February's Favorite Reads

White Jazz, James Ellroy. My trip through the LA Quartet is complete and I’m a better person for it. Ellroy’s novels are flawed in general—American Tabloid the notable exception—by overcomplicated plots. White Jazz avoid this for the most part, but the ending is still a somewhat frantic wrapping up of loose ends. The best written of the quartet, Ellroy is in full control of the style and voice he’d use to such advantage in Tabloid. He’s an acquired taste and not for everyone, but no other writer makes me revel in the excesses of his prose like Ellroy.

The Given Day, Dennis Lehane. Maybe the best book I’ve ever read. This or The Grapes of Wrath. I read The Given Day when it first came out and loved it. It’s even more powerful ten years later after having watched recent American history play out. True, Lehane had the benefit of 90 years’ hindsight when he wrote the book and wears his heart on his sleeve, but the way he weaves facts and fiction makes points about the eternal struggle of the haves and have nots few others can. I’ll have more to say on this after I’ve had some time to digest it.

All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, Jonathan Abrams. Reads like Connie Fletcher’s best work, though guided and far more introspective. Abrams gained access to just about every surviving member of the cast and key members of the crew; it’s a shame Robert Colesberry and Robert Chew had passed. The nuggets here are too many to cite, and to cite too few would do the book a disservice. Besides, I don’t do spoilers. All fans of The Wire need to read this.

Understanding Art

Benoit Lelieve is one of the people who keeps me from getting old. While he’s young enough to be my son—okay, my nephew, maybe—his blog Dead End Follies routinely provides fodder that keeps me looking at things in a fresh light and exposes me to others I might otherwise have missed. While his tastes and interest are not always my own (see the age difference comment above), his writing on more universal issues, filtered through our dissimilar backgrounds, is always thought-provoking. This isn’t the first time he’s stimulated a response that required more thought and space than could fit into a comment, and it will not be the last.

A few weeks ago he wrote about the difficulty of understanding art. (Pause inserted while you read his piece, which would be worth reading even if it weren’t helpful for understanding what I wrote below.) As with all such discussions, the crux of the matter is defining what art is, as it’s impossible to understand anything if one can’t define it. Therein lies the rub. Art is like beauty (and, not coincidentally, often has “beauty” somewhere in many of its definitions) in that it is in the eye of the beholder. What is art to me may not be art to you, and the guy down street agrees with neither of us, though he’s a cretin, so fuck him.

Does intent matter? Maybe. Probably not. J.S. Bach didn’t intend for his cantatas to become timeless works of art. He just needed music for Sunday’s service. On the flip side are countless writers, singers, songwriters, actors, sculptors, painters, on and on with pretentions of creating art. Their definition of art is sometimes whatever they create and, oh my god, is this a “my shit doesn’t stink” crew to have to deal with. So, no, intent doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Another question that comes up—often raised by snobs—is whether art is more “noble” than entertainment. Even if that’s true—a point on which I am not sure—there’s also no bright line there. Doesn’t art need to entertain its audience on some level? Since its medium (listening, viewing, reading) is not required for life—and by “required” I mean like food and water and air—can’t we say there must be some reason for people other than the creator to partake, and that reason is to be entertained? Devotees of Gabriel Garcia Marquez are likely not entertained by his writing in the same way as Bruce Springsteen’s fans are by the Boss’s work, but each has qualities in their creations that engage others, and we can think of that engagement as entertainment as easily as anything else.

Now, there is entertainment and there is entertainment. “Mere” entertainment doesn’t challenge the audience. (See Benoit’s comments about the TV show Numb3rs. See? I told you to read his piece.) If one engages with a book or movie or piece of music but is not compelled to think about it afterward as more than a good time, it succeeds as entertainment, but it is not art. Art is when the experience gets one to thinking about more than what was on the surface. I enjoy Ray Donovan, but when each episode is over any discussion focuses on what happened, what went well, and what they might have done better. Compare that to The Wire or Deadwood or NYPD Blue, where The Beloved Spouse and I talk about all of the above and how it affected us. What it made us think about we hadn’t thought of before, and what it made us re-evaluate.

I argue that no one can fully “understand” art. It’s too dependent on one’s previous experience and background. I have friends whose opinions I trust and respect, whose work I enjoy and value, who get moist about the virtues of X-Men or Batman, or any of a number of members of the DC or Marvel universes; I think they’re fucking comic books. That doesn’t make me wrong, nor them. It doesn’t even mean either of us is mistaken. It just shows there’s more each of us may still have to learn, and having more to learn—and a desire to continue to learn it—is always a good thing.

Maybe that’s all we need to understand about art. It’s what makes us want to keep growing.

Potpourri

The Beloved Spouse and I started watching Breaking Bad over the weekend. (We wanted to be sure it was worthy of us, and no one would pull a Deadwood and stop the series in the middle, okay? When we’ve seen all these episodes, we’ll check out that NYPD Blue show everyone is talking about.) Last night we saw the episode where Walter’s family has the intervention, to talk about whether he should get treatment. I can’t remember seeing a better hour of television.

A question for all of you who watched the show on AMC: did they censor the language? I can’t think of another basic cable show that showed bare breasts and allowed for this level of cursing. Even when Justified is rated for Nudity, it’s a two-second shot of Raylan’s ass.

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We watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on a lark Sunday night. Knew nothing about it, except people I trust had recommended it. Expected something along the lines of Way of the Gun and were taken by surprise. Great fun, with three leads who were born to work together (Robert Downey, Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan). That’s all I’m going to say, except to warn the people in the Midwest they’ll say “fuck” a lot.

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Read the following quote by James M. Cain in Brian Ritt’s Paperback Confidential:

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hardboiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.

I’m not big for posting quotes around the office, but want to think of this every day when I write.

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Patrick Stewart is appearing in two—count ‘em, two—Broadway plays simultaneously: Waiting For Godot and No Man’s Land. I was impressed, until it occurred to me he probably plays Godot, which frees him up to be in No Man’s Land.

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We were able to start on Breaking Bad because we finished our fourth (I think) viewing of The Wire last week. I cannot begin to say how much I learned about storytelling from this show, and yet the stories were not the best of it. The characters are so well drawn that, after the final montage, when you see what everyone (except McNulty) does next, you’re left with the feeling these people’s lives are continuing; you just don’t get to watch anymore.

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Football people are defending Richie Incognito’s excessive harassment of a Miami Dolphin teammate as part of football’s “warrior culture.” Two things:

1. Football players are not warriors.

2. The military—where the real warriors live—would not tolerate such behavior.

Crawl back under your rocks, Richie and his people. It ain’t selling here.

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Swear to God, this is the (next to) last time I’ll mention Grind Joint’s launch this Saturday, November 16, at the Mystery Lovers Bookshop, 514 Allegheny River Boulevard in Oakmont, PA. Ten in the morning. I’ll tell how the book came to be written, read a little, answer questions, and, hopefully, sign some books. It doesn’t sound like much fun to read it in black and white like this; I’ll try to do better in person.

 

(PS: I hate the smell of potpourri. I’ll come up with a better title next time I write a blog full of random thoughts.)

Season Two

The Beloved Spouse and I finished Season Two of The Wire tonight; it’s our third or fourth time through. Season Two is my favorite for several reasons. The plots dovetail fluidly, the morality play of trying to do right by doing wrong, and the stark honesty of showing what happens when nominally straight people get in over their heads. Mostly, it takes me home.

I grew up near Pittsburgh about the time the mills passed the point of no return. There was a small mill in my town, a larger one directly across the river, and New Kensington once made most of the world’s aluminum. My father didn’t work in the mill, though he did work for a while at Alcoa’s Technical Center, at the time the largest metallurgical laboratory in the world. My grandfather worked in the aluminum mill; a grandfather-in-law lost three fingers there. One uncle worked at Alcoa’s powder plant, was laid off, worked again, laid off again, over a period of many years. Things were different then. Getting laid off meant, “Things are slow. We’ll bring you back then they pick up.” Now it means, “Get the fuck out.”

I was old enough to understand what was happening, though I missed the worst effects by not yet being in the workforce. Jobs were leaving in droves when I graduated high school. By the time I graduated college, they were gone, and so was I, to the army. They were hiring.

Now I’m a father with a grown daughter and spent a year out of work in the early aughts, proving high tech jobs aren’t recession-proof. I got by on a decent severance and the proceeds of a house sale, and before the year was out I gained an appreciation for two things: good times don’t have to last forever, and bad times don’t have to end. The fact that mine did didn’t blind me to how lucky I was.

What resonates so well with Season Two of The Wire is empathy. I felt for the kids in Season Four and for Bunny Colvin’s frustration in Season Three, but I don’t know any drug addicts or dealers, don’t spend time with people who live near those corners. I know Frank Sobotka and Horse Face. I went to school with Nick and Ziggy. Thirty years—now forty—didn’t change what makes them recognizable.

I’d like to think I wouldn’t make the same decisions Frank Sobotka made, but, then, Frank didn’t wake up one day and decide to become a criminal. Times were hard, the only life he and his friends had ever known was falling apart, and he found himself in a position to do something about it. The camel got its nose into the tent an inch at a time while Frank refused to ask himself the questions that would have destroyed the foundation of his rationalizations.

Where was the tipping point? Well before the dead prostitutes were found, certainly, but was there a bright line he had to cross, knowing as he stepped across it he was now a criminal and there was no going back? Of course not. Frank never thought of himself as a criminal until it came apart, and, as he said to his lawyer near the end, he had to get clean. Piece by piece he sold his soul until at the end it wasn’t his anymore, though its core may have been as pure as ever.

More than the other seasons, more than any fiction I can think of, Season Two of The Wire makes me wonder if I would have come out differently in Frank’s situation. Can I say I’d have a better moral compass, or would I lack the balls to do what I felt needed to be done and face the consequences later?

This is why Season Two gets to me the way it does, on multiple levels, and what I’d like to evoke some day in the Penns River novels. I haven’t yet. But that’s what I’m working toward.