Article: 1005 of alt.etext Path: news.cic.net!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!ddsw1!redstone.interpath.net!mercury.interpath.net!not-for-mail From: ctporter@mercury.interpath.net (Chris Porter) Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,alt.zines,alt.etext Subject: (news)letter 2:1 Date: 27 Oct 1994 08:07:25 -0400 Organization: Interpath -- Public Access UNIX for North Carolina Lines: 320 Message-ID: <38o55u$ooc@mercury.interpath.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: mercury.interpath.net Xref: news.cic.net rec.arts.books:113217 alt.zines:6340 alt.etext:1005 (news)letter "Say the thing with which you labor." Thoreau from the porter micro.press Volume 2, Number 1 October 24, 1994 _________________________________________________________________ Please send suggestions and submissions. To get on the mailing list, send your name and address to: CTPorter 317 S. Tate St., Apt. 3, Greensboro, NC 27403 or e-mail ctporter@mercury.interpath.net Your input is appreciated. Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction passes the most strenuous of tests: I saw it twice within a week and even enjoyed it more the second go around. It's so intense that throughout the first viewing I was on the edge of my seat wondering what badness was about to come down. Knowing what would happen the second time through I was able to concentrate more on the little things. For example the acting: everyone does well but I automatically think of John Travolta because his role was so different from what I expected, and he pulls it off wonderfully. He plays Vincent Vega, a muscleman for the kingpin Marcellus Wallace, and Travolta makes you love the character. His funny little swagger, the mannerisms (especially when drugged), and the expressions -- I didn't know Travolta could pull something like this off. Set in Los Angeles, Pulp Fiction covers a couple of days in the life of various characters, with the different stories tied together and not necessarily presented in chronological order. Vegas' sidekick, Jules (Samuel Jackson), recites a Bible passage to his victims and learns, finally, what that verse might mean; Bruce Willis plays the boxer Butch Coolidge, who decides not to throw his fight, contrary to Wallace's orders, but who redeems himself to the big man through his works; Quentin Tarantino plays the square Jimmy who fears his wife's reaction and so wants the dead body out of the garage pronto; Harvey Keitel is the Mr. Fixit Winston Wolf, who rids the garage of said body, pronto. The little ways in which the different stories are tied together were fun as well. Cellular phones figured in several of the parts; breakfast and what one ate for breakfast kept recurring; as did the more obvious concern with time -- always something needed to be accomplished and part of the emotional weight the movie imposes on the viewer is the question of whether the time constraints will be met: will Bruce Willis ever make his way back down the steps, armed as he is? Will Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) pull through? Will the bad guys (both pairs) ever leave the restaurant? If you don't like four-letter words or the prospect of watching killing, save yourself the nickel and don't go. This is a violent movie but it doesn't show too much, graphically. There are some scenes with a lot of blood (who can forget the bit of brain stuck in Samuel Jackson's afro?), but I'd bet that even with those more graphic scenes there's less mayhem in Pulp Fiction than in a Rambo movie. Tarantino gets your heart pounding, expecting more violence than you actually get, and we identify more with the characters as personalities and so when they meet a violent end we cringe a little more than when a bargeload of terrorists gets blown to bits in a Rambo installment. Do Unto Others ... Quiz Show is Robert Redford's treatment of a scandal surrounding the fixing of game shows in the late fifties, centering on a show called Twenty-One. Charles Van Doren (played by Ralph Fiennes) is the aristocrat who parlayed his participation into a Time cover and a consulting job on one of the studio's morning shows. When it was discovered that the show was rigged, Van Doren's star fell but quick. John Turturro plays Herb Stempel, the contestant run off the show to make way for Van Doren. Stempel was the big winner but wasn't endearing enough for the American public, a role fit by Van Doren, the rich WASP kid from the literary family. Stempel felt humiliated by being instructed to lose by failing at a question he could have answered in his sleep. Rob Morrow plays the congressional investigator Richard Goodwin, whose effort to get to the bottom of a very innocuous complaint Stempel made to the Grand Jury springs the whole story on the nation. We're supposed to feel, watching this movie, that this episode was some kind of watershed in our history, that the corporate entities responsible were evil and that we poor John Q. Publics were dupes to their conniving, believing the stuff that entertained us was real. I heard one patron, who would remember, speaking after the movie to another, who wouldn't, that "we were all shocked when this happened." Here America rushed home, traffic stopped in the streets, to watch a show (and others like it) that was dishonestly controlled by the corporate sponsors. These shows weren't "real." The corporate executives are made out to be evil in contrast to the American public, and Stempel and Goodwin, the Average Man's good. There is certainly nothing different about that. But it bothers me that the message would be so heavy, so dominant, in a film which itself manipulates history. I read the account of the episode in Goodman's book, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties and it just doesn't jive with the treatment given it in Redford's film. Most obviously the case involved less digging by Goodwin; in the movie his tireless detective work leads to the breaking of the case. The movie, by altering a very key detail -- a judge presiding over the case refuses to release the details given to the Grand Jury while in reality Goodwin received those records -- creates a totally different story. Out of what was actually publicizing the complaints of a wronged man the viewer sees a huge corporate conspiracy against which the little man fights and wins. This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Oliver Stone is derided for playing loose with the facts in JFK (I've never seen it), but Robert Redford? Who would have thought that Redford would welcome the changes to plot and character that Hollywood demands? And the movie is fine -- I enjoyed it. It is anti-Hollywood in that there is absolutely no sex or even a romantic interest in the movie. But to be guilty of the same issues that it thoroughly derides strikes me as very hypocritical and dumb -- someone wasn't thinking. The Low-Life Boswell Martin Amis' London Fields follows the fortunes of some London characters set in the near future. The narrator is an author who decides to write a novel about the goings-on of several local characters, and he finds ways to insinuate himself into their lives in order to know what's going on more completely. Keith Talent is the local pub's big man, a ne'er-do-well who longs to strike it big in darts; Guy Clinch is the well-to-do idle crony ridiculously easy to fool; Nicola Six is the femme fatale playing the one off the other in order to fulfill her own plans -- she wants one of them to murder her. I really enjoyed this story at the beginning, and I read over two hundred pages of it, but it really bogged me down. The daily lives of these characters, even given the novelty of the plot, just gets too boring when Nicola Six is in the middle of her scheming, making sure Guy falls hopelessly in love with her by playing the inexperienced virgin who wants a baby, while humoring Keith with the promise of some out-of-this-world sex. So little happens and their lives don't interest me, finally; it just gets old. I Love LA What is it about Los Angeles that gives rise to such fascinating pulp? The past couple of weeks I've been wondering why the mysteries I've been reading (Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy) just couldn't take place anywhere else. My personal knowledge of LA, gained from a week spent at an Anaheim campground, doesn't give me any hint. But there is that aura of LA, built by fast money and growth, that supposedly attracted a fairly brutal element. James Ellroy's LA Confidential proved addictive, though I still don't know why. All of the characters seem to bleed one into the other, and it's very difficult at times to keep straight in the head whether "Bud" is the well-connected policeman on the rise to Chief of Detectives, the cop who takes such pleasure in punishing wife-beaters, or the cop who works hand-in-hand with the sensational Hollywood rag. It must be the plot that makes this story of crooked cops, show business and the underworld with its porn, drugs and deception so compelling. The very first chapter features a shootout worthy of Rambo, and yet there is this conviction that it could all be somewhat true to life. If there was a hood who could blow away a platoon of hired guns, wouldn't he be found in LA? And the level of police corruption described in LA Confidential, set in the 1950s, made me think of the LA police and their current reputation, after the Rodney King beating and the OJ Simpson case. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe faces off against the LA badguys in Farewell, My Lovely which was wonderful, while The Little Sister, written ten years later, I quit reading. Farewell, My Lovely is full of Chandler's great phrases -- the man could flat out write and I imagine him with a pocket notebook capturing such turns of phrase like, "He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck" (1); "as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food" (1); or "He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker" (133). Those were chosen at random but the whole book is full of the like. In trying to analyze the book I had the impression that there were only a handful of commas in its 250 pages. That's not quite the case but his style is straightforward. I felt as if the book had its own momentum, I was pushed the whole way through. The Little Sister I didn't enjoy as much because Chandler seems more aware of his success -- Marlowe strikes me, in this mystery, as being cocky, whereas in the earlier work a lot of Marlowe's charm is his being behind the eight ball. In the earlier work Marlowe reacts; in the later novel he acts. Zines So here I am marvelling at the synchronicity of life -- the new Crunchy Music Stuff zine, featuring the opening salutation, "Greetings Earthlings!" was there atop an advertisement for the 1995 Chevrolet Lumina Minivan on the back cover of the October 17 Newsweek, which also said, "Greetings, Earthlings." That is the stuff of which the (news)letter is made, and I guess I should slide very easily into an analysis of the independent music store and corporate advertising budgets, but I was stopped in my thought processes by one of Joel Bowman's "Indelicate Indefinitions" in the Crunchy Stuff: number seven (! -- a mystic number, surely) defines a "coinkydink" as "observing minor, irrelevant coincidences in one's life to which one assigns a hidden 'meaning.'" Who, here, has life all wrong, myself or Joel Bowman? þ Jack Szwergold puts out the Super Stupid Slambook zine, one I consistently enjoy (for details write him at jis@panix.com). I saw a plug for his collection of cartoons, the Super Stupid Sideshow. I packed a one dollar bill into an envelope, sent it to the S.S. Sideshow (PO Box 242, Village Station, NY, NY 10014), and got back the real thing. But not only did I get the little booklet of twelve cartoons, but if you send in the page with the advertisement, he'll draw a cartoon on it for you, your own personal Szwergold. So actually you get thirteen cartoons for the price of twelve which comes out to seven point seven cents per (there's that number again!) -- what a deal! þ Arthur Hlavaty, who publishes the Derogatory Reference zine, has started a football-related zine called "Freakishly Overdeveloped Geeks," in which he recaps the week's football games (write hlavaty@panix.com). Here, in a slightly edited account, is his basic philosophy of rooting for football teams: I root for passing teams against ball-control teams. This is important. It may be one of those Essential Human Differences, where one side can never hope to understand the other. Aerial warfare is fun to watch; trench warfare is boring to watch. Therefore, aerial-warfare teams should win. This is Truth to me, and all my perceptions of the game are filtered through it. A man after my own heart. It's too bad he's forced to watch the Giants and the Jets every week, though in this area we're faced with watching the Redskins, and that hasn't proved too exciting for some time. þ Another zine that I found was the October/November issue of Stay Free!, put out in Chapel Hill. The back issues of Stay Free! are available on the World Wide Web (http://sunsite.unc.edu/stayfree), and it's a quality publication. The graphics are wonderful and there are some interesting articles, like one by Jason Torchinsky on employees who used their menial jobs to do other things. Albert Einstein is an example: he wrote five important papers while working in the Swiss Patent Office. Undemanding jobs can be a boon because you have more free time than your buddies who hustle to climb the corporate ladder. So there might be something to be said for being a sandwich artist at Subway, mightn't there? Art I've been working on collages and they never seem to come out just right. I've been especially impressed by the work of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who was associated with the Dada movement in the early 1920s. These collages, which he called his "merz- paintings" ("merz" being part of the German word for "commerce), employ various found objects and they always seem perfect -- one more piece or one less just wouldn't be right. This example, "The Cherry Picture," I found in a collection of collages entitled, simply, Kurt Schwitters. Quote of the Week Overheard in a Charlotte store over the weekend, a bunch of good old boys sitting around waxing wise with their cigars, and the just-out-of-high-school know-it-all finds himself on stage. All the older ears are open to his analysis: You don't have to use your head if you're a liberal. You don't have to think. That's what's wrong with them. I wish I'd thought of something particularly stunning that would have embarrassed this guy, something that would have had those old men talking about me for months ("remember that fella who ...?") but I guess the situation was too perfect -- all I could do was to look him in the eye from across the room and laugh. For all those artist types, Matt Russ asked me to mention the upcoming show at the Tate St. Coffee Shop. Any work that features the theme of coffee is eligible for a show that will run from November 15th through December 15th. Whether your work deals with "a coffee cup, a coffee house, a bag, a plant, a bean, a dream, or even a coffee buzz," bring it in, just as long as the piece is suitable for hanging. You might ask him for further details at (910) 275-2754.