Colin Marshall

Cat and dog media

I trust you’ve heard pet owners’ pointless arguments about the merits of cats versus the merits of dogs. As a non-pet owner — isn’t the whole idea of civilization to keep hair and poop out of our homes? — I listen to this unresolvable debate from the sidelines. Nevertheless, I spent childhood more than partial to cats, forming pleasant memories poring over page-a-day cat calendars and books about the various breeds (favorites: the Scottish Fold, the Japanese Bobtail, the swimming Turkish Van, the water bottle-textured Sphynx). I loved the aesthetics of cats, which felt tied up, somehow, in their behavior: they liked your appreciation, but they didn’t seem to need it.

Contrast that with dogs, who, according to the “dog people” lobbying in their favor, rush elatedly up to meet you when you come home. I get that, in the abstract, but I can’t help quoting Meet the Parents: “You need that assurance, do you? You prefer an emotionally shallow animal?” And I see the contrast between these animals as having even more relevance to movies than that. Doesn’t film, television, music, literature, radio, the web — doesn’t all media — break down along cat-dog lines? Either it dashes right up to you, tongue out, pleading for your attention, or it strikes a pose wherever it happens to sit, meeting you halfway if you care to approach — and not particularly minding if you don’t?

Of the myriad possible cinematic sins, only one strikes me as unforgivable: giving in to and thus baldly expressing terror that the audience might stop watching. I figured this out while watching Slumdog Millionaire, a movie constantly crapping its pants over the slightest possibility that you’ll look away. This syndrome breeds countless other ills, including but not limited to the tiresome “hyperkineticism” of cinema’s past 25 years and the blunt melodrama of its last hundred. While I no longer have any skin in the cat versus dog game, I care deeply about the cat versus dog media game.

Cat media: Bookworm. Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Charlie Rose. Jim Jarmusch. Entitled Opinions. 3:AM Magazine. Experimental video. In Our Time. David Lynch. New Directions Books. With Hidden Noise. Editions of Contemporary Music. A Piece of Monologue.

Dog media: Jerry Bruckheimer. Reality television. Hot-talk stations sweatily eyeing their Arbitron numbers. Fully SEO’d Social Media Hubs. 24-hour coverage of celebrity dating. Designed-to-be-viral videos. Gawker. Cable news broadcasts crammed with scrolling sub-screens. Dan Brown. The Black Eyed Peas. Maxim. “Productivity” pr0n. Turbocharged tips to jack your strat.

Yes, I admit to the simplification of presenting two extremes on an actual spectrum. But consider the core idea: cat media knows it’s good, and thus doesn’t mind if you don’t seek it out right away. Dog media doesn’t care if it’s good, as long as you’re absorbing it. I only want to experience media that has the confidence of a cat, media that doesn’t care whether or not I like it, media that refuses to fall all over itself in the mad scramble for my attention, my ticket sales, my quarter-hours spent listening, my page views. (Bonus points if it goes in the water, if it’s hairless, if its ears fold down, or if it’s got a cool poofy tail.)

Cavalcade of Cavettosity

Interviewing geeks rejoice: Hulu now hosts 19 episodes of The David Susskind Show, free for the streaming. Susskind’s name may not ring a bell, but if you’re at all into long-form interviews, he was of the original gods. Quoth Wikipedia, “his program, Open End, began in 1958 on WNTA-TV in New York City, and was appropriately titled: the program continued until Susskind or his guests were too tired to continue.” I mean — nice.

Along the way, Open End switched to its more Susskind-y title, and Susskind had Dick Cavett on. Though he hasn’t maintained a consistent television presence since the nineties, he’s drawn attention lately for his NYT blog and remains a beacon of wit, depth, and urbanity to which us Gen-Y interviewers compulsively look. (In fact, Jesse Thorn talked to him on The Sound of Young America

JESSE THORN: I don’t know a lot about pommel horse.

DICK CAVETT: What?

just the other week.) But won’t you take a trip back to 1974 with me and behold this prime piece of interviewer-on-interviewer action?

(I plan, if I make more appearances in the visual media, to wear Cavett-style turtlenecks as an inside joke. I tried to do it in high school, but no one understood.)

Now square this interviewer-on-interviewer circle by fast-forwarding to 2011, when Cavett drops by Charlie Rose to talk about the bookified version of his blog. I do hope Charlie makes good on that promise to let Cavett host, though I somehow can’t stop being haunted by Cavett’s response: “You must be my best friend! The position is open.” I found similarly revealing insights in a 1972 New Yorker profile, especially this quote about his concept of the interviewer’s role:

The interviewer's role should not necessarily just be questions. I don't know where I got obsessed with the idea that interviewing is simply asking questions. It's so much nicer when it's more of a dialogue, it's so much easier when you have that breakthrough — something that resembles actual speech without the pressure of the lights or the camera. It isn't necessarily just the penetrating question.

And really especially this quote about his early inclination toward celebrity:

I thought, "If I ever become famous, I'll talk to everybody who wants to talk to me, I'll be nice to people, I'll drop in at little houses on side streets where they don't expect me and dazzle and thrill them, and that'll be the fun of being famous. I'll stop in at drugstores and sit at counters and give the people a look at me and a little something to talk about."

If anyone else has ever drilled down closer to the core of the drive to become well-known, to cultivate as large an audience as possible — as least as I personally experience it — I don’t want to know about it.

And now Clive James, who wrote a chapter on Cavett in his book Cultural Amnesia, one of the few volumes on my must-own-not-borrow list:

There will be no Dick Cavett of the future. We should count ourselves lucky that there was one in the past. I count myself blessed that I knew him when he was still a small but seductive part of the American landscape. Eventually that landscape seemed to change its mind about wanting to include him, but it is possible that he had the idea first.

Go to work

The hosts of one of my favorite film podcasts, Battleship Pretension, recently addressed an intriguing bit of negative listener feedback on the show. I forget his specific grievance, but the guy writing in took issue with the number of major films Tyler and David regularly admit to not having seen. A fair point, but, as Tyler and David replied, you’ll always leave certain movies unseen no matter how hard you watch, and unlike them, you probably didn’t go to film school. Plus, there are social lives to be had, beers to be drunk, pizzas to be eaten, etc.

Yet I kept thinking about the complainer’s core concern. On the surface, he seemed to claim Tyler and David hadn’t seen enough movies to have earned the authority to talk about the form itself. Down below, the complaint echoed a demand I feel myself having of anybody I listen to talk about anything, whether they’re talking about film, music, literature, visual art: how do I know you’re experiencing, exploring, and thinking about this stuff even when you don’t want to? I happen, for example, to have two tabs open with two different James Wood articles. His reviews instill in me confidence that he doesn’t read and analyze novels just when he feels like it; he goes to work. I wouldn’t trust his judgment if he didn’t.

Needless to say, “going to work” doesn’t necessarily mean turning up to an office every day — and, for most interesting crafts, rarely if ever does — but it shares an element with that. I sometimes think about this as habit, asking myself, “Does this creator do this work habitually?” I sometimes think about it as a system, as in, “Does this creator do this work systematically?” I need to know a creator is giving me only the tip of an iceberg built with great working regularity.

Unlike that one dude, I don’t think Tyler and David fail to go to work with Battleship Pretension. They record and release a show per week, almost like clockwork. They don’t seem to take “me” days. I realize, though, that the complainer objected to their film viewing, not their film discussion; while the show’s regularity makes clear that they must discuss films even when they don’t want to, I admit to having no way of knowing whether they watch them regularly, even when they don’t want to.

So if you want to make a life of some craft, it makes sense to institute a system, a schedule — no matter how basic — as soon as possible. Sure, I’ve conducted 150-some-odd Marketplace of Ideas interviews, but interviewing only becomes what I do to the extent that I do it regularly — which, pretty much, I have. I’ve been writing longer, but I’ve done it much less regularly; some of my print stuff and online columns run on a schedule, but the rest I’ve too often foolishly chained to the petulant beast of “what I feel like.” Filmmaking I’ve done least regularly of all, choosing so far to rely on the vanishingly rare fuel of inspiration. No surprise that I’ve done it the least. Unsustainable practice, as the enviros would say.

This looks the same from the consumer’s side as it does from the creator's. I respect most the work of creators who, broadly speaking, do what they want to do — especially when they don’t want to do it. Whatever you or I do whether or not we feel like it, that’s what we capital-D Do. (On reflection, you might find this is painting; you might also find it’s slinging macchiatos.) This remains only a suspicion, but I’ve come to think that I only really do what I do every day. Anybody I’d presume to consider an audience likely believes that about me anyway, so I think I’ll go ahead and get it tattooed on my wrist now.

Yoshihiro Fukagawa: Pâtisserie Coin de rue

Japanese films do one thing consistently right: when they involve a craft, they know that craft. They not only foreground it, but respect it. Perhaps you sense cultural cliché approaching — the sushi chef reducing the human hand’s every possible cutting motion down to a twitch reflex, the geisha applying her pure white makeup and playing her shamisen with equally spare refinement of decades, the calligrapher performing laying down brushstroke after brushstroke as if nonchalantly landing space shuttles — but the fact remains that non-Japanese movies hardly ever get this right. Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress, to name one example, wasn’t really about pie-baking. For all its talk about and shots of filling and crust, it never elevated the craft beyond a part of its protagonist’s job and a combined metaphor for and backdrop element of her relationshippy story.

Juzo Itami’s Tampopo holds, and perhaps will always hold, the championship belt of Japanese craft movies. Not only does it draw on greater depths of knowledge about ramen than even the impressive amount of information on its surface would lead you to expect, it’s built around a core of ramen; take the ramen out, and you can’t replace it with, say, pies. While few Japanese films can touch Tampopo — in any regard, really — even the most heavy-handed, emotionally blockheaded releases in that country’s mainstream, and there are many, know better than to take craft lightly. Pâtisserie Coin de rue may lack nuance, if less catastrophically, but I can’t question its grip on the finer points of pastry-making.

The picture approaches this subject through its protagonist, a young not-quite-bumpkin — a smaller-city bumpkin, I guess — in futile search for the boyfriend who left for Tokyo to become a master pâtissier. Alighting on his last known pâtisserie of employment, she begs the owner and head chef to hire her, after which she sweeps the deck, endures the stink-eye from a slightly older co-worker, labors to break her simple pastry skills back down and build them up again, and, when disaster inevitably strikes, desperately lobbies a haunted legendary pâtissier to come out of his depressive retirement for one last big job to save the shop. Yes, really.

If Japanese audiences complain about being thought of as unsophisticated, need they look any further to find out why? If this movie didn’t know what it was doing with regard to the aforementioned craft and, to a lesser extent, with its aesthetics — for Japanese films also share a certain aesthetic strength right out of the gate — I’d have grown mightily pissed at all the violins, dead little kids, and ludicrous acting choices telling me what to feel. Yet I admit that I did hear a non-trivial amount of sniffling all around me at the screening. Am I so out of touch... ? No, no — it’s the other viewers who are wrong.

Watching Japanese movies and reading Japanese novels, I often wonder what it would be like to experience the kind of manic devotion to a craft Pâtisserie Coin de rue’s pâtissiers display. (Says the guy who spent last night intensively studying Dick Cavett and David Susskind in 1974.) I bet it delivers a real feeling of pride and security in one’s place in the world, but I doubt I could handle that degree of limitation. What if the apocalypse were to come, and there I stood amidst the wreckage, like an idiot, knowing everything there is to know about icing consistency — and mostly that? (Then again, I don’t know how much call a post-apocalyptic world will have for interviews, experimental film, and writing about the oddities of Japan.) I think of (past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Momus’ post on the “superlegitimacy” of Japanese train drivers:

The west prefers us to be divided, to wear masks, to adopt a casual, pragmatic, rather non-committal attitude to our jobs. Only selected professions (entrepreneur, artist, designer, sexual pervert) are really seen as vocational in a passionate way, the way that would make you say 'He's what he does right to his core, he lives it 24 hours a day'. A western train driver might make us feel indifference, scorn and pity, or make us hope he had a nice family and hobbies to compensate for the under-rewarded, uninteresting drudgery of his job. This Tokyu Line employee seemed to have the very soul of a train driver. He had made train driving his religion. He made me feel admiration and jealousy. I wanted his commitment, his dignity. I wanted to wear white gloves and make delicate ceremonial gestures even while doing something completely pragmatic and down-to-earth. I wanted to cry out with ecstasy every time I crossed points. As this driver, I would never feel unimportant. I would feel, in fact, like a star.

So while I enjoyed the film’s exploration of its professional themes, as far as it went, there clearly remains much territory to mine. I’d also love to see or read more about a phenomenon so central here that it goes not only unquestioned but effectively unacknowledged: Japanese Francophilia. Some of these characters were supposed to have studied in France, but damn, they still have the demeanor of a bunch of tourists boutsta get a bad case of Paris Syndrome laid on them.

Undeniable Mitchellness

My main concern in life right now is that Elvis Mitchell may not be getting sufficient props. I first came to know of him as the host of KCRW’s The Treatment, which you might call the Bookworm of film and style. Like Michael Silverblatt, Mitchell conducts not interviews, with all the question-prewriting and formal rigidity that term entails, but conversations. (Also like Silverblatt, he’s restricted to half an hour, but I’ll take what I can get.) He writes film criticism in print and has done so since the eighties — thus doing his part to break down that bothersome wall inexplicably constructed between criticism and all other pursuits — he’s hosted various television programs, he’s lectured at colleges, and he possesses two-foot dreads.

Further evidence of Mitchell’s undeniability:

• (from Popdose) “I’ve never been in a situation on my radio show or when I filled in for Charlie Rose where I’ve had a list of prepared questions given to me. I just can’t think that way. I’ve always found when you’re sitting in front of somebody and you’ve got a list [of questions], their eyes go to the list, they’re not looking at you, they’re trying to see what the questions are and trying to count the questions so they can get done with this and go meet somebody for a drink or go make their flight.”
• (from Undercover Black Man) "When I walked into the restaurant, Elvis was in there smoking a cigar. I thought they shot people for that in L.A. Elvis said it was cool. 'They know me here.'"

• “I went back after being out of school for six months and not wanting to go work in an auto plant. ’Cause I knew that I was basically too shallow to be a real working man for a living.”
• “I don’t have a publicist. You would’ve thought I did, but I don’t.”
• (from Film.com) “[James Lipton] sits down with that stack of questions, and like a prosecutor he never asks a question that he doesn't know the answer to. And for me that's where it gets interesting, where I want to start is the question that I don't know the answer to and with any luck they don't know the answer either, and it becomes a conversation about that. You know, there's a kind of connection you make when people are just weighing things out. Sometimes it gets to be that moment when somebody says ‘I've never said this before,’ because in conversation we tend to not say that kind of thing. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that happens.”
• (from New York magazine) “Mitchell is known for his opportunism as much as his talent, and he has a great ability to generate opportunities for himself. Often too many, to the point where it could be an editing adventure to track him down to get him to file.”
• “‘Elvis has this sort of Candide-like air about him,’ says Outside executive editor Jay Stowe, who edited Mitchell at Spin (yes, he worked there, too). It’s not naïveté, exactly, but an aura of doing what he wants and seeming surprised, in all innocence, when people take offense.”
• “He often invites his students to the Enormous Room, a campus-area bar on Massachusetts Avenue, to see one of his teaching assistants D.J.”
• (from Wikipedia) “On April 27, 2008, Mitchell was returning from Toronto to Detroit when border guards found Cuban cigars and $12,000 in cash on him.”

David Fincher: The Social Network

The Social Network’s script grew out of a book by Ben Mezrich, who takes true stories of youngsters who make piles of money by outwitting some system, organization, or market and casts them into the breathless prose of embossed-cover airport novels. I read Bringing Down the House, his first of these, years ago, and I couldn’t quite get a handle on its core story about a pack of MIT kids’ elaborate card-counting scheme through all the shimmering please-adapt-me fog. By the time he got down to the “true story” of some guy who seems to have done something or other in a Dubai oil market, his empire seemed to have caught fire. Mark Zuckerberg and co. put it out right in the nick of time.

Given their artlessness, why do people read these books? True, it takes a rare ingenuity to figure out how to profit from a casino or an index futures market or Harvard’s student photo database or whatever, but these strike me as parlor tricks — highly lucrative parlor tricks, but parlor tricks nonetheless. I have to give Mark Zuckerberg more respect than the Aspergian aspirational randoms that star in Mezrich’s other narratives of choice, though, because at least he made something. Alas, he made an online social network, which falls pretty far down my list of impressive accomplishments, even when it results in becoming a billionaire and the most famous member of one’s — our — generation.

“I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an armed struggle against the undead,” David Sedaris wrote about his IBM engineer dad’s early enthusiasm for computers. “Unfortunately, my father's team won, so computers it is.” Despite having been way into computers as a kid — computer games, specifically — and enjoying certain of their functions as an adult — podcasting, specifically — they often fail to inspire me in adulthood. That my peers seem mainly to find success with things like web startups, apps, and viral videos irks me; for all the innovation, these projects tend to strike me as just a bunch of undifferentiated internet stuff.

Cinema, however, has only grown in its ability to fire me up. (I know full well that, in, like, 1910, people probably dismissed everything on film as a high-tech waste of time too, but I’m too dumb to grasp the implications of that.) As lukewarm as I felt about an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s account of Facebook, at least it took the form of a genuine movie, theatrically screened, instead of, say, a Flash animation. And how about its unlikely combination of creators? Aaron Sorkin writing, Trent Reznor composing, David Fincher in the director’s chair: despite being no particular fan of any one of those guys individually, I couldn’t fight back curiosity about what they put together. The film turns out to be as enjoyable as it is obscurely oppressive, giving the story a surprisingly dark, driving feel — Fincher’s hand, I assume — and high-glossing it with countless small visual effects. It features the highest volume of what I assume to be CGI focal trickery that I’ve ever seen in a much-discussed regatta sequence, which, alas, winds up being as cinematic as the picture gets, but that’s still probably more cinematic than most films in major U.S. release right now.

All the cooks do their damndest to flavor this broth, but I can’t help tasting a certain thinness. One clue to the problem comes in a quote from Gawker CEO Nick Denton, talking about Zuckerberg in the New Yorker: “Apparently, his original idea for Facebook was this dark Facebook. Like, the idea was that it was going to be a place for people to bitch about each other, and then it evolved. It was interesting how agnostic he was about which approach to take.” In that agnosticism lies the reason I can’t summon much interest in Zuckerberg’s accomplishments. He seems to have — indeed, The Social Network depicts him as having — ultimately just cranked away at the puzzle of figuring out what the greatest number of other people would flock to. Neither real life nor this movie offers any evidence that he’s especially, personally into what Facebook is. I don’t consider premising a movie on this a bad idea in itself — subject matter usually doesn’t — but this one feels as if it’s always insisting upon the inherent interestingness of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook. I don’t buy it.

 

A Smithian honesty

Despite having never been a Kevin Smith fan, I spent a chunk of the last couple days just listening to interviews with him. The richest two aired on The Adam Carolla Show and Marc Maron’s WTF; hearing them, I felt that few things in media could have compelled me as strongly at that moment as Kevin Smith being interviewed. Yet I have little if any desire to watch or re-watch any of his movies. What’s up with that?

Obvious but partial explanation: Smith’s a talker, but not so much a director. He acknowledges this more and more often with the passage of time; he even mentions it in both the aforelinked interviews, in the context of phasing out the filmmaking element of his career. Podthinking about his podcast, SMODcast, I wrote that a great podcaster by the name of Kevin Smith, born in 1980, hit his early-mid-twenties — that personal era of do-or-die ambition — in the early-mid-2000s, just as the medium of podcasting emerged. Alas, he exists only in an alternate universe. The Kevin Smith of our timeline, born ten years earlier, entered his early-mid-twenties in the early-mid-nineties, the dawn of the U.S. low-budget indie film boom.

Smith knows this; indeed, he seems to know himself well. In his conversation with Carolla, he says that, if he wasn’t Kevin Smith, he’d be Kevin Smith’s biggest fan, the leader of Kevin Smith’s fan club, maybe even Kevin Smith’s adulation-crazed assassin. And I believe him! You can tell that he makes exactly the sort of stuff he himself likes, a strategy that sounds stupidly obvious but which requires you to know what you like in the first place. Earning that knowledege with any kind of solidity, I find, turns out to be a non-trivial task.

While I may not be totally into everything Smith does, I’m more than down with the fact that he does all of it. His filmmaking, podcasting, public speaking, and comic-book writing are my interviewing, writing, filmmaking, and sound manipulation. Of course, he has a certain something I lack, besides the ability to rock denim shants: success. No matter how unlikely a branch he adds to his career, he maintains an undeniable, unconflicted Kevin Smith-iness at its core; the majority of his work falls under the heading of “being Kevin Smith.” (The same goes, I would guess, for Carolla and Maron.) Most of what he shoots, writes, or says aligns with the very essence of Kevin Smith, and from that he draws great freedom. For all the variety of his ventures, he still leads a unified life, and his audience knows and appreciates this.

Can I claim the same thing? Doubt it. I wouldn’t even know how to go about describing what “Colin Marshall-iness” is. When I ask myself if product x, y, or z I’ve produced would truly please me were I not creator, I tend to assume it would, but I have no idea how to test that assumption. I envy Smith his seemingly unambiguous internal compass; sometimes mine just sort of spins. Even if I do know my own tastes, can I use them as a channel through which to connect with humanity? Smith seems to have done just that, mediating his own inclination toward Jedis and dick jokes to cultivate thousands upon thousands of people desperate to pay sixty bucks just to hear him talk. But how to develop a Smithian self-knowledge, a Smithian unification, a Smithian — dare I say it — honesty?