Sonic Life - Thurston Moore (2023)

Sonic Life was a fascinating read. Mostly because I have been listening to Sonic Youth since 2000, and routinely included them whenever anyone asked me my "top 3" bands. I've watched The Year Punk Broke countless times. I've listened to many of their albums--Daydream Nation, Sister, Goo, Dirty, Washing Machine, Sonic Nurse, Rather Ripped, The Eternal--rather frequently over the years. I met Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon once, and wrote about it in a zine, and gave it to Kim the next time I saw them (at Tonic). I was very intimidated and I approached Kim and she accepted the zine and spoke back to me in a German accent, perhaps a defense mechanism, or a deflecting one, which mirrored my anxiety. I saw them play live many times--perhaps not a dozen, but more than half a dozen. I picked up Girl in a Band on the day it was released (actually just tried to--it was sold out; I read it in March 2015, exactly 9 years ago; also the above details are largely repeated in the linked review, and I do think I have gotten slightly better here). 

I was not nearly as excited for Sonic Life, perhaps because so much time had passed, and because I had already managed my expectations. Sonic Youth had played their final show in November 2011, and Girl in a Band was released in February 2015. For those unfamiliar, Sonic Youth started in roughly 1981, so they lasted 30 years. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore had been married in 1984, and the end of their marriage spelled the end of their band. One imagines Kim Gordon starting the book in 2012 or 2013, delivering the finished product in 2014; on re-perusal, it is raw and emotional, written when the pain of the unraveling was still fresh. 

There was no question, however, that I would read Sonic Life as well, and I asked for it for Christmas. For all of his iconic glory and presence as a singular Thurston, a certain mystery pervades his band's recorded output. The songs are rarely personal--they are more often about friends than themselves. Lyrics, while important, often take a backseat to the noise. The language of their music is atonal, and inaccessible to a great deal of people. It almost feels like there is a resistance towards wanting to be understood. 

Coming from this perspective, Sonic Life is a revelation of sorts. As a person that spent their teenage years in Connecticut and adopted New York City as a home (albeit only temporarily), I felt a certain kinship with him, even as I struggled to understand his modus operandi. I was there in 2001. I would say that things were not that different from 1981, then. In 2021, I would not say the same thing. So while I was not there for the 70s and 80s, when New York was dangerous and somewhat affordable, I came when Giuliani was Mayor, and the city had been "cleaned up" to a degree, but still had many areas yet to gentrify. CBGB was still open and a new subset of bands attempted to recapture the magic of the scene in the late 70s. I was more influenced by Sonic Youth than the Strokes or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (though a band I managed owed a fair debt to Interpol), but those bands held a place for me that Patti Smith or Televsion might have held for Thurston, when he moved there in the late 70s. There are definitely overlaps.

Thurston "gets it":

"The only affordable alternatives were to be had along East Houston Street, either the Yonnah Schimmel Bakery on the corner of Forsyth Street, for a knish jammed with yellow mustard and sauerkraut, or Katz's Delicatessen, a couple of blocks east, for a split grilled frankfurter with the 'works' on a toasted bun, ideally downed with a Dr. Brown's cream soda. If you were feeling flush, a couple more bucks could get you either a hot pastrami or a corned beef sandwich on rye bread, doused with mustard and coupled with a large sour green dill pickle. The pickle was key, as it helped you digest all those cured meats. At times a pickle was all that was needed, and the pickle stores on the Lowest East Side's Essex Street--huge barrels of briny vinegar pickles set up on the sidewalk, sometimes so acrid your eyes would water--were perfect for an emergency crunch fix." (120)

I took a summer course at NYU called "Writing New York City," and our professor, Nettie Jones, took us on field trips around the city, one of which was to a certain pickle merchant on the Lower East Side. This remains the best pickle I have had in my life. So he gets it. Dr. Brown's cream soda is also the credited beverage of choice at Katz's (even if that establishment is an institution that hardly feels like the "secret tip" on the pickles). There are other revelatory food passages, such as praise for the frites in Amsterdam, and I loved them because I could relate, but I digress.

*

Overall, this is a great book. The primary criticism is the front-loading. This is roughly 500 pages long, about twice as long as Girl in a Band. At page 400, we are somewhere around 1993. So you have 400 pages covering 1976-1993, and 100 pages covering 1993-Present. 1987-1993 are covered rather quickly as well. Really, the majority of this book is about the beginning of Sonic Youth, roughly 1980-1985, with a strong emphasis on the Confusion is Sex/Kill Yr Idols and Bad Moon Rising era, which is when the band began to ascend. I always found the earlier material somewhat unlistenable, and Sonic Life lent a greater appreciation for those albums. For how difficult the listening may have been, it is clear from the book that they were trying to be more of an accessible "rock band" than the vast majority of their peers in the No-Wave Scene. 

To give a specific example, consider the song "Ghost Bitch," a song that almost never registered to me, ensconced deep in the muck of Bad Moon Rising, which shows up on many more setlists than I previously perceived. And while there is a lot of noise in it, it turns into a more traditional "song" and actually kind of exemplifies what was great about their earlier material--that transition from pure noise and feedback bleeding into a song and the feeling that the moment has arrived. This is much more noticeable on live recordings, and a reminder that Sonic Youth was one of the great live bands, their noise jamming akin to the "noodling" of the Grateful Dead.

They do actually have an opportunity to meet the Grateful Dead, but it is passed up and Jerry Garcia dies shortly thereafter and regret is pronounced. In the early days of punk, hippies were the enemy, but that facade fell away in short order. Greg Ginn was a huge Deadhead and Black Flag became a jam band right after Damaged. Lee Ranaldo was also a bit of a Deadhead, though it's clear Thurston's heart is with the Stooges. Neil Young asked Sonic Youth to open for him in 1990 and their experience on that tour was somewhat transformative. They would soon have their "pop" moment, becoming leading mentors to Nirvana, influencing their decision to sign to a major label imprint and the consequent explosion of Nevermind. And they would realize not long after, that massive success was not in the cards, and settled comfortably into their niche around 1995 on Washing Machine, which was good enough for a fairly nice living. 

*

The chapter on Sonic Youth in Our Band Could Be Your Life underwhelmed me at the time, perhaps because the members of the band all seemed to act like adults, and drama was minimal. Until the end of their career, the biggest drama seemed to be the way they jerked aroud Bob Bert. Bert was their primary drummer before Steve Shelley took over, and after Richard Edson, who became an actor (in Stranger Than Paradise, the director of which was Jim Jarmusch, also a figure in the "scene"). But I had no idea how many times Bert was fired and rehired (at least three or four times). He never did anything wrong, the band just wanted a different "style" of drumming, but they had trouble finding a suitable replacement, so they kept asking him back. So he may be considered an unsung hero, for providing stability even when they did not offer the same.

Of course, the drama came at the end, and Moore dodges it to an extent. He claims that he does not want to capitalize on pain. Which feels like something of a shot at Girl in a Band, because that book basically took the dissolution of the relationship as a framing mechanism. Moore does explain how he fell in love with his "soulmate," to an extent, but the salacious details have already been printed elsewhere, and apparently do not merit refutation. And even if they did, it would not be a good look to respond to 8-year-old grievances after all this time. Thurston has said that he is totally open to a reunion, and the book is in the spirit of that, a celebration of all they accomplished--so it makes sense not to dwell on the past, once everyone has put it behind them. Regardless, while it is not our business to tell people how to write meaningfully about divorce, I have to believe there could have been a way to offer an effective mea culpa and maintain dignity, and that absence feels like a missed opportunity. 

More generally, there is not a great deal of emotion in this book. There are plenty of rhapsodic flourishes about the power of music. Iggy Pop once said (memorialized by Mogwai), "when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally." One could say the same about this book. It just kind of washes over you. 

* 

There's so much information. Moore may have an excellent memory, or kept diligent journals, but the book required significant research as well. It seems like the entire book is a recitation of all of the tours that the band ever did. There are far more anecdotes from these performances than from the recording of their albums or anything else in their lives, apart from the birth of their daughter Coco. 

While Moore may not want to berate himself or hold himself up as a target, he is more than willing to make fun of himself. The band always came off as very cool and hipper than thou, so it is endearing to read about the awkward beginnings:

"Together we walked across downtown to the East Village. We found some late-night food at a diner on Second Avenue, Egan [Kim's dog] tied up outside, attentively waiting for his master, once in a while issuing a bark to let her know what time it was. Kim told me she had been staying far uptown at the apartment of the SoHo gallerist Annina Nosei. Leaving the diner, I asked how she was going to get up to Annina's with Egan so late at night, as animals weren't permitted on the subway unless they were Seeing Eye dogs. A taxi seemed luxurious. She said she was okay. I was too shy to kiss her, even politely on the cheek, though I wanted to. So I simply said--

'Okay, see ya around.' 
--and stuck my hand out, feeling immediately foolish. She cocked her head slightly, half-smiling, before returning my handshake.  
I walked to my apartment smitten and a bit mortified, my desire overwhelmed by my lack of confidence. I was clearly no Lothario. I was twenty-two years old but with a teenage brain, slow to transition to adulthood." (145)

*

The beginning of this book is as good a primer on the New York City music scene in the late 70s as I have read. The book as a whole is not as good as Please Kill Me, but the beginning of it eclipses that, at times, because it is funneled through Moore himself. Similarly, I cannot say it is better overall than Girl in a Band, though many aspects of it are better. Moore is excellent as a historian. The sheer amount of information is overwhelming and the narrative is amusing. Girl in a Band is more artistic, the prose is often more clipped and spare, and it progresses along an emotional arc. There is no real arc to this book--rather, there are Books, six of them, comprised of 71 chapters.

The arc of Sonic Life is in Books 1-3. That is where Moore realizes his dream and vision of the future and goes about manifesting the band and its unlikely success. There is something deeply inspiring about these pages, a tone that Our Band Could Be Your Life maintained throughout, about not having any idea of how to play music but wanting to anyways, and doing it. 

So when this book captures that energy, it is at its best. I do think it needs an index. Any book that required significant research and lobs hundreds of names of famous, semi-famous and non-famous artists at the reader should get an index. There is a real "scene" that gets captured here, in full-fledged glory (punk), which eventually dies and turns into something else (no wave), which then dies and turns into something else (college rock), before branching off into nether realms (grunge). There may be a greater testament to the No Wave scene than Sonic Life but I've yet to see it. Moore's observation of it and life within it is the strongest part of the book. 

 

Those were simpler times, and they are treated lovingly. The real memoir of the book is Moore's early life. By the time the band is charting a course towards greater accessibility with Sister, the book is about Sonic Youth, and no longer about Thurston Moore, and emotional truth does not apply to entities the same way (i.e., it was nice of John Lydon to show the band what seemed genuine concern when their gear got stolen before a gig they did with Public Image Ltd.). He sums it all up rather nicely, it just ends too abruptly. 

Grade: A-

 

****

Is that really all I have to say? No. But I can't write a perfect review of this book. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to provide two excerpts--one from Sonic Life and one from Girl in a Band--about the same event, which is a performance by Public Image Ltd. Perhaps that will provide a window into how these two artists remember details:

"There were others of course--the Velvet Underground, the Door--who took risks in the 1960s, when no one knew where any of it was going. Before them were the Beats and before the Beats the avant-garde artists, the futurists, Fluxus, and before that, the blues, outsider music, a mourning for what's expected but will never happen, so why not dance and play and forget for a few moments that we're all alone anyway?

Cut now to Public Image Ltd. performing at the Ritz in 1981 in New York City. Sid Vicious was dead and the Sex Pistols were over. Public Image Ltd. had made an impact and their third album, The Flowers of Romance, had mystery, with its girl on the cover. The Ritz crowd anxiously awaited the band's appearance. The huge movie-scale screen where videos were projected before bands was still down. The screen was a natural barrier, used to create and motivate the crowd's reaction. First up came a huge image of John Lydon's face, laughing. Then he began to sing. Projected onto the screen was a strange film of a dark alley and the girl from the cover of The Flowers of Romance getting out of a garbage can. The film stopped, but the screen stayed in place, and suddenly behind it, the shadows of the three band members appeared. The screen stayed still. Furious at seeing the ghostlike, ritualistic figures of the group out of reach behind the screen, the audience became agitated; they couldn't see the band in the flesh. They started yelling. A few of them threw metal chairs. The band ran offstage and the audience proceeded to destroy the screen. 

Public Image didn't go out there intending to cause a riot. They were simply trying something new. The audience's expectations were dashed. The band's pure audacity had drawn crowds to the Ritz in the first place, but then the audience couldn't accept what the band was offering. It was too much. And that experience, that feeling, will never appear on YouTube, will never be downloaded onto anyone's laptop or phone. Today you will never find a picture of it, because the Internet didn't exist, and no one was paying attention, or bothering to document what was taking place right before their eyes, with the exception of a zine started by a bunch of fifteen-year-old New York girls called The Decline of Western Civilization." (261-262)

This comes near the end of Girl in a Band, and goes onto to discuss our need for heroics from musical icons that died too young, how the 80s were like the 60s, questioning whether the 90s actually happened, and then ends with her seeing Dave Chappelle at the Oddball Festival in Hartford in 2012 or so, comparing the audience to that show to the one for PiL at the Ritz, and how Chappelle couldn't get the audience to stop talking and so opted to spend 25 minutes on the stage, smoking a cigarette and waiting in silence, to their escalating dismay. It's kind of a great mini-essay on what it means to be in the audience and what we expect to get out of the experience. She had written famously before about how audiences want to see themselves on stage, and so the performer should be a mirror to them in a way, serving as a conduit for their energy. It appears that Sonic Youth took this concept to their stage show, in their waning years, as they would project a video of the live audience itself, being captured from the front of the stage, behind them on a screen as they performed. I have to think this is a callback to the PiL screen, and Gordon's and the band's own notions of how to frame the audience experience.

In contrast, the 28th chapter of Sonic Life, "The Electric Dread," is 3 pages long: 

"Public Image Ltd, in May 1981, set up shop in New York City. Their idea was not to perform gigs like any other rock 'n' roll group, but to make recordings, books, and films--to be a 'company' of sorts, a brand as opposed to a band. 

Less than a year earlier John Lydon and PiL guitarist Keith Levene had appeared on the program Tomorrow, a late-night network talk show with an engaging, funny, take-no-guff interlocutor named Tom Snyder. Lydon and Levene attempted to state their case of being an 'anti-band' to Snyder, only to become argumentative when he didn't take the bait.

The band had already shaken up the North American airwaves earlier that year by lip-synching on the weekly music show and institution American Bandstand, Lydon making no pretense of going along with the pretense, walking among and dancing around the live TV audience, reavealing PiL's music to be nothing but a canned recording.

On the Tomorrow show, Snyder was surprised, even astounded, at how rude and aggressive Lydon could be. At one point he admonished the punk lord, only for Lydon to accuse the host of having a 'tantrum.' Lydon and Levene kept getting out of their chairs to lean across the table and cadge cigarettes from Snyder's pack. 

The episode was explosive for us, energizing the entire scene in its defiance of the mainstream.

The Ritz nightclub on East Eleventh Street had a cancellation by the London band Bow Wow Wow (who were managed by the ex-Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, whom Lydon was then suing). Lydon and Levene accepted an offer for their new anti-band to play the gig instead, but only if they could perform behind the Ritz's monolithic video screen, touted as the largest in the world. Rolled down, it filled the entire stage. They had the idea to illuminate the screen and stage from behind with high-intensity PAR can lights, creating monstrous silhouettes, while Super 8 film footage of the group bopping around Manhattan was shown.........

[The queue outside the Ritz is described, the rain that began crashing down, and the extended wait for the band to set up their unorthodox arrangement, and the hapless opening band that was booed off the stage...]

Before too long the silhouettes of Lydon, Levene, and their bandmates rose high on the screen, inciting cheers from the audience. The opening salvos of the band's just released album, The Flowers of Romance, with Lydon yodeling an unholy atonal yowl, blasted through the PA.

A live feed of the group behind the screen would intermittently cut into the preshot Super 8 footage. Each time an actual image of Lydon or Levene would appear, the crowd would lift its voice in approval, but the effect soon became redundant and annoying. 

Bottles began to be hurled as chants of---

'Lift the screen! Lift the screen!'

---filled the room. 

[The audience's pulling of a tarp on the stage that was under all the band's equipment is described.]

Keith Levene ran in front of the screen, waving his arms at the audience to stop the madness, but it was entirely ineffectual as bottles whizzed past his head, nearly braining him. Stagehands ran out to rescue Keith as a pretaped image of Lydon appeared on the screen, warbling and strumming tunelessly on an acoustic guitar, singing a piss take on an old folkie tune---

I've got a hole in my heart

Levene proceeded to put on a recording of The Flowers of Romance. He played some kind of feedback guitar with it, which sounded excellent to me--though my appreciation for it may have been in the minority. More chants of---

'Lift the screen!'

---came, mixed with yelling and laughter, bottles lobbed endlessly towards the stage. Lydon again appeared on the screen, this time singing an actual live and in-person version of the same song---

I've got a ho-o-ole in my heart

The audience lost it.

This was not a concert; it was an insane asylum.

With the pulling of the tarp having fully dismantled the band's gear, Lydon's silhouette loomed across the screen as a giant demon, haranguing into his microphone a singsong tease---

'Silly fucking audience, silly fucking audience!'

It was the final straw.

Bottles now rained over the room and onto the stage, splattering, smashing, and staining the screen, the crazed audience grabbing at it, attempting to tear the offending obstruction down. The pride and joy of the Ritz, its world-famous video screen, hung precariously from its moorings. 

In an instant all the houselights flared up, a Wizard of Oz voice booming from the PA---

'THE SHOW IS OVER!! EVERYONE LEAVE!! NOW!!'

Furious security guards began to forcibly push the audience out of the room. No one really fought back; everyone was simply too bewildered, too giddy even, at how messed up and chaotic this gig had become. There were laughs and a few shouts of---

'I want my money back!'...(183-185)

Maybe you can see the difference. Gordon's is like an essay, from a distance; Moore's is like a short story, experienced moment by moment. It's likely both were at that PiL show at the Ritz in 1981 together, but you can't totally tell from Gordon's.  I didn't fully copy the entire text of "The Electric Dread," but I hope the lawyers at Penguin Random House are willing to dote on me, and see that this is its own form of publicity, and that it can only help keep conversations about the book going. Book reviews should be able to include long excerpts, and this has been a foundational rule on Flying Houses. It helps the reader decide if they want to take the deeper dive.

*

I'm not sure what else to say. Both of these artists and their band have meant and continue to mean a great deal to me. They do not get their due respect. Perhaps they did, briefly, 30 years ago, and Daydream Nation is in the Library of Congress and they are still famous, in the sense that they stood for the vanguard of their time, and persist today as solo artists that keep pushing themselves in new and sometimes exciting directions (Gordon's two solo records have both been remarkably good; Moore's work has become a behemoth, less suited for the type of rambunctious live performances of Gordon on recent tours--really appearing to me like a female-fronted version of the Fall, her onstage persona reimagined and reinvigorated--and more suited to jazz lounges and study lounges, playing instrumental music for productivity, and naps). Their books are a "study in contrasts," and each is certainly worth reading for any fan of the band. Gordon's is the more affective story, and the reader will feel more after finishing hers; Moore's is the nerdier, more emotionally-distanced one. Arguably, the first half of Sonic Life eclipses Girl in a Band, and if it had continued in that vein, might have been better overall. It doesn't fall of the rails exactly, but it loses some verve and sense of wonder along the way, and turns into bulletpoint-like prose summing up their final years (the chapter on 9/11 is the last great part of the book). Much of it is extremely readable and amusing and thought-provoking and educational. And that really should be good enough for a book. We need not require that musicians open up and bleed in their memoirs--it just feels like that would be more true to the spirit of punk--but there are other sub-genres and other aesthetics. 

2024 Academy Award Nominees for Best Picture

I heard recently that voting for the Academy Awards will end next week, right around February 29th or March 1st, and it would make a great deal more sense to complete this post prior to that date, and I realize now, the Awards ceremony itself is not very far away (March 10th). Because I enjoyed the exercise last year, I thought I'd do it again this year. It was a bit crazy, because I had to just about watch one movie per day for the last week, and now if I get on it, I will have more time. There are about 16 or 17 days left and I have 6 movies left to see. I will write about them in the order they were seen, as before. 

Oppenheimer

To date, Christopher Nolan has been recognized by the Academy for four films: Memento, Inception, Dunkirk, and this. He has not won Best Director, and I think this may be his year. I also think this may be the film to win Best Picture, if the Golden Globes are any indication. I have not looked too closely at predictions yet, and only know one sure-fire winner, which everyone should also know. 

Both Robert Downey Jr. and Cillian Murphy won at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards, and also seem like fair picks to win Oscars. Matt Damon arguably deserved a nomination more than Downey Jr., and probably didn't get it because his character is "less interesting," even though he injected the film with sorely-needed comic relief. 

Overall, I liked this movie. I saw it in IMAX 70 MM, which was cool, and the cinematography is beautiful. It's delicately made. One might say it is designed to win Oscars. I respect it as a film, and think it poses important questions, but left me feeling a bit cold, emotionally. The primary drama of the film is whether Oppenheimer's security clearance will be renewed, and it is played out over a lengthy series of administrative hearings. This is the type of thing I usually like--the audacity of a "blockbuster" about bureaucracy--but also makes me feel that it is prestige for the sake of prestige (and The Prestige is one of Nolan's many films that did not get the respect it deserved at the time). 

17 years ago, that film was only nominated for Art Direction and Cinematography. A year later, Nolan followed it up with The Dark Knight, arguably the greatest blockbuster superhero action movie there has been, which won for Sound Editing and Supporting Actor. He followed that up with Inception, which demands multiple viewings (more recently Tenet required the same, though I think fewer wanted to try). We don't need to go through his whole filmography; suffice to say, he is clearly one of the greatest "mainstream" auteurs of our time, and is due for recognition. This is not my favorite film of his (I liked 3 or 4 of them better), but it is definitely the most "Oscar worthy," in a similar vein to Dunkirk--because it is historically accurate. This is a valuable thing when our world is prone to inaccuracies and questions surrounding stories told by the victors. Oppenheimer does bridge this gap nicely, showing the heart of the conflict inside the person, and how the world wants to see him, or not see him as his feelings evolve. I probably need to see it a second time. It didn't put me to sleep but my viewing companion did doze off in the theater.

On rewatch, I recalled my friend's critique after the theater viewing: "I think I need to watch it with closed captioning." A word, briefly, about closed captioning. I was ashamed when I began regularly turning them on for most things I watched. I soon realized, perhaps in 2018 or 2019, that this practice had been adopted by the masses. Perhaps this is to deal with the influence of "mumblecore" films, but I doubt it (Joe Swanberg isn't Quentin Tarantino, or even Kevin Smith); we just miss less. And this film is populated by at least a dozen fairly nondescript white, male actors, referred to just by their last names, and it can be difficult to keep everyone straight. So I do think this film is aided by closed captioning, but that didn't make me like it much more.

I do think I am wrong about it being "historically accurate," just from the opening scene with the apple, which I had forgotten, along with another delusive move or two. I also forgot about my favorite "cameo" in it, and perhaps the way that character is barely in the movie at all and then has a major dramatic moment near the end. It surprised and befuddled me. I appreciated that weirdness, and I actually really liked how it "flashed forward," to show what happened after these hearings, later in his life. The dramatic bombast of it all is powerful, and befits the importance of the man itself--it is a big, loud movie, and I won't be surprised at all if it wins.

Barbie

Another film I probably need to see again is Barbie. Now, I liked Barbie, just fine--until the very end. Near the very end, there is a certain throwaway moment that will escape notice from just about everyone, except a very specific subset of people that will feel seen. And ashamed. But I am probably taking it too seriously. Suffice to say, I later heard an interview with Greta Gerwig (a contemporary) and she acknowledged that she does in fact love Pavement, so it's fine. Anytime the Fall is mentioned in a movie like this, we should take that as a win. 

Apart from that idiosyncrasy, my issue is that this movie got far more love than The Lego Movie, and it is reductive of it. It will probably win Best Song, and that was The Lego Movie's only nomination. Granted, visually, this film is stunning, even if it is "plastic."  They are very different movies but they definitely have many things in common, one of which is Will Ferrell playing the bad guy, who is given more room to vamp here. It has a feminist message whereas Lego was just more focused on child-like glee. This also has its share of child-like glee, along with a bit of a darker edge. 

I have complicated feelings. Margot Robbie was robbed of a nomination. Ryan Gosling and America Ferrara deserved theirs. The plot of the film is also very similar to The Lego Movie. What's unique is that it is mainstream, fully endorsed by Mattel, and subversive. Perhaps one of the best things it did was open up conversations on gender politics, while still being a fantasy, and fun. Ultimately, it was recognized because it had its cultural moment, shared with Oppenheimer, that fully returned the masses to theaters. It was important in that respect, and I have to believe it was a better experience with a theater audience than Oppenheimer (I watched this at home on Max). I need to see it again probably, but basically yeah, I thought it was about as good as The Lego Movie--only a little better in the way the story was brought to life. 

Maestro

Maestro is a fine film, but it almost feels like Bradley Cooper wanted more after A Star is Born. Lady Gaga did not win Best Actress for that, but everyone acknowledged her as the best thing about it. Cooper was also nominated for Best Actor for that, in a very good performance as well, but it felt like token recognition. Lady Gaga was the star, and in Maestro, Cooper is the star. It's a largely admirable effort that is also likely to leave audiences cold, perhaps ironically, even colder than Oppenheimer. 

I liked parts of it. The interplay between Cooper and Carey Mulligan is the best thing about the movie. The two of them have a handful of scenes in it that are as good as anything else that came out this year, and would be borderline iconic if not crushed beneath the weight of the rest of the film, which is a  biopic that attempts to cover a rather long period of time. Credit Cooper for taking on difficult material, and portraying the conflicted bisexuality of his character (even if audiences may feel more sympathy for Mulligan). Of course, the cultural milieu plays a role in that dynamic, and the film's historical accuracy approaches that of Oppenheimer. It still feels like a mash-up of Tar and Star, and not as good as either. 

It is worth watching, however, for the scenes between Mulligan and Cooper. It gains speed as it moves along, as Cooper dials up the absurdity of his performance, which is iconic in its own right. I don't expect it to win anything, and its place here is a result of the expanded Oscar ballot. It is worthy of recognition, but so is The Iron Claw (Zac Efron's performance in that was criminally underrated).

Killers of the Flower Moon

In terms of what "deserves to win," it seems it comes down to Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon. Both are over 3 hours long. I am not sure how others felt, but even though this one is about 30 minutes longer, it felt shorter to me. I didn't fall asleep during either. It's perhaps worth noting that I watched this on Apple TV+ and started it with my dad at 11 PM. 

He told me he had tried to watch it before, and he didn't like it. He said it made him uncomfortable to watch. He made it about 45 minutes deep. This time, he lasted until 1 AM. I stayed up until 2:30 AM to finish it. He left right before the most awful part of the movie happens. This is a really awful movie in terms of morality, and it continues to be dialed up until it reaches that epitome. After, it shifts into its second half, which must be where the controversial "intermissions" had been inserted by theater owners, when Jesse Plemons shows up to investigate the murders. It loses a tiny bit of steam in the second half, and there are bizarre elements that ultimately coalesce in a memorable epilogue that underscores the most heartbreaking element at the center of the film. Its last words teared me up. 

Is it more important than Oppenheimer? Probably. The movie takes place 100 years ago. Most of the awful atrocities committed against Native Americans occurred in the 1600's-1800's, but this film shows that really nothing changed in the 1900's, and thereby questions how much has actually changed in the 2000's. Everyone in America is living on Native land and we often forget that. Near the end of the film, Robert DeNiro delivers a short monologue that encapsulates every argument that could be made for colonialism, and reveals the film to be a perfect allegory of the history of the plight of the indigenous. 

It's another significant accomplishment by Martin Scorsese, and a testament to his rightful place in the all-time canon of cinema. We can only hope that in 25 years, Christopher Nolan will remain at the top of his game and do the best work of his career, because it feels that way for Scorsese. 

The Holdovers

On Friday, February 23rd, I subscribed to Peacock for a month and watched The Holdovers (enveloping it with a re-watch of Oppenheimer, see above for update). The movie tricked me, for a minute. I didn't realize it took place in December 1970. At first, I thought it was a flashback, where Paul Giamatti was a teacher in present day, and a student in 1970. But then he would be playing about 15-20 years older than he is. 

In more ways than one, this movie is a throwback. It might remind a viewer of some of Hal Ashby's work. It is an R-rated film, but it should be PG-13, because it ultimately is a family film. One of the stills I almost chose was connected to an article titled "the 65 best Christmas movies of all time," and so this may be considered an instant classic, and an obvious choice for future television programming around the holidays. 

I was struck by how "uncynical" it was. I liked it fine, but similar to Maestro, and our next item, feel that its place here is a result of the expanded ballot. I think I have to put it over Maestro because it is a finely-paced, complete film. It does not attempt to make any major message, unlike some of the other nominees. It is a small, quiet, heartfelt film, filled with great compassion for its characters, and about as gentle as one can imagine. 

Some people think the Best Actor category comes down to Cillian Murphy and Paul Giamatti (the others are Bradley Cooper, Jeffrey Wright, and Colman Domingo from Rustin, which I should also see). It is a tough call who will win. Giamatti, I think, may win for "career achievement," because while Cillian Murphy has had his own lengthy career at this point, Giamatti is a feted actor that was robbed of a nomination for his previous collaboration with Alexander Payne, Sideways. (It is difficult to say whether Giamatti will beat Murphy, and it is difficult to say whether Da'Vine Joy Randolph will beat America Ferrara, but I believe this film has a slight edge in the Best Supporting Actress category; it may well win for both, but should be recognized for at least one. The SAG Awards seem to indicate it will be Randolph and not Giamatti.) 

In a lot of ways, The Holdovers is a redux of Sideways, a buddy comedy with Giamatti, except in this case he is playing more of a curmudgeon than a snob. And it's not about wine culture, but boarding school culture. Giamatti himself went to Choate, and I thought I might "see myself" in this, but I didn't really (the film was shot at Groton, NMH, Deerfield, and two other prep schools, though not LC, sadly). This was not the great boarding school film that is yet to be made (the way The Catcher in the Rye is the great boarding school novel). It is, however, a moving meditation on the nature of family and togetherness, and unmistakably touching in how it teases out the vulnerabilities of its characters. I teared up at least once or twice. Yet even with this air of melancholy, it is heartwarming, and the "lightest" nominee after Barbie. It would be difficult to hate this film, and I liked it, but as noted, I believe this is late recognition for Sideways, because nearly 20 years later, that film is rightly considered a modern classic.  

American Fiction

On Sunday, February 25th, I went to the local movie theater and saw American Fiction. I have to rate it similarly to The Holdovers, but it is a very different type of film. The first comparison I could draw is to Sorry to Bother You. Both are satires about similar issues, but obviously, that one "jumps the shark," and this one stays within the realm of the plausible. 

It's surprising that this is adapted from Erasure, a book published in 2001. (I was also drawn to consider The Sellout in the course of watching this, and how that book is not comparable to the two primary "texts" this film depicts.) The film is unmistakably important for our times, because it poses questions about identity and representation, which have been hot-button issues for years on end, and demand deeper inquiry. They will need to pick a "clip" for the Oscars from Jeffrey Wright's performance, and I hope they pick the brief scene he has with Issa Rae, where he confronts her and calls her out on what he sees her work as doing. That scene, like certain scenes between Cooper and Mulligan in Maestro, is borderline iconic. It's beautifully written and acted. And the way such issues are percolating in our culture and driving divisiveness, this film should likely inspire thoughtful debate and conversation. 

It's unfortunate that it took more than 20 years for this book to be adapted, and that I haven't read it. (I haven't read Killers of the Flower Moon, either, but the movie is making more people read the book, and that is the side-perk of giving such films recognition.) At a certain point, Wright says that he doesn't even really believe in race, and while that may have been more common in 2001, it feels quaint today, with more performative virtue-signaling in social media, and the rejection of teaching Critical Race Theory in certain sectors of this country. I was going to say Sterling K. Brown deserved a nomination for supporting actor, and I see that he got it. Tracee Ellis Ross is also very good in her abbreviated role. 

This is a thorny film, but that is only half the story. At the end of the day, like The Holdovers, it is a moving meditation on family, showing how Wright and Brown navigate the uncertain territory of middle age, caring for their mother when she needs them most, while she is unable to give them the validation and love that they crave. It makes a bigger "statement" than The Holdovers, but it is also heartwarming in unexpected ways. 

That being said, for further reading and an alternative take that goes much deeper, see this, which made me feel sort of terrible for thinking the movie was pretty good. Apparently, the book is braver, and better. 

Past Lives

On March 1, 2024, I watched Past Lives on Paramount+. To this point, it is the most narrowly focused of the nominees, and somewhat similar to The Holdovers, isn't deeply invested in any message, other than the metaphysical trope of in-jun and 8,000 lifetimes. I could be cynical, and point to the ten nominees, and the previously controversial standards for eligibility, but the film is worthy of recognition. (Drive My Car was better than Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once and I implore you to watch it after the Oscars if you haven't.) Past Lives overtakes The Holdovers as the "smallest" and "gentlest" nominee. It is rated PG-13, and I do not understand why it is not PG except for the filmmakers to signal this is not a movie for kids. There is hardly any cursing in it, no graphic material, no violence, and the conflict it depicts is inherently veiled. "Fiction is about trouble," some writing instructors may intone, and the trouble here, which has an element of EEAO about it, is that our lives have too many possibilities, and sometimes we have to leave behind parts of it for reasons beyond our control. The leaving may all well be good and necessary, and as one character says near the beginning, "When you leave something behind, you gain something, too." And maybe what we gain is a newfound freedom to start again and try to shape our lives into a way we wish them to be. And maybe once we have done that--even if we are happy--we may have imagined more perfect futures before we have understood the realities of adulthood.

I don't want to say too much about the plot of the film, but it is about as simple of a plot as you can have in a movie. What struck me about it is its spareness. There is no concrete "subplot," not even a tangential conflict over whether or not the married couple wants to have kids. It is just squarely focused on this single issue, the notion of how things might have gone differently if say, we didn't need to leave, or if we had brushed against a certain person in the subway (or perhaps at a party in a dorm, or in History class, or at a music festival, the laundromat, the grocery store, etc.). The plot in one line: childhood sweethearts reconnect 12 years later over Facebook/Skype, and 12 years later again in NYC. 

In the way The Holdovers is a great holiday film, this is a great NYC film, vaguely reminding me of one of the earlier random film reviews on this blog, and more obviously, Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally. And it is a very romantic, bittersweet film which makes me feel more teary-eyed in retrospect than it did in the moment. At first blush I would have rated it as lesser than the other films seen to this point, but the mood it inhabits is suffused with such deep humanity that practically no one could not identify with some element in it. There is a good chance it will make you cry, and ponder the trajectory of your life, and perhaps it may inspire an upheaval, whether foolishly or practically. I won't spoil which direction the film goes. This is just the most "human" and "basic" story told by any of the nominees, that transcends race, nationality, language and tangibility in general--we just know one main character is a writer, and the other main character is an engineer. To paraphrase Flannery O'Connor: every writer has material, whether or not they believe it, for they have gone through childhood. And so too, after moving into adulthood--when we have continued to pursue certain childhood dreams, and made good on them, we wonder if our feelings from our most innocent times end up feeling the most intense and genuine. Maybe I am trying too hard to wax poetic to give closure to this capsule assessment, but if you've seen the movie, you may understand why. 

* 

Last year, there was some brief mention of budget and box office, and just for the sake of fun and comparison, let us consider the nominees this year.

Oppenheimer
Budget: $100,000,000
Box Office: $953,800,000

Barbie

Budget: $145,000,000
Box Office: $1,446,000,000

Maestro

Budget: $80,000,000
Box Office: $820,567

Killers of the Flower Moon
Budget: $200,000,000
Box Office: $156,000,000

The Holdovers

Budget: $200,000 (!)

Box Office: $41,400,000

American Fiction

Budget: $16,000,000 (reported estimates differ)

Box Office: $21,900,000

Past Lives
Budget: $12,000,000
Box Office: $26,600,000

Anatomy of a Fall

Budget: $6,600,000

Box Office: $29,600,000

Poor Things 

Budget: $35,000,000

Box Office: $101,900,000

The Zone of Interest

Budget: $15,000,000

Box Office: $16,400,000 

I'm not sure why any of this matters. Perhaps I want to ask, has a box office bomb ever won Best Picture? It must have happened. 

In any case, Maestro is a massive failure, but those numbers don't tell the whole story because it was most definitely the most widely-streamed of the nominees, in accordance with its rollout. 

Why did Killers of the Flower Moon have such a massive budget? It's very long, but how did it cost twice as much as Oppenheimer, which is also very long? Should we consider the "efficiency" of the film if we are really to call it "the best?" We may never know the former, and we can debate the latter, but regardless, to this point, I still think Killers is the best. 

*

Poor Things

On the morning of March 4, 2024, sometime between 9 and 10 AM, I twisted a nerve in my back and threw it out; at 7:40 PM, I arrived 10 minutes after the showtime for Poor Things. This theater doesn't show 10 minutes of previews, but I don't think I missed more than a few of the opening minutes to the film. Suffice to say, I will watch again at some point.

My enjoyment of the film was hampered by my condition, which made laughing painful. I did not laugh hard because I knew it would trigger a spasm. It would be accurate to say I laughed until it hurt.

Even so, Poor Things is not a hard comedy, and while humor is persistent throughout, Mark Ruffalo most often brought the pain. The film is nominated in 11 different categories, including Emma Stone for Best Actress and Ruffalo for Supporting Actor. 

Emma Stone will not win, unfortunately. She did win the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy, but that category in the Oscars is a fait accompli. She was also nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in The Curse, which she did not win but also proves, 2023 is the year that she ascended into nearly the highest echelon in Hollywood. (Many more people will see Poor Things than The Curse, but the latter is even more bizarre than the former, and both are excellent and worth seeing.) She has already won Best Actress for La La Land, and I do not think this loss will bother her. Like Michelle Williams and Cate Blanchett last year, she deserves to win for this, but there is only one statue to give, and ties are all but impossible.

Ruffalo is not likely to win, either, but his performance stands apart from his career to this point. While he has always been a respected actor, and this is his 4th nomination for a supporting role, it is arguably the best work he has done. It is a comedic performance, and while playing Bruce Banner/The Hulk brought (brings?) its fair share of humor, this is far more subtle. I don't even know who he is supposed to be. I thought he was a magician or something.

I digress. Poor Things is a great film. I have seen a few of Yorgos Lanthimos's films in the past, to varying degrees of confusion and boredom, and think this is the best he has done (I liked The Lobster a lot, but this is unmistakably more epic).  I missed the opening minutes, but in the way of plot, this is a take on Frankenstein. The production design is noteworthy, and all of the technical elements are well-executed, but the screenplay and the acting elevate it to another level. The film may cause you to question how your experience of the world has been shaped by your parents, and society, and even "what it means to be human," in the same way that Shelley's Frankenstein was more philosophical inquiry than horror story. It is also oddly similar to Barbie. It is "fun"--but it is also provocative, and "pregnant with meaning." 

 

Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute)

On March 5, 2024, I began Part 1 of the Sandra Huller double-feature, renting Anatomy of a Fall on Amazon Prime, which will complete this project. Huller is nominated for Best Actress for this, and also plays a lead role in The Zone of Interest. She also played the lead role in the film I considered the best of the previous decade. Perhaps not unlike Emma Stone, Huller "ascended" in 2023. (I will have to watch Sybil in the coming weeks, which is her previous collaboration with filmmakers Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, before this.)

Anatomy of a Fall is basically a courtroom drama-thriller with some elevating elements. Huller is a German actress, and she plays a German writer (also named Sandra) that lives in France and prefers speaking English. It is not a spoiler to say she is eventually put on trial. It happens rather quickly, and the way the film moves through these various preliminary scenes rapidly, telegraphing what new developments have just come to pass, is one of the highlights. The opening itself ensures that you will never think of the 50 Cent song "P.I.M.P." the same, ever again. 

While making the film, Huller repeatedly asked whether or not her character was guilty, and the director refused to tell her. That ambiguity drives the film and imbues her performance with unsettling depth. It was also interesting as a former law student to see the differences in French trial procedure. 

Perhaps the greatest strength of this film is how much remains unknown. We cannot truly know what is in another's heart, we only know what is in our own. One could watch the movie with two completely different interpretations, and Huller's performance holds true in either case. It would be interesting to know if she had her own personal belief about the guilt of the character, but I doubt she would publicly pronounce it. So I guess that's what make this a little different from usual courtroom drama-thrillers, because most of the time, the audience knows the truth, and here, we are just as good as a jury. (While I do want to avoid spoilers, I would be curious to talk to someone that saw the ending, because I am wondering if my own thoughts are shared.)

The Zone of Interest

On March 7, I completed this project and Part II of the Sandra Huller double-feature, and I needed to buy The Zone of Interest on Amazon. So I can watch it again whenever, but I am not sure if I would unless a friend requested to see it. It's a very strange film and probably the most "artsy" of the nominees. Jonathan Glazer is an interesting filmmaker. When I was growing up and thinking about being a film director, he had recently come out with Sexy Beast after a notable career directing music videos. Sexy Beast is great and hilarious and totally different from this. He may have made other films, but after that, he was most notable for Under the Skin, which is the weirdest of all, but which more than a few people considered one of the best movies of the previous decade. It employed a similar color palette to a few discrete scenes in The Zone of Interest, one of which is captured in the still above.

It's about a German family--a Nazi family, but a family nonetheless--and the way they manage a happy domesticity in a beautiful home neighboring the front gates of Auschwitz. Many people comment that there are no images of the Holocaust, but that's not exactly true. Because a great deal of the material juxtaposes the cruel inhumanity of the father in his work as a Nazi officer with the gentle devotion he shows to his family (despite one odd scene which I think calls that into question). 

Glazer is a "slow" filmmaker, seemingly making one movie per decade (though did do the fairly mainstream Birth in 2004, and a short film, The Fall, in 2019) and may now be comparable to the often-great Terrence Malick. This movie is similarly slow and meditative, and extremely uncomfortable at times, and appalling. Huller brings humanity to her character, even after she jokes with a friend (or was it her mother?) that someone refers to her as the "Queen of Auschwitz." She fights for her family and there is some semblance of a happy ending, which obviously is conflicting and not really satisfying. This is intercut with a flash-forward near the end that lends a greater weight and gravity to the film, underscoring the horror of reality as it once was.

In a way, this is a "token" nomination, in the way that All Quiet on the Western Front was last year, and 1917 and Dunkirk were before: the war film nominee. There is not always a Holocaust film nominee, but they are fairly frequent--off the top of my head, obviously, Schindler's List, and also Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, Jojo Rabbit--and there are many more, and I forgot Inglorious Basterds. All of these films are powerful in different ways, and sadly, still relevant and necessary ("genocide" continues, and we continue to debate what constitutes it). There is no film adaptation of The Banality of Evil (though I did just find out, there is a documentary, titled Hannah Arendt) and while that would be undoubtedly rake in Oscar nominations, for now there is just this, which portrays a different variant of banality. This is not a pleasurable watch, or comfort viewing, probably for anyone, except perhaps for the deplorables justifying neo-Nazism, who might get some sick enjoyment out of it. For everyone else, it's a lesson that bears repeating, and might make the audience search themselves, and think about what they would do if they lived in Germany in the 1940's, whether we might be an "innocent bystander" or resist. It is much easier to resist when the real threat of persecution, imprisonment, exile or execution is a not an issue.

*

So then, that wraps up our coverage of the Best Picture nominees. As for predictions:

Oppenheimer for Best Picture (Killers of the Flower Moon deserves it though)

Christopher Nolan for Best Director 
Cillian Murphy for Best Actor 
Lily Gladstone for Best Actress
Robert Downey, Jr. for Best Supporting Actor
Da'Vine Joy Randolph for Best Supporting Actress

I can't say much else about the rest of the nominations, and if you are doing an Oscar Ballot competition like my family does every year, those other nominations mark the winner. So I'm sorry I can't be very useful to you, but I don't want to steer you wrong. I am reasonably sure that the above six categories will go this way, though there is always the potential for a surprise.

Fin.

Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture--and the Magic That Makes It Work - Jesse David Fox (2023)

My first thought-best thought after reading Comedy Book following Doppelganger and The Perfection Trap: it was not as good as either, but offered the most enjoyable reading experience of the three. Should Fox consider that statement, query whether le plaisir du texte is greater than sturm und drang. I am likely using these pretentious-sounding phrases incorrectly. The world may be broken, but comedy is flourishing. 

What can we take from a book? A different way of seeing and understanding the world, maybe. All three of these books made me think, but this one felt most familiar. All of these books are non-fiction, and all of the authors have a very urgent point they are trying to make. 

Actually, I read Sure, I'll Join Your Cult more recently than The Perfection Trap, but yeah they are all non-fiction. However, Maria Bamford did not have a thesis supported by evidence marshalled from primary and secondary sources, like these other three (other than her own experience, examining the nature of cults and cult-like behavior). Doppelganger and The Perfection Trap also discussed cults of various guises, as does Comedy Book. All four of these books are connected. This was more amusing and entertaining and enjoyable than Perfection or Doppelganger, but in the Fox v. Bamford match-up, I am sure both would concede to the other. The primary connecting tissue between all four is one word: compassion.

A year ago, I was taking a stand-up comedy class on Zoom. There was no required text. Sometimes our instructor would send us clips from YouTube, and hold up certain comedians as masters of the craft of joke-writing and joke-telling. Fox has written a book that could function as a class on stand-up, or serve as a key text in such a creatively-centered course. Bird by Bird is to creative writing classes as Comedy Book should be to stand-up comedy classes. Of course, there are far more of the former than the latter, but if this book is any indication, we can expect the latter to grow (and perhaps expect the former to fade accordingly with attention spans). 

*

The very urgent point that Fox wants to make here is that comedy, like Rodney Dangerfield, doesn't get any respect [as an art form]. The first place my mind jumps is to Annie Hall. This is still the only Comedy to win Best Picture (Birdman and Everything Everywhere All at Once both have their share of comedic elements, but neither fit snugly into the genre.) Many people say comedic acting is much harder than dramatic acting. Fox makes the point that Annie Hall (along with M*A*S*H, Tootsie, and The Graduate) are "great, well-made comedic films, but they aren't laugh riots." (56) They aren't "hard comedies." 

From there the discussion shifts to the filmography of Adam Sandler, and it's not exactly Fox's point that Sandler's "lowbrow" or "gross-out" comedies deserve more critical acclaim--rather, intent matters, and Sandler knows audiences connect with this type of humor that has become his calling card. Even as he does more serious roles for other auteurs, he cannot be considered an auteur himself, because he is not P.T. Anderson, the Safdie Brothers or Noah Baumbach. I believe that Fox means to push against this notion--that we can and should consider Adam Sandler an auteur in his own right, even if the films are admittedly execrable. 

He drives this point home by discussing what some consider Sandler's worst movie, Jack and Jill. I had heard enough about this movie that I wanted to watch it, and I got about halfway or two-thirds through it before growing bored and disinterested. That said it is really absurd and I did laugh a fair amount earlier on. (This may have been after the Grown-Ups 3 script was circulated, and I still believe this would make an incredible movie.) Fox and I are probably pretty close in age and so I think Billy Madison holds a special place in both of our hearts (to my mind, actually a good film and borderline-classic "hard comedy"), but it feels like this bothers him a little too much, that critics feel bad about movies that rely on poop jokes. 

But later, he mentions how Blended provided him with "a profound personal realization about the sacrifices my own parents made blending my family," "not in spite of some of the dumbest jokes of Sandler's career, but, in my opinion, because of them, as they told the overthinking part of my brain to take ninety minutes off, so I could feel something." (66) He then quotes Ernest Becker from The Denial of Death for the second time (first time: "[Man is] a god who shits.") to reference Otto Rank, a colleague of Freud's that worked with Henry Miller and Anais Nin who believed that the only cure for neurosis was the "need for legitimate foolishness." (66)

The point is fairly made. Even the films appealing to lowest-common-denominator "lowbrow" audiences present a value proposition beyond their bankability. Sandler has a deal with Netflix that gave him a ton of money and creative control and he chooses to make these rather silly movies, and some people seem to have a problem with that, and Fox thinks such critics are missing the point. Sandler is living the dream, and Fox gets it, and he deserves it after paying his dues, and there's nothing wrong with watching movies that don't necessarily make us think (though not all of us think they're really that funny, either). 

*

Early on in the book, Fox makes his point, and the rest of it reads something like a very long rant about comedy, with some occasional flourishes bordering on profundity. The book references many comedians while examining particular facets of comedy. To perhaps better structure this review:

Jerry Seinfeld
Chris Rock (on "bombing")
Bernie Mac
Janeane Garafalo
Adam Sandler
The Simpsons
Gilbert Gottfried (on jokes that are "too soon")
SNL (post 9/11, and generally)
Jon Stewart (and other outgrowths of The Daily Show)
Bert Kreischer
Louis C.K.
Maria Bamford
Margaret Cho
Tig Notaro
John Early
Kate Berlant
Jo Firestone
Bo Burnham
Kristen Schaal
Hannah Gadsby
Jerrod Carmichael
Drew Michael
Anthony Jeselnik
Lisa Lampanelli
Dave Chappelle
Ricky Gervais
Bill Burr
The Office (on memes)
I Think You Should Leave (on memes)
Ali Wong
Lil Rel Howery
Bowen Yang
Matt Rogers
Mike Birbiglia
John Mulaney
Marc Maron 

If you like any of these comics, you are likely to find something of value in Comedy Book. If it is not already clear, however, Fox works by topics associated with stand-up, and some of the chapter titles include "Funny," "The Line," "Truth," "Laughter," (not required for comedy!) and "Community." Some of these chapters are better than others, and Fox is at his best when he is dissecting the brilliance of someone he admires. 

A quick note on the writing style: it is conversational, and humorous (though more than a few times, lands in "dad-joke" territory, pseudo-intentionally) and a bit long-winded. This is probably better than the opposite. The book feels a little longer than it needs to be, but I appreciated the thoroughness and attention to detail. I am not a comedy fanatic by any stretch, but I knew most of the people referenced above, and some of them quite well. There were some surprising tidbits (like how Maria Bamford did an overnight Zoom stand-up show, sleeping with the camera on), and the occasional petit madeleine truc (like the SNL cold open after Trump was elected, or the Pete Buttigieg "High Hopes" viral video thing--to make up a sophisticated-sounding phrase that may not exist) and we can be reasonably certain that Fox has left no stone unturned, so to speak. You cannot sum up the entire history and trajectory of comedy in a book, but this comes close. I can take "long-winded" when the material feels comprehensive.

*

As I said though, even when I felt the topics had been analyzed to death already, I still enjoyed reading Fox's rants, because his passion is so strong that it drove me to care more. I can't help but include one quote for very odd, personal reasons. 

"It was like I was Sandra Bullock in Gravity, doing routine repairs on the outside of my spaceship, when metal shards from a blown-up satellite came flying through, cutting up the craft, detaching my tether, leaving me flipping and flipping through space, floating away from my ship and Earth." (20-21)

Fox used the metaphor to describe his emotional state following the death of his mother, to highlight how comedy helped him cope with that tragedy (he was only 7), and it was rather moving. Recently Joey Votto used it to describe his emotional state after changing his mind on retirement, after his team declined the option to sign him to a 1 year contract. He called out to George Clooney to save him. 

A lot of people in the arts don't care about sports or consider them irrelevant, but George Carlin made one of his most famous bits about football and baseball, and athletes are entertainers and often rather funny--so Joey Votto matters, too, because he gets that. And maybe he didn't do too well last year (he owns that, and knows he can do better, knows he is not done), maybe the Reds don't want to do him the honor of a final farewell (it would be a redux of 2023), but I really hope the Cubs will step up and be his George Clooney. It is, in fact, one of my 12 wishes for 2024. Votto is a national treasure and will always be one of the most famous Reds in history. He loves hitting at Wrigley Field and it would be a beautiful way to end his career, with a World Series ring, beating the team that didn't want to stick with him for a deja vu trip around the sun. He wouldn't be asking for a lot, just a small contract for a year and the opportunity to play. This is an unfortunate pipe dream, but for the moment, we can fantasize about the beauty that could be. (This tangent wouldn't be allowed in a book, but I have to do what I can for the sake of the enterprise.)

*

So you probably have a good idea of what this book is like by now, but before we wrap, it is best to consider the nexus between this book and Doppelganger, and to include a short note about the material on Dave Chappelle, because it articulated a point that many have made, but few so distinctly. 

I may have written about this before, but here are my top 3 most notable experiences at comedy clubs:

(1) The Comedy Cellar - August/September 2001 - Outside the club, I saw Carson Daly (Chris Rock was also with him, and I believe Fred Durst, too) and dissed him, drunkenly, foolishly, and he graciously admitted he knew he stood for "everything that [was] wrong with the teen pop generation." 

(2) Boston Comedy Club - February or March 2002 - I go with a pseudo-platonic friend to a showcase featuring a person that lived across the street from our dorm (Janeane Garafalo did too, but this was a person named Jordan who had a bit about Mike Tyson having a match-up in the ring with a wild animal, shortly after he announced that he would eat Lennox Lewis's children). There is a two-drink minimum and we are not yet 19. I am put on the spot and asked if she is my girlfriend. I say she is not (I leave out that she wanted to be, once, and that she had a boyfriend now) and the comic generally makes fun of me, like I am dorky or whatever, and then adds that tonight they are going to get me laid. It was extremely uncomfortable, but there was a prophetic element buried in there, too.

(3) The Comedy Store - Sometime in early 2008 - My friend, a manager for a famous jazz musician, is in town for a tour stop and taking a few of the back-up musicians from Africa out for a good time, and we all go for a night of comedy, and are frequently mocked for the oddness of our group. My friend and I are considered the "Jewish handlers," because we were white and wore glasses, and then I am called Harry Potter, and it is only better because there is a women with a really crazy "emphysema laugh" in the audience that the host pivots towards for crowd work, and then later because Pauly Shore took the stage and apparently did not want to make me any more uncomfortable. 

So yeah, it was kind of funny to read this from Fox:

"'Look at Harry Potter over here.' That's what I would get. I had not read Harry Potter or watched any of the movies, but I got what they were trying to say--I had brown hair and glasses. I should say they didn't just say 'Harry Potter.' No, that's not funny enough. 'R*****ed Harry Potter.' Now, that's funny. 'Gay Harry Potter.' Funnier! Honestly, as a group of four guys, it was a lot of gay stuff. It blurs, but I'm pretty sure Lisa Lampanelli called us the 'United Nations of f*****s.' I forgot this, but one of my fellow UN representatives remembers Lampanelli touching another's leg and making some sort of Black penis joke. He also told me he always thought her act was kinda racist. I had no idea. I had not asked my friend at the time. I'm sure I laughed. Maybe I thought this was funny, maybe it was the pressure of the crowd, maybe I was scared she'd notice and go after me next. I know I was not offended. Why would I be? I was not gay, but I also didn't know why I would be offended if I were. But, also, in general I didn't get offended. This is not a point of pride as much a proof of privilege. None of the slurs Lampanelli threw around--and she threw them all around--applied to me, and everyone else seemed to be laughing. I guess she'd call people 'kikes,' but by 2002 that wasn't a word that meant anything to me. Frankly, in retrospect, I was desensitized." (190-191)

Now, I was offended, because it made me feel like a loser, and maybe this segues into the Doppelganger thing, or the anti-woke thing, or the freedom of speech thing, or the punching down thing, because they all feel connected. 

*

When I was about halfway through this book, one night I watched the newest specials by both Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais. Chappelle's was better, but Gervais's wasn't terrible. Both of them are lightning rods for obvious reasons. Perhaps its best to start with something Gervais says towards the end of his special:

"Here's the irony: I think I am woke, but I think that word has changed. I think if woke still means what it used to mean, that you're aware of your own privilege, you're trying to maximize equality, minimize oppression, be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic....Yes, I'm definitely woke. If woke now means being a puritanical, authoritarian bully, who gets people fired for an honest opinion or even a fact, then no, I'm not woke. Fuck that." 

Rather than pointing out specific examples of people getting fired after being "reported" by a Woke Person (because it is usually not just having an honest opinion or stating a fact that does it), I want to analyze this the way that Fox would. Because on the one hand, Gervais is right, and the authoritarian, bullying Woke Person is part of the "fractured left" that Naomi Klein bemoaned in Doppelganger. On the other hand, when he says "fuck that," it gets a big cheer that sounds too much like a rallying cry. It's a rallying cry against cancel culture, and the "anti-woke" comedians often complain about being cancelled despite the First Amendment (Fox notes more than once that they are on a stage and getting paid for saying these things), and on WTF Marc Maron will talk about how freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences of what you say, which really is how we live as civilians. It's a broad rallying cry against cancel culture, but cancellations are highly specific. 

Fox does discuss Louis C.K. in some detail, but Aziz Ansari is consigned to a footnote as being one of the eighteen acts that has headlined Madison Square Garden (9). Talking about him or Al Franken is tricky (talking about their books is not). There are likely other "woke" people that were cancelled and came off as hypocrites, but these two seem most prominent, and both were cancelled for acts with women that felt creepy, transactional and/or gross. (Let's ignore Bill Murray and James Franco for now--"me too," like sexuality, exists on a spectrum.) In any case, none of them happened just because of words. 

Ansari was the only one to make a "mainstream" comeback, and I am surprised that Fox did not take a moment to talk about his comedy special Right Now but he does talk about John Mulaney's "comeback"* after going to rehab. Maybe there was no point to be made, and I don't know how most people feel about that special, but to me, it was fine, and he did the right thing, and he took his time away, and he did his penance, and he talked about it openly onstage (albeit briefly and vaguely)--he did it mostly the right way.

Most people, however, do not get the opportunity apart from their "apologies" posted to social media, which are often lambasted as "non-apologies" if they contain any whiff of self-defense. Being cancelled is incredibly scary, but there is a whole playbook for it now, PR-crisis mode, and anyone that chooses not to "play the game" runs the risk of committing career suicide, unless their intention is to drop out entirely.   

Fox does address this to an extent with Kevin Hart and his rescinded invitation to host the Oscars (actually just for one joke itself), and Louis C.K. did immediately respond with a mostly appropriate apology in The New York Times (I am not going to hunt it down and analyze it, but that's how I recall it). He didn't later try to get a big special to win everyone back, but instead made his own platform, and you can find him if you want to find him. (Trump has taken a page out of the same book, but you will still find him even if you don't want to.) 

It's hard to treat everyone perfectly equally (some people get away with everything), and some cancellations are deserved and some aren't, and while I pretty much agree with Gervais's statement, I don't think I would cheer for it, or even clap. It's simplistic, neat and tidy. Plenty of people say "gender is a fact," and not all of the authoritarian bullying Woke People think they should all lose their jobs, but they will certainly try to convince them that they are wrong, or write them off. (And yes you can lose your job for any reason, employment is almost always at-will unless you are unionized, and First Amendment Retaliation claims are only cognizable for governmental/public employees.) These people can petition Netflix to remove certain jokes, but they don't bend to them (though the Academy did). The truth is generally found in the details. 

*

Dave Chappelle has said he is "Team TERF," and so perhaps its best to end here, because after his previous special, many people at Netflix protested and their boss told them he heard them, but he wouldn't take it down, and they could leave if they felt that strongly about it. (I think that's what happened, right?) Chappelle cancelled his own show after he realized he was getting laughs that made him uncomfortable, when he perceived a segment of the audience had been laughing at him rather than with him. I don't know how many more specials he has under contract with Netflix, and think what you will about him, but I do not think he can or should be cancelled. 

As a critic, I prefer not to take sides, but it is inevitable, and I do not think Dave Chappelle is socially irresponsible. I do think he could be less "lazy," though his most recent special showcases his joke-book, and I do not want to accuse him of that. He could pander more, I guess, but if there is one thing comics should never do, it is pander. If he panders, his audience will think he's a sellout, and he will lose the juice that comes with being "bad boy." He doesn't feel he has to "repent" for anything, and I did find it curious that Fox left out the "epilogue" part to one of his specials where he spoke at length about his relationship with the trans community and his trans friend that essentially gave him permission to do the jokes. These are really thorny topics and I'm feeling the urge to use the phrase Gordian Knot.

I do think plenty of us growing up in the 80's and 90's dealt with "punching down" humor as a matter of course and reflection of reality, and this may be why many comics of that time period and earlier find censorship of such comedy to be "woke BS." We all had to put up with it, we all have internalized homophobia, deal with it! Yet we don't grow by thinking that way. But if we do grow, our comedy may turn into a Ted Talk. 

This book is about what comedy is for, and comedy is for many things, but most directly, trauma-coping. Comedy can do many other things, as can literature. We can learn from a comedian's set the same way we can learn from a book, and we might become better human beings for having experienced them. There are ways to do both--Nanette being the prime example. But Chappelle can't pivot like that. Hannah Gadsby broke through with that trope. Chappelle broke through the way most comics of his generation did, and he has no reason to do the type of mea culpa that Ansari did. He could only do that if he was cancelled in a major way, and his audience is such that it would never happen, because he is not actually a bad person, he just sometimes tells jokes that offend a lot of people. (That being said, he could make some kind of statement, and most of his fans would continue to follow him, and he does not need to worry about money.)

*

In writing this review, I think I am coming up against the problem that Fox must have had in writing it: the tendency to rant and fight with oneself about taking sides. This was the quote:

"Though the direction of the joke is against North Carolina's bathroom bill, how it is received will vary based on each audience member's prior thoughts and feelings. A trans person or a total ally will have different opinions about the joke itself, but their stance on trans issues would very likely not be impacted at all. Audience members who obliquely support the trans community but feel some trepidation or confusion around the topic might find relief from their worry about this issue, in a way that moves them in the direction of unqualified support. Conversely, for audience members who aren't outright bigoted but are confused, skeptical, or generally weirded out by transgender people, Chappelle's dehumanizing fascination with the biology of the trans community can resonate and reverse any soft allegiances they were forming. For the unrepentant transphobe, Chappelle, just like the satirists of Chapter 5, is giving the audience a vocabulary to talk about trans people--he is giving them ammunition. It's hard to prove anyone ever heard a joke and then went out and committed a hate crime, but people repeat jokes they like. It deems certain speech allowable, and worse, it encourages people who are less funny, who are more oblivious to context, to try to walk the same line, and that will result in vulnerable people feeling bad and more vulnerable." (227)

Basically, to Fox and many younger comedians and audiences, Chappelle is a master of the craft, and a dinosaur. Bigotry is hack. New comedy will find a way to be funny without punching down. Query whether "punching down," now, is actually punching back. 

I personally do not like to punch back. I will take the punch, and walk away, and I know I will be the bigger person for doing that. But I guess now, before you decide to go talk on stage for a living, you really ought to do a lot of work on yourself, and make sure that your heart is in the right place, and make sure that no one will get the wrong idea. That may be impossible. They will always get the wrong idea. It's how you deal with the blowback, how you "respond, rather than react," that will dictate your fate. Just generally speaking as a human being, it is better policy to love than to hate, and we can reflect the ugliness of reality in our art, but we can also imagine different realities and re-think the idea of "targets" in general.  

I'll die on this hill with respect to comedy: everyone should just make fun of themselves. Self-deprecation is life. 

Comedy Book: B+
Review of Comedy Book: D+     

*I watched Baby J last night, and to be honest, it is probably better than Right Now. My only issue with it is that he only really talked about the rehab experience for the entire time. The reference to divorce and lack of further elaboration feels like a missed opportunity to do a super special, back-to-back, but I am sure this was the more emotionally responsible choice to make.