"Deleted Scenes, Deleted For a Reason." Or, "Christ Re-Re-Crucified, Re-Rewind."

Time for a roundup of the recent DVD extras:

1. Rounders (Dir. John Dahl, 1998)

I watched this strictly average movie about poker because I like poker and I'd heard that it had a certain cachet in the world of "high stakes poker players". This is faulty logic. Since when (I should have reasoned) were "high stakes poker players" the least bit doyennes of the arts? Would I read a novel recommended to me by Annie Duke?

Let me be clear: I do not accept anybody's novel recommendations at this stage in my life.
Life is at too great a premium to waste your time muddling through some middlecore fudge cause one of your big palsy-walsy bum-chums thinks it's a hoot. Fnack that dust.
I love my friends but their tastes are routinely seriously off-kilter and I wouldn't want to be them for all the tea in China.
The lives these people live!

(I should say, however, that I was in Trader Joe's on La Brea & Third last night and I was exhausted and holding in one hand the standard "water cracker" and in the other the "Golden Rounds" packet of crackers. My dull skull trying to do the arithmetic to work out which had the less calories. As I did it, and as my wife was putting in her two penn'orth on the subject of crackers, a complete stranger offered the unsolicited recommendation of the Pita Bite Cracker with sea salt. Thinking for a moment to take offense, I instead decided to follow his recommendation, reasoning that "wisdom cries out in the street." That is, however, as far as my taking of recommendations commonly goes.)

Rounders is an all right film, if you like watching Edward Norton really chew up the scenery, snort it like snuff and then sneeze all over his fellow members of the cast.
If not, it's not.

The DVD extras are quite interesting though because they feature some of the stars of the "real life" poker world giving their "insider" tips "for free of charge". I like this because alongside that ill-named, seasoned hack Fat Chris Moneymaker, we also get my preferred player, and proud possessor of a hare lip, the so-called "Poker Brat" Phil Hellmuth.

Phil's advice is superficial , as is Fat Chris's –– what did you expect though, that they'd really give you the golden ammunition to annihilate them at the table? –– and I'll pass over them without comment.

The advice I want to look at today is that imparted by Chris Ferguson, who is known in poker circles as "Jesus" (for his supposed resemblance to the Son of God). (This means he has long hair and a beard.)

Chris Ferguson says good words, right full of sound sense and mercifully free of the egotism or facetiousness commonly associated with the poker circuit. His recommendation to the "studio audience at home" is to play with your friends.

This might seem blindingly obvious at first, but then I re-examined it and found that Chris Ferguson's resemblance to Jesus had imbued his very soul and he sounded like the Son of Man in his casual poker advice now. It's like Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis, the novel in which Manolios, the humble shepherd lad who plays Christ in the village pageant, takes on the mien and the saintly convictions of Christ as he increasingly "inhabits" his role. Just so with Chris Ferguson. Play with your friends, he bids us. Go among men and spread fellowship and equity.

Idea for a novel: Poker player with delusions he is Christ.

Gets crucified.

"George Lucas Says He's Retiring."

George Lucas has announced that he is retiring.

Retiring from what?

"I am retiring from golf and scuba diving and the cocktail hour and thumb-twiddling and also from orchestrating pointless, mindless, endless orgies. I am going to take up the cello."

________________________________________

Maybe George Lucas should retire from trimming his beard in his wonted eccentric style. The combination of the fat multiple chins with that precisely-kept beard creates a dispiriting effect.

"Werner Herzog Comes Through."

We went back to the scene of our last auto-da-fe, Bryant Park, to once again witness Werner Herzog in fevered conversation with an unknown property, this time a so-called geographer and artist name of Trevor Paglen.

I'd been in the library since before two, working in the Jewish Division. It was freezing in there, since they had the AC cranked up high as it'd go. I emerged, into what was probably a balmy evening, shivering. Met wife on the steps–– in fact, by the lion who is called "Patience" –– and shrilly remarked, "Christ - let's go to H&M and buy a jumper."

We went to get a seat in Bryant Park for this free event "under the stars" and there were no good seats close to the stage, although there was everywhere evidence of that dastardly practice of seat saving.

Here is a sight of humanity as it really is rather than how it loves to think it is; craven, vicious, sneaking, conniving. In a word: seat-saving. It is like this when you alight on a bus and everybody it seems is sat on the aisle seat, jealously keeping the window seat vacant. And these are nominally "grown adults".

This day I got in protracted arguments with two people on the subject of seat-saving. 
I said, "It can't be done." 
They said, "It can. It is." 
My first combatant was a leering, jaundiced-looking Spanish female to whom I said, "You cannot save seats in these United States. This land is your land; this land is my land. From California to the New York islands. From the redwood forests––"  She laid out across the seats and defied me to move her. She was full of Zuccotti Park green bile and defiance. I had a great urge to tip her off the seat. She would have me call the police. Shouldn't leave unless it were in chains. I said I would find a friendly gendarme presently and went off, fuming, looking for a higher authority with whom to plead my case.

In Bryant Park you might as well plead with the granite face of the squatting statue of Gertrude Stein for all the good it'll do you.

I shall say little of this undignified to and fro that after all diminishes me.  I got into a further, more protracted ruck with a liberal-arts wealthy hip grandmother-type, Blythe Danner with a colourless pencil-line moustache and bobby-soxer's pony-tail, who was sitting with pursed lips (sucking pensively on her bleached moustache) tapping away at her laptop as I berated her. Pretending to ignore me as I hectored her, sounding for all the world like my father.

"I almost hate to interrupt your blogging," I said. "It seems a genuine shame. It's a loss to the Western Canon. But I know you," I said. "I know you of old." 
(I resisted the urge here to sing "You Jack of Diamonds") 
"I say that I know you and I do. You pledge faithfully to NPR and Channel Thirteen. It's sort of a principle with you. You subscribe to the New Yorker and you are a regular at the 92nd Street Y. You simply cannot wait to see Zadie Smith in conversation with Chris Ware. You really are the life-blood of the arts in New York City, and I say that without exaggeration." 
I don't think I could have been much crueler if I tried (short of mentioning her moustache.)  I saw that I was nevertheless veering off my subject by broadening the critique somewhat.  I ended up perching like a leprechaun on top of the paperback that she had pedantically laid down to save the seat. I said, "There I have sat on your little paperback; what for us now, you and I, grandmother?"

Ha. It all worked out because the person she was saving the seat for phoned her even while I was sitting on the book that stood in the world of symbols for that person, and they said they couldn't make it. There is a moral lesson embedded in this somewhere but it escapes me.

After a while of that gig-goer's delight, the sight of roadies bumbling about the stage while the pre-show tape blares loudly (this time playing Harry Smith-style old-timey backwater buckwheat plunder), and after an award-winning female poet suffered us to sit through her humdrum Weltanschauung, Trevor Paglen mounted the stage and explained to us with humility and brio and unctuous charm how he was sending a sort of platinum-plated Viewmaster reel of photos up into the satellite ring around the earth, where it is supposed it will represent the Earth's culture to anybody who chances upon it for the rest of eternity.

It was interesting, if inevitably rather willfully Quixotic, but then Werner Herzog loped onto stage and disabused this man Trevor of all confidence he might have ever had in his project.

"Treffor, I don't believe in it," he rumbled, seconds after beginning. "It will never be discovered by aliens." With Teutonic logic he quite briskly proved conclusively that Trevor's project, years in the making, was folly. "It would take a spacecraft from the nearest galaxy hondreds of thousandts hoff yeahrs to penetrate our solar system; they would haff to haff generation after generation continuing the flight through space, inbreeding each time to produce a new generation of idiots..."

It was a convincing argument, even if I was meekly thinking (a keen reader of Fantastic Four comics) "What if the aliens can teleport by the use of an elementary wormhole?" 
Herzog dealt with wormholes later.

Herzog was on form. I was chary, not only after my last set-to with him at the Library (see previous post), but also having recently seen the extras on the Grizzly Man DVD which includes a deadly-dull documentary about the making of the film's soundtrack, which has those dynamic gentlemen Richard Thompson, Henry Kaiser and Jim O'Rourke twiddling and noodling in a studio.

We see Herzog "sitting in" on the session, getting all sentimental over the female cello player. It even has Herzog wishing aloud that he could play the cello: "I vould giff ten years off my life to master the cello."

"Has this man never read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons?" I thought, in which excellent novel the nihilist Bazarov sneers at "a paterfamilias learning the cello."

On this evening in Bryant Park, however, Herzog was in a refreshingly pithy frame of mind. 

They were having problems with the microphones. As much as they talked, street hubbub from the restaurant nearby and the streets beyond us kept carrying on to the microphones. Herzog had a microphone on his lapel which he could only be heard on if he held his lapel up and lowered his head to it. Moderator Paul Holdengräber kept fretting about Werner's microphone, but Herzog was pithy about it. "I am fine in this strange position, Paul."

After freewheeling through an array of whimsical images that said next to nothing about life on this planet they showed a slide of a Paul Klee daub of an angel which had been ridiculously over-interpreted in purple prose by Walter Benjamin. When Herzog quite rightly laughed savagely at the Benjamin paean ( –– such laughter a blasphemy in New York though –– ), the moderator, Paul Holdengräber, blurted out with weird animation that he had spent ten years of his life in the study of Walter Benjamin and his works, during which years he was an active participant in a menage a trois.

I couldn't see the relevance of this unprovoked revelation at all. 
Didn't want to picture the squalor in my young mind. 
Indeed, the audience could be heard to recoil as one, at this unnecessary nugget of "T.M.I.". 
The audience could be heard to think it would be a very good thing if the future alien visitors (but they can never exist!) are spared this particular piece of information about the sex life of  "The Libertine Holdengräber".

Then it was, I think, that we all thought as one: "Isn't it time for this night beneath the stars to pack up and go home? Isn't it time for the stars to go out and the universe to discreetly end?"

On the way home my wife said to me, "Do you think the menage a trois was with two men or two women?"
I said, "I think it was him, the cat and a houseplant."

"Righteous Chagrin of the Market Warriors." Or, "Miller Gaffney Is Unimpressed."

Of all the colourless range of emotions visible everywhere on the many-headed Hydra that is the TEE-VEE, the one perhaps least often evidenced is that of chagrin. This is too refined, too classical, too ubi sunt a feeling for the age.

Shall we see Bruce Jenner or Kim Kardashian look back in sorrowful chagrin before "our" cameras any time soon? Shall we see that ruefulness, that bitter yet intelligent regret pass across the faces of the conniving characters on Gallery Girls? No, chagrin, neo-classical regret and ruefulness are antithetical to the usual crop of reality-teevee shows, whether they are documentary in intent or competitive. Even when the characters on The Amazing Race lose out on the million dollars, when they are cheated and betrayed and humiliated at a "detour",  they do not show chagrin. They froth and they seethe and rally their online offensives.

I saw some rare chagrin once on an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter, when Dog was mourning, in Biblical tones, the loss of several of his children: "I have fathered lo these my many children under mine loins, and God said it was right good and I have had to me in my times all these sons, and verily God took me down a notch or several."

Dog is a bit like a nineteenth-century rural minister, or even a Colonial type for whom the loss of six or seven of your children is simply the norm. That said, Dog's chagrin was sentimental in root, and it inevitably tipped over into broad bathos almost as quickly as it materialised.

An intellectual chagrin, however, of the type expressed by the last cultured denizens of a ransacked culture, I rarely see. This is funny, because the present culture is pretty ransacked! However, on last night's episode of Market Warriors, there was a beautiful and quite stunning record of the culture in tatters and of a modest yet elevated coterie among the ruins, staring gloomily and in awe at the shards about them.

"These my fragments which I have shored against my ruin..."

Market Warriors is a superior (in both senses) reality show along the lines of Storage Wars. You will note the passing resemblance in the titles even. However while Storage Wars in its title and its outlook emphasises the wars themselves, the crude bellicosity, the skirmishing and the cutthroat machinating, the whirr of the axe, the musick of the cudgel, Market Warriors places a more humanistic emphasis on the Warriors themselves -- the mortal participants. It is not a paean to the slavering and unsophisticated god of War.

Perhaps that's cock and bull. Rather, Market Warriors is on Channel Thirteen, and so naturally has a more refined air and tenor. As my mother-in-law said when I naively asked her if she watches Storage Wars, "My dear man, I watch Antiques Roadshow. Pass me my snuffbox for I fain would lie doon." It is the difference between the Jacksonian log cabin and the hard cider culture and the precious, patrician, John Harvard book-larnt culture of John Quincy Adams.

Market Warriors is cut from the same artisanal yeoman-philosopher calico that fashioned the U.S. version of the Antiques Roadshow and so naturally accommodates and indulges the genteel sensiibilities and sensitivities of those patricians who prefer that show. It also features [Antiques Roadshow compere] Mark Walberg as the disembodied voice narrating the goings-on, and in this capacity he gets off some real zingers. I mean hoo boy. His sarcasm, as a disembodied voice, is remarkable to behold. It's as though because he is not visible he can be more cutting and droll than he would be if visible in the throng of an antiques show.

I should note, for foreign readers, that the Mark Walberg I refer to is not the similar-soundingly-named Hollywood film star and former purveyor of white rap Wahlberg, but another man of, incredibly, virtually the same name.

How can such things be?
You'll believe a man can fly.

Mark Walberg nearly made the leap from Channel Thirteen to prime-time teevee ("the very eye of history") a few years back in a show based on the connect of members of the public confessing tawdry secrets on live TV to the horror and bemusement of their loved ones. It was a miserable sight to see him crudely whoring for the prime-time greenback. Walberg had betrayed the cause of intellectual television in pursuit of the Hollywood dollar. It was like seeing Thomas Jefferson splayed out in a low bawdy-house. It backfired on him quite badly and the show was cancelled even in these savage times for being too much the inhumane Grand Guignol. Walberg returned, chastised and  reformed to the Antiques Roadshow. Yet the disembodied Walberg we hear on Market Warriors happily retains some of that tart, barbed, annihilating negative energy that characterised him on his axed cage-match-hell-show.

To return to my first subject, which was that delicate emotion seen so rarely on teevee (since it involves reflection and regret and quiet sadness and after all intelligence and remorse and humility), chagrin. On Market Warriors the same four characters go around an antique show or flea market or a bazaar and they have a set time and a set "purse" to acquire objects from the fayre. These, the distinguished objects eventually chosen according to the application of the contestants' superior experience and their celebrated breeding, are then auctioned off in another State. The profit, or the loss, is counted up and the winners derived from this totting-up.

Every episode I have seen of this show involves the contestants making massive losses. They pay too much in the first antique shop or flea market and then at the auction (in Cleveland, or Cincinnatti, or Madison Wisconsin) their refined tastes are as unto so many pearls before swine as the ignorant pigs of these rural towns bid mere pennies for they know not what. These grubbers are the likes of Mark on Baggage Battles or that swaggering, crafty scrounger Dave on Storage Wars.  They are the profiters from chaos. They are the riverboatmen on the Styx. They shall prevail as the old men with delicate manners go down, swept under. 

It's a real barbarians-at-the-gate scenario, and it was pronounced this week. They bought in Old Mass and they sold in Ohio. They did right poorly. The four contestants are seen in the attached images with this very weblog so you can behold that what I say is proper and true. I laughed to see them. There was nothing for them to say; they had complained on previous episodes about the crassness and the obliviousness of the auction attendees. There was no point in repeating themselves. All they could do now was to sit with these unfeigned expressions of despair and wait for Death to come  -- as it will.

I never saw such expressions on television before. They are so pure and unadulterated! The soul is still alive and well and can be seen in the faces of these well-named warriors.

I can't help but love and sympathise with these faces. I spend much of my day with the same expression on my face, and not just when I am trying to sell off some books or CDs or comic books and getting precious little for them from, say, the buyers at Strand. The misery of the Market Warriors wasn't just that they had lost – the money, after all, wasn't even theirs – nor was it even at the repeated public loss of face they have undergone in the course of this well-meaning program. Their horror and chagrin is, finally, at the decline of a civilization entire.

______________________________________________________________________

One funny thing on a recent episode of Market Warriors, which I have to recall, came when one character, the so-called "Professor" John Bruno, was walking through an antiques fair and he saw a dealer with a long white beard looking at him with a face full of sad entreaty. Bruno said, "Hey guy," or some hippy halloo to him. The dealer responded with amazing wistfulness, "John... it's me..."

John Bruno looked closer at the man and recognised, through the cruel masque of reduced circumstances and that rude veil of hoary aging, an old and well-loved old bondsman. He said, in unfeigned shock and horror and yet tenderness too I believe, yes I believe there was tenderness in it, "My God... how long's it been..." or words like those.

Again, as above, here were real human exchanges and emotions usually too raw and vivid for the television to see or allow us to see. At the sheer candour of the showing of the raw human nerve system, I laughed out loud again in delight and horror and regret.

"Other People's Favorite TV Shows."

I was watching an old episode of Parking Wars as I ate my lunch. It was an episode I'd seen before but that's okay because Parking Wars rewards the repeat viewer. It's like re-reading Herman Melville.

In the commercial break they had an advert for CSI Miami on DVD.

I thought, "Hard to believe some people sit around like schmucks watching old episodes of CSI Miami. And yet they do!"

It is quite incredible what people sit around watching on TV after hours.

_______________________________________

Speaking of Parking Wars, I asked wife last night, "What do you think the lyrics are to the Parking Wars theme song?" It's an unusual choice for a theme song, but a good one.

I think the lyrics are,

"That ain't gonna make it right
 That ain't gonna make it all right
 That ain't gonna make it all right now."

This is the sum of the lyrics.  It is also the only song I can think of that manages to credibly incorporate a "large van or truck-reversing" alarm into the music itself.

The new episodes of Parking Wars have mysteriously drifted away from Philadelphia and are now featuring scenes in Staten Island and the Bronx.

The guy from the Bronx who drives a tow-truck that removes cars from private car parks. He said: "Dis da hood so people think they can park where they like. They wrong today."

He stopped off at his toddler's pre-school and went over to peer into the playground to look for his son. When his son scrambled over, dad started baby-talking at him, "You gonna play Playstation tonight?, gonna play Batman Lego tonight?" He kissed his son through the mesh fencing. Then he turned away and said to the camera cold-blooded: "Next generation of car-towing right there."

__________________________________________

Cody on Chef Race said, "I am literally walking into a lion's den."
Is that true?

Cody had a couple of restaurants in Greenpoint. One of them, we went in and I unambiguously asked for a hot dog. They didn't have any buns.

On another episode Cody became tearful and said to his team-mates: "I'm really impressed. Right now you guys have got so much respect for me." 

He owned the taceria next door to The Thing on Manhattan too, and it shut down soon after the show finished, never to reopen

"Impenetrable."

I ran into Keith from the No Neck Blues Band the other day in the Village. I had some copies of The Kirby Collector magazine in my hands at the time and he looked disdainfully at me and said "Is that what you're reading these days?"

My lips reared back from my gums in a defiant sneer and I drawled "Who don't like Jack Kirby? Show me that man. Let him come among us and state his case if he dare." 

I asked Keith what he'd been doing lately. He'd been acting in Eugene O'Neill he says. 

"Fiddle-de-dee," says I. 

The band he said was sifting through old tapes of live shows, of which they had thousands of hours.

"Like the Dead." I mused dreamily. "Like Pearl Jam."

Keith said, "I prefer the comparison to the Dead."

We were talking about the interview I'd done with the No Neck Blues Band in 2003. I said, "Yeah we should do an update. A twentieth anniversary Where are they now?"

Keith goes, Yeah, it must of been a good ten years by now.

I shot back, shrilly, "Nine years. It was nine years. It's been nine years." 

I am very prickly about matters of time -- every year an indictment.

On the subject of dwindling self-expectations, we spoke a bit about David Foster Wallace who was after all the sujet du jour nine years ago. Keith said he'd summoned up a bit of interest in DFW after DFW's suicide. "Like it legitimized his mewling about despair and sorrowfulness," I chuckled. Keith prevaricated a bit then admitted it. "Like reading Sylvia Plath." 

I said I'd read The Pale King twice (happily I got paid by the hour for my trouble) and I was quite content to leave the poor man buried and not to bother his soul further after that last ejaculation. 

So as we were parting ways, Keith goes, "So are you writing anything now?" 

Before I could mumble something, eyes averted, about a vast systems novel in progress lo these many years, he corrected himself thus: "Are you writing a blog?" 

As soon as he said it we both had a queasy sense of deja-vu, only compounded as I tediously spelt out ("spat out") the name ELIAS NEBULA. 

"Oh yessss," Keith said. (Anagnorisis.) "I remember now. I tried looking it up. It was impenetrable." 

"Impenetrable?" I rejoined, sharply. "You're calling me impenetrable? Have you listened to your group's records lately?!"

This is of course the tragedy of the avant-garde in the twenty-first century.

Infighting, and the regrettable conquest of the mid-cult. 

AFTERWORD: I remembered, I urged Keith to look at this site and to leave a comment to prove he had done so. Curious readers will note that no such comment has been left. "Curious readers" may have "noted," in fact, that nary a comment has been left since Mark Balelo (an occasional character on the show Storage Wars) wrote his famous "cease and desist" note to this correspondent after I called him a nouveau-riche half-wit with all the grace and intuition of a guinea-fowl some time in the balmy days of last year. Is Mark Balelo really more committed to the life of the mind -- the project of die kunstkulturwelt -- than Keith from the No Neck Blues Band? It appears he is. 

Asterix Und Der Goths Mit Der Herz Aus Glas Mein Gott Leibchen.

I watched Herzog's Heart of Glass after several months of pronounced dawdling and dithering and evasion (watching Monkees, watching Dog the Bounty Hunter). These Herzog films are forbidding, not in a sense that they will be an intellectual powerball overload, but in the sense that they could conceivably be dull. They almost never are dull, of course (Fata Morgana and Even Dwarfs Started Small notwithstanding); one wonders why the trepidation persists. Maybe it is the humdrum, unwavering nature of the opening German rural settings of his earlier films. The willful, defiant holding of the shot on the static mountaintop or the roiling mists (or the landing aeroplanes) beyond an acceptable point.

Maybe it is the dulness of the flaxen-haired towheaded German peasant in his shit-coloured smock. The image does not draw us in irresistibly.

I wearily work my way through the three Herzog box-sets I bought years ago on Shaftesbury Avenue, like a duty to the god Weltkunstkultur. Like I ploughed through The Monkees Seasons One and Two. Like I strove like a pit-pony through the Alain Delon box set my wife got me for Christmas. It's absurd; wasn't culture meant to be pleasurable? 

It is of course a symptom of the times that we are so ADHD that to sit through anything longer than an episode of Justified is considered a travail.

The Delon box-set was on my "Wish List" so it's hardly my wife's fault, but still it felt like a purifying mortification for the deity of KUNSTKINEMA, sitting through these less-well-known Delon vehicles. The Widow Couderc.  The Swimming Pool. Simone Signoret at every turn, imploring us with her sad eyes to invest our spirits in the project of Kunstkinema weltschmerz. 

Nothing ever equals Delon's fine work in the Melville films, of course. Still these films were okay and I liked them and I did my duty by the Lord and I watched them. I mortified my flesh and I am a better upstanding Christian for it. 

And Herz Aus Glas was a good film too. Not particularly dull. It has a beautiful soundtrack, with Swiss yodelling and medieval music; and when I listened to portions of Herzog's commentary track, and I heard his enduring and unfeigned fannish enthusiasm for the soundtrack, my slight vexation at Herzog as a public man evaporated. Herzog was not posturing here --- he was not feeding his self-ego -- his gaping Cthulhu Mythos -- his shrine to himself as his own hearth deity -- his own skull kept in a cabinet in his Hollywood home -- he was speaking as an unabashed enthusiast, and it was good to hear. A bit of sincere humility Christ Sake. 

I even felt bad for some of the uncharitable unChristian things I said about him in a previous post.

(The fact remains that his attested ignorance of Nick Broomfield is the arrantest bunk.)

When I was watching this film I thought, of course, in my chronic comparing way, that the film was very similar to the beloved "B.D." Asterix and the Soothsayer (1972). 

Heart of Glass was made the year after the German edition of this book (Der Seher) was published (although it appeared in serial form in MV-Comix from 1972 to 1973). 

I suppose that M. Herzog will now claim that he has "never heard" of Asterix the Gaul!

IT IS TO LAUGH, NICHT WAHR?