Cards up the sleeve and other dirty tricks.

I'm pretty close to polishing off the last few stories in Richard Matheson's anthology Button, Button. With the exception of the random story in whatever collection I may have read them in, the majority of my exposure to this legend's short fiction has been in translation. Not in the foreign language sense, but as film or television segments.

Reading these stories, it's easy to see why his name is synonymous with the Twilight Zone-effect. They mostly work toward creating a suspenseful singular effect, and then in the last line or two overturns the entire schema of the narrative. "It's a cookbook!" sort of thing, you know. Matheson often does this very well, expertly and artfully, raising a stylistic trope above mere pulp formula when he is at his best.

There's a wisdom that claims you can learn more from artistic failure than genius. In failure, the creative gears are exposed as the machine creaks and sputters in disharmony. Two stories in this collection strike me as being remarkably off-the-mark for such an accomplished writer.

"No Such Thing As A Vampire" is about exactly what the title announces. An older man of science, who happens to live in Romania, struggles to deal with the inexplicable attack of a vampire on his younger bride. He enlists the aid of a younger, handsome colleague, to help him take action against his impossible assailant. Like I said earlier, I've seen this story as a short film first, and while the film wasn't a true spine-tingler, it worked pretty well to deliver some shock at the conclusion and revelation of the older man's real motives.

However, the short story is told as an inner monologue from the point of view of the older Dr. Gheria, who happens to be the only one in the story who really knows what's going on with this vampire and really the last person to believe it, really. Yet, we as readers are just supposed to accept it when Dr. Gheria reveals in the final paragraphs that he was scheming the entire time. Right. This is what we've come to know as "cheating" in the writing trade. Others call it derisively an author "gotcha". Either way, it violates the rules that most readers trust their writers with, and it's sloppy writing, really. The story could have certainly been told in a way that wouldn't violate this contract between reader and writer. Just watch the film or read the screenplay for an example of how.

"Pattern for Survival" is another case, but a more interesting one. I can't get into specifics, at the risk of destroying the suspense of the story. That's the problem. The entire shock of the story relies on the reader finally figuring out what is going in the story. Confusion, more than misdirection, leads the reader to the stunning revelation of the world the writer in the story lives in. So, at the risk of perpetuating some cliches of avant-garde writing, I'd suggest that Matheson's use of a completely unreliable narrator and oddly "meta" overtones puts this short story a good fifteen years ahead of it's genre time. This story only works when you realize how it works -- but as a narrative itself, it fails all the standard marks of a good, ripping, yarn. As an exercise, I tinkered with writing this story as a script and it seems completely impossible. By the second scene, the entire "surprise" of the story would be gone. There would no drama. There would be no plot. Nothing happens!

Of course, all of this is worth mentioning, and only interesting by virtue of the fact that Richard Matheson has proven himself to be one of legendary storytellers of the 20th century. I believe that studying the failings can only help illuminate the true genius of the successes.

Public Enemies

Public Enemies

Michael Mann has been playing at cops and robbers for longer than I have been alive. Once reviled for bringing that new-fangled “music video” style to television drama in Miami Vice, he has since gone on to demonstrate an appreciation for action, style and technology, which has overshadowed both Miami Vice and the superior Crime Story. No longer a “vapid proto-fascist”, he has shown himself to be an indie filmmaker in spirit, if not in brand.

The projects that Michael Mann has gotten his hands on have been changing. While connecting an artist’s personal feelings with stories they present to the world is a dubious exercise, it doesn’t take a finely focused critical eye to see an arc stretching from Starsky and Hutch to Public Enemies. For now, without exhaustive research, I would say Heat would be the apogee of this arc. In this particular film, the motives of cop and criminal are considered in balance and sympathetic parallel. While Heat has its weaknesses, this film was the boldest step Mann took over the thin blue line.

How is this important? These details are important because it helps illustrate why Public Enemies is a moment in cinema which may go unobserved by many, but lauded by a few. The movie is brilliant in many ways. Brilliant because it is thick with a subtext which skewers the clichés of law enforcement in a way which was unimaginable twenty years ago.

Of course, John Dillinger was a violent criminal who may or may not have been a Robin Hood, but in this film, it is clear that the myth of Dillinger is as timely now as ever. A delerioursly paranoid circumstance, a victim of corruption on all sides and also incorruptibly romantic, Depp’s Dillinger blurs the line between hero and anti-hero so far that I didn’t feel any guilt for cheering him on by the end of the film. Dillinger is the anti-authoritarian hero, and one can feel the glee that both Mann and Depp must have felt slyly celebrating the exploits of a pre-war bank robber. (Especially as the target of a Mussolini quoting J Edgar Hoover)

I don’t think it is any accident that this film also demonstrates just how far “shot on video” has come along. While there are moments where the technical limits of video, even high definition video, are evident; the striking difference augments the violence. Much like the stuttering frames of Saving Private Ryan, the strange clarity heightens the experience rather than distancing. My date for the evening asked me why it looked “like live TV”. Much like Dillinger with his Thompson submachine guns and BAR rifles, Mann has taken the technology of the day and made it serve his own anarchic ends.

For all its genius, the film stumbles in the script department. There are a few too many cops and robbers clichés that should have been avoided. I suppose some viewers cheer whenever a character says they “have a bad feeling” about a job, or when the prison guards fall for the (not so) clever ruse like dolts, and there was no reason in the world we needed to see Johnny Depp swinging dual pistols around like a mid-90’s HK action hero. Depp is fun to watch, and brings plenty of intensity to the role, but the character as written gets pretty watery once you try to get past the iconic rebellion. There is probably about a script page worth of development spent on his human motivations, rather than the mythic ones.

Still, I can overlook all that. I was so busy cheering on the “blackbird” (Dillinger) of this film that I wonder if time spent developing mortal failings wouldn’t have just short-circuited the cumulative effect. Some characters leave space for the willing viewer to inhabit, while others step off the screen to inhabit the viewer. Depp’s Dillinger is the former.

They say you can judge a society by its’ prisons. Maybe in some movie world, you can judge it by the people who stay out of prisons. Mann and Dillinger’s America was a landscape of outlaws whose powers kept them out of the reach of justice, but whose reach could never fully keep Dillinger’s own individual, causeless rebellion, under total control. Like the times and the nation that created him, the mythic Dillinger is a dark reminder that liberty often means freedom from power, and not the freedom to wield power.

Why I Won’t Mourn the Uptown Bar

Why I Won’t Mourn the Uptown Bar

I’ve heard the story from several people – the venerable Uptown Bar is closing, for good and for real, this time. I don’t make it a habit to read City Pages, so I don’t know if they have confirmed the story. Given the development going on in the neighborhood, I can’t say there is any reason to disbelieve the truth of the rumor.

Like most of my friends, acquaintances and passers-by, I have spent plenty of time at the Uptown Bar. Got smoky, sweaty and drunk with several hundred of my closet friends while seeing bands such as the Gear Daddies, Soul Asylum, Jesus Lizard, Run Westy Run, and Arcwelder there. I’ve stumbled drunk to nearby afterbar house parties, had beer spilled on me, spilled beer on others, had Sunday bloody marys and had a few awkward and unexpected moments with soon-to-be ex-girlfriends. Hell, I’ve even managed to get up on the stage for a few poetry readings or other projects. So, it’s been good to me, and it was certainly as much a part of my first decade as an adult as anywhere else.

I don’t spend much time in Uptown anymore. Especially now that I’ve stopped smoking cigars, the only reason I have to go there is for the occasional meal or movie. The fact is, most of the people I see walking around Uptown these days scare me. Maturity has brought reluctance to type people based on clothing, but it gets real hard to not see Uptown as tool central these days. There’s nothing funky, hip or cool about the place anymore. It’s overrun with condos and businesses geared toward the kind of crowds which in general swarm to places like Buckhead in Atlanta or the more grotesque parts of Boston. Whatever it is, it isn’t Minneapolis. Lake and Hennepin is more of a corporate playground than cultural center.

So, godspeed Uptown Bar. Whether you relocate or vanish completely, I say you’ll be missed, but time has moved on and so have those who made you special. Uptown is no longer worthy of your rich cultural history or the beer soaked memories your sign may inspire in those who were there, then. Vibrant cultures change or die in stagnation. Places and people have shifted and created their worlds in other places. As you leave the Uptown area, it will cement Uptown’s new identity and hopefully push the last hip hangers-on into the frontiers of the city that are both established and to-be discovered.

Minneapolis, like many cities, is built on districts, zones, neighborhoods or ghettos. I suppose the word you use for a community, like history, is based on the winners, or at least the current majority. Maybe in this case, or in this city, the names should come from the songs written about the area. Prince’s “Uptown” has faded far, far into the hues of nostalgia and myth. Sadly, but more interestingly, the Cows’ “Uptown Suckers” is more appropriate than ever.

erotica?

Lethem on Ballard

Kathio Landmark Trail 09

(for Missy)

Birch have it the most interesting

At the least, they curl like sheaves

Eager to receive tattoos of meaning

Woodpeckers prefer the fallen

Pecking typewriter codes through

Lined rows, player skin, dotted punch card calls

After decay and wherewithal

Bark falls in waves, unkempt reams

Wait to be spooled or burned to air

A trail means look ahead or down

Hedged back, emeraled olive

Forest hides by the side in shade and gobo

Beside the pruned and tall oaks

Are broad tentacled spiders

Monsters of wood which dance mute across decades

There are others who bloom with fungus

As they rise through the canopy

Span across the straight trail - unseen beneath

Landmarks and posts mark clearings now

History landscaped and sodded

While memory pantomimes in brush

These designs are the forest’s life

Written in twist, bloom, and shade

All is preserved and hidden

We are not the trails in the light

We are the spindly sapling

And the coiled green protector that guides

All the eager branches up

All the solemn roots under

As tree rings echo with the acorns drop.

-TW

hungry like the wolf

I am thinking about how little writing I've read which describes the smell of blood in the air. Because of my new condition, I bleed copiously from the slightest wound.

I scratched absently at a mosquito bite the other night. Noticed a strong salty and metallic smell; after looking out the window, and at the cat, I realized there was a small stream of bright red blood running down the length of my forearm.

I really wonder what we smell like when we are opened up.

I intend to find out.

stasis

I am wondering what it is that dictates the dreams we remember are actually the dreams from the night before. This last week, my wife said I was saying a friend's name over and over in my sleep, but I had no memory of a dream about that friend.

Remarkably, the next night, I did dream at length and with some stress about that very same friend.

Perhaps the dreams we remember are delayed or completely out of joint? Perhaps the dreams are not fractured, just our memory of them? Maybe our conscious mind is the real surreal-maker?