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Tag: pauline kael

Published August 30, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Drowning Not Waving — A short profile of Toronto-based cartoonist Jeff Lemire, creator of Essex County and The Underwater Welder, for The Globe and Mail:

Lemire, who profited from art classes in high school but is otherwise self-taught as a graphic artist, first heard about the profession of underwater welder from a colleague at one of the restaurants where he worked before comics started paying the bills three years ago. The father of a three-year-old boy, also named Gus, Lemire felt that underwater welding seemed like a good metaphor for parenthood.

Burdened with Cinema — Clive James reviews The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, for The Atlantic:

She could talk well about popular art because she had not only seen all the movies that there were, she would have gone to all the opera performances that there were if she had not been so burdened with tickets to the cinema. When she talked about Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, her remarks were up there with the professional dance critic Arlene Croce’s because she, Kael, had been a connoisseur of dance all her life. She knew her way around a jazz band. Apart from mental equipment like that, her reading was prodigious in its volume, and fully serious in its content. Her house had all the Oz books in first editions—I saw them, and marveled; they looked as beautiful as her Tiffany lamps—but she was by no means restricted just to film-linked popular literature. When she reviewed a Russian movie based on a Dostoyevsky story, she could refer with daunting ease to anything by Dostoyevsky, including all the major novels chapter by chapter.

And finally…

An interview with film director David Fincher at Art of the Title:

I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It had never occurred to me that movies didn’t take place in real time. I knew that they were fake, I knew that the people were acting, but it had never occurred to me that it could take, good God, four months to make a movie! It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick.

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Published April 13, 2012

Something for the Weekend

A stunning new cover for James Joyce’s The Dubliners by German designer Apfel Zet (which reminds me — in a good way — of Tony Meeuwissen’s Woodbine-inspired cover for Billy Liar published by Penguin in the 1970’s).

Consistent Forms of Hostility — With an exhibition opening in May at the Barbican in London, Rowan Moore looks at the enduring influence the Bauhaus school at The Guardian:

Not much united Walter Ulbricht, the Stalinist dictator of East Germany for two decades, and Tom Wolfe, celebrant of the splendours and follies of American capitalist excess. Not much, except a loathing of the Bauhaus and the style of design it inspired. Ulbricht called it “an expression of cosmopolitan building” that was “hostile to the people” and to “the national architectural heritage”. Wolfe called it “an architecture whose tenets prohibit every manifestation of exuberance, power, empire, grandeur or even high spirits and playfulness”.

For Ulbricht it was alien to Germany, for Wolfe it was alien to America. Both agreed that it was placeless, soulless and indifferent to ordinary people’s needs. And if the Bauhaus attracted such consistent forms of hostility, that is due to the power and coherence of the image it presented to the world, of disciplined and monochrome modernist simplicity, usually involving steel and glass.

Translators Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel talk about translating Haruki Murakami into English at the SF Bay Guardian.

And finally…

A Very American Critic — Elaine Showalter on film critic Pauline Kael at the TLS:

Cosmopolitan in her reading, sophisticated about international cinema, and au courant with theories of the auteur, Kael was nonetheless a very American critic. She was forty-seven before she ever travelled to Europe, and from the very beginning, she used her reviews and essays to explore what it meant to write film criticism in the United States, where the movies were always a compromise between art and commerce. “The film critic in the United States”, she wrote in “Movies, the Desperate Art” (1959), “is in a curious position; the greater his interest in the film medium, the more enraged and negative he can sound”. American film critics risked the temptations of selling out to Hollywood, or expressing contempt for mass market films. Kael prided herself on both her knowledge of the film medium and her deep love for the movies, trashy and avant-garde alike. Movies, she wrote in “The Function of a Critic” (1966), “are one of the few arts (along with jazz and popular music) Americans can respond to without cultural anxieties”. She did not intend to condescend to her readers or tell them that their tastes were wrong.

 

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Published March 30, 2012

Something for the Weekend

The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist is out next week.

Ware’s World — Seth Kushner’s photos of cartoonist Chris Ware in his Chicago home.  Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics by Christopher Irving and Seth Kushner is published by Powerhouse Books in May.

Redefining ‘Contrarian’ — Armond White on film critic Pauline Kael, and her reputation as a ‘contrarian’, in the CJR (via Bookslut):

Since the advent of the Internet and the rise of review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes, the illusion of consensus opinion now dominates the culture’s perception of criticism. Individual critics’ voices matter less than the roar of the crowd, which judges films as “fresh” or “rotten” and drowns out anyone who begs to differ. Outlying critics are isolated and deprecated, their deviations from the consensus seen as proof of their eccentricity or ineptitude. As an icon of mainstream critical influence, and as someone who had little use for group hugs, Kael’s independent stance presents a real challenge to the current critical order.

Addressing this change is more urgent than simply championing Kael; it’s a matter of defending the endangered voice of independent criticism that Kael represented so well. Now is a good time to redefine “contrarian” as autonomous, uncoerced journalism. Kael’s writing—and the new, ongoing controversy she engenders—makes this absolutely necessary.

(I’m not at all sure White accurately reflects readers’ expectations of critics, but it makes for a fun article).

And finally…

Nobody’s Perfect — Noah Isenberg reviews Masters of Cinema: Billy Wilder by Noël Simsolo for the LA Review of Books:

A writer by nature, Wilder was a man of uncommon wit and unforgiving sarcasm who made his martinis with the same verve as he made his movies… His was a raconteur’s cinema, long on smart, snappy dialogue, short on visual acrobatics. And though his dizzyingly prolific, half-century-long career brought us everything from romantic comedy masterpieces Some Like it Hot (1959) and Sabrina (1954) to such acerbic gems as Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951) and The Apartment (1960), Wilder remained forever reluctant to embrace the notion of director as artist; he saw himself merely as a trafficker in mass entertainment.

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Published October 21, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Words and Pictures — An interview with cartoonist Tom Gauld at The Rumpus:

Format, words and pictures all work together to make a good comic. I started at college doing pure illustration and only gradually got into making stories and using words. I’m still more comfortable with pictures than words: I’m happy doodling away on drawings for hours, but putting words together is always more of a struggle. I  usually like to keep things as simple as I can so it’s interesting seeing what I can remove and still keep the story: you don’t want to say something in words which is better said in the pictures (and vice versa).

There is also a preview of Tom’s new book, Goliath, on the D+Q blog and you can read my interview with Tom here.*

A General Contempt for Small Talk — Edward Docx, author most recently of The Devil’s Garden, on Tolstoy, Russia, and literary prizes. So much good stuff here:

[I]f there’s one thing that novelists love to talk about, it’s how to make things real when, obviously, they are not. This in turn leads naturally into something novelists like to talk about even more: the terrible struggle of writing itself. (My favourite line about writers: “Writers are people who find writing more difficult than other people.”)… Metaphors rise from the table like disturbed lepidoptera. Writing a novel is like attempting to solve an extremely complicated maths equation, which seeks to represent reality, and through which you are trying to lead the public without them ever getting wind that said equation is, in fact, impossible to solve or that, actually, it might not represent reality at all. We are getting carried away. Deciding to write a novel is like visiting an obscure, half-forgotten and slowly-evaporating planet entirely comprised of swimming pools and deciding that what is needed is… yes, another swimming pool! But, for obscure reasons, a swimming pool that must be built single-handedly from scratch and then filled using only a syringe.

And finally…

Critical Authority — New York Times film critics A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis discuss Brian Kellow’s new book Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark and the ongoing legacy of the (in)famous New Yorker film critic. Here’s A.O. Scott:

[T]he idea of critical authority has always struck me as slippery, even chimerical. Authority over whom? Power to do what? The importance of particular critics can’t be quantified in lumens of fame, circulation numbers or box office returns, though by all of these measures Kael, in her heyday, certainly enjoyed unusual prominence. But like every other critic, she was above all a writer, and a writer only really ever has — or cares about — one kind of power, which is the power to engage readers.

I think Kael is remembered not for her particular judgments or ideas, but rather for her voice, for an outsized literary personality that could be enthralling and infuriating, often both. A lot of people read her for the pleasure of disagreement, and the resentment she was able to provoke — in critical targets and rival critics — is surely evidence of power. An awful lot of our colleagues are still, in both senses, mad about her. To reread her is to understand why.

*Just so you know: D+Q are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.

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Published October 19, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Buzzwords of the Incurious — Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, delivers a searing review of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis.  A must-read:

The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.

Swimming Out of Guilt — David Ulin talks to Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus at the LA Times:

“I didn’t predict this for myself,” Spiegelman admits, firing up another cigarette. “I thought ‘Maus’ was going to take two years and I’d move on with my life. But it’s an ongoing wrestling match. Basically ‘Breakdowns’ ” — the 2008 collection that recontextualized his early work, including the first three-page “Maus” strip, from 1972 — “and ‘MetaMaus’ are the great retrospections, the period of my life I’m still swimming out of. Then I get to find out if there’s any other stuff in my pockets to make bets with.”

The World We Live In — Author William Gibson interviewed at the A.V. Club:

I don’t actually think of science fiction as primarily a predictive form. That’s its cultural reputation and that’s what lots of people believe it is, but my approach has always been that it’s invariably about the day it was written in. Regardless of what the author tells us, it can’t really be anything else. There’s no way it can be about the future, except it pretends to be the future. It’s like reading 1984. What it’s actually about is 1948, the year it was written. You see Orwell responding to various aspects of the world he lived in, which was changing, since the world always is.

See also: Margaret Atwood talks about speculative fiction and her new collection of essays Other Worlds with CBC Radio (audio) and The Globe and Mail.

And finally…

Trash — Nathan Heller on film critic Pauline Kael, a new collection of her work, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, and Brian Kellow’s new biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark:

Kael realized that the pictures had a chance to succeed where classic books, painting, and art music had been shunted from the mainstream; she thought a tolerance for “trash” was key to maintaining this openness and innovation. Still, she was no fugitive from the old arts. Kael once said that she’d rather live in a world without movies than in a world without books, and she resented the decline of public literary dialogue. She saw the movies as American art’s second chance.

Also at The New Yorker, Richard Brody looks back Kael’s book 5001 Nights at the Movies.

 

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