Louis Menand, usually so good, trips up on LA & noir

LA 1 Response »
Jul 302009

Is it a New York thing? Menand has reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” for “The New Yorker,” and I think he’s generally got a handle on it — although I don’t concur with his assessment that it’s fluff, I understand how he might say so.

But I think he’s got LA and noir entirely wrong. From the middle of the review:

Pynchon’s novel is set in Los Angeles, which is by no means a departure from hardboiled tradition. This is partly because mystery writers have tended to be screenwriters as well (or wished that they were), and so have lived near Hollywood, and also because movie and television crime stories have been shot in and around L.A. for a century, since it’s cheaper not to travel. Marlowe and Archer both work in L.A. So does Walter Mosley’s detective, Easy Rawlins.  Southern California, in real life a place of few dark alleys and little weather, is bona-fide noir territory.

As Richard Rayner’s new book “A Bright and Guilty Place” shows, mystery and noir and Hollywood didn’t coincide because of happenstance and wannabe screenwriters but because of the cycle of crime, corruption and reform that was at the core of the city’s public life in the 1920s and ’30s. We have lots of dark alleys, thank you very much, and it’s exactly the contrast between the brilliant sunlight and our morally dank actions that gives noir its power.

Later, Menand writes that Pynchon’s protagonist, Doc:

does walk down mean streets (or the L.A. equivalent: bikers, drug dealers, sex-club performers, nefarious dentists) and is not himself mean.

Here Menand refers to the quote from Raymond Chandler with which he’d started the piece: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” But Chandler was himself referring to Los Angeles, the city at the center of much of his work. The parenthetical should not read “the LA equivalent” but “the PYNCHON equivalent” — because the dentists here are no more nefarious than they are anywhere else.

Los Angeles is an enormous, complicated city, and I don’t know if anyone can get it exactly right. But it pains me when someone as smart as Louis Menand doesn’t seem to try, instead recycling old thin cliches.

Posted by paperhaus at 1:58 pm

don't tell anybody, but I'm wearing the same jeans as yesterday

andetc No Responses »
Jul 292009

You’d think with my varied responsibilities that I could get away with wearing the same pair of jeans without encountering any of the same people two days in a row. But not today; I’m heading to the same office as yesterday, and the pants, the pants they are the same.

This used to make me crazy, crazy enough to fill closets with pants and skirts. In fact, I have lots of eligible skirts, but they’re all wrinkled, because I don’t have quite enough skirt hangers, and while the ironing board is now set up right in the middle of the living room I haven’t quite gotten around to using it, other than as a resting place for clean laundry. I could buy more jeans, if I could make more time, if I didn’t bail from shopping errands when parking becomes a drag, if I really just cared more about the jeans and the skirts and the clothes, which I did used to care about. Like I said, it made me crazy, once.

Because when I was 13, the absolute worst age for a girl to have to wear the same pair of jeans two days in a row, I didn’t have enough pants and skirts to make it through the week. Although then it was pants, really — I wore pants: the skirts weren’t cute until high school. Then, I only had 4 pairs of pants, which meant I had to recycle one pair during the week, which took lots of planning as it was 8th grade and some classes met every day and others didn’t, so then it wasn’t so much that no one would see the doubled-up pair of pants as simply minimizing the exposure without repeating the pattern enough to get noticed, because getting noticed for something like not enough pants in 8th grade would have been just about the worst thing ever, other than all those other worst things ever, which there was, honestly, a really long paradeful of when I was 13.

Did I mention that, of my 4 pairs of pants, one was bright yellow?

This was of course my own doing. Like a crow, I am drawn to the shiny. But when faced with an inadequate supply of pants, a BRIGHT YELLOW pair is an added complication.

Today, my jeans are not yellow. But it’s possible they’re coming off. Maybe there’s something clean that I overlooked — time to go check the ironing board.

Posted by paperhaus at 3:55 pm

busy busy busy

andetc No Responses »
Jul 282009

My sister blew into town last week for my birthday (she’s the taller, blonder one) and we did much walking around LA, particularly from one happy hour to the next. That’s the Edison behind us, which was not my favorite of the downtown bars we visited, but which did have the cheapest drinks — early on Thursdays, you can get the house cocktail for 35 cents.

In non-birthday, non-drinking news, I talked to the Irish Independent (more on authors coming back from the grave) and to the Guardian again, this time about the former husband of Elizabeth Eat Pray Love Gilbert getting a book deal for his story about finding himself after the end of their relationship. I do wish his story was something like whoring and brawling and turning into a slovenly, porn-watching bachelor, but it sounds like he traveled the world to find his spiritual center. Ah well.

I turned in a book review at the LA Times. I’m building a website for a literary agent. I went to the Getty last week — not to work, which I often do — but to eat and drink like a Roman.

Posted by paperhaus at 3:24 pm

Book review and quotage

andetc, book reviews 1 Response »
Jul 132009

My review of Jonathan Ames’ The Double Life is Twice As Good is in today’s LA Times books pages. The book is not so great, and I couldn’t help but think that his publisher wanted to have an Ames collection on shelves which included the story “Bored to Death” by the time the HBO series based on it (starring Jason Schwatrzman) premieres this fall. Not only to the pieces fail to say much of anything, but old diary entries and an email are included — filler-style odds and ends. I wish the book had been great; Ames generously gave me an interview when I was a struggling podcaster, and was very kind, too. Such is the sucky job of a critic, though: you’ve got to be critical.

On another note, I got to talk about works-after-death for an article that appears in today’s Observer. There’s a major upcoming release by Nabakov (the long-secreted The Original of Laura), a re-do of Hemingway’s A Movable Feast, and a few others, including Graham Greene’s first (unfinished) novel. The Strand Magazine gave Jacket Copy a peek at Graham Greene’s effort — sort of an Agatha Christie knock-off — and I got to chime in about what the dead-guy-book pile-on means.

Posted by paperhaus at 3:00 am

The view from there

andetc, architecture No Responses »
Jul 052009

The fourth of July BBQ I could walk to was too good to pass up. At not quite two miles away, and up a dusty trail through a park, many Angelenos would not consider this walkable, but I was determined. When it came to picking out shoes, I wavered, and I was not super-cutely attired — indeed, I was sweaty and winded — when I arrived, but there you go. I’d walked.

Of course, I mooched a ride home.

But before that it was a lovely BBQ, with lots of food and drink and 3 year-olds the size of 5 year-olds careening around, not at all in control of their ever-growing limbs. We sat on a large patio, watching the sun go down and sparks of fireworks rise up along the horizon.

Where I live, I am hemmed in with no view, but it’s easy enough to find one if you hike up a steep hill.

I’d been there once before, at this home of a longtime acquaintance, when it was full of stuff. Yesterday the stuff was there but pushed away, tidied, and I took the time to appreciate the off-kilter rectangle-ness of the space, the wall of windows, the studio-type floor, the rock fireplace and short rock wall with a square velvet couch that seemed built for its spot, a bedroom that was a just a nook with a wide open wall to the rest of the space. There was another part of the house I hadn’t seen, a roommate, a kitchen, but I stood there thinking that this was the way to do it right, to create the open space and the windows over the trees and the big wide patio and the space to work in. I just kind of stood there taking it in.

The place is really great, I told my longtime acquaintance, who was cranking the windows open, or shut. How did you find it? Well, someone they knew was working on a Schindler documentary, and there was this house…

This is a Schindler house? I asked.

Yes, they said.

Oh, I didn’t say. Wow, I didn’t say. I was just quiet, which for me is saying both those things, really.

I thought of other places of sublime, out-of-reach beauty. Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, or those Newport mansions I grew up close to, or the houses in Malibu I drove past on Thursday. Every time I’d seen one of those places I’d imagined what it would be like to live in them, to have that as the texture of your life, every day. How the physical space would be a like a gift that would secretly inform your actions, even when you stopped noticing it, if you could ever stop noticing it.

And here I was, in a place like this not as a museum but as a place where someone — not rich — lived for real, who made potato salad and drank tequila. I felt fortunate to have used this bathroom and seen this view and done ordinary things like help string the christmas lights and neglect to carry food back to the kitchen. I could have driven someplace else and I would have missed it; but yesterday, the sublimity of that Schindler house was the texture of my life, too.

Posted by paperhaus at 7:26 pm

What Malcolm Gladwell gets wrong about Free

book reviews, criticism, media No Responses »
Jul 022009

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Chris Anderson’s Free in this week’s New Yorker — I wrote about the dust-up surrounding uncredited passages in the book and what the implications of Anderson’s error might be in the LA Times, so I was curious. I think Gladwell brings up many good questions about Anderson’s thesis — that as stuff becomes close enough to free to round down, our economy is changing.

He’s correct in saying he that the end cost of a product is only partially the product itself — that distribution, execution and other expenses make up the bulk of the cost.

But he’s not correct in implying, then, that things aren’t free. Just because it’s expensive to produce something — a specialized drug — doesn’t mean that the cost will be passed on to the buyer.

Take, for example, the music industry and journalism, two things I know a bit about. Whether it’s the millions it takes to put Metallica on CD or a couple hundred bucks in home recording, songs can be copied and recirculated for free. And the LA Times can be accessed online for free, no subscription necessary. It’s not that songs or newspapers are free to produce — they’re not — but they are free to acquire.

In Gladwell’s drug example, he concludes, “In this case, information does not want to be free.* It wants to be really, really expensive.” But what information wants is not necessarily what information gets. Metallica does not want you to download their music without buying it. But the expectations of Free aren’t dictated by information, or Metallica, or the producer of a drug — they’re from the um, purchasers — people who know that Free is possible, and will continue to choose it first over notfree.

* The phrase “information wants to be free” came from Stewart Brand in the 1980s. It was remixed a few times, but each time he said or wrote it, it was paired with the idea that information also wants to be expensive. Sometimes, when people argue against “information wants to be free,” they overlook the fact that this free-expensive duality was part of the statement in the first place.

Posted by paperhaus at 2:54 pm Tagged with: , ,

Nietzche in the morning

andetc, book reviews, has everyone gone mad? 3 Responses »
Jul 012009

Shortly after getting up I checked my Twitter feed — a weakness, to be sure — and saw that Alain de Botton was Tweeting quotes about anger. Here’s one:

Angry people call poverty on themselves and ruin on their homes, denying they are angry, just as the mad deny their insanity, Seneca -De Ira

de Botton — who is @alaindebotton, if you’re curious — had recently left an angry comment on the blog of Caleb Crain, who (negatively) reviewed de Botton’s book “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” in the NY Times. “You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that,” de Botton wrote. “So that’s two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review…. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

Which is heated, if not nasty. And it doesn’t fit with the Alain de Botton I saw at the Getty in LA just a few weeks ago, who came across as sweet and patient. He stood for hours on a chilly patio in order to speak to every person who wanted a book signed; it was a long queue at the end of his book tour, but he never got frustrated or exasperated.

So he’s either good at fronting, or Crain really pissed him off.

I’m inclined to think the latter, and I’m glad that de Botton said what he said. Not that I hate the review, am convinced this is de Botton’s best work or am even sure that he’s right about the damage done — but I think expressing anger is OK. Don’t like the review — say something! Such reactions shouldn’t leave reviewers cowering, but get them up on their feet, shouting their opinions, their reasons, their refusals to submit!

There is some kind of play-nice mentality going around that I’m not sure I believe in. Maybe we’ve lost our ability to argue without getting personal, or the skill of expressing anger with eloquence. I think that’s why de Botton was pulling what 140-character quotes he could about anger’s place in our lives.

That said, I’m not sure that going to Nietzche on how to live is ever a good idea.

The emotions of envy, hatred and lust are life-conditioning emotions which must essentially be present in every life – Nietzsche

It’s not untrue, but it feels uneasy, unresolved. Nietzche is good for some things — he’s always thought provoking, if not infuriating — but his ego-driven, brittle intellect didn’t make him much of a life coach.

Posted by paperhaus at 4:22 pm Tagged with: , ,
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