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elodieunderglass · 7 months

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changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

#this is the sort of observation I make here that people #go off and write their thesis about #so while I’m not expecting to be the first or cleverest person to say this #if you do use it as a springboard #tell me if you get a good grade ok?#I’ll be tremendously proud of you #like if you take a shitpost and use it to craft deep attentive thought on something important #I just think that’s probably the most noble use of a human brain #it makes me want to take off my hat and slam it to the ground in inexpressible emotion #it’s a cowboy hat btw #and I say something like GOLDURN IT THAT KID SURE HAS DELIVERED.#ok so don’t deny me this #especially if you correct me after a long research journey #GOLDURN IT THE KID IS RIGHT!

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nsmama · 5 years

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Anxiety is turned up to 11 today. No particular reason. Whee, brain chemical imbalances! So I'm super nervous about my local air quality (petrochemical burn plume!) and my kids' difficult semester at school and the political climate of the USA and whether I'm going to go to bed on time and that I still haven't done my taxes and...

So I'm drinking coffee to be able to adult, because I self-medicated my anxiety with Narumitsu fanfic last night and I was up, uh, way too late. But I like Narumitsu fanfic. I didn't read any scary/triggery ones and I pledge to stay off them until I'm in a better place even though I love them too.

As usual, I am distracted by Ace Attorney and my darling lawyer romance. What was I saying?

Caring For My Brain, right. Coffee for adulting, carefully dosed to not provoke more anxiety. Reading sweet Narumitsu fan fiction so I can feel happy feels. Eating the fuel foods that don't set off more bad brain chemicals. I'm having trouble remembering the other things today.

Sleep, that's one. Probably that one will help rather a lot. So, must plan to *not* get too distracted by fan fiction after everyone else goes to bed tonight.

I guess that's it? I also want to write about Recipe for Turnabout because I finished it last night, and I really want to read up on research for Gregory Vs. Flu (working title) because I don't know much about Gregory times at all but it's pinching at me. But those things have to be extras. Today I have to focus on setting up for a better day tomorrow.

Mental health care is exhausting all by itself sometimes. Also I don't like the sitting president of the US because a, he is a toilet person in so many ways and b, he sets off my abuser-radar when I see him move. I'm tired of the news being a goldurn mental health pitfall. Let's vote that piece of toilet float out, okay? I can't do four more years.

Today my anxiety is turned up to 11. Yup. But I'm going to make sure I can make it. Even if that means a little incoherent Tumblr posting.

#mental health #keep waking up

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avanneman · 5 years

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Clint Eastwood’s “Mule”: Very Largely (Yet Not Entirely) Disappointing

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When I saw the ads for Clint Eastwood’s possibly final film, The Mule, I was—rather shockingly, since I haven’t seen one of his films since In the Line of Fire (1993, and excellent)—intrigued. A gritty tale of shady, sleazy drug deals gone wrong, with the twist that the hapless protagonist caught in the middle is like 88! Sounds, you know, intriguing! So I went to see it, not even bothering to check out a review.

For the first twenty or thirty minutes, I more or less got the film I wanted to see. We begin with a flashback of Earl Stone (Clint, of course), who runs some sort of wholesale greenhouse operation, slipping out of his own daughter’s wedding to attend some sort of convention for his ilk—so much easier to engage in empty, genial, banal, hand-shaking, back-slapping social ritual, full of canned compliments—“I’m sorry, ladies, but you must be lost. The beauty pageant is on the third floor!”—than deal with, you know, emotion, much less, you know, wives! To cap off the perfect evening, Earl even gets an award, a little vase for being wholesale greenhouse operator of the year for Chickasaw County, or wherever the Hell we are.

Well, that’s what I saw. Clint more or less buries the backstory. The Mule is based on a real person, Leo Sharp, famous back in the day as a hybridizer of day lilies, registering some 175 hybrids (the American Hemerocallis Society lists over 75,000), before shifting to a life of crime, so, presumably, that’s what the award was for, but I didn’t catch it.

Later, we do see Earl in his element, fussing around the greenhouse in a shapeless hat and shapeless clothes, compulsively fiddling with this and that. “We’ll move these outside in a week. I need Freddie to get another bale of peat moss. I’ll just repot these right now. No, I’ll do it myself. No sense in waiting.”

Well, fast forward to the present, and the greenhouse is gone. It appears that the goldurned Internet has put ole Earl out of business, just as it did to ole Leo. Earl heads over to what is coincidentally his granddaughter’s wedding—or, well, something—these shindigs all look alike—thinking he just might take advantage of all the emotion sloshing around to move in temporarily with his ex-wife or (again) his ex-someone! But his ex-wife (I bet it’s her) puts the kibosh on that! “Get on out of here, old man! You didn’t have time for your family, and now your family doesn’t have time for you!” Earl, of course, tries to explain to his wife that it was his devotion to day lilies—“They’re so beautiful, and they only last one day”—and his devotion to his family—“I was on the road 60, 80 hours a week so I could support you!”—that always kept them apart and it only seemed like he never wanted to be around them, but no one’s buying his line.

So Earl stumbles on out to his sagging pick-up, the sum total of his worldly possessions, the fragments he’s shored up against his ruin, loaded in the back. Just as he’s fixing to leave, some Hispanic guy runs out of the party and comes up to him: “Hey, old man! You need to make some money? Maybe you should call my friend!”

So Earl, hunched and trembling, his face a mass of wrinkles that could out-mummy the mummy, pipestem arms protruding from his cheap, short-sleeved shirts, stumbles forward into the Breaking Bad world of Walter White, and 88-year-old Earl’s ten times the helpless lamb that 50-year-old Walt was. Walt at least had a skill. Earl has nothing. It’s remarkable that Eastwood, who throughout his career reveled in his manly fitness, now exploits himself as the living symbol of the utter helplessness of extreme old age—“shameful old age”, as Homer called it, living in an era when the wages of helplessness was often death. And, of course, things haven’t changed that much.

Former bossman Earl now finds himself ordered about by ruthless foreigners one third his age. Didn’t this used to be a white man’s country? Well, it isn’t now. Earl follows orders, and makes his run, but after he’s done, the movie starts to slide sideways. There’s just so much humiliation a star can stand! There comes a time when he just has to assert himself, and be a star!

For his second run, Earl shows up in a gleaming, jet-black Lincoln Mark LT pickup. The real Leo Sharp drove a Lincoln pickup, but I wonder if his was quite as customized and accessorized and gleaming as Earl’s, though maybe so. According to the New York Times article I linked to, mules were paid $1,000 a kilo, and Leo took up 100 kilos at a time, so he could afford it.1

But having the big truck isn’t enough for Clint. He’s got to make Earl a badass. We see Earl checking into a motel, and then entertaining, or being entertained by, two seriously high-end whores. Granted, Eastwood doesn’t quite have the nerve to pretend that Earl is up to the challenge. Instead, he makes some lazy, old-man jokes—“You ladies are going to give me a heart attack”—and then (presumably) falls asleep. But he does have the ladies!

It gets worse. Earl (like the real Leo) is the best mule ever! So good that el jefe wants to meet him! So Earl goes down to Mexico, and we visit one of those Cartel mansions so beloved of Hollywood, complete with more bare fannies than a Fast and Furious festival. It’s not clear if Clint’s workin’ the crowd—“I’ve been makin’ movies for sixty years! You want to put asses in the seats? Put asses on the screen!”—or workin’ his own pathetic geezer-man fantasies, but the result is pretty much the same.

In the meantime, of course, the feds are slowly closing in on the operation that employs Earl. What could have been a fun plot—young guns in both the Cartel and the DEA bucking for promotion lead to a squeeze that gives Earl the chance to make a huge score, along with the chance of getting his head blown off—is left to wither on the vine, because what Clint wants to do is to show old Earl have a change of heart. In a predictably contrived chance meeting, he and a young, unknowing DEA agent have an early morning breakfast together. There’s some sort of hook to get the conversational ball rolling—the DEA agent realizes he’s forgotten to call his wife on their anniversary, or something—which leads Earl to lament his wasted life: “I’ve been a terrible husband, and a terrible father.” And so we realize, if we haven’t started to figure it out already, that this film is Clint Eastwood’s confessional: He’s apologizing to all his wives, mistresses, kids, and grandkids, for never giving a damn about anything but his career. Ole Earl was on the road, 80 hours a week, not to support his family, but to get away from them, and Ole Clint was on the set the same way.

And so we don’t get the big shootout that I was expecting. Instead, we get Earl going back to be with his dying wife, and see her forgiving him, and telling him what a comfort it is having him at her side, telling him how glad she is he’s realizing that going off to those silly conferences where he and his buddies give each other prizes2 doesn’t mean a thing, that it’s being with family that counts. Seems like he’s a star on the set and at home! Almost like eating your cake and having it too!3

But Clint (fortunately) isn’t quite finished yet. Earl does get busted, though in a nonviolent manner, and has to stand trial. He might be able to plead a lot of extenuating circumstances, but refuses to do so. When a man does wrong, he takes responsibility. Well, that’s fine and all, though perhaps not quite as impressive as Clint would have us believe—some might find the whole bit just a tad histrionic—but it sets up a final scene that does have some power.

Clint is behind the razor wire, in prison orange, but outside in the prison garden, on his hands and knees, wearing the same shapeless hat as before. He’s a man so old he’s outlived life. Even the most basic human pleasures, eating and sleeping, are meaningless now. Food is tasteless, and it makes your jaws ache to chew a crust of bread. At night, you lie down aching and weary, and wake the same way. You mean nothing to anyone. But there is one thing you can do. You can still tend to your garden, and tend to your lilies, and make them bloom.

Leo could afford it, but could Earl? According to the Times, the Cartel paid $1,000 a kilo shipped to Detroit (changed in the film to Chicago). One hundred kilos fills five duffel bags. Clint, to save time, or whatever, shows Earl getting the big bucks for transporting a single bag. Sure, $20,000 is good money, but it doesn’t buy a tricked out Mark LT. (The whole thing gets a little complicated, because Ford stopped making the Mark LT for the U.S. market in 2008, but did make some “second generation” trucks for the Mexican (!) market from 2010 through 2014. So exactly where and how did Earl get his gleaming black beauty, which to my skeptical eyes looks like one of those one of a kind rich man’s toys cranked out for the high rollers of Beverly Hills at $200,000 a pop?) ↩︎

Like, you know, the Oscars! ↩︎

There is somewhat similar vibe in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, when Woody, when he isn’t screwing his exquisite high-school honey Mariel Hemingway, shows himself helpless and humiliated in the face of scornful analysis provided by former lover Meryl Streep (scornful and, implicitly, accurate) and then shows himself forgiven and more or less redeemed by the love of Mariel, who takes him back after he leaves her to chase after bad girl Diane Keaton (because anything easily possessed isn’t worth having). I remember when the film came out that a woman remarked to me that almost all the men in the film (except Michael Murphy as archetypal WASP “Yale”) were shorter than Woody. ↩︎

#Clint Eastwood #The Mule #movies

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somer-joure · 7 years

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A Falls-iversary Post

I wanted to write something more, but today was a bit of a day. So here’s an anecdote. Sort of:

It was never a given that Take Back the Falls would be as good as it was. Before it was written, before it aired, it had every chance of being a big fat dud. Yes, Hirsch and his team had proven again and again that they were good at what they did. Yes, the hype train had grown jet turbines and shot right up through the roof. It didn’t matter. Endings are difficult to write and insanely easy to screw up. So many well-written stories—especially television shows—have awful endings, and the final chapter of a story makes a world of difference. In Gravity Falls’s case, it was the difference between “animated classic” and “that one show that was really good until it choked at the end,” and there was no guarantee the finale was going to be good.

I didn’t get to see the finale the day it aired. My roommate and I stayed up until 3AM that night trying to get it to play on the XD app (we had cable, but neither of us owned a tv), but the app was probably so overloaded with everyone else trying to watch the episode that we never got more than thirty seconds in. (And that was enough, by the way. Thirty seconds in is right about the point where Stan throws away the bat and the kids run in for a hug. It was about then that I turned to my roommate and said something like, “You get a shovel, I get a shovel, and let’s dig each other’s graves now, because this episode is gonna kill both of us.”) So we had to wait. By the time both of us got off work the next day it was around 11PM, and our third roommate was leaving to go and meet some friends and wouldn’t be back until 4AM. As she was leaving we joked with each other about how, hey, wouldn’t it be funny if the episode was just so mind-blowing that we were both still up when she came back? Wouldn’t it just be goldurned hilarious if she came in, saw us awake and, I don’t know, crying or something, asked what was wrong, and all we could say was, “It was just so beautiful!”? Wouldn’t that be silly? Except that’s…kinda what happened.

Okay, so we weren’t crying four hours later, but we were wide awake and riding so high on a post-finale buzz we didn’t get to sleep for a couple hours after that. I don’t know that I’ve ever been that imaginatively invested in an episode of television. Take Back the Falls was better than good. Gravity Falls stuck the landing. It did everything right—the story, the characters, the animation, the backgrounds, the voice acting; it all worked. I’d decided I was going to continue liking Gravity Falls no matter how the ending turned out, but the ending was so good it retroactively made everything that came before it even better. That’s hard to do.

I love Gravity Falls because it’s a good story. Is it perfect? No, but, for my money, it’s about as close to it as stories ever get. So here’s a big thank you to Alex Hirsch and the entire Gravity Falls crew for creating something that completely captured my imagination and for reminding me what it was like to be a kid at a time when, frankly, I needed to be reminded.

#gravity falls #take back the falls #I will never stop loving this show #my roommate and I spent about three hours in a constant stream of WHAT ABOUT THAT MOMENT WHEN STAN— I KNOW!#the ending was beautiful

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avanneman · 6 years

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How gay was Tom Wolfe? Well, pretty goddamn gay

Looking at the many pictures that have been published of Tom Wolfe in his white suit glory years, one has the strong sense of seeing something rare: a male anorexic. In what was surely his best book, The Right Stuff, Wolfe paid homage to “real men”, men who didn’t go the opera and couldn’t order a meal in French to save their lives, but could and did risk them for nothing more, and nothing less, than glory, men who put the pedal to the metal and kept it there, come Hell or high water. Yes, Wolfe loved “real men”. There was only one drawback: real men don’t fuck queers.1

Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1930s and 40s, a setting that he described as “paradise”—a paradise which he left as soon as he could and to which he never returned. Wolfe arrived in New York in 1962, quickly making a name for himself at the upstart New York magazine, part of a stable of crockery breakers collected by editor Clay Felker intended to take on the reigning literary establishment.

Wolfe bewildered one of the reigning grand old men of literary New York, Dwight MacDonald, because he seemed to have an entirely negative sensibility: everything struck him as ludicrous and contemptible, while nothing was worthy of praise.

In fact, Wolfe had an informed contempt for the old leftist intelligentsia of which MacDonald was one. His Ph.D. thesis at Yale had been The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942. He interviewed many of the members extensively, men who he surely knew regarded his own background—“southern bourgeoise*”2—with the same contempt with which he regarded them. Like many another curmudgeon—Malcolm Muggeridge, for example—Wolfe knew how important success is in this world, and how hard it is to obtain, and he hated people who pretended to despise it and in fact did despise those who labored to obtain nothing more than a middle-class place in life—those sweaty, common types devoid of grace and style and passion.

Unlike Muggeridge, however, Wolfe had no “Church”,3 no positive set of values to set up against the vast wasteland of literary Manhattan. Wolfe’s great handicap was that he simply wasn’t very smart. He couldn’t understand a great deal of what was being said and done in New York, and he wanted to dismiss it all as nonsense, but he lacked the intellectual vantagepoint and tools to do the job. He was smart enough, I think, to realize that the literary prestige of southern writers of the previous generation, who were both numerous and highly admired, was dependent on their imaginative power and not on any coherent set of values. The myth of the “Old South,” which defined and obsessed them, he discarded like like a cheap suit. But he found nothing to replace it. He could tear down, and he did, but he couldn’t build.

It’s not surprising that perhaps Wolfe’s most successful works were the famous essays “Radical Chic” and “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers”, which allowed him to give liberal hypocrisy on race the beating that it so richly deserved. The sight of the over-privileged Manhattan elite elbowing each other aside in order to prove who loved the “oppressed” the most—people with whom they had nothing in common and did not understand and whom they would not like if they did understand—was made to order for a bitter southern boy who could never express what he really felt—that things had been better for everyone under segregation and that these Yankee “geniuses” were destroying everything worthwhile in New York—everything that made life living—in order to pretend to a tolerance they neither felt nor practiced.

It still strikes me as curious that Wolfe remained resolutely apolitical. He certainly had a lot in common with the National Review’s hatred and contempt for “modern times”, and one would have thought that the advent of “Cowboy Ron” in the White House would have brought him out of the closet, as it were, but that didn’t happen. He seemed to prefer the company of the people he made fun of, the chattering class who ruled the Upper West Side. They were the in crowd, the fun crowd, the cool kids. It’s a pure guess, but perhaps his closely closeted homosexuality had permanently alienated him from conservatism—and religion in particular—while still a boy.

Wolfe’s fondness for the male form was openly on display in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), about Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest4 and leader of a gang of LSD dropping “Merry Pranksters”. Kesey, Wolfe informs us, had “a helluva build”, as did several other merry pranksters. I don’t regard “helluva” as “good writing”, and I don’t think “helluva build” is “guy talk”, as Wolfe wants us to believe. Do construction workers say stuff like “You know, Bob, you’ve got a helluva build there”? Or “Thanks, Jim. You’ve got a helluva build yourself”? I don’t think so.

I never read a piece by Wolfe that didn’t run too long. His books should have been magazine articles. Article length quickly became an exercise in literary dick measuring, and this was one area where Wolfe could keep up with the best of them. His famously florid “style”, which he used to “expand” his work, I found tediously mannered, repetitious, and predictable—his painful lack of imagination made more and more manifest even as he labored to conceal it.

In 1975 Wolfe took the bold step of being directly serious rather than satirical when he wrote The Painted Word, an attack on what was then the modern art establishment. There was certainly much to criticize, and in fact many of the critics that Wolfe attacked, rooted as they were in the essentially romantic notion of the artist as hero that flourished down through the 1950s, were as unimpressed as Wolf with the artists like Andy Warhol who detonated it in the sixties.5 But Wolfe unconsciously revealed himself as the earnest philistine he was, wondering why these goldurned fancy folk couldn’t paint a goldurned apple that looked like a goldurned apple. After all, everyone knows that Michael Angelo was the greatest sculptor ever, so why don’t modern sculptors sculpt like goldurned Michael Angelo?

Wolfe had much better luck with The Right Stuff, a series of essays on those ballsy bad boy patriots risking their asses for the gold old USA that originally ran as articles in Rolling Stone before being published as a book in 1979. The book was made into a widely heralded film that was a big flop, but Wolfe was sitting on enough cash, and enough acclaim, to attempt his great dream, a big novel in the style of the 19th century realists whom he (I guess) loved as a boy.

The result was The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in book form in 1987, a huge critical and financial success that I barely examined before concluding that the point of the book was to allow readers to hate black people in good conscience while allowing Wolfe to give full rein to his misogyny.6 The book is filled with conniving black hustlers and slutty rich bitches—though much if not most of the critical praise for the book assumes that Wolfe’s “real” target was Wall Street greed.

If that were not enough—and, of course, it is—Wolfe was a terrible novelist. “If you start with a type you end with a stereotype,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald explained.7 Wolfe started with a stereotype. His idea of character development was to say things like “he was a typical Wall Street lawyer”, followed a deluge of label dropping. Wolfe knew, and cared, far more about clothes than any straight man would.8

The Bonfire of the Vanities made Wolfe the most famous novelist in America in one stroke, to the helpless rage of geniuses like Norman Mailer and craftsmen like John Updike, Wolfe’s success doubly galling because it made them realize how much they wanted to be, not “great” writers, but rich and famous ones.

Like The Right Stuff, “The Bonfire of the Vanities* was made into a widely heralded film, directed by Brian De Palma and loaded with big stars, that was a massive flop—much more of one than The Right Stuff, because expectations were so high. It was expected by many to be the definitive putdown of Reagan-era excess, Hollywood somehow erasing Ronnie from America’s memory. Wolfe didn’t like the film—whether he started disliking it before or after it flopped isn’t really important. Anyway, he had the cash, and the book’s reputation—and Wolfe’s—was intact.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of his career was an anticlimax, though, if anything, Wolfe worked harder than ever. For the truly driven, work, not success, no matter how obsessively it be desired and pursued, is the true purpose. Only continuing labor can assuage the nameless fears that provoked the desire and the pursuit in the first place. Wolfe labored almost 12 years to produce A Man in Full, a stunningly awkward (awkward and bad) doorstop about a Georgia good old boy, Charlie Croker, who very unsurprisingly sports a “helluva build”, about which Wolfe finds it difficult to shut up. Critics, as they invariably do when confronted by a much heralded dog, struggled to avoid noticing how bad the book was. As I remember, no one had the nerve to actually call Wolfe a homo, but many did quote, at length, Wolfe’s obsessive and overwrought descriptions of pecs and abs. Six years later, in an even more absurd novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe tried to write himself into the persona of a young woman, somewhat in the manner of Henry James in Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, but with less success. Neither of these books made it onto either the big or the little screen.

I only read one piece by Wolfe that impressed me, and I was amazed at how good, and how unlike his standard work, it was. I’ve forgotten the title, but it probably ran in New York magazine sometime in the eighties. The “frame” was standard Wolfe, about an obese homeless man who terrorized respectable folks (to Wolfe’s immense delight) rampaging around the Automat9 in Times Square at six in the morning on Christmas day. What’s interesting is not the bread but the sandwich meat in between.

Wolfe very uncharacteristically offers some autobiography, reminiscing about his early days in New York, how he’d always volunteer to work when other people didn’t, at night and on the weekends and holidays, a good way to avoid having to socialize and, above all, an excuse to avoid meeting mom and dad. “I’m sorry, mom, they’ve got me working both Thanksgiving and Christmas again this year.” This schedule left him free, free to wander the streets of the great big toy that was New York at all hours all by himself. Amazingly, Wolfe tells us that he had a romantic notion of himself as the protector of the city, who kept an eye on things while everyone else slept. Imagine being in Times Square at six in the morning on Christmas Day! You can’t get more alone than that!10

Wolfe’s solitude was his freedom. The city itself was a never-ending spectacle, but the greatest spectacle of all was the people at the top, the endless struggle for status, the women struggling to be beautiful so men would find them attractive and the men struggling to be “great” so that women would find them attractive. Buildings are built, novels are written, home runs are hit, fashion shows are held, bonnets are purchased, eye shadow is applied, and all for what? All in pursuit of a simple biological function that can be performed, in the nude, actually, with none of these grandiose trappings whatsoever! This enormous structure, ever changing and brilliant, and infinite in its variety, built entirely on fucking! How couldn’t you laugh?

Afterwords The city that Wolfe enjoyed as a young man, where you could wander at all hours through many sections of the city with no fear of molestation, was destroyed by the great urban riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King. I lived, not in New York, but in Chicago from June 1967 through February 1968. In those days, the Loop swarmed with people until midnight during the week and later on Friday and Saturday (everything was closed on Sunday). When I visited Chicago years later it was deserted after the evening rush hour. Times Square in the seventies was devoid of commerce except for porno, prostitutes, and three-card monte dealers.

I hold the fact that Wolfe had a wife and two children to be irrelevant to my thesis. ↩︎

Wolfe graduated from St. Christopher’s, an Episcopalian prep school in Richmond, sure to provoke a smirk from any “committed” intellectual. He supposedly turned down an offer to attend Princeton in favor of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. I’ve been to both towns, though not as a student, and it’s hard to imagine someone as ambitious as Wolfe choosing Lexington over Princeton. It’s not unusual to meet people who tell you they switched from Amherst to the University of Maryland because they couldn’t stand the cold, or had to turn down a football scholarship at Ohio State because of a bad knee. ↩︎

Like Wolfe, Muggeridge started out as a “modernist” critic of modernism, but unlike Wolfe became tediously medieval, much in the tradition of more august figures like T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Evelyn Waugh. ↩︎

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was made into a once legendary 70’s film, starring Jack Nicolson and directed by Milos Forman, which no one seems to talk about any more. ↩︎

What was the “message” of a work by Andy Warhol? “Thanks for the moolah, sucker!” ↩︎

In the book, Wolfe sniggers at fashion models as “boys with breasts,” a gibe that strongly suggests how much he preferred boys without them. ↩︎

Wolfe, who was as light-fingered in his fiction as his non-fiction, “borrowed” the final twist for The Bonfire of the Vanities from Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby—the hero takes the fall for a charge of vehicular manslaughter even though a woman was behind the wheel. ↩︎

I always felt—in an unkindly way—that The Bonfire of the Vanities was popular among journalists because they could understand it. ↩︎

The Automat, basically a self-serve cafeteria, was a classic “only in New York” item. They were driven out of business by “modern” fast food outfits like MacDonald’s, but I believe they’ve been reinvented. ↩︎

Of course, with its massive Jewish population, and a sizable Chinese population as well, Christmas was not nearly as big a deal as in the “real America” that Wolfe had so gladly left behind. ↩︎

#Tom Wolfe

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