The Best American Poetry

15 Years On: John Leonard, 1939-2008: Ambushed Into Sentience [by Ken Tucker]

John Leonard, who died Nov. 5 [2008] at age 69, was a dizzyingly inspirational critic. Lots of people are going to write appreciations of his extraordinary body of literary criticism, and although I am here to speak for his television criticism, I will inevitably include some of Leonard's observations about books, because for him, one informed the other.

When he began simultaneously reviewing books and TV in the early 1970s, he wasn't someone who wanted to make you feel it was okay to like pop culture (and he was then writing at a time when his readership often wanted such reassurance). No, Leonard's writing stood as proof that high and low culture could and should spark off each other, yield up fresh juxtapositions and ideas. He didn't merely write about watching TV, he Leonard-ized the experience, noting that we tuned in "wishing merely for a chortle or a pipe dream, suspecting our cable box is just another bad-faith credit card enabling us to multiply our disappointments, we are ambushed into sentience.
              Leonard’s crammed prose was a series of cultural references packed into sentences so densely that they exploded in your head. Lots of critics write year-end summation pieces; only Leonard could summarize 1971's TV-year thus: "The mind is a vacuum tube. The memory is artificial turf, videotape, consisting of images of George Plimpton and Archie Bunker; beneath it lies the bodies of four thousand lobotomized network vice-presidents, sewn together at their pineal glands and Achilles' heels… FCC commissioners and the bureaucrats of public television scrimmage with cleated prose and padded brains."
       Twenty-six years later, showing not a trace of abated energy, he praised an episode of Homicide: Life On The Street that focussed on a long interrogation scene by saying, "for a single hour in March, for which Tom Fontana won the Emmy he deserved, I learned more about the behavior of fearful men in small rooms than I had from any number of better-known movies and serious plays and modern highbrow novels by the likes of Don DeLillo, Mary McCarthy, Alberto Moravia, Nadine Gordimer, Heinrich Boll, and Doris Lessing." With Leonard, this wasn't idle cultural name-dropping—he had read and written about all of those novelists. That comparison was not idly made; he had also spent the year watching Northern Exposure and Roseanne ("about joblessness and lesbianism as well as bowling") and Picket Fences and the TV-movie "Roe V. Wade, with Holly Hunter as a Supreme Court case." He had his blind spots (he couldn’t get past Archie Bunker's bigotry to appreciate All In The Family's craft and sociological impact), and he had his TV crushes (Blair Brown and Veronica Hamel felt his prose caress many times). But he remained not merely sensible and passionate but revelatory. No one else could review a travel documentary with a sentence like this, a glorious example of one of Leonard’s signature devices—the list-sentence that becomes in itself a form of criticism: "We wandered with a shopping list—Greek light, German sausage, Russian soul, French sauce, Spanish bull, Zen koans, hearts of darkness, the blood of the lamb, and a double-knuckled antelope humerus from Oolduvai Gorge. We'd rub our fuzzy heads against the strange, and see if something kindled." We’d rub our fuzzy heads against the strange—that is poetry as much as it is criticism, and Leonard spun it out without warning, without ostentation, but like a newspaperman on deadline delivering a staggering gift.
       Over the years I have often repeated to writers who bitch about lack of recognition the story Leonard told in his first collection of criticism, 1973's This Pen For Hire, that he started writing TV reviews for Life magazine. But when he became the editor of the New York Times Book Review, he was told "it was considered inappropriate" for a Times-man to write about that lowly medium, and so he continued writing about TV, but under a pen name, Cyclops. "Life still receives letters thanking the magazine for getting rid of me in favor of Cyclops," Leonard wrote, "or demanding my return and the firing of Cyclops. So much for a distinctive prose style."
      But it is precisely his prose style that made anything Leonard wrote immediately identifiable. He was the first great TV critic. Of those who followed, James Wolcott, Tom Carson, Mim Udovich, and Clive James are the only other ones who can touch him. But none of them—and few of us—can rub our fuzzy heads against the strange and come up with thoughts as clear and complex as those of John Leonard.

--Ken Tucker

from the archive, first posted November 6, 2008. See too https://slate.com/culture/2012/03/john-leonards-reading-for-my-life-reviewed.html

"Lookout" for David Berman and The Silver Jews [by Ken Tucker]

The Silver Jews is a band led by singer-songwriter-poet David Berman. In existence with varying personnel since 1990, formed in Hoboken, New Jersey, the Silver Jews has its sole constant in Berman. He is a singer in the same sense that Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, or Allen Ginsberg is a singer. Vocalizing in a flat, nasal monotone, speaking his lyrics as much as singing them, Berman isn't American Idol's idea of a star, and all the more reason to like him for that. But a flat voice and poetic imagery can get you either neglected or as overrated as Nick Cave or Kristofferson. Berman navigates a cozy middle ground on his new album with his band the Silver Jews, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, recorded in Nashville. It's is sort of country-rock, sort of art-rock. It's sure as hell not (feh) spoken-word; neither are his performances of the tunelessness-as-a-sign-of-integrity sort in the manner of James McMurtry.

Before I go any further, let me remind/recommend Berman’s 1999 poetry collection Actual Air. His publisher was probably glad to get the money-quote (ha!) from Billy Collins for the back cover, but close readers will note that Berman's conversational grandness is closer to a contemporary with an equal passion for music, the mighty Mark Halliday, than Collins. As a print poet, Berman deploys his wordplay with poignant sincerity. As sung poetry, the lyrics on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are more than poignant and/or sincere. They’re also willfully obscure and philosophical (typical song title: "What Is Not But Could Be If"), and occasionally simple and direct to the point of abstraction. (No, the song called "Open Field," is not, as I first assumed, some sort of Bermanesque homage to Charles Olsen's gang—it's an adaptation of some lyrics by an obscure-to-me Japanese musician and artist, Tori Kudo.)

But one thing "Open Field" and Berman’s own songs on this album suggests is the magical, chimerical idea that anyone can make music as forthright and unadorned as this. Berman emphasizes this notion by including drawings of the chords he used to create this album, adding the note, "Anyone can play these songs." No, David, not anyone; only some Silver Jews.

Among whose number is Berman’s wife, Cassie, who also plays bass, and who provides the right vocal notes of plaintiveness on "Suffering Jukebox," a deceptively simple song with the brilliant notion of assigning human feelings to an old jukebox filled with sad country songs. Rarely has the use of the pathetic fallacy in pop music been more precisely pleasurable, and I like way Berman puns on the phrase about the jukebox "breaking down."

A number of compositions on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are big, knotty story-songs, chiefly "San Francisco, B.C.," a version of the Summer of Love if it were re-told by a lower-depths novelist such as David Goodis or Charles Willeford. Another garrulous ramble, "Aloysius Bluegrass Drummer," concerns the title character’s raucous involvement with a tough customer of a woman named Brick Butterfly. David Berman carries both his poetic and country music influences lightly, quoting a phrase from Emily Dickinson in that song as casually and appropriately as he does one from Roger Miller, the songwriter of "King of the Road," among many other, lesser-know great songs.

People who’ve followed Berman's career for more than a decade may be flummoxed by the paucity of autobiographical-seeming, or advice-containing, tunes that put the "cult" in cult-following for this artist. Some early reviews has ascribed this to Berman’s real-life sobriety and what appears to the outside world as a happy marriage. But while I think one of the pleasures of pop-culture criticism is in not merely analyzing the work at hand but bringing to the subject everything one knows about a performer's life and reputation, in this case, I'm going to chalk up the disarmingly uneven, fitfully majestic music on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea—get an earful of "My Pillow Is The Threshold" immediately, please—to a mundane yet thoroughly admirable motive: a desire to be heard by as many people and as various an audience as possible.

--Ken Tucker

From the archive; first posted June 23, 2008

"Scarface Nation" [by Ken Tucker]

Highly recommended.

Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie by Ken Tucker (St. Martin’s Press)
Not merely the behind-the-scenes making of the 1983 De Palma/Pacino film (and the 1932 Howard Hawks/Paul Muni version), but also a critical analysis of how Scarface has influenced pop music, TV shows, YouTube videos, and political culture (see the chapter “President Scarface,” starring Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, among others). "Insightul, intelligent, memorable, true." -- Lawrence Starling

Cry Hard, Cry Fast: Ken Tucker Takes on John D. Macdonald

Continuing my fitful John D. MacDonald reading, I just finished ‘Cry Hard, Cry Fast’ (1955). It’s about a highway auto accident. In each of the first five chapters, we’re introduced to people in cars who’ll be involved in the accident. MacDonald sketches in their lives, and what led them to be on the road on this day. It’s a tricky narrative challenge, to keep starting with a character, stopping, and going on to someone new, but MacDonald does it so deftly that you keep everyone in your mind. The middle of the book has a discussion of the physics of auto crashes and how insurance companies calculate the results: great, precise stuff. ‘Cry Hard’ isn’t even a thriller, really—just one car contains people who’ve committed a crime, but no crime is committed in the course of the novel. I loved it. I have some other stuff to read now, but my next MacDonald will be, I think, ‘A Bullet for Cinderella.’

-- Ken Tucker

Tom Disch, 1940-2008 [by Ken Tucker]

When Tom Disch committed suicide on July 4, 2008, we ran this short obituary note by Ken Tucker: 

The general public may know his best-known credit: He wrote the novella The Brave Little Toaster, which became the acclaimed 1987 Disney cartoon. But Disch also wrote ten science fiction novels and scores of short stories that placed him at the center of his genre for their uncommon literary adroitness, dry wit and clear-eyed skepticism. Go read the lyrically beautiful On Wings Of Song (1979) immediately, please. He also wrote a unique trilogy of mordant thrillers: The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991), and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994).

His primary calling, however, was as a poet. He published a half-dozen collections characterized by a mastery of poetic form, and in 1995 published a collection of essays, The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters, that overflowed with glowing appreciation and ruthless criticism of what he considered the best and worst tendencies in modern poetry. I kept it on my bedside table for periodic re-reading and inspiration.
I'll quote just one apercu among many from that collection that all critics would do well to heed: "The larger value of negative criticism—beyond the sigh of relief that 'At last someone has said it'—is that, without it, any expression of delight or enthusiasm is under suspicion of being one more big hug in that special-education classroom where poets minister to each others’ needs for self-esteem."
Others will doubtless comment on the importance of Disch’s poetry in this space; my small request is that you also read the full range of what Disch wrote and fully appreciate his art, craft, and passion. It was the failure of an audience to appreciate the scope of what Disch accomplished that, I'm willing to bet, was one cause of his sad, too-early death.

--Ken Tucker

The general public may know his best-known credit: He wrote the novella The Brave Little Toaster, which became the acclaimed 1987 Disney cartoon. But Disch also wrote ten science fiction novels and scores of short stories that placed him at the center of his genre for their uncommon literary adroitness, dry wit and clear-eyed skepticism. Go read the lyrically beautiful On Wings Of Song (1979) immediately, please. He also wrote a unique trilogy of mordant thrillers: The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991), and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994).

His primary calling, however, was as a poet. He published a half-dozen collections characterized by a mastery of poetic form, and in 1995 published a collection of essays, The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters, that overflowed with glowing appreciation and ruthless criticism of what he considered the best and worst tendencies in modern poetry. I kept it on my bedside table for periodic re-reading and inspiration.
I'll quote just one apercu among many from that collection that all critics would do well to heed: "The larger value of negative criticism—beyond the sigh of relief that 'At last someone has said it'—is that, without it, any expression of delight or enthusiasm is under suspicion of being one more big hug in that special-education classroom where poets minister to each others’ needs for self-esteem."
Others will doubtless comment on the importance of Disch’s poetry in this space; my small request is that you also read the full range of what Disch wrote and fully appreciate his art, craft, and passion. It was the failure of an audience to appreciate the scope of what Disch accomplished that, I'm willing to bet, was one cause of his sad, too-early death.

--Ken Tucker

"True Detective": Making eloquent TV with hardboiled monologues [by Ken Tucker]

I’d pretty much had it with serial-killer narratives – on TV, in movies, in pop novels. I was tired of the dead-helpless-women trope that recurs in too many of these plots, weary of the murderers who are frequently portrayed as brilliant masterminds we’re meant to reluctantly admire, exhausted by the hardboiled ethos that’s accrued around the men and women who solve these cases. But then along came, last weekend, the premiere of True Detective, on HBO. It’s about two police homicide detectives in Louisiana and how they handled a very grim case.

         The detectives are played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, initially as an almost comic odd couple. Harrelson plays Martin Hart, a laconic good ol’ boy, a married-with-children working stiff. He’s paired with McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, a burned-out-case loner cop who’s coming off years as an undercover agent arresting drug dealers. They eye each other warily and play to each other’s strengths: Hart has a fine work ethic and a doggedly logical manner; Cohle is an obsessed workaholic and alcoholic, steeped in a half-eloquent, half-loony existential philosophy that leads him to make near-mystical divinations of human character that cohere as smart hunches.

    True Detective is structured so that we watch Cohle and Hart investigate the first murder in 1995, and then the show cuts back and forth to present-day interviews with the two men: They’ve been called in by the police to be interrogated about their crime-solving methods, because another murder has been committed, and it’s possible that Cohle and Hart, who thought they’d caught their killer in the 1990s, may have fingered the wrong guy.

    One thing that immediately distinguishes True Detective from other shows in this genre is its writing: All eight of its episodes (I’ve seen four so far) are written by one man, Nic Pizzolatto. A novelist and short-story writer, Pizzolatto is fond of something that’s usually the death of drama on TV: The monologue. Interviewed separately, McConaughey and Harrelson reel off pages of words, paragraph after paragraph, supposedly facing another cop but actually looking straight into the camera at us. And as their individual monologues proceed, their lives unravel for us: We learn about Hart’s disguised temper and marital infidelity; of the depth of Cohle’s despair for the worthiness of humanity. Pizzolatto’s scripts are rich with the eloquence of the everyday, of men straining to explain their lives in guarded language that ends up revealing more than they intend. Pizzolatto has an immense talent for the first-person-singular: I recommend his tough-guy novel Galveston (2010), also written in this style, as well.

    Every episode of True Detective is also directed by one person, Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed the 2011 remake of Jane Eyre. The result of this one writer-one director creation gives True Detective a focus and intensity that transcends the suspense of who committed the killings. The series plays out like an exploration of spiritual exhaustion enlivened by the energy of ordinary life – it suggests that getting through the day, day after day, contains enough drama and comedy (and True Detective is fitfully hilarious) to sustain even the most played-out lives… and by extension, one of the most played-out genres in pop culture.

--Ken Tucker

"Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer": Music, protest, and the 'poor rhymes' of Alexander Vvedensky

The subtitle to the film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, a documentary airing on HBO tonight (June 10, 9 p.m.), is accurate: Nadia Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina, and Katya Samutsevich, who were arrested on Feb. 21, 2012, after performing for 40 seconds on the alter of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, do indeed embody many of the precepts of 1970s punk-rock culture. Although presenting themselves as a band, they view their work as performance art as much musical performance. A collective of unstated numbers of young women, Pussy Riot has found its most effective communication tool to be planned “spontaneous” musical performances that consist of rudimentary songs proclaiming their feminist, anti-authoritarian stance.

         In the documentary, the members come off as tough-minded, resourceful, and wry: “It’s not too hard,” one of them says of their punk-band strategy: “Write a song and think of the place to perform.” Filmmakers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin have footage of the group assembling at a protest site, divvying up the musical duties (“You play the guitar”), and diving headlong into a song or two before scramming.

         Since the sacrilegious sin-crime and immediate arrest that made the group famous worldwide lasted a mere 40 seconds captured on what looks like a jittery cellphone, the bulk of A Punk Prayer is taken up by the show-trial of what I’d call the Pussy Riot Three. Placed behind a glass cage, the three women are allowed to make occasional statements, but their defense team comes off irritatingly smug and complacent – it’s as though the lawyers defending Pussy Riot lacked Pussy Riot’s own awareness of just how offended the combination of defying the Orthodox Church and Vladimir Putin’s leadership would be to the court system.

         The trial exerts a sickening fascination. The film is warmed by the comments of some of the defendants’ parents. Soon after Nadia tells us that her father is “wonderful… so supportive,” he proves it. A thoughtful, baby-boomer generation man, he tells of being told by his daughter of Pussy Riot’s church-invasion plan as they rode the subway. He says he immediately tried to talk her out of it, but “after a few stops” on the subway ride, he realized she was determined to go through with her actions. His reaction? “I started helping out with the lyrics,” he says.

    Unmentioned in the film is the debt Pussy Riot says it owes to the Russian poet Alexander Vvedensky (1904-1941), himself a government-suppressed poet of organized anarchy, and, like the Pussy Riot Three, a member of an art collective, OBERIU (Association of Real Art). During her group’s trial, Nadia specifically cited Vvedensky’s “principle of ‘poor rhyme’… He said, ‘Sometimes I think up two rhymes, a good and a poor one, and I pick the poor one, because it is the one that is right.”

         A Vvedensky poem collected in the superb, recently published An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets) includes lines that could be a Pussy Riot lyric:

How cute!

Will they cut or bite off their heads

It makes me want to puke.

All those about to die get cold feet.

They have activity of stomach,

Before death it lives as hard as it can.

But why are you afraid to burn up, man?

Nadia and Masha are serving two-year sentences in prison camps; Katya was released on appeal. One key moment in A Punk Prayer occurs during a break in the trial: When informed that Madonna had written the group’s name on her back to display it at one of the concerts, and had donned a balaclava onstage as a gesture of solidarity, the faces of Nadia, Masha, and Katia are intent, avid. They seem not to be thinking, “Cool! A big star likes us, maybe we’ll become famous, too, and be freed!” Instead, what their faces communicate is: “Oh, good. Maybe she gets it. Maybe some of her fans will now hear about us and get it. Our message still has a freedom on Madonna’s back, and in covering Madonna’s face. She’s not as good as we are at communicating this freedom, this audacity, but she’ll do until we get out.”

(After tonight’s premiere, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer will be repeated on June 13, 16, 18, and 22.)

 --Ken Tucker

 

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.

(ed note: the post originally appeared on May 9, 2010)

George Jones, a fool no more

George Jones, who died this past Friday at age 81, had long been lauded as one of the greatest voices in country music history. He was also, along with Hank Williams, one of country music's most cautionary tales, with a history of alcoholism, substance abuse, marital woes, and career mismanagement that would have forced a lesser man into early retirement or (as in the case of Hank) an early death. Unlike Williams, Jones was never a great songwriter; he was a great interpreter of others' songs. He was very much a contradictory artist: A loner who did some of his best work in collaboration with another singer -- Tammy Wynette (his ex-wife) and Melba Montgomery most notably. And all of the problems that dogged him whenever he didn't appear onstage (which was frequent enough to earn him the nickname "No-Show Jones"), vanished when he was in thrall to his own gift, in performance, at one with the baleful sentiments he sang. He was hard on himself in every sense, and always carried with his toughness and stubbornness an air of hangdog shame, as though he felt destined to be the fool, not the master, of his life. 

 

Jones was one of the most self-conscious, for good and ill, of great American artists. He knew his gift, he knew it wasn't so much his voice as his phrasing that was the genius part ('s why he could redeem so many lesser lyrics). But the clenched-jaw delivery can also serve as synecdoche for a man frozen, trapped: trapped by his feelings of inferiority, the unwarranted shame he felt about his class, the paralyzing sting of those in mainstream music industry who never recognized him fully, for the cruelty of country radio for abandoning him when he still had something to give. People of privilege sometimes don't understand why an artist can start to self-destruct when he feels resentment, abandonment, false praise instead of the kind of praise and appreciation of his gifts he knew he was owed. (And I'm talking about the whole arc of his career, not just the final years.) "No-Show" was a fond joke barely concealing a different diagnosis: an addictive, isolating personality that could not achieve enough comfort in his own skin. All of which makes the best music that he leaves behind more precious.

--Ken Tucker

Richard Hell's punk poetry memoir 'I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp': No void here [by Ken Tucker]

Richard Hell wrote one of the best songs built around one of the least useful, or at least most misunderstood, phrases of 1970s punk rock in “Blank Generation,” for his band the Voidoids. To his great credit, as his new memoir I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography (Ecco Books) proves, he and a few of his cohorts were among the least blank, most thoughtful and informed young musician-writers working during that period, not nihilists but poets with the romanticism wrung out of them by some combination of natural asperity, experience with music-biz venality, and a genuine passion to make some kind of art.

         And so while I Dreamed is indeed the memoir of a man who spiked his hair, consumed a lot of different chemicals, and lived in the shadow of Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, and Johnny Rotten, Richard Hell stakes out his status as an always-intelligent man whose musical value has been underrated and whose excellent taste extends to a casual yet more than knowledgeable reference to “my main man New York poet Ted Berrigan.”

         Indeed, the most interesting aspect of this swiftly paced tale of a Kentucky-born first-gen punk-rocker is that he was a poetry fan and a poet before he was a bass player, a lyricist of concise note, a by-his-account profligate yet caring ladies-man. Hell – born Richard Meyers in 1949 – writes with some of his greatest passion about the second generation of New York School poets including Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Tom Veitch, as well as ornery outliers like Bill Knott, the latter for writing “fully thought-through funny word-packs of imagery and ideas of loneliness, desperate love, shock and fury.” He lavishes as much praise upon publications such as “C” magazine and “Ashbery’s and Koch’s and Schuyler’s and Mathews’ swoon of witty word-chess” Locus Solus as he does influential recordings by the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. If Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir Just Kids took a more literary shape than the straightforward prose and chronology Hell offers here, his is the book to read to get a less self-mythologizing view of what it was like to live in the blended musical-literary circles that overlapped and bedded down with each other in the late-70s/early-80s.

         It may be that, as someone who wedged into the vibrating narrow corridor of CBGB’s and sat at the same Gem Spa counter stools as Hell during this period, I am more susceptible than an average reader to his amiable rambles not just through CBGB lore but also his jobs at the Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Bookstore. But that also means I know his details are pretty much spot-on. Plus, I like the way Hell is not so highfalutin’ that he doesn’t enjoy sharing gossip about and quarrels with characters including his Television band-mate Tom Verlaine (boyhood buddies who became thoroughly sick of each other over the course of launching a career – that’ll happen when you’re a part-time drug-head and he’s a full-time control-freak); record-biz hustler-talents like Richard Gottehrer and Terry Ork; or Hell’s quick, vivid portrait of a pre-publishing-agent shark Andrew Wylie when he was still a punk-loving poetaster (a would-be Aram Saroyan, no less!); and the way Hell disliked Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye because Kaye disliked Hell’s guitarist Robert Quine (I know Lenny; I like Lenny; but the late Quine was undeniably great).

         Even better, Hell writes vividly about “what it felt like to be creating electrically amplified songs,” the way “it was like making emotion and thought physical, to be undergone apart from oneself.” Hell halts his story at 1984, when he “stopped making music and stopped using drugs.” Yet I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is not that dreadful thing – the “survivor’s memoir”; it’s a chronicle of an assiduously adventurous life lived with an acute awareness that the adventure is not something to be exaggerated or obliterated, but rather a blessing to be well-remembered.

--Ken Tucker 

J.R.I.P.: Larry Hagman haunts "Dallas" [by Ken Tucker]

The wonderful TV and literary critic and dexterous light-verse emitter, Clive James, once wrote that “J.R. Ewing’s reign as the King of Dallas reached its apotheosis under Reagan. Now that corrupt America was passé and straight-arrow America was back in business, it was time for J.R. to get his. The shooting of J.R. was announced in advance all over the world. It was fictional, but it made news like fact… J.R. was no longer an actor, he was a real man. He was more than that, he was a Messiah. He rose from the dead and continued with the next series, like a President going into his next term.”

         Well, last night, J.R.’s body was lowered into the grave once more, with finality, because we were also, in effect, watching Larry Hagman’s body achieve sepulchral grace. J.R. was Hagman’s creation as much as it was creator David Jacobs’, or any writer or producer, who worked on the original run of Dallas. The actor invested what could have been a cartoonish villain with an evil intelligence. Yes, sure, because this was a frequently outlandish nighttime soap opera, with what has come to be called in the fan-boy culture of TV analysis as a knotty “mythology,” there were regular moments when J.R. was a caricature of venality. But more often, Hagman made sure that J.R. was in on the joke – the big-buck Ewing relished his power and his ability to make mere mortals (frequently his brother Bobby, played with superb asperity by Patrick Duffy) tremble.

    J.R. was capitalism with unruly eyebrows, aging but still fitfully potent. Last week on Dallas, two shots rang out during a phone call J.R. had placed from another country. He referred to a gesture he would make that he called his “masterpiece.” No: It was a fate forced upon the character after Hagman died during production of the rebooted Dallas’ second season. The bang-bang occurred at the very end of that hour, and so last night’s edition featured the funeral and a deepening mystery. Old Dallas characters were hauled out to pay their (sometimes dis-)respects to J.R., and even the most ardent fan probably spent some time gazing at his or her HD screen to note whose jaw-line was sagging, whose gut strained a Texas belt buckle.

         Now that J.R. is gone, who beyond the hardcore devotees will continue to watch Dallas, with its cleverly conceived but mostly plastic-looking young co-stars intended to continue the J.R.-Bobby brawling? Certainly Josh Henderson, as J.R.’s son John Ross, has stepped up to achieve his own semi-original take on J.R.-style mendacity. (I qualify the originality since what Henderson, with his drooping eyelids and mumbled menace is doing frequently seems half-Hagman, half-Elvis Presley.)

         The hour, titled “J.R.’s Masterpiece,” was written by Cynthia Cidre, and was shrewdly executed. By the end, we knew that J.R. had not been killed in Mexico by a random thug; that Sue Ellen had fallen off the wagon; that Emma Brown was popping clonazepam and having sex with John Ross, who is technically her step-cousin – kissin’ cousins.

    I’ll be interested to see how much the ratings dip, or surge, in the weeks to come. The young demo that the new Dallas is aiming for have far less invested in J.R.; just as original fans used to admire what Clive James called the “peachy epidermis” of Sue Ellen and Pam Ewing, so the current generation of viewers may be entranced by the Bachelor-style curviness and musculature of the younger actors.

    Writer Cidre has set up the rest of the season with an echo of the famous 1980 “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger. Now it’s being promoted as “Who Killed J.R.?” Cancer killed Larry Hagman, but he hovers over the proceedings now and forever. We’ll never again see eyebrows that did as much acting as any puny human who tried to share to screen with J.R.

--Ken Tucker

"Girls" review: Lena Dunham's problems for, and with, parents

This week’s Girls was a high point in a second season that’s been a bit of a disappointment. After making a well-deserved media splash as a novel TV approach to the depiction of Young Women In Our Time, Girls is showing some of the wear and tear that occurs when an ambitious creator also becomes The New Voice of Her Generation. (Promise: no more capitalized theme phrases from hereon.) At least, that’s the sense I get, given the timing, shooting schedule, and result of Lena Dunham’s intensely scrutinized, It’s Not Just TV (oh, damn – sorry) creation.

The second season feels more like a conventional sitcom, with snappy punchlines and increasingly lovable characters, or at least characters we’re meant to understand as earnest, wounded birds. Except for the male characters, who tend to be angry wounded pitbulls. Dunham’s Hannah and her sisters-in-the-sisterhood are never more engaging when they’re not engaging each other, but rather, interacting with people older than themselves: Parents, employers, would-be mentors, patrons, and sleazebags.

So it was this week’s installment, which found Hannah accompanying Jemima Kirke’s Jessa to spend the weekend with the latter’s father and most recent stepmother – played respectively by Ben Mendelsohn and Rosanna Arquette. The half-hour contained the usual amount of Girls hijinks, Seinfeldian phrase appropriations (the repetition of “sexcapade”; “You are ‘the cushion’” – i.e., the absorber of too much emotion), and sight gags (Hannah, her bladder too full at a remote outdoor train station, squatting to pee in semi-full view of an older couple).

But this episode, titled “Video Games” after a nutty belief of Arquette’s character – that the world is “literally” a video game – was filled with nice touches and filled in a bit more of the Girls universe. Jessa is, you’ll recall, coming off the dissolution of her brief marriage to a wealthy heel. If it was typical of Dunham’s writing strategy that this haughty, assiduously devil-may-care yet totally-together Brit would prove to have a thoroughly dissolute, emotionally unstable and needy father, it is to the show’s credit that the relationship felt right – that Jessa is the daughter such a man would produce, in that we-react-against-what-we-dislike-the-most about our parents.

Significantly, I think, this episode was written by producer Bruce Eric Kaplan, better known in some circles as “BEK,” the cartoonist whose work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker. I say significant not merely because Kaplan also wrote a few episodes of Seinfeld, but because the series this season has featured more fully delineated male characters whenever Dunham and/or another female collaborator aren’t writing them. Sorry, not sexist, but it’s just true: The early half-hours of this second season featured the show’s least believable new characters, most notably the happily brief appearance of Donald Glover as Sandy, the dreary, surprise!-he’s-a-black-Republican creation.

Where the second season of Girls has frequently carried a distracted air, as though the cast members were rushing through their jokes and problems because Dunham had a scheduled Rolling Stone or I-D cover photo-shoot, “Video Games” had a wonderfully languid pace – Kaplan created a warped idyll that allowed the series to pause, take a deep breath of non-Brooklyn air, and gather its senses.

The beautiful capper to the episode was that, having seen how dreadfully Jessa had been parented, Hannah felt moved to call her own parents to express in a sweetly sincere, fulsome manner, how much she loved and appreciated her own parents, played with the usual terrific verve and comic-stressfulness by Peter Scolari and Becky Ann Baker. The phone call was a failure for Hannah, of course – her neurotic, suspicious, yet always-Hannah-obsessed parents chose to interpret her call as another occasion for worry, suspicion, and alarm. But the final scene provided a lovely conclusion to a 30-minute meditation about how they fuck you up, your mum and dad.

--Ken Tucker

Ken Tucker's Take on the New "House of Cards"

"House of Cards finds Kevin Spacey being waspish, supercilious, and meanly clever — in other words, just the way we like him, and the way he’s been most effective." That's how Ken Tucker opens his EW review of the brand new House of Cards. I believe he had to turn in his copy on the basis of only the first two episodes, so he is bound to have a lot more to say after digesting the whole series of thirteen, but he is certainly right in characterizing the Netflix original series as "a finely nasty showcase." Ken likes Kevin Spacey's asides to the viewer and asks quite pertinently whether people plan to "watch a whole batch [of episodes] in a row or to parcel them out for more conventional TV viewing." I have a feeling he will revise his opinion of Zoe Barnes ("some combinaton of cynical and dim"), but I do get a kick out of the graf that concludes, "You know what? Forget I mentioned it." -- DL

Denise Duhamel Poem on "Breaking Bad" Season Finale

Great catch Ken Tucker!  On September 3, this @KenTucker tweet breezed by: "I fear betrayal in friendship and love that blindsides me": not Walt Whitman, but another poet, Denise Duhamel" and now lots of people want to know which poem it's from. 

"82 Reasons Not to Get Out of Bed" is too long to reproduce in its entirety but you can find  the poem in Saints of Hysteria A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry Edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad (Soft Skull, 2007).

Here are the first few lines:

82 Reasons Not to Get Out of Bed  (by Denise Duhamel et. al.)

I fear dented cans,
the ones with their labels torn like a pantyhose run.
I fear dented cans even though I know
bulging cans are the ones that cause botulism.
I fear small caskets, and I fear small pox.
I can’t be vaccinated because I’m allergic to the serum.
Check my arms—I don’t have any of those vaccination dents
like everyone else. I fear going to a new hairdresser
or gynecologist. I fear people with authority who look nervous.
I fear any box big enough to hold me.
I fear the number 4 for no reason.
I fear this bad habit will catch up to me.
I fear being awake in the middle of the night
when everyone else is asleep, even that yappy dog Peppy,
and the baby in him. I fear the dogs that do not recognize
my smell or care. I fear the whirr and rattle of the tail.
I fear the front door slamming when the bedroom window is locked.
I fear strangers who do not know my strength . . .

And this is what Denise Duhamel had to say about how the poem was written:

Process Note:

Lines for “82 Reasons Not to Get Out of Bed” were written on October 24, 2001 by the members of Special Topics: Trends in Contemporary Poetry—Literary Collaboration and Collage, a graduate seminar I taught at Florida International University. Mitch Alderman, Terri Carrion, Andreé Conrad, Kendra Dwelley Guimaraes, Wayne Loshusan, Abigail Martin, Rita Martinez, Estee Mazor, Astrid Parrish, Stacy Richardson, Sandy Rodriguez, Jay Snodgrass, Richard Toumey, George Tucker, Jennifer Welch, William Whitehurst, and I wrote indi- vidual lines. Rita Martinez took the lines and rearranged them into the final ver- sion of the poem. Stacy Richardson, the only undergraduate in our class, passed away in 2002. This poem is dedicated to her.

Fans of poetry and Breaking Bad know that Walt Whitman had a starring role.  Did anyone besides Ken pick up on Denise's cameo?

-- sdh

A holiday gift idea: 'Everything Is An Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson'

Here’s my Christmas book gift recommendation. To (re-)discover a first-rate critic, and read about a life that went wrong in a harrowing way, you must read Everything Is An Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson (Fantagraphics Press), by Kevin Avery. Nelson, who died in 2006 at age 69, was part of the first generation of rock critics, instrumental in bringing attention to musicians including Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, the New York Dolls, and Warren Zevon. He served as the record-review editor of Rolling Stone and was an A&R man for Mercury Records.

         But this thumbnail sketch of Nelson’s career doesn’t begin to suggest his import as a writer and presence. Avery’s book is divided into two parts. The first is a biography titled “Invitation to a Closed Room: The Life of Paul Nelson.” The second is a collection of some of his most famous and/or influential pieces, titled “Good Critic Paul: The Writings of Paul Nelson.” The biography tells a story that might easily be transformed into the plot of one of the semi-obscure hard-boiled writers Nelson admired so much, a tale out of David Goodis, say, or Horace McCoy. It’s the story of a man who loved a certain kind of music, literature, and movie with a passion that eventually overtook his life. Nelson was a romantic, and prized tales of loners, misfits, and rebels. Whether it was Zevon’s song “Desperadoes Under the Eaves,” the Lew Archer detective novels about missing children and bad parents, or the sere Westerns of Howard Hawks, Nelson prized above all portraits of men who performed with grace under pressure, who pursued doomed love affairs, who held themselves apart from society as independent agents even when what they really were were high-functioning hermits.

         So it was with Nelson. His greatest influence and activity occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. In a 1976 Village Voice essay entitled “Yes, There Is a Rock Critic Establishment, But Is That Good for Rock?,” Robert Christgau named the Establishment’s core quintet: John Rockwell, Dave Marsh, Jon Landau, Nelson, and Christgau himself. All but Nelson continue to have active careers; Nelson, however, became, in a Graham Greene phrase Nelson himself used too frequently, a “burnt-out case”: His taste and standards of excellence became so circumscribed, his natural inclination to hole up in his small, rent-controlled, pack-rat Upper West Side apartment re-watching old movies and re-reading The Great Gatsby and thrillers so self-seductive, that he slowly slipped away from the world.

         Eventually, Nelson took a job behind the counter of Greenwich Village’s Evergreen Video store to make a bit of money; he pretty much ceased writing, and abandoned keeping up with new music. When he died, he was indigent and malnourished.

         Does this sound like not the sort of book you’d give as a cheery Christmas present? Perhaps, but you’d be wrong: This volume is exhilarating. Avery tells with great energy Nelson’s tale, with copious details about the active period of his subject’s life, and in so doing limns a portrait of a certain kind of pop-culture/bohemian existence in the late-70s. And Avery’s generous selection of Nelson’s writings are certainly among Paul’s best, particularly Nelson’s profile of Ross Macdonald, “It’s All One Case,” and the harrowing account of helping to pull Zevon back from an addict’s life in “Warren Zevon: How He Saved Himself from a Coward’s Death.”

         I knew Paul somewhat – he assigned me reviews at Rolling Stone; I visited his apartment a number of times to watch movies and admire his carefully maintained collection of first-edition mysteries. A picture of Paul among other friends taken at my wedding appears in this book. But my acquaintance with Paul Nelson doesn’t color my judgment of “Everything Is An Afterthought” as a first-rate book: It’s right there in the pages, in the opportunity to hear Nelson’s soft but authoritative voice. One of the subtexts of Avery’s book is that a critic can be as much of an artist as any artist he or she writes about. This is a portrait of an artist who declined to be an artist anymore.

--Ken Tucker

Nick Ashford, dead at 70, a songwriter as 'solid as a rock'

Following the death of Jerry Leiber (see David Lehman’s fine tribute below) comes the news that another half of another fine songwriting team – Nick Ashford of Ashford and Simpson – has died, at age 70. While I would never claim that Ashford and Simpson’s body of work is nearly as important as Leiber and Stoller's (the latter remained unequalled until Lennon-McCartney for the range and ambition of their pop songs), Ashford and Simpson made some very beautiful music together.

 

Early on in its career, the husband-and-wife team wrote hits for other duos, most notably Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell (“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” was one early summit; “Ain’t Nothin’ Like The Real Thing” was even better). As performers and producers as well as songwriters in the 1970s, Ashford and Simpson recorded a series of albums that presented something distinctive: a portrait of a classy, upwardly-mobile couple in love – with each other, and with success. Never smug, never taking love or material gain for granted, they were politely adventurous (no other classy duo coming out of the 1960s would have recorded an unironic instrumental called “Bourgie, Bourgie”) and extravagantly soulful on hits such as “Send It,” “Is It Still Good To Ya,” "By Way of Love's Express," and “Solid.”

Nick Ashford – tall, debonair, dashingly handsome – was a songwriter born to be a front-man. His skill and gracefulness were rare.

Gladys Horton, lead singer for The Marvelettes: More than just another fish in the sea

Gladys Horton, one of the lead singers for the Marvelettes, has died. It’s a measure of how little respect this great girl-group has been given that The New York Times obituary of Horton had to resort to many hedges due to a lack of outside scholarship about the group. Horton was either 64 or 65 when she died; she was born either in Inkster, Michigan, or Gainesville, Florida; the Marvelettes broke up either “in the late 1960s or early 1970s.” Sigh. I think we know the exact moment the Beatles broke up, and the precise moment Dylan “went electric,” don’t we?

         The Marvelettes will always be obscured by other acts on the Motown label starting with the Supremes. But they released a string of singles that are exceptional examples of girl-group soul. Their tight harmonies, no-nonsense phrasing, and lack of melodramatic flourishes may actually have worked against them, as did their talent for putting across a novelty song such as (the Marvin Gaye-written) “Beechwood 4-5789” as skillfully as they did more poetic work such as Smokey Robinson’s extraordinary “The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game.”

         Horton didn’t sing lead on that last song, but she did on the group’s biggest hit, “Please Mr. Postman,” and one of the Marvelettes’ trickiest, wittiest performances, “Too Many Fish In The Sea.”

 

         “I don’t want nobody that don’t want me,” sang Horton on that song. The firm decisiveness is in the lyric written by Norman Whitfield and Eddie Holland, to be sure. But it wouldn’t be half as effective had Horton not sung the sentiment with such a whiplash sting, flicking each consonant at the listener as though she wanted to commingle pain with your pleasure. She was a fine, fine vocalist, and you’d do well to track down a copy of The Marvelettes: Anthology, the best showcase for the group’s work, a short history of soul music across 28 tracks, concluding with the superbly punctuated song title, “A Breath Taking Guy.” Every breath Horton took on these hit singles was a strong one

'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