Not that I took exception when I read the Guardian’s list, not at all. I was delighted, in fact; pleased to be provoked to think about first lines, and how good ones abound; why, you could make a hundred lists of the ten best lines and never run out of material, right? Which got me curious and looking around the room where I’ve been working lately—my daughter’s—my papers and books strewn among hers for the next few weeks, until she comes home for the summer; good fun, consequently, to take a random sampling. Herewith, ten openings for your consideration, fiction and non:

On the bed:

1. “One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome, taken in 1852.” Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida.

From the bottom shelf to my left:

2. “Kath. Kath steps from the landing cupboard, where she should not be.” The Photograph, by Penelope Lively.

3. “I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley.” Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley.

4. “It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.” Chandler. Farewell, My Lovely (a brittle little Vintage paperback that must have belonged to my father-in-law).

From the bench on the opposite wall:

5. “The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast.” 1Q84. Haruki Murakami.

In the middle of the shelf over the desk, wedged between The Bell Jar and a French dictionary, #6: Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, which begins: “A Nurse held the door open for them.”

And further down that same shelf, #7. “It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” Orwell. 1984.

From the shelf just above, # 8 (This one kills me): “Dear James: I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times.” Baldwin. The Fire Next Time.

Back to the bed:

9. “The man was stubborn.” Calvin Trillin—Messages from My Father.

10. “Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it.” From Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, Jr.

And, in deference to Eliza (my daughter), let’s make it 11; because how to leave out J. K. Rowling, who, in this room, has almost a whole shelf all to herself. From her first, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

Ta da. But what does this selection tell us? For one thing, apart from the Harry Potter parade, we need a better system around here: I’ve been looking for the Lively for weeks, and also Eudora; and the rest of our Baldwins, fiction and nonfiction, are downstairs, I believe, so what’s this one doing up here?

But about these opening sentences: Tell me they aren’t mysterious and enticing—and I’m thinking it’s because every one of these books appears to start in the middle, as if to assume that the reader is in the know, which, of course, she isn’t; but she’s flattered all the same, to be trusted and invited; to have the author’s confidence, as if he or she were telling the story for her and her alone.

And how is that achieved? How has each author managed to enlist us in this way? With the Barthes, it’s the phrase, “I happened on,” which implies, doesn’t it, that he was doing something else at the time. That “Kath steps from the landing cupboard,” without introduction—well, obviously we’ve got catching up to do. In How Green was My Valley, something has compelled the narrator to pack all his things; but he’s going ‘from’ not ‘to’ which ups the ante considerably. With the Murakami, we’re actually in transit, on the road, music blaring. And how about Chandler: “It was one of those blocks”: So cavalier, right? —“it” with no antecedent?—as if to imply that we should know why he’s going on about that particular block in the first place. Now, Welty’s nurse—wherever, whoever they are, when she opens the door to let them in, we can’t help but be worried for them, right? Whereas Baldwin is honestly and totally overwrought, and we have to know why. And if Trillin’s state of mind feels, in comparison, resigned (amused), it too was arrived at before the book begins. Same thing with poor India, so ill at ease in the world from the outset—which doesn’t bode well.

As for #11: What does “thank you very much” tell us about the Dursleys? Why, they’ve got something to prove—an axe to grind, a grievance to air—and we’ve only just met them, too.

And, as I say, this was a random sampling; if I started all over again, I’m betting the outcome would be much the same. So why do so many authors choose to start their stories mid-stream? What’s the reason and the effect?

To seduce, right? At the very least, to immediately engage the reader, who, as noted, is not just eager to get up to speed, but delighted to be on such intimate terms with the author from the start. Moreover, the strategy requires specificity from the get-go—the writer is obliged from the very first moment to come up with just the right details of place, person, and thing, to insure our investment, to give us our coordinates, so that we can find our way forward and back. And that specificity makes for good prose, establishes authorial voice and control right off the bat.

Easier said than done? Sometimes, and sometimes not. When we’re lucky, our first lines simply arrive: They’re delivered to us when we’re walking or driving or watering the plants or washing the dishes, or in the middle of the night, or on line at the ATM machine, or during somebody else’s book-signing even. Other times, often in fact, we have to write our way to them, which is why, even when we think we’ve nailed a good beginning, it’s best not to get too attached—we might wind up shuffling things around, even cutting whole first paragraphs which turn out to have been throat-clearing, at least in my case.

The point is, in order to actually get to the beginning, you have to begin. Somewhere, anywhere—anything that gets you started is good—but a prompt is one thing, and a strong first sentence is something else. Therefore it isn’t good enough to get started, no. You have to keep going…

But most of you know something of Dinty, who’s not only one of the most generous writers and teachers around, but among the most versatile, too. The author of The Accidental Buddhist and Between Panic and Desire, he’s written across genre to give us a couple of indispensable books about craft, a novel, and an anthology to boot—

and now, here’s his newest, The Mindful Writer, 59 ‘chapters’ arranged in four parts—

The Writer’s Mind
The Writer’s Desk
The Writer’s Vision
The Writer’s Life—

in which he explores the relationship between mindfulness and writing as each practice informs the other in ways we might not have considered.

A tall order, right? The stuff of volumes, in fact. And yet The Mindful Writer is small enough to fit in your pocket, your bag, your glove compartment, your sock drawer—you never have to be without it: as reference, as balm, as talisman; to refresh, encourage, comfort, and instruct. It’s a trove of treasures from the likes of Thomas Mann, Raymond Carver, Chuck Close, Martha Graham, Hayden Carruth, C. S. Lewis, Charles Baxter, Junot Diaz, Flannery O’Connor, Anton Chekhov, Joan Baez, Ben Yagoda, William Faulkner, and Ursula La Guin, to name only a few.

But why don’t I whet your appetite, hmmm?

Here’s Stephen Dunn: “Your poem effectively begins at the first moment you’ve surprised or startled yourself.” (The Writer’s Mind)

And Allen Ginzburg: “Catch yourself thinking.” (The Writer’s Desk)

A quote from E. M. Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” (The Writer’s Vision)

And from Ezra Bayda: “Your difficulties are not obstacles on the path, they are the path.”

And see, if all we got were the quotes—Dinty having done our homework for us—dayenu, as they say in my tradition: it would have been enough. However: We get Professor Moore as well; accessible, insightful, funny, and true, cheering us on like the teacher and friend he is.

So about Dunn, he writes: “…And don’t despair the false starts: just scratch them out and move forward.”

And he riffs off Ginsburg to say, “That thought is a line of a poem, the beginning of a story, an essay.”

Forster prompts him to remind us: “Only through writing—moving sentences, adding imagery, adjusting syntax—do we arrive at what we really think…and thus, what we really want to say.”

And Bayda’s wisdom provokes him to confide: “Here’s what I tell myself on the days that I am blocked, on the days that I can write nothing, on the days that each new sentence I put down seems even more mundane than the last. I tell myself, “Don’t worry, man, it is just a bad stretch you need to get through, and then you’ll be okay for a while.””

All this, all these gems as delivered and considered by Dinty, some or all of it bound to resonate with some and all of us—writers, artists, citizens of the world—on any given day. And what’s more, to make us feel grateful (I’m quoting the author) for the “challenge” and the “gift.”

As they say in your tradition, Dinty: Namaste.

And thanks goes to you.

Whether or not you like Cameron’s Titanic, he does manage to capture a bit of that zeitgeist told through a modern point of view. For example, Leonardo di Caprio’s Jack is absolutely heroic as he cuts through the priggishness of society and exists romantically as a well-traveled self-taught artist, a far more lucrative and respectable prospect today than a hundred years ago. While the wealthy guard their Monet and Degas paintings, only Jack manages to really appreciate what is special about them. In other words, he is a character from our time trapped among well-heeled moneyed barbarians. Poetic ironic justice is had because we all know that history will eventually catch up and take sides with our hero’s ideals.

Similarly in Downton, we have characters who struggle against the decline of the British aristocracy and others who embrace it. Such mundane aspects of modern life as applying for a non-servile job, answering a phone, driving a car, or even dressing oneself are treated as uncommon occurrences in the context of a rather rigid class system. And while most of the characters struggle against the decline of British aristocracy, a few characters embrace it and share our modern sensibilities. They are for worker’s rights, women’s rights, and also know somehow that applying for socially-mobile jobs, answering phones, driving cars, and dressing oneself will be the norms of a distant future. In a certain sense, the writers of the show mean to tell us that we ought to identify with these modern characters, because they have chosen the correct version of the future.

Shows like Downton Abbey and films like Titanic flatter us with the idea that we, the audience, live in a blessed world that has graciously overcome all the class struggles of the past. We can be who we want to be, and our rights extend equally to all members of society. In recent years, these backward-looking shows have gained steamed, and their poster boy, Mad Men, shows us an anti-Semitic, sexist world of well-dressed white men working in corporate advertising right as the 1960s counterculture will overturn all of their assumptions. Even last year’s breakout blockbuster, The Help, was a backward-looking film showing a racist, segregated world of well-dressed white women around the time when the Civil Rights’ Movement will overturn all of their assumptions. In all of these cases, we are presumed to be on the right side of history, and perhaps are supposed to be relieved that the prejudices of the past were indeed fought and defeated.

But were they?

As the events of recent days and weeks and months reveal, a lot of the same issues we “won” in the past have actually returned in new forms. Sexism is alive and well in the form of a Congressional hearing of all men denouncing women’s rights to health care and in Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” and “prostitute” comments which sent advertisers fleeing in droves. Unlike the servants in Downton Abbey, we live in a less socially-mobile era than our fathers did. Being an African-American teen means you can be falsely stereotyped as a drug-dealing thug, even after you’ve been senselessly murdered and your killer has not faced criminal charges. And while having a black President encourages us to see an historic victory for race relations in America, we also saw the ugly smearing of Obama’s credentials regarding his country of origin and his religion not to mention his policies.

What makes the backward-looking show particularly popular today is that we have become an age obsessed with irony. Even a modern-day show like The Office is populated with characters who only thinly veil their prejudices. On that show, a comment from the boss meant to demonstrate racial sensitivity comes off as racist and ignorant. What gives the show its humor are the reaction shots of horrified people who look into the camera to share their disgust and shock with the camera and, by extension, us. We are told that being a sexist, racist simpleton is funny, because we all know that sexism and racism has been vanquished. This has led to “hipster racism,” the phenomenon where good-intentioned and avowedly non-racist individuals attempt to show off how edgy (read “ironic”) and hip they are by repeating the horrifying epithets and stereotypes of the past.

At this year’s AWP Conference, I attended a panel called “Writing about Race in the Age of Obama.” The panelists consisted of two Asian Americans and two African Americans (notably, one also identified as Native American). While the Q&A session tried courageously to navigate the tricky world of writing about race, the discussion suddenly turned to the subject of an anonymous white woman who had walked out during one of the talks. The African-American speaker noted that she may have left due to being uncomfortable about race, but that it may also have been to go to the bathroom. No one knew. But in the Q&A, another white woman revealed that she forced herself to stay at the panel simply to avoid being viewed as being insensitive to racial matters though she did have to use the bathroom. From then on, it was a back and forth negotiation with tension always on the verge of escalating. Was the speaker attacking the woman who left? Was it an innocent observation? Was it simply an error to even have mentioned it in the first place?

What I came away with was the realization that it wasn’t that race bothered people; it was that anger about race bothered them. People don’t mind a calm discussion where they get to be equally on the “correct” side, but as soon as it gets accusatory and becomes a shouting match, people lose their rational thoughts about race and let loose ideas and comments which are ugly, even though the spark may have been something as innocuous as a white woman leaving a room for an unknown reason.

Recently, I found myself engaged in a debate about Ken Narasaki, a veteran Japanese-American actor and writer, choosing to walk out of a show based upon racist epithets against Asians in the show. Narasaki said that while censorship wasn’t the answer, he felt the carelessness of the epithet used was a cause for concern in driving him and possibly others away from theatre, and he ended by saying he’d most likely never return to that theatre. For some of us, this was a calm and reasoned argument and a source of pride that an Asian American had the courage to stand up for his convictions. For others, his statement was an attack on the theatre itself, a censorship screed, and above all a false accusation of racism. One of the counter-arguments made included reference to the play, Clybourne Park, which won the Pulitzer and deals with the difficulty of true racial sensitivity. The back and forth was flippant, ugly, and finally maddening, an endlessly vicious cycle of hipster racism and outrage.

Perhaps this virulence was best described by Bruce Norris, writer of Clybourne Park, who said in the a TCG-published interview, “We white people (because we are the oppressors) sit around going, ‘Is it time now? Has enough time elapsed? Can we now say ‘nigger’?’ But of course that never happens, so white people feel resentful because we realize the past is going to hang around our necks like millstones forever.”

As much as I like to believe we live in the world where all the evils of the past are now easily blown away like so much dust, instead I now see that these backward-looking shows, though designed to make us feel complacent, should really serve to remind us that we need to remain vigilant about what exactly we fought in the past and how to continue to live up to our ideals today. While we might be tempted to stand in place and to whack-a-mole the straw men, we might benefit more from thinking about how long the road still remains in reconciling our past selves with the ones we hope to become.

Jim Fingal and John D'Agata

Here’s a fact: I haven’t read John D’Agata’s new book, The Lifespan of a Fact. Even so, audacious as I am (obstreperous, too), I’ve been arguing about it with everyone else.

But what are excerpts for (see Harper’s) —and reviews, too—if not to whet our appetites, not just for the work, but for the subject, itself; and moreover, to involve us in the larger conversation, which, in this case, if you believe our own David Ulin, comes out of D’Agata’s “vivid and reflective meditation on the nature of nonfiction as literary art.” Except—and this is where I get hung up—John D’Agata keeps insisting he isn’t writing nonfiction: In fact, as quoted in David’s generous and smart review, he says of About a Mountain (Norton, 2010) and the excerpted article in The Believer, on which the new book is based: “I’m not calling this ‘nonfiction… and neither do I intend to call anything that I write ‘nonfiction,’ because I don’t accept that term as a useful description of anything that I value in literature.”

But that was only the most recent development (as of this writing and as far as I know), in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Before David’s even-handed endorsement, came Laura Miller at Salon, David Kois at Slate, and Hannah Goldfield at The New Yorker. And all along Dinty Moore has been keeping track of the hoopla at the Brevity Blog, where dozens of readers and writers (me too) have chimed in from various angles to say what they think about this latest stunt: And a stunt it is—a staged conversation between D’Agata and Jim Fingal, his fact checker at The Believer—which is fine, perfectly okay; almost anything’s okay in nonfiction, as long as we tip the reader off.

Look, I’m not arguing now about Montaigne or Orwell or Hazlitt or White, or any of the late greats whom we can’t actually ask about the element of truth in their work. And yes, of course, absolutely: The essay—rant, rave, or meditation—is a try, an attempt; points to nothing so much as the truth of one writer’s imaginings and the way his or her mind wanders and works. Therein lies the joy, the suspense, the sense of discovery in creative nonfiction—in fiction and poetry, too, yes?—for reader and writer alike. So what’s the difference? In nonfiction, the writer’s on the block: if she makes a wrong turn—if she conflates, compresses, alters for her own purposes, serves her own agenda—she can’t shove it off on a character, as in: He did it, he’s the one, he’s not to be trusted. No—however we riff and extrapolate, the onus is on us: We’re creating a persona, yes—that artifice is assumed—and he or she is reliable or not. Said Lawrence Weschler (interviewed by David Ulin in the L.A. Times, in 2009: “… every narrative voice — and especially every nonfiction narrative voice — is a fiction. And the world of writing and reading is divided into those who know this and those who don’t. When I report, I aspire to accuracy, fairness, all those things, but after I’ve gathered the material and I have this pile of notes on the table, that’s when the fun starts.”  I have as opposed to I change. What hubris to change them (the facts), unless we cop to it: unless we remind our readers, before or during (not after), this is the world according to me.

However, says D’Agata, in a recent interview: “I think it is art’s job to trick us. I think it is art’s job to lure us into terrain that is going to confuse us, perhaps make us feel uncomfortable and perhaps open up to us possibilities in the world that we hadn’t earlier considered.”

To make us uncomfortable? Yes. To open us up? You bet. But to trick us? Into what exactly? Into believing in a concocted version of the truth that serves an author who couldn’t make sense out of events as they happened? Who couldn’t resist the urge to come up with something better or worse or more interesting? Well, okay, but what’s the point if we’re not in on the trick? D’Agata is a fine writer and a splendid thinker; I want to know what he makes of the actual circumstances; and if he pretends he doesn’t owe them or me an authentic shake, I’ll feel duped. It’s as if I’m vegetarian and a celebrated chef decided to lie to me about the soup course; passed it off as vegetable when it’s chicken. Sure enough, it’s delicious—but this is clever? This is revelatory? Or is it a cop-out? The challenge isn’t to fool me into eating chicken, but rather to work with vegetables to make a soup that is just as astounding.

The short of it? I want my nonfiction author to evidence some respect for his subject and for me. If he intends to play with the facts, I want him to tell me so, as with Jo Ann Beard, in “The Fourth State of Matter,” who having evidently left the scene of the crime is compelled to imagine it; as with Lauren Slater, who’s straight as can be about her strategy in a memoir titled Lying; As with Samantha Dunn, who writes early on of one of her characters in Faith in Carlos Gomez: “Let’s call him Rafael, which is nowhere near his real name, and let’s say he’s from Argentina, which he’s not.”

We all understand that the truth is not just elusive but occasionally boring, confounding, or damning. But this is what we do! We essay to decode it. We are not, in pursuit of “meaning,” allowed to tweak; not unless A) we say we’re tweaking or B) we identify the work as fiction. And let’s say we go ahead and do the former, tweak for meaning: isn’t it possible we’ve therefore missed out on the real deal? Don’t we have to wonder about that? Does it not occur to John D’Agata to question himself?

Here’s D’Agata’s blurb on the back of Michael Martone’s Racing in Place (Georgia, 2008). “The thing that’s so frustrating about Michael Martone is that his wonderful mercurial tendencies don’t let those of us in nonfiction completely call him our own.” I know, I know, a blurb is only a blurb. Still it caught my eye.

But whether D’Agata has defected or not in the last four years, whether his work is nonfiction, or some fourth or fifth or sixth alternative, where’s his humility? Writing, like all performance, is a kind of seduction: as such it requires confidence, the courage of our convictions, and self-scrutiny, too. Even when we’re getting it right it behooves us to question ourselves; to wonder, to doubt, to consider the possibilities. You want to essay? By all means, it’s a fine tradition. Otherwise, call your story a story and no need to call names—for shame, John D’Agata!—you who were one of our own: When did you decide that nonfiction isn’t valuable? Isn’t art?

Where are the eyes that looked so mild,
Hurroo Hurroo
Where are the eyes that looked so mild,
Hurroo Hurroo
Where are the eyes that looked so mild
When my poor heart you first beguiled
Why did ya run from me and the child
Johnny I hardly knew ye…

The plot
The characters
The romance
The Jack Russell and
(spoiler alert)
The revolver

Sorry about that, but you’d have guessed on your own—you would have—the whole delightful movie is entirely predictable. And yet. It’s also surprising. Profound. Not just entertaining—though, no doubt, it aims to entertain. But The Artist—a film about the end of silent films (all day long I’ve been trying to come up with an equivalent—I can’t believe it’s not butter! I can’t believe they’re not talking!—and coming up short)—has bigger points to make about genre, form, voice, and art.

So how does it work? It’s simple, really. The actors—James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, John Goodman, Bérénice Bejo, Jean Dujardin (and his little dog, too)—play the story for truth; carry on, in short, as if they can hear each other (never mind us) and therefore deliver performances that are wonderfully authentic. And the upshot? We can only conclude that form—which evidently liberates even as it constrains— serves art, and not the other way around. Plot and effects and genre be hanged—aim to tell the truth as you understand it, with conviction, and your story will hit its mark.

As if that weren’t enough to think about, and admire, the viewer leaves the theatre with still more to consider: What’s the difference between a cliché and an archetype? Can an artist pay homage, and deliver something that feels wholly original in the bargain? How to touch the universal nerve? The answer in each case has to do with full-on commitment and attention to detail. The Artist is a story about making art—a silent movie about one man’s struggle to find his voice! Isn’t that a gorgeous irony?—and will somebody please help me come up with a clever equivalent? Something better than I can’t believe it’s not butter, sugar, magic…

[Video Link]

Broadway’s decline as a pop cultural artform has been well noted. PBS documentaries and history books have lionized the last gasp of Broadway’s relevance. It was Louis Armstrong’s 1964 cover of “Hello Dolly,” the last time Broadway topped the Billboard charts. The moment has become couched as pivotally as Bob Dylan going electric or The Beatles coming to Ed Sullivan, but in truth, it sounds much more like a whimper.

Between the 1930s and 70s, INTO THE WOODS would have been made into a movie musical within a decade. Today, we are over 20 years from its initial production without an INTO THE WOODS movie, and that speaks volumes. Sondheim lets us know in his latest book, Look, I Made a Hat, that despite having had two high-profile Hollywood readings with big stars in the major roles (Cher, Meg Ryan, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, etc.), the project had no green light.

And I wouldn’t blame anyone in Hollywood. INTO THE WOODS is a complex, postmodern, feel-good-then-feel-bad musical. Its fairy tale fantasy setting screams big budget with no guarantee of box office return. There are few seriously hummable tunes although Sondheim’s score is among his best. On top of that, it didn’t even win the Tony for Best Musical. It lost to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s behemoth operetta THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, whose film version itself only came out in 2004 to a lukewarm reception unbefitting its pedigree.

[Video Link]

INTO THE WOODS isn’t alone either. SWEENEY TODD took even longer to reach the screen. RENT arrived long after the prime of its topical subject matter. 1960’s THE FANTASTICKS had a movie that was dumped by MGM in 2000, never to be nearly as beloved as its longest running incarnation off-Broadway. NINE won Best Musical in 1982 only to underwhelm on screen in Rob Marshall’s 2009 version. LES MIZ will be coming soon to the movies this December after opening on the West End in 1985. With long stage-to-screen lag times, any enthusiasm these movies might have had during the buzz of their original Broadway runs will have substantially dissipated. At this rate, WICKED won’t be made until Kristin Chenoweth is fit only to play the older Madame Morrible.

Let’s face it. The movie musical as it was has become a dinosaur. Occasionally we still get hits at the box office (for example, CHICAGO and HAIRSPRAY), but only after being tweaked, coddled, and movie-fied. Whereas the old movie musicals like WEST SIDE STORY or THE SOUND OF MUSIC or MY FAIR LADY or OLIVER! (all Best Picture winners by the way) could just have characters break out into song, our new movie musicals require justification. Singing in a story no longer is a foregone conclusion, but one that has to be sold to the audience each and every time. CHICAGO had the conceit (stolen from CABARET by the way) of showing all the musical numbers as taking place in a dream-like cabaret world of the main character’s mind. Some musicals figure an audience will buy such sung exuberance if it stars celebrities and is scored by well-known pop tunes (MAMMA MIA! and the upcoming ROCK OF AGES). DREAMGIRLS needed to convince us of the singing by telling us we are really just watching musicians rehearse. Curiously enough, when the singing in DREAMGIRLS eventually takes the place of the dialogue, it feels jarring and anachronistic. With modern eyes and ears, our desire for realism and cynicism pervade new movie musicals.

Such things were unthinkable in the golden years. The purpose of the movie musical was to bring Broadway to Main Street. Hence, WEST SIDE STORY was not only co-directed by its original director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, but it was designed to capture and share the sensibility of the original show. In other words, these musicals looked stagey on purpose to remind viewers they were watching theatre. This can look strange and unfilmic, and many of them have not aged well despite the source material’s longevity. It’s no wonder then that the best movie musical of all time, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, was conceived as a film first.

[Video Link]

However, there is a genre of movie musical that didn’t exist in the heyday of the movie musical, one that could possibly redeem the whole enterprise. That genre is the musical concert film. Rather than giving the show a makeover, a documentarian simply captures the excitement of a live Broadway performance with few compromises. Adding in advancements in camera technique, these films can often feel more dynamic and in-the-moment than their narrative film counterparts.

While Rob Marshall’s hiring is good news, for many the idea of an INTO THE WOODS movie seems redundant since its concert film starring Bernadette Peters is already definitive. Similarly, on DVD, you can see Bernadette and Mandy Patinkin in SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and Angela Lansbury in SWEENEY TODD, all in their original glories. Experiencing closing night of RENT is a bittersweet sight to behold, and the brilliant but seldom seen rock musical PASSING STRANGE will live on forever as a Spike Lee joint. While the chance of one of these becoming a blockbuster or Oscar-winner is slim to none, they do offer musical lovers what they long for within Netflix’s long tail: to see these stories told as if they mattered.

The Band’s Visit (2007). Whenever I stumble across an absolutely pitch-perfect, flawless comedy like The Band’s Visit, it makes me want to hunt down anyone who’s every made a crappy film that’s supposed to be funny and yell, “You are an idiot for thinking you know how to make movies!” And then I want to track down all the actors in those movies and scream, “You are an insult to humanity for thinking you’re funny!”

The many awards that The Band’s Visit has won at festivals around the world (including at Cannes) don’t even come close to doing justice to this small film about an Egyptian police band that ends up stranded in the wrong town when they go to Israel to play a concert at an Arab Cultural Center. While it may seem that the film is a political one (indeed, it was banned in Egypt because the Egyptians and Israelis in the movie effortlessly commingle), The Band’s Visit is primarily about everyday people and their longing for love and connection.

If you want to be an actor, it would behoove you to study the droll and wry perfection and comic timing by every single person in this movie, from the leads right down to the last supporting character. And if you want to be a filmmaker, go out on a quest to find writer/director Eran Kolirin (who spent nine years writing the script) and beg him to teach you everything he knows not only about cinema but about life.

Aside from the laughs, The Band’s Visit is chock full of deeply moving characters, scenes, and metaphors that in and of themselves are remarkable acts of transcendence.

The trailer doesn’t quite capture the hysterically funny and sometimes sad heart of the movie, but it will have to do:

The Fall (2006). It’s not an exaggeration to say that The Fall generously offers some of the most original, arresting, and rapturous images ever committed to film. Director Tarsem’s labor of love—it took four years to make in 18 different countries, in between commercial-directing gigs—tells the epic tale of five mythical, mismatched, anachronistic heroes who travel stunning landscapes and get into fantastical scrapes in order to seek revenge upon the evil Governor Odious.

Those who dismiss the movie see it as over- and self-indulgent, obsessively embracing style over substance. But those who love it see substance dripping off every shot of this beautiful and deeply affecting film.

The adventure is framed by the smaller story of an American stuntman (terrifically played by Pushing Daisies’ Lee Pace) and a Romanian girl (the amazing Catinca Untaru) in a 1920s Los Angeles hospital and their tender friendship—he’s the one who spins her this epic yarn, and, in exchange, she sneaks him drugs he’s not supposed to have.

One broken man’s redemption through the love a child is moving and gratifying, sure, but Tarsem (working with co-writers Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis) is getting at something more—an intriguing statement about the art of storytelling (for Tarsem, more specifically, it’s about the art of cinema), about the symbiotic relationship between artists and audiences, about artistic ownership, and about how imagination can be more transformative and necessary than truth.

In an age when fake memoirs are the greatest literary controversies of our time, The Fall shuns simplistic questions such as, “Is this story true?” The more apt question, the more timeless question, is, “What is truth?” The Fall is smart enough to ask that question. And it’s even smarter to suggest that coming up with an answer is a shared task—between the movie and you.

Love Songs (Les chansons d’amour) (2007). Although Love Songs is shot on location in Paris (with “extras” in the background who turn to the camera because they don’t even know they’re in the movie) and although it often displays a documentary aesthetic, the film veers far away from the kind of realism you’d expect, instead opting for an alternate French reality in which characters—entangled in straight, bisexual, and gay love affairs, without the burden of those pesky labels—wear their hearts on their sleeves by expressing exactly how they feel through matter-of-fact dialogue and a dozen or so gorgeous, heartfelt pop songs.

Director Christophe Honore and composer Alex Beaupain’s beguiling film is populated by characters who seem emotionally schizophrenic, navigating scenes that wildly shift moods at the drop of a tune. It’s like watching a bipolar musical. And the fact that it doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own naivete and its French New Wave conceits is a wonder. How can a movie mired in melancholy (after all, the entire story hinges on an unexpected tragedy in the first act) also enchant you with its charm, its sense of play, and its thirst for passion? In every way imaginable, Love Songs (which also pays fitting homage, of course, to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) defies logic—as demonstrated by its audaciously romantic final shot.

Together (2002). Directed and co-written by Chen Kaige (of Farewell My Concubine fame), Together is the unabashedly sentimental but extremely smart and constantly surprising story of a 13-year-old Chinese violin prodigy and his father, trying to make it big in bustling Beijing. It boasts vivid and loving characterizations (you even fall in love with the “villains”), beautiful visuals, layers of meaning (Kaige’s father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution), and an ending that—yes, I’m willing to admit this—made me sob.

Some complained that the movie is overly sentimental, but I think that’s such lazy criticism. The film simply lacks cynicism and possesses a deep and affecting humanity. I remember MPW Director Brighde Mullins once challenging writers to “dare to be sentimental.” It’s an important thing to take into consideration when your aim as an artist is to have some kind of effect on your audience. Remember that there’s a big difference between sentimentality and sloppy manipulation. (But also remember, however, that all art is manipulative.)

Randy Newman’s lovely music for Avalon (1990) is heartfelt and elegiac, which also perfectly describes this deft, observant, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking study of three generations of Polish Jews in Baltimore in the early and mid-1900s. (Listen to audio samples of the score here.)

This semi-autobiographical story of immigrants (and children and grandchildren of immigrants), which won Levinson a WGA Award for Best Screenplay, will no doubt hold resonance for anyone who has or who knows someone who has adopted America as his or her new country.

Avalon is a loving portrait of the large Krichinsky clan and its pursuit of the American dream, but that dream comes at a terrible cost. For all its humor and generosity of spirit, the film wants to explore the disintegration of the family, asserts that progress has dark consequences, and blames television of all things for destroying the cohesion that had always been central to the collective identity of the Krichinskys.

Near the end of the film, a character says, “If I knew things would no longer be, I would have tried to remember better.” Avalon is a clarion call for us to remember our roots, a plea for us to make storytelling—to make oral history—an integral part of our lives once again.

(By the way, you can watch the trailer here, where you’ll get a glimpse of two terrific actors on opposite ends of the generational spectrum: Armin Mueller-Stahl and a startlingly young Elijah Wood.)

Still Life with De Kooning...

Back in the 80s, when I lived in New York City, my sister and I went to see a De Kooning show at the Whitney Museum of Art. We played a game: Stood back from each canvas and guessed its title, delighting ourselves when we came close—when we saw what we were supposed to see—though no word or phrase of ours was as pungent or evocative as any of De Kooning’s: Here’s a sampling (in no particular order) from the vast retrospective on the sixth floor of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art through mid-January, 2012: The Cow Jumps Over the Moon; Landing in Boston; Door to the River; The Cat’s Meow; Conversation; Queen of Hearts; Excavation; Whose Name was Writ in Water… And my especial favorite?–title, I mean?–Self Portrait with Imaginary Brother: Talk about mixed genre; talk about emotionally loaded. And to think about: how can an artist—painter, musician, poet—focus the imagination of his audience with a title? Should a work of art speak for itself? Should we go ahead and interpret as we please? (Can we help it?) Or ought we to consider the creator’s intention? See, once we know the title of that drawing, and as we consider those two boys side by side—how not to be intrigued by the inner life of at least one of them?

Self Portrait with Imaginary Brother, completed in 1938, comes early in the current exhibition, which covers “seven eras”; De Kooning only stopped working a few years before his death at age 93. But though it wasn’t difficult to choose my favorite title, I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite decade—I couldn’t, in fact. For if they are wonderful one by one—each painting and each period—taken together, as evidence of a life in art, the effect is extraordinary.

But you can read any number of experts on De Kooning–including Holland Cotter, who wrote about this particular show when it opened last September: “Unfurling a Life of Creative Exuberance” reads the headline, which (speaking of the power of titles), by way of entry to his smart review, was just one more reason I couldn’t wait to get to MoMA when I was in New York a few weeks ago.

According to Taylor, “…De Kooning…wanted to open everything up, to bring—to squeeze—everything into art: high, low; old, new; savagery, grace… And so he did, in a laborious, pieced-together, piled-up, revision-intensive way…”
The critic then explains the artist’s process: “Typically he would start with a drawing, add paint, draw on top of the paint, scrape the surface down, draw more images traced and transferred from elsewhere, add paint to them, and on and on.”

Sound familiar? Sound like writing and revising? (and revising, and revising again) I thought so. I hoped so. And I couldn’t wait to see for myself.

Then, not long after I’d made reservations online, a status update on Facebook caught my eye: “I want to write the way De Kooning painted,” wrote Susan Cheever. At least that’s what I thought she’d written–that’s what I remembered when I checked with her after seeing the show, to ask about quoting her post. Susan referred me to an essay she’d published at The Fix, which was enough to send me back to Facebook to find her post all over again. Turned out I’d been hasty—I’d heard what I wanted to hear. Susan’s actual status? “I want to write the way De Kooning painted in 1981–those last precious years.” And in her good essay, she asserts that De Kooning’s best work was created after he got sober at age 74. “Can only a fellow ex-alcoholic get it?” she asks.

Maybe so. But how to reconcile Cheever and Cotter? Cheever and me? Not that Cotter doesn’t love the later paintings (and I do, too), but not more than the others; and while Cheever characterizes the early work as “frantic and uncontrolled,” he tells us just the opposite: the artist, he says, “was a deliberator,” and, “Every painting was a controlled experiment.”

On top of which, in the exhibition itself, one of De Kooning’s students is quoted as saying that his teacher worked relentlessly, month after month after month on a single piece, to achieve the feeling that the paint had been “blown” onto the canvas. So, whether or not the artist was a drunk, here’s my take: I’d like to write like De Kooning painted; with that kind of focus, absorption, commitment, and passion, year after year, decade after decade; I’d like to accumulate a body of work that honestly reflects who I am and who I’m becoming; I’d hope to acquire experience, insight, and fluency that informs my craft and content; and I’d like to think my perspective–as it changes and deepens–will continue to inform and transform me and my sentences.

De Kooning inspires me—just me—not because he sobered up, but rather because he was never content to repeat himself; and, as far as I can tell, he never got stuck. Or if he did, I guess he stuck with it until he wasn’t stuck anymore. Besides which, those earlier paintings are gorgeous in my view, full of movement and color and humor and joy and pathos and mystery; and I’d like to write like that, yeah.

So: All kinds of questions raised here, by three—only three!—responses to art: Is it true that we are what we do? How much must we know about the artist to understand and appreciate his work? Can the audience, reader or viewer or listener, help but project and endow? Is there any such thing as objectivity on either side of the equation? And does it matter what moves us, so long as we are moved?

Chime in and tell me what you think…

More importantly though, it is because Steve Jobs infinitely changed the world of writers and storytellers. Rather than list the litany of his “a priori” gagdetry achievements, I applaud Steve Jobs, because today, I would not be typing these words on this blog if it were not for Steve Jobs.

Jobs made the word processor a daily part of life. But more than that, the Apple Computer became a staple of classrooms from the 80s onward. I remember the mystical experience of sitting in front of the Apple IIE (above) and taking typing lessons and words-per-minute challenges. It taught me to not only embrace the machine, but to find in it a kind of inspirational feedback, daring me to push myself to my limit like a stopwatch to a sprinter. To this day when I see someone who didn’t grow up with that feedback and who is struggling to eek out a few words with two typing fingers, I think of Steve Jobs.

The feedback loop followed me through high school. I learned how to do accounting on an early Mac spreadsheet. I did my first newspaper layouts on Macs running Quark. I worked with filmmakers sitting for hours on end using Final Cut Pro, Apple’s proprietary film editing software. At each stage, Steve Jobs made me a better person by being the best of who he was.

But Steve Jobs didn’t just provide me the skills for telling stories; he was instrumental in ushering those stories into our popular culture. As an early employee of Atari, he and his friend, Steve Wozniak, assembled the most advanced circuit boards for the video game, Breakout. Much later, when the Macintosh was being introduced, he funded and supported Ridley Scott’s vision for the most famous television commercial in history, 1984 (below). Currently, his Apple Store is one of the leading places to purchase movies and TV shows.

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However, those achievements are dwarfed by one single investment. In 1986, George Lucas had lost money on the massive flop “Howard the Duck.” He decided to liquidate parts of his burgeoning special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic. One of the money-losing arms was a computer graphics company that had its own creative visionaries to match Steve Jobs. Those visionaries were Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, and the company Steve purchased was Pixar. In classic Jobs fashion, he not only purchased it, but also fed it with his endless optimism and determination until it became, well, Pixar.

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The legend would be incomplete, however, without a word about his other records. Steve Jobs left much to be desired as a responsible citizen of the world. He turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses in the Chinese factories making Apple products. He stopped donating to charity, calling such activities a “distraction.”

But Steve Jobs was a true visionary who knew what he was meant to do, and that was to turn the tech world into simply “the world.” He sought to give the machine a human feel, an idea present from the very first Macintosh, which he programmed to speak the words, “Never trust a computer you can’t lift.” Because of him, we have ubiquitous computers we do carry everywhere creating new stories everyday.

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