The game itself had its moments but was mostly a boring blowout. The entertainment, too, was a mixed bag. One minute we hear Celine Dion (who isn't even American, dammit) singing a predictably schlocky rendition of "God Bless America"; in the next, on the other hand, we have the Dixie Chicks harmonizing very nicely on "The Star-Spangled Banner." At halftime, an engaging performance by Shania Twain's cleavage was unfortunately marred by the presence of Shania Twain's music. (If this woman is a country singer, how come those songs sounded like Loverboy?) No Doubt was much more listenable, and Sting had the good sense to ignore his solo catalog and sing an early Police song.
As for my Reason column, I wound up writing about "The Myth of Media Deregulation." The piece contains absolutely no references to the Super Bowl.
FROM FRODO TO HOICHI: Turns out I like The Two Towers better than The Fellowship of the Ring. (I'm referring to the movies, of course, not the books.) Like its predecessor, it is uneven, overlong, and filled with high-fantasy speechifying of a sort I lost patience with before I'd even hit my teens; but, on the plus side, there are fewer shots of Elijah Wood's wide-eyed stare, much less sub-vaudeville slapstick from Merry and Pippin, and (praise the Lord!) absolutely no New Age yodeling from Enya. Meanwhile, the large-scale battle scenes are shot with far more art and care than the equivalent portions of most other Hollywood spectacles. And while there is less of Christopher Lee's enjoyably campy performance as Saruman to relish, Andy Serkis more than picks up the slack as Gollum.
Bias alert: I'm not usually impressed by "epic" films. My favorite exception is the "Hoichi the Earless" sequence in Kwaidan, a mostly brilliant quartet of Japanese ghost stories. "Hoichi" begins with the legend of a samurai battle, relating it in a way that actually feels like one of those epic medieval poems -- and bears no resemblance to a Hollywood epic at all. I recommend it highly.
Actually, I recommend almost all of Kwaidan. Its first sequence is mediocre and skippable, but the other three actually fulfill the promise offered and broken by so many movie trailers: "Unlike anything you've ever seen before."
I'm against war with Iraq, but I have to admit that the line is funny. Of course, it also constitutes "moral equivalency," which I thought was supposed to be a no-no in those ideological parts. I suppose it's all a matter of whose ox is being gored.
SELF-PROMOTION: I have an article in The Wall Street Journal's Leisure & Arts section today. It addresses the ancient question, "Can a TV commercial be art?"
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.)