I do have hope I can come back to writing here more often.  Currently, my thoughts are about a change in the way I read.

I’ve always been someone who can’t put down a book once I’ve picked it up.  I could count on one hand the books I’d abandoned mid-read.  Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis being the last I remember (it’s opening 50 pages ruminating on a seating chart for B-list celebrities bored me out of my mind).  Hell, I actually finished Twilight despite every urge to throw it through a window.  And pick it up and find another window to throw it through.  Preferably Meyer’s.

(Note: my referring to Twilight is a crass attempt to bump up my Google stats to compensate for my lack of updates.  We’ll see if it works.  Also, this (NSFW, I’m guessing) is just a wonderful, horrible culmination of… everything.  And the copy describing the actual toy is better writing than found in the books.)

Anyway, I digress.  The point here is this.  Matthew Pearl has led me to an epiphany.  I was reading his The Poe Shadow for a book club.  And falling asleep more than once.  This book takes a good premise – exploring the mystery around around Poe’s death – and makes it as dull as possible.  We have a narrator who is supposedly obsessed with Poe to the point of seeking out the person who inspired his character Dupin and destroying his engagement with childhood love.  Being a reader in the head of an obsessive could be a discomfiting, tense, just-one-more-page experience.  However, I think Pearl felt that a gentleman of that era was required to speak, write and act mannered so as to be, well, a gentleman.  So, instead his narrator – whose name I’ve forgotten and can’t give a crap enough about to walk across my tiny condo to look up – comes across as mildly interested in the events around him and completely unmotivated in action.

In the amount of time I was able to slog through fifty pages of literary oatmeal mush, my wife was able to go through almost half of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.  Much like The Poe Shadow, this is another genre novel written as if it was created in the 1800s.  But with a sense of humor, actual characters with passions that come across on the page, and a compelling style.

Watching the joy with which she read Clarke and contrasting that with the grey obligation I felt whenever I looked at the Pearl sitting on my nightstand, I realized something: I do not have to finish this book.  I have no book report to write.  No money is riding on it.  My book club will not flog me for my lack of wherewithal.

I can put it down and move on to better things.  Including working on my next short story, watching one of my billions of Netflix movies in my queue, or rereading Strange & Norrell.

Thank you, Matthew Pearl.  You’ve given me a lot of time.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall hits much of the same notes that have been hit in other Apatow-produced films. Jason Segal is the just-dumped Peter who jets off to Hawaii to forget Sarah Marshall, his actress, ex-girlfriend. He meets Rachel (Mila Kunis) and so on and so on as these romantic comedies go. Throughout the film, of course, Peter needs to learn how to grow up into himself — but, Sarah Marshall differs from Knocked Up or 40-Year Old Virgin in that the female lead has some of her own growing up to do, even if less so.

It’s the details, as always, that actually make these films. Segal embodies a raw, open wound, as he did when he played Nick in Freaks and Geeks. Go back and watch the scene from the very last episode of that show where he dances the most pained disco ever and you’ll understand. The beginning of this movie is filled with moments of emotional breakage that he does well.

I was, truthfully, waiting for the movie to fall on its face after its excellent pre-Hawaii sequences. Sarah’s job on a CSI-like show aside Billy Baldwin channeling David Caruso provides enough laughs on its own, not even considering Peter’s weeping misery. And considering that Peter is the musician for the show (“Oh, you want dark and ominous?”), even his job contributes to his inability to extricate himself from the relationship.

But, on the island itself, the cast gets a little familiar — Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd show up — and the movie mostly maintains its stride, though does meander a little. But, mostly into good places. Jack McBrayer shows up playing, essentially, his Kenneth character from 30 Rock on a honeymoon and very confused about his new wife’s sexuality. “Off to find the mythical clitoris!” is an excellent exit line for him.

I think the best addition to the Apatow stable is Russel Brand as Aldous Snow, the pretentious British rocker who stole Sarah away. He is the only truly reprehensible character in the whole bunch, but every bit of faux-humility, uncaring infidelity, his very uncomfortable reactions to super-fan Jonah Hill, and his awesome, awesome music video works so well. And teaching McBrayer how to make love to his wife using oversized chess pieces provides a hilarious montage in a movie that enjoys a number of them.

Peter and Rachel’s relationship on the island was fun to watch unfold, with all the usual tropes of new love in romantic comedies (four days? really?), but once again, the individual moments work. On top of that, the movie does a good job — for the most part, except for a few missteps — of not vilifying Sarah more than she deserves, or making Rachel too angelic. Everyone is flawed and no one is just… evil. Jason Segal wrote this film, and I think he did well learning his lessons from Apatow and Seth Rogan.

I’ve left entirely out of this review any discussion of the best gags in the whole film, one that centers on Peter’s real dreams for himself. Slate’s review gives it away, as I’m sure others will, but its worth having it come out of left field on introduction and then just… build from there.

The question that remains is whether Pineapple Express, the Seth Rogan-penned film about a two stoners who have to run from hitmen will be as funny as its trailer makes it seems like it will be. All I know is that “Paper Planes” is an incredible song.

This time around, no Neko.  But, despite that, I was engrossed, still singing, if not as enthusiastically.  “The Bleeding Heart Show” was still… unassailable despite its use in commercials for questionable educational institutions from Arizona.

The lack of Neko Case was noticable, but not, by any means, fatal.  Katherine was good, great, something.  Enough to make me dance like a dork, which is really all I care about as I’m not an actual music critic.

It was an utterly bizarre experience to be out of the 9:30 before 11 because, really… why would Okkervil River, of all opening acts, go on before 8pm?  Fucking seriously?  I hadn’t heard their stuff before The Stage Names.  So, we showed up at 8-ish and were extremely confused about why the crowd was so thick so early.  Until I heard the familiar strains of “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe.”  Well, shit, now it all made sense, except for the fact that a big bill like The New Pornos/Okkervil River didn’t get an opening act.  Which makes no sense at all.

Regardless, I was still in the crowd, still wanting to hear every strain of music, despite the minor issues that didn’t make it the complete expeience that their last show was.

So, I’m sleepy and actually have the opportunity to collapse at a reasonable hour after a show, so I’m going to take it.

See you, hopefully, before the Tokyo Police Club show.

I can’t be surprised that I saw a lot of them at the Kimya Dawson show. I mean, the soundtrack for Juno, on which she has a significant number of songs, has to be popular amongst a certain set of the youngun’s.

Also, my knees suck, which also makes me feel old, but that’s neither here nor there.

It’d been forever since I’d been to the Cat to see anyone, so I got to reinvigorate my annoyance with the crowd that talks too much.  However, despite the talking through Spoonboy — the overly earnest anarchist folk singer — and Angelo, the higher-fidelity French folk singer, the crowd did settle nicely for Kimya herself. Despite the fact that during the merely two songs from Juno that she sang, it was clear that most of the crowd was here because of the movie.

If you have heard any of her music, the obvious but accurate descriptor that comes to mind is “whimsical.” Which normally doesn’t track with me, but occasionally whimsy can be a wonderful thing. I was originally tempted to describe Kimya’s music using some sort of Seussian comparison — the fact that she sang three children’s songs certainly helped that urge along. But, really, it’s not so much Seussian as… straightforward. It’s rare that one finds a singer who tells a crowd, “This is a song about when I was pregnant and worried about being on tour,” and follows that with a song whose lyrics are exactly about that. No emo symbolism, no oblique poetry, just… that.

So, really, Kimya succeeded in creating a show where the lyrics, “Fuck Bush and fuck this war,” were actually somewhat effective for me. That is, my cynic that would normally respond with, “Well… yes, of course, but… is that actually an argument?” decided to shut the hell up for an hour and listen to the crazy-haired woman with the guitar.

We’ll see how long into tomorrow’s Les Savy Fav show that warm fuzzy feeling lasts.

First order of business:  I wrote a few reviews while I was gone.

 CJ7 – The Stephen Chow movie which was oddly ridiculous and was just interesting enough for me to recommend.

 Be Kind Rewind – Oh, being disappointed in this film was just tragic. The trailer never failed to make me smile, the movie often did.

Persepolis -  Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel come to life.  I liked it, but not as much as the books.

So, beyond the whole “getting married” thing, which took up a little bit of my time, there was also a suprising lack of good shows coming through DC.  April, though… I will be seeing Kimya Dawson, Les Savy Fav, Okkervil River & The New Pornographers, and Tokyo Police Club.  So… good month.  Lots of forthcoming entries written at 1am after a show.

Go Heels, and all of that.

After seeing Juno, though, I think I understand Sam’s point of view a bit more. When Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) gets pregnant, our initial impressions of her family lead us to think that we’re going to see a Hoover-esque moment of self-centered spite. Instead we get a tough but non-judgmental reaction from her father Mac (J. K. Simmons, always good) and stepmother Bren (Allison Janney, again, always good). It’s the first surprise of many in the film.

That’s the thing that Juno never lets you forget: people are surprising. They can be assholes and saints rolled into a single person; one does not preclude the other. The whole film, under Jason Reitman’s (Thank You For Smoking) direction continually shows us full, complete people on screen. Except for a single misstep with Rainn Wilson, channeling Dwight from The Office, there are no types.

Mac can be gruff and vulgar with his daughter, obviously upset with her mistake, and never once lose our sense of their mutual affection and love. It’s both shocking and completely normal that Bren would attack the ultrasound tech who obviously is judging the teenaged Juno for her state.

It’s a pretty remarkable experience to be legitimately sad and happy watching the lives of fictional characters. The fact is that Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody create people who aren’t made of quirks or tropes. Juno herself, played gorgeously by Page, sports a tough facade that, thankfully, doesn’t hide a cliched soft-side; she is a resolute but scared teenager and it shows and still manages to avoid the overwrought movie-of-the-week scenes that one would think that this subject matter could easily fall prey to.

Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner play Mark and Vanessa Loring, a couple that Ellen finds through an ad in the Penny Saver — they want to adopt and she wants to give up “this thing,” as she calls it. The story line with the Lorings was both on the screen in the first five minutes we met them and completely blind-siding. Audible-gasps shocking.

Of course, there’s the father, Bleeker. Michael Cera, once again demonstrating his brilliance at playing the awkward teen. Not to say that Cera is rehashing George Michael Bluth again and again. Sure, he’s a little strange, but he has backbone and doesn’t stammer when he sings. I haven’t seen a sweeter relationship on screen in years.

I have almost nothing bad to say about Juno. Cool soundtrack: check. Pop culture references: check. Excellent ideas for alternate uses of a T-shirt gun: check. Urge to describe things as “wizard” and get a bed car: check.

Speaking of that, the set design through this movie was amazing. Seriously, coming back to LMS for a second, both of these movies have that in common: the full (or not-so-full, in some cases) houses that characterize their residents as much as their words.

Find this movie. It is, as one character says of another, boss.

Enjoy.  I went through it for you.

The Grand Ole Party was a solid second opener, but far too reminiscent of a lesser Noisettes to really keep my attention.  I do think it’s awesome that the lead singer is also their drummer, but that necessitates a simplicity to their songs that is just a little bland and made their whole set run together.  Good pipes on her, though.

But the meat of the show, the reason why was there:  Rilo Kiley.  Jenny Lewis’s gorgeous voice.  And so forth.  I was pumped, f-ing thrilled to get these tickets when I bought them.

Then I listened to Under the Blacklight.  Which is, I’m sorry to say,  is simply a boring album.  The songs are repetitive, simplistic and derivative of music that should be long dead.  I don’t need to imagine Jenny Lewis as Stevie Nicks.  Or Annette Funicello (hello, “Smoke Detector”, a song that would have been interesting if we were actually playing Beach Blanket Bingo — modulo a couple naughty lyrics).  Or the fucking Bee-Gees.

So, I wasn’t as excited, though my enthusiasm was merely dampened, not drenched.   And, unfortunately, hearing the Blacklight songs live only marginally improved them.  Which, I guess, is a huge sign of the quality of the band as, I dunno, polishers of crap?  I was hoping that, somehow, the concert experience would change my mind on the CD.  Considering my verbatim (and not quiet, because I am occasionally an dick) reaction to the “Breakin’ Up” was “That is a totally shit song,” that wish didn’t come true.  Who else thinks that track is the result of a disco ball fucking a 13-year-old girl’s diary?

But enough negatives.  Because the concert, despite missteps in music selection, was fun.  Sure, the set list, which seems to be close to this one, was half Blacklight (and, unfortunately, missing the titular song, which is one I like), but in the end getting to hear “Portions for Foxes” and “Wires and Waves” and the half-audience-participation version of “With Arms Outstretched”– I was contributing! — was worth it.  The band was definitely into it and Lewis herself got to be the skilled, sexy rocker that she is.  Her voice is amazing and it’s fun to watch her and her cohorts perform.  Actually, weirdly, the concert did improve my estimation of More Adventurous, which is by no means a bad album, but is outdone by their earlier work.

Here’s hoping that their next album will be a return to form, so I can go to their next concert without being annoyed at half their songs.  And maybe, next time, I can actually get a chance to hit one of the giant balloons.

I was lent the full, novella-sized version of B. R. Myers’s essay expecting to at least contemplate throwing it across the room. I mean, it paints current literature as a whole as too pretentious for its own good. And I should probably have taken umbrage, being the owner of many books written after 1900, a number of which I would consider favorites of one sort or another. Favorite genre-creator: Neuromancer. Favorite book whose cover makes me ashamed to read it on the Metro: Lolita. Favorite, or rather “favorite” whipping boy/example of exactly what Myers is talking about: Infinite Jest… wait, no, Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Whatever… or the first ten pages of Everything is Illuminated which illuminated only how little interest I had in the story Foer was telling.

However, my fears about the actual content of the Manifesto were probably unfounded – I was more in line with it than I realized I was. Sure, he was taking an extremist view, but, hell, he called it a frigging manifesto, what should I expect? His tearing apart of Proulx, McCarthy, and Auster seemed reasonable, given the fragments he provides. Of course, he could be wrong about those, being that we do only get to see quotes. But I do appreciate that he tries to use passages used in reviews to praise the work. It’s easy to see how holding up “You’re a rooster on Tuesday, you’re a feather-duster on Wednesday” (from Proulx’s Close Range) as “great writing” as NYT’s Richard Eder did is stupidly hilarious.

Then, of course, he has to go off on DeLillo. White Noise in particular. Rage about the bloat and overreach of Underworld, be my guest. I haven’t read The Names, so… I can’t comment on that.

But White Noise is, to my mind, an excellent book. I reread it for the purpose of comparing my notes to Myers’s. It isn’t perfect or nearly as deep as DeLillo wants it to be, and it does flag at the end. But it succeeds in reaching moments of useful, current metaphor.

Myers starts in on the well-worn first passage of White Noise. The one in which the protagonist, Jack Gladney, watches the “day of the station wagons,” the day in which students arrive at the university at which he teaches. The text lists, for a page and a half, items – some to the brand — in the cars, sketches the picture of a new school year. Myers follows the quote with:

“You don’t have to have read anything published past 1960 to know at once what you’re in for: a story of Life in Consumerland…. If you found the above shopping list witty, then DeLillo’s your man. If you complain that it’s just dull… he can always counter by saying ‘Hey, I don’t make the all-inclusive, consumption-mad society, I just report on it.’”

And I don’t create false dichotomies, I just report on them. Myers seems to see that we either think this is witty or dull and nothing else. I don’t think this particular litany is meant to be a joke as much as an introduction to, yes, a story of Life in Consumerland. The problem here is that White Noise is often described as hilarious and funny; which it is, in parts, one which we’ll get to in a bit. And maybe Eder was rolling in the aisles. I wasn’t – even if I was supposed to be — but I knew where I was. I knew the story I was going to be seeing and (this is key) I wanted to read it. Maybe Myers just didn’t.

His attitude towards the Consumerland-type novels is generally one of contempt. He reminds me of my freshman creative writing professors who admonished that mentioning Sony devalues your (most likely shitty for other reasons – c’mon, it’s freshman writing) story or poem because now it couldn’t be… what? Deciphered by future readers in a hundred years? Please. You know how few of the footnotes in The Woman in White I read? Despite not knowing the particulars of Italian sopranos in London in the 1890s, I was still able to find my way through the book, practically tearing pages to get to the next. Context matters, both in the sense of locating the readers in a time and allowing them to parse sentences in which they may not recognize every proper noun. And stories tethered to a time are just as valuable as stories that aren’t.

“Hardly had it gone into paperback than the station wagon bit the dust,” complains Myers. Well, White Noise was set in the early 80s. So? This seems deliberately obtuse on Myers part, niggling in a way that he avoids for most of the rest of the essay. I mean, he describes the book as “topical” then whines about the fact that it uses details from a specific moment. Here’s the thing: most people can figure out that station wagons are motorized conveyances even if they are not familiar with them. I may as well complain that people don’t use horse-drawn carriages anymore when I read Jude the Obscure.

Actually, he keeps doing this deliberately obtuse thing, asking questions that have easy answers. Noting the point of view doesn’t allow for Jack to see what’s in the station wagons, thus making it a joke on his part, he asks if the station wagons are a joke, too, as if we as readers lack the ability to discern Jack’s imagination of the moment from the moment itself. He complains about repetitive narration when that seems, quite obviously, to be the point. Here’s the thing: it’s not a super-duper deep point. But it’s still a point and one that works in context. Gladney’s and his wife’s ships-in-the-night dialogue succeeds for me because it emphasizes both their neediness and inability to communicate those needs. And, yes, Mr. Myers, it is funny. Again, to me. And your snide asides about those who did find his back-and-forth on the word “entering” funny bounce off of me because I’m rubber and you’re glue. C’mon, imaging the “ample” Babette saying “Insert yourself, Rex. I want you inside me, entering hard….” mocking authors who use the verb to describe intercourse was certainly good enough for a chuckle out of me, which is as good as anyone’s gotten, even the venerable Mssrs. Wodehouse and Pratchett (though they sustain those chuckles across an entire book, true).

This is Myers simply committing the same sin that DeLillo does in believing that he’s above us all. That he knows. That he is “smarter than we are,” as John Leonard said of DeLillo, in a moment of what I hope is true stupidity or massive self-hatred on his part.

And that’s often the problem. Myers fills up his chapter on DeLillo with a lot of eye-roll inducers and then adorns it with pointed, smart comments. No one, ever, should say something as blazingly condescending as what Leonard did of any author. The toadying of critics is ridiculous, absolutely, and Myers nails that point, but largely misses on the actual criticism of the text itself. And the fact that DeLillo’s interviews are wince-inducing (at least what Myers quotes) is interesting, but I rarely care about an artist outside of his work; or rather, I rarely let it affect how I view the work except in extreme cases.

One of the bizarre things in the essay is the fact it never mentions some of my favorite passages of the book, which I feel must have been referenced in reviews, somewhere. One of the most prominent is when Gladney and a colleague visit The Most Photographed Barn in America. Jack’s friend says of it, and the crowd around it taking even more pictures, “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.” I’ve been to the Most Photographed Barn in America. It’s called the Mona Lisa. The imagery of this passage hit me from across the years since I had read it when I was standing in the Lourve, amongst the tourists who never actually saw the painting while they were in the Hall of the Masters, but only saw the pictures that they were taking. White Noise is worth the price of entry (aka, the sagging end) for this metaphor alone, in my opinion.

I read the book for the first time in the late nineties and I could see DeLillo telling us about the encroaching false expertise of the amateur – hello, blogging and Wikipedia — in the passages in which Heinrich, Gladney’s young son, expounded on topics he couldn’t possibly know anything about. I found Gladney’s “death sentence” humorously absurd and fitting with the exaggerated setting that Myers never really seemed to grasp.

So many of his complaints involve saying things like “No real person would utter [that dialogue].” Well, no. This is heightened reality. Fiction that is not to your taste, which is fine. I’m not as dumb as other detractors of his, who believe he seeks only realism, but I think he does fail to judge the book on its own merits, relying too much on what DeLillo himself thinks of the book, which is an irrelevant point. I wish Myers had discussed Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis – which does fail, Hindenberg-like, because of its use of proper nouns — or one of the numerous other examples of books which absolutely deserved the treatment he gives White Noise, because I do think it made his overall argument in A Reader’s Manifesto weaker. At least Myers was fun to read.