Virtual Memories

Throughout my adult life, I’ve been burned by artists. I enjoy a book, movie, or record, and find myself immensely disappointed by the follow-up works by the artist. Sometimes, it’s simply an instance where the first work is so singular, so arresting, that any subsequent work has to pale in comparison.

Other times, it becomes clear that the artist got lucky. He caught lightning in a bottle, and will never be that good again.

Years ago, the first time I phoned the critic and novelist David Gates, I asked him about the novel he was working on. He said, pretty facetiously, “I’m in a sort of bind. If it comes out like Jernigan [his first novel, which I adored], people will say I’m only capable of writing that type of book. If it comes out nothing like Jernigan, people who liked that book will complain that this one is no good.”

A few years later, when I read it, I thought, “This is pretty good, but it’s no Jernigan.” I was a little embarrassed about that reaction, but hey. I read the book again a few months ago, and enjoyed it a lot more than I remembered the first time.

But artists have burned me. I put a lot of stock in a strong artistic vision. After Miller’s Crossing, I was able to forgive the Coen Bros. a lot. Should I have? I kept going to their flicks, despite the recurring disappointments. Eventually, they produced a movie that I enjoyed immensely: The Man Who Wasn’t There. But they also made Intolerable Cruelty.

I haven’t seen a new Woody Allen movie in 7 or 8 years. Too many disappointments, and I was done. Can’t go back to the well too often.

Which gets us to I [Heart] Huckabees. The official VM fiancee and I disagreed about this flick beforehand. We were in agreement that, based on the commercials and trailer, it looked terrible. She dismissed it. I countered, “But it IS directed by the guy who made Three Kings . . .”

I had no intention of seeing Huckabees in the theater, but the DVD release reprised our mini-dispute over the movie. I promised her that, if I did watch it, I’d do so on a weeknight and not when she’s around on the weekends.

Then we found a used DVD sale this weekend, and together spent FAR too much money on movies (a combined $140, but we got 16 titles out of it, including the third season of Family Guy). Because of the “buy 3 get 1 free” part of the sale, I went back to the bins and picked up Huckabees at $12.

After I brought Amy home yesterday, I sat down and watched the movie.

Now, like I said, I was giving it a shot because of Three Kings. I adored that movie when I saw it in the theater with my buddy Jon-Eric. We watched it again the night before the Iraq War began. I watched it a third time during one of last year’s many trips. It should’ve been required viewing before the current war, but it probably would’ve confused both the pro- and anti-war sides.

Anyway, after a five-year gap, the director (David O. Russell) made Huckabees. I’m still trying to figure out why.

It purports to be an existential detective story, but the opposing worldviews it offers are pretty Lowest College Denominator (”Everything’s connected!” “No, everything’s meaningless!”), and the “plot” is centered so deliberately on coincidence that nothing gets around to meaning anything. The lessons we pick up, from what I gather, are that corporations are evil, evangelical Christians are evil, jet-skis are evil, and gasoline is evil. It’s also evil for women to have to look good, for people to buy cheap clothing, and for Lily Tomlin to wear tops with circular cut-outs to accentuate her breasts. I’m not making that up.

So, what I’m getting at is that I was yet again burned by thinking that David O. Russell had more than one good flick in him. It’s possible that his earlier movies were good, and maybe I’ll check them out. But, holy crap, was this one useless movie.

BONUS TIME!

For sticking through to the end of that post, you get the list of all the DVDs the official VM fiancee and I bought this weekend! Joy!

The Family Guy, Vol. 2

I [Heart] Huckabees

A Night at the Opera

The Ladies Man

Moulin Rouge

My Cousin Vinny

Bonnie and Clyde

Army of Darkness

Cannonball Run

The Ref

The Man With Two Brains

Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special

Enter the Dragon

Ghost Dog

Brazil

Animal Crackers

P.J. O’Rourke on the need to tax celebrity:

“America’s media and entertainment industry has a gross (as it were) revenue of $316.8 billion a year. If we subtract the income derived from worthy journalism and the publishing of serious books, that leaves $316.8 billion.”

Mickey Kaus links to a blogger who thinks he’s figured out how “red states” get red and “blue states” get blue.

Personally, I want to find out if Bloods vote Republican and Crips vote Democrat, but I guess no one’s explored that issue.

Keith Thompson writes about his departure from the cultural left wing:

I’ll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America’s political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today’s best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

And it’s in the San Francisco Chronicle, no less.

Once I get this current issue wrapped up (by Friday, I pray), I’ll have more time to write a few longer pieces on which I’ve been dabbling away. Meanwhile, here’s a passage from Proust that I read this morning. He’s gazing at Albertine, asleep in his bed.

In this way, her sleep realized to a certain extent the possibility of love: alone, I could think of her, but I missed her, I did not possess her; when she was present, I spoke to her, but was too absent from myself to be able to think of her; when she was asleep, I no longer had to talk, I knew that I was no longer observed by her, I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself.

The phrasing’s a little too precious, compared to some of my favorite passages of his (I’ll share more of them later), but you can discuss among y’selves.

The NYTimes has an article about a Proust reading group in NYC. These sissies have taken two years just to reach the fifth book of the series. Your unhumble Virtual Memoirist, on the other hand, started the same book this weekend, a mere 4 months after beginning the project. In your (collective) face, you pansies!

As for the article, here’s a paragraph that I haven’t altered in any way. Please explain to me how it fits together.

As in the novel, whose narrator constantly forms opinions, only to undermine them, it is difficult to ascertain how Proust permeates each member. Some in the group take the same bus or have sushi together afterward; others have remained relative strangers, as they discuss how well Proust’s characters can be known.

Perhaps, as the next paragraph quotes, “It’s sort of cubist.”

Virginia Postrel has a pretty good post about the Newsweek/Koran fiasco.

It puts me in mind of the furor over Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, back in 1988. A lot of Christians were pissed off when this one came out. People who’d never seen the movie called for protests, not realizing the humor factor in hearing Judas-by-way-of-Brooklyn, by Harvey Keitel.

Anyway, my point is, these Christians were irate about a movie portraying Jesus Christ as a man with some human feelings. You can argue about the validity of what they were mad about, but what’s incontrovertible is that no one started a riot over it. No one threatened the lives of Scorsese, Willem Dafoe, or Paul Schraeder (although some of my friends really disliked Bringing Out the Dead).

Or, as Ms. Postrel puts it:

With its Western biases, Newsweek thought it was writing about allegations of prisoner abuse, a human rights issue. Its overseas audience had a different reading. The differences between us and them really are bigger than the differences between us and us.