There’s a type of prose piece whose main job is to be talked about. These articles or essays need not be right, or well-researched or particularly insightful but they reverberate through the chattering classes like self-satisfied church bells. Sometimes the commentariat calls this counter-intuitive journalism, usually when talking about Slate. This implies that the purveyors are gadfly-types who are chipping away at ossified public discourse by saying what everyone’s thinking but is too held back by convention to say. I like to think of it more as culture bait, calculated to jab at socially exposed nerves in order to get attention. I don’t blame the editors of the Times Sunday Book Review for thinking, “Hey, when was the last time people spent a week talking about the Sunday Book Review?” But Katie Roiphe’s article in Sunday’s Times about “Sex and the American Male Novelist” makes me wonder why writing can’t be provocative without being regressive.

Roiphe takes contemporary American male novelists to task for, well, being pussies in their writing about sex. At the same time she celebrates the likes of the Roth, Updike, Mailer and the rest for their ilk for acting as the nation’s id, exploring sexuality through their writing in a way Americans were too afraid to discuss outside their bedrooms. She sees the old guard’s frank depiction of base desire as representative of courage on the part of the authors. In Roiphe’s piece, being explicit is the same as being transgressive and edgy, whereas current authors (Chabon, Eggers, Wallace and some other white guys) find “the cuddle preferable to sex” and are just soft.

The Times essay is in many ways a response to another essay, which I guess makes this a rejoinder. Roiphe quotes from although never formally cites David Foster Wallace’s 1998 New York Observer review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time, “Certainly The End of Something Or Other, One Would Sort Of Have To Think” in which he formally denounces the “Great Male Narcissists” she applauds. But Wallace is no hack and he frames no simplistic second-wave denunciation of aggressive sex. Instead he views Updike in terms of his place as chronicler of “probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.” What irks Wallace is that Updike and his lot are so self-involved that they think, like Wallace’s own Oren Incandenza in Infinite Jest, they can fuck the existential pain away.

Roiphe predictably blames feminism for the death of GMN (the ‘N’ being ‘Novelists’ or “Narcissists’ depending on your affiliation and sass) sex writing and she’s probably not wrong. I’m no fan of the simplistic line against either Updike or Roth (having not read enough Mailer to comment) that rejects their works based on a perceived misogyny. Yes, the GMN are a bunch of self-involved men with a bunch of anxiety, a lot of it around women, but so are most published writers. Updike and Roth were transgressive because they confronted readers with desire that was otherwise locked away and expressed larger fears in terms of sex. For their protagonists, Roiphe mentions the literary stars Rabbit Angstrom and Nathan Zuckerman respectively, sex was about power and control, the one place to exercise an imagined masculinity while confronted with a changing world.

Thanks in large part to feminism, these scenes of sexual sublimation in which women are toe-holds on the sheer rock face of existence ring false. This changing world is the only one a lot of us have ever known and we don’t need to fuck women in the ass or cheat on our wives to make us feel okay with it. Roiphe writes about an acquaintance throwing out a copy of Philip Roth’s The Humbling for containing a sex scene that she found “disgusting, dated, redundant.” As for disgusting, the acquaintance is right, at least as far as the scene that turns rape and kidnapping into a wild threesome is concerned, but the fact that The Humbling seems dated is what makes it worth reading. Roth is far past his prime in terms of shock value, but a book about a broken old man having sex with a younger lesbian is improved when the author thinks a green strap-on has totemic significance. We feel the age in Roth’s relish to provoke.

None of this means sex is not still about power and control, but is it a surprise it is filled with a different kind of anxiety for a new generation of writers? The feelings produced by hiding a copy of Playboy under your bed and awkwardly watching a Girls Gone Wild commercial with your parents are distinct. What Roiphe describes as “a new frontier of sexual behavior: adultery, anal sex, oral sex, threesomes” is now what adolescents see when they click the wrong link or watch television at night. How can something still be offensive if it’s being sold to us 24/7? What formally shocked adults now shocks 12 year-olds who are allowed to watch Gossip Girl. This doesn’t make us necessarily any more sexually liberated than our grandfathers, but the market managed to filter out anything redeeming, anxious or philosophical from Updike and Roth leaving only insecure masculinity with nothing but a cock to defend itself. We are supposed to live up to the controversial sex of our predecessors without anything controversial left to do. Instead of seeing threesomes as verboten, the modern men knows all he needs is to buy enough hair gel and he can have as many girls as he wants at the same time. No wonder contemporary male authors have characters who don’t know what to do when they get what they’re supposed to want.

The literary missing-link between the GMN’s and the contemporary wussy boys is Brett Easton Ellis. In his novels the reader sees what self-avoidance through sex becomes in an era of post-industrial commodity capitalism. There are no taboos Ellis’s characters can’t buy and through its realization, masculinity reveals its violence and emptiness. In American Psycho, the narrator Patrick Bateman has all sorts of transgressive sex including murderous violence that would have made any of Updike or Roth’s characters reach for the closest phone to call the cops. And he does it with the same bemused detachment with which he listens to Huey Lewis. There is nothing of free love left in Ellis, the sex may be animalistic, but it has the rationality of a stock trade. The same group of feminists who denounce Updike and Roth have fought Ellis each step of the way even though he’s on their side. When Clay shuts the door on the grotesque tableau of rape and abuse at the end of Less Than Zero, Ellis shows the reader that consummated desire is not the same as salvation. He depicts the collision between taboo sexuality and late capitalism, and it is monstrous.

In post-Reagan America, the aggressive depictions of sex Roiphe remember reek of insecurity and decay, they are commercial, cold and not very sexy. Contemporary authors are left in a different historical position vis-a-vis their sexual anxiety. Only a surface reading of Infinite Jest could yield “Characters … often repelled or uncomfortable when faced with a sexual situation.” The quotes Roiphe uses from the novel describe Oren, a cerebral football player who seeks solace where the writers told him he should: between the legs of a married woman. Yet he finds no cure even as he traces infinity on his lovers’ naked sides. This isn’t a case of feminism making men weak, it’s men learning from the past. Ellis, after all, based Patrick Bateman on his father.

The fact that I identify more with Hal Incandenza than Alex Portnoy doesn’t make Portnoy’s Complaint any less a great book. The fact that it would not be written today does not make it any less a great book. Roiphe is fighting a straw-man insofar as Wallace writes about being an Updike fan and casually mentions having read around 24(!) of his books. I like Updike too, even if I prefer Roth. What they wrote is still relevant, even if it fails to provoke. If anything, men about whom those books were written still run the military. Understanding their sexual anxiety is probably not a bad idea. But yearning for a time when men wrote about how they would save themselves through the sheer metaphysical power of their conquering dicks is silly. We’re far too anxious for that these days.

Updike and Roth, as well as Ellis, wrote culture bait in their own ways, but they never pined for an imagined past. They expanded taboos outward, stretching them to the breaking point in the process. These days too much of what grabs headlines seems to point backward, as if the past will always be more controversial than the future. Young forward-looking transgressive voices exist, even on sex, but for them to get exposure publishers and editors need to stop picking fights with feminists just for the exposure. In the mean time, if you want to read some writing that pushes on contemporary ideas about sex, check out anything by Jeanette Winterson but especially Written on the Body. I know she’s a girl (and British and a lesbian!) but her descriptions of sex without gender are as erotic and powerful as anything those old guys ever wrote. And just as challenging.

“Do you girls know you have a television set between your legs?”

So, it’s been a while since I last wrote. I can’t really say that I’ve been busy, which is perhaps why I haven’t written; nothing much to report. Seen a few movies, on DVD, not in the cinema. Actually, one in the cinema too, I’ll get to that. They’ve been a variety of what I’ve been interested in seeing, gifts and, in one case, one that was forced upon me pretty firmly.

I rewatched Ocean’s Eleven, it was a good reminder of how awesome that movie is. The one I just watched tonight was Less Than Zero, a 1987 film based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote American Psycho. It was very good, quite different to American Psycho in many ways, but there were a few links and I think the novel is a bit different. Robert Downey jr. was very good, as usual. The lighting and music were cool, I liked it.

I watched Zodiac last night, which was forced on me by my film buff friend, Liam. I was glad, it was a very good movie. It’s directed by the guy who did Fight Club, Se7en, Benjamin Button, very good. It’s all in the details, the characters all have their little things and there are so many things to notice in the film. The acting was really top notch, I was impressed by everyone, they all had their own physicality, their own body language.

One I watched a little while ago was Kids, which Liam had given me as a present, since he knows how much I enjoy child pornography, date rape and AIDS. It was a rough film, it started off fairly strong but still funny, many amusing bits, but it was downhill fairly quickly, was very harsh. Good movie though, nothing like a bit of drug-related date rape of an AIDS infected minor to end off a film.

At the cinema I saw Zombieland, which was really funny. I’d pay for a ticket just to see the credit sequence at the start, amazing. Like Shaun of the Dead, this is a comedy that takes its zombie effects seriously. They looked proper, it was actually shocking at parts, as well as being extremely funny. I recommend it. Who ya gonna call?

Your sleep-deprived casino thief,

TDE

Lunar Park
by Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher by Picador USA,  2005

Bret Easton Ellis, author of modern classics such as “Less Than Zero” and “American Psycho” takes the reader into an uncategorized genre with this novel, “Lunar Park.”  What at first seems like a memoir listing the trials and tribulations of a young man that becomes a famous author while still in college (“Less Than Zero”) and then becoming part of the Literary Brat pack and living the Rock and Roll lifestyle.  Bret becomes an addict and loves the groupies the fame and the drugs.  But this book takes an odd turn and the reader realizes this is no memoir.  The book soon becomes a sort of a haunted house horror novel.

Basically what has happened in “Lunar Park” is that Bret has written himself in as a main character with a haunting past.  The drugs, no ability to maintain a lasting/meaningful relationship and a verbally abusive father.  The Bret Easton Ellis in the novel may not be too far from the real life Bret Easton Ellis, but keep in mind, it is a novel.

Bret Easton Ellis has lived the most extreme of celebrity lifestyles and even fathered a child with a model, Jayne Dennis.  The only problem is that he denied he was the father (he claims that Keanu Reeves is the father).  After years of continuously hitting bottom; there are tales of his publisher having to send a handler out with him on book tours to make sure he does not imbibe, but most of them quit, not able to handle the downfall.

Finally Bret’s ex-girlfriend decides to take him in and maybe establish a family and help Bret get better.  She has not only Bret’s son, now 11, but also a 4 year old fathered by a record industry mogul.  This already doomed family moves into a “McMansion” in suburbia in the northeast United States.  They send their children to elite schools and keep the kids medicated on all the latest drugs, Ritalin, etc.

Bret decides to throw a Halloween party and this is where the horror begins.  He soon becomes haunted by his father, who ignored him as a child but once Bret became rich and famous, tried to become part of his life.   He is also strangely being haunted by the main character from his novel “American Psycho.” All this while trying to become closer with his son and trying to form family bonds and dealing with the communities strange string of murders and missing children.

At the apex of this haunting story, the family is chased from their home by a carnivorous toy, and the home they are living in changing form into the home in which Bret was raised.

Very interesting story and some very good haunting, this horror story definitely would give Stephen King a run for his money.

When it gets cold like this, especially if it’s accompanied by snow, I’m reminded of when I lived in the dorms at school. Sitting with my feet up on the radiator, reading. While through my window I had a view of the dorm complex courtyard coated with a layer of snow that twinkled in the bright, even harsh at times, sunlight.  I read a lot. The book I read more than any other was Jay McInerney’s novel, Bright Lights, Big City. (Less than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis was a close second) And today  I’m compelled to read it again, as I have been doing almost every years since I first discovered, not when it was first published in 1984 but in 1988 after seeing the movie, staring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and Phebe Cates.

I know that BLBC, like it’s author, has something of checkered past, and that even McInerney himself refers to it at times as a kind of albatross around his neck. The books was and still is sometimes mocked. Sometimes I wonder when a Best of Bad McInerney contest is going to be created, if it doesn’t exist already. The second person narrative technique employed is often dismissed as nothing more than a clever device. Perhaps. But no book before it nor since has continued to resonate with me, has regulaly lured me back to read it again, has made me want to write. For me, it was my persmisson book – it gave me permission to write about what I really wanted to write about because I didn’t know you could write about such things; I wasn’t very well read at the time, so sue me. Before I’d read BLBC it was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, of course, that held that distinction but it was quickly replaced.

I’m trying to resist the impulse to set aside what I’m reading now to read BLBC because I’m perpetually backed up on my reading and never seem able to make a dent in the stack of books that I want to read, it just keeps growing, but forces seems to be conspiring against me.

This morning the movie was on cable. Of course, it is not a very good movie but even so I’ve watched it many times. Less Than Zero is a better movie. But a remake of BLBC: the movie is in the works, due to be released in 2010. I’m curious to see what comes of it this time around. I’ve often wondered what it would been like if Woody Allen  had directed it or perhaps Ed Burns. My person preference would be for Stephen Sodeberg to do it. But I think the guy who produced and directed Gossip Girls for TV is doing it.

No doubt, in the end I’ll succumb to t his impulse to read BLBC yet again.And maybe this year of all years I shouldn’t even attempt to resist since 2009 marked the 25the aniversery of it’s publication. And as such maybe this year more than most it deserves a re-read.

I wonder if McInerney, because he seems to want to be remembered for his more sophisticated novels, is balking at a 25th aniversary edtion of BLBC. Or maybe they’re simply waiting until the movies comes out, releasing them together.

Less Than Zero is Bret Easton Ellis‘ first novel.

Plot:
Rich college student Clay returns home to L.A. for the winter break. He spends his time going to parties, doing drugs and having sex while thinking about whether or not he wants to have a relationship with Blair, his girlfriend. But Clay grows increasingly alienated from the amoral behaviour of his friends.

Less Than Zero is a good first novel, but not the best Bret Easton Ellis has ever written. It’s also completely stuck in the 80s (it was published in ‘85) and seems a little out of date for that. [Actually, I read the first pages and the looked up the first publication date because I had to know if it really was published in the 80s.]

This novel is hard to pull off – all the characters are incredibly jaded and unsympathetic, even Clay who tries to excise the effects of growing up in this company and tries to get some sense of (moral) direction.

I wanted to feel sorry for everybody but Ellis didn’t really let me. I mean, these are young people who are very lost. But then they go ahead and [SPOILER] get their rocks off to a snuff film and rape a twelve year old [/SPOILERS] and whatever sympathies I could muster just evaporated.

As I said before, sometimes the book feels a little dated because it asks questions that are not so en vogue today. But since the questions asked have never been really answered, since nihilism is still something that continues to engage people, I didn’t mind.

It’s definitely a book worth a re-read (especially since Ellis has announced that he’s writing a sequel). [And I think I need to get my hands on the movie - Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader? Cool.]

There are innocuous objects which later become emblematic of systemic frustrations, an accidental center of so many Venn diagrams. Simon Spotlight’s movie tie-in God Hates Us All is one such object.

I noticed it on the fiction table at the newly opened Greenlight Bookstore. At first I thought a guerilla marketing team had placed the book. This wasn’t a novelization of a film or TV property in the traditional sense. The book in question is the fake literary phenomenon by Hank Moody, protagonist of Showtime’s “Californication.” I’ve seen the show, which posits David Duchovny as a Chuck Pahlaniuk/Bret Easton Ellis hybrid following his libido into wacky/zany adventures. The show is a pretty transparent “Entourage” knockoff as a male fantasy of wish fulfillment: an edgy New Yorker in Los Angeles, newly minted off of the movie rights from his edgy novel, adapted into an execrable romcom with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Moody’s talent is never questioned in the show. In fact, his agent and wife both complain about his stalled followup book. The show isn’t concerned, however, as Moody’s enfant terrible stature is merely a handy excuse for a parade of easy and topless women. This makes a lot more sense when you realize it’s also produced by Duchovny, who recently admitted an addiction to sex.

Back to God Hates Us All. What’s so particularly vexing is how this departs from novelizations. Showtime and Simon & Schuster have packaged the fabricated, ghostwritten novel itself as marketing: it’s not an adaptation, but a real novel fashioned out of the world of the TV show.

As an analogy, imagine if a movie studio built a real version of the Xanadu estate from Citizen Kane. Yes, Hearst Castle, its original inspiration, still exists. But its tangential relationship to the film (no one needs to see Xanadu to understand Orson Welles’ film, or vice versa) is similar to God Hates Us All. What is the point of the entire exercise? It’s not just marketing, but something worse: marketing which devalues its medium.

Think about this book in the context of where I first witnessed it: next to Olive Kitteredge, Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, and a new edition of Pride and Prejudice. Is there an ethical consideration here? If you were a debut novelist with a manuscript on submission at Simon & Schuster, would God Hates Us All give you pause?

I’m genuinely curious. I may just be overreacting, putting literary fiction on too high a pedestal. This may just be a minor casualty of what Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture – you can’t have Girl Talk albums and shot-for-shot Psycho remakes without a few trainwrecks. What’s more, I’ll proselytize for hours on the benefits of ideas operating across media landscapes. I suppose what bothers me most here is the purposeful blurring of the editorial/commercial lines. (Especially as a fan of Less Than Zero.)

: : : : : : : :

In my meanderings around writers boards and the feedback I hear at writer’s conferences, I see a pattern among a sub-species of fish I call Less Than Zero who, sadly, swim in our publishing pond. LTZs are the agents and editors whose ulterior motives aren’t to the author’s benefit. They may only agree to “represent” an author if they can find an interested editor. Or maybe they make a habit of selling their clients’ books to PODs. Perhaps they’ll tell you that, “oh yes, we edit your manuscript,” and that really means they run it through Spell Check. I call them Less Than Zero because they are the gorp that gets between my toes when I go to the beach. They’re worse than navel lint because they hurt authors.

Now here’s where I channel Sigmund Fraud, so lie down on my couch and sip on one of the beagle’s margaritas. The golden thread that weaves its way through these diseased yaks is Evita Peron-ititis: “You must love me,” – meaning that their only way of getting their meathooks into authors is via flattery and kindness.

Think about it; it’s much harder to question someone you like and believe is a good guy. And they’re counting on this. It a very effective way to keep authors submissive. Sadly, I’ve seen authors defend their editors and agents clear to the death of their own books. It’s literary equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. The minute you dare to question their abilities is when you see their true colors. They can become abusive with the flick of the switch. It’s another tool in keeping authors submissive.

While it’s true that we all try our level best to be engaging, supportive, and not scare the pants off prospective authors, we also have a job to do, and that’s to make you as successful as we can. Sometimes we don’t have time for love and kisses – especially during editing.

Less Than Zeros are slick, kiddies, and it’s all about timing. They work very hard to get authors comfortable and in love with them so they can lower the boom over their heads, which equates to, “Um no, you misunderstood. I said your book would be available to bookstores, not in the bookstores,” or “all agents charge processing fees; it goes toward editing your book, mailing and printing costs to send hard copies to publishers. You’ll get your money back when your book sells.”

By the time you hear this, you’re pliable and willing to believe them because you like them. After all, flim flam artists aren’t nice, are they? Oh, you bet your Aunt Gertie’s pumpkin pie they’re nice. It’s all they have.

And what happens when you begin to question their tactics? Out comes the abusive and rude emails. They’ll tell you you’re ungrateful or don’t know anything about the business. They will send you nastygrams about how you’re not promoting enough.

This is all about research, dear authors. If an agent has no verifiable sales to solid houses, take a step back. If a publisher only prints up 25 books and tells you, “Of course we have distribution – through Ingram and Baker and Taylor,” take a step back.

Don’t let your desire to be published color your survival instincts. There is NO WAY you can make lemonade out of lemons – not in this business. If you’re with a scank agent or editor, you will not succeed, no matter how hard you try. Cut bait and move to a new pond where the Less Than Zeros aren’t allowed to swim.

John Clay Wolfe

Oct 2009

The car business literally ceased the day World Trade Center I and II fell back to the Earth. And so the savvy suits at GM created a landmark campaign “Keep America Rolling.” Generous Motors offered 0% interest for 60 months on EVERYTHING they made. Customers had to forfeit their rebates in exchange for 0% interest loans, but my god did it work. The sales rates were staggering.  I personally witnessed customers at a Texas Chevy house literally fighting to be next in line to sign papers. The rumor had gotten out that 0% was going to end suddenly; the customers in this particular store believed they were in a race to sign docs before the last 0% credit was used up. That was 2001. Today eight years later, zero percent is BACK on.

The zero percent come-on comes and goes like a rising tide. Much like the manufacturer rebate system, the no-interest rate deal has become a tool to control/stimulate the marketplace. Personally, I’m surprised it still has any effect at all. But it does. GM offered a 48 for 0% for 48 hours sale two seasons ago that made the fish float to the top like two army telephones in a stock pond. That 48-hour sale morphed into 72 for 72 hours, and then flopped around for another week before the 0% spigot was closed AGAIN.

Zero percent financing is not that great of a deal when one does the math. The mathematical rebates vs 0% calculation finds its mathematical median in the mid-$30,000 purchase price, with rebates flirting with the $4-5,000 mark. Translation. If the unit (vehicle) has a $4000 rebate and the net price is under $30k, take the rebate, not the free money. If the reciprocal is over $35k, it usually makes fiscal sense to go for the interest-free loan.

The much discussed Cash for Clunkers come-on was the retarded brother of 0%. Same as it ever was. Your tax money stimulated major moves in the sales VU meter, with the usual painful hangover. While the manufacturers bitch and moan about the “end of government incentives,” the hangover from zero percent in ‘01 and ‘02 was just as bad. This one seems worse because things always seem worse when you’re living them.

Moral of the story: if you artifically stimulate something—whether you do so with drugs, financing or plain old lies—there will always be a reckoning.

There is a difference, though. Consumer confidence is lower than a grasshopper’s knee, and there’s no sign that it will come back any time soon. Pain is slowly becoming panic for the brass hats and dealers. You won’t read about the panic in Automotive News or hear about it on the network news. But it’s there. I feel it, I smell it, I hear it in the factory conference calls, and running the grapevine with other dealers.

The industry is shaking, sweating, looking for a fix. This sounds crazy, but in a world where common sense seems not to apply, and we all just keep looking for that next sales high. And here it is: Reverse Interest.

You buy a new Caddy, Fiat, Ford, whatever, and the carmaker will pay you five percent a month interest to make payments on your new purchase.  They could do it, just beef the rebates up a bit (which they’re already running that way again) then offer reverse interest if you give up the rebate.

Obviously, this idea wouldn’t fix a damn thing. But it might get the car business through the winter. Either that or . . . what? At some point, the music will stop and there won’t be enough chairs for everyone. And then . . . the music will start again.

Also on www.thetruthaboutcars.com

The score was never officially released but it’s been circulating for years. Been meaning to up it for a while.

The original soundtrack can be found here.

Enjoy

Dylan Edbus, the protagonist of The Fortress of Solitude, attended Camden College. When this bit of info drops, I just assumed that the school was real because I had no reason not to. Yet, as I continued reading, I began to think that it was Lethem’s invention (I couldn’t tell you what it was in the text that made me question the school’s existence). When I reach the paragraph where Dylan mentions that he and his roommate go to the End of the World, all those brain synapses and sparks and protons and electrons start doing their thing. Camden College is the same fictional school where Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction is set.

I haven’t read any of Ellis’ more recent work but in Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction he really takes the minimalist approach to description. Everyone is tan or not tan or not as tan as they used to be. There’s so much repetition in these books—which I imagine is supposed to emulate the inarticulate voice of 1980s youth—that they’re hypnotic, if that makes any sense. They’re kind of Gertrude Stein-esque and you’re looking for variation in the string of repeated words, hoping to figure out the deeper significance. I read The Rules of Attraction four years ago but the End of the World is something that I am able to recall simply because it was mentioned about 50,000 times by various characters.

The End of the World is a bar near Camden College.

I think I realized I was “in it”, my mild obsession that is, when I was taking photos for my vintage clothing eBay Biz, Hotel Regina Vintage, (girls gotta make a little money) and I was taking a photo of our own dear Pam McGarvey (Sandy in Gemini Rising) for an 80’s dress I was putting up for auction. I think the dress is lovely: a rust jaquard silk with a classic flattering cut, dolman sleeves, and shoulder pads fit for a linebacker. Pam (whose laugh is as charming as she is) started cracking up the minute I presented the dress to her. I have to admit it did make me pause and look at the dress more critically. I still found it lovely, but the shoulder pads were rather pronounced.

"This is how we dressed in the 80's," I insisted amidst Pam's hysterics. I flashbacked to myself at her age, trekking down Fifth Avenue to my temp job in "Looks like a pump feels like a sneaker" (they didn't really) shoes, pantyhose and dress with shoulder pads, or suit. I've always been a conservative dresser and I think my style still remains somewhat 80's in my preference for dresses and suits. I even assured Pam that shoulder pads were making a big comeback this year and she just gave me a look.

Maybe she’s right because the damn dress didn’t sell (yet), but my point is that even though shoulder pads and other retro 80’s looks may make a brief comeback on the runway, I doubt if they will make a major impact on the far reach of fashion. Why? Because it changes so fast now that no one has time to keep up except for a certain few “fashionistas” who in my opinion are beginning to more and more resemble aliens. But I digress…

I began to wonder why I was so drawn to that rust dress (if it had fit it would be part of my Fall 2009 “statement) in the first place, and then I realized that I’ve been on a mild 80’s nostalgia bender in the past few weeks. Maybe it was the death of that former wunderkind John Hughes that set me off, but I began to reflect with sentimentality upon a decade I have previously always despised.

The obsession is beginning with the clothes and then moving on to films. Yesterday, while searching through the Netflix catalog intending to do some research for a new project I’m developing, I suddenly found myself dedicating hours of a rainy afternoon to Judd Nelson’s 1987 mini series “The Billionaires Boys Club”

and I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed every sleazy, nostril flaring second of it. I found myself thinking, “You know that Judd Nelson, was pretty damn good.” Do I really think that or is the 80’s revival just “in the air”? Does it happen naturally or is it all Madison Avenue? I’m not sure, but I can tell you that “Less Than Zero” and “Metropolitan” are now on my Netflix queue. Maybe I’m finally accepting that the 80’s really were “my generation”.

Wife and daughter out of town, visiting family in California — Mahattan Beach and San Fran. With them gone the house is empty and quiet. So to fill the void and my time I’ve been watching a lot of movies, more than I have in some time.

This weekend, among other movies, I watched:

The Informers, based on the Brett Eston Ellis book of the same title, which as been called a novel but seems more like connected stories. In any case, I’m interested in any works of BEE’s. Set in 1983-84, this is typical Ellis fair, involving rich LA young people that do a lot of drugs, have a lot of sex. Sort of the counter-view to, say, John Hughes version of the 80s, which much less ominous, more bubblegum pop. It didn’t do well at the theater, but I liked it, for the 80s details as much as anything else. Although one thing that seemed off was the that the girls’ hair styles seemed more late 90s, i.e. straight and blonde as opposed to done up with Aquanet and brown with frosted blonde highlights etc. But maybe things were diff in LA at the time.

Good performances all around, especially by Kim Basinger and Winona Ryder, who deserves more roles but for some reason seems to have gone a little undeground — very GenX. Mickey Rourke is a good scarey guy, as per usual. Billy Bob Thornton is okay, but I’ve never been a big fan of his anyway, especially since he fucked up All the Pretty Horses, although I’ve heard it was the studios doing more than his, but in any case a serious missed opportunity.

At this point, I think the only novel of Ellis that hasn’t been made into a movie or is in production to be made into one is Glamorama. But then Ellis is,  at least in part, bank rolling these projects. Perhaps the reason he moved from NYC back to LA area. He’s an ex-prod on this film. And it seems a worthy effort. Not as good as Less Than Zero and American Psycho but then the original material wasn’t as good so. But then those movies had actors in roles they were made play, baby — Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Bale.

Mick Boogie presents Paulie Rhyme, Less than Zero is a 15 track opus of an
emcees take on being bred in the Midwest and breakthrough in the Bay. Paulie
Rhyme has been touring steadily since 2005 (Guy on the Couch, Green Giants, Ice
Bears, etc.) hitting the road in the US, Canada, & Japan with acts such as
Hezekiah (Beat Society), Prince Po (Organized Konfusion), and more. With a
strong D.I.Y. work ethnic and rooted in the teaching of the Zulu Nation, Rhyme
is definately aimed to move the crowd, rock the spot, and uplift your spirit.
With a combination of soul, boom bap, lyrics, and thought provoking concepts,
Less than Zero is a must have and gives the listener a full view of what is to
come in the future.

Featuring production by Keelay & Zaire, Vinroc, King Most, Amos Famous, Rey
Resurreccion, Besto, Tone X, Deedot, Joe Dukes, Soundtruck, with guest
appearances by Raashan Ahmad, Drastic, Proph the Problem, Wonway, Khai
Sharrieff, Edreys aka Billy Drease, Knobody, Do. D.A.T., Da Evangillest, K-
Swift, Solis Cin, Enoch, Inkfat, Wreckelekt, & Dj Rod Roc

Sharebee DL link <–

I feel like I miss the point with Bret Easton Ellis. I’ve read half of American Psycho, all of Rules of Attraction and now all of Less than Zero, and it feels like a joke I don’t get. I couldn’t read American Psycho as all of the identikit businessmen were getting me down. We get it, everyone’s the same, we’re not individual etc etc. I enjoyed Rules of Attraction because it had more actual plot and better characters. Less Than Zero unfortunately falls into the first bracket of Ellis books.

Clay is a thin, blond, tan college student who’s come home for the holidays. All of his friends are thin, blond and tan. Most of them are college students, some of them are drug dealers but the majority of them combine the two lifestyles, while remaining thin, blond and tan. You get the idea – Clay’s rich parents don’t pay him enough attention, but neither do the parents of his thin, blond, tan friends, so it’s all okay.

There really isn’t a lot more to tell about story. I like the verbal motifs that crop up throughout the novel – Clay picks up on a phrase his friend says about driving (people are afraid to merge) which he builds on until it becomes a chorus of mis-matched, out of context and meaningful words on how shit life is.

Ellis reminds me of Douglas Coupland, but he lacks any of the wry humour and downright humanity present in JPod, for example.

Some things I learned from Wikipedia and imdb: Less Than Zero was Ellis’ first book. There’s a film of it too, released in 1987 and starring John Hughes muse Andrew McCarthy as the aforementioned Clay. Robert Downey Jr and James Spader also appear in the cast list, as fairly prominent characters. Interestingly, none of them are blond, thin and tan.

Seriously, if anyone can explain to me why I should like Ellis’ writing, please do. I don’t dislike it, and I can appreciate that his style may be loved by many, but for me he just doesn’t press the right buttons. There are only so many business cards, lines of coke or blond, tan people I can stomach without reading something else.

I feel like I miss the point with Bret Easton Ellis. I’ve read half of American Psycho, all of Rules of Attraction and now all of Less than Zero, and it feels like a joke I don’t get. I couldn’t read American Psycho as all of the identikit businessmen were getting me down. We get it, everyone’s the same, we’re not individual etc etc. I enjoyed Rules of Attraction because it had more actual plot and better characters. Less Than Zero unfortunately falls into the first bracket of Ellis books.

Clay is a thin, blond, tan college student who’s come home for the holidays. All of his friends are thin, blond and tan. Most of them are college students, some of them are drug dealers but the majority of them combine the two lifestyles, while remaining thin, blond and tan. You get the idea – Clay’s rich parents don’t pay him enough attention, but neither do the parents of his thin, blond, tan friends, so it’s all okay.

There really isn’t a lot more to tell about story. I like the verbal motifs that crop up throughout the novel – Clay picks up on a phrase his friend says about driving (people are afraid to merge) which he builds on until it becomes a chorus of mis-matched, out of context and meaningful words on how shit life is.

Ellis reminds me of Douglas Coupland, but he lacks any of the wry humour and downright humanity present in JPod, for example.

Some things I learned from Wikipedia and imdb: Less Than Zero was Ellis’ first book. There’s a film of it too, released in 1987 and starring John Hughes muse Andrew McCarthy as the aforementioned Clay. Robert Downey Jr and James Spader also appear in the cast list, as fairly prominent characters. Interestingly, none of them are blond, thin and tan.

Seriously, if anyone can explain to me why I should like Ellis’ writing, please do. I don’t dislike it, and I can appreciate that his style may be loved by many, but for me he just doesn’t press the right buttons. There are only so many business cards, lines of coke or blond, tan people I can stomach without reading something else.

Bret Easton Ellis’s literary voice emerged fully-formed in his first novel, Less Than Zero, published to acclaim in 1985 when he was 20 years old and still a student at Bennington College. In stark minimalist prose Ellis chronicled the desultory world of wealthy L.A. teenagers living a hollow existence of drugs, soulless sex, casual violence, and consumer extravagance. Comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald and a latter day “lost generation” were drowned out by the more derisive label of “brat pack” that was soon attached to Ellis and several other hot young 1980s authors with splashy book contracts, in particular Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York).

All hell broke loose with Ellis’s third book, American Psycho (1990), which is perhaps his masterpiece and one of the most shocking American novels ever written. Using the same flat, emotionless narrative voice from his earlier work, Ellis clearly laid the blame for his generation’s—and the country’s—moral meltdown at the feet of Reagan’s “morning in America” symbolized by the Wall Street boom of the 1980s. American Psycho is narrated by Patrick Bateman, 26 year-old investment broker and serial murderer. The novel’s chilling deadpan style is perfectly tuned for embodying the widening gulf between rich and poor, between men and women, between exploiters and the exploited.

Ellis’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, refused to have anything to do with the horrifying and controversial manuscript. (Ellis, however, was contractually allowed to keep the sizable advance he’d been paid while writing it.) The novel was eventually published by Random House as a Vintage paperback amid protests that it be boycotted. There were a handful of critics who realized that beneath the gore, American Psycho was a sardonic satire comparable to Norman Mailer’s scabrous 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?, in which a brutal Alaskan bear hunt became a metaphor for the dark side of America’s John Wayne military mentality.

Ellis later insisted that the theme of American Psycho wasn’t violence at all, but rather rancid consumerism. Furthermore, as if to save us the ordeal, he even recommended that readers could skip most of it once they understood that the book was reducible to the following narrative schemata: “Shopping, shopping, shopping, clothes, clothes, clothes, sex, sex, murder, shopping, shopping, clothes, murder …”

The surprise of his ambitious new 482-page novel, Glamorama, is that Ellis has reinvigorated his style with a more reader-friendly comic energy and a hapless Candide-like protagonist. Victor Ward is a typical Ellis character in many ways: a male-model and New York dance club promoter living a pampered life of easy money, easy drugs, and easy sex with multiple girlfriends. He’s also a monumental doofus and often the butt of his own vacuous insights:

“Baby, Andy once said that beauty is a sign of intelligence.”

She turns slowly to look at me. “Who, Victor? Who?  Andy who?” She coughs, blowing her nose. “Andy Kaufman? Andy Griffith? Who in the hell told you this? Andy Rooney?”

“Warhol,” I say softly, hurt. “Baby …”

Even minor characters are etched with witty precision, such as interior designer Waverly Spear—“dead ringer for Parker Posey”—and her breathless inspirations for Victor’s nightclub: “I see orange flowers, I see bamboo, I see Spanish doormen, I hear Steely Dan, I see Fellini… I see the 70s, baby, and I am wet.”

For the first hundred pages or so, Glamorama maintains a screwball-comedy pace with puns, jokes, and rapid-fire dialogue. The story then proceeds to add a few more dimensions, both figuratively and literally. We meet Victor’s dour father, a U.S. senator considering a presidential bid. As a public official he’s deeply embarrassed by his son’s tabloid lifestyle. In short order Victor finds himself involved with a shadowy government agent and an overseas mission to locate and bring home one of Victor’s former girlfriends, a film starlet who may be involved with terrorists. The satire is rich: the clueless Victor is suddenly set down in the middle of an espionage thriller with overtones of everything from Hitchcock and James Bond to spoofy films like Modesty Blaise and Austin Powers.

The strangest turn taken by Glamorama is an absurdist postmodern leap that’s entirely new to Ellis’s fiction: a film crew makes an appearance midway through the book and they never leave. In fact, Glamorama evolves into a looking-glass alternate reality in which Victor is simultaneously living the book’s story and acting in a movie version of the story. It’s a fiendishly clever and complex literary ploy, with Victor adrift in a media-saturated nightmare of escalating violence. He unwittingly joins an international terrorist cell—while, at the same time, acting in a movie about an international terrorist cell—comprised of bomb-throwing fashion models.

Ellis never shies away from detailing the carnage that ensues from deadly explosions in a crowded Paris cafe, or a train, or a 747 in flight. And the novel’s most gruesome locale: a basement torture chamber used by the terrorists to punish and/or execute anyone who gets in their way. Here is where Glamorama revisits the graphic horrors of American Psycho, reconfigured this time around for a commentary on real-world violence versus the comfortable distance we’re used to from CNN and newspaper accounts of geopolitical struggles. Ellis would no doubt approve of us skipping over the stomach-churning passages in Glamorama once we get the “point” that real violence is repulsive.

The ideology of the terrorists is never specified and Ellis demurs from offering anything like the critique of right-wing politics that kept American Psycho focused in its outrage. (Psycho-killer Patrick Bateman makes a sick-joke cameo appearance in Glamorama. Several of the characters in the new novel, including Victor himself, also appear in Ellis’s 1987 book, The Rules of Attraction.)

Is Glamorama for everyone? Not a chance. But in an era when Thomas Harris’s grim flesh-eating opus, Hannibal, can shoot to the top of the summer bestseller list, I’m beginning to suspect Bret Easton Ellis has a larger potential audience than previously assumed.

August, 1999

It’s always nice to know that your favourite book will be turned in a film but when you go to cinema the surprise can be good or bad. Do you want some examples?

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

I read the book after watching the movie and I have to say that Ang Lee did a wonderful job! It’s definitely one of my favourite movies ever. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger were perfect. The book was really short, the idea was good but the atmoshere created in the movie was better (I’m probably the one who thinks so…).

BOOK VS FILM: Film

FIGHT CLUB

Another film of my Top 10! I read the book after watching the movie because I was really curious and I’ve discovered an amazing & crazy writer. Chuck Palahniuk has an unique style and the movie has an unique style too. It’s weird, alienating and nihilistic. I can’t choose between the movie and the book so…

BOOK VS FILM: even drawn

LESS THAN ZERO

I’ve read the book before watching the movie and I have to say it was better even if I didn’t like it so much. The film hasn’t got a good plot and the only thing I enjoyed was Robert Downey Jr’s performance.

BOOK VS FILM: Book but not too much

LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN

I’ve read the book before watching the movie and I can copy & paste the same description of Less than Zero (without Robert Downey Jr’s performance… lol). From the same author, Requiem for a dream is 10000 times better… always in my opinion.

BOOK VS FILM: Book but not too much

And now something more popular…!

HARRY POTTER

Harry Potter… Harry Potter… I was eleven when I read the first book… My favourite book is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and guess what’s my favourite movie? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! The cast is really nice and full of great actors and I think that all the characters are well described. But what’s my final judgement?

BOOKS VS FILMS: Books

TWILIGHT

I’ve read the book (well the saga) before watching the movie and even if I was a bit prejudiced because I thought it was too difficult to make a good movie about vampires without being ridiculous I enjoyed the film too. The soundtrack was really good and the cast too. I can’t wait to see New Moon but especially Eclipse, my favourite book of the saga. Who will win the battle? Now…

BOOK VS FILM: Book

What do you think about them?

XOXO MARYG90

Over the past week or so I’ve been wondering a lot about whether a good book can make one feel and/or act like a worse person. I’ve come to the conclusion that it can if it’s written by Bret Easton Ellis.
Last year I read Ellis’s Less The Zero in one afternoon and walked around feeling like a deranged sociopath all day. American Psycho, partly because I didn’t read it in one gulp and partly because I can’t identify with yuppie Wall-Street douches from the 80’s – as compared to the meaning-deprived young people of Less Than Zero – did not have quite the same dramatic effect. Yet I still found myself with a higher propensity to say things that are just mean over the past week. To everyone who’s had to talk to me, I apologize, but I blame Ellis.
Amerian Psycho is about yuppie Patrick Bateman who buys stuff, judges people, does drugs, goes out to eat in fancy restaurants and in his spare time, murders, rapes and tortures. Ellis describes all of these activities in the same disengaged monotone and the reader doesn’t get the sense that Bateman distinguishes much between decapitating sex-workers and ordering a bottle of Evian. He does both a lot.
I saw the movie version of American Psycho a few years ago and it’s been one of my favorites ever since. Christian Bale pulls off by far his best performance as Bateman and while reading I was struck by how faithful the movie was. Both are strong critiques of the psychotic nature of America in the 80’s and the rise of consumer capitalism. The book is focused very specifically at the commodity level – probably around twenty percent of the novel’s words are brand names. There’s also a strong element of biomedicalization (PDF warning, but it is an awesome read) with Bateman and his contemporaries – who are really indistinguishable from Bateman – spending a large portion of their days maintaining their bodies through compulsive weightlifting, dieting, manicures and a lot of blow.
The one solid contrast I saw between the book and the movie is that Ellis doesn’t see Bateman as exceptional in any way. The movie emphasizes the second word of the title while the book focuses on the first. Throughout the novel there are various allusions to other yuppie psychopaths with the same extracurricular activities as Bateman.  He is not an aberrational character in the novel, rather he’s a product of his environment. And it’s in describing the environment of post-modern capitalism where Ellis really excels. From now on when people ask me what the hell I mean by the post-modern condition, I’ll redirect them to this passage:

Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire-meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in . . . this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged . . .

Ellis’s point isn’t so much that society’s hard-fought indifference allows us to turn a blind eye to murdering millionaires, rather he asks how could Bateman not become a psychopath?
As promised, I want to connect this to Malcolm Gladwell’s newest New Yorker piece. In the incredibly well-named “Cocksure,” Gladwell asks to what degree a demand for overconfident bankers caused the financial crisis. The basic thrust of the piece is the same as in American Psycho, given the incentive structure, how could the bankers not have destroyed the financial system? From Gladwell’s article, it looks like the main job of financial serivces execs is to measure their dicks and call everyone else a fag. (Seriously, here’s what Bear Sterns exec Jimmy Cayne said on the record about Treasury Sec. Geithenr: “This guy thinks he’s got a big dick. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend.”) What the hell kind of adult says shit like that?
For years these are the management qualities that the deregulated markets encouraged. Incentivising reckless risk-taking with other people’s money using financial instruments designed to camoflauge risk is a bad idea. We end up with these Bateman-wannabes guarding America’s money. That’s what we asked for and that’s what we got. Reading American Psycho, it was striking to see how little has actually changed.

Not a bad soundtrack; not great either. Covers by Aerosmith, Poison, Slayer and Bangles, if you like that kind of thing.

Standout tracks: “Life Fades Away” by Roy Orbison and “Going Back to Cali” by LL Cool J.

Hard to find.

Enjoy

320 kbps