For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about: Pete Townshend has been arrested for viewing child pornography online. He has confessed to the deed but not to the presumed intent: He was researching the sexual exploitation of children, he says, not participating in it. As a longtime Who fan, I hope he's telling the truth -- hope his explanations for his behavior sound so defensive and so curiously repetitious because he's upset anyone would accuse him of pedophilia, not because he's desperately trying to weasel out of a tight spot. It's true that Townshend has been speaking out against kiddie porn for a while now, a fact which supports his version of events. Of course, it's also true that, a couple decades ago, he was simultaneously an anti-drug crusader and a junkie.
Even if he was looking at the stuff as a disgusted investigator and not as a lusty boy-lover, that doesn't mean he'll be spared a jail term. I don't know what the law is in England, but here in America journalists have been imprisoned for doing exactly what Townshend claims he was doing.
Meanwhile, the whole Who catalog suddenly seems a bit ... dirty. You can make your own foul jokes about the phrases "before I get old" and "the kids are alright." Me, I feel grimy enough for titling this item "Preteen Wasteland."
The reissue of the year: two of Doug Sahm's finest albums, one of them never before available on CD. The songs range from honky-tonk to jump blues to psychedelia to jazz -- if a musical style has ever drifted through Texas, Sahm can (a) play it brilliantly and (b) combine it casually with everything else.
A new collection of old music, recorded from 1926 to 1929 and released in countless forms since then. Surely you don't need me to tell you how good Louis Armstrong was?
Sublime folk-rock from a punk pioneer. (Before she went solo, Houston was in the Avengers.) For years I only had a pirated tape of this out-of-print album; now, thanks to the Internet, you and I can acquire the CD directly from the artist. Best track: "Putting Me in the Ground."
Cash's most recent studio album was a mixed bag -- but with this brilliant live set from 1969 hitting stores at the same time, who could complain? Bloggers caught between hawkish and dovish sympathies will especially enjoy the singer's declaration, re: Vietnam, that he's "a dove with claws."
By college, my favorite Tolkien tale was not The Lord of the Rings but "Leaf by Niggle," a short story he published first in 1947 and then, paired with the essay "On Fairy-Stories," as the slim volume Tree and Leaf in 1964. Both the story and the essay are defenses of fantasy, and it is the essay that includes Tolkien's famous response to those who deride fairy tales as escapist: "Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
As a self-contained argument, the essay is engaging but not really complete. As a companion-piece to the short story, it serves quite well. Faerie, it declares, "holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the Earth, and all the things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, when we are enchanted." It is this realm that the title character creates in "Leaf by Niggle," devoting his spare hours to a vast picture he's painting in a tall shed in his garden. Like Faerie -- or, more broadly, Fantasy -- Niggle's art serves as an escape, a fantastic diversion from a bland and bureaucratized life. While the world around him seems obsessed with trite legalities and matters of state, Niggle passes his time in the act of creation, inventing a new reality that not only is preferable to the world of a "serviceable cog" (Tolkien's phrase), but at story's end is truer than that world as well.
"On Fairy-Stories" declares the chief purposes of fantasy to be recovery, escape, and consolation, and Niggle's painting serves as each. It is a recovery of a clear view, the work of an artist "who can paint leaves better than trees" in a country where the individual leaf is sacrificed to the higher collective order. It is an escape from the "nuisance" of one's "duties" to that order. And it is a consolation, not only for Niggle but, later, for all those who use the world he has created "for convalescence." A theme of the essay reverberates in the story: that the fantasist, at his best, creates something more real than can ever be fashioned by the world's jailers, and that long after all the jails have decayed, Faerie will remain.
For a monarchist, Tolkien was quite the anti-authoritarian. His hobbits lived in a Chestertonian sort of anarchy; and Niggle is, in his ground-down way, an individualist hero -- smaller, realer, and altogether more interesting than the boring supermen favored by another sort of libertarian.
1. The Exterminating Angel Directed by Luis Bunuel
Written by Bunuel and Luis Alcoriza, from a play by Jose Bergamin
This was the first Bunuel film I ever saw. A dozen or so later, it's still my favorite.
2. The Music Man Directed by Morton DaCosta
Written by Marion Hargrove, from a play by Meredith Willson and Franklin Lacey
A real movie musical, completely liberated from its stage origins, with a sophisticated score and an enjoyable anti-bluenose streak.
3. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Directed by Robert Aldrich
Written by Lukas Heller, from a novel by Henry Farrell
"You mean, all this time we could've been friends?"
4. Knife in the Water Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Polanski, Jakub Goldberg, and Jerzy Skolimowski
Polanski's first feature. Very tense.
5. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence Directed by John Ford
Written by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, from a story by Dorothy M. Johnson
Unravels one legend, helps invent another.
6. The Manchurian Candidate Directed by John Frankenheimer
Written by George Axelrod, from a novel by Richard Condon
My memory's a little hazy and I might be getting the chronology confused, but I'm pretty sure I went to a revival screening of this hyper-paranoid thriller on my first date, back in high school. Make of that what you will.
7. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Directed by Robert Enrico
Written by Enrico, from a story by Ambrose Bierce
One of two templates for Siesta, Jacob's Ladder, Lulu on the Bridge, Abre Los Ojos, The Sixth Sense, Vanilla Sky, and Donnie Darko.
8. Carnival of Souls Directed by Herk Harvey
Written by John Clifford
The other template.
9. Lawrence of Arabia Directed by David Lean
Written by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson
After Woman of the Dunes, this is probably the best movie ever made about sand.
10. Lolita Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Kubrick, from a novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Officially, the screenplay is by Nabokov, but the shooting script bore little resemblance to the novelist's self-adaptation. It is, at any rate, a fine black comedy, with especially amusing performances by Peter Sellers, James Mason, and Shelley Winters.
1. The books are also toys. Tactile tomes like Pat the Bunny used to be rare; now they're everywhere. The familiar pop-up book continues to thrive, along with more radical artifacts that do not pop up so much as they unpack. A children's book might include a mirror or two, a series of strategically placed holes, or some detachable creatures that can be played with separately; it might come in a special waterproof edition, printed on material that bears no resemblance to paper or even to cardboard; it might owe more to its designer than to either its author or its illustrator.
There is as much experimentation in these books, as much willingness to move beyond traditional ideas of narrative and of text itself, as in the most avant-garde postmodern novel. I'm especially enamored with the brief but endlessly fascinating Hello Bee, Hello Me, to the point where I may have to buy my own copy.
2. The toys, meanwhile, are also texts: they speak, sing, or are covered with writing. If there are books that are more interactive than ordinary toys, then there are toys that contain more actual words than some of the books. There may be a direct line between installation art and these mass-produced playthings, the chief difference being that the latter tend to be more concerned with delighting their audience.
Whatever this strange in-between medium may be, I found some more examples of it at the Walters art museum today. Searching the building for some hint of modernism, R. and I stumbled on its manuscript room, which contained handcrafted books both from medieval times and from the last few years. The second group turned pop-ups and the like toward more mature and eccentric themes, transforming the toy-book into an avenue of adult expression.
Meanwhile, yet another plaything -- the video game -- is converging with the movies, creating what looks to me like a mass art in its Nickelodeon stage. Toys, games, books, art: there's a hundred culture-studies papers to be written about all this, I tell you. (Ninety-nine of which were probably published long ago. Chances are pretty good that I'm late to this party. Oh, well: it's nice to be here, nonetheless. Hello, bee. Hello, me.)
4. The Candidate Directed by Michael Ritchie
Written by Jeremy Larner
Every time I flip by this on TV, I wind up watching it to the end.
5. Frenzy Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Anthony Shaffer, from a novel by Arthur La Bern
Hitch's most modern movie -- this is the second-to-last film he made, and the first with any nudity or genuinely graphic violence -- is also remarkably traditional, a straightforward thriller starring one of his most familiar characters: the innocent man wrongly accused.
6. Sleuth Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Written by Anthony Shaffer, from his play
Witty, suspenseful, perfectly crafted.
7. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Directed by Luis Bunuel
Written by Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carrière
Cinema's greatest surrealist having fun.
8. Cries and Whispers Written and Directed by Ingmar Bergman
One of the most painful and depressing films I've ever seen. Part of me thinks it should be much higher in this list. Another part doesn't want to include it at all.
9. Play it Again, Sam Directed by Herbert Ross
Written by Woody Allen, from his play
Remember when Woody was young enough that you could hope he gets the girl without creeping yourself out?
10. The Heartbreak Kid Directed by Elaine May
Written by Neil Simon, from a story by Bruce Jay Friedman
For once in his mostly regrettable career, Neil Simon shows some fangs -- or maybe I should credit Elaine May for refusing to soften the story's edges. Either way, this comedy is exquisitely cruel.
1. Sans Soleil Written and Directed by Chris Marker
A bizarre and wonderful essay-film about Africa, Japan, festivals, robots, Hitchcock, and much, much more. There is no movie in the world that is remotely like this one.
2. Danton Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Written by Wajda, Jean-Claude Carrière, Jacek Gasiorowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Boleslaw Michalek, from a play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska
The best film ever made about the French Revolution, salted with pointed parallels to events in the director's native Poland.
3. Blade Runner Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, from a novel by Philip K. Dick
There are those who say the director is the true author of a movie. That theory doesn't fit this film, which owes its greatness to Dick's story and Lawrence G. Paull's production design. That said: if you haven't seen Blade Runner before, it's the director's cut that you should rent, not the studio's somewhat blandified original release.
4. Fitzcarraldo Written and Directed by Werner Herzog
Herzog's best picture, about a mad scheme to build an opera house deep in the Brazilian jungle.
5. Dimensions of Dialogue Written and Directed by Jan Svankmejer
As with most of Svankmejer's short films, this is rather difficult to describe. Suffice to say that you might never be satisfied with ordinary animation again.
6. The Draughtsman's Contract Written and Directed by Peter Greenaway
Greenaway is one of those moviemakers whose shorts tend to be better than his features, perhaps because there isn't enough time for the picture's conceit to get tiresome. Despite that, this feature-length puzzle-box about sex, sketches, and secret societies is my favorite of his films.
7. Burden of Dreams Directed by Les Blank
A documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo (see above), in which Werner Herzog seems at least as mad as his title character.
8. Moonlighting Written and Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
No, not the TV series. This one's a rather depressing picture about Polish workers in London during the Solidarity uprising.
9. The Return of Martin Guerre Directed by Daniel Vigne
Written by Vigne, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Natalie Zemon Davis, from a novel by Janet Lewis
A middlebrow historical picture. Sometimes they're actually good, you know?
10. America Is Waiting Written and Directed by Bruce Conner
A music video of sorts, though I doubt it ever aired on MTV.
SELF-PROMOTION: Behold, my latest Reason Onlinecolumn. It is, basically, the product of a man who faced a deadline, and wanted to write something about the late Joe Strummer, and realized he didn't have it in him. How do you get a whole article out of the observation that "Career Opportunities" is about as close to perfect as a rock song can get? You can't; or I can't, anyway; I just put on the record, pause to enjoy it, and write about Time's silly Persons of the Year award instead. Rest in peace, Joe.