SELF-PROMOTION: My new column for Reason Online is a riff on the movies Guess Who and Inside Deep Throat.

Also, May's print edition of Reason is now out. I don't have anything lengthy in it, but I wrote a brief squib for the Citings section about the health hazards of medical licensing.

posted by Jesse 2:46 PM

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STUPID BLOG TRICKS: Matt Welch has invited me, sort of, to play one of those silly fill-out-a-form-on-your-blog games. I'll do my best.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

This is a reference to the Ray Bradbury novel in which people commit banned texts to memory, thus "becoming" the books. It's also a strangely recursive scenario: I'm stuck in a book and I'm also a book myself? What is this, an Escher painting?

Anyway, my first thought is that I ought to be Rebels on the Air, by Jesse Walker, because I can't imagine that anyone else would bother to keep it alive. But I already spent years writing the damn thing, and the last thing I want to do is spend any more time with it. My next thought was to be Where the Wild Things Are, because there wouldn't be much to memorize -- I'm kind of lazy -- but I'm not sure what I'd do about the pictures.

I dunno. Can I be a Bill Cosby routine? That might be fun.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Yes, which is kind of ridiculous, but weird things can happen when you're right on the cusp of puberty.

The last book you bought is:

Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis. A hilarious novel. I read it nine or ten years ago, and thought it would be nice to own a copy.

The last book you read is:

I'm making my way through several books at once right now, so it's kind of hard to keep track. I think the last one I finished was Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy.

What are you currently reading?

Too many tomes to list here.

Five books you would take to a deserted island.

1. Matt Welch's Bible:

the one I've been lugging around with me since Spring Break of 1988, in which the tormented second wife of a corrupt and abusive Santa Barbara-based pastor scrawled hundreds of thousands of words worth of frantic reminders, diary confessions, underlined words, post-it notes...all detailing her unhappy marriage, cruel step-children, recovery from breast cancer, apologies to God for thinking independent thoughts, stuff like that....

I know he said he wanted to take it to his desert island, but it sounds too enticing to pass up.

2. A photo album. Because after a while I'm gonna get lonely.

3. Gravity's Rainbow, because maybe if I were stuck on a desert island I'd actually get around to reading it.

4. Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, to look at when I'm supposed to be reading Gravity's Rainbow.

5. A complete Encyclopedia Brittanica. Because it's big, and I'll need firewood.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Sara Rimensnyder, because she hasn't updated her blog in over a year and maybe this will get her writing again.

Bryan Alexander, because he might take the questions more seriously than I did.

Clark Stooksbury, because he might take the questions even less seriously than I did.

posted by Jesse 9:00 AM

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SELF-PROMOTION: Yesterday I did a thumbsucker for Reason Online on nonviolent resistance movements in the Middle East.

posted by Jesse 5:52 PM

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THE HILLS ARE ALIVE...AND HAVE EYES: Forty years ago this month, the film version of The Sound of Music debuted. It's one of the most maligned musicals ever to become a beloved classic: Its own co-star nicknamed it "The Sound of Mucus," and to this day I have an easier time remembering the lyrics to Mad magazine's parody than the original songs. It's the Schindler's List of sap, and -- confession time -- I like it.

I like it because the damn thing keeps changing on me. When I was a boy and my mom watched it on TV every year, it was a movie about a woman who makes life cheerier for a bunch of kids; and then they all escape the Nazis. I was vaguely aware that she also married Christopher Plummer, but it seemed like a minor plot point -- until I saw it again in my early twenties. Suddenly, the maternal Julie Andrews who taught children to sing had become a pretty young woman who falls in love with a widower. The kids popped in to do a number every now and then, but they were just an adornment; the movie was really a love story. Which ends when they all escape the Nazis.

A decade later, after many of my friends had started to have children, I watched it again. Now it seemed to be a movie about fatherhood: how distant dad Christopher Plummer reconnects with his kids. The love story was there, but it was a means to an end; the reason he loved Julie Andrews was because she made his household a family again. After which, they all escaped the Nazis.

There are, I'm sure, teenage girls who think this is a story about Plummer's eldest daughter getting spurned by her first love. There are probably people who think it's a basically plotless soundtrack. There may even be people who think it's about escaping the Nazis.

How does it manage to be so many movies at once? Mostly, by letting us fill in what we don't see. The last time I watched it, I paid careful attention to the pacing, noting all the times it lets us infer what's going on and project as much importance as we'd like onto what's happening. And so, for example, when Andrews and Plummer finally marry we see a lavish wedding scene; every corner of the screen is filled with ornate decor. We see the bride, and we see the groom. But there isn't a word of dialogue, and the whole sequence is as sparse in time as it is rich in spatial detail. If you latch onto it, it could stretch into hours in your memory. If you don't, then it's gone in a blink.

I like The Sound of Music because every time I see it, I remember something it's easy for a critic to forget: that the movie I'm criticizing exists in my head, not on a screen.

posted by Jesse 3:59 PM

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