Colin Marshall

The five creators fascinating me most at the moment

(I’ll do this periodically.)

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. Though I haven’t followed the comic in years — there’s something to be said for the notion that laughing about the poisonous office environment just opiates the pain needed to escape said poisonous office environment — I was recently compelled to catch up on Adams’ blog. The resonances with my own thoughts were striking. He’s even spent some of the last year writing about the primacy of elusive human skills over more learnable technical ones, a new favorite topic of mine. This isn’t so much of a surprise, since I obsessively read and re-read Adams’ prose books The Dilbert Principle The Dilbert Future as a kid. A lot of his intellectual sensibility rubbed off on me.

Nick Denton, CEO of Gawker Media. Ben McGrath’s profile of Denton in the New Yorker piqued my interest to do some research on the guy. Denton’s narrative, at least as McGrath and others have reconstructed it, is an old one: ambitious, well-educated young guy pursues high-minded goals, gets burnt out on society’s non-response, then strikes a “Fuck it, I'll just give ‘em what they want” pose and makes it big. Despite my interest in Denton the man, I have so very, very little in the topics Gawker Media’s blogs covers: gadgets, science fiction, celebrity gossip. Thing is, I suspect Denton isn’t interested in that stuff either! But like Adams — and, I guess, me — he’s into observing human behavior. It’s just that they’ve both been willing and able to act on and cash in on what they’ve learned.

Jean-Luc Godard, feisty French New Wave filmmaker. I just interviewed film critic David Sterritt on The Marketplace of Ideas. Though we didn’t talk about Godard, I picked up Sterritt’s books on him. I’ve been paying especially close attention to his compilation of Godard interviews, since this filmmaker’s art seems to reside as much in the craft of his persona as in the craft of his cinema. I actually haven’t seen very many of Godard’s films, and those I have leave me cold as often as they excite me, but with a dude like Godard, I’m pretty sure liking everything he does isn’t the point. He doesn’t like everything he does. And sure, he’s given to self-contradictory grand pronouncements, but he seems to have lived his life and career in the only honest way — uncompartmentalized and inseparably.

Werner Herzog, director of everything from Even Dwarfs Started Small to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Steel yourself to see his name in these lists pretty damned often. Like Godard, to discuss his life, his work, and his self is to discuss essentially the same thing. I just checked Paul Cronin’s Herzog on Herzog, from which I posted a bunch of excerpts last year, out of the library again. Given how many of Herzog’s good suggestions I ignore on a daily basis, the book is a self-flagellation tool for me. If I were true to the Herzogian game, I’d get a job as a night watchman at an insane asylum, learn five more languages, and teach myself to pick locks. Instead I just think about paying my credit card. I suck.

Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and CEO. I often bring Jobs up as an example of the right business guy to emulate. Some friends balk at this, claiming he’s so unusual that he’s not a good example of anything. But that’s the point! The point is to be that unusual. Would that the world had more LSD-dropping, Ashram-going, aesthetics-obsessed, across-three-disabled-spaces-parking visionaries. I’m also very much on board with his concept of taste: “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.'' Though I hadn’t thought about Jobs in a while, this early-eighties photo of him at home with tea, turntable, and Tiffany Lamp brought back to mind everything I admire about the man. (It's now my desktop background, an ever-present reminder of all I have failed to accomplish.) Strangely, I’ve never read any books about him. I’ll begin to change that by picking up one of the unread Robert X. Cringely volumes on my shelf.

Three years of ideational marketeering

After I aired the first few Marketplace of Ideas interviews, I figured this e-mail was, give or take a few months, well on its way:

From: Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

You have flawlessly reintroduced lively, intelligent conversation to the airwaves. To allow you to continue doing this without compensation of any kind would truly be a crime. I am prepared to offer practically enough money to sustain a decent existence.

But the town belle doesn’t just jump on her first suitor. I figured this e-mail would follow shortly thereafter:

From: Another Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

I cannot, in good conscience, let any other public radio bigshot claim you as their own. I would be remiss in allowing the depth and seriousness conferred by a program like The Marketplace of Ideas to accrue to any other public radio network. I am prepared to offer enough money to not only sustain a decent existence, but to rent an apartment with a garbage disposal.

I would be tempted — who wouldn’t? — but I would hold out a week or two longer for this e-mail:

From: A Third Public Radio Bigshot
To: Colin Marshall

Colin,

You have created a program that, once listened to, cannot go unlistened to. Clearly, you are the life force that will revitalize public radio, that will make it vital and engaging to millions. I am thus naturally prepared to offer a lavish compensation package, including a paycheck each month of an amount sufficiently high that some money will remain even at the beginning of the next. We will march on a road of bones.

I understood the real bidding war would be much larger, uglier, and more complicated; the imagination always streamlines these things. But strangely, as The Marketplace of Ideas enters its fourth year, I haven’t even gotten the first of these messages. I assume the public radio bigshots are getting my address wrong. It’s colinjmarshall at gmail, guys. Colinjmarshall. There’s a j in the middle.

So while they straighten that out, I’ll continue the yearly tradition of naming my five favorite MOI interviews of the past twelve months.



Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about something I discussed with Nick Currie, also known as Momus, back in February. We somehow managed to cover about thrice as many topics as I usually do in an hour — old computers, boarding school, creating parallel words with lies where those lies are true, North Korea, Japan, Plato’s cave — all from the launching point of talking about the closure of his Livejournal, of all things. He shuttered it on his 50th birthday, the same day I aired the interview, so it was a pleasing coincidence of big events.



I got into North Korea in much more depth the very next week, when I talked to Brian Reynolds Myers about his book on understanding North Korea’s mindset through its propaganda. The conversation became very popular when I transcribed it for 3Quarksdaily. Distancing myself from the role of interviewer an reading or hearing it just as someone fascinated by North Korea — most people are — I can see why it’s fascinating. I especially like how Myers also gets into bits and pieces of his own background, especially regarding his drive to study closed societies. Yet this one didn’t seem to win me too many new subscribers, which I can’t quite explain. I wanted to tell these single-serving fans, “But all the interviews go this deep!”



If, when I was fifteen, you told me that in ten years I’d be talking to Wang Chung’s Jack Hues, I’d have freaked in the best possible way. (If, however, you told me that a t-topped vehicle would still remain nowhere in sight, I’d have freaked in the worst possible way.) You know those stories people tell about finally talking to creators whose work they’ve long admired and coming away disappointed? This was the exact opposite of that. If anything, he was even smarter, more candid, and more articulate that I could ever have allowed myself to expect.



This is what I find fascinating about our long tail-y media: a guy in a band that’s been a household name for 25 years is a celebrity to me, but so are two guys about my age who talk about movies in a North Hollywood apartment every Thursday. Whether or not this is the Age of Personal Celebrities, I met two of mine, Tyler Smith and David Bax of the movie podcast Battleship Pretension, by interviewing them. I wanted the conversation on my show to be as funny and freewheeling — “double-F,” I call it — as an episode of theirs, and I got my wish. But we also got surprisingly incisive about what cinema is as an art form (and how cinema is never not an art form).



Maybe this is recency bias, but I think my conversation with KPCC’s John Rabe might turn out to be one for the ages. The genius revelation dawned on me not long ago that, if I’m going to be a radio personality, it might be advantageous to include some of my personality in my radio ventures. Rabe and I got in touch after I reviewed his show Off-Ramp on Podthoughts. Our on-air talk that followed seems to me like a new high point in the “actually be a two-person conversation” aspect of MOI’s mission. It helps that we talked about stuff I can speak to, like the city of Los Angeles and the bizarrely low assumed audience engagement level of most radio programs.

By the time you read this, I’m pretty sure those public radio bigshots have gotten on the whole e-mailing thing. But until then...

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 44. Derek Bailey's On the Edge (1992)

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On the Edge parts I and III. 52:22 and 58:13 min., color, 1992. By Jeremy Marr and Derek Bailey. Ubuweb's description:

A series of four 55 minute films shown on Channel 4 TV in the UK in early 1992. To say this was the best and most intelligent analysis of improvisation to be screened on UK television is probably unnecessary: it has in all likelihood been the only televised programme on this form of music-making. Written and narrated by Derek Bailey, produced and directed by Jeremy Marr, it developed out of the first edition of Bailey's book on improvisation (the broadcast almost coinciding with the publication of the second edition) and attempted to provide a world-view of the subject, not being bound by country, musical genre or preconception.

1: Passing it on
Broadcast 2 February 1992 this programme featured: Douglas Ewart at Haynes School in Chinatown, Chicago; improvisation in Mozart with Robert Levin, piano and the Acadamy of Ancient Music with Christopher Hogwood; John Zorn and Cobra; improvisation in religious and devotional music and communities with: Naji Hakim - organ improvisations in Paris; Gaelic psalm singing on the Scottish Isles of Harris and Lewis; and Indian singing with Pundit Hanuman Misra.

3: A liberating thing
Broadcast 16 February 1992, concentrating on jazz based and free improvisation. With Max Roach at the Harlam School of the Arts; Butch Morris conducting (with, among others, Shelley Hirsch); Sang-Won Park and Korean music; Max Eastley's sound sculptures; Derek Bailey (solo and fleetingly with Phil Wachsmann, Steve Noble and Alex Ward); Steve Noble and Alex Ward duo; Nashville musicians including Buddy Emmons; Eugene Chadbourne.

File this one under "wish we had more TV like this today." Hell, maybe we do have more TV like this today; far be it from me to actually check. And while we're correcting, file not this one but these two under it. Ubuweb doesn't have all four episodes of On the Edge, but they've got the first and third, and from the descriptions they'd seem to be the most interesting.

The series opens strong, with a pro-improvisation polemic — I don't think that's too harsh a term — from Robert Levin, who's still a well-known pianist and composer. "To invent something is totally beyond the scope of the modern orchestra," he says. "It seems to be more technological, or, at least, Pavlovian." This is along the lines of what Brian Eno has been saying about scripted and recorded music for years; Alex Ross has more recently taken up the cause with very specific, needling regard to what has been labeled "classical music." These shows aren't entirely or even especially about classical music, but as a framing device it's a stark illustration of what happens to a genre when you suck the improvisation out. As Levin sums it up: "We have a terrible problem: these pieces have become museum pieces."

If Ubuweb's summary hadn't already pointed it out, I can assure you I'd be making a very big deal about how the show goes on to approach improvisation from a bunch of different angles and in a diversity of contexts. So you've got the maverick classical piano improviser, sure, but you've also got the ragtag, anything-an-instrument band improvising in an NYC loft; the classes of little kids improvising on Douglas Ewart's made-up instruments and Max Roach's drum kit, the untrained but impassioned choral improvisation; the improvisatory sonic sculptures alongside which Max Eastley improvises; the Korean flower shop owner who, in the improvisation of his homeland traditional music, finds solace from "things that make me different from what I want to be."

I guess what I'm saying is that the programs are successfully about a concept. This is rarer than you'd think; even books have trouble with it. Musical improvisation is actually one of the better examples I can think of of an idea that can't really be directly described, at least not with any great accuracy. You've got to find as many and as different examples of it as you can, and just let your audience experience them. Including unadulterated performances at length — at what passes for length on TV, anyway — is one of the many ways On the Edge gets this right.

Episode three even includes a segment on Butch Morris and his practice of "conduction," that is, a hybrid of conducting and improvisation where he, as the conductor armed with gestures both conventional- and unconventional-looking, "plays" a group of improvisers. That's pretty neat, but what's important is what he says to his improvisational orchestra between pieces. He demands of his players that they now entertain themselves here by playing something that they wouldn't entertain themselves with at home. He'd rather they not play at all than play something they wouldn't like were they in the audience. "I don't want you to play any old thing," he says. "I can get any-old-body to play any old thing."

Donald Keene: On Familiar Terms

Donald Keene, the most famous scholar and translator of Japanese literature alive, has published two autobiographies. This one, put out in 1994, is the first; the glossier, breezier, but somehow no less substantial Chronicles of My life came out in 2008. Rather than some multi-volume, each-decade-a-book-unto-itself Clive James autobiographical situation — though I’m a fan of that form, too — Keene’s two memoirs cover almost the same life territory. The second technically has 15 more years to work with, but Keene doesn’t seem to consider them nearly as eventful or interesting as the preceding 72.

That’s not without cause, by the way; they’re a pretty damned exciting 72 years. Exciting to my mind, at least, especially the middle 30 or so, when Keene was in tight with the Japanese literary titans of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Your Yukio Mishimas. Your Yasunari Kawabatas. Your Kenzaburo Ōes. Your Kobo Abes. It’s the Kobo Abes that particularly interest me, since (a) Abe is my favorite Japanese novelist, (b) information on the man in English is hard to come by, and (c) Keene and Abe were pretty good pals. Or they became so after clearing a misunderstanding in which, on their first meeting, the medically-trained Abe instinctively diagnosed the transcendently mild but (at the time) very tired Keene as a drug addict.

Keene himself is an interesting guy, no doubt, as you’d have to be to get into Japanese literature in the forties — and more on his autobiographical persona later — but it’s his association with all these fascinating Japanese writers that drew me to him. It’s the same reason I’ve been so into other memoirs like Ed Seidensticker’s Tokyo Central and (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) John Nathan’s Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. This hard-working, hard-talking, good-eating (and sometimes hard-drinking) community of novelists, poets, translators, and other literary figures was called, I think, the bundan. Sure, this bundan existed long ago and far away, but I’ve come to see it as a model that could in some sense come back suddenly and unexpectedly, given the right conditions.

As a vehicle for experiencing this time, place, and coterie, Keene’s mind is as close as you’re going to get to neutral observation. That’s not to call the man a passionless cipher; he often expresses great admiration for some things and people and great irritation with others. But given how deep he gets into literary Japan, he keeps a curiously uncrossable emotional distance. Keene’s dominant feelings are devotion to Japanese literature, love of classical music, impatience with ideology, dismissal of students not as devoted to Japanese literature as he is, and bemusement at what he considers his impossibly good fortune in life.

I can’t avoid commenting on the glaring absence of any trace of sexuality. The sexual neutrality Keene puts across in his writing about himself feels so deliberate that it backfires, drawing close attention to the very thing it excises. I have to assume, on his part, either complete asexuality or some variety of closetedness. Certainly the latter is more plausible, especially given what Keene’s peer Donald Richie called “the strange prevalence of people of like preferences among foreign Japanese specialists” of their generation. Indeed, Keene’s contrast with the liberated Richie, who’s written at least one entire unpublished manuscript on his Japanese homosexual encounters alone, could hardly be starker.

Still, that’s a reasons I actually find Keene’s persona in these books compelling. Below what I’m sure some readers would call a gentle, amiable, resoundingly bland surface exists an obviously complex fellow. And I admit to getting a kick out of imagining Keene, retiring self-effacement in a comb-over, hanging out with boisterous types like Abe, who would hand him cup after cup of his homebrewed carbonated garlic sake drink. (“I do not recommend it,” Keene writes.) Let alone the mental image of him sitting in a plastic pool chair alongside the Speedo-clad, flamboyantly muscled, ever-less-covertly gay Yukio Mishima, who even then foreshadowed his elaborate ritual suicide in the name of the glory of Japan.

Naturally, there’s also an element of self-flagellation to my reading books like this. I imagine it’s a surprisingly common cause for reading the autobiographies of those who have lead rich lives. I think to myself, “Donald Keene did all this stuff decades and decades and decades ago, without computers, without the Information Superhighway, without fancy-man Mac applications — hell, without reliable mail. What’s your excuse?” I certainly have no desire to become an academic, which was one of Keene’s goals from early on, and he would probably call himself a cautious, play-it-safe type, but still, there’s a courage of conviction in his life that’s way, way too rare.

Peter Greenaway: The Falls

The Falls is a three-hour, 30-year-old, 92-part experimental mockumentary. In the immortal words of Snakes on a Plane star Samuel L. Jackson, you either wanna see that or you don’t. I wanna see that, but then, I’m a big Peter Greenaway fan. I like his interests and/or obsessions (hardly distinct categories here). I like the way his mind works. I like the distinctive universe he’s created. I like, perhaps above all, his sense of humor.

Not every cinephile shares these opinions. I’m always surprised by how divisive all things Greenaway, both of the man and of his work, really are. In a recent piece in whatever The eXile has become, a journalist attending (one hour of) a Greenaway master class represents the opposite point of the spectrum from mine:

His is the kind of filmmaking that’s so uninvolving it requires an explanation. It had better be conveying a weighty message because it’s not doing anything else. In fact, it should be allegorical, with everything symbolizing something else, so at least you could make a guessing game of it. The giant cigar stands for patriarchal capitalism, and the opera singer is the feminized institutional culture that sings the praises of a violent and oppressive system…

David Thomson expressed a smarter but no more appreciative opinion in the Guardian:

I have a decent, yeomanly, unobtrusive loathing of the films of Peter Greenaway. I don't know why, but just thinking of him makes me want to huddle that bit closer with Falstaff, John Constable, Denis Compton and Diana Dors. Yet I have to recall that there is a devil in Greenaway — a wit, an un-Englishness that might take my four pals and make a wondrous movie about them. And, honestly, which other models of the humane and the humanist in British film could do the same? The last film-maker I can remember who was called horrid and loathsome and so on in print was Michael Powell. There's the warning.

Peter Greenaway’s working worldview, as I interpret it, is this: Cinema has, for too long, been treated as a primarily narrative medium, like literature or theater, when in fact it is richer as a primarily visual medium, like painting. I buy it because I approach films as pieces of visual art in the first place. I think Greenaway’s way of putting narrative second (at best) is a badly needed corrective to practically all other movies in existence, which don’t just put narrative first, they pull it somehow out beyond first, to the point that it distorts and wrecks everything else they might have artistically accomplished. Clearly, some people think prominent, forceful narrative is actually cinema’s sine qua non What’ev.

So instead of narratively, Greenaway organizes The Falls alphabetically. The structure is a page of a directory listing known survivors of the Violent Unknown Event (VUE), a sudden, large-scale happening that left a few million Britons afflicted by bizarre symptoms. These include conditions like skin discoloration, finger paralysis, webbed toes, diminished eyesight, improved eyesight, bone-marrow deficiency, the acquisition of hitherto unheard-of languages, and a habit of driving in circles. We watch brief profiles, absurdist mini-mockumentaries in and of themselves, on each of the 92 VUE victims whose surnames begin with “Fall.”

Greenaway has complained about modern films’ tendency to simply convert 19th-century novels into impoverished moving images, which is a more than fair objection. In The Falls, though, seems to owe just about as much to text — it’s just a different kind of text. So much of the material is biographical narration and still images that I kept imagining the whole project as a book — an annotated directory, I suppose — and wondering how much it would really lose in the transition. Turns out there is a Falls book, available from Dis Voir in both English and French.

Given the dizzyingly countless references to his earlier and later works that Greenaway makes in The Falls, I think of it as but one large component in a wider multimedia project. His more recent Tulse Luper Suitcases, an interconnected farrago of films, books, CDs, sites, and exhibitions that I haven’t even tried to figure out yet, made his predilection for that kind of thing clear. So perhaps it’s not a movie, exactly, but something more interesting than a movie. It seems to have been Greenaway’s lifelong mission to hone that elusive new form. Sometimes the elusive goals are the best.

John Cameron Mitchell: Shortbus

“The dude who made Hedwig and the Angry Inch followed it up with this crazy sex movie.” That’s the meme on this one. Though less than a decade old, Hedwig got fast-tracked into the cult canon, so I’m a tad embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t seen it until some friends showed me the light this year. John Cameron Mitchell, the starring auteur of Hedwig, brought Shortbus out in 2006, and I was slightly more intrigued by it than its predecessor. I thought it wouldn’t make sense to watch his lesser-known sophomore effort before his beloved freshman one, so I did nothing.

One reason Shortbus has what notoriety it does is, indeed, teh secks. I feel as if, in the 2000s — the 21st century! — clearly unstimulated onscreen intercourse (between unknowns, no less) should no longer have been such a big deal, but alas, it remains so today. Chalk it up to the large and mighty pr0n industry’s need to protect their fleshy territory. The other reason is that one of the participants isn’t exactly unknown. Sook-Yin Lee plays the/a protagonist, a frustrated couples’ therapist, and she’s famous. Well, she’s Canada famous. A MuchMusic VJ. CBC personality, too. The Ceeb’s public objections to her performance in this movie wound up boosting its profile lord knows how much.

Sex aside — and there’s about as much of it as I imagined, not much more, not much less — Mitchell actually plays this one surprisingly safe. We’ve got one character, the aforementioned therapist, who seeks riddance of her “pre-orgasmic” state by plunging into the the titular Shortbus, a secret NYC club where half the attendees are, uh, doin’ it. (And they’re doin’ it in more conventional ways than I admit to having expected; I seem to remember more experimentation going on even in Caligula.) We’ve got another, a suicidally depressed former male prostitute who wants to “open” his relationship with his longtime (by former male prostitute standards) boyfriend. Both characters struggle with their own sexual dysfunctions, though the problems as well as the solutions come from different angles. One was living a little too Shortbus-y a life; the other’s was apparently not Shortbus-y enough.

This setup produces a couple dozen genuinely funny moments, and Mitchell almost always successfully balances the overt jokes with subtler stuff. I just wonder where the convention-breaking spirit went when he was plotting and structuring the film. Its bones aren’t a million years of evolution away from a garden variety rom-com, so what shine are the moments that don’t quite fit in. I think particularly of a scene, early on, between Ceth (pronounced “Seth”), a twenty-if-that male model who becomes the central gay couple’s third player, and a business-suited octogenarian he runs into at Shortbus. The old man, a boldly obvious stand-in for Ed Koch, falls into a halting, almost haunting monologue about his and America’s confusion and non-response at the height of AIDS.

But whatever Koch’s Tobias’ regrets, Sofia’s blockages, or James’ compulsions to self-destruct, the primaries and secondaries alike solve their sex issues by the credits — and hey, they got past ‘em by loosening up and letting go a little bit, and we’ve all had a good laugh along the way! There’s nothing badly wrong with this, but for such a supposedly controversial picture, I’m startled by how much Shortbus is less “crazy” sex movie than an essentially nostalgic one.

He wanna travel

This article, from the Japanese magazine Paper Sky, is an interview with Haruki Murakami about writing and the states of mind brought on by foreign geographical contexts, and vintage record collecting. It was pretty much precision-engineered to get me to read it:

I hate asking you this, but here goes: What are your three favorite overseas destinations?

H: First would be Boston, Massachusetts in America, because it’s the most convenient and satisfying city for collecting secondhand Jazz records. Plus, there many delicious Indian restaurants in Boston — and you can find Samuel Adams draft beer anywhere in town. You can also run the marathon there — which I’ve done a few times. In Europe, I really like Stockholm, Sweden. Again, there’s a wonderful secondhand record shop there, and I visited that store everyday for three days straight. The owner is a fanatical collector of great jazz records. And here’s something unusual: The passengers on the subways in Stockholm are almost all talking on their cell phones all the time. It’s very surreal.

I also love Sydney in Australia. Although most of the people there wear boring clothes, because the fashions are really casual and simple, the food and wine in Sydney is excellent. How mysterious! Also, the aquarium and zoo in Sydney are both unique and wonderful. Unfortunately, there’s not a single good secondhand record store there. Maybe that will change in the future.

What does Murakami do on his many airplane flights? “Sometimes I take my small DVD player with me and watch old Jean Luc Goddard [sic] movies. As you know, those great old Goddard movies are hardly ever shown on planes.” My greatest desire is to be Haruki Murakami watching a Jean-Luc Godard movie on a flight to Stockholm.

A map of Couplândia

The latest chapter of my 101 Contemporary Novelists Without Whom Your Brain Might Well Shrivel and Die is up today at The Millions. It’s about Douglas Coupland:

“I’m not saying that the bulk of novels out there aren’t art — they are — they’re just not modern art.”

Douglas Coupland, “Why Write Modern Fiction?”

How ironic that Douglas Coupland, the man who popularized the term “Generation X”, turns out to be one of the least ironic novelists of his generation. His novels may, on the whole, be loaded with typographical trickery, brand names of the nanosecond, slacking youngsters, and Simpsons references, but he’s also deep into a suite of timelessly, radically un-hip novelistic themes. At the lightest readerly touch, Coupland’s smirking surfaces and visual bravado give way to a landslide of questions and concerns about, as Andrew Tate put it in his book-length study of Coupland’s writing, “conviction, community, connection, and continuity.”

Take Coupland’s work as a whole and his strengths become starkly apparent. He’s especially good when writing in the voice of an actual character, not a neutral, disembodied narrator. (He’s even better when writing as several of them.) Often criticized for peppering his texts with marketing detritus forgotten or best forgotten — Tae Bo, Gap, Pets.com — he deals with the timeless human problems best when discussing them in parallel with things so disposable. His penchant for suddenly dropping protagonists into bizarre scenarios also draws reviewer heat, but when he successfully mixes the very bizarre and the very mundane, there’s nothing quite like it in literature. He’ll often steer away from the norms of plotting and typesetting tradition, and when he does, the harder he cranks the wheel, the better.

Consider yourself linked not once, but twice.

Korean cinema diary: Dream, Epitaph, A Dirty Carnival

Dream is the latest film by Ki-duk Kim, one of the very few Korean filmmakers with a high international profile. I think of him as one of those foreign directors who gains an “art house” (lord, how I loathe that term) reputation without being terribly innovative. (You know, that might even be the pre-requisite for such a reputation.) That’s not to say his movies are bland; I actually quite admire the ones I’ve seen. Even though Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is one the Korean films with which non-Korean-cinephiles are most familiar — the others being Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy and Joon-ho Bong’s The Host — it’s got an impeccable aesthetic sense. The same thing almost goes for 3-Iron, though it’s not as well-known.

I could say the guy’s about look and feel, not form; I have yet to see a particularly interesting structure from him. Dream doesn’t break the pattern. It’s as if A Nightmare on Elm Street met the old body-switch movies of that era met an especially bleak Hanks-Ryan rom-com. When Jin, the male lead, falls asleep, Ran, the female lead involuntarily acts out his dreams. (One semi-fascinating point about these two is that Ran speaks only Korean and Jin speaks only Japanese, which are definitely not mutually intelligible languages, yet they communicate with seeming fluency to one another.) The first time this happens, Jin dreams about crashing a car. Soon, the cops are knocking on Ran’s door, and she sleepily protests that of course she wasn’t just driving around — while her wrecked car sits parked right below.

Jin and Ran figure they can sleep in shifts, but for some reason this doesn’t work out. There are a few truly ugly sequences when Jin desperately resorts to just keeping himself awake by any means necessarily: taping his eyelids open, slashing himself with a razor blade, etc. Here is a situation that cannot end well. Kim does execute it reasonably well, but ultimately I call it a minor entry in his body of 15 (!) films. It’s pretty much all about the aesthetics this time around, and while some of the choices there work — I liked the dissonant Takemitsu-style score — most feel strangely restrained.


Sik and Beom-sik Jung’s Epitaph is further proof that genre stuff is only engaging when it comes from another culture. I guess you might call it, what, a historical horror movie? It’s mostly set in the Japan-occupied Korea of 1942, and even that’s one big flashback from framing scenes set in 1979. That might be why, despite running under 100 minutes, it feels sprawling. It also seems to implement most of the horror devices ever invented: ghosts, serial killing, freaky kids, chattering zombies, possession, identity swapping, body gruesomeness, medical gruesomeness, mechanical gruesomeness. My personal favorite is the apparition, in silhouette, of a hunchbacked old woman carrying a baby. When the baby turns its head, you can tell it doesn’t have a face.

But it’s a big jumble of individually effective horrific moments. Don’t even bother getting the throughline straight; even if it does untangle, that isn’t the point. This, I’ll declare from my limited research, is the “K-horror” modus operandi. It’s still far, far superior to what even the finest scary movies North America are doing right now, which seems to have devolved into a game of budget torture one-upsmanship. I’d sooner sit through even the dopiest, messiest, most melodramatic Korean shriekfest (which Epitaph really isn’t) than any one of the Saw sequels.


If the K-gangster film hasn’t matched the K-horror film’s popularity, it’s not for lack of quality. It might be because foreign audiences aren’t as familiar with the Korean mob scene as they are with, say, the Japanese Yakuza. (To the extent that they’re familiar with the Yakuza, which isn’t much of an extent at all. Sydney Pollack’s movie was pretty cool, though.) It’s a little slick for my tastes, but Ha Yu’s A Dirty Carnival would make a respectable ambassador for the genre.

As in Dong-hun Choi’s The Big Swindle, the outlaw characters’ best laid plans are complicated and ultimately ruined by the outlaw’s inherent untrustworthiness. A well-dressed but impoverished 29-year-old thug named Byung-du is at the center of this, trying to climb the greasy pole steadily enough to support his kid sister and sick mom. This involves killing a troublesome accountant, participating in truly epic street battles, acting as a gangsterism consultant on an elementary school buddy’s Tarantinoesque movie project, spilling a few too many beans to said buddy, becoming a target of one’s own brethren, having to decide whether to slay friends or “family” just to stay alive himself, etc.

I’ve read that Yu began his career as a poet, only later turning to film. This strikes me as unusual enough that I’m now thinking back and trying to identify the possibly “poetic” qualities of A Dirty Carnival. This is a doomed exercise, but I do think you find most of the picture’s value where it deviates from the norms of gangster filmmaking. It strikes a surprisingly adept balance between the glorification of gangsters and the self-conscious, excessive de-glorification of same. Byung-du tries his best to be slick and noble, but his awkward edges remain on display. He’s got a few decidedly ass-kicking moves, but the fights he gets involved in are filthy, chaotic scrums. This gets more impressive the more you think about how many movies get it (at the very least) not quite right.

As in almost every Korean film I’ve seen, there’s humor alongside the heightened drama. It ends with perhaps the finest single example of simultaneous sadness, optimism, nihilism, and laugh-out-loud ridiculousness I’ve seen, with the boss at the top of the gang’s org chart singing the Alan Parsons Project’s “Old and Wise” at the karaoke bar.