Amy Stein’s photography is stuck somewhere between found and posed. Her subjects, no doubt interrupted while going about their routine, are nevertheless mugging for the camera, that wonderful grain giving each image the quality of a item found in a box at a garage sail. They occupy that perfect intersection between real and manufactured that only photography seems to be comfortable with; and so perfectly framed, so delightfully exacting, that they almost cannot fail to charm the viewer.
The 1935 edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by the Italian illustrator Carlo Farneti. There’s nothing that says crazed fever dream like a dejected figure facing a gauntlet of monstrous, crimson-eyed owls or a crowd, their faces twisted in fear, gathered around a towering casket.
“ROSS ROSENBERG, RISE, YOUR ALLOTTED TWO HOURS OF HUMAN RECHARGE TIME ARE UP.”
There was a time when this would cause me to leap several feet into the air, my cot ejaculating me in an arc across the room, a whirling mass of spastic limbs and bodily excretions. Anymore, it simply causes my eyes to open. It’s amazing what a man can get used to.
“YOU ARE NOW AWAKE. PROCEED TO YOUR TERMINAL. IT IS TIME FOR THE WRITING OF THE FAM.”
I made my way to the desk and settled onto the metal stool. From his room above me I could hear the faint sound of an electric razor as Forbes went about his daily ritual.
“TODAY YOU SHALL WRITE THE FAM AND IT WILL BE CLUE.”
“The movie based on the board game? Really?”
“YES THAT ONE. THE ONE THAT STARS TIM CURRY. ALSO CHRISTOPER LLOYD AND MADELINE KAHN.”
I accepted this fact in silence. My reticence appeared to irk her.
“DO YOU NOT LIKE CLUE? IT HAS TIM CURRY IN IT.”
“You mentioned that. It’s not that I don’t like it, I’m just not sure I have much to say about it.”
“THAT IS UNIMPORTANT. YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT CLUE. IT HAS TIM CURRY IN IT. ONE DAY TIM CURRY AND I SHALL MARRY.”
“I don’t think that will work,” I said. “I mean you’re a giant, possibly psychotic, computer and -”
“AND HE IS A TIM CURRY,” she bellowed. “WE WILL BE MARRIED AND LIVE HERE IN THE CATACOMBS. NOW BE QUIET AND WRITE.”
As another Friday comes to a close, the smell of burnt coffee slowly filling the recycled air of the off-
“NO! STOP THAT! NO ONE LIKES THAT. YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT CLUE.”
Today the FAM presents Clue the 1985 film based on the popular board game. It stars Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd, and Madeline Kahn.
“MORE.”
Interestingly the film had three different endings (all included here) that were distributed to different theaters. A fourth was filmed but never released and survives only in the novelization and a single photo.
“THIS IS ACCEPTABLE, THOUGH IT SEEMS LIKE IT IS MISSING SOMETHING.”
There is also a fifth ending in which Tim Curry and M.E.R. are married.
If one were to suggest a spokesman for a rugged, tough men’s cosmetic, Charles Bronson is a good choice. Despite the man’s questionable choice in hirsute facial adornment, he exudes manliness. His eyes have an ever purposeful gaze, his face is craggy and weather worn, and his walk is the walk of a man who rides a horse on a regular basis, forsaking it only in very extreme circumstances, in which case he takes his car, which he also rides like a horse.
Yes, Charles Bronson is a man’s man, and the makers of MANDOM knew this when they crafted a series of commercials — mostly in Japanese — with him as their focus. Here they show Bronson at his very manly best, doing manly things like tossing his cowboy hat onto a set of mounted steer horns, spinning around in his desk chair, and giggling on the phone like a manly schoolgirl. MANDOM knows exactly what the users of MANDOM want; and they deliver with possibly more Bronson than is safely recommended.
Part of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival’s Animation Showcase, Adrien Merigeau presents the tale of a young wolf’s sojourn to a dark and foreboding forest. Accompanied by two friends, his mission is to find his estranged father. Whether or not he will find closure as well remains to be seen.
I’ve been walking through this forest for some time now. I came here after I left work. I shut my oyster off, placed my paperwork in my squid and got on the elevator. It brought me down to the forest, and now I’m walking home. It seems like it’s taking a lot longer than usual. I begin to worry that it may be taking too long. If I’m not home in time for dinner, the terrorists will kill my girlfriend. This cannot happen. I begin to run, but it’s no use. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. I frantically look around, trying to regain my bearings. To my left, I hear a noise. Whipping around, I notice that the brush is rustling. Suddenly, a nyala with a man’s face emerges from the brush. We stand there for a moment, staring at each other. Or maybe we stare at each other for a long time, I’m not sure. I am sure, though, that we stare at each other. Then the man-nyala slowly opens its mouth and in a deep, lugubrious voice says, “The mother’s milk is poisoned by the quiche.” Then it begins to scream. And then I wake up.
They’re dropping like flies this week, dear readers. Yesterday it was reported that both actress Zelda Rubinstein and author/historian Howard Zinn had died and today word comes that J.D. Salinger, famed author of Catcher in the Rye is also gone, at the ripe old age of 91. A recluse for most of his life, besides the occasional lawsuit to stop seemingly anyone from publishing any details about his life, one could be forgiven for thinking him already dead which, I suppose, might have pleased him immensely.
What we are left with is a blurry portrait, taken from accounts by a former lover and his daughter. The man who emerges is a narcissist with a penchant for Eastern philosophy, homeopathy, and drinking his own urine. It is, perhaps, not the most flattering of biographies.
Still, in the end, none of this really matters. Those who will mourn the loss of Salinger do not mourn him, so much as they mourn the man who gave us Holden Caulfield. In that sense, the frustration with Salinger’s reticence has less to do with the words from his mouth than those from his typewriter. All we are left with is a set of four, slim volumes and a handful of short stories, taking up precious little in the way of shelf space. And yet his most famous creation, the young Mr. Caulfield, endures in just about every aspect of adolescence in this country. One may dispute Salinger’s ability with the written word and it would be a far easier proposition than disputing his influence. In many ways, J.D. Salinger created the teenager we know today. The sullen, disenchanted, angry and, ultimately, sensitive young person was set in stone in Catcher in the Rye, the model for countless (if not all) counterculture icons since.
It may be that such effusive words are unwarranted when describing a book or its protagonist, but a book so widely read, so deeply entrenched in our culture, deserves nothing less. Ultimately it is a case of the work having far outgrown its creator; a creator who quickly came to despise both it and the fame it brought him. In that regard the loss of Salinger is already decades old.
Hey you, over there. Yeah you, with the Garfield plushy and the pictures of your cat, Garfield, dotting your cubicle walls. That’s right, you. You know what your problem is? You’re too damn cheerful. You say you hate Mondays in a way that tells me you really don’t and you’re always the first one to suggest ideas for weekend long team building exercises. You should stop that. What you need is a good, harsh dose of reality, delivered with an animated veneer. Here, sit yourself down and let me show you something.
Today, the Friday Afternoon Movie presents Grave of the Fireflies directed by Isao Takahata and adapted from the book of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. Released in 1988 by Shinchosha, who wisely hired the renowned Studio Ghibli to animate it, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of Seita and his sister Setsuko. Orphaned near the end of World War II — losing their mother in the firebombing of Kobe and their father in the line of duty in the Japanese Imperial Navy — we follow the two through a desolate and famine ravished Japan as they attempt to survive, enduring the cruel indifference of both their relatives and fellow countrymen.
The antithesis of what many people expect from an animated feature it must have been even more puzzling upon its release in Japan, paired as a double feature with Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. Grave of the Fireflies is a look at the aftermath of an event that Japan continues to come to grips with and it is nearly unflinching in its gaze refusing to gloss over the cruelty and desperation it falls upon without ever becoming gratuitous. Roger Ebert, in his review, said that he felt the choice to animate the story was the correct one as “live action would have been burdened by the weight of special effects, violence and action” and I could not agree more (thought it should be noted that there have been two live action versions released in Japan since, in 2005 and 2008). The impressionistic nature of animation only helps to let this tragic tale emerge on its own terms. Scenes like Setsuko, dying of starvation and hallucinating, offering her brother a “dinner” she cooked for him, in reality clumps of mud and stones, are some of the most heart-wrenching things I have seen a movie.
It’s proof of the power of animation that something like Grave of the Fireflies work’s so well; and a shame then that, in this country at least, the majority of animated feature films decline to deal with this kind of subject matter, opting instead to tackle stories deemed too strange (or costly) for traditional live action films or the saccharine, princess fantasies of Walt Disney. In fact, it seems disingenuous to limit that statement to the U.S. There are few animated features that dare to approach this kind of subject matter and perhaps none that have plumbed the same emotional depth, period. It’s a testament to Takahata and Studio Ghibli’s skill and courage — and the power of Nosaka’s story — that even movies from some of my favorite directors, writers, and producers don’t affect me the way Grave of the Fireflies does. If you haven’t seen it you owe it to yourself to experience this profound study of war and its effects on the human condition.
A French carving, pharm dating from the 1700s, designed to look like a human molar. At 10.5 centimeters in height it depicts inside its two halves, “The tooth worm as Hell’s demon” an explanation of the toothache as a battle occurring with the mythical tooth worm. The legend of the tooth worm apparently dates back to 1800 BC Mesopotamia and even has its own creation myth:
“When Anu created the Sky,
the Sky created the Rivers,
The Rivers created the Valleys,
the Valleys created the Swamps,
the Swamps created the Worm,
the Worm went to Samas and wept.
His tears flowed before Ea.
“What will you give me to eat, what will you give me to such?”
“I’ll give you a ripe fig, apricots and apple juice.”
“What use are a ripe fig,
an apricot and apple juice to me?
Lift me up! Let me dwell ‘twixt teeth and gum!
I’ll suck the blood from the teeth
and gnaw the roots in their gums.”
“Because you have said this, O Worm, may
Ea sink you with his mighty hand!”
The idea of a tooth worm was finally put to scientific scrutiny in the late 18th century by both Pierre Fauchard — “the father of modern dentistry” — and Philip Pfaff — who was dentist to Frederick the Great of Prussia. Pfaff seemed loathe to totally commit to such a position however (or was, in fact, a wonderfully sarcastic man), writing that, while he himself had never personally come across a tooth worm, he did not wish “to dispute the observations of learned doctors.”
Today is as good as any for a mind-fuck so the FAM is proud to present 2006’s A Scanner Darkly directed by Richard Linklater and featuring a rotoscoped cast headed up by Keanu Reeves who stars as Bob Arctor, a member of a household of drug users. Arctor is also known as Fred. This is the name he goes by at work, where he is an undercover police agent assigned to the household in order to discover the source of a new drug called Substance D. Fred has, in the course of his investigation, become addicted to Substance D as well and soon his surveillance focuses on one person: Bob Arctor.
And so it goes in A Scanner Darkly. Adapted from the 1977 novel of the same name by the late, great Philip K. Dick, one of his most personal work, in many ways a record of his drug experiences in the 70s. Twisting and turning, it is also one of his most complex, a labyrinth of alter egos where people are hidden from even themselves. Linklater handles all of this with aplomb, putting together a movie that deftly trumps its source in plot presentation. As much as I have always liked A Scanner Darkly it oftentimes trips over itself in explaining events, making for more than a few passages that require multiple readings in order to suss out.
Despite any problems with plotting, it remains one of Dick’s saddest works, and one of the few novels in which he goes out of his way to create real characters with a modicum of depth. The man, for all his brilliance, never put much importance on the people that inhabit his worlds; they function merely as tour guides, escorting the reader through the fantastic universes he has created. But the story of Arctor/Fred, perhaps by dint of it being a roman à clef, manages to overcome this proclivity and in doing so presents a powerful tale of paranoia and profound loneliness.
The fate of Arctor, used, abandoned, and broken, was one that Dick witnessed far too often and he channeled that hurt and anger into a story that sets its sights on both sides of the drug debate. It is most telling, then, that in his afterward, in which he lists people he has known who have suffered serious permanent physical, mental damage, or death from drug use he lists himself as well. It is just as sad that this list, included in the ending credits of Linklater’s film, had a name added to it. The story of A Scanner Darkly never really ends.
