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THEM
By Jon Ronson
No one will ever call Jon Ronson anything but Ron Jonson. It's the most incorrect looking name I've ever seen. For the sake of a more fluid review I'm going to refer to him as Ron Jonson.
Ron Jonson is British. He's also Jewish, a fact that rears its head frequently as he interviews the most notoriously anti-Semitic people on the planet. I won't bother citing examples or listing the KKK members or Islamic Extremists he interviews, (because I don't want to look up their names,) but I will tell you that it is a great book. Ron Jonson is, apparently, fearless, while remaining sufficiently self effacing for comedic effect. He appears to be on the side of whomever he is with, going so far as to don a white hood for the benefit of a cluster of Klansmen. He befriends his subjects, coming off as even-handed in his exploration of secret societies and the lives of ideological extremists.
His visit with Tony Kaye, the director of American History X is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. Michael Moore would have peed in his own baseball cap for the sort of odd reality Ron Jonson was able to uncover.
The book could not have been written by an American. Ron Jonson had the benefit of being able to objectify certain taboos that appear to be unique to the American mind. He is honest about his thoughts, the kind of thoughts that Americans fear will somehow be broadcast and get them banished to a white trash training camp somewhere too far away from New York or San Francisco. By exploring both sides of every conspiracy, Jonson neutralizes them, reveals them to be ridiculous. The moral appears to be that if people would simply bring racism and antiracism to honest light instead of keeping it in some shabby quaking tinderbox, we would all be able to get on with our lives.
He also penetrates the Bohemian Care society to witness their satanic owl-burning ceremony. You won't believe it. Then you will. Then you'll get on with your life.
SECRET KNOWLEDGE
By David Hockney
David Hockney has been my favorite painter since I saw him on a Bravo special. He was interviewed in a room with his paintings, and when asked to explain what they meant, he would say things like "It's me house," then proceed to explain exactly how he painted it and why it looks so bizarre. He is, simultaneously, a painter for the common man and a painter for the pretentious twit. Incongruous with what I had come to expect from painters, David Hockney had no secrets (sorry) and appeared to be the sort of bloke (sorry, again) who would laugh if someone farted or give a museum curator a titty twister and then run away...then come back and apologize but do it again and run away again...then come back to enjoy some brie and talk with his mouth full.
Secret Knowledge is Hockney's titty twister to every young Vermeer or Rembrandt inspired art school alumnus who is currently sweating over a canvas between nine hour shifts at Kinkos.
The secret knowledge is that The Mona Lisa was traced, pretty much. Anyone can do it. All you need is a concave mirror and some sunlight to create your own camera obscura. This will project the image of your friend, sitting coyly outside the window of your (or someone else's) tool shed, onto a canvas. Then you can go ahead and trace your friend, like Caravaggio did, and you're a master painter.
The evidence is thoroughly convincing. 17th century painters were essentially like the guy from the mall in 1981 who took a portrait of you sitting in a white wicker chair before a large photograph of a bail of hay.
The book ought to make a lot of artists feel slightly better about their struggle, the way that a magician might feel better about his inability to actually levitate once he's watched David Blain's Secrets Revealed.
The funny thing about the book is its fanatical sincerity. I mean it's sixty dollars. You buy it, you go home and it's page after page of details and comparisons with notations that are more or less "Look at this...Now look at this...and this. See? SEE!?" It's like watching someone who believes fervently that "Paul is Dead" and charges you sixty dollars to watch him hold a butter knife up the bass drum on Sgt. Pepper, all the while panting and grinning as if he's just discovered a fifth dimension or teleportation or something. There is one page where Hockney instructs you to stand the book against the wall and walk to the other side of the room. I was reading it in bed so I got up, put it on the radiator then got back into bed to look at it.
Woohooo!
IF CHINS COULD KILL Confessions of a B Movie Actor
By Bruce Campbell
The most remarkable aspect of this book is its existence. If you don't know--and you probably don't. I didn't--Bruce Campbell is the actor with the big chin who was the lead in all three Evil Dead movies. That information is absent from the book jacket, presumably to make room for a life-size photograph of Bruce's face.
However, the book is more or less a confidential look at the making of those movies as well as a history of the Sam Raimi fraternity of filmmakers--who all attended the same high school in Michigan.
Appropriate to Bruce's acting shtick, the book is written in cornball language, which seemingly hams over the truth of what his life may or may not have been like. Certain salient moments that I was waiting to read about (the girl having sex with the tree) are mentioned only briefly, but there are multiple diagrams illustrating Sam Raimi's ground-breaking camerawork and hundreds and hundreds of photographs.
I forgot that Bruce Campbell had his own television series, due to the fact that The Adventures of Brisco County Junior aired on Weekend nights in the early nineties when I didn't engage in much of anything that didn't involve sulfite warnings or Superfuzz Bigmuff. But he was, uh, Briscoe County Junior in that show. He was also in the Mchale's Navy Movie and some episodes of Ellen.
I suppose the reality of the film/television industry is that it is essentially boring. It's like the William Shatner biography where the only backstage ruckus was a practical joke played on Leonard Nemoy for which Shatner and "the crew" hung Nemoy's favorite bicycle from the rafters and watched him panic believing it was stolen. Bruce's big scandal?---He and his pals have Sam Raimi's car dismantled. It's a cruel industry.
I'm selling the book short. I've always liked the manic, uncomfortable goofiness of Sam Raimi's films--to which Bruce Campbell contributed quite a bit, and the Evil Dead movies are wonderful things. And now I know that the average age of everyone involved in the making of Evil Dead was 20! That's the type of revelation you get from reading "Chins" (as the imaginary kids call it.)
If you liked the Evil Dead movies, you'll enjoy this book, just skip the first chapter about Bruce Campbell's childhood. He built forts.
THIS SHAPE WE'RE IN
By Jonathan Lethem
Someone needs to explain this to me-- not the book, but how many times removed from it I should be. Like, on a descending alternation between sarcasm and earnestness, at what depth should I stop to enjoy the story? It's not funny anymore.
I don't dislike Dave Eggers, McSweeney's, or the McSweeney's "brand," but there's really no way to review this book, because doing a McSweeney's book is like writing a Simpson's episode. The recurring characters, hatched from the first cute little qualifier on the copyright page, are a group of post post post post post…..., apologetically ostentatious in their velour shirts. They sigh and snicker between the lines. Come to think of it, they just stand between the lines, point at things, and then look at you. All things are understood. Mcsweeney's just wants you to know that they get it.
This and future books associated with Dave Eggers have already been spoiled by the hip, dictatorial ennui of these subliminal characters.
So, this episode was written by Jonathan Lethem, who wrote Motherless Brooklyn, which is an excellent book.
This Shape We're In is about a tiny society living inside of a human body called "the shape."
Let's all get a case of schmidt's and play D&D.
CLOSE TO SHORE
by Michael Capuzzo
I once had a conversation with someone about the movie ALIENS. She told me that she thought it was great, but for the scene where the alien gets in the elevator and pushes the "up" button. "I mean, it rode the fucking elevator," she said.
Close to shore is a non-fiction account of a great white shark that, in 1916, terrorized swimmers off the Jersey shore. Everything is perfectly plausible until the shark--included in the third person omniscient narrative--gets lost and ends up swimming through a creek into a farming town eleven miles inland to eat its citizens.
It swam to a fucking farm!
The book's strengths lie in its intimate portrayal of early twentieth century culture and the hapless Americans who had no idea what was going on. In 1916, stuff just happened. A man in Haddonfield New Jersey dug an entire dinosaur skeleton out of his backyard. Drivers of "horseless carriages" weren't bound by speed limits, stop signs, or the skills necessary to drive, and they swerved aimlessly, careening into walls and running one another down. The Philadelphia fireworks display on July 4th 1915 seriously injured 115 spectators. Apparently people were lucky to make it to thirty without exploding or contracting scurvy. Pianos were constantly falling out of buildings and if someone sneezed on you, you were fucked. Any scene in which a character leaves his house, is terrifying-- you expect him to fall into quicksand, become impaled on a wrought iron fence, or, if he is lucky, eaten by a shark.
Everyone was doomed.
Capuzzo details the thoughts of the shark, as if he had interviewed it at some point. He also adds numerous disclaimers about how he was able to "imagine" the different characters, though their real lives were thoroughly researched. I guess it was a long time ago. What can you do? If people write about Lincoln, they need to embellish his thought process otherwise he'd be endlessly ruminating over a review he read of My American Cousin and likening everything to log cabins:
"Lincoln removed a cigar from the humidor. 'Why this reminds me of a-- of a log' he thought 'but small.'"
Capuzzo is quick to point out fundamental differences between 1916 and 2001. They didn't have screen windows. They didn't have photographs of sharks. (people had to rely on the cover painting from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.) No one knew what "vitamins" were.
I can't decide if it would have been a better book without these comparisons. When reading the Great Gatsby, it isn't difficult to understand the technological limitations of the era without footnotes declaring "There was no Napster. Bands played at our houses."
My thoughts on the book as I was reading were either "Bullshit!" or "I can't believe no one's ever mentioned this to me."
So, it was cool. Sharks are cool.
And it swam to a farm!
I can't mention this enough.
A FARM!
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