Posted by: Lee Shackleford at 53 days ago in
Personal
I’ve been asked to write a music review. I approach this with deeply mixed feelings, because I know very little about contemporary popular music. I was raised on a peculiar combination of Gospel, Victorian Operetta, and 1960s folk. My favorite songs now are the Swing and Big Band tunes of the 1940s. I remember a young man once looking through my record collection — at that time about 200 albums — and then saying, “Don’t you have anything?” By which I assume he meant “anything anybody else in the world would ever want to listen to.”
On the other hand, the artist whose work I’ve been asked to review is my friend Jonah Knight, who identifies himself (if he must be pigeonholed somewhere) as an indie acoustic musician. And while I can’t profess to be an expert on this subgenre I do, in the words of the great poet Anon., know what I like. And I like Jonah’s music.
There’s no reason to take my word for it, anyway. You can get all of Jonah’s sounds and stories on his website at www.jonahofthesea.com. So ultimately you should do that and judge for yourself.
Meanwhile, I’ll tell you that Jonah is a skilled guitarist with a versatile voice — but to my mind his greatest gifts are as a composer of singable tunes and writer of intriguing lyrics. He bills himself as a “Singer/Songfighter,” and the wittiness of the coined term “songfighter” is typical of his love of language. That this brother playwright is so handy with a turn of phrase comes as no surprise to me, but it is a delight. I especially like the lyrics of “Cameron’s Dog” and “Calling,” both of which seem at first to be talking about something mundane but turn out to be about profound matters of the spirit.
Spirits, indeed, seem to be very much on Jonah’s mind. His new album is called Ghosts Don’t Disappear, and naturally the songs touch, in various ways, on the notions of what’s left behind us when we leave — not just when we depart our lives, but when we move out of a relationship, or grow out of childhood, or withdraw from society.
Jonah’s voice is warm and friendly, and I think it invites the listener into the surprisingly private world of his music. In this way he reminds me of Suzanne Vega, despite the obvious gender difference. Like her, he’s not always concerned with being precisely on-pitch, which may jar the ear of anyone who’s been raised exclusively on the studio-brat music of “Top 40” radio. But I see this as pure virtue; anybody can be pitch-perfect with an autotuner doing the heavy lifting for them. Jonah’s up on the highwire without a net, and I think that should earn the listener’s respect.
I should also mention that the hip-hoppy song “I Gotta Hat” is my new favorite cure for a sour mood. Sufficiently amplified, the song could bring a smile to the faces on Mount Rushmore.
Jonah’s got more talent than any ordinary body can contain, so it’s natural that it shimmers out in all directions. That sort of energy attracts attention. So I expect that one day Jonah will be “discovered.” He’ll get a record contract and a studio will pour millions into carefully crafting his public image. And they’ll have songs written for him by the very best corporate-approved writers, and in the studio they’ll overwhelm that lovely voice with synth and they’ll autotune him until he sounds like everybody else. And he’ll be rich and famous. And he won’t be Jonah any more.
On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that before Jonah lets that happen, he’ll willingly become a ghost himself.
(David Duncan, my umbraphile soulmate, is in the South Pacific right now to witness a total solar eclipse from — get this — Easter Island. So I’m reminded of this piece that I wrote years ago, when he and I missed a similar opportunity.)
My best friend and I have been discussing calcification.
An event, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, passed us by. And we have sensed that the world, our silent stone sphere, moved past us at such a high speed because we ourselves had petrified. We were so immobile that even a rock had outstripped us.
Almost a year has passed and we continue to regret having missed this spectacle, this horrible thing in the sky. The sun was briefly eaten by a dragon and then disgorged again whole, apparently unharmed. We saw it on television, frozen by electronics to be thawed out at our convenience. The people who saw it with warm eyes of their own were in Mexico. They were too far away to join.
We both know enough about the spinnings and turnings of the vast boulders that swim upstream in space to understand why the event was taking place. We knew that these intricate cosmic arcs and parabolas occasionally intersect, and in that instant they strike another and make a sort of spark…or else they punch a hole in their whiteness and a flash of black is pinched out.
Either way, it is frightening and beautiful to behold. It is the dance of the stars, and it is a reminder to the bugs crawling on one of the rocks that time flashes past us at speeds beyond our reckoning.
They tell me that when you stand under the sun on days such as the one we missed, after waiting for part of the light to disappear, the first new darkness is seen, not in the sky, but on the ground. A nightmare experience of the shadow of the moon ripping through the trees, chewing up the grass, whipsawing toward you at Juggernaut speed. Then the edge of the black tidal wave passes and you are under the lunar water.
A year after the event we did not see, I meditate here, many miles from Mexico. Time passes. My clocks tick; some of them hum. The sun rises while I type, despite my most ardent prayers for it to stay hidden by the horizon.
My friend and I are feeling our bones crunch under the granite weight of the rolling years. Mad, mad to regret how we missed one demonstration of how quickly the universe moves.
There is proof enough.
I finally figured it out. I’ve been puzzled by the fact that I set up this blog but never use it. And I think … and if you know me, I hope you’ll weigh in with your opinion … I think the problem is my own tendency toward rigid perfectionism. I’m mortified by the idea of posting something that expresses an idea poorly. Or do I mean “poorly expresses an idea”? And shouldn’t that question mark have gone inside the quote instead of outside? And three sentences back, did I mean “toward” or “towards” and why can’t I remember the difference?
See what I mean?
But you know what? I’m trying to lighten up — not just in my own endless self-scrutiny but in many other ways as well. My family doctor, whose wisdom often approaches that of Solomon himself, says I worry too much. About damn near everything. And the worrying gets in my way of just about everything meaningful and good that I’m trying to do with my life.
So if he’s right about that, and the cure is in my own hands, then surely this blog is one front on which I can wage the war against my own worry. (See? I like all the alliteration there, and I didn’t plan that — sometimes GOOD things happen when I attempt things without planning them to death.)
So starting today I’m going to try to write on this blog much more, and the fretting over quality can go to Hell. When all else is said and done, the simple fact that I’m very likely to be the only reader of this blog is tremendously liberating.
Several people have asked me what I thought about the latest Sherlock Holmes movie … I haven’t been ignoring them, honestly I haven’t, but I had the idea that I’d save it all up for one whopping huge blog post. But my blog was down and it’s taken me months to get it running again, and well, you know how it is …
But the blog is back up and I have no more excuses!
Some folks seem surprised to learn that I liked the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie, and that’s the phenomenon I feel is worth writing about here. Their surprise, they say, comes from knowing that I am first and foremost a fan of the original sixty stories penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and less of a fan of the many permutations of the Holmes saga that followed through the 20th century. Since this film was touted as a “re-imagining” of the Holmes canon, people who know me assumed I would view it with some distaste. And I can’t pretend like I didn’t expect the worst; the phrase “re-imagining” will always be associated, in my mind, with Tim Burton’s train-wreck Marky-Mark PLANET OF THE APES.
What most people don’t realize, I suppose, is that over the years the Sherlock Holmes character has been realized on screen in so many parodies and put-downs that it’s hard for the Holmes purist to care anymore if there’s one more desecration, no matter how high-profile that grave-robbing may be.
Well.
The trailer certainly suggested this was going to be a sort of steampunk adventure in which characters called Holmes and Watson would play pivotal roles, but there were few clues to the film’s allegiance (or lack of same) to Conan Doyle. (And yes, I can almost hear Holmes saying to me now, “Oh, the clues were there, Mr. Shackleford, you simply failed to observe them.”) But what a pleasant surprise. I never expected the film to hew so closely to the original stories, and especially not in such loving detail Director Guy Ritchie and his slew of screenwriters, I had heard, made it clear from the start of the project that they were doing away with the deerstalker hat and the curved-stem pipe. I think a lot of people understood that to mean that this film would create a new Holmes with no regard for previous conceptions. I had different hopes but dared not give them utterance; we’ve all been disappointed so many times before! But this time the promise was real: the new film would mine deeply into the mother-lode of source material, not mere build a casino on top of it.
Y’see, the deerstalker hat, for example. It is indeed the universal symbol for Sherlock Holmes, I suppose because you very rarely see anybody else, in real life or in fiction, wearing such an odd-looking garment. But it is a real hunting cap, appropriate for outdoor wear, and Basil Rathbone had one in the early Universal films in which he starred with the curiously miscast Nigel Bruce. But the hat is not in the original stories. Holmes is mentioned in one story as wearing a “close-fitting cloth cap,” but that’s as close as we get. The original illustrator of that story, Sidney Paget, drew Holmes wearing the fore-and-aft deerstalker cap, and the image resonated. (Although I still maintain it didn’t become truly iconic — not in America, anyway — until Basil Rathbone slapped that topper on his high-peaked dome in the Universal films.)
So yeah, doing away with the deerstalker is not a break with Conan Doyle — it’s a return to his intent! And the same is true with the curved-stem pipe. Never is this explicitly described in the original sixty stories; the pipe came to us from actor William Gillette, the first to play Holmes on stage or screen. He worried that a straight-stemmed pipe blocked the audience’s view of his face, which it probably did. He found a pipe that dropped below his distinctive mandible, and like the deerstalker, the pipe became iconic.
Three cheers for Ritchie et al, then, with doing away with all of that clutter. But that’s all mere subtraction; would this new film actually restore aspects of the Holmes character that are typically underplayed on film and television? It seemed almost too much to ask.
And yet!
As the film opens we discover that Holmes is a sort of a brawler, the kind of guy who’d get into a fight just to see if he can win (or possibly in the hopes that he’ll lose and learn something from the experience). Can this be canonically accurate? The refined and sophisticate “thinking machine” Sherlock Holmes, a bare-knuckle boxer and experimenter with martial arts? Check. Read the stories; it’s all there.
Later we see Holmes exhibiting behaviors that suggest he might not be entirely sane. But are they the invention of this screenplay, or drawn from the original stories? Well, we see him doing target practice indoors, trying out poisons on an innocent animal, and driving his landlady mad with the nightmarish jungle of dangerous chemicals in his room and the Sargasso of papers and artifacts that he insists must never be disturbed. Is any of this canonical? Check; every bit of it is in the original stories. Including, I should point out, Watson’s bull pup, which is mentioned exactly once (!) in all of the stories. Ritchie’s film makes the dog a minor character!
So what else is true to the original stories? Holmes’ grousing about Watson moving out of 221B to marry Mary Morstan? Check. Holmes’ previous encounter with the American adventuress Irene Adler, who outsmarted him and remains at large? Check. Holmes’ neurotic, obsessive compiling of facts, however trivial, a symptom of possessing a brain that seems to be operating far beyond its design parameters, threatening a violent explosion at any moment? Check.
Watson’s gambling habit? Apparently such a problem that Watson has entrusted his checkbook to Holmes (!), who keeps it under lock and key? Check.
Oh, and Watson as tall, slender, handsome fellow for whom any woman might fall like a hundred-weight of masonry tiles? Check. I suppose the Watson character has never entirely recuperated from the damage done by casting Nigel Bruce in the role, all those years ago. (Although David Burke and Edward Hardwicke did him a world of good.) So when the trailer for this film was first screened, people said, “Jude Law? As Watson? Really?” And that’s how I could tell who’d read the original stories and who hadn’t. Jude Law as Watson? Absolutely!
This film has many shout-outs to all of us who know the original stories, but I have two favorites. One is Watson’s passing remark to Holmes to the effect of “what you’re drinking is intended for eye surgery.” In those days, a solution of cocaine was used as an anesthetic for a variety of purposes. Holmes, in the original stories, is a frequent abuser of the drug. So apparently in this scene Holmes has gotten into Watson’s stash again. (And Jude Law’s delivery of the line makes it clear that this happens, well, a lot.)
And near the end of the film, Holmes and Irene are alone on the bridge construction, looking out at the sky over the Thames. And the remark is made that a storm is coming. Holmes says very nearly the same thing at the end of “His Last Bow,” the final chapter in the Conan Doyle stories. Surely this is no coincidence.
All of which is to say, I loved the latest Sherlock Holmes, recommended it to everyone, and look forward to the sequel even though we all know how disappointing sequels usually are.
So what did you think of it?
P.S.: One of my dearest and most insightful Sherlockian friends has written a better review than mine. Get it here.
Posted by: Lee Shackleford at 221 days ago in
Satire
WARNING: Possible Satirical Content. Do Not Operate Satire Until Brain is Fully Engaged.
Many Americans are concerned about the possibility of a future in which same-sex couples can enjoy all the benefits of marriage currently taken for granted by millions of male-female couples. The concern has often been stated that to allow such unions would endanger “the sanctity and stability of the marriage institution.”
To allay these worries, I propose legislation which would make all marriages more difficult to obtain. For example, to preserve this “sanctity and stability of the marriage institution” we must have laws forbidding the marriage of male-female couples whose combined ages equal less than 32. We must also forbid the marriage of all couples in which neither party has ever dated anyone else, or when either party is proven to be incapable of enumerating a single flaw in the other party’s appearance, character, or intelligence. Indeed, a simple IQ test should be mandatory for the issuance of all marriage licenses, with a passing score of 110 (for each party, not cumulatively).
Couples applying for marriage should also be queried on the types of wedding ceremony they plan. Couples who reply that they plan a wedding which will cost more than the current market value of the bride’s parents’ house would be denied a license until they have completed an entire year serving meals in their community homeless shelter. Couples who reply that they plan a wedding officiated by a costumed character (i.e, Elvis impersonator, Starfleet Admiral, the Pope) would be permanently refused a license and publicly flogged with copies of the Weekly World News.
In the same spirit, married couples who seek a divorce should be required by law to repay everyone who gave them wedding presents, with interest compounded at 10% annually. (One interesting side effect of this would be that families and friends of young couples would quickly find that the best way to express their disapproval of a marriage will be to present the couple with large sums of money; when the marriage collapses, the giver will be all the richer for having foreseen the inevitable outcome.)
All married couples who wish to bring new children into the world would first have to pass an intense period of interviews, examinations, and counseling. This process should be exactly equal to the exhaustive scrutiny focused on persons wishing to adopt a child. In other words, it should no longer be assumed that the mere possession of sperm, ova, and the related equipment is some sort of license to bring fragile lives into existence.
When all of these new laws are in place, perhaps the “sanctity and stability of the marriage institution” will be in such a condition that threats to its survival may be taken seriously.
