977), to gaze down upon her infant son and sing, "Some of them make it, some of them don't." 

This is one of my favorite McGarrigles performances, Kate singing her "I Eat Dinner":

Kate -- sitting behind her piano, exchanging unknowable glances with her sister as they sang -- made music unafraid that its often soft tone would be mistaken for passivity. This sister-team recorded songs with such astringent precision, it's no wonder it took other performers, with more lush voices and arrangements, to make hits of the McGarrigles' songs (Linda Ronstadt, "Heart Like A Wheel"; Maria Muldaur, "Work Song"). 

Kate took long periods off from recording to raise the family she had with the great singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. They divorced 1976, and Loudon wrote some memorable songs about their relationship, including "Red Guitar," in which he recounts destroying a cherished guitar in a drunken rage. The song peaks with the line, "Kate, she said, 'You are a fool, you've done a foolish thing.'" Wainwright recorded Kate's "Come A Long Way" as a rueful salute to their marriage; when Kate and Anna got around to recording it four years later, the song was transformed into a testament of self-reliance.

I fear I've made Kate McGarrigle sound grave and severe, living a stoic life in cold Canada. In fact, she had a wicked sense of humor and a great playfulness about her. Once when I interviewed her, she reminded me that I'd once described Kate and Anna in print as "the Bronte sisters with mittens." "We laughed and laughed" when they read that, she said.

Firm, funny, realistic, and independent, Kate McGarrigle was certainly a wonderful musician, and she seemed like a wonderful person.

Happy birthday yesterday, Elvis Presley!

Elvis Presley was born 75 years ago yesterday. As the terrific musician Patterson Hood wrote yesterday, his birth is the date the celebrate, not the anniversary of his death, since, among other reasons, "Pat Boone's daughter had the #1 record in the land the day Elvis died with 'You Light Up My Life,' so Rock and Roll wasn't much healthier than Elvis was then."

It's impossible to pick a greatest-Elvis moment, of course, so I'll just give you one of mine, from his brutally great 1968 concert. The poetry occurs about 1:45 into this video, when Elvis cannot bear the beat of the music inside him and rises up from his chair to shake it loose from his soul (and his booty) for a second: