CHARLES TAYLOR

Scout's honor

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:34:16 GMT

Burn Notice ’s honest con job
In the popular imagination, the spy is always cool, sophisticated, elegant — in other words, European.

BE PREPARED: Jeffrey Donovan’s Michael Westen is such a straight hero, you could imagine him in an ad for Arrow shirts.

In the popular imagination, the spy is always cool, sophisticated, elegant — in other words, European. The American contribution to pop imagination, the private eye, is more suited to our native character: brash, wisecracking, two-fisted.

One of the great jokes on Burn Notice, which is now in its second season on USA (Thursdays at 10 pm), is that it gives us an American spy who is neither a Continental wanna-be nor a shamus by another name. Instead, Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) is another established American icon: the Boy Scout.

Resourceful, industrious, clean-cut, helpful to others, honest (okay, a practiced undercover con man, but only in the name of righting wrongs), Michael, as played by Donovan, is such a straight hero, you could imagine him in an ad for Arrow shirts. Even his cravings are healthy: he consumes so much yogurt that manufacturers must be fighting one another to buy ad time on the show.

The premise of Burn Notice, which was created by Matt Nix, is that Michael, a spy for some unnamed US agency, is abruptly “burned.” That is, he’s deprived of his clearance and his identification, his assets are frozen, and he’s dumped in a city — in his case Miami — on a kind of indefinite probation.

The backstory has Michael trying to discover who burned him and why. And the show’s creators are smart enough to treat his quest as comic investigatus interruptus. Every week, he’s guilt-tripped into helping some poor sap who’s stumbled into a situation that requires someone to outsmart a set of baddies who think they’re infallible. What follows, in voiceover and deftly edited sequences, is the meeting of Bob Vila, Mr. Wizard, and 007’s Q, in which Michael concocts surveillance devices, booby traps, and other handy gadgets from — all together now — common household items.

Since gadgets by themselves don’t get the job done, Michael’s good deeds entail luring the bad guys into a con. And it’s then that Amesbury native Donovan, posing as some overeager or impossibly cool player, really shines. He lays on the kind of Boston accent that Matt Damon fakes and Mark Wahlberg does naturally, and the result is peculiarly American: refusing to be intimidated by the villains he’s putting the squeeze on, he acts like a Southie kid who’s lucked his way into Hugo Boss suits and who eyes every sharpster who crosses his path as some foreigner not to be trusted. He’s a sharpie in lout’s finery, and what tickles you is the surface brashness and buried shrewdness.

War stories

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:41:40 GMT

Mailer on the ’68 conventions
“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago , you can’t help but feel a chill.

THE TIME OF HIS TIME: Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago | By Norman Mailer | New York Review of Books | 241 pages | $14.95 [paper]

“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago, you can’t help but feel a chill. At that year’s political conventions, the GOP performed its Lazarus act on Richard Nixon’s political career in Miami and the Democrats appointed Hubert Humphrey as the public face of their self-destruction in Chicago while, in the streets outside, Mayor Daley’s storm troopers brutalized protesters and anyone else in their path. These were socio-political events begging for the exegesis that Mailer, that dogged visionary, could bring them. Wrong as often as he was right, Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish.

In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which he wrote on assignment for Harper’s, Mailer was not only perfectly attuned to the moment but prescient. The 40 years he foresaw were, he understood, years in which Nixon’s reign of law and order — the appeal to middle-class “forgotten Americans” — represented an end to the sober, careful conservatism that had always ruled the Republican party and the beginning of something more sinister, something whose logical endpoint is the radical right epitomized by George W. Bush. It’s a period that may now be coming to an end as the Republicans, like a cancer that turns on the good cells first, are destroying themselves after nearly destroying the country.

It’s in that context that a potentially unifying figure like Nelson Rockefeller had no chance to win his party’s nomination. And though Mailer says that considering Reagan for the office of president would be like imagining Johnny Carson in the job, he perceives the 57-year-old Reagan as the GOP’s equivalent of the rising young man waiting in the wings. “He had the presence of a man of thirty,” Mailer writes, “the deferential enthusiasm, the bright but dependably unoriginal mind, of a sales manager promoted for his ability over men older than himself.”

Working girl

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:30:37 GMT

In Plain Sight’s straight talk
On USA’s nifty summer series In Plain Sight , Mary McCormack, as federal marshal Mary Shannon, joins the select league of those who’ve made jeans, tank tops, boots, and leather jackets into an American fashion statement.

PROUD MARY: McCormack is fluent in the hard-boiled American language of smart-ass.

On USA’s nifty summer series In Plain Sight (Sundays at 10 pm), Mary McCormack, as federal marshal Mary Shannon, joins the select league of those who’ve made jeans, tank tops, boots, and leather jackets into an American fashion statement. McCormack is a tall, robust woman with long, straight dirty blond hair, and Mary Shannon’s uniform (and it is a uniform, as much as Giorgio Armani’s ever-present black T-shirt, or Batman’s cape and cowl) is an expression of both our native casualness and her utilitarian no-nonsense approach.

Mary is stationed in Albuquerque, and her assignment is to settle people into the witness-protection program. Some, like the little boy who sees his father’s dealings with drug kingpins, are innocent witnesses. Others are scumbags getting a second start by spilling what they know.

The terrific thing about Mary is that — minus a smidge of compassion for the innocent — her approach isn’t that different with either class of witness-protection entrant. Not a romantic or a dreamer or prone to sentimentality, she doesn’t expend a lot of time deceiving people about the lousy deal of life. In fact, getting a chance to start over is, she recognizes, a damn sight better deal than those of us who play by the rules get. Her empathy comes out in quirkier ways — like including a copy of Playboy in the bag of groceries she buys for a young Russian girl entering the program. The feds have promised this sad-sack Masha a boob job, and Mary proffers the magazine as if it were the Sears catalogue of mammaries.

It’s her own life that doesn’t lead her to expect happy endings. Her home is crowded by her airhead mother (Lesley Ann Warren, who isn’t getting the material she needs in order to dig into the edge of desperation in her performance) and sister (Nicole Hiltz), both of them fond of chemical substances in the liquid and powder form. And her relationship with a would-be major-league pitcher is stuck on the rocky road between sweethearts and fuck buddies.

I hope that the creator, David Maples, doesn’t make the mistake of starting up a romance between Mary and her partner, Marshall (Frederick Weller, whose offhand delivery is growing on me), as the erotic/professional tension between them is not only very pleasing but a convincing description of a coed work relationship powered by mutual respect. Maples has executed a smart reversal of the cliché of the sawed-off tyrant of a boss by making Mary’s, Stan (Paul Ben Victor), so in awe of her that he might be her subordinate.

Masterful mysteries

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:02:12 GMT

Rendell and Nabb transcend genre
Not in the Flesh is Ruth Rendell’s 21st Inspector Wexford novel since she and the character debuted in 1964.

SWAN SONG: Nabb’s own death shadows the final installment of the Guarnaccia series.

Not in the Flesh | By Ruth Rendell | Crown | 320 pages | $25.95

Vita Nuova | By Magdalen Nabb | Soho | 272 pages | $24

Not in the Flesh is Ruth Rendell’s 21st Inspector Wexford novel since she and the character debuted in 1964. In that time, she has also published 23 stand-alone novels, seven collections of short stories, two novellas, and 12 novels as “Barbara Vine.” And if anything, Rendell, who is now 78, is one of those artists to whom age has brought greater clarity and sharpness to a moral vision that was pitiless to begin with. It’s with good reason that John Mortimer’s line (“If it weren’t for a ridiculous literary snobbery about ‘crime writing,’ Ruth Rendell would be acclaimed as one of our most important novelists”) is often quoted by her admirers.

Rendell is too fine a writer and has, you feel, simply seen too much of human behavior to coddle anyone’s sense of niceties. Although the finish of some of her novels (notably A Sight for Sore Eyes and The Bridesmaid) can seem as if O. Henry has donned death’s own shroud, Rendell does not work the grisly side of the street. What’s grotesque in her work is the pettiness and vanity and hypocrisy of people, and the way those small sins often slide effortlessly into the commission of larger ones. Rendell is a moralist, not a nihilist. She refuses to pretend shock, but that doesn’t mean that she is incapable of being appalled.

In the past few Wexford novels, Rendell’s complete lack of hesitation in saying what people are has seemed to parallel her inspector’s increased impatience, a quality less to do with the crankiness of age than with the accumulation of experience. (Reading Wexford’s dubiousness toward a fantasy novel he’s told he won’t be able to put down reminded me of a stormy winter morning years ago in a Harvard Square bookshop. Some twit, oblivious that some of us still had to go to work, came in and chirped, “What a wonderful day to stay in and re-read The Hobbit!” Miraculously, she left the store alive.) Not in the Flesh gets a good, classic start for a mystery novel: a pensioner who pulls in some extra money truffle hunting with his dog stumbles on a long-buried corpse. Wexford and the rest of the Kinsgmarkham police squad (his natty, somewhat provincial partner Mike Burden; the younger, tiresomely PC Hannah Goldsmith, to name the most prominent) investigate. And as always, the people they encounter are so plausible that part of your brain feels compelled to protest that they could be part of the human race.

Past and present

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:30:16 GMT

Andrew Motion's is a memoir to savor
A book as scrupulously observed and beautifully wrought as Andrew Motion’s In the Blood can provide a shock of recognition. This, you think, is what memoir was meant to be.

HAPPY CHILD Motion writes about joy and discovery and the kind of fear that shapes you without necessarily scarring you.

Family memoirs have largely become entries in the abuse sweepstakes from new writers vying for attention, or else catalogues of eccentricity in which dysfunction has become the new measure of good breeding. So a book as scrupulously observed and beautifully wrought as Andrew Motion’s In the Blood can provide a shock of recognition. This, you think, is what memoir was meant to be.

Motion, the poet laureate of Great Britain, has no tale of abuse or dysfunction to relate. In the Blood is bookended by a trauma — the brain injury that his mother sustained in a riding accident when he was 17, an injury that kept her largely in a coma until her death nine years later. But this is the story of a mostly happy childhood, one with childhood’s distinct discoveries, joys, and fears, the kind that shape you without necessarily scarring you. Mostly, though, it’s about the making of a poet. In Motion’s portrait of the inner life of his childhood, that means the refinement of his powers of observation and perception, his sensitivity to the natural world and the manmade world, and especially to the people around him.

The book combines vividness of description — which conjures the physical and emotional particulars of the scenes Motion is relating (and which could not be invented later without making the invention obvious) — with the kind of reflection that, though it may come later, could not come at all without the initial keen observation that makes such reflection possible. It’s Motion’s particular gift to make his fidelity to the East Anglia landscape of his childhood of a piece with the empathy he shows to his family: his father, a slightly distant presence; his younger brother, Kit, both ally and rival; and above all, his beloved mother, his champion and confidante, balancing between providing comfort and refuge to her son and encouraging him to face the larger world.

Motion’s memories of the boarding school he attended are good enough to be placed alongside Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.” (You realize the grimness such places evoke, from Dickens chronicling Nicholas Nickleby’s encounter with Wackford Squeers on down — and there’s a great Dickensian moment: on the train trip back to school from the holidays, young Andrew realizes even the school toughie is crying.) “We didn’t help each other much at school,” Motion writes, “or make plans about how we could make it better. We kept our heads down and waited for time to pass. Scribbling out the days in a little calendar I kept inside my Bible. Counting down towards the holidays or the visits our parents were allowed to make twice a term.”

War of words

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:08:58 GMT

Is reading good for you?
Freelance writers are often the recipient of unusual opportunities.

BOOKED: Reading, Brottman says, has become “a new panacea that conquers everything.”

The Solitary Vice: Against Reading | By Mikita Brottman | Counterpoint | 240 pages | $14.95

Freelance writers are often the recipient of unusual opportunities. Recently I had the chance to interview a former member of the Gambino crime family who, during his 10 years in prison, discovered both Orthodox Judaism and Marcel Proust and has written a memoir about how this changed his life. One reason I turned it down was that it seemed to play into the most persistent fantasy of the literate: reading makes you a better person.

In The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, Mikita Brottman says no to that supposition, not in thunder but in the voice of common sense. Brottman, a professor of Language, Literature, and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, has written a book that’s part memoir of an English childhood spent willingly isolated among books and part polemic attacking the shibboleths that currently surround reading.

It is not an argument against books or against reading but an attempt to be clear about the act. Over the phone from Baltimore, Brottman tells me she got “disgusted” with the Reading Is Fundamental campaigns and their kind. “Reading has become an unassailable virtue. There are more kids who were like me than one would suspect whom reading has kind of separated from their family, led them to be dissatisfied with the world outside of books, given them a vocabulary they can’t use.” Reading, she says, has become “a new panacea that conquers everything.”

Part of what Brottman is reacting against here is the sweeping claims that deify reading without taking into account its reality. She mentions a particularly wrongheaded New York Times op-ed from 2004 in which Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon) banged on that old saw beloved of reading groupies: Literary Culture Is Active, Visual Culture Is Passive.

Nonsense, says Brottman. “Literacy is so important to our culture because there is no real outlet for people to have different kinds of intelligence.” In other words, literacy has become the only way to measure intelligence. “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or a great artist or a great musician, when it comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.”

Paradis found

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:24:41 GMT

The chanteuse is loose
Must we still make the case for French pop?

FRENCH KICKS: Even if you don’t know what Vanessa Paradis is singing about, it’s the sound that hooks you.

Must we still make the case for French pop? Just as Jerry Lewis gags are a stand-by when claiming that French tastes belong at the bottom of the pissoir, threadbare bon mots about plastic, lifeless French pop are hauled out to assert those froggies can’t rock. Typical is Jim Farber’s recent New York Daily News review of No Promises, the second CD from the sudden first lady of France, Carla Bruni. He drags out all the clichés about French chanteuses substituting fey breathiness for singing and then shoehorns Bruni in among them. (Note to Farber and his editors: don’t let it bother you that Bruni is Italian and sings this album in English.)

We’ve long since reached the stage where hipsters can be relied on to have an Air or a Serge Gainsbourg CD in their collection, maybe even a Françoise Hardy or a Keren Ann. But where’s the clamor for the latest from premier French hip-hopper MC Solaar, or new discs from Étienne Daho and Benjamin Biolay? Biolay, with his designer scruffiness (Bruce Weber shot the photos for his new CD) and velvet-gravel voice, is lately being treated as something like the reincarnation of Gainsbourg. He has far to go for that — but his work does have some of the master’s sly dreaminess, and his marriage to Chiara Mastroianni (daughter of Marcello and Catherine Deneuve) gives him a chance to reach Serge and Jane levels of coolness (as does their duo project, Home).

It’s high time non-French pop fans discovered Vanessa Paradis. Best known in these parts as the gal who lured Johnny Depp to France (and bore him two children), Paradis has been a huge star since her first hit (at 14), “Joe le taxi,” and her second album, which was composed for her by Gainsbourg. She’s also proved to be a superb, instinctive screen actress.

Paradis has recently released her fifth studio album, Divinidylle (Barclay import), and though it doesn’t have the sustained pop punch of her live Vanessa Paradis au Zénith or Vanessa Paradis, her 1992 English-language album written (mostly) and produced by Lenny Kravitz and capturing, as nothing else quite does, the sound of early ’70s candypop, it offers the pleasures that make it worth waiting for her albums.

Werewolf’s song

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:12:38 GMT

Toby Barlow’s verse novel has teeth
The story, the emotion, and the beauty and precision of Barlow’s language can convince you that new writers who want to experiment are not all zombies risen from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

CLOSE SHAVE: Werewolves, yes, but Barlow’s verse is more literary than pop.

Sharp Teeth | by Toby Barlow | Harper Collins | 324 pages | $22.95

Here’s what you need to know about Toby Barlow’s debut novel, Sharp Teeth: (1) It’s about packs of werewolves roaming modern-day Los Angeles; (2) It’s written in unrhymed verse; (3) The story, the emotion, and the beauty and precision of Barlow’s language can convince you that new writers who want to experiment are not all zombies risen from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to suck the life out of American fiction. To judge from Barlow’s author photo, he even shaves regularly.

Sharp Teeth provides the combination of smarts, lyricism, and thrills that you might associate with the brainiest horror and fantasy entertainments. If you loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you’ll probably love Sharp Teeth. But it’s not a pop novel. Barlow doesn’t kid the premise — his humor is of a drier sort. There’s suspense and narrative momentum, but the story, even at its most violent, isn’t visceral. Barlow takes a mournful, sage tone. The poet’s voice telling us the story is speaking, as storytellers almost always do, about matters that are settled, events that can’t be changed.

For all that it has the elements of a thriller plot, with competing wolfpacks (used, among other things, by big-time meth dealers to take out their small-time competition) and shifting loyalties, Barlow has written a novel about the connections — familial, social, romantic — we form, about how easily they break, and about the comfort to be found in the compromises we never thought we’d settle for. A schlocky horror novel would set us up for slaughter when Lark, the leader of one pack and one of Barlow’s two protagonists, is adopted by a lonely woman. (Werewolves here look like dogs when they change over.) But Lark finds that he loves the affection she gives him, and that he can take pleasure in the affection he gives her.

The parallel to that is the story between the other protagonist, the sweet, kindhearted dogcatcher Anthony, and the unnamed female of Lark’s pack who, sent to seduce Anthony, instead falls for him. This is another tale of adoption, only in this one it’s the wolf who adopts the human.

The cyborg and the sistah

CHARLES TAYLOR — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:51:55 GMT

Janet’s Discipline and Badu’s New AmErykah
What’s in a fantasy world?

What’s in a fantasy world? Both Janet Jackson’s Discipline (Island) and Erykah Badu’s New AmErykah, Part One (4th World War) (Universal/Motown) are structured as journeys. On the sleek, metallic Discipline, Jackson logs onto a computer and is greeted by the robotic voice of “Kyoko,” which assumes the roles of guide, servant, and cybertherapist over the course of the album. On Badu’s sinuous sprawl of a record, the opening “AmErykahn Promise” describes a train ride to America whose destination seems to be both Ellis Island and Auschwitz. A Darth Vader–sounding conductor instructs passengers where to leave their valuables and orders a “brain sample” taken from one resistant rider.

As conceits go, they’re both ridiculous. Jackson’s is a meaningless nod to digital culture; Badu’s is steeped, as her record intermittently is, in Nation of Islam bullshit. But for all the ideological wooziness of New AmErykah, Part One (Part Two will follow in the summer, and another record in the fall), for all the weirdness that caused the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff to label it “a deep, murky swim in her brain,” it’s an inviting record and, yes, a record to wade into and swim around in but also one that sounds as if it had been made by someone living in the world.

Discipline is the kind of record you forget before you’re finished listening to it. Its synthesized, programmed sound, the silvery packaging and black-and-white photographs (with Jackson looking something like a cross between a dominatrix and Sally Bowles by way of Blade Runner), the sexless sexiness of Jackson’s come-ons and confidences, all add up to an artifact that looks and sounds as if it had been untouched by human hands. Discipline is a like a piece of coffee-table erotica that’s safe to display precisely because it has no chance of turning you on.

It now seems a very long time ago that we were able to talk about Janet Jackson as a performer who was much more interesting — and certainly making better music — than her brother. Her best album remains 1997’s The Velvet Rope (Virgin), with its radio-friendly singles, especially “Got ’til It’s Gone” (which benefitted from the gnomic seductiveness of Q-Tip’s participation) and the scary piece of sexual rage “What About.” If on that number Jackson didn’t go to a place that would have made it scalding, it was still harder and meaner than anything you’d have expected to find on a CD of superstar pop.

Cover girls

CHARLES TAYLOR — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:42:59 GMT

Cat Power and Shelby Lynne
On Cat Power’s second album of covers, she might be traveling the same territory Elvis did in “Kentucky Rain” — a country road with low clouds on a chill, gray afternoon.

RISKY BUSINESS: Whatever the psychodramas of Cat Power’s past live shows, the music on Jukebox is anything but fragile.

Cat Power, "Metal Heart" (mp3)

On Cat Power’s Jukebox (Matador), her second album of covers, Chan Marshall might be traveling the same territory Elvis did in “Kentucky Rain” — a country road with low clouds pressing down on a chill, gray afternoon. Her voice comes at you as if from a flatbed truck as it goes around the bend up in the distance — it hits you on the rebound. By the time the vocals reach your ears, Marshall is gone. The drama of the songs is in the past. What she gives you is the shredded equilibrium of someone living in the aftermath. On Jukebox, even when she’s most direct, most urgent, her presence is defined by an absence. You don’t hear the hurt as much as you do the wound.

Marshall includes the lines “I once was lost but now I’m found/Was blind but now I see” from “Amazing Grace” in her own “Metal Heart” (one of the two songs she wrote on the album), and by now no one should be able to bring anything new to that hymn. But she strips the sense of transcendence and deliverance that the lines usually express. Instead she offers them up as plain accounting of her state, in the manner of someone not hiding from her past but not dwelling on it, either.

The notorious psychodramas that used to make up Marshall’s live shows have become an unfortunate part of her public image. Various profiles in the last few years have talked about the emotional grounding she’s achieved. I’ve never seen Marshall live (she plays Thursday, February 7, at the Orpheum), and I may be alone on this, but, without denying the emotion of these performances, what I hear on Jukebox is anything but fragile. At times it’s akin to the narrative voice you find in the best American hard-boiled writing, maybe one that could speak these lines from David Goodis’s The Wounded and the Slain: “I’m trying to be something, so that wherever you are, you can say to yourself that it wasn’t a waste of your heart and your life.” The gamble that it might all be for nothing is implicit, and so — in Marshall’s best moments, the last-woman-standing defiance of Bob Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” the that’s-the-way-it-is acceptance of her take on Spooner Oldham & Dan Penn’s “A Woman Left Lonely” — is her willingness to risk that.

Tough thrill

CHARLES TAYLOR — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:17:43 GMT

Household justice
People who love this book tend to talk as if reading it were experiencing something terrible and necessary.

CRICKET: Household creates unbearable tension by keeping his fugitive in one place.

Some books strike startlingly similar chords in their readers. Whenever I’ve come across someone else who’s read Geoffrey Household’s 1939 Rogue Male — just reissued by the New York Review of Books in their series of classics returned to print — neither one of us has ever talked about the book in the gleeful or excited way readers usually talk about thrillers. People who love this book tend to talk as if reading it were experiencing something terrible and necessary.

Household wasn’t a sadistic writer. By any standards (not just contemporary ones), the violence here is rendered with great discretion. Household’s unnamed protagonist is an aristocrat sportsman, and his view of the world is very much along the lines of what is and isn’t cricket. (Looking at the dust jacket photo of Household that adorned the novels he wrote in the ’70s and ’80s—snow-white mustache and fringe of hair, plaid sports coat and ascot, and affectionately holding a big marmalade cat whose tough tabby expression tells you he’d prefer to be on his own fours — it’s easy to imagine Household possessing that sense of fair play.) RogueMale is about trying to hold onto some sense of justice and proportion while finding the tactics to defeat a force that has no recognition, no interest, in those qualities.

The book opens in an unnamed European country (read: Germany) with the hero being found in possession of a rifle with a telescopic sight outside the country home (read: Berchtesgaden) of the country’s leader (read: Hitler). Tortured and left for dead, the anonymous hunter manages to make his way back to England, only to find that agents of the European power have pursued him. His English gentleman’s sense of responsibility will not allow him to involve the government in an international incident by seeking their protection, so he flees to a foxhole in the country.

Part of what makes Rogue Male so memorable is the oddness of its form. This is a novel of pursuit in which the pursued stays mostly in one place. Household was a great physical writer. As his hero makes his hideout, building his underground lair and covering his tracks, both he and his creator display a sensitivity to the English countryside, a sense that it will provide shelter and food and also spiritual ease. The most peaceful moments of the book are the hero’s remarking of the sound sleep he finds in some copse or the hollow of a tree.

Nerd noir

CHARLES TAYLOR — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:55:55 GMT

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ’s Black Dossier
This volume, the first published solely as a graphic novel, is the comic as fetish object.

EPOCHAL: In Black Dossier, writer Alan Moore is the fanboy as grad student.

The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Black Dossier | By Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill | America’s Best comics | 208 pages $29.99

The third volume of writer Alan Moore & illustrator Kevin O’Neill’s multi-generational popular-fiction mash-up, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, is an amazing geegaw. This volume, the first published solely as a graphic novel, is the comic as fetish object.

For those of you just joining our story, the LOEG, as it’s called, is a group of unusual individuals working for British intelligence. Its first incarnation, the Murray Group, owes its name to Mina Murray, née Harker, the heroine of Dracula, who has proved her exceptional strength by surviving the attentions of that ruler of the undead. Also in her group are Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, the deranged killer Edward Hyde, and the man who becomes Mina’s lover, Allan Quatermain.

The idea was to weave the icons of popular fiction into a kind of master narrative. That suits Moore’s conspiratorial imaginings as well as his Poindexter’s impulse to show off his knowledge. In Black Dossier, he’s the fanboy as grad student. Borrowing from Graham Greene’s The Third Man and enlisting as one of the Dossier League members Virginia Woolf’s time-traveling, gender-switching hero(ine) Orlando, Moore and O’Neill range well beyond the literature of the fantastic. Prospero makes an appearance in this edition, as does Spenser’s Faerie Queene. 1984 is a major plot source, and there’s a young agent named Emma Night. Fans of The Avengers will remember that Mrs. Peel’s maiden name was Knight; perhaps the “K” has been dropped to suggest that the purposes of the government she serves are less noble than dark.

In this installment, it’s 1958, and Britain, having won the war against Adenoid Hynkel (the name Chaplin gave to Hitler in The Great Dictator) and overcome the Ingsoc government (i.e., Big Brother) that came to power after the war, is out to smother the dirty secrets its intelligence operatives of the past might spill. Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain — who dipped into a fountain of youth in a previous adventure and are now sprightlier than ever at, respectively, 84 and around 135 — steal the dossier containing those secrets and find themselves pursued by British agents.

Covering Dylan

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:05:25 GMT

From Newport to I’m Not There
Dylan is his own cover band.

THAT WAS THEN: Dylan’s open, direct, funny appearance at Newport in 1963 set him up for the reverence and the hatred that followed.

The unnamable: Todd Haynes’s not-Dylan movie. By Jon Garelick

He's here: Todd Haynes talks about his Dylan movie. By Rob Nelson

Agent Zimmerman: Bob Dylan? A CIA spy? Wait . . . now it all makes sense. (Or as much sense as his lyrics make, anyway.) By James Parker

Watching the various Dylans that parade and steal and strut and drift through Todd Haynes’s exhilarating I’m Not There, and watching the changes Dylan himself goes through in Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror, which compiles his performances at the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1965, you realize that there’s something profoundly beside the point about Bob Dylan covers. Dylan is his own cover band. The way he always reinvented himself and reinvented his songs (anyone remember the squalling, unrecognizable “Masters of War” he unleashed at the Grammy Awards as the first Gulf War was getting under way?) has, with some notable exceptions, stayed ahead of what most artists are able to wrest from his songs.

The prize of the two-CD soundtrack to I’m Not There (Sony) is the title track, which Dylan and the Band recorded during the “Basement Tapes” sessions. Not only was it never officially released, but it’s among the scarcest of Dylan’s bootlegs. It’s an amazing performance — steady and plaintive — that holds at bay the drama building up in it, and Dylan’s voice has an almost keening edge. The song all but bookends the album, closing it and also providing the second track, a marvelous cover by Sonic Youth that captures that band’s knack (as on their version of the Carpenters’ “Superstar”) for paying homage to a source while providing their own song — in this case the charged aural drift that they have, over the years, staked out as the territory where they’re the chief explorers.

As with all tribute albums — which is what this soundtrack amounts to — some things work and some things don’t. And some things that seem just fine in the movie, like Richie Havens as a porch-front musician singing “Tombstone Blues,” don’t work so well when you put on the CD and realize you have to listen to . . . Richie Havens. “Ballad of a Thin Man,” done here by Stephen Malkmus and the Million Dollar Bashers (consisting of, among others, Steve Shelley, Thurston Moore, and Tony Garnier from Dylan’s touring band), is mesmerizing in the film when it’s coming out of Cate Blanchett’s Dylan. But without the visual, it’s diminished, though Malkmus still captures the song’s murderous essence.

Superbad: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

CHARLES TAYLOR — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:54:02 GMT

Lakeshore
Teen movies have long used the funkiest black music to throw into relief the shenanigans of the nerdiest white guys.

Star power

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:55:55 GMT

Deneuve demystifies — and enchants
Deneuve has been in the public eye long enough to know that only damn fools reveal themselves to the public.

TRISTANA: Deneuve’s recounting of the mundane details of filmmaking only enhances the magic of good movies.

The onslaught of DVD extras, and the sort of PR disguised as journalism that’s practiced on shows like Entertainment Tonight and in publications like Vanity Fair, has resulted in making coverage of moviemaking more widespread — and less real — than ever. Close Up and Personal: The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve isn’t a great book, and readers whose appetite for juice is whetted by that subtitle are going to be disappointed. Deneuve has been in the public eye long enough to know — especially in a culture where gossip functions as pornography — that only damn fools reveal themselves to the public. But a real person emerges in these pages, and, through that restrained self-portrait, so does the process of making movies.

The mundanity of what Deneuve records functions as its own form of demystification. You get the sense in these diaries of people working in conditions that are good or adverse, of the boredom of waiting for lighting, the chore of getting the right make-up or costumes. And this demystification makes you realize just how mysterious, how fortunate, it is when a good movie results from this process. Truffaut once said that at the beginning of a shoot he hoped to make a great movie and that by the middle he was hoping to make a movie. There’s no particular despair evident in Up Close and Personal, but that same sense of “who the hell knows?” comes through.

The diaries Deneuve has included were kept during the shoots for both good movies (Waris Regnier’s East-West, Luis Buñuel’s Tristana) and lousy ones (Stuart Rosenberg’s 1969 romantic comedy The April Fools, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark). There’s also a diary of her harried experience on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival — which only proves that film festivals are no place to judge movies.

There are movies I’d have preferred to read about, such as Jacques Demy’s Les demoiselles de Rochefort|The Young Girls of Rochefort, in which she starred with her sister Françoise Dorléac, shortly before Dorléac was killed in a car crash. (In an interview with Pascal Bonitzer, Deneuve alludes to the devastation she felt: “It’s hard to talk about the challenges of being an actress, unless you have a close actress friend, which I don’t, and I realised how much I was missing Françoise, how much I missed being able to share in the way you only can when you’re personally close and do the same kind of work.”) Or Leos Carax’s mad and maddening Pola X, in which Deneuve seems to exist only for us to drink in her glamor. (The few lines she writes on the film are perceptive: “Carax would do well to work with a scriptwriter, but there aren’t enough scriptwriters anymore, because unfortunately, they all become directors.”) Or any of her collaborations with André Téchiné.

Fabulous fakes

CHARLES TAYLOR — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:01:00 GMT

Charmed by the Traveling Wilburys
If “The Basement Tapes” had been conceived for the Top 40, it might have sounded much like the Traveling Wilburys.

VIDEO: Traveling Wilburys, "At the End of the Line"

If “The Basement Tapes” had been conceived for the Top 40, it might have sounded much like the Traveling Wilburys. The connection goes well beyond Bob Dylan’s appearance in both sets. The Wilburys sing songs of the weird and the gnomic. Their music is cryptic, salacious, funny, defiant, heartbreaking. What distinguishes it from the songs Dylan and the Band recorded in Big Pink is that you can dance to damn near every one of the little boogers.

The two Wilburys albums — Traveling Wilburys, Volume 1 and the follow-up, which George Harrison, with Pythonesque tongue in cheek, named Traveling Wilburys, Volume 3 — have been brought together along with a DVD of their videos and a new documentary in The Traveling Wilburys Collection (Rhino). And it’s a tribute to the Wilburys’ weird achievement that even this somewhat deluxe treatment doesn’t make the music into any big deal. It still has the casual oddity that from the time the first album appeared, in 1988, was always its charm.

Warner Bros. Records “Chairman Emeritus” Mo Ostin explains in his liner notes how Harrison, ELO leader Jeff Lynne, and their buddies Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison came together to record “Handle with Care” as the intended B-side of a Harrison single. Ostin thought it was too good to toss away on that, and he persuaded Harrison and his buds to expand the masquerade into a full album. By the time a second album was made, a few years later, “Lefty Wilbury” (Orbison) had died. Volume 3 is dedicated to him; a photo in the CD booklet shows the four surviving Wilburys sitting around a kitchen table on which sits a pair of sunglasses that might well be Orbison’s ubiquitous shades.

In 1988, Orbison was making the lovely comeback LP Mystery Girl, but none of the other Wilburys was at anything like a creative peak when they recorded Volume 1. The joy of what they created in the studio has much to do with their treating the enterprise as a lark and not with any supergroup solemnity. The paradox is that these adopted personas allow the performers to seem effortlessly like themselves. It’s doubtful, for instance, that Harrison ever got the puckish humor of his screen appearances into his music the way he did here.

Holding out Hope

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:16:58 GMT

Mandy Moore does it her way
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a bar having a quiet late-afternoon cocktail when I became aware of an insistent, irritating noise.

VIDEO: Mandy Moore, "Extraordinary

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a bar having a quiet late-afternoon cocktail when I became aware of an insistent, irritating noise. As I concentrated on it, the noise resolved into a voice somewhere between a mewl and a whine. To my alarm, I realized I knew exactly what the voice was going to say next. And then I realized it was Patti Smith’s cover of “Smells like Teen Spirit.”

Were Smith’s earnest, deadening cover a parody of a folkie attempting to be “with it,” it might match the brilliance of the outtake from A Mighty Wind in which the Folksmen turn the Stones’ “Start Me Up” into a cheery sing-along (“You make a blind man cum/Cummm”). But it ain’t a parody. And as the high priestess droned on, I began wondering why this atrocity has automatic hip cachet when, for the last three years, I’ve had to cajole, beg, shame, and bully people into listening to Mandy Moore’s Coverage.

You’d think that turning your back on the teen pop that made you famous to do a cover album of great ’70s and ’80s pop songs — songs your target audience couldn’t care less about (“Elton who?”) — and getting dumped from your record label would be enough hipness for anyone. Freed from the processed, saccharine pap of her contemporaries, Mandy Moore revealed a rich, warm, surprisingly muscular voice. And, with the lone exception of the irredeemable “Moonshadow” (by Cat Stevens, a/k/a Yusuf Islam), her taste was superb. Coverage (Epic) showed a predilection for the best sort of mainstream singer-songwriter pop: Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” John Hiatt’s “Show a Little Faith in Me,” Joe Jackson’s “Breaking Us in Two,” and, best of all, Joan Armatrading’s “Drop the Pilot,” which Moore turned into a first-class rave-up. “I figured,” she tells me on the phone from Los Angeles, “there were other people my age and younger who had missed out on this music, and I hoped to introduce an audience to it and then, hopefully, get them listening back to the original artists. But nobody really listened to Coverage.”

Some people recognized just how good the album was — Spin called it the best covers album since Bowie Pinups. More typical was the reaction of a friend who, on my recommendation, bought Coverage to teach his toddler about ’70s and ’80s music. A few weeks later, he informed me his wife had thrown it in the trash. (This aesthetic judgment courtesy of people who subject their children to the horror that is the Wiggles.)

Before and after the Riot

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:48:12 GMT

Sly Stone’s lost utopia
When Sly Stone sang “Listen to the voices,” who could have known that, in just three years, voices of an entirely different sort would take him over?

STARTING AT ZERO: As befits the leader of a racially and sexually integrated band, Sly Stone had confidence that people were better than their prejudices.

When Sly Stone sang “Listen to the voices” on the 1968 “Dance to the Music,” who could have known that, in just three years, voices of an entirely different sort would take him over? But when you listen to the rhythmic strands of nonsense syllables that provide the break in “Dance to the Music,” building tension until Sly and the rest of the Family Stone return in full euphoric force, it’s hard not to hear the buried, cryptic voices that crawl out of the recesses of the band’s 1971 There’s a Riot Goin’ On, a sound that would cause Greil Marcus to call the album “golem music.”

Three years. Not too little a stretch of time for a ’60s performer to end up at a place that would have been unthinkable when he started. That was the time it took the Beatles to go from A Hard Day’s Night to Sgt. Pepper, Dylan from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to Blonde on Blonde. But no one besides Sly Stone in effect ended his career with the implicit message to his audience that what had come before was a lie. There were records after Riot, just as Jean-Luc Godard made movies after Weekend. Yet if the music that preceded Riot still sounds too good and too true to be a lie, the finality of the album cannot be argued with. For Sly, it was the equivalent of the finish of Weekend, when the title “Fin du cinéma” made it seem as if Godard had just jumped off the planet.

There are other albums to talk about — six, in fact — in the new Epic/Legacy limited-edition box set Sly and the Family Stone: The Collection. (They’re also available individually.) But with the exception of the 1969 Stand!, they’re all swallowed into the black hole of Riot. The attraction of this long-overdue reissue series is the remastered editions of albums that have been unavailable or available in cheap first-generation CD configuration. The bonus material to be found is mostly instrumentals and a few edits for the singles market. None of it is memorable. Worse, Epic/Legacy has failed to include the non-album singles. Which means that you can blow $70 on this set and still come home without the essential “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” and the band’s most beautiful song, “Everybody Is a Star.”

Singin’ the trues

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:33:08 GMT

Martina McBride shows what she’s got
I’d be lying if I said I’ve liked every song I’ve ever heard Martina McBride do.

VIDEO: Martina McBride, "Anyway"

I’d be lying if I said I’ve liked every song I’ve ever heard Martina McBride do. But in the 13 years I’ve been listening to her, I’ve never once felt she was lying. For such a hugely popular singer, she’s done more than her share to resist the anonymity of contemporary country. The possessor of one of those rare voices that just gets bigger and stronger as it increases in volume, McBride doesn’t sing what she doesn’t feel. She may be incapable of that. That’s the blessing of her talent.

The curse of that gift is that no song on her new Waking Up Laughing (RCA) is as good as the way she sings it. This is her first time as a producer, and the first time she’s had a hand in writing some of her songs. The opening bodes well. It’s called “If I Had Your Name,” and its chorus ends with the great kiss-off “If I had your name/I’d be changin’ it right now.” She sings this as if she meant every syllable, as if it had been weighted and considered before it was spoken — and it’s all the more withering. The mandolin, steel-guitar, and fiddle work — by, respectively, Bryan Sutton, Paul Franklin, and Larry Franklin — is reassuringly “country” and not MOR trying to pass for country.

You can hear the plainspoken, unforced toughness McBride is capable of on “Cry Cry (’Til the Sun Shines)” — it’s in the way she bites down on “kicked” in the line “He always talked her down/He took her pride and kicked it ’round,” relishing its hardness. “Cry Cry” is one of those empowerment songs McBride has been singing since 1997’s “Evolution,” and, as always, her singing emphasizes the specificity of the situation instead of the bromide. She knocks the Oprah out of these numbers. They aren’t her great “Independence Day,” a song so fierce and alive to contradiction that it can never be smoothed over or tidied up (only “Smells like Teen Spirit” surpasses it as the best single of the ’90s), but then, what is?

So though I don’t doubt the sincerity of songs that suggest caring can ameliorate the woes of the world, the material on Waking Up Laughing underlines what McBride is leaving out. “For These Times” is a state-of-the-world song that makes no specific references and isn’t likely to offend anyone. “I’ll Still Be Me” posits a stable marriage as the answer to the fears that wake you up at 3 am. “Anyway,” one of the CD’s best performances, includes the line “God is great, but sometimes life ain’t good.” That’s a measure of the plainspokenness of which country music is capable. What it leads to here, though, is certainty and reassurance: “Sometimes when I pray, it doesn’t turn out like I think it should/But I do it anyway.”

Mary Weiss

CHARLES TAYLOR — Fri, 18 May 2007 13:53:30 GMT

Dangerous Game | Norton
“I don’t write hits,” sings Mary Weiss on her first — at 58 — solo album.