Steven Rubio's Online Life

life itself

Roger Ebert’s recent death prompted me to read his 2011 book, Life Itself: A Memoir. When it comes to film critics and memoirs, I’m with Pauline Kael, who is quoted at the top of this blog: “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.” Roger Ebert reviewed thousands of films, and taking that enormous body of work alongside his television appearances, we might be forgiven for thinking we already know the man.

There is very little in Life Itself about specific movies; it’s not a compilation of reviews. He writes a lot about movies in general, though. There are chapters about Russ Meyer, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese, and Werner Herzog. These chapters are very much in the memoir tradition, in the way a traditional movie review is not.

But the majority of Life Itself goes beyond movies, offering a picture of Ebert that isn’t part of his film writing. It’s not that a Pauline Kael (or a Steven Rubio) had no life outside of her film writing. But she injected so much of her self into her reviews that over time we got to “know her”. Ebert certainly used a personal style in his reviews, but with Life Itself, he wants to record what his life was like when he wasn’t reviewing movies.

Which is why, as we reach the 12th chapter, we’re still only up to high school. By then, we’ve already learned a lot about growing up in Illinois in the 40s and 50s. Ebert has specific memories of his past, and he trusts those memories (perhaps more than he should). His experiences, related to us via his fine writing, are interesting in a generic way, by which I mean it’s not crucial that we’re reading about the childhood of a famous man. We’re reading about an American childhood.

This is followed by several chapters about college, and the period just after he graduated. By chapter 20, we’re knee deep in the life of a journalist at the tail end of the “Front Page” era. Ebert is a fine raconteur, and his tales of people, famous and not, are fascinating.

Things proceed in a roughly chronological pattern: a Studebaker he loved, Gene Siskel, his marriage to Chaz (she’s present throughout the book, Ebert sees everything through her eyes, even the decades before they met), all the way to his 50th high school reunion. Outside of an odd tendency to repeat himself, these are all delightful to read, again whether the subject is something about which we know (his partnership with Siskel) or something about which we are clueless (I had no idea Studebakers were ever considered anything but a joke). He finishes with three chapters that form something of an elegy, as if he wanted to be sure to get it all down before he died and someone else’s version became public. Just before that, though, he includes a chapter about Studs Terkel, because after all, if you knew Studs, you’d be remiss not to spend some time on his life. He calls Terkel “the greatest man I knew well … the most widely and deeply loved man I ever hope to know.” Studs belongs at the end, alongside the passages about the end of life, because he exuded so much life, himself.

I think people would enjoy this book, even if they didn’t know much about Ebert’s film work. But for those of us who followed him right up to his last years, when he became King of the Internet, Life Itself is more than an interesting memoir about an interesting man who knew interesting people. It fills in gaps we didn’t know existed, adding depth to his legacy. Perhaps Kael should have written those memoirs, after all.

she did love her bad boys

Richard Kramer recently wrote a brief memoir essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books that was reprinted in Salon. (The titles are instructive: the original was titled “A Broad’s Laugh: On Pauline Kael”, while Salon called it “Pauline Kael was my mentor”. Kramer leads off with an anecdote about visiting Kael at her home in 1969, when he was 16 years old.

She led me to a table, and as she got me a soda, a large man emerged from the bathroom, tucking in his shirt. He nodded to me and didn’t offer a hand.

“Oh, fuck you, Bob,” she said. “You can shake hands with him. He’s not going to take a job from you.” “Bob” obeyed. “This man,” she told me then, “is our Next Great American Director, honey. And so far, I’m the only one who knows it. But that’ll change.” Next Great, etc. (yes, Robert Altman), left us and she told me about the movie he’d just finished, a comedy about the Korean War that was so good and so fresh the studio was talking about not releasing it — that before I arrived, he had been in tears.

“Peckinpah is a crybaby, too,” she said. “The tough guys always are. I don’t know about John Ford, but I’m not sure I want to know about John Ford.” (Thirty-five years later I sat across the aisle from Altman on a plane. He slept the whole way, so it wasn’t until we were both at baggage claim that I got up the nerve to introduce myself and share the scene of that long-ago afternoon. He thought for a moment, mumbled something, and then, adjusting his expensive suede cowboy hat, said, “Pauline Kael … Pauline Kael … Oh. Right. That’s the cunt who destroyed me.” And that is why one should never approach one’s idols at baggage claim.) I’m convinced that Pauline would have laughed at that, though. She did love her bad boys.

One of the things Kramer does well is show how Pauline Kael could be the person who promoted the career of a Great American Director, and also be the person who was later denigrated by that same GAD, and also be the kind of person who did right by a 16-year-old, and continued to do right by him until she died. It’s also noteworthy that a short essay about a critic who has been dead for more than a decade, who in fact quit reviewing movies all the way back in 1991, is just as interesting now as it would have been when she was still alive.

And finally, it’s noteworthy that Kramer’s piece is written as a memoir. There is something about Kael that inspires a personal response. Of course, she was famously personal in her critical work. Yet it was a constructed “personal”. Brian Kellow’s fine, loving, warts-and-all biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, told even obsessives a lot of things about the critic that we had never known before. We felt we knew her, but what we knew was “Pauline Kael”, not necessarily Pauline Kael. For this reason, a short, anecdotal look at the “real” Pauline from someone like Kramer, who knew her, is welcomed.

Kramer also helps us understand how Kael’s influence went beyond movies (which is perhaps why her influence still seems relevant). He writes, “I see that what I got from her was less a way of looking at movies (although her way has never left me) than a way of looking at life.”

Ultimately, Kael’s influence on this blog has been made clear over the years, most importantly in the tagline: “I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have.” Those of us who spend a lot of time (I guess 11+ years of blogging counts as “a lot of time”) following that idea know what it means to reveal “Steven Rubio” while keeping Steven Rubio slightly more private.

tracy landecker on the shangri-las: mwah!

Rhino has a series of digital books they call “Single Notes” that, as far as I can tell, are meant to resemble an extended version of liner notes for albums. Are You There God? It’s Me, Mary: The Shangri-Las and the Punk Rock Love Song by Tracy Landecker looks at the musical and cultural impact of the Shangri-Las, arguing effectively that they were precursors to a lot of different music in the 70s and beyond.

Landecker offers fairly detailed commentary on the Shangri-Las’ hits. Those comments are especially welcomed for the lesser-remembered songs that don’t show up on every 60s anthology: “Out in the Streets”, “Past, Present, and Future”, “He Cried”. But the heart of the book, and of the band, lies in the classics: their first hit, “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand)”; their most famous song, “Leader of the Pack” (for me the one time camp overwhelms the band); my personal fave “I Can Never Go Home Anymore”; and “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” with its immortal opening happily stolen by the New York Dolls, “When I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in love, L-U-V!”

I may be misjudging the audience for this book, but for me, Landecker spends too much time in a relatively short essay connecting the band to the events of the day. They seem perfunctory, but then, if you’re reading it and have no idea who the Shangri-Las were, I suppose the brief summary of the 60s is necessary.

What Landecker does best is make the band, and in particular lead singer Mary Weiss, into icons that would ring true to future fans like Landecker herself. As I read, I thought she was stretching it a bit, making a bigger case for the Shangri-Las than they deserved. But reading the book sent me to the music, and it took barely a minute for me to realize Landecker was right: the Shangri-Las really were great. And Landecker makes all of the group’s songs seem like a coherent whole. This was not just a “hits” band.

So if you have an e-reader, get yourself a copy, read it, and crank up the music. Rhino has even provided a Spotify playlist from Landecker to accompany the book.

Here’s “I Can Never Go Home Anymore”:

http://youtu.be/dYdr-MslXkw

if i were a villain

A few years ago, just before Daniel Craig helped revitalize the James Bond franchise, I wrote an essay on Bond Villains that was published in a book titled James Bond in the 21st Century: Why We Still Need 007. That essay, “If I Were a Villain, But Then Again, No”, is available for free on the Smart Pop Books website until Monday:

http://www.smartpopbooks.com/if-i-were-a-villain-but-then-again-no/

My assignment was to write about the best Bond Villain. I chose Klaus Maria Brandauer in Never Say Never Again. Here’s a brief excerpt:

As the film progresses, it’s hard not to imagine Brandauer in the hero’s role. Connery’s return is decent enough; he’s in great shape, and the maturity of his passing years fits well with his performance. But Brandauer is like a better, blonder Roger Moore, or even, to project forward in time, Pierce Brosnan, and his presence works off Connery’s, gives us the opportunity to simultaneously examine the original and a rather kinky alternate version, one that is just as suave and witty and worldly as Connery, but off-kilter enough to suggest new possibilities for the character of 007.

the cards you were dealt

Not long after the end of the Rising tour in 2003 Bruce started taking antidepressants. Within days he felt like a shroud had been lifted from his shoulders. “It was like, get me this stuff now, and keep it coming,” he recalls. …

And yet Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. “You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt,” he says. “These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.”

Peter Ames Carlin’s new biography of Bruce Springsteen, simply titled Bruce, does a good job of simultaneously showing why Bruce is a hero to so many, and reminding us that Bruce is just another human with all of the imperfections that implies. In the course of his long career, Bruce has made very few mistakes once he hits the stage; he rewards the audience’s faith. Since we don’t know him personally, many of us imagine that the artistry and camaraderie and energy all carry over once the show has ended. So it’s a bit surprising to find that Bruce has a temper, or that the reason he gives his all as a performer is because music always comes first, at the expense of personal relationships (although this may have ebbed somewhat once he had kids).

I don’t identify with Bruce Springsteen. Well, there’s 1978, when I was five years into my life as a steelworker and I felt at the least that I was at one with the narrators of many of the Darkness songs. But for the most part, I identify with the situations and characters Bruce describes, not with the author himself. As his fame grew, I often wondered how he could still find a way to put into words and music things that I thought he no longer had to feel. The darker songs on The River, and all of Nebraska, hit home for me, but I didn’t think of them as particularly personal for Bruce. He had never been a singer/songwriter in the James Taylor mode, had never written about navel-gazing, and so I saw the doomed couple in “The River” as just another in the large array of characters Bruce had written about.

Still, one of my favorite of all his lyrics comes in “Backstreets”, when he admits that he is like all of us, stranded, forced to confess that he is hiding. I should have understood that no matter how his fame grew, he was also always that guy in “Backstreets”.

Carlin’s book gives us a peek at that guy. It’s not that the book is filled with gossipy stuff you can tell to friends. It’s that we learn the downside of being so dedicated to your art. I’m reminded of an artist I once knew, a man of some fame in various parts of the world. “I’m an asshole,” he said. “All artists are assholes.” I don’t know … I bet Jean Renoir wasn’t an asshole. But I got my friend’s point: art mattered more than anything else, which meant eventually, the artist would have to be an asshole. Sometimes in the biography, Bruce is a bit of an asshole. Not often … the truth is, he seems like a pretty good guy for someone as rich and famous as he is. But it expands our sense of him and his art when we know some of what happened when the stage lights went out.

Which takes me to the quote at the top of this post. I knew a lot of the things in Carlin’s book, and we all know that Bruce has used therapy to get himself through rough times. But to find that his chemistry didn’t always allow him to be his best, and that he finally figured out there might be a way to control that … I had never heard that story. And since one of my fears since I started taking bipolar meds was that I’d turn into a zombie, it’s reassuring to know that the person who has so much commitment and energy is, if anything, more productive than ever now. Yep, Bruce is like all of us, stranded and hiding on the backstreets. He’s done something about it. And so did I.

manuel vázquez montalbán, “offside”

My review of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho detective novel, Offside, is online at Souciant magazine’s website:

“Spain, the False Nine”

Carvalho’s nostalgia is balanced by the fact that he had been a political prisoner under Franco. And many of Carvalho’s observations of Barcelona’s decline (in his eyes) are on target. He isn’t thinking back to a time when everything was good as much as he is bemoaning the negative aspects of “freedom” under a constitutional monarchy, where the strong can still swallow the weak. This is not the typical nostalgia for a better time, but rather the realization that there was a time when one could hope for a better future; now that the future has become the present, Carvalho knows that some things haven’t changed in the right ways.

ball four, revisited

This wasn’t the first time I revisited Jim Bouton’s book about the 1969 Seattle Pilots baseball team. He seems to come out with a new edition every decade or so, and I generally re-read it then. This time around, my birthday came up, I saw there was a Kindle version, I put it on my wish list, and my baseball-loving sister got it for me (thanks!).

Ball Four is of interest, even to a non-fan of baseball, because of its historical importance as one of the first sports books to reveal what the game was “really” like. It wasn’t the first … not sure what is, although Jim Brosnan wrote two similar books in the early 60s, The Long Season and Pennant Race, that have long been favorites of mine. Nowadays, it might seem quaint to realize there was a time (the early 70s) when the baseball establishment could be in an uproar because Bouton (and his co-writer, Leonard Shecter) talked about players cussing and taking amphetamines and getting drunk on their off-days (and sometimes their on-days). Brosnan went through the same thing, although as I recall (not having re-read his books for a few years … perhaps it’s time) his books didn’t have quite as much a feel of exposé as Bouton’s did.

But most of the interest for the non-fan comes from that historical impact. The diary aspects, with its chronicling of the drudgery of a six-month season, are great for baseball aficionados, but I don’t suppose others would care. Having said that, Ball Four ultimately works because it is a book filled with characters, and the fact that they are real people makes it even better. Apparently Joe Schultz, manager of the Pilots, was angered by his portrayal in the book. Which is sad, because Schultz comes across as a great character, someone placed in an impossible situation (managing a poor, expansion ball team that lasted only one season before moving to Milwaukee) who used an idiosyncratic use of language to cajole his team into whatever heights they might possibly reach.

That’s what is most enjoyable about revisiting Ball Four, reading once again about Bouton and Schultz and the rest. The response of the time is historically interesting, but in the end, what I like best is Joe Schultz telling the guys, “Boys, bunting is like jacking off. Once you learn how you never forget.”

For an interesting, positive contemporaneous review of the book from a perhaps surprising source, check out Robert “Dean of American Rock Critics” Christgau’s piece, “Bouton Baseball”:

Bouton is the kind of iconoclast who is so insecure in his chosen isolation that he seems to delight in making other men look foolish. To an extent, this may be salutory. Even the most skeptical fan forgets that those names in the newspapers and figures on the screen are as frail as you or me, and this oversight is compounded by the daily dope from journalists whose living depends on acquiring more dope tomorrow. But it's hard to say how essential such an illusion may be to the continued power of the game. The baseball men who complain most bitterly about this book never claim it is untrue, only unfair--because it examines baseball's errants so steadfastly--and injudicious--because it reveals what the kids are better off not knowing. Unfair it isn't: Bouton obviously loves baseball and despite his snittiness he describes his fellows with generous appreciation. But injudicious? I don't know. Theoretically, a player is judged by what he can do on the field--the game itself is the thing. But even more than other sports baseball requires not just technical esteem but an investment of emotion, and emotion is best invested in people, however faultily perceived. I don't think the glowering visage of Sal Maglie will ever fill me with awe again.

in the night kitchen

I don’t have much to add to the many heartfelt paeans to Maurice Sendak. But I will add what seems to be a minority opinion, that my favorite of his books is In the Night Kitchen, not Where the Wild Things Are. The surreal trip into the milk bottle, the happy/scary Oliver Hardy cooks, “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.” … I love it all. Gene Deitch did a nice animated version:

can a leftist love 24?

A few years ago, I wrote an essay for a book in the Smart Pop series from BenBella Books, on the series 24. For one week only, the Smart Pop website is running that essay for free: “Can a Leftist Love 24?”

It was an odd project for me. We were originally told that the idea was to avoid polarizing the audience. Then, conservative writer Richard Miniter was named editor, which freaked me out a bit, perhaps especially when I found out he liked my essay. But I have to say, Miniter was a good editor. Most of the time, when I wrote for BenBella, the famous editor was window dressing, but Miniter actually edited my stuff. (I should add that then, as often with BenBella, my primary editor was Leah Wilson, who is one of the best editors I've ever worked with.)

Here's a brief excerpt from my essay. You can read the whole thing at the Smart Pop website for a week, or you can buy the entire book if you're so inclined.

It is one thing to want popular culture that better reflects who we are as a diverse populace, and another to say that we should turn off our critical faculties in the name of supporting something that has more cultural importance than it does artistic value. And it is one thing to have concerns about the use of torture on 24, and another to say that 24 is bad art because it features scenes of torture. It might be more dangerous art, but the cultural impact does not necessarily change the aesthetics.

that was a ten

For one week only, the Smart Pop website is featuring, for free, my essay from their book on the television series House. The book is called House Unauthorized, and the essay is titled “`That Was a Ten`: Why House Is More Ordinary Than House”. Check it out!

We’re looking at a pretty unusual central character for television. Irascible, okay. Misanthropic, a bit of a problem, but can be worked with. Drug addict? Oops. Toss in a rationalist’s disdain for religious belief and you have a pretty dangerous character, at least in the context of prime-time American broadcast television. Is it any wonder that Shore does everything he can to normalize his show, that he covers the complex House with a mundane House? How else can he sneak this godless druggie past the public?