This was reflected in a relatively unimpressive group of Best Picture nominees. Ron Howard’s good but not great A Beautiful Mind would take top prize against Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, Todd Field’s In the Bedroom, and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. The other nominee: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which began a three-year streak of the franchise’s entry being nominated.

I’ve always felt Fellowship was the best of the trilogy and I certainly would’ve had no problem with it winning over Mind. The Academy decided against some edgier material, such as David Lynch’s critically lauded Mulholland Drive and Chris Nolan’s twisty thriller Memento.

Ron Howard took Best Director over Altman and Jackson. Lynch would be nominated here for Mulholland, as well as Ridley Scott for Black Hawk Down. Field and Luhrmann were the two auteurs whose Picture was nominated left out. Certainly, I would’ve reserved a slot for Nolan for his work in Memento.

Denzel Washington would earn his first Best Actor prize for Training Day (he won Supporting Actor for Glory in 1989). Other nominees: previous year’s winner Russell Crowe for Mind, Sean Penn for I Am Sam, Will Smith as Ali, and Tom Wilkinson for In the Bedroom.

I would have considered Johnny Depp for his performance in Blow or Billy Bob Thornton in Monster’s Ball. Keeping with the Memento kick, how about Guy Pearce for his challenging lead role? And if you’ve read my previous Oscar History posts, you’ll notice I usually advocate for comedic performances, which the Academy typically ignores. So how about a shout-out to Ben Stiller for his hilarious turn as Derek Zoolander?

Oscar history would be made as Halle Berry became the first African-American to win Best Actress for Monster’s Ball. It would also be the first year where both the Actor and Actress prizes went to African-Americans. Other nominees: Judi Dench in Iris, Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, Sissy Spacek for In the Bedroom, and Renee Zellwegger for Bridget Jones Diary. Other performances worthy of consideration: Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive and Audrey Tautou in Amelie.

Jim Broadbent was a surprise Supporting Actor winner for Iris, beating out favorites Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast and Ian McKellen in Lord of the Rings. Other nominees: Ethan Hawke for Training Day and Jon Voight in Ali.

Steve Buscemi in Ghost World and Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums were worthy nominees. And here’s a totally outside-the-box selection from me: Bruce Davison’s wonderful performance as Kirsten Dunst’s dad in the romantic drama Crazy/Beautiful, a greatly underrated film.

Jennifer Connelly would win Supporting Actress for A Beautiful Mind. Other nominees: Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith (both for Gosford Park), Marisa Tomei for In the Bedroom, and Kate Winslet for Iris.

I probably would have found room for Cameron Diaz’s effective performance as Tom Cruise’s jilted lover in Vanilla Sky.

So, all in all, other than some historical Actor and Actress winners, 2001 was a pretty blah year for the Academy. A Beautiful Mind is a solid flick, but definitely one of the least memorable Best Picture winners of recent years, as I see it.

Patrick McMullen raped his daughters, beat his wife and sons, and isolated his family in a converted nightclub with an eight-foot double fence from 1995 to 2001. Patrick, who was active in the John Birch Society, covered the windows with dark cloth and held his family hostage, confining them in what media described as a cult-like atmosphere. There were six children in the family; all were homeschooled (school officials visited the family in 1995, shortly before they moved into the converted nightclub, and were assured that the children were being educated at home). The terror ended when Patrick’s wife Christine finally took the children and fled. The children had been so isolated and controlled that they did not even know how to turn on a shower or use a crosswalk. Patrick was tried and convicted of child rape and indecent assault and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Date: May 2001
Location: Salisbury, Massachusetts

BBBBB

Directed by Alejandro Amenabar

USA/Spain/France/Italy, 2001

Terrific thriller directed by Alejandro Amenabar and produced by Tom Cruise, who took on the project after he bought the rights to Amenabar’s Open Your Eyes and remade it as Vanilla Sky. Nicole Kidman gives a brilliantly subtle performance as a woman waiting for her husband to come home from the Second World War in a large, gloomy manor on the British island of Jersey. Her two children, who are both allergic to natural light to a near-lethal degree, insist they’re hearing things go bump in the night during their long hours of playing by candlelight. Nonsense, says their mother, and off you go before you give me another migraine. Soon come three new servants who may have more than their share of answers as to what’s really going on in the spooky old house. Audiences will definately compare the “I See Dead People” thematics of this film to The Sixth Sense, and there are many similarities to compare, but this film takes more of its inspiration from British gothic horror movies of yesteryear (most notably Jack Clayton’s 1961 The Innocents, adapted from Henry James’ novel The Turn of The Screw). Fionnula Flanagan matches Kidman’s brilliant performance with a real presence as the new housekeeper of the manor, and the two youngsters playing Kidman’s children are unbelievably charismatic. Make no mistake, even for those smart enough to guess the outcome before it happens, this is one very scary and marvelously enjoyable movie. Watch it again after you’ve seen it once, it magically gets scarier with every viewing!

Here is the back story on my Africa trip in 2001 that birthed AfroGrass and the inspiration for my current Electro Americana live show using the Art of Live -Looping. Only 2 minutes!!!

The Lions head coach and his coaching team select the squad using their knowledge, experience, judgement and instincts, but with just four wins from 12 Tests in the professional era, maybe the squad could be assembled in a more objective ‘fair’ way. What if there had been established qualification criteria for the squad based on results? Would squads have been any different?

Both the European and United States teams in golf’s top team competition, the bi-annual Ryder Cup, are selected based on qualification standards that relate to other competitions players participate in ahead of the principal event. As the best predictor of future performance is past performance, what if similar criteria had been applied to the Lions?

The obvious difference between golf and rugby in this respect is that one is an individual sport and the other a team sport, the golfers’ individual performances qualify for them for a team event, so for rugby you need to imagine a type of quota system, similar to those used in many other sports, where performances don’t guarantee specific individuals, but berths. For example, using two seasons of post-Rugby World Cup Six Nations results in the period immediately before a Lions tour to decide how many players from each country should constitute the touring party. Post-Rugby World Cup to account for ‘cycles’ ending and starting, and Six Nations matches because it grades the players in competition against each other as part of their teams.

If you apply this theory to the 2013 Lions tour squad, there are small differences in player numbers from all the respective countries against the actual selection; decreases for Wales and Ireland, and increases for England and Scotland. The 2013 Lions squad includes 15 of 37 (41%) players from Wales, but the figures adjusted by results indicate it should be 13 (36%) instead. Ireland also lose two players in the adjusted results, while England gain one and Scotland gain three.

The top line on the graph shows the percentage of players from each country in the 2013 squad, while the bottom line indicates the percentages based on Six Nations results in the period after the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

• 2013 actual selection – WAL 15, ENG 10, IRE 9, SCO 3
• 2013 results-based quota – WAL 13, ENG 11, IRE 7, SCO 6

If you apply the quota method to the other Lions squads in the professional era, it actually produces similar differences, and shows us in particular that England have been the biggest beneficiaries of selection against results while Scotland have been most disadvantaged.

England’s ‘+10′ really stands out in that list, and gives clear statistical support to views that
Clive Woodward’s selection policy for the 2005 tour to New Zealand was not only pre-conceived but ill-conceived, with an extremely skewed numerical balance in the squad. Yes it is the only time in the professional era that the Lions have played the All Blacks, but is it really a coincidence that it was the only tour where the Lions never looked like winning a Test? In this case, Woodward opted to rely on a core of players that had served him so well as England coach, and merely ‘added’ other players on considered merit. He selected 21 of 45 (47%) players from England, 10 more than the next highest contributor, Ireland with 11, and despite both Ireland and Wales having better Six Nations records after the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

Four years before Woodward’s tour to New Zealand, the last tour to Australia in 2001 provided some similar and interesting numbers, with then Wales coach Graham Henry matching Woodward’s percentage, selecting 17 of 36 (47%) players from England. Even though it was four more players than the results quota suggested, Henry’s selection was at least more understandable than Woodward’s, with the England teams of 2000 and 2001 totally Six Nations dominant and responsible for seven of the 25 biggest wins in the history of the championship. Henry’s over-selection of his Wales players (10) was less understandable however, specifically as Scotland (3) had similar Six Nations results to Wales’ in the period after the 1999 Rugby World Cup and Ireland (6) had bettered both of them.

Even a neutral coach with no obvious international agenda like Ian McGeechan picked his 1997 and 2009 squads with variations in the results-based percentage quotas, most notably in 1997 when he selected 18 of 35 (51%) players from England when results suggested it should have been 14 (41%). Like Henry in 2001, McGeechan’s selection was understandable given England’s dominance of the Five Nations in the period after the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and especially because he is the only Lions coach in the professional era that justified his selection policy with a series victory.

Despite McGeechan’s Scottish background, an affirmation of his neutrality was that Scotland were the team that lost out most in his 1997 selection, with only five players in a squad where the results quota suggested they should have had as many as 10. Again, McGeechan earned the right to justify his selection policy with a series win, but the legacy of that tour was a poor reputation for Scotland’s players that has seen them consistently overlooked in favour of players from other countries in tour squads ever since. Over five tours in the professional era, Scotland have had 16 fewer players in Lions squads than the quota based on their results suggested.

In 2009, an overblown relevance to performances in the year of the tour up against results over preceeding seasons affected the balance of squad selection. Ireland’s Grand Slam earned them the most players (14) in the 38-man squad despite England’s superior Six Nations results consistency in the whole period after the 2007 Rugby World Cup. England had only nine players in the squad, despite the results quota suggesting 12.

The imaginary qualification criteria based on results we’ve used here for Lions squad selection has produced variations in all of the selected squads in the professional era, but whether squads assembled in this theoretical way would have performed better or worse than those assembled in subjective reality is, of course, arguable. That said, the concept itself is interesting and would certainly be more reflective, objective and ‘fairer’ than the current established process.

Kate: So you’re a fugitive, huh? What did you rob?
Terry: Everything!

The byline of Zadie Smith’s piece, “Last week James Wood blasted modern fiction, calling for a return to feeling from self-conscious cleverness in the wake of the terrorist attacks,” promises a bolder and braver response than the young Smith delivers. Though she explains her point of view, she says later that this interaction shaped and changed her writing – her later novels are far more “modernist” and “realist” in tone (NW is a “London novel” in the olden sense). Here is Smith’s self-effacing beginning:

The critic James Wood appeared in this paper last Saturday aiming a hefty, well-timed kick at what he called “hysterical realism”.It is a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth and a few others he was sweet enough to mention. These are hysterical times; any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped – this was Wood’s point, and I’m with him on it. In fact, I have agreed with him several times before, in public and in private, but I appreciate that he feared I needed extra warning; that I might be sitting in my Kilburn bunker planning some 700-page generational saga set on an incorporated McDonald’s island north of Tonga. Actually, I am sitting here in my pants, looking at a blank screen, finding nothing funny, scared out of my mind like everybody else, smoking a family-sized pouch of Golden Virginia.

At least she’s funny. Here Smith begins to explore with a bit more nuance some of her issues with Wood’s critique:

The first is this: any collective term for a supposed literary movement is always too large a net, catching significant dolphins among so much cannable tuna. You cannot place first-time novelists with literary giants, New York hipsters with Kilburn losers, and some of the writers who got caught up with me are undeserving of the criticism. In particular, David Foster Wallace’s mammoth beast Infinite Jest was heaved in as an exemplum, but it is five years old, and is a world away from his delicate, entirely “human” short stories and essays of the past two years, which shy away from the kind of totalising theoretical and thematic arcs that Wood was gunning for. If anyone has recently learned a lesson about the particularities of human existence and their separation from social systems, it is Wallace. But even if this were not true, frankly, literature is – or should be – a broad church. Whatever the weaknesses of the various writers Wood mentioned, I don’t believe he would wish for a literary landscape missing a book such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or DeLillo’s White Noise; the very books, in fact, which have cast such a tremendous shadow over two generations of American and English fiction.

What Smith points to again is a kind of multiplicity at the intertextual level of readership that her own novel seeks to create in a world she has written:

I read Flaubert and Nabokov for the varicoloured intimacies of life; I read Zora Neale Hurston to hear the songs of love and earth, and I read White Noise to experience, yes, a Frankfurt school comedy, in which every boy, girl, man, woman, black, white, lesbian, Jew and Muslim speaks in exactly the same way: like DeLillo.

Here she does the same move as Wood on what writers “can” and “cannot” do, which I don’t love:

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

She discusses the pains of writing, the resistance to encyclopaedic knowledge, the call to arms in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow for “a look to power sources.”

Except… er… it turns out that the plot is horrendously simple. It has to do with things like faith. Revenge. Poverty. God. Hatred. So what now? Does anyone want to know the networks behind those seeming simplicities, the paths that lead from September 11 back to Saudi Arabia and Palestine, and then back to Israel, back further to the second world war, back once more to the first? Does anyone care what writers think about that? Does it help? Or shall we sing of love and drawing rooms and earth and children and all that is small and furry and wounded? Must we produce what you want, anyway? I have absolutely no idea.

But still I’m going to write. If only because Wood is right; there are still books that make me hopeful, because they function as human products in the greatest sense. Bellow’s Seize the Day, Melville’s “Bartleby”, Nabokov’s Pnin – works that stubbornly speak and resonate, even in these image-led, speechless times. But it is a trick of the light that makes us suppose these books exist in soulful opposition to more recent examples of “dialectical devilry”. These books are works of high artifice, and there isn’t a decent novel in this world that isn’t; their humanity derives from their reverence for language, their precision, their intellect and, more than anything, from their humour.

It’s all laughter in the dark – the title of a Nabokov novel and still the best term for the kind of writing I aspire to: not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both.

But he might see even that question as too intellectual in approach. I think Wood is hinting at an older idea that runs from Plato to the boys booming a car stereo outside my freaking window: soul is soul. It cannot be manufactured or schematised. It cannot be dragged kicking and screaming through improbable plots. It cannot be summoned by a fact or dismissed by a cliché. These are the famous claims made for “soul” and they lead with specious directness to an ancient wrestling match, invoked by Wood: the inviolability of “soul” versus the evils of self-consciousness and wise-assery, otherwise known as sophism.

Thus Wood’s advice to Smith is “be more human… I wonder what to do with that one.” This becomes the strongest part of Smith’s response – how she demonstrates the way in which these novels are working with cultural materials in exciting ways Wood does not see:

I want to defend the future possibility of some words appearing on pages that will be equal to these times and to what I feel and what you feel and what James Wood feels; that is, this fear that has got us all by the throat. He argues against silence and against intellectual obfuscation. He says: tell us how it feels. Well, we are trying. I am trying. But as DeLillo dramatised (again, in White Noise), it is difficult to discuss feelings when the TV speaks so loudly; cries so operatically; seems always, in everything, one step ahead. Yet people continue to manage this awesome trick of wrestling sentiment away from TV’s colonisation of all things soulful and human, and I would applaud all the youngish Americans – Franzen, Moody, Foster Wallace, Eggers, Moore – for their (supposedly) small but, to me, significant triumphs. They work to keep both sides of the equation – brain and heart – present in their fiction.

Even if you find them obtuse, they can rarely be accused of cliché, and that – as Amis has argued so well recently – is the place where everything dies… I truly hope they are not cowed by these renewed assaults on “clever writing”, calls for the “death of irony”, the “return of heart”. There was always a great deal of “heart”, of humanity, in these writers.

Smith seems to give a credit to American tradition, rather than accusing it of corrupting her work: “Sometimes it seems purely an American trick, this ability to draw the universe, as Carver and Fitzgerald did, into a circumscribed artificial, yet human, space.” Smith considers whether the novel itself still has value as a genre, something 9/11 has made her think about:

Most mornings I think: death of the novel? Yeah, sure, why not? The novel is not an immutable fact of human artistic life, after all, just a historically specific phenomenon that came and will go unless there are writers who have the heart, the brain and, crucially, the cojones to keep it alive.

She turns to the shorter novel (reminds me of what Woolf says about women’s writing!): “Personally, I find myself more and more struck by controlled little gasps of prose, as opposed to the baggy novel… Which seems the exact opposite of the American/ English instinct: I must cover the world in my shit immediately.” Her conclusion is uncertain and multiple, for which I am grateful. She speaks to Wood, but she is also speaking back:

Is it this reverence, this care, this suppression of ego that Wood wants to see from us? It is what I want to see from myself, but whether I will manage it is another matter. It will take sympathy – a natural instinct, a sentimental reflex – but it will also take empathy, which I still contend is largely a matter for the intellect. Your brain must be up for it, for making that necessary leap. At the moment, my brain feels like catfood. So I may never prove to be much of a writer – a real writer, the kind I like to read – but then again, maybe I will. I’m not sure how much it matters any more. But we shall see.

Taking its title from the first work of aphorisms by Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human), James Wood’s review of Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, is most famous for its coinage of the term “hysterical realism” (a term of dubious value in any case, but especially, I think, because he coins it in reviewing a female novelist). Wood begins by diagnosing a “hardening genre” of novel in the tradition of Charles Dickens:

A genre is hardening. It is becoming easy to describe the contemporary idea of the “big, ambitious novel.” Familial resemblances are asserting themselves, and a parent can be named: he is Dickens. Such recent novels as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Mason & Dixon, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and now White Teeth overlap rather as the pages of an atlas expire into each other at their edges. A landscape is disclosed–lively and varied and brightly marked, but riven by dead gullies.

(The image of the atlas here would make a fascinating comparison with David Mitchell… It’s so close to the goal of that book that one almost wonders if it was his inspiration!)

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence–as it were, a criminal running endless charity marathons. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs. Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned.

Creating an imaginary description of a novel culled from many styles, James Wood jokes about improbable names like Toby Awknotuby (perhaps as in Pynchon), twins in Delhi with the same “genital mutilation” (perhaps as in Rushdie), the cult study of Wordsworth by Hell’s Angels (perhaps as in DeLillo), and weird character traits that occurred at specific moments in history (perhaps as in David Foster Wallace). The problem with this for Wood is that it occurs before the character has “done a thing, or thought a thought!”

Zadie Smith is added to this tradition because of her own twins, “silly acronym[s],” and farfetched scientific claptrap. “This is not magical realism,” Wood famously says, “It is hysterical realism.”

“Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections [by whom?] are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality [oh dear]: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality–the usual charge against botched realism–but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a cover-up.

Underworld’s “calm profusion” has “a soothing sense that it might never have to end, that another thousand or two thousand pages might easily be added.” This fearful continuity (what I want to consider as vital to seriality and faceting), conceals a sort of mindlessness for Wood, as he reveals when he puns on the “lights are on, but nobody’s home” cliche: “Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation.”

What are these stories evading? One of the awkwardnesses evaded is precisely an awkwardness about the possibility of novelistic storytelling. This in turn has to do with an awkwardness about character and the representation of character… they clothe real people who could never actually endure the stories that happen to them… they are stories which defy the laws of persuasion… what above all makes these stories unconvincing is precisely their very profusion, their relatedness. One cult is convincing; three cults are not.

I find myself rather confused about what it is, for Wood, that distinguishes these recent works from earlier postmodernism, such as White Noise, The Crying of Lot 49, even Pale Fire or The Golden Notebook! This obsession with network and profusion seems to me a hallmark of the fiction of the era, rather than a swerve of the 1990s. Take this description, which is not only a perfect description of The Crying of Lot 49, but also the essence of its genius (which Wood, apparently, does not admit):

An endless web is all they need for meaning. Each of these novels is excessively centripetal. The different stories all intertwine, and double and triple on themselves. Characters are forever seeing connections and links and plots, and paranoid parallels. (There is something essentially paranoid about the belief that everything is connected to everything else.)

What interests me in Wood’s critique is the way that his critique of these novels seems to me to be their very strength; he seems to want to hold to a model of the novel as a fixed, unchanging genre. And it’s not even so much that this is all new; it is rather its return to 19th century convention with a contemporary twist that irks him:

These novelists proceed like street-planners of old in South London: they can never name a street Ruskin Street without linking a whole block, and filling it with Carlyle Street, and Turner Street, and Morris Street, and so on.

In a mode similar to the social realist novel of the 19th century, these novels emphasize forces or ideas over characters, for Wood:

Life is never experienced with such a fervid intensity of connectedness… real humans disaggregate more often than they congregate. So these novels find themselves in the paradoxical position of enforcing connections that are finally conceptual rather than human. The forms of these novels tell us that we are all connected–by the Bomb (DeLillo), or by myth (Rushdie), or by our natural multiracial multiplicity (Smith); but it is a formal lesson rather an actual enactment.

Paradoxically, this is what I find so formally interesting about the novels Wood criticizes. In fact, I think their multiple characters, which drop in and out of lives, are more like a certain kind of realism (we try to make patterns around characters that disappear), and the emphasis on ideas and forces clearly has something to do with a rising awareness of and interaction with systems, technology, and globalization, which the novel cannot help but assimilate and explore. The novel, as Bakhtin points out, swallows up genres and ideas and modes of parlance. Its form of mimesis must change as the world changes (think of Benjamin’s argument about society, or Stendhahl’s mirror vs faceting…) What if the experiment of David Mitchell is the “Time Passes” section of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse taken to its most fecund point for a new age? Wood argues that these characters have no character (I almost think he means morality…):

All these contemporary deformations flow from a crisis that is not only the fault of the writers concerned, but is now of some lineage: the crisis of character, and how to represent it in fiction. Since modernism, many of the finest writers have been offering critique and parody of the idea of character, in the absence of convincing ways to return to an innocent mimesis. Certainly, the characters who inhabit the big, ambitious contemporary novels have a showy liveliness, a theatricality, that almost succeeds in hiding the fact that they are without life: liveliness hangs off them like jewelry.

Smith is ‘not as bad’ as some of the others, like Rushdie. Sometimes we feel sympathy and interest for her characters. “Clearly, Smith does not lack for powers of invention. The problem is that there is too much of it.” What he finally betrays is his distrust of the novels’ surfaces:

As realism, it is incredible; as satire, it is cartoonish; as cartoon, it is too realistic; and anyway, we are not led toward the consciousness of a truly devoted religionist. It is all shiny externality, all caricature.

Wood acknowledges that many great writers used types (I’m yawning at Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as the examples he gives, not only because it’s dull to extol the 19th century Russian writers at the expense of Dickens, etc., but because it’s not even true, especially of Tolstoy. Two writers could not differ more than they do…). The novels he offers as counterexamples include Buddenbrooks, “written by a writer only a year older than Zadie Smith” (yes! by Thomas Mann! In 1901!), as well as the “less great” Nausea by Sartre and Camus’ The Plague. Wood’s praise is that these engage the same “unreal, symbolic vitality” of hysterical realism, but attach it to ‘real’ characters.

Wood’s problem with the style of the contemporary novel seems mainly to lie in its abandonment of the Jamesian ideal of the individual bourgeois ego unfolding in a psychically complex way to the reader over time. The modernist novels he cites are all written this way; thus he implicitly endorses contemporary novels in the vein of Ishiguro and McEwan – replays of realism and modernism, for which I find them far less interesting – rather than the likes of Smith, Mitchell, and the American writers. (Where would Byatt fall, in his view? She does both so expertly…) Of course this is where we arrive at Dickens:

Many of Dickens’s characters are, as Forster [in Aspects of the Novel] rightly put it, flat but vibrating very fast. They are vivid blots of essence. They are souls seen only through thick, gnarled casings. Their vitality is a histrionic one. Dickens has been the overwhelming influence on postwar fiction, especially postwar British fiction [Spark, Naipaul, Smith].

Here again, Wood prioritizes Forster’s ancient idea of “flat” and “round” characters over any new and vital possibilities for the novel (he also folds Bellow and De Lillo in at this juncture). Here’s where it gets really rude:

One obvious reason for the popularity of Dickens among contemporary novelists is that his way of creating and propelling theatrically alive characters offers an easy model for writers unable, or unwilling, to create characters who are fully human… He shows a novelist how to get a character launched, if not how to keep him afloat, and this glittering liveliness is simply easier to copy, easier to figure out, than the recessed and deferred complexities of, say, Henry James’s character-making. Put bluntly, Dickens makes caricature respectable for an age in which, for various reasons, it has become hard to create character.

But it gets worse:

Yet that is not all there is in Dickens, which is why most contemporary novelists are only his morganatic heirs. There is in Dickens also an immediate access to strong feeling, which rips the puppetry of his people, breaks their casings, and lets us enter them.

For Wood, no one cries and has outbursts of feeling in these novels (I feel like we are reading different novels… What of all the tears in Zadie Smith? Or Jack and his wife in White Noise? Oedipa’s tears in Lot 49?) Here again with the priority of the individual psyche:

It is now customary to read 700-page novels, to spend hours and hours within a fictional world, without experiencing anything really affecting, sublime, or beautiful.This is partly because some of the more impressive novelistic minds of our age do not think that language and the representation of consciousness are the novelist’s quarries any more. Information has become the new character.

Wood doesn’t seem to consider that perhaps it isn’t that these authors can’t write a certain way, but that they want to explore the world this way. His horrible dismissal of pop culture and film makes it clearer still that he seems to fall on the aesthetic side of the curmudgeonly Adorno (rather than fun-having Benjamin): “It is this, and the use made of Dickens, that connects DeLillo and the reportorial Tom Wolfe, despite the literary distinction of the former and the cinematic vulgarity of the latter.” Zadie Smith heself, Wood points out, admits that “none of us” have yet gotten the balance of information and character right… yet.

Ironically, the moments of Smith’s novel that “glow” for Wood, that are “better” than Rushdie, are actually the descriptions of “a recognizable English type… receding,” another weird way in which even his valorizations (of an old white dude in a young novel bursting with multiculturalism) seem to completely miss the point of the text at hand.

About her, one is tempted to apply Orwell’s remark that Dickens had rotten architecture but great gargoyles. The architecture is the essential silliness of her lunge for multiplicities–her cults and cloned mice and Jamaican earthquakes. Formally, her book lacks moral seriousness.

Its best moments, for Wood, are again where it regurgitates the formal tropes of modernism:

When Smith is writing well, she seems capable of a great deal. At several moments, for example, she proves herself skilled at interior monologue, and brilliant, in other passages, at free indirect style:

There’s a disturbing way in which the novel seems to be unreal for Wood because he simply refuses to recognize the reality it seeks to portray. He refuses to enter the suspension of belief that fiction invites and entails. Characters “binging in any kind of allusion” might actually be what those characters think, but Wood does not want to be convinced:

Nothing we know about Samad… convinces us that Smith is telling the truth when she tells us that this hot-headed Muslim sat talking about women’s breasts; the topic seems, instead, to have been chosen by Smith from a catalogue of cliches called “Things Men Talk About in Bars”… The language is oddly thick-fingered, and stubs itself into the vernacular: that juvenile verb “squished,” for instance… corrupts… it is bewildering when… she seems to leave Samad’s interior, and watch him from the outside, satirically (and rather crudely).

Wood reduces all of these to the old dialectical binaries, erasing the multiplicity they try to represent: “And so it goes on, in a curious shuffle of sympathy and distance, affiliation and divorce, brilliance and cartoonishness, astonishing maturity and ordinary puerility.” When characters change their minds, there is no Jamesian depth; “It as if the novel were deciding at these moments whether to cast depths on its shallows, and deciding against.” Once more, we’re reminded that this is ‘even worse’ than Dickens:

It is quite clear that a general message about the need to escape roots is more important than Irie’s reality, what she might actually think, her consciousness…This is problem-solving, all right. But at what cost? As Irie disappears under the themes and ideas, the reader perhaps thinks wistfully of Mr. Micawber and David Copperfield, so uncovered by theme and idea, so uninsured, weeping together in an upstairs room.

“Which way will the ambitious contemporary novel go? Will it dare a picture of life, or just shout a spectacle?” For Wood, these are diametrically opposed values, and though the novel he’s reviewing contains both, it shouldn’t, mostly because he refuses to believe that it can.

“TELL ME HOW DOES IT FEEL” – October 5, 2001 - The Guardian

Lambasting Zadie Smith wasn’t enough for James Wood. Two months later, following the 9/11 attacks, in a bizarre rerouting of his theory, James Wood writes another article on the topic of hysterical realism. This time the subheading is “U.S. novelists must now abandon social and theoretical glitter, says James Wood.”

How we swerved from Wood’s first theory, originating in the work of Naipaul, Rushdie, and, above all, Smith in the UK and somewhat well-connected to Wallace, Pynchon, and DeLillo in the US over to a transparently anti-American theory of national artistic corruption that somehow has something to do with 9/11 – after the fact – is mind-boggling. Wood ironically enacts the same paranoid overconnectedness of facts that he critiques in fictions. The article begins with Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis saying they’re shamefully glad they don’t have a book coming out this month. In my mind, Wood should be ashamed he did have a review a month beforehand.

“Will the horrid alteration of America’s greatest city also alter the American novel?” Wood wonders (as if it could not). Stranger still, Wood claims a skepticism about the value of the information fiction he was already preaching before 9/11 even happened: 

“One is naturally suspicious of all the eschatological talk about how the time for trivia has ended, and how only seriousness is now on people’s minds – not least because the people saying it are usually themselves trivial and, as in McInerney’s piece, are thus unwitting arguments against their own new-found seriousness. Doubtless,  trivia and mediocrity will find their own level again, in novel-writing as in everything else. And besides, the “New York novel” – as opposed to the novel set in New York – is a genre of no importance at all. If I live the rest of my life without having to come across another book like Bret Easton Ellis’s New York novel, Glamorama, I will have very happily been what Psalm 81 calls “delivered from the pots”.

He goes on to admit that “there has, of course, been great fiction set or partly set in New York” – thanks, Wood, I really couldn’t figure that out by myself – glad we all have your blessing to agree. These are “already dark books” – how would they accommodate 9/11? Once again, their great value is that “their foci are human and metaphysical before they are social and documentary” – the modernist rises again. “They are stories, above all, about individual consciousness, not about the consciousness of Manhattan.” Once again, too, he attacks the “tentacular” Underworld: 

he DeLilloan idea of the novelist as a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer – a cultural theorist, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry – has been woefully influential, and will take some time to die.

The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result – in America at least – is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very “brilliant” books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.

This is a lot like the piece on Zadie Smith, and he goes on to attack her next. What’s so bizarre here is the mention of curry and Kilburn even as the insults fly toward specifically American novels – oh, and Zadie Smith. And Rushdie. And… What Wood hopes is that

This idea – that the novelist’s task is to go on to the street and figure out social reality – may well have been altered by the events of September 11, merely through the reminder that whatever the novel gets up to, the “culture” can always get up to something bigger. Ashes defeat garlands.

Wood again deploys a modernist image of backward-looking mimesis to claim an “explosion” that the contemporary novel already explores and values, though he doesn’t seem to see it:

Fiction may well be, as Stendhal wrote, a mirror carried down the middle of a road; but the Stendhalian mirror would explode with reflections were it now being walked around Manhattan.

He even takes on a Yeatsian “Surely, the Second Coming” tone as he wishes this change into existence:

Surely, for a while, novelists will be leery of setting themselves up as analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations. It is now very easy to look very dated very fast.

He cites the irony of Franzen’s The Corrections, which ends with the line “disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States.” More death wishes:

he other casualty of recent events may well be – it is to be hoped – what I have called “hysterical realism”. Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism’s next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence.

And for the grand finale, Wood’s hopelessly modernism-loving conclusion:

It ought to be harder, now, either to bounce around in the false zaniness of hysterical realism or to trudge along in the easy fidelity of social realism. Both genres look a little busted. That may allow a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not “how the world works” but “how somebody felt about something” – indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings). A space may now open, one hopes, for the kind of novel that shows us that human consciousness is the truest Stendhalian mirror, reflecting helplessly the newly dark lights of the age.

Recently, my uni mates and I arranged for a long overdue catch up (like all good 3 Michelin stars, we had to book over 1 month in advance).   The location was a nice private kitchen in TST and we decided to have a mini vertical of a chateau that is currently gaining superstar status, Pontet Canet.  Like all good wine tastings, we choose an Italian to get warmed up (after some bubbly of course) and a strong Aussie Cab Sauv to make sure we were all tipsy at the end of the night.

After a quick taste, it become blinding obvious that PC 2001 was denser and needed more time so we enjoyed the wines in this order; Chianti Classico, PC 2002, PC 2001 followed by Majella Coonawarra

Overall, it was a great night which was also educational the difference in vintages was more pronounced when tasted side by side.  Bravo to my friends who brought the wines and I can’t wait for the next gathering!

Nose: very fruity nose of black fruits and cassis, hint of herb and mint,

Taste: medium bodied, a bit light for a Chianti, low acidity, easy to drink but a bit hollow on the mid palate.

Finish: short finish of 10 second

An OK bottle but I felt it was lacking the usual Chianti fruitiness.  Perhaps it would’ve benefited with more aeration?

Nose: liquorice, dense red fruits and a hint of blackcurrant and mint,

Taste: red fruit and wine gums, slightly tannic, good fruit and medium bodied,

Finish: 20 second finish

A good wine.  The wines are easy to drink and delicious when paired with food.

Nose: denser than 2002, black fruits, creme de cassis, hint of herb, sweet black fruits like blueberry, hint of vanilla

Taste: sweet red fruit, slight tannic dryness,  this is still a young wine! Medium bodied and with a very good and silky texture

Finish: 30 second fin with a coffee aftertaste.

A very good wine with nice fruit.  I was amazed at the finish when I sensed some coffee aftertaste…

Nose: oily texture, concentrated black fruits, alcoholic nose, hint of medicinal cough syrup

Taste: sweet cabernet sauvignon made in a new world style, not tannic, very fruity with a slightly reductive nose.

Finish: 15 second finish

A solid wine which expresses Coonawarra Cab Sauv well without being overextracted.  Shame we had it after the 2 PCs!

BB

Directed by Woody Allen

USA/Germany, 2001

Woody Allen’s clever little zingers ring out from his mouth constantly but fall flat in this overtired and badly paced comedy, his least impressive in years. He plays an insurance investigator in the forties who is at odds with his female superior (a very lovely Helen Hunt), who is herself keeping late hours with her married boss (Dan Aykroyd in a superb performance). Little do Allen and Hunt know, but they’ve been hypnotized by a somnambulist (David Ogden Stiers), who is using them to steal precious jewels from the very same people they’ve been hired to protect. Usually Allen’s genre pieces are his clever way of using a familiar cinematic story to explore the kinds of characters he likes to present on screen: Manhattan Murder Mystery worked well as a murder mystery movie, but what it really was about was a bored housewife who finds her life again after taking herself for granted for too long. Here, there’s no deeper surface and nothing to discover, so Allen is basically expecting us to only enjoy the mechanics of his weary plot. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to enjoy, and the lazy editing and Allen’s constantly using takes of himself that were obvious flubs (he corrects his lines repeatedly) get the better of one’s patience. Period detail is dead-on, and surprisingly, the supporting performance by Charlize Theron as the Veronica Lake-like heiress is rather awkward and the role forgettable, while the tiny bit that Elizabeth Berkley (that’s right, Showgirls Elizabeth Berkley) has as Allen’s secretary is thoroughly charming. Best to just watch Bullets Over Broadway again.

Smith’s Verdict: *1/2

Reviewed by Tanner Smith

Michael Bay tends to make his big-budget action films an hour longer than they need to be. Apparently, how he and producer Jerry Bruckheimer manage to do that is to keep holding onto whatever eye candy they can create and market from their popcorn movies. Special effects take center while scripts are not usually called upon to serve them. And with “Pearl Harbor,” Bay and Bruckheimer take things a few steps further. This is their “epic” effort, set against a historical backdrop and attempting to tell a compelling human-interest story with a running time of 183 minutes. 183 minutes—if Bay’s earlier action films were an hour too long, then this one is about an hour-and-a-half too long.

Did Bay think he was making “Titanic?” Like that film, “Pearl Harbor” spends a majority of running time with a romantic couple and their conflicts with being together, with a historical event looming and waiting to come around until later in the film, when said-characters would have to endure true danger.

Actually, yes, I am convinced that this was an attempt to cash in on the success of “Titanic.” But the main problem with “Pearl Harbor” is the lazily-written screenplay. The dialogue is laughably bad; clichés in romances and war films are present; and the human-interest story is hardly interesting. So much money went into the look of “Pearl Harbor” that I’m surprised that the rest of it wasn’t used to create a more complex script. As it is, it looks nice, the cast is solid, the special effects are very impressive, and it has the potential to be something better than it is, given the subject matter which is admittedly captivating. Having a story set around the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941 is interesting enough if given the right human-interest story. But I couldn’t care less about most of what was happening onscreen. That it runs over three hours in length makes it even more unbearable to watch.

The story centers on bomber pilots Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), who are best friends and practically brothers. Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) is a nurse who passed Rafe in a medical exam for the Air Corps, even though he is dyslexic. Rafe and Evelyn are fools for each other until Rafe announces to her that he’s joining the Eagle Squadron very soon.

Get this—Rafe gives Evelyn the news the night before he’s supposed to leave and denies her a night of romance so that the lust will be a good motivator not to be killed in the war, and return home. Then he tells her not to see him off, stating that if she does come, it proves that she loves him. Sheesh, this is the human-interest story we have to go through? That’s just the beginning. It gets worse as we endure a second romance between Evelyn and Danny, after Rafe is declared dead, killed in battle. And wouldn’t you know it—after all that time, we find that Rafe is still alive, as he comes home and discovers Evelyn’s relationship with Danny. And there you have it—a love triangle that will undoubtedly be interrupted and resolved by one of the key actions of World War II.

An hour-and-a-half into the proceedings is when we finally endure the attack on Pearl Harbor. Admittedly, it’s pretty intense and is told in a somewhat-credible way, given the goofiness of certain situations (such as a stutterer who alerts his fellow soldiers of the attackers, and even a private who runs out to find out what the commotion is all about, while brushing his teeth and wearing a towel). But here’s a major problem with this action sequence—we never got to know any of the soldiers getting killed in the attack. Rafe and Danny are unwinding from an argument the night before, and aren’t in the middle of the attack. And as for Evelyn, she and her giggling friends are attacked at the base hospital, even though I don’t think I’ve read that the Japanese fired on civilians. Everyone else is just an extra. That’s a very bad move to set up these three characters and not put them in real danger for the attack, and even worse not to give us memorable character traits for the ones that are getting killed.

I never cared for the protagonists, or the love-triangle they have to endure. Dramatic tension is cast aside for clichéd writing and uninteresting situations. The romance is recycled from what seems like soap-opera material. When the attack does come is when things are more interesting—even though the poorly-developed characters aren’t in much danger in that central sequence, at least we don’t have to deal with their story for a while. But once that’s done with, there’s still an hour left, with more monotonous characterization and dull conditions. You know you’re in trouble when you find yourself wishing for more over-the-top action in a Bay picture.

The only redeeming aspects of the final hour of “Pearl Harbor” are the moments involving actors playing true-life characters. In particular, Jon Voight (sporting a rubber chin) plays Franklin D. Roosevelt who of course declares that America join the war—he has a particularly “awesome” moment in which he, out of anger, wills himself to stand up from his wheelchair and stand up to Congress. Also entertaining is Alec Baldwin as General Doolittle, who late in the film states every single obligatory war-movie-speech cliché in the book. That is irritating yet funny at the same time.

I can’t really blame Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale because they are admittedly solid in their lazily constructed roles. The blame has to go to Randall Wallace’s screenplay. It lacks dramatic pull, wastes a great chunk of running-time on uninteresting characters, and lacks an element as vital as intelligence. “Pearl Harbor” is overlong, unexciting, and unremarkable. And it just shows everything that “Titanic” did right (whether you like it or not) and what this movie does wrong.

My Rating likeable

© Universal Pictures

When thinking back on the pleasures of this first film in what would become a dependable car-based franchise, it must be said that the plot ranks pretty low. A gang of thieves in impressive racing cars is hijacking trucks laden with valuable electronics, so blond-haired undercover police officer Brian (played by Paul Walker) is sent to infiltrate a notorious group of autoracers headed by Dominic Toretto (played by Vin Diesel) in the hopes of finding out whether he or one of the crews he races against is behind the thefts. That’s pretty much it.

Luckily, that’s not really what the film is about, as it’s based on a magazine article about the subculture of city street racing in souped-up cars. The plot is a flimsy excuse on which to hang all this vehicular frippery, and like some kind of automotive porn, there are duly scenes with lingering discussions over car specs, engines, nitrous oxide injectors, and the like. The Wikipedia entry on the film also charmingly details every make and model of car that is of significance, for truly these are characters to rank alongside the (human) actors.

Which isn’t to say the acting is bad, just that it does what it needs to. Walker is largely forgettable in the central role: he has a nice, if rather telegraphed, romance with Dominic’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster), who like her brother has a headstrong streak. Neither she nor Michelle Rodriguez, as Dom’s girlfriend Letty, accept background roles in this culture of fuel-injected mayhem, and more than hold their own amongst all the testosterone (though there’s still room around the edges for scantily-clad gyrating women when there’s call for a big racing setpiece). In fact, it’s Diesel, with his pensive looks and oddly melancholic disposition, who speeds away with the film as a man with a shady background and a lost father who looks to the furious burst of speed that comes from streetracing as a means of (all too brief) escape. He has the personal charisma to hold together and control his disparate crew, and (as my friend Andrew points out) doesn’t personally resort to inflicting any violence himself throughout the film.

The script does well to balance the quieter interpersonal scenes with big, loud vehicular action, and the actors (including Rick Yune as Dominic’s Korean nemesis) are capable enough to pull these off without undue reliance on special effects or explosions. And speaking as one who has never owned a car and holds no particular interest in them, even the automotive ogling is a fascinating glimpse into a distinct subculture that’s never really impinged on my life; there’s almost a tenderness to some of the autoshop scenes and the value placed in good engineering. It is, after all, a car which stands in for the relationship between Dominic and his absent father, and this generous spirit is carried over to the final confrontation between Brian and Dominic.

It may not be a profound film, yet in its way it’s sweet and charming, but with enough in the way of kinetic action sequences to please those who thrill to that kind of thing too.

A good sci-fi with right mix of questions and answers

Definitely inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s ’2001: A Space Odyssey’, Oblivion is not as thought-provoking and may even be considered as lacking in originality, but it’s still an entertaining and visually-superb film. It packs the same amount of action and ideas, and the futuristic setting is a feast to the eyes. Ever since Tron Legacy, Joseph Kosinski has proven to everyone that he has skill when it comes to creating massive worlds with unique themes. He has never disappointed with his visual effects, though he still needs to work on storytelling. I’d like to see him do more of this, but hopefully with much more talented writers behind him. He could go a long way as long as he learns from his past works. But for now, I’m satisfied with what he was able to accomplish with this movie. And with Tom Cruise and Olga Kurylenko’s performances, there became a sense of humanity in this film. The ending will polarize many, as it depends on audiences’ taste and preference when it comes to sci-fi offerings. But for me, it simply had a good combination of questions and answers, and it left me satisfied by the end.

GRADE: B

Directed: Brad Anderson

Stars:  David Caruso, Stephen Gevedon, Paul Guilfoyle

What we think:

Few horror films have had much of an impact on me in terms of getting inside your head – I don’t go in much for blood splatter and gore.

I’m not a huge fan of the mainstream horror films, although some have been enjoyable. It’s always the hidden gems that really have an impact that make you want to sleep with the light on.

Forget torture porn, something which I fail to see any benefit from; watching a group of stereotypical teens getting ripped to shreds is not my idea of a great horror film.

I want to be impressed and terrified, not disgusted and repulsed.

That’s why Session 9 is probably my favourite horror film (running close with the original Halloween), I had to watch this a couple times over the course of a few weeks as there were things I missed and questions I wanted answering.

Written and directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist), it focuses on an asbestos cleaning crew as they work in an abandoned mental hospital (what could possibly go wrong?!)

When one of the crew stumbles on some old tapes that are recorded sessions (1-9) with one of the former patients, it leads to a series of disturbing and unnerving events for the crew.

The cast list includes C.S.I Miami’s David Caruso, Josh Lucas and popular Brit actor Peter Mullan, who for me was the show stealer and the one who is most affected by the events that take place within the film.

The location is perfect, what could be better than a dilapidated mental hospital – even in the daylight is rises out of the ground like a terrifying sculpture. And that’s before you even get inside.

During the tour round, we see long shots of corridors and enclosed rooms where all kinds of things had been going on, then the voices start and the tension slowly begins to rise.

Anderson’s script is tight enough that you can engage in the characters personalities, there is something not right with all of them, but certainly some more than others.

The most attention grabbing parts of the film is the unraveling of the session tapes which Mike (Stephen Gevedon) gets his hands on, clearly addicted to finding out who the mysterious Simon is.

There are a few twists and turns but it will hold your attention all the way to the bitter end of which is the most shocking revelation of all.

Anderson proves that little is needed in terms of dousing the screen with buckets of blood, he locates the things that really do scare people and gets chills running down your spine.

You’ll certainly be reaching for the light switch after this.

Visit the IMDb page for Session 9

Please feel free to leave a comment about this film, we would love to know what you think and we’ll do our best to respond!

Murari 2001 Telugu Movie Watch Online Full Movie

Murari 2001 Telugu Movie Watch Online : Youtube Video : Alternative Link :

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Also, you may notice a slight favoring of songs from the year 2000 and early 2001. This is because I love the 1990s and the 1990s didn’t end until 9/11. Think about it. They didn’t. At least not musically (okay, 2001 was pretty different from 2000, which was just an extension of 1999). There is also a favoring of later in the decade with the middle part getting skimmed over. Because it sucked. Almost all of these songs got regular radio airplay on pop music stations (with very few, and worthy, exceptions). The two songs I feature this week were “leftovers” – songs I don’t remember hearing on the radio that I personally discovered after the decade had ended. Here we go…

Movies have the potential of being a unique experience or a forgettable distraction. Some are forgotten by most and some remain vividly in our memory for a long time, maybe forever. What’s undeniable is that movies are one of the most complex and intriguing entertainment forms ever created. I want to share my thoughts about movies (all kinds of movies). I want to say what I think, like, love and hate about them in the most accessible yet interesting way I can (and I hope I succeed in entertaining people and maybe even generating discussions). I hope whoever is reading this (if anyone) enjoys what I write here.

I named the blog “The Crystal Chamber” as a tribute to a scene in one of my favorite movies (of which I’ll probably do an in-depth review at some point): “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” (2001). A truly underrated and under-appreciated classic. Be warned: The scene contains some spoilers. The beautiful score is composed by James Newton Howard. Finally, Welcome to the Crystal Chamber!

I read this on Kindle, so my meticulous note taking wont be reflected here.  Of personal interest to me was that I read two books that Stanley Kubrick converted to film back to back on my Kindle.  This wasn’t a conscious effort on my part, just that the two followed one another alphabetically by author.  It’s actually not fair to say that Kubrick adapted this book; reading the afterword taught me that Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark had actually worked together in planning the movie and the book, so much so that when the movie took a turn it would affect the course of the book.

I can’t imagine trying to write a book that way and I’m sure there’s another study that follows trying to do that, if nothing else it’s probably on the Commentary of the movie.  I wouldn’t know because I only have the movie on Blu-Ray and my Playstation 3 hasn’t worked since I’ve moved to South Carolina.  I’m good and pissed about that for a couple of reasons.  If I was going to be down here and unemployed I could at least have bummed around properly playing PS3, but no…  I have to play PS2.  First world problems, no?

I’m not a big fan of Kubrick, I guess I should say that up front.  The Shining scared the piss out of me, Dr. Strangelove, I’ll grant I love that movie, but I love it for Peter Sellers and you can’t give Kubrick credit for Sellers, except that he had enough wisdom not to try and reign him in.  Full Metal Jacket? I think the first half is perfect, but I don’t care about the second half.  That’s the thing about Stanley Kubrick, I think, is that his movies may be perfect from a filmmaking standpoint, but that doesn’t necessarily make them interesting.  This doesn’t really have anything to do with the book, I suppose, except that again, the two are intertwined.

The book is boring.  There is almost no action, except for Hal 9001 trying to kill the whole crew.  The study of Hal was fairly interesting and that’s why the knowledge of Hal permeates pop culture, because I knew who Hal was without seeing the movie, I assumed he had a bigger role in the book.  He doesn’t.  An artificial intelligence which breaks off of its programming is very interesting in the laws of robotics kind of way, especially when it gets into the primal being of self preservation.  The most interesting thing said in the book to me was when it was observed that Hal was threatened by earth saying that the ship may need to shut down Hal.  He took this as a hostile action because he’d never slept before, and since he’d never slept he didn’t know he could wake up.  I thought this was a very poignant observation.

There is an interesting statement about humanity in the book.  Twice in the book the it makes mention of the idea that eventually humanity could advance until it no longer needed bodies, and that would be the ultimate advancement of humanity was that it could transfer its brains and then its spirit into other forms.  HAL can be seen as the first step down that road, he is a homemade brain, who can exercise free will.  The book tells us that the aliens who eventually turn Dave into the Starchild had completed the same technology when they perfected space travel.  We see that, by HAL’s existence, humans are on the evolutionary path to becoming the same types of beings that sent the monolith to them in the first place.

So, yeah, I didn’t care for the book.  I’ll probably still watch the movie, but I can only hope to be pleasantly surprised.

In the late nineties, the Furtips from Arnhem were having a quiet moment, when Jan Pol was working in Amsterdam in the then booming IT-branche. Amsterdam-Arnhem is a one-hour ride on the train, so he frequently stayed in Amsterdam with friends. One night, in the small hours a new band was formed: Young Pilots. Reinier Veldman was the drummer and Jan and Manon Engels would be playing guitar and bass in turn. Both Jan and Manon had songs ready, so they wasted no time and started rehearsing with a near businesslike precision.

Recording

Only a couple of months later they were ready to record. They took to the studio of Henk Jonkers in Amsterdam and Blanco Recordings in Arnhem. In the Vondelpark In Amsterdam they taped 8 songs.
Blanco was a collaboration between Martijn Blankestijn (Beetle Sonique) and Camille Courbois. On the 19th and 20th of may 2001 they took their recording gear to the “fishpond/schoolhouse” in Park Angerenstein in Arnhem, where the band recorded 5 songs.

Releasing?

Johan, Manon and Reinier compiled a 12 song CD from the recorded tracks and send the album to Daniel Gill of Animal World Recordings in the USA. He thought the collection of songs was brilliant and proposed to release them on his label.
Jan Pol started working on the album art. When he visited an exhibition of Jaap Kroneman, he was impressed by the readymade photograph of a crashing airplane, not failing to notice the fun relation to the name “Young Pilots”. He asked Jaap if he could use the picture for his upcoming CD and Jaap agreed, but only on the condition that it would be him who should design the artwork. Jan shook on it and after a couple of months the Young Pilots were presented with their artwork. Jan was over the moon with the design and send it to Daniel immediately.

Daniel, having had weird artwork proposals from Jan before, wasn’t entirely happy. We are now in a post 9-11 world. In fact, it’s not long after the attacks happened, so putting a crashing plane on the front cover is definitely shocking, and as a USA-based label not a logical choice. And there are more shocking things about the sleeve, but you’ll have to see for yourself! Understandably Daniel rejected the artwork. The band decided to conjur up a new design and sometimes new proposals were sent by mail, but also rejected and slowly but surely everything grinded to a standstill. No further attempts were made and sadly the album dissappeared in a drawer.

It’s all hard to understand, especially if you consider that the Young Pilots returned to the studio a year later to record a maybe even more brilliant album, but just as unreleased. It will be posted on this blog in the future. So stay tuned!

Young Pilots in Henk Jonkers’ Studio

Songs

The set consists of a mix of frantic songs and dreamy epics. That is typical for the songwriters. Jan’s tracks are more uptight, while Manon’s songs tend to be more laidback and easygoing.  Jan’s lyrics seem to deal with relationships and art, where Manon’s could well come from an unknown world, distant, from behind a never explored horizon. Although, having said all this, the compact instrumentation, especially the tight drumming, keeps all the songs perfectly together as an album.
I think all musicians on this record are amazing. I’m a livelong fan of the flowing style of guitar- and bassplaying of Manon. I’ve always been a fan of Reinier’s drumming and on this record he is combining his sharpness and experience to a new high. He gives the music an incredible drive and he basically provides the music with a lot of different moods. And Jan?.. Oh well…he shines…
The vocals of Jan and Manon are a perfect match. Apparently they are very different, but sometimes you can’t tell which is which.
There is “Raise the Rhine”, where Jan comments on Dutch musicians using Americana imagery, while living in the low countries.
Listen to “Big fat toad”, where Manon gives us a easy sunday feeling in dreamy depictions of a beautiful world.
And listen to “I am Debra Winger”, a striking hommage to the actress.

Package:

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Cinematographer: Atsushi Okui

Year: 2001

“Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can’t remember.“

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