A Pretty Fakes links roundup!
• Anthony Lane absolutely and hilariously eviscerates Star Wars 6—wait, no, I mean, 3—Revenge of the Smiths in this week’s New Yorker, making Jayrah & me bust out laffing when we read the Yoda-speak title of this post, and also ripping the general Lucasgloss:
Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes.
• Rilo Kiley’s voice supreme, Jenny Lewis, has a soul album coming out, hopefully with the terriffic title Rabbit Fur Coat. A very strong and intimate set of mp3s of RK doing a few songs in Dallas can be found here. You can watch the video for my favorite song of theirs, “Portions for Foxes,” here. Uh, and I should be writing a follow-up to seeing them in Phoenix any-day now. Today? Maybe. But, no.
• I request that you read Jacob’s American Idol recaps on Television Without Pity. Nay, I DEMAND it. Otherwise, you won’t get to read stuff like this!:
. . . Paula blows kisses at the crowd, there are, like, streamers and tickertape and there’s a pony, clomping around on the risers, and then a 132-piece brass band comes marching in full regalia and there’s a majorette doing the choreography from “The Way That You Love Me” out front, with bright red feathers and negative 15% body fat and a black bodysuit and a 100-watt smile, and the song that they’re playing is a newly-commissioned composition by Philip Glass entitled “You’re Not A Pedophile If He’s Twenty-Two,” and then they name her Queen of Popularity and give her a jet plane in her favorite shade of lavender, plus a pet snow tiger kitten, with which she can communicate telepathically . . .
Yes, he’s unsane. That, my friends, is inspired and booze-addled lunacy with a thick syrupy coating of brilliance, and you need to take a bite, because it is so fucking sweet. Um.
• Support the Jam! This Saturday we’re having a benefit for Jubilee! Jam in Belhaven—a street party on Gillespie, from noon to 8 pm. There will be food from Video Cafe, beer, and it’s only $10. If you want to volunteer to be a ticket-taker or a beer server for a two-hour shift, you get in FREE! Write me at prettyfakes@gmail.com if you want to know more. The line-up:
1. The Suitors (12:00 to 12:30)
2. Don Henry with David Womack (12:45 to 1:30)
3. The Hard Stuff (1:45 to 2:15)
4. The Vamps (2:30 to 3:15)
5. Eric Stracener with Bob Pietcyzk (3:30 to 4:00)
6. The Moils (4:15 to 5:00)
7. The Delta Mtn. Boys (5:15 to 5:45)
8. The Circuit Riders (6:00 to 6:45)
9. Cary Hudson (7:00 to 8:00)
• And, as you may have noticed above, we have a new e-mail address (prettyfakes@gmail.com), so WRITE US!! We heart you, and we will write you back. Also, have you seen our v. cool new little manifesto? Er, manifestito? Yes. THERE IS BOURBON INVOLVED. And, fire. Alcoholism and pyromania! We are so much fun! Here are some examples of the best e-mails we’ve gotten so far:
I bet you are so pretty in person.What are you talking about? All of your cartoons are Cartoons that are Actually Good. You are a magical genius.
I thought I was alone in my love of poetry, mocking the Oscars, Charles Lindbergh, and John Darnielle. Now, I see that I am not. At this Eleventh Hour, I have stayed a sharpened blade from my wrists, as I have found my true-home. God bless you, Pretty Fakes.
I bet you are so, so pretty in person.
&tc. So, write!
EYE DID-NOT. Um.
And it’s pronounced “Dar-NEEL.” You were clearly pronouncing it “Darn-YELL” in your head.
No, I think that’s spelled right. It’s just his mental pronunciation that I’m criticizing. Groundlessly.
dear pretty fakes,
can you please refrain from bringing up lindbergh every year? just this once?
“politics aside”—break me a fucking give. his hatred for jews, blacks, and asians aside; his, uh, friendship with hitler aside; his stumping to keep america friendly with the germans; and his speeches about how only whitey was smart enough to figure out how to fly aside…..SHHHHHHEEEEEEESH! and don’t even think about bringing up henry hyde, uh, i mean henry ford
kiss, kiss,
vendela
Prof., how in the hail did you know that I was pronouncing it that way? Because, I was.
Vendela, I think we have to say things like “politics aside” for a whole HOST of things. I don’t celebrate Lindbergh’s fascistic tendencies, or his prejudices; instead, I focus on the fact that he was the first to perform an admirable feat. Likewise, I respect Thomas Jefferson in so many ways, but do not abide his slave-owning, temporal legality or no. Wrong is wrong.
Big Gray, if you’re thinking this makes me give up ground on my old anti-Elia Kazan standing, well, I still wanta whack him upside the head. There’s a big difference between being a prick (Lindbergh), intellectually dishonest (Jefferson), and selling out people before a Senate committee. However, I acknowledge your excellent, and very mature, point that we can value the acts or art of a person despite their personal loathesomeness.
I will try to do-better.
haw! like “politics aside, edgar ray killen had a great garden”
i dunno if the lindbergh deal is that far off of Kazan…or actually worse because he used his considerabl(ly greater) notariety promoted the acceptance of murders.
IS that worse?
and you know, i agree here:
However, I acknowledge your excellent, and very mature, point that we can value the acts or art of a person despite their personal loathesomeness.——but the willingness to do that is subjective, i think, as illustrated in the kazan/limbergh deal above.
Wasn’t there an episode of Growing Pains where Brad Pitt was some rockstar who turned out to be a jerk because he was makin out with groupies and poor little Ben got all mad and ripped his posters off the wall, until good old dad came in and helped him realize that he could still like the music even if the person sucked? Yes, I think there was.
I’m a dork so I have to say this . . .
Did you all know that Kazan actually testified twice? The first session was closed, and the transcripts, which were made available fairly recently, reveal that he refused to name names. Had some prick not squealed about the session to the press, thereby putting tons of pressure on the committee and on the studio heads Kazan was working for, he wouldn’t have been called back. I’m not excusing his public testimony, mind you, but I would have stood for him at the Oscars a couple years ago.
The liberal hero, Arthur Miller, wasn’t called to testify until several years later, when most of the heat had already cooled. In fact, had he agreed to allow Marilyn to have her photo with the committee chair, he wouldn’t have been asked to testify at all.
In a Lindbergh/Kazan cage match, Lindbergh wins Bigger Prick every time.
I’m just saying . . .
Wow! I didn’t know that, Darren. Age and lawyerhood have changed my stance on many, many things. I never tried to put myself in Kazan’s shoes, or run through different permutations of what happened. For example, we’d likely all be FINE with a diehard anti-Communist testifying against suspected Communists, because that makes sense. It’s only when you assume that Kazan “betrayed” a group of “fellows” that righteous indignation creeps in.
You know, I’ve never thought of this until right now, but what if Kazan HATED Dalton Trumbo’s guts? What if Trumbo was a terrible frickin’ person? I’m not a relativist, but I do seek to understand, which I didn’t always do.
And, “Bigger Prick Cage Match” is a cartoon just waitin’ to happen.
yeah…a cartoon only Johnny Ryan can do!
thanks darren. i didn’t know any of that either. not that it excuses kazan, but he gave us “on the river front,” one of the best stick-it-to-the-man movies ever. i could never figure that one out.
and lindbergh was awarded a freaking nazi medal by goering, himself! a medal he never gave back, even when we went to war.
uh, i mean “on the WATER front,” duh.
For future reference, don’t ever start a comment discussion that happens to be directly related to my dissertation . . .
Rather than “stick-it-to-the-man,” I would call On the Waterfront the most moving defense of informing ever made. I’m not sure if this stuff will make it into the final version of my first chapter, so here you go:
“IT’S INTERESTING HOW THE MINUTE WE TRY TO MAKE THE SCRIPT PRO-AMERICAN YOU PULL OUT” (qtd. in Miller, Timebends, 308). Harry Cohn’s 1951 telegram to Arthur Miller punctuated the dissolution of Miller’s and Elia Kazan’s latest project, The Hook, a film inspired in part by journalist Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into organized crime and the longshoreman’s union. A Brooklyn native, Miller had become distracted by the story during his long walks through the adjacent Red Hook waterfront district, and, in particular, he recognized great dramatic potential in the recent disappearance of a dock worker who had stood up notoriously to the New York mob-influenced International Longshoreman’s Association. Once transformed by fiction, his hero would be, as Miller wrote in his notebook, “the genuinely moral man. . . . It’s as though a hand had been laid upon him, making him the rebel, pressing him toward a collision with everything that is established and accepted” (qtd. in Gottfried 168). For Miller and Kazan both, The Hook would be one more opportunity to publicly interrogate the corrupting influence of America’s postwar capitalist values, as the two had so famously done already in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.
By the time it reached Harry Cohn, head of production at Columbia Pictures, Miller’s script had already been rejected by Twentieth Century-Fox, Kazan’s home studio. But Cohn, an old union man himself and one eager to capitalize on Miller’s and Kazan’s recent critical and commercial successes, agreed to finance the project on one condition: “I just have to check it with the FBI” (Miller, Timebends 305). Cohn in fact handed the script to Roy Brewer, who was not only a prominent figure in Hollywood’s unions and a close friend of the very leaders villanized by Miller’s script, but was also chairman of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), an influential anticommunist organization headed by John Wayne. Predictably, Brewer denied the influence of racketeers on labor and deemed The Hook unpatriotic. His recommendation to Cohn was that the film instead expose the real problem: communist infiltration of the longshoremen’s union. According to Kazan, Brewer suggested that Miller show “in the strongest possible way you can that [the hero] does not represent the so-called progressives” (qtd. in Gottfried 176). Despite Kazan’s urgings, Miller abandoned the project; Kazan would reteam with Cohn three years later, directing Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, another script inspired by Johnson’s reportage.
The language of Cohn’s telegram is revealing. By critiquing the machinery of capital, even if metaphorically, Miller’s script was necessarily unpatriotic; a revised, anticommunist version would necessarily be “Pro-American”; and anyone unwilling to recognize that distinction would necessarily be marginalized as “interesting,” or suspect. Written within months of the Rosenberg sentencing and barely four years after HUAC first opened its Hollywood hearings, Cohn’s memo exemplifies the mighty influence exercised by both the House committee and, in their stead, by groups like the MPAPAI. Careers had already been destroyed by the blacklists, particular films would be undone by organized public protests—witness the American Legion’s boycott of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight in 1952—and, amid this rabidly anticommunist milieu, Miller would soon emerge as arguably America’s most prominent public intellectual of the much-battered Left. Through his highly publicized break with Kazan, precipitated by his old friend’s decision to “name names”; through his next two major plays, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge; and through his own testimony before HUAC in 1956, Miller cultivated the not-unproblematic personae of “liberal activist,” joining the likes of Dwight Macdonald, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and I. F. Stone. Such public intellectuals, as Richard Pells notes, “resisted not simply the tactics of but the rationale for McCarthyism” (265). Miller would, in effect, enact the role of his favorite hero: the “genuinely moral man” who rebels against the monolith of “modernized” America.
And from several pages later . . .
When he received his summons, Arthur Miller was living near Reno, Nevada, where he was establishing residency in order to finalize his divorce [from his first wife]. In the three years since the premiere of The Crucible, Miller had written two one-act plays, A Memory of Two Mondays, inspired by his one-year stint as a worker in an auto parts warehouse, and A View from the Bridge. The latter has been treated by most critics as Miller’s response to On the Waterfront, which premiered in American movie houses in 1954. Featuring memorable performances from the stable of New York actors who had helped to make Miller and Kazan famous, including Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, and Karl Malden, the film is a defense of informers, substituting the Waterfront Crime Commission for HUAC, and Brando’s brave simpleton, Terry Malloy, for Kazan, Cobb, Schulberg, and everyone else who had chosen to name names. On the Waterfront proved to be, in many ways, a vindication for Kazan, as it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
thanks darren, you’ve ruined it for me, now. it’s like that book “the giving tree” by shel silverstein. i always thought it was such a beautiful story of love and commitment until mr. floon pointed out that it is, instead, the disgustingly pathetic story of a grossly co-dependant tree.
you’re both right.
Darren, you obviously know quite a bit about this, and alluded in your earlier post about the fallacy of Miller being a “liberal hero”—since he was not under the same sort of pressure others might have been. You said that you would have stood for Kazan at the Oscars, so my question is—is it because you forgive the complexity and gravity of the serious personal and political situation that forced his hand, or in appreciation of his art?
Both. And also because the sight of 1,000 multimillionaire celebrities making Kazan’s life into a public show of their leftist cred turned my stomache. I do think my stance on the informers has softened, though, and I’m not sure if I can rationally justify it. For what it’s worth, I think I might actually be more disturbed by Kazan’s womanizing and misogyny (throughout his life) than his moral weakness (under potentially career-destroying political pressure).
Jenny Lewis…
I like what I am reading here. Hey, do drop by at my website if you…