A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; none whatsoever is worse.

The Band, A Musical History (EMI)

David Peschek

Friday September 23, 2005

The Guardian
If ever there was an argument for the occasional pernicious evil of the CD reissue, this five-disc-plus-DVD box is it. A Musical History is certainly comprehensive: it runs from the Band's early backing-band days -- first for Ronnie Hawkins, then the newly electric Dylan -- through seven albums that document their evolution into trad-rock behemoths. And, for completists otherwise at a loose end, it includes 37 unreleased tracks. Critical consensus has it that this is seminal and hugely important music. But it's clear -- especially over five CDs -- that it is music whose ersatz nature, conservatism and ill-disguised fakery attains a crushing critical mass of boredom. Creating a plodding, hybrid Americana from borrowed blues and country, the Band have squatted over a certain kind of North American music ever since their heyday. But painfully evident in their cod-soulful straining for gravitas is the lack of the vitality of their influences, smothered as it is by the deadening weight of heritage. And does anyone need to hear The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down ever again?

Um, yes -- especially with what's been happening in that part of the world over the last couple of weeks.

You read something like this and wonder how it happened. Was there an editor somewhere on The Guardian’s staff who figured The Band were overdue for being taken down a peg or two? Maybe that would have been a better move before they broke up in 1976 . . . or before two members died.

Or is this David Peschek’s take? If so, it unwittingly exposes stunning ignorance. As for that crack about “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” it would seem that Peschek is unaware Robertson wrote the song, seemingly assuming – incorrectly – that it’s “trad. arr. by” instead of an original composition. He also seems unaware that The Band created the genre the British call “Americana.”

But then, should we expect anything other than tone-deaf inaccuracies from somebody who’s a DJ for something called “Horse Meat Disco”? (Eew.)

Country music: simple, heartwarming stories of honest working folks.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Country singer Mindy McCready was hospitalized after overdosing on antidepressants early Friday following a quarrel with the father of her unborn child. She was in fair condition Friday afternoon, officials said.

According to a police report, McCready and William McKnight were arguing on the phone about whether his parents would help pay for the pregnancy. He cursed at McCready and she became angry and took about 30 antidepressant pills, the report says.

After McKnight called her back and she didn’t answer, he called police and an ambulance.

McCready’s lawyer did not return a phone message to his office.

McCready, 29, has had a series of legal and personal problems in recent months, including a drunken driving arrest in Nashville, a suicide attempt and an arrest in Arizona on charges stemming from her involvement with a con man she said she was trying to help police catch.

McKnight was also charged earlier this year with trying to kill her. McCready said he punched her in the face and tried to choke her.

Last year, McCready was charged with obtaining the painkiller OxyContin fraudulently at a pharmacy. She pleaded guilty and was placed on three years’ probation.McCready had a No. 1 hit in 1996 with “Guys Do It All the Time.”

Still not depressed enough to appreciate Coldplay.

Coldplay’s allure continues to elude me. I even sat through about 40 minutes or so of a concert that MuchMusic shot sometime during the winter and recently broadcast to see if I was missing anything. You know, had I dismissed them too early or something? (Also, I was ironing and there was nothing else on, which meant I had no alternatives.) Prolonged exposure to Coldplay only deepens the mystery of Coldplay’s continuing success and their embrace by apparently just about everybody on the planet except for me, you, John Pareles of the New York Times and Hua Hsu of Slate, both of whom wrote cogent analyses of what Coldplay seems to be doing . . . or what it isn’t doing, which, in both of their estimations, is anything worth getting excited about.

I have my own notions about what Coldplay might actually be (as distinct from the grandiose claims made on its behalf by its millions-strong legions of mopey fans who are still young and adolescent enough to equate moping with depth, seriousness and intelligence . . . or sensitivity, or something). Is Coldplay a second-rate Tears For Fears tribute band, the neutered Oasis, a melody-free Supertramp for people who don’t like hooks or riffs, a slow-motion U2 that cribbed all its lyrics from 70s Christian youth-group inspirational posters or some bizarre combination of all of the above? One of the things Coldplay does not seem to be is capable of coming up with an entire song, one with a beginning, middle and end . . . or verse/chorus/verse/bridge/chorus/repeat-to-fade. There are plenty of two-chord kind of throbs, but they never get to that third or even fourth chord you might reasonably expect from a pop song.

I guess every generation gets the navel-gazing power-ballad producing entity it deserves. Coldplay are this decade’s Maureen McGovern? Maureen McCormick? (unless that was Celine Dion -- they both sang mawkish tune-free ballads in movies about big doomed boats), or perhaps they’re this decade’s Bonnie Tyler. Air Supply? Climax? Journey, but without the upbeat rock numbers . . . ?

I watched that MuchMusic concert and was astounded by the dreary sameness of the proceedings. Every number was a plodding two-chord ballad that started slow and dull and quiet, continued slow and dull and increased gradually in volume, then subsided into plaintive bleating on Martin’s part. It speaks of true devotion on the part of Coldplay’s fans that they can distinguish between the different numbers. Maybe they use the same device I found myself using, which was to identify the songs by their apparent musical antecedents: “Oh, this is the Oasis rip-off . . . this is the sort of fake-U2 one . . .” etc. But it all seemed like way too much work for too little reward.

And as the Jimmy-Jib crane swooped over the audience to show the throng of ecstatic Coldplay fans, I just keep thinking of an exchange from the “Homerpalooza” episode of “The Simpsons,” where Lisa, listening to Smashing Pumpkins, says to Bart, “Their music may be bleak, but they certainly seem to be connecting with the crowd.” Bart says, “Lisa, making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.” And that’s probably what’s preventing me from appreciating Coldplay. I’m not in the demo. It seems to help to be 17 and to have written at least a few really bad poems, the kind where you try very hard to express the inner turmoil of your soul and instead turn out unintentionally hilarious, solipsistic tripe riddled with cliches and belaboring the obvious.

A friend of mine, just a few years younger than I am (we have the same cultural reference points) defended Coldplay by comparing their effect with that of Supertramp on him when he was 14. I asked which Supertramp -- the “Crime of the Century” Supertramp, the quiveringly sensitive melodists with the instrumental ability that 14-year-old boys would likely mistake for “chops,” or the later, million-selling Supertramp of “Breakfast In America”? He didn’t answer, and I don’t know how anybody could conflate Coldplay’s dreary dirge-making to the rococo pretension of Supertramp’s fake jazz symphonics. But there’s probably a very specific and individual connection there that I’ll never understand.

Finally, it’s reminiscent of something Ben Folds said in an interview when he released Rockin’ The Suburbs. He said Billy Corgan had grown up in a pretty nice Chicago suburb, and, given how things work in North America, really didn’t have all that much to be as depressed and/or angry about as his songs would suggest. Then, said Folds, there’s Stevie Wonder: born and raised poor in Detroit, lost his sight when he was still a child, and cut some of the most unrestrainedly joyful music ever made. As the reefer line on page one of Slate said of Chris Martin: “You’re married to Gwyneth Paltrow; why so glum?”

How can we miss George Michael if he won’t go away?

Michael film signals ‘retirement’

Singer George Michael has said that a new film about his life is the start of a retirement from public view. The pop star said it would be a much more “behind the scenes affair”, and called his own genre of music “dead.”

“I thought I should explain myself before I disappear,” said Michael, who was at the Berlin film festival to launch the documentary.

The film, A Different Story, chronicles Michael’s life and career from the 1980s and his personal struggles.

The 41-year-old told reporters that he wanted to “move his career into a different form,” but added that he does not know what it is going to be yet.

“I’m still going to be making music,” he said, but added that he was “not going to be around”.

He hinted at discontent with the current state of music industry, and said: “I don’t really think that there is anyone in the modern pop business who I feel I want to spar with.”

Michael said that the film would put his two decades of fame into context.

“It’s almost as much for me as for my fans, in terms of trying to make sense of the last 22 years and bring it to a close in a proper way,” he said.

The documentary chronicles the highs and lows of his life in the public gaze, from his meteoric rise as one half of pop duo Wham! to his arrest for lewd conduct in a Los Angeles toilet in 1998.

George Michael’s “retirement”? What does that mean? He hasn't released a record in years. Sure, there was his idiotic "Wag The Dog." That was supposed to be George's protest over the US's Iraqi invasion. It made people who had bitterly opposed the invasion re-examine their thinking, at least partly because of its embarrassing production values, which made "South Park" look like some Pixar-type CGI hyperrealism. Its understanding of international relations and its points about the U.S. invasion were on about the same level.

So is he retiring from being a has-been? In which case, wouldn’t that be a comeback? And if it is, why didn’t he precede his appearance on stage at the Berlin press conference with a recording of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” which begins with the admonishment, “Don’t call it a comeback”?

George Michael’s appeal has not been merely elusive, it’s been utterly baffling. What is there to like? There is plenty that objectionable, yes. Annoying? Oh, by all means. But what was his appeal? When Michael and hapless vestigial appendage Andrew Ridgley first appeared, as Wham, they seemed like one more variation on the template of (choose one) The New Kids On The Block, The Osmonds, The Bay City Rollers, New Edition, or, if you prefer, a precursor to (choose one) Bros, N Sync, The Backstreet Boys, or any one of an infinite number of pretty much identical prefab pop-tart ephemerae. But George Michael didn’t have much appreciable talent even by the low standards of that sorry arena.

Wham disappears, and a few years later here comes George Michael looking like some unholy collision between a Miami-Vice-three-day-wino-scuzz grooming regimen, acid-washed mall-rat and tidied-up leather queen: the daughter Rainer Werner Fassbinder never had. His record company flogs the hell out of him, and George decides he’s an artist. The only thing worse than a pop-tart past its best-before date is a pop-tart with pretensions to be something other than a concoction of high-grade sucrose and empty calories. George extended his career for a few more years by recording pallid facsimiles of hi-gloss R&B Muzak that made Kenny G and Michael Bolton seem like the keepers of the Funkadelic flame. And it raises some questions about his contention that “his style of music is ‘dead.’” What style would that be? Crummy ersatz soul? Pallid rhythm and blues that has neither rhythm nor any discernable trace elements of the blues? Mawkish, sentimental tuneless ballads that even connoisseurs of the most extreme camp would find overdone and labored? While it’s impossible to know what George Michael thinks his style of music might be, and why he thinks it’s dead, it’s nice to know it’s gone; there are many things I’d be happy never to hear again, and George Michael’s “style of music” is definitely one of them.

Throughout his entire inexplicable career, one of the few consistent things about George Michael has been his constantly announcing his imminent retirement. The only other diva who’s been quitting this long is Cher, whose farewell tour is entering its third or fourth year. Michael’s arrest in that Los Angeles men’s room is his career high-point. He should have gone out on, uh, top, as it were . . . or maybe I mean “quit while he was ahead.” But how could he quit with that kind of publicity just sitting there, going to waste?

Now, however, George has come out of total obscurity to announce his retirement, like some kind of twenty-first-century Norma Desmond. Say your career is over, George? Um, well, we all pretty much figured that out around the turn of the century. But thanks for acknowledging it publicly . . . and now that we’ve got that straightened out, goodbye.

But you know he doesn’t mean it. You know it’s not really a retirement at all. In a decade or so (depending on cash depletion, possible criminal sentences, plea bargains, and other factors) George Michael and Michael Jackson will have a spectacularly creepy act ready for cruise ships, Las Vegas and certain select European venues.

Taxi Driver II.

January 21, 2005 -- ROBERT De Niro has confirmed he’s in talks with Martin Scorsese about a possible sequel to their classic Taxi Driver. The acting legend, who starred as crazed cabbie Travis Bickle in the gritty 1976 masterpiece, says he and Scorsese have been mulling over script ideas. De Niro, 61, recently told journalists: “I was talking with Martin Scorsese about doing what I guess you’d call a sequel to Taxi Driver, where he is older.” The reunion would come just in time for De Niro, whose reputation is eroding with critically panned films like Meet the Fockers.

— New York Post

Taxi Driver II

Act I

After the shooting spree, bloodbath and rescue of Iris Steensma, Travis Bickle is celebrated as a hero. Reaction is ambivalent, too — much as it was in the case of Bernhard Goetz a decade later: People shouldn’t take the law into their own hands. Law enforcement and government officials pay lip service to that notion. But people are grateful to Bickle as well, and most of them would like to do something similar, given the right circumstances and the opportunity.

Charles Palantine’s presidential campaign picks up on the mood, hiring Bickle as a combination limo driver/policy advisor and public-opinion gauge. He’s treated deferentially by the campaign. He’s still also a nut, and nobody wants to annoy him or have any of that fury turned on them. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) continues to be fascinated by Bickle — even more so, now that his mix of charisma and psychosis seems to be drawing political interest. Travis still makes Albert Brooks’s Tom nervous.

That’s all revealed in the opening credits. We pick up the story in 2000. Travis Bickle’s combination of Vietnam experience and determination have made him an excellent political strategist and operative. He’s switched parties, splitting with Palantine — a Democrat — over law-and-order issues; Travis Bickle is a Republican. Peter Boyle reprises his strategist role from the 1972 picture The Candidate Robert Redford, melded together with the character “Wizard” from the original Taxi Driver, only in this instance, he’s Bickle’s strategist/fixer. Bickle has served a couple of terms as mayor of New York, cleaning up Times Square — because as a regular patron of the ’70s grind houses, who’d know better about what kind of filth and depravity it was a breeding-ground for? — and turning it into the family-friendly theme park it’s become.

Now, he’s preparing to seek the Republican presidential nomination, with the backing of such notables at Guardian Angels founder and talk radio host Curtis Sliwa. (In this version, the Angels are still self-appointed maintainers of public order and safety, only they’ve modeled themselves after Bickle; instead of the T-shirts and red berets, they all sport Mohawks.) Some potentially damaging information surfaces, un known provenance: allegations that there may have been more to Travis’s relationship with Iris than a noble desire to rescue a girl in trouble.

Travis Bickle thinks he knows where it’s coming from. Wizard begs him to leave this kind of thing — running down and stamping out smears or rumors — to the professionals. But this time, it’s personal. Travis is certain it’s Tom, stemming from his jealousy about Betsy and his feeling that Travis Bickle is truly dangerous and has to be stopped. It’s a conflict between strategy and information, on Tom’s side, and action as typified by Travis. Bickle is determined to confront Tom and make him retract the allegations he’s sure Tom’s responsible for. As his quest accelerates, so does the frequency of discomfiting questions about Iris from various reporters and associates. The one person who could instantly stop all this, of course, can’t be found. Iris has disappeared, changed her name and built a new life for herself. She’s determined to leave her sordid past of prostitution and drug addiction as far behind as possible.

The first act ends with Travis confronting Tom, and Tom definitively proving he doesn’t have anything to do with the allegations. That raises two big questions. If Tom’s not behind it, who is? And where is Iris Steensma?

Act II
We find out who is behind the allegations. Sport, the pimp played by Harvey Keitel, is, of course, shot and killed during Travis Bickle’s climactic shooting spree in Taxi Driver. Scorsese and Keitel worked together before, on the picture that was the feature film debut for both of them. Harvey Keitel played J.R., the conflicted Catholic protagonist in Who’s That Knocking At My Door? written and directed by Scorsese in 1967. Now, it turns out, he and Sport were twins. J.R. worked to reconcile his Madonna/whore complex by rehabilitating prostitutes and drug addicts. One of them was Iris “Easy” Steensma. At first, of course, he doesn’t realize there’s any connection. But in flashback, we see him getting to know Iris’s story, realizing the connection with his twin brother, Sport — something he keeps from Iris. She bonds with him, but his feelings about women of Iris’s ilk prevent him from acting on his affectionate feelings.

(The weak spot here, obviously, is Iris. Wouldn't she recognize Sport? You could make J.R. really clean-cut, which would help differentiate him from Sport. Iris might even say J.R. reminds her of someone, without having her realize who . . . or maybe she does, but thinks she's mistaken or confused.)

J.R.'s conflicted feelings fester, and he comes to hate both his dead twin brother and Travis Bickle for killing him. When Bickle’s candidacy gathers momentum, J.R. is moved to try derailing him by leaking the details about Iris, even though they’re not true. J.R. is keen to make her more of a victim, more powerless, and by characterizing Bickle as the last in a long line of tormentors and abusers, he can reduce his feelings of revulsion toward her. The way J.R. sees it, Travis Bickle’s shootout traumatized Iris worse than anything she’d endured before that moment, that she felt she was to blame for all the bloodshed, and even if her exploiters were evil, she feels she killed them instead of escaping from them.

J.R.’s desire to rescue her curdles, turning his conception of himself from a rescuer to an avenger. Simply imperiling Bickle’s candidacy isn’t enough. J.R. becomes determined to assassinate Bickle, and we move through the second act with a series of scenes of J.R.’s preparation to kill Bickle that parallel Bickle’s preparations to shoot Palantine in Taxi Driver. At one chilling moment, we see Harvey Keitel staring into a mirror menacingly, and repeating, “I’m talking to you.”

This is intercut with Travis Bickle’s search for Iris Steensma. Poring over old phone books, files and Internet resources, he eventually tracks her down. She’s living in Vermont under a completely different name, alone, and refuses to come back to the city or to help Travis out of his jam; it would be too difficult to admit to her past and return to what she’d thought she’d escaped. Travis argues that he saved her when she needed it, and now he needs her help. It seems hopeless, and Iris seems determined not to leave her refuge — the emotional cost would be too great. But she does give him J.R.’s name as a person who might be able to help him. Travis leaves determined to fix this, and that may mean dealing with J.R. himself. The potential for violence has been ratcheted tighter.

Act III
Travis returns to the city as J.R.’s fury grows colder, more lethal and more determined. Travis gets ready to confront J.R.; J.R. is preparing to assassinate Travis. J.R. appears at a campaign rally, staying just long enough to be seen by Travis as a means of demonstrating he can get to him when he wants to.

After the rally, Travis tracks J.R. down. We see him preparing for this confrontation. Because he knows J.R. is armed, Travis has a gun as well. He comes up on J.R. in a deserted street. He tells him it’s over. That he can’t achieve whatever he’s after. Nervous about what J.R. might do, Travis has a handgun. J.R., noting this, makes the point that Travis has not changed, that he’s still violent and crazy. This makes Travis angry. He raises the gun, yelling for J.R. to shut up, when there’s a shout. A woman’s voice. It’s Iris. J.R., furious at what he thinks is a betrayal, shoots, but only wounds her. Travis, having wanted to protect Iris and himself, shoots J.R.

In the denouement, Iris clears Travis, who is lauded as a hero. Again.

Many great HST memorials, but Hitchens blows it (again).

A lot of varied opinion and differing levels of appreciation and intelligent thinking on the passing of Hunter S. Thompson. The best included Gideon Yago on MTV’s site, which edged ahead of Kurt Loder’s piece on same for style and insight. David McCumber in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was good; same for William McKeen in the St. Petersburg Times, David Carr in The New York Times, the Boston Globe story/interview with Thompson’s lawyer offers some insight about how this came to happen, in addition to more insight, and finally — worth waiting the extra day for, definitely — Ralph Steadman in Britain’s Independent.

Of course, as might be expected, there was a lot of shameless, sub-par, crummy mock-Hunter fakery intended to honor his memory but which only profaned his achievement. Perhaps worst of all, though — worse, even, than the doltish imitation of the legions of witless fans who missed the point and the truth and the poetry, was the always-contemptible Christopher Hitchens. His crapulent extrusion turned up on Slate, which was surprising, since Slate’s usually a lot smarter, particularly about popular culture, politics and writing. Were all the good writers busy? Did Hitchens’s bolus of self-aggrandizing, off-point mumbling come over the transom?

Regardless of how it happened, it was certainly unfortunate; of all the people who could have written an obituary for Hunter Thompson, Slate had to make do with Hitchens's damp, flaccid squib.

At least this “effort” is in line with everything else the worthless sot has ever done; solipsistic to a fault, too long and yet perversely insubstantial:

“I, Christopher Hitchens, was in Aspen. I, Christopher Hitchens, was insufficiently inebriated. I, Christopher Hitchens, pointlessly shoe-horned Saddam Hussein into my lead. I, Christopher Hitchens, determined to become sufficiently inebriated, deigned to brighten Hunter Thompson’s day with my wobbling, doughy presence . . . [lucky Hunter]. I, Christopher Hitchens, shamelessly padded my word-count with flabby, meandering sentences that read like something from a 19th-century Grub Street penny-dreadful slushpile . . .”

Eventually, after 326 words about Hitchens, we get to the putative subject, and are rewarded with what may be the lamest entry in a crowded and mostly disappointing field. It misses the point of Thompson’s work and shows no evidence of appreciation for his journalistic abilities, reportorial diligence, analytical ability, insight, foresight, the places, times or people that Thompson was writing about or Thompson’s mastery of the language. Even if the political analysis was too cogent or incisive for Hitchens, you might hope he’d at least be able to appreciate that Hunter Thompson could write.

But I'm being unfair. How could we expect Mr. Hitchens to appreciate qualities in someone else’s work that are so glaringly absent from his own?

Fortunately, the Web and its contents and connections mean that there are plenty of obits that admirably accomplish what Mr. Hitchens couldn’t be bothered to attempt.

Where most of us familiar with that old SNL sketch line, “Yeah, but what does it mean to me, Al Franken?” recognize it for the joke it is, mocking extreme solipsism, Hitchens — not surprisingly — did not understand it was supposed to be a joke and apparently adopted it as his standard modus operandi.

Really, every single thing that oozes off Hitchens’s desk should begin, “I, Christopher Hitchens, regain consciousness . . .” Every scrap of ill-wrought yawp he extrudes comes with a built-in deniability option: “Urp . . . sorry . . . that must have been the booze talking.”

Unfortunately, that can’t be the case; booze would have been less tedious, more illuminating and more generous of spirit.

Montgomery Burns said it about U2, but it applies to Hitchens just as well: “Wanker.”

Hunter Stockton Thompson. July 18, 1937 - February 20, 2005.

Well, what can one say? I guess we all figured as time passed and Dr. Thompson blew past one milestone after another that he’d blow past 70 with just as much fury and élan as he’d careered through everything else. Sure, there were those rumors about the toll the alcohol and narcotics intake had taken. (My favorite was the contention that his liver was so distended it prevented him from tucking his shirt into his pants . . . no reason not to think that was true.) But as much as he abused himself or tried to fuel the flight from whatever demons were chasing him, there was also the fact of his apparent indomitability, the idea that he’d prevail, just as he had thought the Sixties generation would simply prevail, as predicted in that passage from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas that will be quoted and quoted and quoted in the coming days as people try to make Thompson one of the “doomed refugees of the Love Generation,” as he called Sixties folks.

But that misses the point — as a lot of stuff written about Thompson while he was still alive did, also — and tries to put him in that particular box of nostalgic ideas about that decade. But he was not just in front of that idea and some social trends. He was a force unto himself. What the Sixties did was provide him with a venue and an audience. But he could be just as brutally and hilariously dismissive of both venue and audience as he could about the Kentucky Derby or anything else he examined at close range and found to be half-assed, disappointing, bent, spindled, crushed or twisted: When Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo finally find what’s left of the American dream in Las Vegas, it’s a charred slab of concrete in a weed-choked vacant lot. The book has one kick after another at the corpse of the 1960s. Sergeant Pepper is not the anthem of a generation; it’s something coming out of Harry James’s trumpet as Debbie Reynolds is “yukking across the stage in a silver afro wig.” The soundtrack for the first part of the journey through the desert to Las Vegas isn’t anything by Dylan or the Beatles. It’s “Sympathy for the Devil,” a hymn celebrating some of the basest moments in human history. “White Rabbit” isn’t the musical accompaniment for kicking open the doors of perception. It’s the musical accompaniment to having a 300-pound Samoan try to kill Duke or himself . . . not that it really matters. In fact, like Manson, he tried to soothe Duke by telling him he only wanted carve a little ‘z’ in his forehead . . .

Thompson knew the 1960s were dead in 1970. It took another five years or so for the rest of the culture to catch up. Anybody who had hoped that perhaps as some of the 1960s idealists grew up, they might transmute some of their youthful idealism into political pragmatism should have been following Thompson’s work more closely. He knew where that led, having followed that experiment through the Freak Power uprising in Aspen, and having shown in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 that the brutal realities of politics were the same and had the same ends whether they were being played out across the republic or in one mountain village. Not that such things stopped him. He thought of running for the U.S. Senate from Colorado for awhile, and tried to work out a way to bring some of his Freak Power insights and lessons to bear on the national political stage.

There will be a lot of musing-out-loud about whether Thompson was trying to live up to (or down to) expectations that resulted from his public persona. In fact, in everything that’s been written about him and related by people who worked with him, the persona that emerged in his writing was a lot calmer and more rational than anything he did out in the world.

The letters in The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America show that he was that way long before there was a 1960s drug culture. He was a connoisseur of derangement. Under different circumstances, he could have started issuing a narcotics/hallucinogenic newsletter — something like The Wine Spectator, only for drug fanciers. One has only to read “First Visit with Mescalito” (in Songs of the Doomed) or any of his descriptions of the effects of everything from LSD to ether in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to see that he was able to cogently and evocatively describe the effects of whatever brain-scrambling compound he ingested. In fact, in reading this story in the New York Times Magazine three weeks ago, I was reminded of that passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about Thompson’s encounter with “name deleted at insistence of publisher’s lawyer.”

MAGAZINE DESK January 30, 2005, Sunday
“Dr. Ecstasy” By DRAKE BENNETT (NYT) 4390 words
Late Edition - Final , Section 6 , Page 32 , Column 1
DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 4390 WORDS – “Alexander Shulgin, Sasha to his friends, lives with his wife, Ann, 30 minutes inland from the San Francisco Bay on a hillside dotted with valley oak, Monterey pine and hallucinogenic cactus. At 79, he stoops a little, but he is still well over six feet tall. . .”

The story goes onto detail Dr. Shulgin’s work, which seems to have consisted — for decades — of imagining drug compounds, fabricating them in his lab, ingesting them and making careful notes on their psychoactive/emotional results. Both he and Thompson lived in the Bay Area for awhile. Maybe they found each other . . .

Thompson’s drug intake always seemed like a means to an end. He said he knew there wasn’t any enlightenment to be found, that he just liked to gobble the stuff and see what would happen. And, as he also said, he never wrote when he was on drugs. So the drugs don’t seem to have been fuel for chasing insight, but fuel to escape something else . . . the drugs were just a more completely deranging, more powerful form of fuel than the alcohol that preceded them. Thompson seemed to like shocks and surprises more than anything. That was true when he threw a bag of lye around a bar in New York, when he and Oscar Acosta tried to freak out and baffle people in Las Vegas, and he apparently liked to do it most of all to himself — throw something weird at his brain and try to maintain, to function, despite a terrible self-inflicted mental/perceptual handicap.

Hunter Thompson wrote his own obituary in a number of different forms and places. And, like the “symbiotic trapezoid quote lead” he pioneered in one of his Nixon/Watergate stories, any decent, worthwhile obit that could do him justice would have to be lashed together from a range of disparate sources: the top could come from his “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum” piece for the National Observer, where he tried to piece together what had changed in the world and in Ernest Hemingway that led him to shoot himself on July 2, 1961. Somewhere in there would have to be that line from his story about Jean-Claude Killy, where he described fame as “a crazily inflated culture-economy that eats its heroes like hot dogs and honors them on about the same level.” His obituary for Lionel Olay, “The Ultimate Freelancer” would have to be in there as well, because it contained a lot of explanation about what Thompson achieved. Throw in that passage about Louisville’s Cherokee Park from the unpublished first novel Prince Jellyfish. Somewhere, we would also have to include, as counterpoint to Thompson’s righteous rage about the Republic of the United States and its inability to live up to the noblest aspirations of the Framers, Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Be Angry at the Sun,” which I first encountered — as a lot of people did — in Campaign Trail ’72. There could be a couple of lines in there someplace from Thompson's obituary for Oscar Zeta Acosta, especially the point at which Thompson describes him as "a mutant . . . a prototype never even considered for mass production."

I think that’ll about cover it. But there’s one more thing that would have to be in there: a piece of insight from his two-part Rolling Stone story [“Fear and Loathing in the Near Room”; Fear and Loathing in the Far Room”] about Muhammad Ali: “Some try to write their novels, some try to live them, and some fools try to do both.” Thompson said Ali was trying to sidestep that entire dilemma and cut a new path by “living his own movie.” But long before Clay/Ali even imagined doing that, another Louisville native had beaten him to it.

Fear and Loathing

“To William J. Kennedy
Nov. 22, 1963
Woody Creek, Colorado

“There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything — much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder. God knows I might go mad for lack of talk. I have become like a psychotic sphinx — I want to kill because I can’t talk.

“I suppose you will say the rotten murder has no meaning for a true writer of fiction, and that the ‘real artists’ in the ‘little magazines’ are above such temporal things. I wish I could agree, but in fact I think what happened today is far more meaningful than the entire contents of the ‘little magazines’ for the past 20 years. And the next 20, if we get that far . . .

“Fiction is dead. Mailer is an antique curiosity. The stakes are now too high and the time too short . . . The only hope now is to swing hard with the right hand , while hanging onto sanity with the left. Politics will become a cockfight and reason will go by the boards. There will have to be somebody to carry the flag.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
The Proud Highway

Reckoning "The Hour"

Now that the fuss is over, and the p.r. and the pre-launch hype, try to make sense of “The Hour,” CBC Newsworld’s effort to get the younger demographic pay to attention to the news. Start with the fact it’s not news.

Part of what’s baffling here is what the people who conceived this show mean when they talk about “young people.” Is it the vaunted 18-to-34 demographic, which even dedicated advertising professionals know is a chimera? And who says the news needs to be skewed or prepared or massaged differently for people because of their age? Isn’t it usually the case that whenever young people think something conceived by non-young people is being aimed at them, they won’t watch on principle? The patronizing idea that people in their late teens and early 20s need the news somehow rendered more palatable presumes that they’re not smart enough, engaged enough or sufficiently sophisticated to be given regular news. It’s like they need special “news pabulum” that’s had anything challenging or threatening or unpleasant filtered out of it, or maybe mashed into such a fine paste it doesn’t exist. Or maybe it implies that younger news consumers need absolutely everything coated with a carapace of sugary glitz, cheesy effects and “attitude” in order to make it palatable.

Watching “The Hour” makes that seem the more likely philosophy. The p.r. before the show’s launch made much of host George Stoumboulopoulous’s intention to demand the truth. George stayed on message throughout the p.r. campaign. Look up the stories: George says “no bullshit” at least once — more, if he can manage it — in every piece.

The flip side of “easy-does-it-news-substitute” formula is the implication that all the other news on CBC Newsworld is so unutterably dull that it’s figured the rest of its audience — the “unyoung,” or “old” audience — will sit through just about anything. Only the fickle youngsters can muster the resolve necessary to tune out if something isn’t interesting.

What’s the show look like? “The Hour” is a talk show. George Strooumboulopoulous’s main qualification seems to be that he used to be a VJ, and “the kids” know who he is. The ancillary elements of Stroumboulopoulous’s old job — too much hair product, nasal piercing, no journalistic experience — are grimy icing on the attitudinal cake. There are some tape pieces. But they’re not stories. They’re set-ups for more talk, often in that strange closed-loop approach the CBC, in particular, seems to favor, wherein you send meat puppet out of the building with a producer and a crew to snag a mess of streeter clips in order that the talking head can come back and talk to the host about the clips. Of course, what’s missing is some actual information about whatever it is everybody is opining about.

If viewers want ignorant commentary on the news, why turn to Newsworld? Ignorant commentary on the news is what loudmouthed, opinionated family members are for. If you don’t have loudmouthed opinionated family members, there are blogs at every point on the political spectrum that’ll provide the maximum daily allowance of stupid, badly-written opinion. And if that fails, there’s talk radio, Fox News, Crossfire, or a religious TV channel.

The Big Three networks’ standard-issue 6:00 or 6:30 p.m. nightly newscasts are losing viewers daily. If viewers don’t have the patience or interest in 22 minutes of news during supper, either because they’ve got the news from the paper or online or on an all-news channel, what are the chances they’ll want to watch somebody have not-very-interesting pre-scripted conversations about the news? Does this seem like a recipe for getting anybody to watch a “current affairs” show, regardless of their age?

Interestingly, The New York Times assumes even kids in grammar school can read its product without forcing it through some special “wannabe-hipster-doofus” filter first. At what point do people who gather and deliver news think that their audience doesn’t need some special “low-impact” version of their product?

The thinking that seems to be behind shows like “The Hour” seems to be that by the time you’re grown up enough to handle actual news, you’re in a demographic nobody wants to reach.

But why is it that way?

CBS has decided not to decide, at least for now, what to do with the Evening News. Or with itself. There are noises again about its merging or joining forces somehow — strategically, in business terms, somehow — with CNN, and that would make a lot of sense. Before that, it may turn itself into ABC World News Tonight, ’70s style, with some kind of multiple anchor format, only instead of Peter Jennings, Max Robinson and Frank Reynolds, it’ll be . . . well, that’s not really clear. Possible anchors have included current CBS employees Scott Pelley and former VJ John Roberts . . . whom Canuckleheads of a certain age will always think of as J.D. Roberts.

But of this much we can be sure: Dan Rather is on his way out . . . eventually. Why Dan Rather has remained as the anchor of the Evening News for as long as he has remains a mystery. His being chosen to succeed Walter Cronkite seemed strange when it happened. And the longer Dan did the job, the stranger a decision it seemed. Right at the beginning of his tenure, there was his deeply weird and never explained nightly broadcast-concluding valediction. Rather, apparently, was seeking some kind of signature line on the order of Walter Cronkite’s “And that’s the way it is.” What he came up with was the exhortation, “Courage.” Nobody except Dan knew what led him to choose that; Dan never explained it, and there wasn’t anything in the early 1980s that seemed dire enough to warrant it. (The Iranian hostages were free; Reagan was in the White House, it was “morning in America,” after all, so what was there to be afraid of? There was the Evil Empire, but it wasn’t appreciably scarier than it had been previously. There was a sudden rush of fear-mongering about nuclear vaporization that hadn’t been as prevalent since about 30 years previously. But none of that explained, singly or in aggregate, why people might be so terrified that they’d need to have somebody sternly exhort them to be courageous.) But “Courage” it was . . . at first. Then Dan started to change it up, opting for the Spanish “Cu-rah-hey.” Shortly after that, mercifully, it stopped altogether, just as mystifyingly as it had started.

But that was just one example of Rather-related strangeness. There was the Chicago cab kidnapping: Dan was supposed to interview Studs Terkel, but never showed up for the interview, and said he’d been kidnapped by a rogue taxi driver who wouldn’t let him out of the cab. Dan couldn’t offer anything in the way of identification that might help the cops find or apprehend the alleged perpetrator. There was “Gunga Dan,” when Dan dressed up as a mujahadeen fighter of the kind that — at that time — was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. He looked like Dan Rather in a not-terribly-convincing Afghan disguise. His speaking English with a Texan accent didn’t help sell the illusion either.

A few years after that, Dan was jumped on the street in New York by a guy who beat him while screeching “What is the frequency, Kenneth?”

There was the tennis tantrum: coverage ran long, Dan got annoyed, stomped off the set, the tennis ended and the network went to black for eight minutes while, doubtless, some poor editorial assistant was dispatched to find Dan and get him wired up and back in his anchor chair. That incident got thrown back in his face by an embattled George H.W. Bush. Dan pressed him on his knowledge of the Iran-Contra situation until George — eager to disprove “wimp” mutterings — snapped, “How would you like it if I judged your career by the eight minutes you walked off the air?” The whole stupid collision made them both look bad.

History and his son have made George H.W. Bush look better and better. Dan Rather just got a little weirder and a little more tarnished with each new year and each new inexplicable spasm of bizarre behavior . . . like his odd descent into a kind of blind alley of bad syntax, tortured metaphor and overwrought Texas folksiness on election night in 2000. The longer the night wore on and the tighter and less obvious the results became, the more baroque and parodic Dan’s descriptions got.

And now he’s all mashed up in this memo mess and headed for retirement. (Although, at 72, it’s not like he’s being shoved out early; he’s already outlasted his predecessor — Walter had to retire at 65.) The biggest irony here is that for once, the bad and/or weird behavior is not Dan’s. In this case, he was just the hapless meat puppet fronting a second-rate attempt to nail George W. Bush on his Texas Air National Guard service or lack thereof. And the people who made the decisions to trust the fake documents, to interview and take at face value all the comments from the cranks with some kind of vindictive ulterior motives are all squawking and refusing to leave, even though the 224-page report indicts them pretty squarely and indisputably. Mary Mapes and her lieutenants feel they’re being unfairly singled out, even though the panel that investigated the whole mess did a much more thorough and careful job investigating their shoddy work and half-assed methods than Mapes et al managed as producers and/or reporters.

All the carping by people on the right about the supposed liberal bias of CBS and Dan Rather has never made much sense, and they’ve never been able to offer anything that seemed convincing as evidence of this bias. Dan Rather’s whole act is so strange and twitchy and wrapped too tight — and has been for so long — that it’s work just trying to parse what obvious, factual points he’s trying to get across, never mind how he might be shading them subtle bias.

Not that a lot of the carping by right-wing types about the media ever makes much sense, and there’s never any concrete evidence. Besides, if Fox News Channel and Ann Coulter are alternatives to liberal bias, I’ll just have to accept liberal bias as part of the package, since apparently being fair and balanced also means being shrill, opinionated and fact-free.

We just had a month of free FNC as part of the cable company’s marketing push. The problem isn’t its tilt or lack thereof, it’s how little actual news it offers. Mostly it’s talk shows, the highest-rated of which is the one fronted by tiresome scold Bill O’Reilly, whose primary rhetorical gambit seems to consist of yelling at people to shut up. The papers from his now-settled sexual harassment lawsuit suggest that when he’s yelling “shut up,” O’Reilly is comparatively eloquent. At least that’s less creepy than the kinds of things he apparently says to producers on whom he has a crush.

I don’t think the Air America all-liberal radio all the time is really the answer, either. As with anything conceived to serve an ideological agenda, it’s dull because it’s predictable; it’s too easy to see where it’s going; it’s like listening to a comedian tell old, badly-written jokes. You know the punch lines will make you groan, and you figure them out long before the comedian gets to them.

The other problem here is what passes for “liberal” and conservative” in most of these considerations. The conservatives appear to be a bunch of meddlesome, moralistic and hypocritical haranguers (O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher) and the liberals come across like smug, self-satisfied dolts who are naïve and credulous and just as meddlesome and hypocritical.

Why doesn’t P.J. O’Rourke have a talk show? At least he’s reasonably well-informed, curious about things and funny.

But he doesn’t. And unfortunately, that’s the way it is.

The Delivery Man

I'm enjoying Elvis Costello's most recent standard rock-and-roll record (whatever "rock and roll" means anymore), "The Delivery Man," and, funnily enough, at about 5:00 this afternoon, "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" was on CNBC -- a quirk of their schedule and our time zone -- and there was Elvis Costello with the Imposters doing "Monkey To Man," storming through it and showing off his monkey cufflinks in the post-performance interview. I mentioned this to a friend of mine -- another Costello fan of long standing. He said it was "one of those songs that Costello probably writes in his sleep." He meant that as a compliment, and I think I understand it. The record's a good one. I applaud Costello's feints and efforts and aspirations in other directions -- the jazz work, the Brodsky Quartet "Juliet Letters" work, and, although I haven't heard it yet, I imagine "Il Sogno" is probably pretty entertaining, extrapolating from his movie scoring work and his ability with melody. As for "The Delivery Man," God knows it's better than the relentless, formulaic sameness we're getting from just about everybody else. But I do think there's a certain extra something he brings to his "rock and roll" (whatever that means anymore) records, and it's all over this one.

When other people try to simultaneously use all the tropes and conceits of a particular genre -- even if it's only for a single song -- it often seems like an exercise or a project, the self-consciousness, distancing and framing in quotation marks leaches something out of it. Costello's one of the few people who can borrow idioms like some kind of guitar-toting magpie and still make it sound like his understanding of them is deeper than most, and that there's something in the particular form he genuinely needs to express some element of the song they're used in.

(As for Steve Nieve's quoting Bernstein & Sondheim's "I Want To Live In America" in "Button My Lip," well, I don't have any theories or notions or ideas about that, except that there seems to be at least one really obvious musical quotation on every Cosetllo record. And it's amusing, and it works.)

Lucinda Williams is great on this record. I don't know anything else she's done. Also, I think I was confusing her with Gillian Welch. Or, at least, I did until I saw Gillian Welch on "Austin City Limits." I don't think I'll confuse Gilliam Welch with anybody else again; her dreary, lugubrious moaning makes Leonard Cohen sound like Iggy Pop. I kept flipping back to the show as I continued channel surfing, just in case Welch livened things up and maybe my initial glimpse had been at a particularly downbeat point. Nope.

I'm as much a fan of moaning, spooky hillbilly murder ballads as the next person. But when it's so obviously a fake-out pose glommed onto by someone whose entire knowledge of the idiom and its history seems to have come from a college course in "American Folk Art: Naivete as Metaphor," it's hard to connect with. It's part of a tradition, no question. But not the tradition it wants to be a part of. Instead, it's part of the perpetually adolescent miserablist tradition -- Nick Cave and countless others -- whose "sadness" seems like a marketing gimmick or a pose they struck that they kept at so persistently they forgot it was a pose. They failed to heed the warning that if they kept making that face it'd get stuck like that.

I used to think I was insufficiently deep or mature or somehow insufficiently equipped to connect with their terrible mopery. Now I realize that in fact I was no longer sufficiently adolescent to have much appreciation for self-dramatizing bogus world-weariness. I keep thinking of that observation Ben Folds made: "What's Billy Corgan got to be depressed about? He's a white upper-middle-class kid who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Stevie Wonder has been blind since he was a child, grew up poor in Detroit, and makes the most joyful music possible."

Not that we're singling out poor old Gillian Welch or whoever she is. She just came to mind because of the Lucinda Williams confusion. There are plenty of other examples. A local example who leaps to mind . . . well, that's not really accurate, since it's impossible to imagine him leaping anywhere . . . is Herald "Of Course That's Your Real Name" Nix, who's just released his second album, a mere seven years after his first one -- no point saturating the market or creating a glut of Nixiana. I happened across Herald mumbling his tuneless, one-chord moans on the local cable access channel. Imagine Ed Gein doing a really bad Chris Isaak imitation . . . with two fewer chords . . . and about two minutes longer than necessary. Hey, if you come up with some cliched refrain, you're not really getting your money's worth unless you repeat it about at least 44 times. Watching Herald's performance, I felt worst for his sidemen. The audience wanted to endure Nix noise for whatever unfathomable reason. But the sidemen had to play the one-chord drear through all its interminable tedium. I guess it might be possible to just get into the zen minimalist meditative repetition of it all, but I doubt it.

I prefer my poignant or self-pitying sad songs from the jazz canon: Rodgers & Hart, for example. Or Billy Strayhorn.

I have a similar problem with British rap. The Stereophonics? Feh. The Streets? Please. It's all too fake to even be considered as any kind of expression, and its fakeness obscures any artistic aspirations its perpetrator might have . . . like not-quite-good-enough-actors not quite managing to do a convincing American accent, or Kenneth Branagh pretending to be Woody Allen in "Celebrity."

besides, if you want British rap, why go through the circuitous route of listening to British folks try to imitate an African-American artform they don't seem to be able to do well, for whatever reason? You want British rap? It's been around for about the same time as real rap.

Please stand up and take a bow from the Great Hereafter, Ian Dury.

Post-Christmas pulp; post-modern pulp

The neighbors' Christmas tree is gone. We dragged it two blocks along the street and then past Kitsilano Pool -- frozen, with a flock of confused and vaguely embarrassed-looking seagulls standing around on the ice, as though they knew something was wrong, but couldn't figure out exactly what. Then past the closed concession stand and the Wind Swimmer statue on top of its pole overlooking the pool, across the expanse of field where there are usually knots of people either playing soccer, throwing a football around, hurling Frisbees or, of course, that inexplicable Hacky-Sack thing, which always makes them look like a bunch of sadists trying to tease a bean-bag to death . . . or maybe bore it into submission. Hacky-Sacking ("hackying?") must be great if you're stoned; it looks astoundingly boring otherwise.

A big yellow chipper in the parking lot next to the beach gulped denuded Christmas trees and spewed their chewed remains into a bin on the back of a truck. The folks running it were right in the middle of a pulping round when we approached. Henry and Spencer both stared as the trees were fed into the blades at the back and almost instantly came firing out of the mouth of the spout on the top of the thing in a gout of dark green peppered with blond wood chunks. I kept thinking about Steve Buscemi's character in "Fargo," with Marge Gunderson saying, "and that must've been your accomplice in the wood-chipper . . . and those three people in Brainerd . . . and all for a little bit of money . . ."

There was lull in the tree-shredding: they powered the chipper down and waited for more cars to come creeping into the snowy parking lot and leave another object of pagan worship on the pile. It wasn't clear how big the pile had to be before there were enough accumulated saplings to fire the chipper up again. But the drop in traffic and the few trees in the existing pile seemed to indicate they wouldn't be firing it up again any time soon. So we stomped through the snow to Starbucks for a hot chocolate (for those five and under), coffee (for those over five).

After that we went back to the chipper just in time to watch them zap through a pile of Christmas trees that was about the size of a minivan and a half. Then it was back home, with a lot of snowball-throwing and marveling at the people running a sailing race in the snow on English Bay and considering how exotic this kind of thing seems here. Snow down here next to the water seldom happens. And this kind of winter -- the kind with snow -- lasts about a week or ten days here . . . at least, that's what it did last year. Compare that with the Toronto winters we're used to, the ones that start in late November and conclude sometime in early May, and which are memorable for a couple of perennial features: the endless weeks of gray, slushy drear, the cold snaps whose temperatures make your face hurt when you step outside and are usually accompanied by brilliant sunshine, and the false dawn of a thaw in January or February that melts everything just enough to encase everything in an impenetrable carapace of ice several inches thick.

Here, it's gray and rainy with this bout of "winter" in the middle -- usually just long enough to make you glad it'll be gone in a week instead of hanging around until the end of April . . .

After the tree was done with and we'd had a bunch of snowball fights and were sufficiently wet and cold, we returned here. I finished reading a rotten novel called "L9.99" (you'll have to view that capital L as a British "pound" symbol) by Frederic Beigbeder (originally titled "99 francs," and listed in some places as "L6.99," which seems to have been somebody's idea of a joke, as though it had been reduced in price). When you're reading a good novel, it gains heft; the characters come into sharper focus and the world in which it occurs gets realer because of the accretion of detail and description. "L9.99" does the opposite. The more of it I read, the less real and believable and plausible the characters got, until, by the end of the story, they were inane caricatures who'd become so annoying you couldn't wait for them to completely disappear.

The book is an achievement. It's not often you find the adolescent dingbat politics and superficial lack of understanding of Naomi Klein or Adbusters fused to the clumsy, affectless McDonald's-menu prose style of Bret Easton Ellis in service of the blindingly obvious apercus of Baudrillard, complete with the French habit of overthinking and over-analyzing some aspect of pop-culture ephemera and coming to conclusions that are so bizarrely and deeply wrong they're laughable . . . and all of it leading to the astounding revelation that some aspects of advertising business are not terribly deep or sufficiently selfless and/or noble. Wow. This is all marketed, of course, with the breathless excitement of encountering someone with the fearless ability to speak truth to power. And the fact that M. Beigbeder (or, as I've come to think of him fondly, "Monsieur Bagbiter") used to work for Young & Rubicam and got fired when his boss read the book is held up as proof of its worth and his bona fides. It's implied that the firing was occasioned by Beigbeder's "telling it like it is," but it seems more likely that his boss just fired him because the book was bad. "Sorry, Fred, we can't have anybody who'd write anything this bad working here. What will our clients think? What will other agencies think?" Or, even more likely, Bagbiter was an annoying wiener, and his dumb-ass "book" provided the perfect pretext for getting rid of him.

The British publisher decided it'd be a good idea to translate not just the language -- from French to English -- but the references and "signifiers" from French to English as well. Why stop there? Why couldn't translator Adriana Hunter couldn't have come up with a better plot, chopped out the embarrassing passage wherein every famous person who's died since World War II is posited to have faked their demise in order to live in some post-lapsarian state of cosseted indulgence on an island in the Caymans, cut about 75 pages and fixed things like the misspelling of Paula Porizkova's name and the misattributed and misquoted song lyrics? (And that's a much worse sin in something striving for some kind of hipster doofus cachet, like this book, than it might be elsewhere.)

In addition to those problems, the book seems almost quaintly dated. Published in 2000, it's got that whiff of pretty minor, inane concerns being inflated to the level of real problems: "oh, dear . . . advertising is everywhere . . . and, um, well, it's probably bad, because, um, it isn't good, right?"

But that was only the start. After 9/11, an event one might have hoped would make people who write books like this stop writing books like this, Beigbeder wrote "Windows On The World," in which he imagined the attacks from inside the towers. He said the media's presentation of the attacks was too clinical and sanitized, and that the only way to know what truly happened was to invent it. Wrong, wrong and wrong. I can only guess he was talking about the French media's reporting, since that was not the case here in North America . . . and one of the most detailed and heartbreaking aspects of the reporting on that cataclysm was a French documentary ("9/11"), which I guess he wasn't aware of, either. Or maybe they didn't show it on TV in France.

The excerpts of "Windows on The World" I read offered more of the same tired, adolescent tedium that's Beigbeder's standard product, and for which there must be an inexhaustible appetite somewhere: "clueless French intellectual pontificating about 'American cultural imperialism' and the hollow pointlessness of modern existence while decrying some cartoon version of capitalism that no actual capitalist would recognize." Apparently there's no human experience -- no matter how shattering, life-altering or terrible to contemplate -- that can't be grist for an "explanation" of its "real meaning" by some ideology-damaged European "intellectual." Maybe if we had smart, well-written, intelligently conceived and elegantly argued cultural commentary from people who bothered to try to be be informed or engaging instead of the kind of self-important, noisome, empty sloganeering scribbled by people like Frederic Beigbeder to consider, that wouldn't be such a big problem, now, would it?

Whither Whit?

Just concluded watching “Barcelona,” Whit Stillman’s 1994 (?) picture, the second in his trilogy. (The first was “Metropolitan,” the third was “The Last Days of Disco”) again. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the picture now. At least six, but probably more.

Back when “Metropolitan” came out, somebody (probably Vincent Canby -- that would make sense, although it may not be accurate) compared him to Woody Allen, and that’s kind of accurate, or at least there are rough but appreciable analogies between them: there are moral considerations bedeviling their characters, there’s a lot of dialogue; it’s beautifully crafted, eminently quotable and more often than not, both writer/directors’ characters say things we would like to have the presence of mind to say in similar situations. But there are differences. Where Allen tended -- at least through the middle of his career -- to split his artistic aspirations between funny, sharply observed romantic comedies that also served as a kind of anthropology of a certain stratum of Manhattan society and heavier, dead-serious pictures such as "Interiors" or "Another Woman," Stillman showed himself as somebody who wanted to get those two things into the same picture: the sharply observed elements of the human comedy together with pretty serious emotional territory, although more often in situations where moral quandaries were determining romantic conduct and outcomes. And there was the wistful aspect to Stillman’s work that was absent in Allen’s movies. The young people in “Metropolitan” have convinced themselves that they’ve just arrived at the party moments too late . . . which is funnier because the whole movie is about what happens after they leave the parties they’re ostensibly getting together to attend; they frequently eulogize the fading world they inhabit, lamenting the fact there won’t be many -- or any -- more orgy weeks or debutante seasons soon, and about how the whole “UHB” -- “urban haute bourgeoisie” -- is doomed.

“Barcelona” moves that further, with the Boynton cousins, Ted (Taylor Nichols) and Fred (Chris Eigeman) in a kind of moral/familial conflict and tension, played out in the conflict of sexual politics, moral/romantic questions, and politically motivated violence. Again, a world or moral framework is collapsing or fading or giving way. In the case of Barcelona, it’s the Cold War, which is just about to end, and although it’s never explicitly stated, the picture is suffused with the knowledge that all the pegs and benchmarks and points of the moral and political compasses are disappearing. Every scene in the picture is telling, the performances are brilliant and the writing is tremendous.

Another few years went by, and along came the equally brilliant “The Last Days of Disco,” the story of which occurs between those of “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona.” Once again, a terrific story, a brilliant balance between the internal, moral conflicts and the larger, social and legal ones. And since then, what? Stillman bought some time with the novel of “The Last Days of Disco,” which was entertaining and well-crafted enough. But for Stillman, it almost seemed like a step backwards -- and that’s not something I say lightly. I’d think that in a lot of ways it’s tougher to write a novel than make movies -- although it’s probably easier if we mean “making movies” here the way Stillman makes them, writing, producing and directing. The novel did offer more insight into some of the characters -- most notably, obviously, Jimmy Steinway, the dancing ad man. But the movie offered insight into the character of the social scene, the milieu (for want of a better term) and the differences between the changes people thought were happening in social mores and the unchanging, universal elements that are remarkably resistant to change. There’s another point of conflict. And once again, we’re dealing with a subculture or a world that’s disappearing: it’s the last days of disco, remember. And the opening title card sets the time as “the very early eighties.”

The appreciation for Stillman’s work is sincere, but edged with selfishness. Why hasn’t he kept going? There was talk of his writing and directing a picture called, I think, “The Red Azalea” about the Cultural Revolution in China. But for whatever reason, that never seems to have happened. And there were directing stints on “Homicide: Life on the Street.” But what else? An d why not? It doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that there could have been other, more practical parallels with Woody Allen. The budgets for Stillman’s pictures must be pretty modest and reasonable. They can’t have been expensive to make, at least compared with some of the bloated swords and sandals historical epics that seem to have rolled by . . . okay, I can only think of two: “Troy” and “Alexander the Great.” What I can’t think of is why anybody would want to sit through either one. In the first instance, you’ve got Brad Pitt woefully miscast as an ancient Texan warrior fighting bravely to affect a British accent so the proceedings will seem more “historical,” and the other is directed by Oliver Stone, whose last not-entirely-unwatchable movie was . . . well, “JFK” was execrable revisionist/paranoid twaddle, and has there been anything since then that anybody would have bothered renting?

So how come Woody Allen comes out with a picture every fall almost as reliably as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Whit Stillman seems to be on a once-every-five years schedule? Stillman has said he writes slowly, that it takes him a lot longer to get a screenplay he’s satisfied with than it seems to take anybody else. And his directing and producing the pictures probably adds to the amount of time it takes to get them made. But still, from a purely selfish perspective, it’s way too long since there’s been a Whit Stillman movie, even allowing for the established five-year interval between pictures . . . unless, of course, one is imminent and I’m just not aware of it.

I always thought that if ever anybody were going to adapt any of Salinger’s work for the movies, Stillman would probably be the best choice. Hey, now I’m really reaching. And why not? If Stillman isn’t going to make any movies of his own screenplays or stories, then why shouldn’t we look for material he can work on? Not that anybody’s going to let any movies get made of anything J.D. Salinger has written, at least not while Jerome is alive. And I’m sure there’s some fearsome codicil made out of pig-iron and welded onto his will specifically prohibiting any literary executors from selling the movie rights to his work until . . . well, probably ever.

But, what the hell, Whit, why not drive up to New Hampshire and lean on Jerome? There might be enough similarities between your esthetics and the characters you’ve created that you could make it happen.

Then again, the night before watching “Barcelona,” we watched “Withnail and I,” and what else has writer/director Bruce Robinson done since making that in 1986? What else has he needed to do? And maybe that’s the way it is with Stillman. Having made “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona,” and “The Last Days of Disco,” what else does he have to do?

Breakfast With Hunter

Wayne Ewing’s 2003 documentary Breakfast With Hunter is a portrait of a baffling cultural and literary presence that's truthful and respectful at the same time. In most instances, you might expect those two things to be mutually exclusive. But not always, and not in this case.

Shot over the course of 1996 through 1998, it covers the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the Modern Library edition, the 25th anniversary of the publication of Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72, the making of the movie version of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, some kind of Hunter Thompson Appreciation Day in Louisville and a DUI case with questionable evidentiary and procedural issues in Aspen.

I’ve been a fan of Doctor Thompson’s work for about 30 years. I was 14 when I first read Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which knocked me out, and not because of the drug intake or the any of the reasons people usually seem to glom onto Thompson’s work — many of them the same reasons you’d expect a 14-year-old boy to get a kick out of it. It was the writing: the vivid, visceral impact and poetry of the words. But it made its point without any kind of tenderness or sentimentality. By the time Raoul Duke staggers into some kind of redemption, it’s filthy and tattered; ragged and compromised, and it only counts as redemption because it’s mere survival . . . which doesn’t seem like much. But when destruction is the only other alternative, survival looks like victory. The impact of that book was visceral and cerebral all at once. Who didn’t want to drive to Las Vegas after reading that book, with or without the alcohol, drugs, disruptive intention and burning outrage?

And I guess a lot of people didn’t need more than that book. Not me. I had to read everything, of course, starting with Hell’s Angels and right on through everything else — the Rolling Stone work, all the collected stuff in The Great Shark Hunt and as much as I could find outside of the hardcover offerings, including things that hadn’t been collected at that point — the 1967 piece for the New York Times Magazine about Haight-Ashbury, for example, along with everything else listed in the bibliography of works in the back of Shark Hunt. There was also the Craig Vetter Playboy interview . . . from 1974, I think, while Thompson was still riding high following Campaign Trail ’72.

One of the things that all that reading confirmed was what a tremendous reporter Thompson was, and, I guess, what an excellent reporter he still is, although there seems to be a lot less reporting now than there used to be; it’s not something he does as much now. And even when he was reporting, there was always a clearly defined point of view. But the stuff for the National Observer from all over South America offers one example after another of deep insight and the kind of understanding that can only be gained from going to a place and talking to the people there, as well as really working hard to analyze everything you see and hear, as well as working to synthesize it with a lot of other knowledge and wisdom. As he’s said, he became a journalist because it was a way for somebody who wanted to be a writer to earn a living. And Thompson was a writer from a very early age. As he says in Ewing’s film, it was the only thing he knew he could do that wasn’t against the law. And now that The Rum Diary has been published some forty years after it was written, maybe somebody will publish Prince Jellyfish, since the excerpt of it that was in Songs of the Doomed shows it to be polished, evocative and finely wrought. And if they could published The Neon Bible, which John Kennedy Toole wrote when he was sixteen . . . and then make a movie out of it, well why not Prince Jellyfish? Unlike a lot of other fiction I stagger through these days, once I got to the end of the excerpt, I wanted to read more. I don’t know if that’s the novel he was working on in that cabin in Cuddebackville in upstate New York, after being fried from the Middletown Daily Record or not. But given the quality of work in the two volumes of letters, The Rum Diary and just about everything else (with the exception of Better Than Sex, which is a low point and may be nothing more than a day-late-dollar-short effort to keep lawyers and contracts from crushing him — I don’t know) that’s come out of his typewriter and/or pen, I’d be happy to see everything he’s ever written collected and/or published properly. He’s written at a very high level from the get-go: his membership in Louisville’s literary society, for one thing, in addition to the well-documented practice of writing out pages of Hemingway and Fitzgerald prose as part of an effort to understand their techniques and “rhythms.”

The writing’s all been vivid, and because of that it’s easy to see why there’s been a drive to bring it to the screen. But that’s been as fraught as his Thompson’s publishing history (especially as detailed in Fear and Loathing In America, the second volume of letters.) Part of the problem with the movie work, though, seems to have been — as in a lot of other places and times, and with a lot of other people — confusing the author with the work; Thompson has probably had more trouble and more well-meaning stupidity perpetrated on his behalf by people who thought they were doing him a favor than just about any other writer I can think of. Well, Hemingway, maybe. But even that’s a stretch.

First, there Where The Buffalo Roam, in which Bill Murray does a reasonably good Thompson imitation, but which is more of a caricature that serves the demands — such as they are — of the picture’s lousy screenplay. Murray only has to be a caricature because that’s all the Thompson character is in Buffalo. The picture’s rotten script made no sense and must have pissed off anybody who’d read any of the books or any of Thompson’s work. Whichever coke-addled blowdog wrote the screenplay had taken the least salient aspects of a dozen passages from Thompson’s writing, mashed them together with adulterated, clumsily fictionalized anecdotes from Thompson’s life, and then torqued everything even further for reasons that can’t even be guessed at. Did it seem as though Thompson’s life and work lacked drama, or as though the material required hyping or punching up? The point in Buffalo where Thompson encounters Richard Nixon in a hotel bathroom is a confluence of two incidents: one in Campaign Trail ’72 where Thompson is in Manchester, New Hampshire for that state’s Democratic primary and happens to look up from a urinal in a men’s room (maybe at the Exeter Inn, but I’m not going to look it up right now) and finds senator George McGovern at the next urinal, and the second is a story about Richard Nixon from 1968 (also in New Hampshire, which is the only thing the two stories have in common) in which Thompson is pressed into service to take a car trip with Nixon because “the boss” wants to relax and talk football and Thompson is the only person who knows anything about the subject. The passage occurs in a magazine story about Nixon’s recasting himself yet again in order to serve his monumental — some would say monstrous — political ambition. It’s in Shark Hunt. And both cases are in their respective original places for very specific narrative reasons. In the first instance, Thompson is trying to demonstrate the lack of artifice and expectation around McGovern and his campaign at the beginning of the 1972 primary season (everybody was certain Ed Muskie was going to prevail and that McGovern would be a footnote, at best). The Nixon story comes at a point where Thompson has become convinced that there is nothing to Nixon except ambition. There are no ideals or philosophy or beliefs or goals, except to get elected. Talking about football with him humanizes him unexpectedly, and one of the things the sequence does is to (a) demonstrate that Nixon is not evil, and (b) what politics and lust for power can do to people. To mash those two things together in that preposterous sequence in Buffalo is just idiotic, which is just one of the reasons the movie didn’t — and doesn’t — work: the entire picture is a string of those kinds of false, hollow skits, crude cartoons that would satisfy only people who’d read Las Vegas and missed its point . . . and probably not even them.

It’s easy to see why nobody went near anything else with Thompson’s name on it for 20 years. The stench of Buffalo would have been enough to keep even the most stouthearted, determined Thompson fanatics away from his work.

Not that other people weren’t still trying to make it happen. There’s a sequence in Breakfast where Alex Cox and a screenwriter visit Thompson to talk about their vision for the thing and we watch the project fall apart because they want to depict the metaphor of the wave of the 1960s San Francisco cultural foment breaking literally, and to conflate it with Thompson’s aborted escape midway through the story: They want to have him go to the airport after the Fabulous Mint 400, get on a plane and then get hit by an actual wave instead of trying to drive back to Los Angeles and getting stopped by the cop. Thompson accuses them — rightly — of turning something he considers poetry into a cartoon. As the argument escalates, it becomes clearer that Cox and his cohort are really a lot more interested in making an animated version of Ralph Steadman’s drawings for the book than the book itself. Thompson kicks them out of his house, calls the producer trying to put the movie together and barks threats at her.

It’s good he prevailed, because Terry Gilliam did a terrific job making the movie. The only part that didn’t make any sense was the Gary Busey come-on in the mid-story cop sequence. But everything else was so faithful to the work and did such a good job of translating it that it’s possible to forgive that lapse, tiny as it is. And all the sequences in the documentary illustrate perfectly the weird oxymoron that working with Thompson must be: he's passionate in defending his work, passionate in a way we would hope anybody committed to their work would be. But there are also quirks that make you think about what it must mean to be Thompson's collaborator or editor or co-conspirator and think how tough that job must be.

One of the excellent supplements on the Breakfast With Hunter DVD is a two-part conversation between Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke. At one point in the first half of the conversation, O’Rourke asks Thompson about how he feels about his influence — specifically the negative aspects of it, about the thousands of godawful pages of derivative garbage scribbled by the countless scores of Thompson fans who have tried to write like him. Thompson — rightly — won’t take the blame for other people’s bad writing, although he’s clearly aware of it. Hell, a lot of that bad writing has probably been forced on him, mailed to him, faxed or pushed at him at book signings. The second part of the interview is O’Rourke’s reading the end of Fear and Loathing, with Raoul Duke reeling through the airport, yelling at Marines and ending with his description of himself as “a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.”

You come away from Ewing’s movie with a much better idea of who Thompson is and what he’s like to deal with. The three biographies didn’t really get that across as well: one didn’t bother trying; one was just an agglomeration of interview transcripts. Peter Whitmer’s book came closest. But in this movie, you can see that Hunter Thompson is who he is, was who he was long before he was made to join the Air Force to avoid jail, was who he was through all the later adulation and the early years of anonymity and struggle. Go back and read “Burial At Sea” and everything’s there: all the elements of his worldview, the distinguishing characteristics of his prose; his style, basically. Read through the letters — particularly those in the first volume, Proud Highway and it’s all there, too.

The nickel-a-throw cheap-and-easy psychological explanation probably has something to do with mistrust of the world, being angry at it and not wanting to get too close to it for a lot of reasons that make sense for the writing and the making of art, but which must always have made Dr. Thompson very tough to get along with for anybody who had to do that regularly — his friends, family, co-workers and others. But for every kind of cheap scolding a person could come up with, citing Thompson’s deviation from social norms and niceties, you have to ask yourself about what modifying his conduct would have meant for his work, because over the course of the picture, Ewing makes it clear that it’s all part of a single package, that you can’t get the poetry and the outrage and the insight without the outrageousness . . . or, if you prefer, the “special requirements.” It’s not as though the brilliance is an excuse for the behavior, but at least some of the people with whom Thompson has clashed or closed to struggled must have felt it was worth it, since they’ve continued to publish his work and to encourage him to do what he does . . . which means, of course, being who he is . . . for good or ill, as the doctor himself might say. And thank God for that. The movie is a fascinating portrait and a real through-provoking piece of work for anybody who’s ever enjoyed Thompson’s work for any reason, right or wrong.