Colin Marshall

My favorite thing Marginal Revolution

I aspire to Marginal Revolution author Tyler Cowen’s level of cultural openness. He seems to exercise it at all times, without exception. I know this from reading his blog, and I know this from interviewing him twice on The Marketplace of Ideas, and I received a reminder of this in a recent Businessweek article:

Tyler Cowen has read what's listed in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, though not, he concedes, every single last one of the Icelandic sagas. He rereads what you probably haven't heard of, like Anton Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. For the Brazil trip, in case he runs out of new books, he has also brought Neal Stephenson's 1,100-page Cryptonomicon, which he has already read. Fiction slows him down, he says, which makes packing easier. He carries a Kindle but reads paper when he can; he says he's invested too much time on the rhythm of how the eye tracks the page. Several people have told me the same story about Cowen: They have watched him read, and he scans a page as others might scan a headline.

[ … ]

Since the late '90s much of Cowen's work has looked at the economics of culture. He consumes art and music at the rate he does books, but unlike most critics he doesn't sniff that markets have either ruined culture or brought it low.

[ … ]

After Cowen gets back from Brazil, we meet at Eyo Restaurant & Sports Bar in Falls Church, Va., an Ethiopian place that sits in a strip mall underneath several housing towers. This is yet another of Cowen's enthusiasms: searching for food, and recording it on Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide, another blog. He's included rules on how to find a restaurant and how to order when you get there in a book, Discover Your Inner Economist. For one: Order the strangest thing on the menu—chances are the chef put the most work into it. And the best ethnic food, he writes, is prepared at strip malls. He orders for me, then asks whether I eat raw beef.

I didn’t used to care much about geography at all, although that term makes it sound academic — maybe I mean I didn’t used to care about place. Over the last decade, this changed with a vengeance; I now feel much more in line with the highly place-oriented way Tyler Cowen seems to think about culture. You can see this in my favorite series of posts he makes: “My Favorite Things”. To read these is to know how much culture you’ve missed — or, put more happily, how much culture you have yet to savor.

From "My Favorite Things Hungary": "Movies: Bela Tarr, Satantango.  It’s over seven hours long, but don’t be put off.  It has some of the best shots of grazing cows and angry peasants committed to reel, and I wanted it to be longer." From "My Favorite Things South Africa": "Music: Where to start?  Malanthini, for one.  As for mbqanga collections, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto series is consistently excellent.  Singing in an Open Space, Zulu Rhythm and Harmony 1962-1982 is a favorite.  Random gospel and jazz collections often repay the purchase price and in general random CD purchases in these areas bring high expected returns." From "My Favorite Things Egypt": "Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus?  I don't find him especially readable." From "My Favorite Things Turkey": "Cynic: Diogenes, who in a few ways was an early version of Robin Hanson, though I am not suggesting Robin is a cynic in the lower case sense." From "My Favorite Things Grenada": "Short story writer: Paul Keens-Douglas.  This pick is a no-brainer.  Here is Keens-Douglas telling a story.  Here is Keens-Douglas doing a comedy routine.  I used to have some very good cassettes of him telling folk tales." From "My Favorite Things Mars": "Album about: David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Venus and Mars is not overall a good album; it is mostly dull and overproduced.  So Bowie is a clear winner here."

I plan to “borrow” this format for a post about Mexico City (I find myself more city- than country-oriented) before I leave for there. We’ll see how it stacks up.

The uselessness of "good"

Since my career prospects depend on people liking the stuff I make, I spend plenty of time thinking about how I got to like the stuff I like. (A slight variation on Jon Hassell’s ultimate question, “What do I like, and why do I like it?”) In what feels like a revelation, I suddenly realized that I’ve never grown interested in anything simply because someone said it was good, no matter how credentialed the someone, no matter how emphatic the superlatives piled upon “good.”

When I talk about criticism, I use a standard line about how two words have no place in the thinking critic’s vocabulary: “good,” “bad,” and all synonyms thereof. The sheer cheapness of broad positive or negative pronouncements — but especially positive ones — seem drained them of their interestingness. I guess you’ve got to burn a calorie or two to type out that a film “is perhaps the greatest, most astonishing masterpiece to grace screens in the last half-century,” but even praise an order of magnitude more grandiose costs you essentially nothing — well, nothing aside from devaluing the currency of your own praise, but that’s another issue.

Let’s take The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s new movie, reviews of which now sprout up like mushrooms. Had any critic written the made-up line above about it, they wouldn’t have moved me an inch closer to the cinema thereby. When Roger Ebert calls it “film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives,” I raise an eyebrow, but only just. He makes a comparison to 2001, one of my favorite early-cinephilia experiences, and that piques my interest a little more. But the clincher comes in a single observation on Jack Fisk’s production design: “Fisk is about my age and was born and raised in Downstate Illinois, and so of course knows that in the late '40s, tall aluminum drinking glasses were used for lemonade and iced tea.” I feel l need to see those glasses.

A.O. Scott writes of the “awe, amazement and grist for endless argument” The Tree of Life offers; only the last of the three sound interesting to me, but I’ve found almost any film has the potential to fuel eternal (if pointless) debates. “It is like Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ transported into the world of ‘Leave It to Beaver,’” he writes, “an inadequate and perhaps absurd formulation but one that I hope conveys the full measure of my astonishment and admiration.” Astonishment and admiration rarely transfer from viewer to viewer, but Wordsworth meets Leave It to Beaver? Oh man, who wouldn’t want to see what comes of that mash-up?

Anthony Lane, whom I’ve realized many other critics seem to consider a disgrace to the trade but whose writing I simply can’t not read, has always skillfully avoided the good-and-bad game. Though the least straightforwardly positive of the three, his review paints the most compelling verbal picture of The Tree of Life. Odd lines about how the film’s main boys “relax into near-Oedipal bliss” or about shots with “Sean Penn, dressed in Armani, kneeling on a beach, while the other characters mooch around like unwanted extras from ‘Zabriskie Point’” stoke my curiosity, but, for whatever reason, a passage not directly related to the movie actually gets me looking up showtimes. “‘If we cannot educate ourselves to his purposes, then clearly his work will look like nonsense,’” Lane quotes. “That is Malick, writing of Heidegger, and introducing his own translation of Heidegger’s ‘The Essence of Reasons,’ in 1969.”

Wait wait wait. The director of this film — a film that stars Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, of all actors — published his own translation of Heidegger? That observation, one Lane includes under the pains of a little extra research and at some risk of losing his audience, convinces me to watch this film more than all the exhortations about wonder and majesty and transcendence and masterpieciness I’ve heard from countless critics, cinéastes, and utter randoms alike.

But in the interest of absolute clarity, let me say that I have a pre-existing interest in Terence Malick. I’ll watch anything he directs. But why? How did I decide to follow his films in the first place? Much of my interest grew from hearing rumors about his working methods: his shooting Days of Heaven only during the “magic hour”; his panning away from carefully orchestrated explosions on the set of The Thin Red Line and onto passing flocks of birds; his making a movie once every 11 years or so on average; his constant (and constantly backfiring) flight from fame; dreaming of producing an Andrzej Wajda-directed Sansho the Bailiff on Broadway. This stuff strikes me as more meaningful than incantations about his “singular quality of vision,” his “cinematic mastery,” or his status as a craftsman of “undisputed classics.” Goodness, or even greatness — especially greatness, maybe — doesn’t turn my head. Weirdness certainly does.

Or maybe I just got into Malick because of that old story about Pauline Kael’s review of Badlands. Reading her pan of the film, William Shawn, her editor at the New Yorker, said, “I guess you didn’t know Terry is like a son to me.” Kael’s reply: “Tough shit, bill.” My reaction: any movie Pauline Kael insisted on getting that harsh about has to have something special going on.

The stimulation baseline

Given my long-standing love of film, my new but flaming interest in boredom (stoked by reading David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and interviewing Lee Rourke about his boredom-centric novel The Canal), and my admiration for Manohla Dargis, I think I have a constitutional mandate to blog about "In Defense of the Slow and Boring”:

“Of course, what I think is boring,” [Warhol wrote in his memoir “Popism,” “must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.”

Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like “Empire,” eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one). Long movies — among my favorites is Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” — take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing, that most movies try to obscure through continuity editing. Faced with duration not distraction, your mind may wander, but there’s no need for panic: it will come back. In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.

Forgive me for invoking the same old quote from favorite director Abbas Kiarostami that I drop every dozen posts or so:

I absolutely don’t like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater.

Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake me up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kinds of films I like.

As little as I want to approach an argument about the merits and demerits of “boring” movies — or, worse, “eating your cultural vegetables,” the subject of the opinion piece that originally sparked this dialogue — this talk does illustrate something I’ve observed in myself and maybe you’ve observed in yourself: I live in constant fear of boredom, yet I never actually experience anything that feels like boredom. Half the reason I don’t work as much on what I probably should comes down to a terror that the work won’t provide enough stimulation to keep me going. But everything always does provide enough stimulation to keep me going! But is it ever just a matter of the task, the experience, or the work at hand? Isn’t it more to do with my own mind?

Most of the time, I’ve accidentally upped my “baseline” stimulation level too much by, say, opening twelve browser tabs of terribly compelling audiovisual information and rapidly flipping between them, wallowing in a veritable orgy of meaningless auto-distraction. Get up that high and it seems, if falsely, like the labor of Hercules to quiet down the buzz. Only one way to avoid that hassle: keep the distractions flowing. Some forms of entertainment, such as the movies I don’t really like, do this with particularly freakish effectiveness.

Dargis offers this explanation as to why:

If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. And so the images keep zipping, the sounds keep clanging and the actors keep shouting as if to reassure you that, yes, the money you spent for your ticket was well worth all this clamor, a din that started months, years, earlier when the entertainment companies first fired up the public-relations machine and the entertainment media chimed in to sell the buzz until it rang in your ears.

This explains a lot, for me, about why people meditate. Meditation — or any kind of voluntary deprivation of sensory input — lowers that stimulation baseline like nothing else. I groan a little whenever I hear a film critic call a picture “meditative,” and I groan louder still when I realize that they apply the word to so many of my personal favorites, but I don’t quite consider it coincidental anymore. These films, call them “slow” or call them “boring” or fall asleep during them if you will, both lower my stimulation baseline and yield their riches to the viewer in direct proportion to the lowness of their stimulation baseline. I find that one of the more rewarding positive feedback loops around.

Your mileage may vary, but the lower my stimulation baseline, the more interesting I find any given thing in the world. And could I go to far in arguing that the more interesting you find any given thing in the world, the richer life you lead? I don’t subscribe to the level of asceticism that dictates total severance from the need for stimulation, but I do expect good things from he who eliminates his dependency on any one particular source of stimulation — any kind of stimulation. The world is his, isn’t it?

The coffee conversion

I remember this commercial from years and years ago where a thirtysomething woman, on her way to a thirtysomething woman-type social function, rehearses her refusals of coffee. Even as she rides the elevator, you hear her thoughts in voiceover: “No coffee, thanks!” “Nope, tea drinker!” Every time I saw it, I felt an overwhelming wave of contempt for this character. Without knowing exactly why, I just couldn’t stand the idea of someone habitually refusing one thing after labeling themselves dedicated to another. But here’s the thing: I was a coffee-refusing tea drinker!

Still, a lot of youngsters don’t drink coffee. It heads the standard list of “acquired tastes,” though it does so in the company of my favorite things in life: cigars, natto, Steely Dan. I just happened not to acquire the taste for coffee until, uh, 26. But “taste” doesn’t quite capture my meaning, in that it implies I actively disliked coffee before. I didn’t; going down to the neighborhood coffee roasters, sitting on the bags of beans, and smelling the air remains one my favorite early-childhood memories. I mean “taste” as in “Now that bear has a taste for human blood; we’ve got to kill it.” I just hadn’t activated my desire for coffee yet.

I did this deliberately, because coffee people had always bothered me. Surely you know who I mean by “coffee people.” Under that large umbrella stand not just the obsessive types drilling down to one particular preferred bean, one particular preferred grinding method, one particular brewing method, and one particular serving method — it didn’t help that I grew up around Seattle — but the ones engaged in what I saw as a truly ugly pissing contest:

“Aw, yeah. I take it black. Always black.”

“Oh man, you drink this stuff? This stuff is so sweet!”

“This ain’t coffee, this is a candy bar, is what you’re drinking.”

I sensed a certain disdainful masochism in dedicated coffee drinkers. These people seemed to look down their noses not just at drinkers of supposedly inferior beans, but drinkers who would dare to supplement their coffee with absolutely anything other than coffee: milk, sugar, guava syrup, whatever. Are they running a race to the bottom of the taste scale, I wondered? Where does it end? Will they profess undivided enthusiasm for coffee that tastes like ditch water? Urine? Liquid-Plumr? Why?

So I faced the humiliating Scylla of becoming a sour-puss “tea drinker” and the equally unpleasant Charybdis of becoming a coffee fetishist. For a long time, I settled on the former in deed if not in word, neglecting to overturn my mug at the diner and resigning myself to defeated bags of Lipton — where available. Those of you elsewhere in the Anglosphere may not realize this, but as much as the American tea situation has come along in recent years, it still kind of sucks. Traveling to New Zealand and certain parts of Canada, I found that the environment around me seemed ever ready to provide me with reasonably decent tea; these places knew that, if I wanted a beverage, I probably wanted that. For whatever reason, this particular English colony never caught on to the whole tea thing. Here, expecting tea makes you look like a weenie (or a thirtysomething woman mouthing excuses to herself in an elevator in a ad for stirrable tea crystals).

My deep revulsion to identities based on aesthetic preferences (“But jazz isn’t my thing — punk rock is my thing”) kept me steady in this track until recently. Walking down the street one day, I suddenly knew — just knew — that I could not possibly go on without the biggest cup of iced coffee available. I bought one, chugged it, and now drink coffee, in some form, every single day. Irony of ironies, I only drink it black! I fear that putting milk in my coffee would “rock the boat” somehow, though I continue to put it in my black tea without fail. Because, hey, if I’m going to take up coffee, I’ve got to temper it with at least an equal amount of tea. So the plan now dictates tea in the morning and coffee in the afternoon. Ah, freed from yet another obligation to choose!

Albert Brooks: Modern Romance and Defending Your Life

I recently recorded an interview with film critic Dave Kehr about his new book When Movies Mattered, which includes a few articles praising Albert Brooks as not just a funny guy but one of the most formally adventurous filmmakers in the eighties U.S. mainstream. Kehr singles out 1985’s Lost in America as an achievement that especially earns this praise. Naturally, this got me excited for the American Cinematheque’s Brooks retrospective. I couldn’t make it to Lost in America, but how much less could I find in Modern Romance and Defending Your Live, the chunk of the Brooks oeuvre playing on the night I showed up?

During the screening of Defending Your Life, I kept hearing a scratchy yet high-pitched voice piping up from the row behind mine: “This is hilarious!” “They could never make this today!” “Oh, wow, did they really say that?” “This is hilarous!” “There’s so many nuances!” I kept turning toward the source of these exclamations, but could only see the curve of obesity behind me. Assuming the chatterer to be a slow or insane middle-aged woman, I thought, “Will somebody please wheel her out of here?” When the house lights came up, I realized I’d been hearing the enthusiasms not of an organically damaged matron but of a twelve-year-old boy. I instantly forgave him everything. Which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about me.

The more revival cinema I attend, the more I find it increasingly difficult to disagree with this sort of expressed joy. Something just feels so viscerally delightful about sitting down in a theater and watching an actual film print of movies from other times, even times not too terribly far in the past. Modern Romance and Defending Your Life came out in 1981 and 1991, respectively, meaning I had yet to be born during the earlier film’s theatrical run and remained too young to care during the later film’s. Even my dad, a longtime Albert Brooks fan, didn’t catch these two entries in the canon As They Were Meant to Be Seen. For me, it always feels like time travel. For those few hours inside the Egyptian, it could well have been twenty or thirty years ago — assuming everyone had their cellphones properly stowed.

That loud kid didn’t stick around for Modern Romance, and what a shame. That got the crowd laughing even harder and longer than did Defending Your Life, and in the old the-negative-warehouse-is-burning-down thought experiment, it’s the one I’d save. In Defending Your Life, Brooks plays a dead ad man who must justify his actions in life to a couple of judges in a Los Angeles-like version of purgatory. He puts a bunch of solid ideas into the story, no doubt — I especially like how the judges evaluate not his morality but his intelligence, which, by their definition, comes down to a kind of unflinching bravado — but the ending both gets him the girl and ties every loose end at the last possible minute as (so my memory dictates) the orchestral swell rises.

Modern Romance, though; even Kubrick had to give this one its props. While neither it nor Defending Your Life (but especially not Defending Your Life) have quite as high a time with the cinematic form as Lost in America does, Brooks still makes a lot of bold moves within it. He strings everything along this line: his character, a film editor named Robert Cole, dumps his girlfriend. But then, feeling (Quaalude-intensified) regrets, he proceeds to spend the rest of the movie getting her back and driving her away again, oscillating between rapture, jealousy (disapproving of the dress she wears out: "There are people who only rape. That's all they do!"), panic, despair, and cutting work on shambolic sci-fi picture starring George Kennedy. In telling this simple tale, Brooks makes choices that only reveal just how daring they are upon reflection. This movie exists apart from the rules of romantic comedies. It doesn’t rebuke those rules directly; it just seems only vaguely aware of them.

Modern Romance really focuses not on romance, or even modernity, but on the debilitating neuroses of the standard Albert Brooks protagonist. Not for nothing has the long L.A.-based Brooks so often received the Woody Allen West tag, but his own neurosis feels different, and he gives it another sort of cinematic expression altogether. I kept having Sullivan’s Travels moments throughout the screening, cracking up at Brooks’ psychological pratfalls amid the laughter feedback loop of everyone else in the theater cracking up as well. Sharp-edged humor, I realize, makes an ideal companion to experimentation, adventurousness, inventiveness, whatever you want to call it. I found that Jean-Philippe Toussaint knows this when I wrote a primer on him. And Gabriel Josipovici and Lee Rourke show in interviews that they know it better than I do. But still!

But however severe his twitchy inability to function in humanity — and I thank my lucky stars I haven’t come down with an equivalent of the terrified Baby Boomer sexual flightiness diagnosed by Brooks and many others — I do feel a certain admiration for Robert Cole. Even knowing how the screenplay dooms him, I couldn’t help thinking, watching him walk from his house to his Porsche to edit that crappy George Kennedy movie, “Damn, even deeply neurotic, this guy is actually a guy. With a house. And a car. And a movie to edit. And he’s just going from one of those things to the other to do that third thing. By his own volition!” But maybe this says more about my own growing psychodramas about feeling a crushing lack of autonomy than about anything else.

In conclusion: there’s so many nuances!