Trust me, I’m the reasonable ideologue
30 October, 2009
Bret Stephens uses his column to bait “global warmists”.
The spark for this particular column is an item in the new book SuperFreakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner. They report a new solution to global warming proposed by Intellectual Ventures (a company which largely serves as a clearinghouse for technological and scientific patents): pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, in order to mimic the global temperature-lowering properties of the Mt. Pinatubo volcano.
After this announcement, various prominent global warming activists are quoted as calling the idea crazy. You can already see where Stephens is going with this, can’t you? He gets in a good dig with the First Commandment of global warming, which is Thou Shalt Not Call It A Religion, and then adds a handful of disputed facts to show that global warming is not an issue, if it is an issue it’s not our fault, and we can’t do anything about it either way.
This logical approach, quite common in the anti-global warming camp, always reminds me of Sir Humphrey Appleby’s eternal wisdom, the standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis:
In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.
Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.
Stephens goes on to suggest that people who warn of the global warming crisis are all after a piece of the public-spending action. In some cases this may be true, though both scientists and professional activists tend not to find work difficult to get in any case. He doesn’t mention the possibility that people who’ve grown enormously rich via polluting industries (or who hope to do so) have at least equal incentive to find the facts as favouring their side of the argument. These rich people also have a lot more resources with which to promote their interests.
Finally, Stephens comes out and calls global warming activists and their many “fellow travellers” Marxists, as both ideas feed “man’s neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence”. I have no doubt that there are many mindless ideologues in the global warming camp, but True Believers are found in every avenue of life, and their existence is no proof of the falsity of their ideas. Many anti-global warming campaigners are obviously on the band wagon for the chance to relive the culture wars of old, regardless that the issues at stake do not exactly co-align.
What of the proposal itself, to pump sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere? Here are the obvious counterarguments, which I hope you will see are not merely ideological kneejerk reactions:
1. Sulphur dioxide has negative environmental effects: it contributes to acid rain (which is why industry in the West has been reducing its coal and petroleum emissions since the 1970s), which has a negative effect on foliage and water supplies, this eventually causing harm to living creatures. Atmospheric sulphur dioxide is also associated with increased respiratory symptoms and disease, difficulty in breathing, and premature death.
2. Continually pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere will require a large ongoing supply. If global warming causes increase in strength, more will be required. It may be easier to just set off a volcano.
3. If global warming is “solved” by sulphur dioxide, action to reduce emissions may be halted (will be halted, if we are honest about these things). As emissions increase unchecked, more sulphur dioxide will need to be used to offset the problem, which will exacerbate the issues mentioned in point one.
So, a less caustic substance would be better. But even so, the cause of the problem would increase.
But according to Stephens, the problem itself doesn’t exist in the first place, so why has he written a column about the “solution”?
Well, he is an ideologue, and his concern is with ideological combat, not the problems of the real world. Ideologues on both sides of the argument would best be ignored, leaving the grown-ups to manage the problems without their “help”.
Plato’s argument for censorship
24 September, 2009
“Children cannot distinguish between what is allegory and what isn’t, and opinions formed at that age are usually difficult to eradicate or change; it is important that the first stories they hear shall aim at producing the right moral effect.” (Republic, Book Two, 378).
Source: Plato vs. Grand Theft Auto
Muslim men hate women
28 August, 2009
That muslim men hate women is the only conclusion I can arrive at, based on things I’ve heard in passing, and this nauseating article (I mean that the subject is nauseating, not the prose). Really, what benefit is there to society, by letting these ways take hold in the West? How long will Europe remain tolerant – until there is a sufficient Muslim vote to introduce sharia law? We can’t fight this awful trend until we have the courage to stop demeaning ourselves and praising other, more “authentic” cultures. We need to be proud of (and indeed more fully aware of) the Western virtues of freedom of thought, expression, and the search for knowledge, which we take for granted but which arrived only by centuries of struggle. Otherwise, just as a person with low self-esteem will always become a victim, all that is of worth in the West will be suppressed and trodden underfoot.
The ugly truth about the American health care industry
20 August, 2009
An insightful interview with a 20-year employee of the American health care industry, now resigned and speaking out for health care reform.
Notable passages from the interview:
It doesn’t have to be stated directly to [corporate bureaucrats] that you will be paid a particular bonus if you deny X number of claims; it’s known, and it’s part of the culture.
…
For elective procedures in many of these countries, yes, you might wait longer for some elective procedure. You might wait longer for an MRI than you would in this country because, on a per capita basis, there are often more machines here than in some of those other systems. But life expectancy in almost every one of these other countries is greater than ours. People do not have to wait long for urgent or necessary care.
…
Reform without the public option would be far less meaningful and effective. The public option may not go as far as people would like in some ways, but we need a mechanism that controls costs and makes healthcare more available to citizens. It would go a long way toward keeping the insurance industry more honest, as the president has said.
…
It doesn’t make a lot of sense. On the one hand, [Conservatives are] saying that [a public option] would put the private sector at an unfair disadvantage, while they’re also saying that the private sector can operate more efficiently. They are trying to have it both ways. But the reality is that the free-market simply does not work in the healthcare sector as it might in other sectors. A public insurance plan wouldn’t need to have the sales, marketing, and underwriting expenses—and would certainly not need to pay executives exorbitant salaries, and would not need to set aside a significant chunk of every premium dollar to pay shareholders—that private plans do.
…
The reason I started speaking out is I knew the insurance industry would come out with guns blazing to kill reform. I knew the tactics they’d be using and buzzwords they’d be repeating—especially through their shills in Congress, media and business. It’s the same old playbook. I know it because I essentially helped write it. … Because we’re talking about billions and billions of dollars at stake for those companies and investors.
…
Medicare is far more popular than almost any private health insurance program in the country. And people in [Veteran's Administration programs] are certainly very grateful. But many of them don’t know that it’s a public program.
…
One of the big PR firms [for] the insurance industry is APCO Worldwide. They’ve represented the industry for quite a long time. They’re skilled at setting up front groups to spread disinformation to challenge proposals. So they will get talking points into the hands of conservative radio talk show hosts and editorial writers at conservative publications. It all comes from the health insurance industry, but they spread this stuff in such a way that their fingerprints are not directly on it. … The tragic thing about these town hall meetings is how some of these angry citizens are being manipulated. When you see these stories about the meetings and how the participants are so concerned about government takeover of our healthcare system, they use the very words that were fed to them by the health insurance industry, not realizing that that’s where they came from, not realizing that they are unwitting pawns of the industry. Because they hear that stuff from people they believe are credible, like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.
NY critics go in for Francis Bacon bashing
22 June, 2009
With the arrival of the Francis Bacon retrospective at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, it seems the new fashion is to deride him, in an attempt to undermine and indeed eradicate his reputation. Chief suspects today are Jed Perl in the New Republic, and Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker (though you have to pay to read the whole article and find out how bitchy he really was, so I’ll be concentrating on Perl).
Typically for art critics, their devastating points are knowing allusions instead of anything concrete. They raise a veritable haystack of strawmen to knock down, and, as far as the actual paintings go, show themselves to have been rendered either blind or unfeeling by their occupation.
Perl says Bacon “owns” the “wrongheaded” tradition of the artist as romantic rebel, for the last half century. I’m not sure how he expects anyone with basic art knowledge to accept this, as (1), despite his insinuation that this was a special pursuit of Bacon’s, every artist aspires to this role, and (2) there are plenty of other, more famous artists eligible for the role, most notably Jackson Pollock (whom the US critics still don’t have the nerve to put down).
(“They are little more than rectangles of canvas inscribed with noirish graffiti.” I wonder how many canvases of literal graffiti have been praised by Perl over the years?)
“He zeroed in on those moments when Van Gogh and Picasso were pushing their glorious anarchic energy to the brink of incoherence [but] Bacon willfully ignored their ordering intelligence, preferring to sacrifice pictorial sensibility to literary sensationalism.” Schjeldahl made the same accusation of literary-ness, which made me nostalgic for Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, which pointed out the ubiquitous use of this slur by modernist critics, who do so without accounting for what this term means and why is is so awful. I suppose it’s a slightly more specific term than “pictorial sensibility”, which as far as I can tell means “the sense of being a picture”.
“The Bacon mystique is not grounded in his paintings so much as in a glamorous list of extenuating circumstances.” This was also one of Schjeldahl’s jibes, that Bacon’s celebrity accounts for his reputation as a painter. Well, however much you repeat it, it remains unprovable, and certainly untrue in my case. I’ve encountered my share of homosexual sleaze, and to be honest Bacon’s shabby adventures bore me. A Bohemian who drank and liked rough trade? That’s hardly headline-grabbing stuff, is it?
(I’ll just briefly note here that no intelligent person takes an artist’s catalogue notes seriously. The stuff about wanting to express directly through paint was what critics of the time wanted to hear, shallow creatures that they are.)
Next Perl accuses Bacon of pandering to “intellectuals and jet-setters”, and of being “carefully calculated”, and in the painting of the death of his lover, “he gives his work a tabloid frisson.” Gee, can you see what he’s subtly implying here? He’s a fake, a sell-out – he’s not Real (this accusation based on no observable facts).
Let’s dissect this sentence: “[He runs] signs and symbols through the shredder,” i.e. he’s casual and doesn’t take Art seriously, “producing puzzles and enigmas,” i.e. he’s deliberately vague in order to fake the sensation of meaning, “flotsam and jetsam floating in a chic void,” chic corresponding with the “jet-setters” of the previous paragraph to imply he’s merely in it for the money. I remind the reader again that no evidence is produced for these arty-sounding insinuations.
“Bacon’s version of the man-all-alone-in-an-unfriendly-world routine takes on a retro appeal. … “Oh, that again.” ” Now Perl has taken a different tack: even if you used to like Bacon, you surely couldn’t now – it’s just old hat, isn’t it? Yesterday’s rags. The fashions have moved on! (Yes, he is in fact saying “If you like Bacon, you will be unfashionable”, which I sadly suppose is an argument with much power to move.)
“This emotional dissonance fits right in with a postmodern taste for muddleheaded irony” – so what kind of dissonance would fit with genuine irony?
Bacon’s Pope paintings have “a howling 1950s look” (1950s? How dated).
“By the 1970s, Bacon’s surfaces are smoother, at times looking almost airbrushed.” Airbrushed 1970s? Certainly redolent of a tacky panelvan painting – touché!
“The stretches of flatly applied paint in tan, gray, pink, and orange suggest the streamlined chic of the 1970s, when furnishings and clothes were done up in Ultrasuede. These paintings are high- style bummers, bad dreams with fashionable upholstery.” 1970s, Ultrasuede, the dated word “bummer” – you can just see Bacon in purple velvet flares now, can’t you? How gauche he must have been! That Perl guy sure knows about art.
(In his next paragraph, he basically hammers home that Bacon had the same handful of pictorial elements he kept reusing. That this could be said of almost any artist is something he doesn’t bother to mention.)
Now Perl employs a lot of airy-fairy words to compare Bacon with Giacometti. Can you guess who comes off better? On every point of divergence, Giacometti is a saint to Bacon’s abject scrabbler. And get this: while Bacon’s technique is “coarse methodical belligerence”, Giacometti has “graphic precision”.
Further more, “Giacometti does not prejudge experience in the way that Bacon does. … Freedom is a possibility in Giacometti’s universe, and this can pose a daunting challenge, especially for museumgoers who expect to be told what to feel.” Museumgoers who presumably feel much safer and more secure with Bacon’s writhing raw meat nightmares than Giacometti’s stick figures. So Bacon is accused of being safe and mainstream, as opposed to Giacometti’s (entirely nebulous) freedom.
Perl’s next paragraph would take far to long to analyse thoroughly, except for its last sentence: “The organic nature of painting, the end-to-end logic that characterizes all painting, whether in Rembrandt or in Mondrian, is rejected in favor of a modernist re-staging of a fin-de-siecle freakshow.” Ignore the final phrase for a minute. What does the rest of this sentence actually mean? What is the “end-to-end logic that characterizes all painting”? Is “end-to-end logic” really synonymous with “organic nature”? If you know what words actually mean, you know the answer is “no”. This highfalutin language is meaningless, and the use of educated-seeming blather is a fundamental part of Perl’s critical technique. It hardly needs stating that the last part of the sentence is also ultimately without meaning, except as a generalised conjuration of negative association.
Finally, Perl reveals that he has expended all these words in the service of Real Art. “The actual matter of art–the artisanal concerns, the structural assumptions–are all too often seen as reactionary and academic, something for pedants and conservatives to bother about.” Well, I agree with this, actually, but I’m not sure how tearing down Bacon to raise Giacometti serves this purpose.
“Bacon … is the real academic–a pasticheur and parodist of avant-garde attitudes.” For the bewildered – no, that is not the definition of “academic”, in any of the shades of meaning that term possesses. But Perl is associating Bacon with the dry artifice of academe which modernist critics spent the 20th century repudiating (while all the time building the new consensus which all the art schools parroted).
What of Bacon’s painting in themselves? Can Perl regard them without regard for artistic fashion, association of celebrity, “literary associations” (yes, the quotes mean I think it’s a meaningless term), and the image he has generated for himself of Bacon as some sort of fame-chasing charlatan?
“The paintings, however, are so bloodless that all they can possibly do is send you back to the story itself. There is nothing in the paintings themselves to hold you there. In Bacon’s work, content trumps form every time. The emotion is as formulaic and pre-digested as in any Victorian picture of a dying child.”
So that’s a no, then.
For myself, I knew nothing of Francis Bacon’s reputation when I first encountered his paintings. They hit me directly, and made me feel that the painter must be in sympathy with my own sense of the world. Looking back, I can see there was a certain adolescent appeal in that bleak, existentialist horror. That appeal remains, I admit, but the totalness of his commitment to the vision still convinces. The background colours suggesting sickly bodily fluids; the wrenched bits of meat, vaguely human, placed just-so in the middle of the scene; the hopeless faces, the drab domestic furnishings, the space separating all the forms – no one else does it like this. No one else shows the horror of life in all its ill-fitting, gawky, heartless, empty reality.
And this is no mere rotting shark, this is a creation of the artist’s own hands and heart. But his brush technique doesn’t relate him to any of the respectable movements of his time, and his use of pop materials isn’t poppy enough for him to get out through that escape route. So of course he’s not acceptable. But how could any living soul not be moved by the mortal passion play he enacts before us?
If you don’t get it, that’s fair enough. You are probably far too healthy and well-adjusted for this to make any sense to you. Bacon really isn’t meant for people constructing an analysis of the development of painting through the 20th century. He doesn’t fit. His misfortune is that he’s painting to communicate, not to fulfill his obligation to “the tradition that values the artist above the art”, whether that tradition is antique or modern. That’s why everything he does is “wrong”. And now he is not alive to defend it with his personal charm, Bacon’s work is becoming the ultimate “outside art”.
The Universal “Monster mash” movies of the 1940s
4 May, 2009
Monster mash (AKA Monster rally): an entertainment exploiting the appearance of two or more popular horror monsters; especially the films produced by Universal Studios in the 1940s, all of which included an appearance by Frankenstein’s Monster.
The 1930s saw the first talking horror pictures, which came chiefly from Universal Studios. These films were also notable because a scientific explanation, with which silent Hollywood horrors had typically concluded, was now excluded in favour of a supernatural aura previously unknown in mainstream American cinema.
The first of these films was Dracula (1931), which, being hugely successful, was shortly followed by Frankenstein in the same year, and The Mummy in the year after. This initial trilogy saw a burst of low budget successors from other studios, but none had the impact of these three. Universal produced other horrors too, including Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), starring Bela Lugosi, but did not attempt to capitalise on its prime properties until 1935, when James Whale was convinced to direct a sequel to Frankenstein, his Bride of Frankenstein.
Bride showed that a sequel recalling previously known characters could be a commercial success (this had been known in the theatre for years, but apparently the lesson had not transferred to the screen). Bride also showed, importantly, that a horror film could be fun. Fun is perhaps the chief differentiating characteristic of this sequel, as embodied in the arch observations of Dr Thessinger, the Monster’s picaresque adventures through the countryside, and, perhaps most of all, a rollicking tone which could only originate from the director’s shear joy at letting loose, cinematically, thematically and dramatically.
The success of Bride of Frankenstein saw sequels also produced for Dracula and The Mummy, plus a couple of new properties, The Invisible Man (1933)and The Wolf Man (1941). Most of these sequels were not only inferior to their forebears, but mediocre in general cinematic terms. Dracula’s Daughter (1936) had a terrific star in Gloria Holden, but was otherwise a shabby “B” picture, let down most of all by its wooden male lead, Otto Kruger. Son of Dracula (1943) was a relatively lavish successor, which was successful in its Southern Gothic atmosphere, but let down by its cast, especially Lon Chaney Jr. as the eponymous Count “Alucard” – he seemed more sad than sinister, and this weak threat made for a poor protagonist. The best performance here was from male lead Robert Paige, who starts out unpromisingly as a conventional juvenile lead, but becomes more convincing as his circumstances begin to straiten.
Lon Chaney Junior was the weak link in a number of Universal horror films, beginning with the title role of The Wolf Man, and following this with roles including Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Mummy. Resting his career entirely on his famous father’s name, he brought little to his roles except a strangely flabby face and an acting range limited to a constant hangdog expression, which passed for gravitas chiefly in the role of the accursed Wolf Man, which was his best part.
On the other hand, the 1940s Universal horrors show Bela Lugosi in a couple of his best performances preserved on film, as the jovial psychopath Igor. This character appears first in Son of Frankenstein (1939), which may have claim to be called the first of Universal’s “monster mashes”, seeing as it is the first horror film to feature several of the archetypal monsters, or at least grotesque characters brought to life by actors notably associated with horror (trailers from the height of the monster mash frenzy tried to bump up their monster count by enumerating generic types such as “the mad scientist!” and “the hunchback!”).
In this film, Lugosi defies critics who call him a clown with little acting ability. In the few film opportunities he had to demonstrate his range, he impresses as, variously, the aristocratic Count Dracula, the leering, jeering Igor, and the obsequious cabby in The Bodysnatcher. What Lugosi lacked was not so much acting ability as a good agent, since, despite his accent, he could have done well filling roles as diverse as Earthy Peasant, Herr Professor (AKA the explainer), and various types of Foreigner, instead of the badly written villain roles in the series of “poverty row” pictures that doomed his reputation.
Karloff is here too, of course, in his last appearance as the Monster. Sadly, after starting well, this film drags heavily in the second half, chiefly when the Monster is on screen. Karloff complained of having little dramatically to do in this film, which can indeed also be said for later incarnations of the Monster, all though not all those later films drag so much as Son. Basil Rathbone plays the Son, though mostly on one cranky note. Lionel Atwill adds to his cult notoriety as the wooden-handed, darts-playing police chief. The Monster ends up falling into a pit of sulphur beneath Frankenstein’s laboratory.
The first really successful monster mash was Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Again, the only “official” monster on site is Frankenstein’s monster, now played by Lon Chaney, who seems to find even this shop’s dummy role a stretch. However, the very “sequelitis” of the film gives it that monster mash tone – here are the same characters, again, in another variation of the old, old story, again (the Monster even befriends a little girl, in a deliberate echo of the first film, though this time she doesn’t come to such a sticky end). Bela Lugosi’s Igor appears for the second and final time, and is again the bright spot and anchor of the movie. There are solid performances by Cedric Hardwicke as the other son of Baron Frankenstein, with Lionel Atwill as his thwarted assistant, and an appearance by B-movie lead Ralph Bellamy as the juvenile lead.
The pacing of the narrative has also improved from Son, and, to be blunt, from Bride and the original as well – this new decade seems to have seen the first glimmerings of insight that films do not always have to move at a walking pace, but can rattle along like a fast-going train. At the time this was regarded as poor film-making, and mainstream cinema still tended to the deliberate and respectable. It wasn’t until the 1980s that cinema as “ride” became a mainstream phenomenon.
But the classic monster mashes, at their best, give an early glimpse of this new, effervescent character of story-telling. Ghost of Frankenstein is, along with House of Frankenstein, the most successful in this respect (both were directed by Erle C. Kenton). There may be weak spots, but we are carried over them by the enthusiastic rhythm of the piece as a whole.
Ghost concludes with Igor’s brain transplanted into the head of the Monster (following which the building explodes for some reason I don’t recall). The sequel semilogically sees Bela Lugosi now playing the Monster, while former Monster Lon Chaney returns as the lupinely challenged Laurence Talbot, AKA the Wolf Man, in Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1942). Reportedly, test audiences laughed when they heard the Monster speak in Lugosi’s voice. He had of course uttered a few words at the end of Ghost, but otherwise the Monster had not articulated verbally since the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. Plus, of course, Lugosi’s Hungarian accent was by this time irrevocably associated with Dracula. As a result, Lugosi’s speaking scenes were cut entirely, except a few moments where you can see his lips moving silently. Even the Monster’s growls were dubbed by a presumably less accent-impaired actor. This is a shame, firstly because this historically unique performance has disappeared forever, and even more so because the surviving portion of the film is so woeful.
Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man was directed by Roy William Neill, best known today for directing Universal’s classic Sherlock Holmes series starring Basil Rathbone. Sadly, just as Rathbone belied this success by turning out to be one of Son of Frankenstein’s weak points, so Neill revealed that without a solid cast he could not produce a creditable motion picture. The film is reasonably well made, though lacking the pace of Kenton’s Ghost, but the lead actors (beside the mute Lugosi) are uniformly wooden, making this film resemble nothing so much as a compendium of bad acting. Chaney as the Wolf Man is probably the best thing here, let down by Ilona Massey as his uninviting love interest, plus the tedious Patrick Knowles as Dr. Mannering, and (from the first Wolf Man film) Maria Ouspenskaya’s amateurish turn as the Gypsy Lady. To be fair, the way in which they deliver their lines without any apparent concern for their meaning may be due to (1) lack of diligence on director Neill’s part, used as he was to the stage-bred cast of the Holmes films, who properly prepared for their performances, and could power their way through the story on sheer charisma; and (2) what is the silliest of all the Frankestein movies in terms of plot, leading to dialog which would have been awkward in the mouths of the most capable actors. Holmes veterans Lionel Atwill and Dennis Hoey (who played Lestrade in the Holmes films) are wasted here. There is also a truly woeful song-and-dance number to suffer through. In the end, the cast are done away with by an exploding dam, which presumably also carries away the revolting population of the nearby village of Visaria. Together with the chopped-up nature of the final product, this constitutes the weakest of the monster mash movies, and is best avoided except for the sake of having viewed the complete cinematic cycle.
Luckily, things pick up again with House of Frankenstein (1944), the other high point of the monster mash films. Karloff appears (as “the mad scientist!”), assisted by J. Carroll Naish (as “the hunchback!”), and together they are the best part of the film. The film is notable for its quaint episodic structure: in the first half, our above-named “heroes” escape prison, revive the skeleton of Dracula, and send him to do their bidding, only to see him get a permanent and fatal suntan. In the second half, they recover the frozen bodies of Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man, revive them too, and come to a sticky end. Director Erle C. Kenton directs with rare flare – the brief scene in which Naish falls through a castle wall into an underground cave is remarkable in its assured, dynamic movement, and sophisticated use of special effect-rigged sets.
John Carradine plays Dracula (AKA Baron Latos), not much more effectively than Chaney had done, but the fast action of the story stops us worrying about that too much. The Monster is now played (mutely) by Glenn Strange, who despite the little screen time he got in the role, is possibly my favourite incarnation of this character (his resemblance to Herman Munster probably helps!). The Wolf Man is Chaney again, and he spends his time complaining about his lot, as usual. There is also a plumply attractive gypsy girl, plus cult favourite George Zucco – he shines in the role of house of horrors host Lampini, before immediately being bumped off by Naish. In the end, Karloff’s mad scientist is dragged into a swamp and submerges along with the Monster, a surprisingly powerful scene, while Naish is thrown out a high window, and Chaney is shot with a silver bullet.
Only Chaney and Carradine return for the final monster mash, House of Dracula (1945), also directed by Kenton. Dracula visits scientist Onslow Stevens (“the mad doctor!”) in his seaside castle/laboratory, to ask for a “cure” for his vampirism. The doctor is assisted by a surprising innovation: a female hunchback (Jane Adams). Soon Chaney turns up, also seeking a cure, having somehow survived a silver bullet in the last film, and then the Monster is discovered in the sea caves under the castle. This film is often derided, unfairly, I think. The plot is plainly silly, but it is certainly more enjoyable than Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, and makes a decent conclusion to the series. The only real problem is the abrupt ending, when the Monster comes to life for the shortest time so far, and perishes in flames only a minute later.
So the core monster mash movies are:
Son of Frankenstein (1939)
Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1942)
House of Frankenstein (1944)
House of Dracula (1945)
–of which best are the fourth and the second.
After these films, Universal included their monsters in a series of comedy films starring the team of Abbott and Costello, starting with Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Lugosi as the Count, Chaney as the Wolf Man, and Strange as the Monster, and devolving through Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) and Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (starring Karloff again) (1953), to Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). Some fans of the 1940s monster mash movies include these comedies within the oeuvre, but I am not a fan of Abbott and Costello, and I don’t consider these overt comedies to fall within the horror category.
In 1944, Bela Lugosi appeared in Return of the Vampire, playing a role which was Dracula in all but name, assisted by a werewolf companion. This film is supposed to be quite good (I haven’t seen it), and was apparently successful enough that Universal asked Columbia to cease making films that could possibly infringe on their intellectual copyright. We might consider this little-known team-up to represent one of the classic monster mash movies.
A note on the music.
While mainstream Hollywood movie music followed Korngold’s lead, in producing scores influenced largely by Richard Strauss, Wagner, and the ballets of Tchaikovsky, composers in shadowy genres like horror and film noir saw the opportunity to write music in a more contemporary style. While Waxman’s Bride of Frankenstein score was still largely beholden to the Late Romantic model, the 1940s saw opportunities in this vein increase, and we hear this in the Universal horror scores by Frank Skinner, Hans Salter, etc. Most of these scores have their requisite Korngoldian romantic moments, but in fact are largely in the same family of tonal modernism as composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Hindemith and Vaughan Williams. Career film composers do not have the same opportunities for respectability, but listeners with open minds will find much gratifying music in these scores, particularly as John Morgan and William Stromberg have done so much good work reconstructing and recording these scores for the Marco Polo and Naxos record labels.
I note that the film House of Dracula has no composer credit, only a credit for musical director to one Edgar Fairchild. However, there is at least one interesting piece of “original” music here, a piano performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata that devolves (thanks to Dracula’s evil influence) into a Mephistophelean mood piece in the style of Debussy, before returning to Beethoven and then stopping abruptly. I hope some diligent person will transcribe and record this music separately at some point.
Universal horror’s little-known cousin.
I must take this opportunity to mention the little known RKO horror films of the 1940s. These were produced in response to Universal’s success in the monster genre. Responsibility was given to one Val Lewton, previously an associate of David O. Selznik, but a gifted producer and writer in his own right. In this unique deal, Lewton was given a free hand to produce the films he wanted – provided he use the lurid titles bestowed upon him by the studio publicity department. In response, Lewton produced a series of horror films notable for their intellectual subtlety, and emphasis on atmosphere over sensationalism. The two best films in this series of seven are the first two, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, both directed by Jacque Tourneur. Boris Karloff joined Lewton to star in the last three films, and in The Body Snatcher was teamed again with Bela Lugosi, who takes the rare opportunity to shine as the wheedling cabby. Any fan of early horror movies should take the opportunity to become acquainted with these little-known gems of the genre.
Why clowns are evil
1 May, 2009
Edit: With belated apologies to Moo.
Here are results of some Googling I did today.
“i hate clowns” 52,700
“clowns are evil” 14,200
“i don’t like clowns” 4,930
“people who like clowns” 776
“i really hate clowns” 264
“who likes clowns” 254
“i really don’t like clowns” 157
“who the hell likes clowns” 134
“people who like clowns are” 4
“why do people like clowns” 1
“i like clowns” 7,580
“i love clowns” 6,530
“i like clowns” -padilla 5,700
“why do people hate clowns” 433
“why do you hate clowns” 219
As you can see by this rough study, clown haters by far outnumber clown lovers.
I think it’s perfectly normal to hate and fear clowns. How can you like or trust someone who wears a mask, who pretends to be exaggeratedly happy, who demands that you smile at him? By this argument, people who like clowns are “tone deaf” in their understanding of human relations – they think a “smile” must mean a smile, and they can understand no deeper than that.
I think clowns may have their roots in shamanic practices, in which the shaman would wear a mask to represent a spirit. These old spirits were not figures of unalloyed joy, of course, but they were powers with whom we would prefer friendly relations. As Christianity became dominant, pagan practice lost its power to impress as a spiritual exercise, and became instead a charming folk ritual. From the charming folk ritual, it is only one easy step to make it an entertainment for children. So the spirit of fertility becomes an animated child’s toy. But the smart kids know not to trust this deception.
Warn your children! “Stay away from that clown – he’s dangerous!”
Bad advice for stupid writers
29 April, 2009
An actual professional editor called Pat Holt posted a big pile of crap on her blog purporting to be the inside scoop on what editors look for in manuscripts. It’s called The ten mistakes: ten mistakes writers don’t see (but can easily fix when they do), and I will deal with this misguided manifesto point by point.
1. REPEATS. She observes that “Kate White uses “quickly” over a dozen times in A Body To Die For“. Good God, that means she’s using the dreaded word every 33 pages or so! (It’s a 400 page book.) How did the copyeditor let that slip by? Holt reminds me of the girl in my creative writing class, years ago, who redlined me each time I used “and” more than once in a sentence.
“Here are the documents.” says one character. “If these are the documents, I’ll oppose you,” says another. A repeat like that just keeps us on the surface. Figure out a different word; or rewrite the exchange. Repeats rarely allow you to probe deeper.
How exactly does repetition relate to “surface” and “depth”, I’d like to know?
2. FLAT WRITING. She gives a couple of examples of undeniably flat sentences, but makes no effort to identify what makes a sentence flat. The problem in these examples is not that the writer has “lost interest” or is “intimidated by [his] own narrative”, that he is “veering toward mediocrity”, his “brain is fatigued” and he has “lost inspiration”. The problem is that these are run-on sentences in which nothing happens. The simple solution is to break up the long sentence into short, punchy phrases.
3. EMPTY ADVERBS. Actually (there’s an adverb for you), adverbs are not inherently bad. Adverbs work when they describe the character or narrator’s point of view. Otherwise they can seem like unnecessary authorial intrusion. But I’m afraid Holt is one of those writers who demands adherence to The Rules without understanding them. She gets a nervous reaction every time she reads an adverb but she can’t say why, except that removing it makes the sentence “more powerful”.
(And “almost inconceivably” is not a bizarre tautology like “a little bit infertile”. A thing that is almost inconceivable may be conceived, with special effort or luck, but it remains exceptional.)
4. PHONY DIALOGUE. Holt correctly identifies the problem of “As you know, Bob” conversations, also known as “maid and butler” talk. She is also correct that character dialog needs to be individual and consistent with character. I’m not sure about this “avoidance of contemporary slang” thing, however. Where do you draw the line? Slang can, like clothes fashion, date embarassingly, but eventually slang and fashion serve the purpose of nice period detail. The trick is to use it, or any writing technique, with taste and moderation.
5. NO-GOOD SUFFIXES. This turns out to be a repeat of the REPEATS complaint, except now it’s words ending in “-ness” and “-ize”. As with the previous complaint, the best solution is to use these words sparingly and mindfully. Holt’s Rule against words ending in “-ly” again shows that she doesn’t know why these rules should be applied, and so is unable to explain the Rule’s exceptions.
6. THE “TO BE” WORDS. This is just the old saw about passive voice being baaaaaaddddddd. Again, she can’t explain the exceptions to the Rule, or even the Rule itself. Of the examples she gives that actually are badly written, the problem in all cases is simple repetition. Her initial examples (“I am the maid”, “It was cold”, “You were away”) aren’t passive voice anyway. (*See link below.)
7. LISTS. Yes, a flat list can be dull. Like any kind of writing, it needs to be created with imagination and flare to be interesting. The list itself is not the problem.
8. SHOW, DON’T TELL. Like the “no adverbs” and “no passive voice” rules, this is well-meant advice for a beginner, but a mere hindrance for a competant writer, who will show or tell as is appropriate to the story. Show, when you want the reader to see; Tell, when you want them to hear the author’s voice. But this is redundant, as Holt seems to misunderstand the whole issue. She thinks bland, generalised description is “telling”, whereas interesting, detailed description is “showing”. (The favoured Graham Greene paragraph is a “tell”, not a “show”.)
9. AWKWARD PHRASING. Yes, awkward phrasing is bad. Thank you for stating the bleeding obvious. How very helpful.
10. COMMAS. Here she is nice enough to correct the highly respected and best selling novelist Graham Greene. I’m sure he’d be grateful. The other example’s main problem is that it is a run-on sentence, not that it lacks commas (although it does). The rule should be that a comma can be omitted if the phrase it would precede or follow is short, and the sense of the sentence will still be easy to grasp.
Although point lists can be helpful, I think the best education for a writer is to read a lot. What to read, though, is the question. Most 19th century stuff is just too stilted to be a relevant model. On the other hand, I agree with Clive James, who said that “Fifty years ago, even bad books were well written” – the corollary of this being that the last few decades have seen a serious decline in editorial standards (see above!). I feel I myself have been disadvantaged as a writer by the “modern” education methods that came in from the 1960s…
*Please see the link below for a dissection of Strunk and White’s famous dictat, The elements of style.
I found this article interesting, having just finished reading Watching the English, an examination of English manners by Kate Fox, which naturally spent a lot of time looking at class issues. (That book, incidentally, is over-wordy and repetitive, and I think underestimates the importance of understatement as a mode of being.)
Sandra Tsing Loh’s Atlantic article is interesting for the contrast US class archetypes make with the English types. It turns out the snooty yacht club is not just a feature of National Lampoon movies. Loh goes askew, however, when she attempts some original thought, based on Paul Fussell’s identification of the classless “category X”, which she surruptitiously conflates with the 1990’s “Generation X”.
She is correct to identify the rise of a Bohemian-identifying creative class in the US (she waves her original Ramones T-shirt as proof of her belonging to this elite, but then unwittingly proves herself a phoney by admitting she never particularly liked the band). Unfortunately, she fails to differentiate between what for want of a better word we will call “authentic” Bohemians, and those she spends half her article excoriating, who are, despite the casual dress and herbal lifestyle, mostly industry “suits”. What we used to call yuppies, in fact.
The real problem is that Loh identifies X clustering as a “problem”, which she ends up accusing of causing the current recession (or GFC, to use the vomit-making acronym). Here’s a quote:
In the relatively affluent post–Cold War era, the search for self-expression has evolved into a desire to not have that self-expression challenged, which in turn necessitates living among people who think and feel just as you do.
Does she really think that people wanting to live beside like-minded people is a new phenomenon brought about by the “self-expression” culture? Look at any society, any culture of the past, to see this is an obviously stupid idea.
Loh’s “Bohemians” “flee gritty Los Angeles for verdant Portland”, and she observes that “Portland is much whiter than Los Angeles, disconcertingly white”. Do you see what she’s doing here? She’s accusing the X’s of congregating in ghettos. Imagine if she accused a non-white group of this. Imagine if she observed that “Los Angeles is much more Latino than Portland, disconcertingly Latino”.
She carries on in much the same vein. “In Austin alone, the percentage of people with a college education went from 17 percent in 1970 to 45 percent in 2004.” She says that (pace Robert Putnam) “the highest-tech cities tended to have the lowest rate of civic connections” – and demonstrates this with an anecdote: she showed some keys she’d found to a guy in San Francisco and he said “I wouldn’t trust the police with those. Post a notice on Craigslist!” I hope I don’t need to point out to you that (a) believing the police to be untrustworthy does not necessarily demonstrate a lack of civic connection, and (b) the reference to Craig’s List actually demonstrates a new kind of civic connection, no less valid than the old, even if less physically tangible.
She quotes Bill Bishop writing “there was a surge of people who wanted to live in cities for what could only be social—or even aesthetic—reasons”. This is not actually a new thing, of course. People with money have always lived where they wanted to, and now more people have more money. It does not mean, as Loh implies, a new selfishness.
The great sin of the X’s is lack of diversity. Loh says “an over-clustering of educated people in one region is not always a social boon”, and obviously means that it is never a social boon. Why? Because, as Bishop writes, “education is presumed to nurture an appreciation of diversity: the more schooling, the greater the respect for works of literature and art, different cultures, and various types of music. … Education also should make us curious about—even eager to hear—different political points of view. But it doesn’t. The more educated Americans become—and the richer—the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view.”
Now, Bishop is fudging here (and Loh is going along with it). If more educated people are less likely “to discuss politics with those who have different points of view” (a phrase which vividly conjures the blank banality of the survey question), so what? In any statistical analysis, one group is always going to be more something than another group. I doubt Bishop or Loh would try to assert from this that educated people are therefore less politically aware than other people, or less informed. They are probably more aware and informed. But they are not being diverse, you see (diversity being a virtue we should “nurture an appreciation of”, rather than a word meaning “consisting of several kinds”).
Thankfully, this awful situation will be brought to an end by the recession: “more Xers will have to start rubbing shoulders with The Other, living in truly mixed neighborhoods, next door to such noncreative types as Kohl’s-shopping back-office workers and actual not-yet-ready-for-their-close-up-in-Yoga-Journal immigrants”. Again, imagine if she was talking about a different group: “Urban blacks should move out of their ‘over-clustering’ regions and get some diversity.” She would be ostracised by her fellow hip-erati (oh God, did I just coin that?), and possibly shot, with some justification, for not minding her own business.
Oh, I almost forgot her big punchline. The rise of the Bohemian-identifying creative class has “brought shameful social stratification* and a consumer binge that our children’s children may well be paying off.” In case that’s not clear enough: “This economic catastrophe is teaching the Xers that their prized self-expression and their embrace of personal choice leads to … the collapse of capitalism.” You see? Lack of diversity leads to Global Financial Crisis! Hang the whites! She provides absolutely no justification for this assertion, which emerges at the end of her article out of thin air, just as it has here.
So why this crusade against the Bobo’s? First of all, it is terribly fashionable, amongst the chattering classes, to knock white people (the fact that these chatterers are largely white is neither here nor there). Apart from goofy poor whites, and socially anxious middle-class whites, the best target is whites with an education and some money. You see, if you have money and education (and are white), you are “privileged” and “entitled”. You are, in fact, no matter how hip or “aware” you may seem to be, The Man, which means you are the cause of everyone else’s problems. You are the proverbial They, whom we all blame and hate.
Now, although Sandra would appear, by almost every definition, to one of the class she is criticising (urban, creative, educated, well off), she is part Asian, which means she’s not part of this “disconcertingly white” pariah group. (I can’t help wondering if childhood experiences of racial “otherness” helped foment her X-baiting resentment.)
So, Loh gets to have her cake and eat it. She can’t possibly lack diversity (the leading cause of economic meltdown) – because she’s not white. She is dressed-down funky (“I believe the true X philosophy is to try to destroy “hipness” wherever one sees it”), “edgy” (she said “fuck” on radio!), no doubt Twittering her fans about the details of her cool life, certainly ecologically “conscious” and globally “aware” – what in this description does not include her as one of the hip yuppies she so vilifies? And yet the blame rolls off her like water off a duck’s back. Lucky her.
* Because Xers invented social stratification, of course. Or maybe she means we used to have the good stratification?
