La Nuit Fantastique, Portrait of an Assassin, The Law, Any Number Can Win, and Joy House released as Vanguard Video Classic European Cinema (Vanguard Video, 2000)
review by A. S. Hamrah

There are plenty of classic European films, plenty of masterpieces that will live in the hearts of movie lovers long after the cinema itself is dead. La Nuit Fantastique, Portrait of an Assassin, The Law, Any Number Can Win, and Joy House are not among them. But that these five films, made between 1942 and 1964, have been lumped together by Vanguard Video (and Image Entertainment, the company putting them out on DVD) and released as "Classic European Cinema" is still a happy event. Their collective status—below minor and completely forgotten—doesn't salvage them as works of cinematic art, but it does salvage them. None of them are must-see's; why not see them, anyway? They provide a rare look into the normal goings-on in the French film industry, which most filmgoers know only through the highlights of that 22 year period, roughly the time from Carné's Children of Paradise to Godard's Contempt.

Marcel L'Herbier's La Nuit Fantastique, seems like a dumb, slightly impenetrable comedy-fantasy until you realize it was made in 1942, under the Occupation. Its hero, a philosophy student and world class sleeper, is in a love with a woman he meets in his dreams. Call her "France" and the waking world "Vichy" and the film becomes a desperate, subversive take on consciousness under the Nazis. The whole thing has a vaguely satanist feel, but it's Lewton played for laughs, grim and unfunny.

Portrait of an Assassin is a tawdry circus melodrama from 1949. In it, an all-star cast (Pierre Brasseur, Maria Montez, Erich von Stroheim, Arletty, Jules Berry, Marcel Dalio) shambles through a plot about a woman who can only love daredevils. Stroheim is in his matyred, self-pitying, full-body-braced anti-glory here; he propels himself through the frowsy sets ("I feel like the furniture is making fun of me," says Brasseur) with a giant's limp and canes.

1959's The Law, an overripe soap opera set in southern Italy, destroys any good will Jules Dassin worked up with Rififi. Its high-powered cast (Marcello Mastroianni, Gina Lollobridigida, Yves Montand, Melina Mercouri, Brasseur again) plays the whole thing like they're waiting for Anthony Quinn or Anna Magnani to show up, maybe even Shirley Booth.

Any Number Can Win and Joy House are early '60s, black-and-white Alain Delon vehicles in Cinemascope, both set on the Riviera. Number is a heist film. It's starts promisingly, as old man Jean Gabin gets out of prison and returns to an unrecognizable, International-Style Paris. It glides along on its nasty tone, overly concerned with its own terseness, and ends up wallowing in empty production value and annoying displays of cash.

René Clement's voyeuristic 1964 Joy House, which pairs the shockingly handsome Delon with an achingly beautiful Jane Fonda, reprises themes from his 1960 Highsmith adaptation Purple Noon. Delon is punished for being so good-looking by a bunch of middle-aged men, including Sorrell Booke as a photographer who wears eyeballs for cufflinks. Its hard-edged photography compensates for its labored qualities, and shows how the location-look of the New Wave supplanted the dewy chiaroscuro of La Nuit Fantastique's set-bound Cinema of Quality as the French commercial standard.

Real Simple: life/home/body/soul(TimeWarner,2000)
review by Susan Roe

If the ads for rehydrating cream are any indication, and I think they are, Real Simple is a magazine marketed toward the over-busy thirtysomething career/family woman—like me. Each issue proposes a number of ways I can become a better person, for example by organizing my kitchen, figuring out what to put in my desk at work, and deciding what to take out of my purse. And did I already mention organizing my kitchen? That one comes up a lot.

It's not enough to note, as I'm sure professional media critics already have, that Real Simple is the most egregious attempt yet to co-opt the so-called voluntary simplicity movement and turn it into yet another form of consumerism. (In November's editor's note we're informed that "at the end of our story on cozy sweaters, you'll find an easy to knit pattern. Why not make it yourself? But only if it's fun. Otherwise, buy one of the sweaters featured...") What I want to know is this: Why does Real Simple hate me so much?

If I'm upset, Real Simple counsels, I should alphabetize my spice rack. If I'm confused about the direction of my life, I should buy some organizing "systems" for my closets and desk drawers. I'm not exaggerating. I am upset and confused about the direction of my life—are they mocking me for that? Or do they just think I'm an idiot? This latter theory is supported by a story in a recent issue on "Tools that Empower," which helpfully explains how to use the ever-confusing hammer and saw, and offers advice like this: "Screws come in a dizzying array of styles and materials that make them useful around the house." Glad to get that cleared up.

Even the most competent woman can't have it all, at least not without feeling like she's screwing up some aspect of her life. I don't need Real Simple to tell me that. What I do want someone to tell me, though, is this: is Real Simple some female staffer at Time, Inc.'s idea of a big, angry joke on her employer? Or is the joke on us?

Alphasmart 3000IR made by Alphasmart Inc.
review by Matthew Battles

The Alphasmart 3000IR is a laptop from another universe—one populated by thoughtful, sensible people who have interesting things to say. The Alphasmart (okay, so they give their computers silly names in that universe; bear with me) is a full-size keyboard with a narrow, four-line screen perched at the top. What you do with it, quite simply, is write. Its memory parcels out about one hundred pages of text among eight files, which you can upload to the word processing application on your Mac or PC via cable or infrared pod. You can download text files to the Alphasmart, too, for editing on the road; the keyboard offers rudimentary cut-and-past, word-find, and spell-check features. Otherwise, there are neither bells nor whistles here: no spreadsheet software, no touch sensitive screen, no wireless stock-ticker. The Alphasmart comes in one color: translucent blue (turns out Alphasmart was doing translucence long before the advent of iMac), and the machine weighs less than two pounds. Altogether, the Alphasmart would seem a dream come true for people who just need to write; the word solution comes to mind, overworked as it is.

You haven't heard of the Alphasmart, though, because it's not sold through electronics stores, and it flies beneath an e-hype radar clogged with the gargatuan signatures of Blackberries and Palm VIIs. The company has focussed on the education market instead, offering its product as a low-cost word-processing alternative for cash-strapped schools. And cheap it is, priced at $224 for the infrared-equipped model. It's inexpensive to maintain, too, running for 500 hours on three AA batteries (that's right: not lithium-ion, not cold fusion. We're talking flashlight batteries). Alphasmart users tend to write long, affectionate emails, which the company posts on its Web site (www.alphasmart.com, where you can sign up to borrow a unit for a two-week test drive). Some offer tips for upgrades, of course: add a modem, perhaps, and email, and a Web browser. But in the parallel universe I want to inhabit, one doesn't need such things, such choices. The Alphasmart's elegance and appropriate simplicity make me want to pick it up and write something with it. In that way it's become more than a tool for me—it's practically a muse.

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud by Herbert Marcuse (Vintage Books, 1961 edition)
review by Joshua Glenn

Earlier this month, I pocketed a paperback copy of Herbert Marcuse's 1955 book Eros and Civilization while visiting my father—who'd read it in 1968, according to his notation on the frontispiece—because of a comment a guy named Jake had recently made in a Wicked Pavilion conference attached to my Idler's Glossary. Jake pointed out how self-indulgent praising the urban layabout seems at a time when people are laying about the sidewalks of this country's urban centers, not because they're anti-work, but because they're out of work. In an effort to respond to Jake's charges, without trotting out Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire for the umpteenth time, last week I finally read Eros and Civilization.

Like his former colleagues in what had, by 1955, come to be known as the Frankfurt School, however, Marcuse was both an engaged Marxian critic AND a champion of idleness. Unless a "non-repressive civilization" is established—one in which "working time [would become] marginal, and free time [would become] full time"—Marcuse insists, the citizens of even the most politically progressive state will remain unfree. Eros and Civilization is an extended meditation on what, exactly, such a civilization would look like, and how Freud's theory that civilization is inherently repressive is inadequate until it meets Marx's dialectical materialism. Great stuff!

What does this have to do with the shit-heels, dawdlers, and footlers of my glossary? In the chapter on "The Aesthetic Dimension," Marcuse writes that living the idler's life of creative receptivity, as opposed to the non-idler's life of repressive productivity, is as close as one can come within bourgeois capitalist society to a true socialist utopia. Singing Orpheus, and swinging Narcissus, should be our cultural heroes, he writes in another chapter. However: "One can practice non-repressiveness within the framework of the established society, from the gimmicks of dress and undress to the wilder paraphernalia of the hot or cool life," Marcuse points out in the preface to the 1961 edition, but "this sort of protest turns into a vehicle of stabilization and even conformity, because it [...] leaves the roots of the evil untouched." The idler must man the barricades; and those who man the barricades must be idlers. OK, Jake?

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (Del Rey, 1995)
review by James Parker

The first two volumes of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy are available in super-cheap paperback editions—rough pages between glossy covers, near-weightless objects of such strange and insubstantial cheapness they seem to be on the point of resolving themselves back into the primal book-pulp (it would take just a little moisture)—and they are to be found in the Young Adults section of your local bookstore. It's a strange demographic, the Young Adult—the term itself seems designed to flatter the earnest pre-teen—and Pullman's books have a strange effect: cold, fantastical, fiercely unhumourous, they call the reader (the older reader, at least) back to that season of youth when knowledge starts to fork through your brain like synaptic lightning, burning = new connections. Severed children, armoured bears, the smell of the North and the sky dense with witches over the Pole—a plot summary would be pointless, because the first volume, The Golden Compass, is really a hallucinogenic prelude, a heavily ritualised invocation of powers. Pullman's gypsies are called Gyptians, and every human alive carries his daemon with him in the form of animal—a lynx or a sparrow or, in one sinister incarnation, a cruel golden monkey. Priests, scientists and social workers are all the agents of some ghastly soul-eating force, and detestation is distributed equally among them; in fact I couldn't get more than fifty pages into the second book, The Subtle Knife, because the honks and chuff chuffings of Pullman's ideological machine starting up were distracting me. Nonetheless, for a dose of how you were when you knew not what you are, read The Golden Compass.

Hermenaut also recommends:

Patterns of Plants by Mamoru Fujieda (Tzadik #7025)
Composer Mamoru takes data from the varying electrical charges of plant leaves and uses them as the basis of melodies scored for harpsichord, koto, and viola da gamba. Listen to them while you're contemplating your Ficus.—MB

The Poems of Laura Riding by Laura Riding Jackson (Carcanet New Press Ltd., 1980)
The collected poems of a neglected modernist master. Dubious of poetry's claim to truth, Riding famously repudiated her art and conceived an absurdly essentialist theory of language. The poems she made on the brink of this turn brim over with a magisterial intelligence and a turbid ambivalence; the difficulty, as she wrote in "The Troubles of a Book," is always "to address liveliness / In reading eyes, be answered with / Letters and bookishness."—MB

Harper's Magazine (January, 2001)
Somehow the cover of the latest issue of Harper's, my favorite monthly magazine, arrived at my house stapled to the guts of the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, one of my least favorite monthly magazines. How else to explain the cover story on coral reefs, the interminable feature article on restoring a Stradivarius cello, or the other feature, which I can't even bring myself to read, entitled "Letter from Salt Spring Island"? The only thing missing is the service journalism piece on How to Find the Best Bed and Breakfasts in Turkey. But maybe that's what Geoffrey Hill's poems were trying to explain to me...—JG

The Pain Journal by Bob Flanagan (Semiotext/e, 2000)
"Sheree's decorating our canopy bed with all of our SM gear; all the whips, clothespins, paddles, leather hood [...] I just don't have the lungs for it. My head is throbbing like a gong. What other kind of pain do I need?" Bob Flanagan became famous (among the sort of people who read books published by Re/Search, including me) for having successfully turned a sexual perversion—he liked pain—into art. Then in 1995 he died of cystic fibrosis. This daily journal, written during the last 12 months of Flanagan's life, is as banal and as self-indulgent as anyone else's journal... and yet, because it's the journal of a dying "supermasochist," it's not like any other journal. Ever.—JG

Sammy: An Autobiography, by Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jane and Burt Boyar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)
This showbiz confession, which swings (get it?) from involving and hilarious to embarassing and chilling, is so impressive that I don't think of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as the publishers of Susan Sontag anymore: I think of them as the publishers of Sammy Davis, Jr. If only Sammy and Elvis had starred in The Defiant Ones, instead of Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier!—ASH

Comedy Is a Man in Trouble, by Alan Dale (University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
Dale's exemplary study of American movie slapstick, from Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, through the Marxes and Jerry Lewis (and on to Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler), offers lots of new insight; it's really brilliant.—ASH