Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation, the fourth entry in the series, represents the worst type of sequel: the unnecessary cash-in, not only bad on its own terms, but bad enough to tarnish the preceding films. As you’ll see throughout the body of this review, I hold Terminator 2 in very high esteem, and consider it a touchstone for action movies, and probably the best sci-fi actioner out there. What makes Terminator Salvation such an out and out disappointment, and has inspired that most fanboyish of reactions from me (”They’ve defiled the franchise!”), is the fact that it’s not a Terminator movie. If you change the name, tweak the robot designs, and get rid of that theme music, it’s unrecognizable, just sub-standard summer pablum without the fun, spirit, or sensibility of the previous movies. (Warning: this review is massive.)

Arctic Dreams

Arctic Dreams satisfies my yearly quota for nature books, the last being Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard. It is Barry Lopez’s meditation on the (as you may have guessed) Arctic. He considers its denizens, its geography, and, to his credit, the Arctic’s figurative significance as the wastelands atop the world.

Though Dreams, having dispatched the Leopard, is my favorite nature book by default, I still have reservations about the genre itself. Mainly because books and nature are oil and water.  Books exist in the indoor world. They are written at desks, read in bed, found scattered over tables and pressed shoulder to shoulder on shelves. They don’t do well outside. The only “outdoor” books, really, are beach books, and beach books are books so lousy that you can breeze through them while enjoying the real breeze off the ocean.

Books about the outdoors, then, are uneven, and beset by problems from the get-go.

Lolita

This is the first time I’ve ever been persecuted for my reading material.

A Vision

A beleaguered Boston fan base files into the TD Banknorth Garden. The guys in green have been shocked once at home by the upstart Bulls, and dropped two more at the United Center, where the masses chant Rose like the name of a god or a beloved leader. Now, Game 7. The team’s old, tired, dinged up. You couldn’t even find Ray Allen on the court if it weren’t for his polished dome, he’s been playing so poorly. Pierce is wilting under the weight of Big Baby and the rest of the team, and Rondo’s can’t keep up with Rose. Their defense has been exposed, and the few Bulls fans in the stadium, aware of the danger of home teams in game seven, are relieved: at least they don’t have to worry about KG, shelved by a knee injury. Now, the final forty-eight minutes, and somebody’s offseason begins today. The crowd’s anxious, ill at ease as the lights drop and the green lasers scribe shamrocks and gaelic knots on the floor.* Your starting lineups.

Rondo, Allen, Pierce, Perkins all jog under the white light of the kliegs, still in their warmups, slap hands and bounce on their toes. Just Big Baby left.

“At forward, 6′11″…” wait, what did he say? Big Baby’s 6′9″ in lifts. “From Farragut Academy,” the crowd explodes, you can hardly hear the announcer finish, “#5, KG, Kevin… Gaaaar-NEEETT!!” Pandemonium in the stands, a roiling sea of the Boston faithful, their hands are raised high, and there he is, stalking to center court.

Vinny Del Negro rakes a hand through his immaculate hair.

—

Don’t put it past them, people. Ainge’s heart attack’s a trick, too!

*I suspect there is no druidic imagery employed in Celtic pregames, but bear with me, here. It’s just a vision.

Mao II

Mao II is a novel by Don DeLillo, and no, it’s probably not as good as White Noise. Which puzzles me. Wikipedia tells me DeLillo has written 15 novels. White Noise was his 9th, and Mao his 11th. A writer with a limited body of work doesn’t give you a large enough data set to plot a trend-line; for instance, F Scott Fitzgerald might have completely outdone Gatsby if he’d kept producing. But DeLillo’s been consistent, and has established an impressive oeuvre over the years, which means we can chart his trajectory and have a pretty good sense of his development as an artist. And, considering it, I have to say that craft alone won’t suffice.

Because the DeLillo of Mao is a better writer than the DeLillo of Noise. The clunky overreaches and on-the-nose prose of White Noise have largely been exterminated, though writerly “Look at me, I’m Making Art!” sentences still crop up with distracting regularity.* DeLillo is an author I second-guess more than most; a lot of times I’ll read a sentence, and then do a quick mental revision, and imagine the paragraph without the offending sentence. I rarely feel like anything is lost. But forget about the occasional superfluity — the dude really can write. He’s got a knack for the unexpected but true, the sort of phrasing that makes you question your reaction, only to discover that something’s resonating. It’s writing which betrays none of its inner workings or seams.

And the themes are as on-point as anything in White Noise. DeLillo’s status as one of The Guys in American letters has been questioned by critics as trenchant as James Woods, but I think he belongs in the pantheon by virtue of his unerring sense of our society and its drift. The man has his finger on the pulse of America, really, and you can see it both in White Noise and in Mao II, two novels that could very easily have been published this year, they maintain such relevance. Where White Noise was a postmodernist wail about the dangers of mass culture, Mao II engages terrorism (as well as the dangers of mass culture).

Then what’s the problem? Great writing, relevant material… but a low-velocity plot. Here’s the outline: reclusive writer Bill Skansey written two great books. His third’s been finished for years, but he’s withholding it for fear of the public’s reaction. Bill sees the novelist as an irrelevant profession — they just can’t shape mass consciousness anymore. Who can? Terrorists. That’s the B plot: a young Swiss poet is kidnapped and held hostage in Beirut by a terrorist group. How do they fit together? Well, they don’t. Not really. But DeLillo tries to ram them together anyway, and seems to recognize just how incongruous they are, but makes almost no effort to reconcile it for the reader. Here’s a for instance. A spokesman for the terrorists, George, tries to sell Bill on coming to Athens. This (edited) dialogue follows:

“Of course I’ve asked myself what you have to gain by traveling to Athens under circumstances that might be called[...] shadowy… I’ve asked myself, Why would he say yes? What does he have to gain?”

“And what’s your answer?”
“You have nothing to gain. There is no guarantee of accomplishing the slightest thing. There is only risk.”

Bill goes anyway. DeLillo thumbs his nose at the reader’s need for motivated characters, here, but he’s not doing it out of spite. Mao II is a self-aware book, and Bill especially gets to take shortcuts since he knows, in some respect, that he’s fictional. It’s fine, I guess, but it doesn’t cohere in such a way to make the hand-waving of Bill’s decision less galling. Writers and Terrorists never really come together, and DeLillo doesn’t blow your mind with the back half of the book. Whereas White Noise had an amazing unity of purpose, Mao II is a book divided. DeLillo wants to talk about writers and terrorism. Problem is, he wants to talk about them in the same breath.

*Can you find which sentence I don’t like?

She goes inside and finds a bottle of Midori liqueur. She can hardly believe there is such a thing. She has seen it advertised at airports and convention centers, the walk-through places of the world, but never thought it was mroe than a gesture, a billboard that rides the skyline in streaming light. And now she finds an actual bottle of the stuff in someone’s abandoned flat. Where else but here? Everybody’s nowhere.

Pinewood Derby

For many basketball players, the bench is a nightmare, a hoops limbo which coach throws you into because you turned the ball over or bricked a shot. It’s punishment, exile, proof positive that the man with the clipboard doesn’t think you belong on the court at that moment. The bench can crush egos, poison relationships, and force trades. Allen Iverson recently said he’d rather retire than come off the bench.

But that’s just for many basketball players. Not all. For some, the bench is the best seat in the house. In fact, have you ever wondered why they bother with cheerleaders at basketball games? When they aren’t dancing during time outs, they’re kneeling behind the cameramen, desultorily rattling their pom poms. Well, there’s a reason the girls aren’t doing much: all the cheerleading happens on the bench. Meet J.J. Hickson:

Hickson is a rookie out of NC State. In his time on the court, he’s shown an aptitude for crashing the glass and scoring from in close. That’s about all the scouting report’s got. For his off-court performance, much more can be said. Whenever there’s a dunk, J.J. is the first man to leap off the bench and start dancing. When LeBron drains a 33 footer to beat the buzzer, there’s J.J. scrambling for the chest bump like it’s a loose ball. Remember when LeBron hung 55 on the Bucks? Go ahead and relive it, but this time, keep an eye on the bench. They’re going berserk, especially at 1:55:

And why wouldn’t they? LeBron’s a spectacle, the kind of player you can’t not watch. And it’s starting to irritate me. But more on that later.

Another team with a gob-smacking superstar, Kobe Bryant, has a similarly active bench. But they’ve got a different flavor. While the Cavs bench are mostly disciples of James, hailing his majesty, the Lakers bench gets most excited when a scrub does something amazing in garbage time. Two samples, both worth your while — the Shannon Brown monster swat on Mario West, and Sasha Vujacic’s recent cram on the Kings. Keep an eye on the bench, again, especially a minute into the first video:

There’s a different feel to the bench reaction, and I think that can be credited to Kobe. The Lakers jump up when somebody gets embarrassed. It’s got the same sneer to it you can see on Kobe’s face after every and 1. The Lakers starters so thoroughly pasted the opponent’s first unit, why shouldn’t they sit back and enjoy the show?

But that brings me back to the Cavs. I was watching a highlight last night, of the Wiz v. Cavs games. This was a revenge game for the Cavaliers, who dropped one to the Wizards about a week ago. The best team in the league performed as expected, and soon Mike Brown unleashed the force that is Boobie. Gibson. Anyway, Boobie gets to the rim and finishes at the 1:45 mark. Start there. See Bron pogo off the bench? Once the rout is on, Ben Wallace throws one down at 2 minutes. That’s when LeBron leaps off the bench, kicks a leg in the air, and drops to one knee, where he starts windmilling an air guitar.

This is one more example of “fun-loving” LeBron, which has cropped up more and more of late. The Cavs have devised ever more elaborate pre-game rituals, including the Mo Williams home run, or the group portrait. (What do you want to bet JJ Hickson gets more excited for this than the actual game?) King James is more like the clown prince, these days, and it’s becoming distracting; for a dude as egomaniacal as James, these antics feel like a grab for attention, like that kid in 4th grade who just wanted somebody to look at him. Is this any way for the best player in the game to be behaving? Irksome as they are, at least the Celtics are appropriately professional. The Cavs are treating it like it’s an intramural game. I don’t mean to be puritanical about it — the game’s out of hand, why not cheer your guys? But the pre-game stuff sets the wrong tone, especially if you’re a team serious about winning a championship. I doubt you can get that competitive snarl going if you’re pantomiming vacation shots before the tip.

I wonder if they’ll be taking pictures of each other before Game 7 of a playoff series. Probably not a good idea, especially if you want the real photographers to be taking pictures of you, pictures like this:

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

Apparently there’s a genre familiar to Latino writers south of the US. As far as I know, it doesn’t have a name, but its basic form is this: An interested historian absent from the events of the novel seeks to piece them together after the fact. Junot Diaz uses it in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Mario Vargas Llosa uses it in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. Call it the hearsay novel.

Having just coined the genre, which makes me the authority by default, I feel comfortable telling you that hearsay novels address issues of historical uncertainty and unknowability. Novels usually make the claim that you can know somebody, and do so by plopping you in their head, but Mayta concedes to reality (mimicking the disillusionment in the narrative, as we’re shown the chimera of liberal politics), and presents you with a list of possibilities. Pick which one you like best.

Hearsay or not, there’s no question Llosa is playing around with the idea of the novel. This is a story not just best told, but only told as a novel. It’s the same idea I wrestled with after seeing Watchmen; my feeling is that stories shouldn’t just happen to told in whatever medium they might fall, but because they must be a movie/comic book/novel. Form shapes content, and content shapes form. Llosa seems to get this. He identifies the pillar of the novel — tense, character, plot — and systematically subverts them.

Start with tense. Simple conjugation, the difference between “walk” and “walked,” can establish what would take a movie team weeks to. You want something to happen in the past? Costume department will have to fabricate a whole new wardrobe, and the production assistants will have to pay some classic car collector five grand to rent his Shelby Cobra and park it on the street. It’s much easier for the author – “It was 1970, and I was walking down the street. I caught my reflection in the cobalt flank of a Shelby Cobra.” Of course, as CGI departments approach absolute fidelity at lower cost, this authorial advantage diminishes. But one will remain: the ability to disorient the reader. Llosa will switch timeframes on the same page, in the same paragraph — even in the same sentence. A movie flashing back like this would necessarily have to announce its movements; characters would be younger, clothes different, etc. But Mayta mocks linear time by fostering this bewildering fluidity between past and present. Here’s a for instance:

“Hello, godmother,” Mayta said. “Happy birthday.”

“Mrs. Josefa Arrisueno?”

“Yes. Come in, come in.”

She’s well preserved.

It is jarring, but not half as irritating as you might think. What does become distracting is when Llosa further complicates your ability to ground yourself, by having the first person narrator begin to imagine himself as Mayta, so that “I” might refer to either our narrator or our protagonist. It’s a risky choice, but as a reader you figure it out quickly enough, so that whenever you begin to feel discombobulated, assume that Llosa has jumped you through time. In my English classes, “logic” is the buzzword of the hour, so I’m not thrilled to use it, but Llosa really does develop a logic and internal consistency to these time shifts, so you can learn to anticipate them.

Characters, like the moment, become negotiable. The narrator traipses all over Peru in an effort to assemble an accurate portrait of Alejandro Mayta, the titular revolutionary. His different comrades and acquaintances provide their different recollections, so Llosa gives us the unfiltered mass of it and trusts us to develop a sense of Mayta alongside the narrator. What we get, then, is a multiplicity of Maytas. This undermines a principal of the novel, a form very concerned with the development of characters. Writing teachers will always ask you: what’s changed for your character by the end of the story? Where has their arc taken them. For Mayta, the arc is not a single curve that we can follow with our finger. There are discontinuities, fractures. The Mayta we think we know might never have existed at all, a problem the narrator acknowledges:

It’s as if the person next to me were different from the person who was just in my study, and different from the Mayta in my story. A third, wounded, lacerated Mayta, whose memory is intact.

Just like the tense, and just like the characters, the plot is slippery. For a novel that purports (with its title) to tell the true story of Alejandro Mayta, the text itself throws up its hands very quickly. What we get is the narrator’s sense of the thing, which may be completely off-base. It highlights a central absurdity to novel reading. Everything in a novel is a lie, but we still hate being lied to. It’s one more challenge Llosa throws up. But his sense of touch gives you the sense that you’re in good hands, and these obstacles, instead of frustrating you, invigorate you, like a physical task just challenging enough. If you’re willing to put in the work, Llosa will reward you.

The Executioner’s Song

Most true crime novels fetishize the crime itself. The moment of violence, when psychology, circumstance, and opportunity converge and something horrible happens; it engenders a macabre curiosity. How could someone do something like that? Inevitably, we return to the normative beliefs that can shield us from the most gruesome of crimes. To wit: everybody’s got free will, and some of us are fucked in the head, and a fraction of the fucked-in-the-head commit awful crimes. When you read an account of one of these incidents, it’s granular, anecdotal stuff, suggesting a statistical fluke and a singular nature.

Norman Mailer, in The Executioner’s Song, takes a different route. It’s the story of Gary Mark Gilmore, who in 1976, murdered two men on consecutive days. He ordered them to lie on the floor, then pressed his gun’s muzzle to their scalps, and pulled the trigger. Horrific as it is, the crime serves not as the climax of the story, but rather its catalyst. In the scope of this 1,000 page beast, Mailer sets the crime scene just 230 in. After the second murder, Gilmore is swiftly apprehended; at his trial, all the evidence weighs against him. How, then, does Mailer fill another 700 pages? He does it by examining the societal web Gilmore was at the center of.  In that web, there’s dozens of people, and between each person there’s a connection; some strong, some perverse. Gilmore snipped his connection with his victims Benny Bushnell and Max Jensen, cut them out of the web altogether, and while that deep injustice outrages many of the books “characters,” Mailer himself refuses to weigh them as heavier than any other of Gilmore’s relationships. So Gilmore’s interactions with his uncle Vern, or his tragic love for Nicole Baker, matter, Mailer claims, just as much as the bloody murders.  By drawing such a comprehensive picture of a community, Mailer tackles a fundamental problem of the genre, that is: how can you make people empathize with a monster?

Gilmore is at the center of things, but he’s a hollow core. Artistically gifted, widely read, and possessing an IQ of 130, Gilmore is described by shrinks as a classic sociopath. He lacks empathy, and this lack permits him to do evil. Mailer, then, seeks to do what God (forgive the theism — this book is set in the seriously religious Utah, and Gilmore himself thought deeply about the afterlife) never did: make him whole. This is Mailer’s best instinct. He never exploits our macabre curiosity, and instead chooses to engage the best parts of us, the most humane and generous. His technique for rounding out this empty man is to show his interactions with all the people he affected. It’s classic storytelling — action reveals character. Once we see how Gary deals with all these people, we find our own footing with him. What we discover is troubling. Unlike in those other accounts of infamous criminals, Gary Gilmore is not an outlier, a fiendish deviant we can chalk up to statistical aberration and forget about.  Though it’s left ambiguous, Gilmore himself strenuously denies any maltreatment by his mother, or the sort of childhood trauma that would allow the psychoanalysts to discount what he did. “He was exactly like everyone else,” his brother Frank says at his funeral.

Actually, Frank says a little more than that, so I’ll present the full quote:

“… the Gary Gilmore that I knew, was both good and bad, like everyone else. That is what I remember most about Gary Gilmore, that he was exactly like everyone else, when he was young before teh law reformed Gary Gilmore, yes, before the law reformed Gary Gilmore, he was like everyone else. To make a long story short, we are gathered here today, because the law reformed Gary Gilmore.”

Here, Mailer’s holding up the mirror to all of us, and asks the question: to what degree did we serve as accomplices in Gilmore’s murders?

Our entire justice system is predicated on the notion of free will. The plaintiff chooses to violate the rights (as determined by society at large) of his or her victims, and the judge metes out punishment accordingly. If you let the frankly dangerous thought of determinism creep in, you might as well throw out the whole legal system. Why punish someone for something they had no control over? Mailer won’t be so glib as to suggest this wasn’t Gilmore’s fault, but is more than willing to take a long hard look at the penal system which could produce such a man. Sent to “reform” school at 14, and spent half his life in a cage. Underwent all the torments of prison, the fights, the rape, was even subjected to a drug called Prolixin, a pharmaceutical equivalent to a lobotomy. If you prescribe to a pretty even nature/nurture split, you can see the dangers of spending your formative years raised by the other wolves. And the more you favor environment as responsible for personality, the more you see Gilmore was doomed. That’s what makes this a tragedy, the sense of fatality.

So that’s where Mailer succeeds. But, like Gilmore, like everybody else, the novel is both good and bad. The dichotomy is neatly reflected in the book, which is actually two books stapled together: Western Voices, which documents everything up to the sentencing, and Eatern Voices, which deals with the media circus surrounding Gilmore’s execution. In keeping with the good and bad split, the Western Voices are much more interesting than the Eastern, and even with Mailer’s colloquial style, the book bogs down in the back stretch.

(His colloquial style also creates some clunky sentences, some reaching a Dan Rather type folksiness that just jars you. Describing Gilmore’s stare as a look “that could blister paint,” is good. Saying “you could feel the anger radiating off him like a heated iron skillet” is not.)

From what I can tell, the problem is Larry Schiller. Schiller bought up the film and book rights to Gilmore’s story, and contracted Mailer to write the book. Since Mailer broadened his scope to include the trial’s aftermath, we’re embroiled in the tedious details of Schiller’s struggle to lock up exclusive rights and win the respect of his fellow journalists, who see him as a carrion bird looking to make a buck off Gilmore’s death. The Executioner’s Song seems, in some ways, a vindication of Schiller. Of course, Mailer and Schiller were friends, so this seems a conflict of interest. Besides, time spent on Schiller is time spent away from the story’s principals, Gary and Nicole, whom Mailer spent 500 pages working hard to make us care about. Gary’s narrative of life and death, right and wrong, love and hate… it’s all so rich and complicated. Schiller’s more sordid quest is one of money and media, and Mailer aggravates things by pairing it with the legal storyline which, the trial over, has now moved into the red tape stage, with Writs and Stays and appeals granted or denied left and right. It’s all tedious stuff, and Mailer introduces us to a parade of attorneys and activists who get a quick physical description and a little pagetime, so many that you see a name like Toni and have to think ten seconds before realizing you last saw her six hundred pages ago.

But Mailer brings it all home for the inevitable execution, when our many characters are devastated by the state-sanctioned execution of one murderer. It highlights the value of human life, that you can even get choked up about a killer’s death, and just drives home how goddamn sad the whole situation is. While it’s three hundred pages too fat, The Executioner’s Song hurts you, makes you feel all raw and scraped out.

A Watchmen Review

General consensus said that Watchmen was ‘unfilmable.’ Zack Snyder and co. have proved that it can be made into a movie — just not a very good one.

Waiting for the Barbarians

This is my third Coetzee book, the first two being Disgrace (read it in early high-school, too young to appreciate it) and Diary of a Bad Year (read it last year, too young to appreciate it). Considering I’ve known about and read the guy’s work for 5 years now, I was a little embarrassed to learn I’ve been mispronouncing his name. So, for your edification:

Coat-SAY-uh

That said, the novel.

Coetzee uses first person present tense, which is perhaps language at its most elemental. It allows him to write sentences as simple as, “I pass.” This simplicity, immediacy, and the cleanness of Coetzee’s prose gives the book the feeling of a fable, though its moral isn’t so clean as Tortoise and the Hare’s. You can fall into the book, though it’s only 156 pages, since Coetzee’s done such an admirable job of creating psychological depth for his protagonist, the Magistrate.

We’re never given a first name — just the Magistrate. Coetzee strips the book of all specificity to increase its universality. So we never learn much about the Empire, or the barbarians who perhaps threaten it. We don’t even know which country it’s set in. All of this serves the book’s purpose; its liquid enough that it’ll fit into whatever container it’s reader would like. For instance, as an American in 2009, the book’s themes of torture and imperialism of course carry a special relevance, and resonate more strongly because Coetzee never anchors the plot to his native South Africa. This way, you aren’t given the easy excuse of saying, “Ah, but that’s somewhere else. That doesn’t happen here.” Well… yeah. It does.

In the book, the Magistrate presides over a sleepy backwater. Mostly thinking about his retirement, his comfortable existence is upset by the appearance of Colonel Joll, dispatched by the shadowy Third Bureau, the Empire’s secret service. Joll’s an interrogator, a “doctor of pain,” and during the course of the Colonel’s business, the Magistrate has to confront his long neglected moral compass.

Joll, in describing his methods to the Magistrate, focuses on pressure.

First I get lies, you see – this is what happens – first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth.

Coetzee develops his narrative pressure with a skillful touch, propelling the Magistrate through his character arc, pushing him, testing him, and then finallly, the break. The sense of structure and assurance laces the text, and what text it is. Waiting for the Barbarians is an earlier work, but Coetzee has some great prose on display. Samples:

With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning’s hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.

I didn’t even have to consult the book for the back half of that quote, it’s stuck with me so well. There’s an M John Harrison vibe about that passage that thrilled me, plus the reliable pleasure of hundred word sentences, doubled when you consider Coetzee’s typical restraint.

He exercises the same discipline over his novels as he does over each sentence, and at a quick 156 pages, Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel seemingly without excess, an idea thoroughly conceived and executed. Well worth the little time it takes to read.