criticism Archive

2

“Cooking for Dogs,” continued…

By
Tom OHare
– March 1, 2012

So, haha! A couple of weeks ago I made fun of a cookbook and gave it a very SEO title, and what happens? Craig Walsh, husband of the author, came to her valiant defense in the comments. Haha! Yes! This really happened and I am just pleased as punch about the whole thing.

I would excerpt it, but the whole thing is worth reading in full for its wry British sensibility. Herewith:

Marjorie originally was asked to create over-the-top recipes for a glossy dog magazine (“Paw Luxuries”) printed in Boca Raton, Florida. The idea was to create recipes that nobody would cook for their dog. To Marjorie’s surprise, and that of the publisher, dog owners actually did prepare such goodies as Poochie’s Paella and Chicken with Black Cherry Sauce.

In fact, the US Department of Agriculture asked if they could license the photograph of the paella to include in a book to show Customs agents what paella looks like. I pointed out that the photograph clearly showed the word “DOG” on the side of the bowl, and that was fine with them. It was, they said, an excellent photograph of paella.

These recipes are online at http://luciesfarm.com/artman/publish/Goodies_for_Dogs_25/index.php

The over-the-top recipes, designed as such, led to an approach by a publisher to do a cookbook. It was originally to be glossy, coffee table book — but Random House wanted drawings so it could be sold as a companion to “Cooking for Birds” written by another author. See http://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Birds-Mark-Golley/dp/1845372581 You can buy a copy for 56 cents via Amazon.

Say what you will of Marjorie’s recipes, but our dogs are happy and healthy. And at least we keep the cook, maid, and butler employed — rather than turfing them out to live under a motorway bridge somewhere dank.

Marjorie is flattered that her long out-of-print book is still getting reviews. We have several boxes of new copies in the basement if anyone is interested. I’ll send the footman to fetch them.

It’s nice that he’s a good sport about it all. I didn’t realize it was a meta-parody of dog owners. Or something. Anyway. Cheerio, Craig! I really do love you!

1

Sometimes a Great Notion (Or, On Permanent Marks)

By
Tom OHare
– August 15, 2011

I started re-reading my favorite novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, again over the weekend. I found a copy when I was going through books on Friday, and since my own had long since been lost to whoever I lent it out to in Portland, I figured I would keep the tattered one I came across (I couldn’t sell it anyway; but, in all honesty, I’ve taken home around a hundred books I could’ve sold, and I’m just making excuses here). Ken Kesey’s meandering stream-of-consciousness prose and richly etched characters (as well as me knowing where everything is going, plot-wise, even if the details are a bit fuzzy) drew me right back in. I’m already worried about Joby’s inevitable death, about Lee and Hank butting heads, about Viv and Draeger in the bar at the end of the story, rolling their eyes at the obstinacy of the anti-heroes, even if they can’t help but admire them a little bit.

It’s a book that inspired me to move 3,000 miles across the country once; to spend three years in Oregon — three years of rain, volcanic mountains, rocky coastlines, unemployment, bad credit, and struggle. Three years on a bicycle, in a shitty 1984 Subaru, in houses with no heat. Gardens, lovers, deadlines missed, friends made and departed. All the wonderful nothing you can put into wanderlust turned semi-permanent (no matter how tenuous). It’s easily the book that had the greatest impact on my life so far, and reading it again is both a lovely stroll down memory lane and an exercise in retrospective self-doubt. Of course (turning the page) I see what I was thinking, but what the hell (turning it again) was I thinking?

Before I left Portland, I walked to my local tattoo parlor one day and asked, “How much would it cost to get some text done on my arm?” The man behind the counter, younger than me, said it was something like $35 an inch, depending on the size, and (me being somewhat flush at the time, relatively speaking) I sat down in his chair and told him to put “never give an inch” in Courier New on my arm. Down the vain, towards my left palm. Never give an inch. It would be there forever.

Will had already gotten the same tattoo, except on his foot in a drunken haze in Missoula, Montana (during which roadtrip I stayed at our mutual flophouse and broke my fifth metatarsal playing softball)… but this was years later when I got myself tattooed. And I wound up thinking that my gesture was different from his. It was different from Henry Stamper’s, too, when he nailed the slogan above his eldest son’s crib in lieu of a religious plaque. Will and Henry wielding “Never give an inch” were somehow more defiant than me. My wielding it was simply a grim acknowledgement of what had gotten me to where I was in the first place: about to drive alone across the country a failure, tired, beat down, in a shitty Subaru with an alternator on the fritz and an axle quite literally about to fall out of place. Wouldn’t that be fun descending the Rockies? Isn’t that what karma delivers when you don’t give an inch? The Rocky Mountains?

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2

Atlas Shrugged (The Movie!) is Probably Not Worth Your Time

By
Tom OHare
– April 18, 2011

Atlas Shrugged: Part I debuted on 300 screens last week. The movie adaptation of horrible-person Ayn Rand’s famous shitty novel has so far been panned by critics, generating an aggregate score over at Rotten Tomatoes of 9% — out of a possible 100%! Which is pretty bad, if you think about it! Which diehard Objectivists clearly have not (Audience reviews hover at 85% positive).

Over at Gin & Tacos, Ed’s penned what might be the best review of the movie I’ve read so far:

Most adults have had the experience of sitting through a live performance by small children wherein the low entertainment value is offset by the fact that among the performers is one’s child (or grandchild, etc.) What would otherwise be excruciating is kinda cute because, well, look at little Billy! That’s our boy. Now imagine that you have been dropped into a random grade school full of strangers and you must sit through the same Christmas play. None of the children are yours. It is two hours long. And it consists of children reading excerpts from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and instructional manuals from various home appliances. You’ve just watchedAtlas Shrugged, and it didn’t even cost you $9.

In fairness it did not cost me $9 either. For the first time in my 32 years I sneaked into a movie without paying, as it was clearly in my rational self-interest to do so. To financially reward the people who made this…thing…smacked a little too much of altruism.

The rest of the review is equally awesome.

Roy Edroso’s take is a very strong runner-up:

OK, [the source material is] ridiculous, but no more so than Rand’s The Fountainhead, out of which King Vidor, Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal made a silly and operatic but perfectly entertaining film.

That was what I hoped for as I watched the thing last night, because as much fun as it is to slag rotten movies, it is much better to be surprised by a good one, especially when you’ve reached the stage in life where two hours in front of a stinker sets you dreaming of the warm couch and leftover sesame chicken that you left back home. But it is my great regret to inform you that Atlas Shrugged: Part I is neither good nor good-bad, but bad-bad-bad-bad. I dreamed, not of sesame chicken, but of my own swift and merciful death, and that of the director, not necessarily in that order. It is not a pleasurable surprise, not a hoot, nor an outrage; it is Rand’s granite crushed, reconstituted, and spread across the screen with steamrollers.

0

Virtual Unmade Beds

By
NB Reilly
– March 24, 2011

I can remember the first time I heard about the movie Unmade Beds — Argentine director Alexis Dos Santos’s second film, which trails two young people circling mostly dead ends while they hole up in a squat in London. It was sometime in 2009, probably September, maybe the 2nd, as that was the day the New York Times published Manohla Dargis’s review of the movie. I didn’t have any particular feeling for the film going in — I’d never heard of Dos Santos and frankly still don’t have a very solid handle on Manohla’s preferences. (I get the sense that she’s more eccentric than A.O., who, incidentally, I kind of respect for liking movies I pretend not to have enjoyed, in the theater, at 10 bucks a pop.)

In any case, the NYT film cabal made Unmade Beds a “Critics’ Pick,” and I liked Manohla’s review, although I don’t remember much of it. Something about messy beds and messy lives, which sounds about right. I’ve intentionally avoided re-reading it (in part so as not to be discouraged by its quality), so I can’t really tell you much else about it.

See, here’s the thing: after I read Manohla’s review — undoubtedly from the hungover solo comfort of my bed — I immediately looked the movie up in Netflix, only to find that it wasn’t on Instant Watch and wasn’t even out on DVD. Distressed, I clicked a button, and Netflix told me it would be sent to me whenever it was available, which I assumed would be very soon. In the meantime, I used the movie as an excuse to check in with the attractive clerk at my local video store, which I haven’t visited since and wouldn’t be surprised to find replaced by a Duane Reade. Or a stadium.

In the intervening year-and-a-half, Unmade Beds has been relegated to a periodic obsession tucked into the far recesses of my ambient desires. This condition’s symptoms have involved compulsive check-ins with Netflix and occasional drunken conversations about the shift in the function of the film review since the invention of the Internet, and — and at this point of the monologue I would start to get didactic — you know, even the videocassette. Before the videocassette came along — which seems so impossibly long ago, I would prattle on — a movie review was a precious commodity — something to inform you whether or not to go see a film that might only be in the theaters for a few days, and which, if you missed it, you’d likely never get the chance to see again. (Think about that for a second. Imagine reading a really shitty review of Casablanca and feeling like a chump for the next 30 years. Or until whenever it came back around to your local theater, which was probably more like every year for the next 30 years. Whatever, you get the point.) Now the review merely helps you wade through a jungle of crap that’s constantly accessible in a variety of legitimate and/or clandestine online forms. Instead of telling you what to watch, the modern film review now just tells you what to avoid.

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0

Jon Stewart: Hipster Propagandist?

By
Tom OHare
– March 21, 2011

Jen Paton at 3 Quarks Daily examines the role of irony in political discourse, and argues that not even the liberal darling Jon Stewart can avoid falling into the trappings of the unintentional propagandist:

…Fox blaming (in the UK, also known as Dail Mail blaming) is the kind of scapegoating by which “the liberal elite” attempt to let ourselves off the hook. Yes, much has been made of the relative “informedness” of, for example,  DailyShow viewers, and Daily Showwatchers would seem to be the polar opposite of Fox’s viewership. But remember: the Daily Show is a programme that gives us reports on “Mess O’Potamia”, and which, during the 2006 Palestinian elections, told us: “Palestinians flocked to the polls to elect … maybe this guy with a beard … or … I don’t know … maybe that guy with a beard.” (Ross and York 2007). Despite it’s self-conscious and highly ironic tone – or perhaps because of it – Ross and York conclude that The Daily Show“reproduces, rather than interrogates,” the tropes of “conventional news journalism.” (ibid, 2007). Just last week (14 March 2011), a segment satirized a trip to find missing Wisconsin senators as a piece to seek out “warlords” in hiding – complete with jokes about how Wisconsonites “treat their women” and vaguely Middle Eastern music playing over the correspondent’s journey into Midwestern backcountry.

There’s a self satisfaction among American liberals about the Daily Show, that those of us who watch the programme “get it” – both politics and the media – in a way others do not. The polls which show Daily Show viewers tend to know a bit more about politics and current affairs only reinforces this feeling of smugness. It’s a smugness that seems to permeate academic writing about The Daily Show as well: one scholar describes Stewart as “there to help move the nation from a simple submission to the White House’s propaganda about 9/11 and the war on terror” to a “more engaged, thoughtful critique of current events.” (Dettmar 2006). But what if something of what Stewart does is equally “propaganda”? And if it is, what is it propaganda for?

I’ve long had some beef with Stewart — or more particularly, with my fellow leftists’ uncritical infatuation with him. That the man is a better social critic than the blowhards on the cable news circuit should not shield him from the kind of criticism we regularly direct their way. Anyway. Go ahead and read the whole thing.

(To be fair to Stewart, I should add that calling Tucker Carlson a “dick” on national television almost excuses him for any shortcomings. Almost.)