Oct. 12, 2009 | Once upon a time, the film projector was the teaching tool of the future. Schools all over the country purchased the temperamental, whirring machines, prompting a flood of educational shorts that offered instruction on everything from personal hygiene to sandwich making.

Kino International has just released the best of the bunch on two DVDs, titled “How to Be a Man” (1949-1970) and “How to Be a Woman“ (1948-1982), and many are as cringe-worthy as you might expect. In the hilariously hyperbolic cautionary tale “Car Theft,” two teens go from stealing a hat to stealing a car to running over a toddler in about 11 minutes.

Read on at Salon…

As God Commands by Niccolò Ammaniti, Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt. Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 400 pp, $14. 95.

In 2001, Niccoló Ammaniti’s novel Io non ho paura (“I’m Not Scared”) was published to great acclaim in Italy. The novel takes place in Tuscany during the so-called “Years of Lead, ” when both right and left-wing paramilitary groups carried out numerous acts of terrorism across the country. In 1978 alone, more than 600 kidnappings took place in Italy, mostly of Northerners transported and held for ransom in the South. “I’m Not Scared” tells the story of Michele, a nine year-old boy who, while out playing with his friends one afternoon, happens upon one of these kidnapped children in a giant hole dug near an abandoned farmhouse. It isn’t long before Michele realizes that nearly all of the adults in his small town, including his own parents, are in on the crime.

The cinematic adaptation of “I’m Not Scared” was one of my favorite films of 2004, and when I went back to read the novel, it proved equally compelling. Many books take on the disillusioning moment when a young boy first sees his father’s flaws, but Michele’s coming-of-age was particularly poignant. His parents had committed an unforgivable crime, and Michele’s struggle to reconcile his love for them with that fact lent the novel both an exterior and an interior drama.

Michele’s eventual attempt to save the kidnapped boy became at once an act of selfless bravery and of traditional rebellion, and the kidnapping was recast as yet another manifestation of the inscrutability of the actions of adults when one is young. In this way, Ammaniti seemed to me less like another Mario Puzo than an Italian David Mamet, creating a realistic criminal universe without any of the grandstanding or glorifying that gave us Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano.

Read on at PRI…

I’ve included the text of the review below the screenshot, or you can click here to read it on the site proper. Sweet!

Salon Books page with Gourmet Rhapsody...and me!

Sept. 11, 2009 | Muriel Barbery’s last book, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” was a massive bestseller both in France and in America. But while the story of a depressed concierge and an angsty teen girl had moments of lyricism, I found its near-constant literary and philosophical allusions pretentious, and its characters unlikable. Thankfully, Barbery’s new book (or old book, technically, as it was written first), “Gourmet Rhapsody,” manages to transform these weaknesses into strengths.

"Gourmet Rhapsody" by Muriel Barbery

“Rhapsody” is the tale of the masterly food critic Pierre Arthens, who lies on his deathbed struggling to remember the one flavor that he believes has defined his life. Every other chapter is narrated by Arthens and centers around a single food item, such as “Toast” or “Mayonnaise,” moving in the manner of a detective story toward the mystery flavor. The other chapters each feature a different narrator who has known Arthens in some capacity. Everyone from his granddaughter to his cat to the statuette of Venus in his study gets a chance to weigh in.

Barbery is at her best in the Arthens chapters, writing with all the gusto of a true gastronome. A tomato is “crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasional more tender hollow.” An octopus is “loath to divulge its secret liaisons to one’s bite,” a poeticization of “chewy.” Arthens’ evocative descriptions are balanced with passages of painful pomposity, such as when the act of watching another person eat is described as a moment “exempt from the infinite vanishing line of our own memories and projects.” However, the pretension that was so problematic in “Hedgehog” is forgivable, even enjoyable, here, because we’re allowed to dislike the protagonist.

Arthens is a man who cheats on his wife, describes his children as “monstrous excrescences,” and is effectively blind to everything but food. But it is that very single-mindedness that makes his deathbed confession such a joy to read. As his eventual revelation makes clear, Arthens has lived his life worshiping a false idol. But all monomanias are pure, and so the critic becomes a kind of tragic hero. Barbery’s triumph is in managing to tell his story while simultaneously conveying his passion. Like any good work of food writing, one puts it down a little bit hungry.

The Armies by Evelio Rosero. Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean, 224 pages, New Directions, $14.95

At the beginning of Evelio Rosero’s novel “The Armies”, the protagonist, Ismael, a retired professor in his seventies, spies on his young neighbor Geraldina over the wall between their properties. Geraldina enjoys walking around her yard naked, knowingly teasing Ismael. “I ask nothing more of life than this possibility,” Ismael thinks, “to see this woman without her knowing that I’m looking at her, to see this woman when she knows I’m looking, but to see her: my only explanation for staying alive.”

It’s a typical statement from the typical creation of a typical older male novelist. Perhaps from reading too much Marquez and Roth, I thought I could pretty well predict where the story was going: Ismael would eventually conquer the beautiful woman, body and soul, and there would be an extended (and slightly nauseating) sex scene. That instead the book would end with mass murder and necrophilia never crossed my mind. Disturbing political novels ought to carry a warning label.

Read on…

(This post was originally written for my arts and culture blog on Salon, Buzzkiller. All postings from that blog will also be reposted here.)

Today, the NYTimes, my go-to source for rant-inspiring material, ran an article entitled “Country’s New Face: It’s Young and Blonde”. Hearkening back to sometime in the early 18^th century, the piece expresses surprise that a female country musician might have gotten her start on the mysterious new interweb. Ignoring the fact that country’s new face sounds a lot like its old face (were not Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, and Tanya Tucker once every bit as young and blonde as Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, and LeAnn Rimes)?), the article found another way to piss me off. Allow me to quote at length:

“In a video posted to YouTube in January 2008, Veronica Ballestrini — then 16, blond, precocious — sits on a wrinkled couch wearing a pink Abercrombie & Fitch zip-up hoodie and clutching a guitar…

…A year and a half later, all the screen time has begun to pay off. Last spring [Ballestrini] recorded a proper video for “Amazing,” a single of her own, and uploaded it. After a couple of weeks it was picked up by CMT.com, the digital arm of Country Music Television, and shown on CMT Pure Country, the network’s all-video digital channel.

A young female country singer savvily using online media to construct a career built on largely self-written songs about teenage experiences? The Taylor Swift Playbook is making the rounds.”

Why does this piss me off so much? Because this article, like so many describing the amazing promotional power of the internet, ignores the fact that the vast majority of musicians who have managed to transmute online fame into tangible success in the real world have been attractive young females. In other words, it is the male tendency to click on every image of a sexy teenager, whether the underlying link is hawking emoticons or offering the opportunity to reconnect with that slutty redhead from high school, that has made these women famous. How revolutionary.

The evidence is overwhelming. There’s Julia Nunes, the babyish blonde ukelele sensation who parlayed her YouTube videos into an opening slot on Ben Folds’ 2008 tour. Or what about Lily Allen, the multi-platinum singer/songwriter who become a poster child for MySpace (even though she was already signed to a record label when she started posting videos there). Then there’s Lily Allen redux, Kate Nash, the more talented (and less born into fame) of the two, who also credits MySpace with her success. Most egregious are YouTube’s five breakout musicians of 2008— Marié Digby (currently signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records), Mia Rose (Cherry Entertainment), Dondria Nicole (Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def/Island Urban), Esmée Denters (Justin Timberlake’s label, Tenman Records), and Lisa Lavie (who has chosen to release her albums independently).

Each of these five women, as well as another few dozen I’m too demoralised to list, started out singing covers of pop songs on YouTube, either while accompanying herself on a guitar strummed with a coma-inducing rhythmic regularity, or else a capella, utilizing her free hand as a baton with which to conduct her Fantasy-era-Mariah-Carey-style coloratura. Then some record exec found himself carrying underwood (file under: jokes that never get old) while watching her video, and made a call. Consider Mia Rose, who is an absolutely gorgeous Portuguese girl and shares her name with a prominent porn star. Both of these facts go further to explain her YouTube channel’s 204,000 subscribers than her voice, which is seldom even in key. Esmée Denters’ medley of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, performed during her opening for Timberlake in London, is truly painful. Try not to cringe when the back-up singers arrive and pretend to rock out to this skinny white girl’s half-assed attempts to dance.

I realize this may sound like over the top rage, but there is so much talent out there on the web, it hurts to see all the attention go to cute eighteen year-old girls singing covers. Just to prove I know how to be positive, here’s an example of a musician I love, Jack Conte. He’s using the medium of YouTube not just to put himself out there, but to produce interesting original music and creative videos. He has 1/200^th the fanbase that Esmée has, and 500 times the talent. But that’s how the web goes. My advice to Jack? I think it’s time to consider a dye job. And a sex change.

The Naked Eye. By Yoko Tawada Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, 256 pages, $13.95.

A reviewer courts considerable danger when he or she condemns a book that is densely surreal or murkily allegorical. Complaining that the story’s symbols are foggy may invite charges that subtleties in the plot were missed; objections to the lack of a clear narrative will lead some to think that the book’s deeper political or moral themes were ignored. But promises of profundity are no defense for rampant obscurity; I read Yoko Tawada’s “The Naked Eye” in constant suspense, convinced that at any moment it must start making sense. It never did.

This may be a matter of taste, or a lack of patience with arty difficulty for its own sake. The prolific Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.

As far as I can discern, her latest novel revolves around a Vietnamese teenager (known sometimes as Anh Nguyet, or “the pupil with the Iron Blouse”; for clarity’s sake, I’ll just refer to her as “the girl”) who is invited to give a speech on Communism at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. The time period is unclear, as is the duration of the novel (trying to parse the passage of time in the book turns out to be as frustrating as trying to locate the hour on a Dalí wristwatch). Once in Berlin, the girl meets Jörg, a German radical who is either her boyfriend or her kidnapper. She fails to show up for her speech and then decides to go back to Vietnam by way of Moscow. Unfortunately, when a stranger lies down in front of a train to stop it, the girl gets on and ends up in Paris. Here, she takes up with a French prostitute named Marie, and becomes obsessed with the films of Catherine Deneuve.

This is where the novel really starts to get weird.

Read on…

Fallout Girl

Another take on the post-apocalyptic novel proves that this venerable genre is anything but a wasteland.

“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.”

So begins author Marcel Theroux’s “Far North,” a novel of post-apocalypse set in Siberia. It’s an interesting geographic choice for this kind of story, as Siberia is one of the few places in the world that already looks as desolate and ravaged as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Theroux, who has both spent time on the Great Steppe, and also filmed a documentary on settlers who have chosen to move back to Chernobyl, does a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the novel’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.

In “Far North,” climate change, along with the attempts to delay climate change, has led to world war, which may or may not have resulted in the end of human civilization (it’s never made entirely clear what has happened to the world outside of Siberia). The protagonist of the novel, Makepeace, is the sole remaining citizen of the town of Evangeline. Early in the book, we learn that this noir-ish, hard-nosed character is not at all what we expect: “Killing always sits heavy with me,” Makepeace muses after taking the life of a violent thief, “Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally softhearted for another reason, I don’t know.”

Read on…