Author: Gil

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Black Unmagic

Back in July, I asked if my wife & I are the only two white people to watch two Tyler Perry movies all the way through. Maybe we’re easily entertained, but we enjoyed the flicks: there was a sorta non-Hollywood-ness about them (even if most of the male leads were model-types), an earnestness that doesn’t come off as laughable (which is pretty rare nowadays). Sure, many of the characters are devoutly Christian, but their faith doesn’t lead to miracles and perfect solutions to all problems. Oh, and Madea and her brother Joe are hysterical, allowing Perry managed to keep up the Flip Wilson tradition of black men playing drag and the more recent Eddie Murphy tradition of playing multiple characters in the same scene.

Nobody commented on my post (sigh), but the release of Perry’s third movie has mooted the question; it doesn’t matter if any white people see his movies, because there are a ton of black people who have made him Hollywood gold. Why Did I Get Married? took in almost $22 million in its opening weekend, doubling up the sales from George Clooney’s well-reviewed new movie about, um, the evils of Monsanto (I think).

My favorite part of the Perry story is how he “came out of nowhere.” Salon ran an article that includes a great anecdote about what happened when Perry’s agent approached a Hollywood studio. No one had any idea who Perry was, despite his stage success among black audiences:

What shocked Hollywood insiders [after Diary of a Mad Black Woman] was how Perry seemed to come out of nowhere. In the wake of the “Diary” success, the Hollywood trade paper Variety wrote a story that led off, “Tyler who?” [Lions Gate studio head of production Michael Paseornek] had been asking himself the same question a year before, after he received a letter from Perry’s agent, talking about a guy who wrote plays for African-American audiences on the “chitlin circuit,” a name that goes back to Jim Crow days, when African-Americans were banned from mainstream auditoriums. Nowadays, Perry’s plays regularly sell out major venues such as New York’s Beacon Theater and the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, where the Oscars are held, and in the last eight years, they’ve grossed more than $100 million through ticket sales and DVDs of live performances sold through his Web site.

“It was an astronomical number for someone I’d never heard of,” Paseornek recalls, “so I called around to other people in showbiz, and they hadn’t heard of him either.”

But those people were white. Paseornek got his first insight into the Perry phenomenon when he walked down the hall to the Lions Gate inventory control department, to talk to an African-American employee named Kenya Watson. “She said, ‘Sure, I’ve heard of Tyler Perry,'” he recalls. “‘I own all his DVDs. Whenever we have a cookout, we put one on.'”

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Eugene Robinson has a nice opinion piece about the Perry phenomenon, and how refreshing it is to see something other than the “magic negro,” whose role is to explain life to white people.

You know me: I may love me some failure, but I also love success that flies under the mainstream radar.

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Yucky promotions

I think Wal-Mart’s “Hot Release Tuesday” may be the grossest name ever for a promotion, but today actually sees a couple of releases that I’m enthused about:

War and Peace – A new Tolstoy translation by Pevear & Volokhonsky! This pair jump-started the wave of new translations of the Russians with their 1990 edition of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the hardcover of which was the most expensive novel I ever bought (as far as I can recall)! Here’s a short essay from Richard Pevear on how he and his partner Larissa work.

Oblivion with Bells – A new record from Underworld! My wife better stock up on Lamictal or some other anti-epileptic drug, since those beats tend to mess with her head pretty badly.

Schulz and Peanuts – David Michaelis’ biography of Charles Schulz will likely be the first bio I read since David Guralnick’s treatment of Sam Cooke, proving that I have some pretty odd tastes, I guess.

I thought I’d try to make this a regular feature, but I discovered that

  1. I couldn’t come up with a single DVD release that would make this list, as I have no interest in Transformers, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip or A Mighty Heart, which convinced me that
  2. there aren’t enough new books, records, movies coming out each Tuesday that interest me.

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More cold war relics

In keeping with the previous post on Norman Mailer’s gnostic wackiness, I should probably also relegate Ben Stein to “relic of the cold war” status, but he seems to have adjusted pretty well to the modern age, and offers some pretty good life & investment advice in his most recent column in the NYTimes:

GET A BIG DOG And have that dog sleep in your bed with you. Dogs know nothing of mortality, and they share that peace with you.

INVEST FOR THE LONG HAUL If you are a smart long-term investor, do not pay any attention to short-term developments. They are often reported by people whose motivation may be to scare you (screaming about the subprime “crisis”) or to make you giddily greedy (screaming about that one certain stock you should buy to retire rich).

On the other hand, Terry Eagleton comes off as a Marxist douchebag.

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Barren-ness

One of my friends wrote me about yesterday’s Middlemarch post, essentially smacking me down for sounding like I “don’t want to be bothered getting into another time and place, which is something that most people think that novels do.”

Guilty! As I hit the “publish” button, I felt that this post came off as a whine, rather than the argument I wanted to make about living at hyperspeed and how difficult it is to slow down. If anything, I wasn’t trying to get into the merits or specifics of Middlemarch: only 125 pages in, I wasn’t in a position to judge it.

Living at hyperspeed, I was stuck for time. Given more of it, I would’ve contrasted the experience of reading a book like this with the experience I had reading Spook Country, an entertaining thriller that felt like it was made of now. Its McGuffin is pretty easy to suss out, unfortunately, but I enjoyed the book probably because of its utter now-ness.

What I was trying to say about Middlemarch, on the other hand, wasn’t that the particular time and place are like a foreign country (nor one that I’m disinclined to visit), but rather that the very experience of reading that novel is like a foreign country (or maybe one I was raised in as a child but forgot about).

Given my tendency not to extrapolate from my own experiences and tastes, I should’ve concluded that this is merely a symptom of my middle-aged shallowness, especially as the past 3-4 months’ workload has left me frazzled and constantly dealing with crises.

Humorously enough, the chapter I read last night begins with this passage about . . . how times are faster “now” and there’s less leisure:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probably that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

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Book Barren

Before a trip, I usually find myself downstairs in our library, looking at 1,200-odd books and trying to figure out how much reading time I’ll have, what mood I’ll be in during the trip, how much weight I’m willing to carry in my bag, and what book will make me look unapproachably smart in the terminal and on the plane. This time around, I was too harried to think straight, and so, last week in Milan, I got stuck without a book.

This almost never happens to me. I knew there would be plenty of time to read on this trip, but I foolishly brought along only a brief (350 pages) novel I was halfway through (Spook Country) and a 110-page play (Rock n Roll), both of which I wrapped up by the second day of the trip. It was time to employ The Eco Strategy.

Unfortunately, the first two bookstores I checked out had no English-language section. Since I was on conference-schedule from then on, there was no time to look up and visit a specialty store (Amy sez there was one over by Castello Sforzesco).

I stopped in at one near our hotel and discovered a very small Inglese shelf. The books were mostly UK Penguin editions, and the most contemporary writer on the shelf was Beckett. So I found myself studying a collection of classics to figure out what the heck could occupy me for the rest of the trip and the 8-hour flight home.

I considered picking up Nostromo, but thought, “That book killed David Lean; there’s no way I’m going to make it.”

Trollope? I wouldn’t know where to start.

Bleak House? My cheap-ass stereotype kicked in, as I picked up a new copy a year or so ago, in the hopes of re-reading it.

A Room of One’s Own? Tried it on three different occasions and never got into it. (Tried reading Mrs. Dalloway twice: same result.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald? I’d be back in the same bookless boat a day or so later.

Then it hit me: Middlemarch! Sure, I had a copy at home, but it was mass-market paperback, and this edition was larger and more readable (I’m getting old, and mass-market typesetting is beyond my eyesight).

I started Middlemarch once back in college, but got derailed due to some piddling matter like coursework. But now it would be the only book in my possession! I’d be sure to get so far into it that I wouldn’t just bail partway through! Plus, it would make me look smart and out of step with the times! The back-cover blurb was from Henry James, fergoshsakes!

From the first chapter, as George Eliot relates the marriage prospects and religious tendencies of Dorothea Brooke, I got to thinking about the nature of sprawling novels like this one. Over its 800 pages, the book attempts to canvas the interweaving lives and classes of a town in 1832 England. I wondered how contemporary readers — outside of academia, that is — would devote themselves to this sort of project. Do people have the patience to read a book like this one? I find it charming in parts, and possessed of enough tension and engaging characters to outweigh the archaicness of some of the language.

But I also find myself facing a variant on the suspension-of-disbelief: that is, I feel as if I have to slow down, to reframe my perceptions to an era in which communications were slower and religious and ideological debates were of a different stripe. That’s not to say that it’s some sorta relic. Dorothea’s zealotry, Casaubon’s arm’s-length distance from the world, Fred’s slacker college-kid are all vivid characters and could easily transpose into the present. Still, a novel like this requires a different way of thinking than that to which I’ve grown accustomed in these past hyperaccelerated years.

Finishing Book One (about one-eighth of the novel) on the flight home, I felt confident that I could stick with this novel and its pace, that I can slow down from this frenetic pace.

Then I thought, “In eight hours, I’ve probably traveled more miles than George Eliot did in her entire life.”