The (Mystic, Conn.) Traveler edited by Joseph Albano
review by A. S. Hamrah
Some writers get compliments for making writing look easy. Joseph Albano, the editor of a free shoppers' monthly paper in Southern New England, deserves a nod for making it look impossible. My friends Michael and Alison Bowen, who briefly moved to Mystic, Conn., introduced me to the Traveler, and I've been obsessed with it ever since. There are piles of free papers just like it in convenience stores all over the country, papers that exist to flog local businesses. They can be a blast to read because in the fervor of their boosterism they often take an unusual approach to the English language. In none I've read does the prose come anywhere near the nutty, tortured style of Albano's. He writes every article—whether it's a review of an act appearing at one of the two nearby Indian casinos or a write-up of a hair salon or a liquor store—like he's a Chamber-of-Commerce Raymond Roussel: he employs a system of his own devising, one known only to him. I hope he'll explain it some day in an article called "How I Wrote Certain of My Reviews of Connecticut's All-You-Care-to-Eat Chinese Buffets." He's one of those writers whose style exerts such a strong influence that after reading him you start to write like him and you start to talk like he writes.
Here Albano tackles a popular subject, Christmas, from an article called "Shopping at Olde Mistick Village" that appeared in the Nov., 2000, Traveler:
Christmas is... filled with spiritual, phantasmagoric, practical and humanistic sensibilities. Steeped in Christ's birth, Christmas means humility, sharing, loving, caring, acceptance, giving, receiving, and more. It's with this metaphor in mind that Christmas becomes a holiday involving myriad facets, all of which converge into an enveloping presence, reduced, as it were, to an emotional plateau, void of attitudes, embracing tolerance, expressing joy.
In an Oct., 2000, Dining Highlights column called "Han Garden: Extra Special," Albano rhapsodizes, "Like night is to day, dawn is to dusk, the formal mahogany entry sets a refined tone regal for the passage into the ethereal garden, the main dining room touched by nature's ambiance... Even the tea parallels the floral feeling. Its lily flower aroma and taste interprets is balletic appeal, daintily served in a miniscule cup with a tiny matching saucer, found only in elite restaurants." I could quote him endlessly because, like Christmas, everything he writes is a joy. Whether he's plugging Tony Bennet or a farm store he tunes his lyre like a Longfellow of the Indian casinos, a Lake Poet in a district where there are only slot machines and strip malls.
Read even one Albano article, and the questions Who is this guy? and What makes him write that way? will ring in your ears long after you put the Mystic Traveler in the recycling bin. The balletic appeal of the Han Garden tea was a clue to his identity. In the Nov., 2000, edition, under the headline "Albano's Nutcracker," the Traveler's editor reveals his true calling: "The company's founding director, Joseph Albano recognized as 'Mr. Ballet' in Connecticut, dances the role of Dr. Drosselmeyer, one with which he's been identified for 41 years, bringing unique insight and sophistication to the Godfather/Santa Claus figure." The Mystic Traveler is what happens when a balletomane publishes a monthly shopper. It—to use Albano's favorite verb—vaunts his refinement from every page. Pick one up when you're on the shore in Connecticut or Rhode Island. The Traveler is as "free as the ocean breeze," as its subhead reads, and just as gloriously windy.
Time Regained by Raoul Ruiz (Kino International, 1999)
review by Clarke Cooper
The house was almost full when I went to see this movie, and then more people walked out in the middle of it than from any other show I can remember.
Both those things surprised me; the first because I hadn't expected there to be so many people interested in Proust or Ruiz in Washington, and the second because if they had decided to come see this picture, what were they objecting to? My guess is that these folks weren't familiar with either Proust or Ruiz after all, thought that mattered, and so blocked themselves from seeing what they were seeing.
One of my associates says "That's ridiculous. There's No Reason anybody should have to know anything about Proust or Ruiz to see that movie. That's asinine." My associate is quite right about that, and entirely mistaken. There is no reason, but it's almost certainly why.
The problem is that a steady diet of garbage can diseducate anyone into a state of general unreadiness. The sole "difficulty" of Time Regained is that it isn't chronological. This shouldn't even begin to be a problem—there's ample narrative progression to follow if you'll just let go of your death-grip on the time-line—but if, as is all too possible, you've never seen anything that didn't follow the lather, rinse, repeat structure of the General Industry Product you may not know where else to find organizing principles. That may be bewildering, and it's not surprising that once bewildered many people will decide the movie is "obscure," and that they don't have the secret decoder ring, and to hell with it.
Big mistake. See this movie; trust it and go with it—that's all it requires. The only advantage to be had from previous exposure to Ruiz or Proust is the unlearning of temporal dependancy and other chains; besides that everything you need to know is right there on the screen. Watch the actors. Breathe the Ruiz air. For a real treat go see something like Cast Away first—when you realize that Ruiz is serious about treating you as though you were an adult you'll feel like you're getting your first bath after years on a desert island.
We've Got Issues: The Get Real, No B.S., Guilt-Free Guide to What Really Matters by Meredith Bagby (PublicAffairs, 2000)
review by Joshua Glenn
Self-proclaimed "economist and renowned Gen X'er" Meredith Bagby, the author of 1998's Rational Exuberance—a "post-partisan" manifesto aimed at results-oriented hepcats, like her mentor Ross Perot—is back. If you suspected that her last book, which summarily dismissed philosophers, political scientists, and other "witch doctors" as being overly concerned with measuring society against abstract ideals of justice and equality, was actually written by a committee of reactionary CIA ops, We've Got Issues will do nothing to dispel that impression.
After all, what young woman who wasn't dreamed up by the Powers That Be would feel it necessary to cram a book about What Really Matters full of cutesy pop culture references—including Mr. T and Courtney Love, Britney Spears and Pokémon, Austin Powers and The Blair Witch Project (not to mention Reality Bites, a film made by and for middle-aged perverts)? And what non-ersatz twentysomething would ever describe politicians as being "sketch," the national debt as "a lotta bones," and her favorite coffee drink (a Starbucks venti half-caf, as if you couldn't have guessed) as "brown fuel"? It just wouldn't happen! "Meredith Bagby" is nothing but a convenient fiction.
Convenient for whom? The fact that the twentysomething political advocacy group Third Millennium isn't mentioned in the book's index, despite the fact that Third Millennium president Richard Thau is quoted half-a-dozen times, and despite the fact that "Bagby" is a member of TM's board, should give us pause. Third Millennium is best known for lobbying Congress on behalf of those interested in privatizing Social Security; they're the youthful face of those free market libertarians who'd have us believe that, as "Bagby" puts it in this book, "Sure, it's too bad that we have to introduce money incentives to make people 'do the right thing.' But hey, this is America, where capitalism is king." You see what's happening here? "Bagby" really is nonpartisan, and she's post-ethical, too... because politics and ethics just get in the way of the market.
"Are we liberal or conservative," the extruders of this text wonder at one point,"Dharma or Greg?" Please do not attempt to answer that question! I suggest we regard it as a koan, instead. Let it roll around your mind until 2004, then tell me what it really means.
La Commune (Paris, 1871) by Peter Watkins
review by Chris Fujiwara
Who wouldn't want to watch a 6-hour film about the Paris Commune? Let's see a show of hands... OK, let me put it another way. The Paris Commune was a two-month experiment in direct democracy that took place in 1871 before it was bloodily crushed by a national government intent on restoring a favorable business climate. Among the Commune's reforms: amnesty on unpaid rents, abolition of night work for bakers, expropriation of abandoned factories, establishment of lay education and improvement of education for women.
Peter Watkins, the director of the '60s classics The War Game and Privilege, shot La Commune in 13 days in a disused factory on the outskirts of Paris in 1999. It's a historical film in which events are reenacted with something like verisimilitude, but the actors also step out of their roles to discuss the disaster of globalization and what the Commune means today. And Watkins's 1871 Paris has two TV networks that report on events from viewpoints pro- and anti-Commune.
The film is frenzied, encyclopedic, urgent, euphoric, experimental. In the ribbon-like long-take mise-en-scene, multiple actions and conversations overlap in aimless communicating space—a ceilinged simulacrum of public space, hot light coming down from above and smoke machines on almost constantly. Like other films that use long duration, La Commune asks to be experienced, not just perceived. From a Situationist text: "Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement from a divinely omniscient viewpoint (like that found in classical novels) can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed to failure and could not have been successfully consummated. They forget that for those who really lived it, the consummation was already there." This could be a motto for Watkins' s film. He knows the objective reasons for the Commune's failure, but those aren't what he made the film for. He's more interested in the immanent "consummation" in the experience of the Commune. To give Watkins the last word (from a text on his Web site): "What happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia—which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma."
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage Contemporaries, 2000)
review by James Parker
It having long been my practice to pick up new works of fiction in the bookstore, read one sentence and then sneeringly set them down again, feeling the midnight sun of my own vast potential eclipsing just about anybody who has been so crass as to actually WRITE anything, I am nonetheless always receptive to a good line. So when I peered sourly into the much-garlanded Motherless Brooklyn and read a description of a vandalised van whose windows had obviously been smashed by someone "with a lot of patience and no fear of interruption" I (mentally) doffed my cap and sank to one knee. Hats off to Jonathan Lethem.
Apart from sharing a first name with my father, he has written a very moving story about a man with Tourette's Syndrome who is also the worst private detective in the world, because his peculiar brain patterns (described so boldly and unsentimentally they seem truly soulful, a facet of the character's pathetic-yet-supreme individuation) cause him to blurt out everything he's thinking, generally mushed into some swearword or obscenity (lots of eat me!'s throughout.) The habits of Tourette-thought, its ticcing rhythms and compulsive creativity, jump into your head with a delightful bacterial prickle, until you can't read even an apparently transparent line like "The Fujisaki Corporation has an interest in these premises" without it fireworking into inanity behind your eyes: "Fucore! Fishmiss! Rest penises!" Limpid and banal language gets sucked and stretched into vile verbal taffy—it's beautiful. They say he's also written a book about a teenage girl covered with fur... Anybody read it?
Hermenaut also recommends:
Dementia/Daughter of Horror, directed by John Parker(USA 1955, Kino on Video) There's much to recommend this cheap-psychology nightmare movie, now available in back-to-back versions (the dialogue-less original, and the even more unsubtle re-release, narrated by a pre-Tonight Show Ed McMahon). Here's a list: 1) It's based on a dream the director's secretary had, and so naturally she (Adrienne Barrett) stars in it, too. 2) It's the only film they ever made. 3) The menacing, charged, black-and-white photography by William Thompson, who also shot some Ed Wood films, is a triumph of skill over budget. 4) It weirdly predicts both Touch of Evil and Psycho—so much so that you're led to the unlikely conclusion that Welles and Hitchcock must have seen it. 5) The music is a collaboration between avant-garde composer George Antheil, Ernest Gold (he later did the music for Exodus), singer Marni Nixon (Gold's wife, she's America's only well-known playback singer, and she dubbed the vocals for actresses who couldn't carry a tune, like Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn; here she sounds like a theremin), and jazz trumpeter Shorty Rogers (his combo appears on screen and performs a number called "Wig Alley"). 6) The actors and musicians all convincingly work together with Parker to create a threatening beatnik night-world defined visually by Thompson's shadows and thematically by a kind of Freudian analysis as cut-rate as the film is. 7) Dementia will be of special interest to longtime (and I mean longtime) Hermenaut readers for the appearance of the Man Himself, Aaron Spelling, in an uncredited bit as a drunk.—ASH
Doob Doob O'Rama 2: More Filmsongs from Bollywood (Normal Records/Q.D.K. Media, 2000) Do you think the songs in Indian musicals are repetitive and shrill? Do what I did: take an eight-hour car trip with only the music from this CD to accompany you. Pretty soon you'll realize that it's a lot less repetitive than the numbers on Rock Boppin' Baby: Sun Rockabilly Volume 3, and it's soothing compared to Meet the Beatles. (Titles picked randomly from the Western Canon.) Which is not to say it isn't hip-shaking—it's hip-shaking like a plastic hula girl on the dashboard of a rocket sled is hip-shaking. One track on Doob Doob O'Rama 2, "Intinti Ramayanam" (from the movie of the same name), is a duet between P. Susheela and S.P. Balasubrahmanyam that features psychedelic fuzztone guitar and yodeling. That's not what makes it good, though, it's just a hook.—ASH
Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution by Paula Kamen (NYU Press, 2000) Despite great advances in having sex her way, Paula Kamen argues in this meticulously researched book, your average young woman still lacks "real sexual power": one based on self-knowledge, self-confidence, self-esteem... and, most importantly, radical social change. Her Way will undoubtedly trouble hip feminists who think the existence of Bust, or ChickClick, is enough. Good!—JG
Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticismby Renata Adler (Random House, 1969). In 1999 Renata Adler published Gone: The Last Days ofThe New Yorker, which caused a big flap among magazine-world insiders; and then last year she wrote an article for Harper's which demonstrated, in passing, what a bunch of assholes the editors of the New York Times are. So, she's the coolest. This collection of her mid- to late-'60s New Yorker pieces are an example of what magazine writing should be like.—JG
Comb in Blue Water, Double Naught Spy Car (11-ft Pole Records, 1997) Somehow this had worked its way down to the bottom of my collection and I uncovered it while burrowing through the Awful Heap in the other room recently. You know the style—western lounge surf for balalaika, only without all the attitude. Just wish they'd put out a new one.—CC
Silver in the Bronx, The Bronx Horns (32 Jazz) The concept of a Latin-jazz combo doing an album of Horace Silver songs seemed to promise, at best, a low level of contrived excitement. But music isn't just concept, you also have to listen to it. Home cookin', indeed: rhythms, fun, great arrangements, and solos, solos, solos.—CF
Take a Picture, Margo Guryan (Franklin Castle Recordings) Reissue of a 1968 pop treasure that was utterly new to me. This is just too lovely. You can listen to it only when you're in the right "Sunday Morning" (one of Margo's songs) mood for the lambent likes of "Sun," "Take a Picture," and "Think of Rain."—CF
