American Inferno - Bret Easton Ellis and Centralia

I found a Paris Review article about Centralia, that little town in Pennsylvania that is now burning underground for more than fifty years. And I wanted to write about it a couple days ago. Why would I want to do that? Because the movie version of Silent Hill used Centralia as its model for the town and shifted the whole background story of the videogame on this town of burning coal-mines and disrupted streets. And I liked that The Paris Review would do an article about it. But then I forgot or didn't have the time or just didn't bother too much.

But just about a couple minutes ago I received news (that are already four days old) that are intricately linked with the Centralia thing that I now have to talk about it. Well, Roger Avary, probably best known for co-writing the script for Pulp Fiction with Tarantino, also wrote the script for the first Silent Hill movie. And he also wrote the screenplay for Bret Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction as well as directed the flick, which is the one really really good film adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel that exists, and BEE loves Avary for that (as well as I do; well, on a whole different level, maybe). Just watch this little piece that introduces Victor Ward/Johnson into The Rules Of Attraction. Victor became later the protagonist of Ellis's masterpiece, Glamorama. Or this one, THE most amazing suicide scene ever.

Well, a lot of talk has been around if Avary would ever be able to raise the money for finally filming Glamorama, and it never looked very promising, because of 9/11 and are the Americans really ready for a movie like this and isn't it kind of too late now, anyway? But consider this tweet from Ellis, dated 10/13/11:

Just finished reading Roger Avary's adaptation of "Glamorama" which he will direct next year. Hilarious, horrific, sad. He's a mad genius.

So, this now makes top of my most eagerly awaited films list. In the meantime: Watch/Rewatch The Rules of Attraction. Avary really did the best job of his career with this one and if he had a hand in the casting as well, everything Bret tweeted is true: Hilarious, horrific, sad. He's a mad genius.

Werner Herzog is Death Proof

All right. I just watched, for the first time, Tarantino's Grindhouse edition of Death Proof. I have to specify: As you should know, Tarantino and Rodriguez did a double feature called Grindhouse, in about 2007, consisting of two feature films, Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof. Both of which are excellent movies. Death Proof is maybe Tarantino's best film yet, although Inglourious Basterds is close on second. Or first, maybe, I can't say for sure. And Planet Terror is a really good zombie flick that keeps very true to Romero in its political and sociological implications. I bought the Grindhouse BluRay because I never saw the double feature, including fake trailers, of which Machete eventually, you know, of course you know, blabla. Mentioning the fake trailers. I love Udo Kier, he is the German Christopher Walken, but on a much much higher level.
Well, I digress. What I wanted to talk about: There was no Grindhouse double feature in Germany, or the whole world other than the U.S., for what I know. Planet Terror and Death Proof were released in Germany six months apart as two 120 minute, stand alone feature films by two different directors. Even the marketing machinery made no connections between these two flicks. There were no fake trailers for Germany and no theater did a double feature without the trailers. But: the U.S. Grindhouse double feature is like exactly 3 hours long. That means that the U.S. version was about 23 minutes shorter per film than the German/European one (plus about 10/14 minutes that the fake trailers made up for). So tonight I, for the first time, watched the shorter, U.S., version of Death Proof.
And there is a whole lot to be missed! It is pretty easy to cut about 20 minutes from a film like this because it's whole aesthetics deal with missing and worn down film reels. But I don't understand the choices made (either way, if other scenes were cut, I would miss them, too, because there is nothing in this movie that deserves cutting). The two scenes that I missed most: 1) Vanessa Ferlito's lap dance for Kurt Russell. I knew that it wasn't in the U.S. version beforehand, and 2) The first meeting of Stuntman Mike with the second set of girls at a gas station. There are more beautiful close-upped feet in this one and a real good joke about female addiction to fashion magazines, with black and white scenes and everything.
I don't like to say this, but you American guys have been tricked. Somehow. And I think of something like the U.S. version of the first Silent Hill game had little ready-to-slay-children-monsters in it and for a German release they had to be replaced with little ready-to-slay-monster-creatures-that-don't-resemble-human-children-so-much because German censors don't appreciate violence towards children. But on the other hand, because Konami felt sorry for their European customers, we Europeans got a really nice making-of-and-international-trailers-DVD for and with Silent Hill 2, which the U.S. release didn't have. So, really. What I want to say. If you only know the U.S. Grindhouse double feature, try to get your hands on the European releases of Planet Terror and Death Proof as well. It is really worth the ride.

And the other thing is: Werner Herzog toured Germany last week because of the German theatrical release of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which I am looking forward to so very much. And he was on Harald Schmidt and I had to realize, although I once idealized Schmidt as THE most intellectual German voice just a few years ago, that Werner Herzog is moving in another realm entirely. There is just no man, no father figure, of deeper knowlegde and wisdom around. Not even Ted Danson in Bored To Death. There is so much calm in everything Herzog says because he just emanates pure ethereal wisdom. And it doesn't seem to me to be a pure coincidence that Ted Danson mentions Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog a couple of times in Bored To Death.
I have to admit that I never saw any of Herzog's movies. I stumbled upon his documentaries a couple years ago and they are just so good and heartbreaking, and wise, and terrifying, and melancholic, and, foremost, true. You just cannot see Grizzly Man and be the same person anymore. Or Encounters at the End of The World. That penguin, running about 80 miles away from his peers, just running and runnning, alone, into the distance, straight into his certain, lonely death, still haunts me. This part of the nature of being is so utterly, heartbreakingly sad and I fear it being at the central nature of all being. Just as Herzog considers brutality and cruelty at the very heart of nature. Watching Herzog always raises so much questions. I'm so looking forward to Cave of Forgotten Dreams. And also to finally watching some of the Herzog/Kinski films. And to connect the first topic of the post with the second, just watch this clip (that you pretty certainly already know; when I wanted to write about Herzog and Kinski a few nights ago, but didn't, I wanted to name the post I Shot Werner Herzog, but this now seems to be a much better title; to watch the full interview, click here):

September 2011 Wind-up

Since I wrote about 90% of all posts from my former workplace (former, yes, indeed. But don't worry, they didn't fire me for blogging related reasons) there hasn't been much posting in the last couple months on my behalf. So I decided, like, today, that I at least give you little list-like impressions of what is, or rather was, going on in my literary, filmic, musical or otherwise musings once a month. This is less inspired than just kicked-off by Nick Hornby's monthly column "Stuff I've Been Reading" for The Believer, which I've been reading this month. Actually I just read it a couple minutes ago. Since I hadn't known at the beginning of the month that I would start such an endeavor at it's very end, I have to guess some of the stuff that made apparances this September of 2011 but failed to inscribe itself deeply into my memory. And since, quoting Bill Pullman in "Lost Highway", 'I like to remember things in my own way, not necessarily in the way they happened', don't blame me if any of the following, or preceding, for that matter, information is incorrect or fails to register with whatever fascist-mode of truth your brain is operating on. So, here it goes:

Stuff that I bought:

• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, BluRay
• Marcel Proust, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, 13 Bd.
• Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse & Psychologie des Unbewußten
• Ernest Hemingway, Tod am Nachmittag
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• The Believer, September 2011 issue
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (Revised & Expanded)
• A ticket for the upcoming BUSH concert in Cologne on Nov, 8th 2011

Stuff that I read and watched and listened to:

• Bush, The Sea of Memories
• Daily Bread; Well, You're not invited
• The Decemberists, Calamity Song
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
• Lars Von Trier, The Element of Crime
• Lars Von Trier, Epidemic
• Lars Von Trier, Europa
• Lars Von Trier, Breaking The Waves
• Lars Von Trier, The Idiots
• Lars Von Trier, Dogville
• Lars Von Trier, Manderlay
• Jorgen Leth, The Perfect Human
• Lars Von Trier, The Five Obstructions
• Lars Von Trier, The Boss of it All
• Thomas Vinterberg, Dear Wendy
• Seth Gordon, Horrible Bosses
• John Michael McDonagh, The Guard
• Californication, Season 4
• some U.S. Open
• Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
• The Believer, September 2011 issue (unfinished yet, it's a bathroom read)
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers (same as above)
• David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (in ASFTINDA)
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (not finished yet)

Well, what can I say? I was preparing for Lars Von Trier's Melancholia by watching all, almost, the stuff that I hadn't watched before and by rewatching all the stuff that I had watched before. And although Dancer In The Dark and Antichrist and Riget are not on that list, I pretty much got it all covered. I have to say that I was really surprised of the variety of his work. Especially his early Europa-trilogy is quite distinct from his later works in visual as well as in narrative style. All of them, The Element Of Crime, Epidemic, Europa, and Dogville at the very forefront, distinguish him as a master storyteller. And apart from the gut-wrenching border-crossings of the human soul starting with Breaking The Waves, he can just as easily pull off an extremely funny comedy like The Boss Of It All. Alright, yes. The last 15 or so years have been a constant tumbling down the rabbit hole of depression and we will have to see if Melancholia will be the end of that or just another apex in his CV. But even in this condition he is an extremely gifted filmmaker. I'm looking forward to everything he gets on the big screen.

Proust: I do not know when or if I will ever have the time to read him but this complete German edition of his À la recherche du temps perdu smiled at me from an 'each book 1€' flea market box. I got the whole bunch for 9€! Also, since I once owned the complete Freud Studienausgabe and sold it on eBay several years ago and now it costs like 100€ up and I'm trying to get my hands back at those books, I got volumes I and III for a euro each at the flea-market. The Hemingway I bought for my brother since he loved The Old Man And The Sea and The Sun Also Rises so much, but doesn't read English so well, hence the German edition. Death In The Afternoon was the only Hemingway I could find there and since there was the very last bullfight in Barcelona this week I thought it would be a nice gift. I mailed the book to him and he didn't respond whatsoever to this niceness of mine. Hm...


Today I bought the Salinger and Lolita. And this is probably the very first time in my life that I bought something for myself of which I have a perfectly good copy at home already. The Catcher In The Rye, that is. Actually there had already been two copies on the bookshelf, the other one belongs to my girlfriend. But I just couldn't resist the wonderful book jacket. It looks so graceful and dignified. I had to buy it. And then I had to think of that Mel Gibson flick, Conspiracy Theory, in which he owns a couple dozen copies of this very novel but can't give a reason why. Or at least I didn't get to know the reason, I never watched the movie, but know just that one scene. Weird, isn't it?


And I stumbled upon The Believer magazine, which is a part of McSweeney's, which, respectively, is owned and published by Dave Eggers, sort of, because of an interview with Don DeLillo and Bret Easton Ellis, so naturally I had to get ahold of a copy. There is also an interview with Jason Schwartzman in it. But this darn Ellis DeLillo interview is ONE YEAR OLD!!! It took place in Paris in October 2010 when both of them promoted their latest novels, Imperial Bedrooms and Point Omega, respectively. And since I'm an avid reader of DeLillo and Ellis interviews, there was about nothing new in it, because they told all that stuff to dozens of other interviewers already. That sucked. The Believer Book of Writer's Talking To Writers arrived a couple days later and at least I do not know so much of the contents of those interviews beforehand, because, frankly, I know just about half a dozen of the (three and a half dozen) writers featured in it. And that is a good thing. I like interviews with writers and those are quite interesting. They nevertheless never reach the quality or length of those featured in The Paris Review.


And the really big thing after Lars Von Trier: I, as you already know, started reading Gravity's Rainbow. I'm about 130 pages deep now and don't really have any words that I would want to W.A.S.T.E. upon this. Therefore I will end this post with the video for The Decemberists's Calamity Song. And I have to make that clear: It is the video, not the song that I like and appreciate for obvious reasons.

a screaming comes across the sky...

I'm ready now. Where will it take me?

extremely bitchy and incredibly clever

As I write this - between the points - I am witnessing the most compelling tennis match that I ever witnessed in my entire life. It is the US Open 2011 women's single finals. Serena Williams vs. Samantha Stosur. The first set was a powerful demonstration of Stosur's aggressive and concentrated domination of the game and, respectively, Williams. Stosur obliterated the shit out of her oponent and won the first set 2-6 after just 31 minutes. Williams had no foot on the ground even when serving for the second set when she had a curious idea. It is break point for Stosur. She returns Williams's serve to the far left corner and Williams does the same when she - ball about exactly over the net - gives a little high-pitched shout. It is loud enough - as women's in-game (exactly now, after 1:13h the match and therefore the women's championship is over) shouts go - for everybody to hear, and also for Stosur to be distracted and mishit the ball. What was peculiar about Serena's shout, though, was that it was designed to break Stosur's concentration. Shouts normally come either when hitting the ball, this has to do with breathing technique and releasing power mostly, or to bring yourself back on track, to aquire or regain a level of concentration that is needed to turn the game around. And that it did. But more so because it was neither when she hit the ball nor after she lost or won the point but right before Stosur was about to hit that little yellow fucker.

The umpire then called point Stosur which meant she got her break - although she didn't get the ball across the the net anymore - because Serena's cry was against the rules, which I think was the perfectly right decision. But Serena was unhappy with that decision and struck up a little dispute with the umpire and then the audience chimed in, whistling loudly and aggressively. For about two minutes. When Stosur finally decided to go on and serve despite all the whistling and shouting, they quieted themselves just to roar up again, when Williams got the point. The trick was done. With Stosur's concentration completely broken and a roaring audience behind her, Serena immediately got the re-break and, following her serve the next game, lead for the first time after the very first game in this match. They played the most amazing points in this stage of the game.
The end of the story is that Stosur came back, big time, and eventually won the match and thus the tournament and thus her very first grand slam title, after 1:13h with 2-6, 3-6. That was the best tennis match I ever saw.

This is why I despise German literature

I finally overcame my physiological and mental (spiritual as well?) impediment of not being able to grab a piece of German literature - say, a novel -, open it with my bare hands and read it from beginning to end, or just a couple sentences in the middle or whatever. This was due to a confluence of coincidences that recommended Irmgard Keun's 'Das kunstseidene Mädchen' aka 'The Artificial Silk Girl". And when I eventually stumbled upon it in one of the Foukisens bookshelves, I read the first two pages and was very intrigued. And indeed, it was not a total waste of time. It was funny and sad enough to go on reading it all to the end. But surely not the literary epiphany I hoped for. At least it broke the spell.

Then I picked up another book that I thought might be interesting and which I bought a couple of years back when the movie came out and Kate Winslet got away with one of her two Golden Globes that year. And now read this:

"Was sind die Zeiten der Krankheit in Kindheit und Jugend doch für verwunschene Zeiten!" or this

"Schließlich hatte ich alles zusammen, Hannas Adresse in einem Gefängnis in der Nähe der Stadt, in der ihr der Prozeß gemacht und sie verurteilt worden war, ein Kassettengerät und die Kassetten, von Tschechow über Schnitzler zu Homer numeriert. Und schließlich schickte ich das Paket mit dem Kassettengerät und den Kassetten auch ab." or this

"Die Sehnsucht nach Hanna wurde so stark, daß sie weh tat." or this

"Das Gesicht war eigentümlich alterslos. So sehen Gesichter aus, die geliftet worden sind. Aber vielleicht war es auch unter dem frühen Leid erstarrt - ich versuchte vergebens, mich an ihr Gesicht während des Prozesses zu erinnern." or this

"Als ich selbst zu schreiben begann, las ich ihr auch das vor. Ich wartete, bis ich mein handschriftliches Manuskript diktiert, das maschinenschriftliche überarbeitet und das Gefühl hatte, jetzt sei es fertig. Beim Vorlesen merkte ich, ob das Gefühl stimmte. Wenn nicht, konnte ich alles noch mal überarbeiten und eine neue Aufnahme über die alte spielen. Aber ich machte das nicht gerne. Ich wollte mit dem Vorlesen abschließen. Hanna wurde die Instanz, für die ich noch mal alle meine Kräfte, alle meine Kreativität, alle meine kritische Phantasie bündelte. Danach konnte ich das Manuskript an den Verlag schicken.
Ich habe auf den Kassetten keine persönlichen Bemerkungen gemacht, nicht nach Hanna gefragt, nicht von mir berichtet. Ich las den Titel vor, den Namen des Autors und den Text. Wenn der Text zu Ende war, wartete ich einen Moment, klappte das Buch zu und drückte die Stop-Taste."

And I now push the stop-button as well, because if I wouldn't, I would have to retype the whole novel (short of about 5 (!) sentences that contain at least an interesting metaphor) as an example of really bad writing. If you haven't gathered yet, I am talking about Bernhard Schlink's 'Der Vorleser' aka 'The Reader'. And it doesn't help that he actually comes from my hometown. And it also doesn't help that this is 'literature' that is taught in German schools. By the way: the movie is also pretty shitty. An aside: I just saw this novel was one of Oprah's picks as well and consequently hit the New York Times bestseller list pretty hard. And although I want to personally apologize to all the people of the U.S. of A. for this wretched piece of German Export I can hardly be held responsible for Oprah.

What he does - Schlink, that is - is taking the Holocaust and employing it to his sentences - this is the genocide of language. Every single word or metaphor is flat and dead. Stale, as if exposed to poisonous gas for too long. It is at the far other end of writerly expression as Anthony Burgess once wrote:

'And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.'

There is no atmopheric dust in Schlink. This is not literature at all. And I want to see it's worth in terms of dealing with the Holocaust but all I can think of is why is he writing so very poorly? This novel is a prime example of what can happen if you only tell and never show - and of course, if you also have no writing skills whatsoever. It has about the same literary quality as Charlotte Roche's novels. The only good thing about it is that you can learn a lot from so many bad choices of another writer. It should not be used to talk about the Holocaust, it should be used in creative writing classes. But then again, German schools don't offer creative writing classes. And this seems to be an essential part of the whole problem.

Just to give you an anchoring point: I started Foer's 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close' today to prepare for and distance myself from this week's 9/11 10th anniversary mass-media-coverage-overkill. And this is a real page-turner and it makes me remember how much I loved every single sentence in Everything Is Illuminated and that I do not see any German writer ever achieving what Safran Foer did in that novel. Do they not dare writing like this about the Holocaust or are they just not apt to do it?

Here is the thing: This one sentence of 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close' has more literary value than there is in the whole of Schlink's 'Der Vorleser'. It belongs to a man who gradually lost his speech, but not his words, which is why he starts to write down everything he otherwise would have said:

'and instead of singing in the shower I would write out the lyrics of my favorite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.'

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling...

...and our story shall be the education of our heroes. - Plato, Republic - Book II

I certainly knew I would love this, but I knew not how much. I start to laugh, sometimes, out loud. Little chuckles that drive the everyday, streetwise composure out of my face. Or it cringes (the composure does) with sudden bursts of pain, my facial muscles flooding with the multitude joys of sorrow or hubristic foreshadowing. People start turning their heads - or so I imagine. But they know nothing of the intricate pleasures that I derive, amongst them, out there in the streets. Out of my ears grow the headphones and, respectively, the wires that are firmly attached to my cell phone. Into my ears, in a very astute and mesmerizing manner, streams Donna Tartt's voice like a dream.

I certainly didn't expect this to happen. I thought it would be a very pleasant ride. Extraordinarily so, yes, but only compared to the vast amounts of ordinariness that surround and encompass everyday life. I fell in love again with this book, this novel, this masterpiece of storytelling. And with the author. It is one thing to love a book so much that you grab it off the bookshelf and start reading random passages out loud until you fall asleep. It is quite another to have it read to you by the author herself. The same author that wrote every single sentence of it and refined them so much that you won't find any flaws in them (except that one sentence on p.321, which goes: 'She was a good girl, a good sport.' Richard would never have said anything like this, maybe out of insecurity, a sly remark to Bunny, but he is not pressured in any way in this situation. But Donna makes you forget this one little inconsistency quite immediately when she goes on:

Sweet chuckles in the dark and her hair falling across my face, funny little catches in her breath like the girls in high school. The warm feel of a body in my arms was something I'd almost forgotten. How long since I'd kissed anyone that way? Months, and more months.

I signed up on audible.co.uk because they offer a free audiobook upon registration. Actually I was going for True Grit because it is the most expensive, if you can think of it that way, of the books read by Donna Tartt. But then I discovered that I am not allowed to download that one from an account - and with billing details - from Germany. Neither was I allowed to download The Little Friend - both audiobooks I wanted to listen to particularly because of Donna Tartt's Mississippi upbringing and native Southern voice.
So the only audiobook of interest that I got for free on sign-up was The Secret History - for personal implications in this novel see my last post. But what I didn't know then and despise of now is this: this audible accounts come with a catch! The files that you are allowed to download are heavy on DRM. To listen to them I have to have a special device, an Ipod or something like this - everything but an ordinary and well-functioning mp3-player - or, the other choice is to burn it to CDs with incoherent chapters that are all, equally, eight minutes long, making a total of about twenty CDs which I wouldn't need anyway, because I have no portable device to play them on.

[Here a little story is amiss that dealt with some things. I'd rather not tell you what it was.]

But one big benefit - [here too, something has been left out] - is that I grasped an understanding of the novel that I wouldn't have gained otherwise. Due to the constant concern about paragraph beginnings and endings I became aware of some aspects of the wider compositional structure of the text. The paragraphs, for example, quite often resemble Richard's state of mind, his level of consciousness. Many start with him waking up or coming to and end with him going to bed or going 'home', to his dorm or, at least, departing from his friends or passing out. The story gets a heavy dreamlike quality this way, as do Richards thoughts and the actions of the group, which Richard often reminisces as being incomprehensible to a rational mind like his own. Which is, of course, one of the main themes of the novel that oscillates between Greek madness and Roman rationality and Richard's "morbid longing" to present everything in a "picturesque" manner, "at all costs." It is also quite on par with Julian's assumption that another, and more precise, word for "psychology" is "fate." It is the underlying theme of classicism vs. modernism. This is the true reason why they had to kill Bunny, after all, to see how far they could push their classicist beliefs onto the modern world around them. How far they could go until the ancient Gods, the Greek Erinyes or Roman Furies "turned up the volume of [their] inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made [them] so much themselves that they couldn't stand it" anymore. And this is exactly what happens in Book II and this is also exactly why Richard remains utterly detached from all the events and the murders throughout the book and thus, ostensibly, stands the test of time. His utter self, his 'fatal flaw' is, as he rightly confesses in the first paragraph, "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs." This is his madness, and it drives him to consider all the events in this (picturesque) light; drives him to tell us about it in his beautiful words, his beautiful narrative, to generate a morbidly picturesque story out of it. The storytelling is his madness, his obsession, the volume of his inner monologue turned way up so that it spills over onto the pages that we read, driving him "out of his mind" and into/onto the world. "This is the only story I will ever be able to tell."

Last night, when I brushed my teeth and made the usual mess out of spit-and-toothpaste splotches in the washbasin, I realized that one of those had taken the form of a rabbit, long ears and all. I first thought it was Bunny appearing before me, revealing himself to me in some kind of dental-hygiene omen. But before I could make out what he might have had to say I cut my gums with the toothbrush and a bright red drop of blood trickled down my lips, falling right onto the figure where it's eye would have been, rendering it a perfect Albino. Dizzyness washed over me with the boldness of this divine message. When I turned on the faucet and splashed cold water in my face, right before I closed my eyes to protect them from the liquid element about to hit, I saw the rabbit dissolving and tumbling down the drain, it's red eye glaring into mine. When I opened them again, the rabbit was gone. Are you ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?