Tuesday, February 6, 2018
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About Me
- John Craig
- Virtually everyone who knows John finds him completely tactless and insufferably opinionated. He sees himself as refreshingly honest. That said, this blog is still an excellent way to kill time while putting off work. If you're a newcomer, you might find browsing through the older posts an amusing waste of time as well.
38 comments:
Loved reading Leaf's review so 'benignly vitriolic'.
Sherie
Sherie --
Thank you, not sure about the "benignly," I'd be more inclined to call it "humorously vitriolic."
For some reason, all good reviewers -- with Dorothy Parker being the most notable example -- are more enjoyable to read when they're being acidic than when they're praising something.
Sam Shepard should have stuck solely to acting and forgot about being a playwright. He was a decent actor who always looked (to me) like the kind of guy you'd see running a gas station.
- Susan
It's an oxymoron.
Just trying to appear clever.
Sherie
Susan --
Ha, he did look working class; I guess that was what made people think he was a good actor. And, frankly, a lot of it was just the way he dressed, and his generally unwashed look. (If that's all it takes, I'm a great actor every morning when I wake up.)
I doubt he would ever have been given many roles had he not achieved success as a playwright first.
Sherie --
Oops, sorry.
Now I remember Sam Shepard. He starred in the Thomas Wolf story about "The Right Stuff". I enjoyed that movie about Chuck Yeager.
Its difficult writing a story. I've started writing a story but can't get past the outline stage. It's a story about a financially successful California couple who are childless. They instead adopt a baby Bonobo ape. Years later when they no longer can care for their ape they give him up to a pet zoo farm. They regularly visit their pet but tragedy strikes when two chimpanzees at the local farm escape and attack the couple. A story about powerful animal/human emotions and instincts.
It's based on a true life event that happened years ago. Maybe you commented on that story?
Europeasant --
I loved Wolfe's book, but wasn't crazy about the movie, partly because I thought Shepard was just the opposite of Chuck Yeager. Yeager was short, muscular, cocky, swaggering, and incredible self-confident with a twinkle in his eye. Shepard, a skinny guy, played him like an introvert with Aspergers.
Yes, stories are difficult. I did a post mentioning the case you're referring to, that of former NASCAR driver St. James Davis, here:
https://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2009/02/aww-hes-so-cute.html
I've always hated Sam Shephard.
I enjoy this: "Three. Focus in your tales upon the problems of violent, psychopathic men and present them as the victims of a brutish, indelicate world. Suggest that underneath it all they are actually more sensitive than typical doctors, lawyers, et al."
That's what I most enjoyed about Kevin Costner's performance in "Criminal." We talked about this. I didn't like the movie (beyond stupid plot twists, etc.) but Costner didn't make the psycho the slightest likable. The director I think tried to foist that trope on us but Costner was having none of it. He truly looked and behaved like the kind of hard bitten white guy you'd move away from if you ran into him in a bar or a midnight laundromat.
Anon
Anon --
Shepard's not the only one who's done this, Hollywood in general has a tendency to glorify sociopaths, and make them more palatable than they in fact are. Think of the way they made two con men look good in "The Sting," or make the two main characters likable in "The Grifters," or the way we were supposed to identify with the Leonardo DiCaprio character in "Catch Me if You Can."
Still haven't seen "Criminal."
When Sam Shepard died, I read articles that talked about his passing. In reading them, I learned that he might have had a battle with booze and that his relationship with Jessica Lange might have involved some domestic violence. Sam sounded troubled, not someone you'd want to be linked with romantically. If I remember correctly, his childhood wasn't an easy one.
- Susan
Susan --
Just looked him up; he worked on a farm as a youngster, but Wiki didn't list anything about his childhood that sounded particularly dysfunctional, except of this father being a big drinker. (Though that couldn't possibly have been a plus, and who knows about his mother.)
He was evidently with Lange for something like 27 years, over that course of time, tempers do tend to flare.
Based on what you had written about him in 2009 I bought his book "The politically incorrect guide to the 60s."
That was an eye opener, and quite enjoyable.
Shaun --
Thank you for doing so.....I read that too, learned quite a few things from it.
Humorously vitriolic, yes, but facile and mostly ad hominem. I don’t think you can depict someone as shallow who’s written 40 plays and more short stories, most attempting to deal with serious issues like family and relationships. Leaf gives a mild pass to Fool for Love and True West, which is appropriate: both had off-Broadway runs of over two years. Fool for Love was brutally affecting, and True West was the funniest night I’ve ever had in the theater (owing in part to Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, whose presence belies another Leaf point).
50 Free --
I've never seen either of those plays, so can't speak with authority. I did read one or two things Shepard had written, a long time ago, and can't even remember them that clearly. (If something doesn't make an impression on me, it turns fuzzy quite quickly.) But you're obviously better informed than I am. I suppose my resentment of Shepard is largely because of the way he played Chuck Yeager, who's one of my heroes, and the fact that he got an Oscar nomination for that complete misrepresentation. Yeager was a tough, feisty, wise-cracking mesomorphic top gun country boy with a sense of humor; Shepard played him like a neurasthenic English major trying to be a Zen warrior.
(When I really love a book, I find myself more resentful of the people who play the lead roles, if they're not true to the spirit of the character. Tom Wolfe is one of my favorite writers, and I loved The Right Stuff. Similarly, I loved Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next, and it drove me crazy that Jack Nicholson got so much credit for playing Randle P. McMurphy, who was supposed to have been a big, healthy, blustering, charismatic Irishman, as a slimy weasel, which is pretty much the only way Nicholson can act.)
BTW, I think Malkovich is a way overrated actor, he's very much in the Nicholson mold: he plays himself in every movie I've ever seen him in, and his voice constantly drips with insinuation the same way Nicholson's does, which becomes quite tiresome very quickly.
Anyway, back to Leaf's review. Was it ad hominem? Sure, but it didn't pretend to be anything else; it was, after all, about Shepard's personal image and public appeal more than it was an in depth analysis of any of his works. (So how could it be anything other than "ad hominem?")
Was it facile? If you're using that word in the sense of "superficial," I'm not sure how a review-length summary of someone's public image can be anything else.
Also, I don't think (I just re-read the review) Leaf ever used the word "shallow" to describe Shepard; he focused more on the implausibility of many of Shepard's characters and plots.
I go to the theater very frequently and dislike Shepherd’s plays for the very reasons in the article. I also dislike his work because of the many Sam Shepard clones which infest the modern theater, the bad driving out the good. Tom Stoppard is perhaps the best contemporary playwright but it’s very difficult to find a play of his to see even though they are always sellouts and he has a prolific body of work. It appears the fashion is against him, as he only writes articulate and understandable English. The audiences love him but the subsidized creative directors don’t. They are too busy playing ethnic activist writer roulette.
The style of this article reminds me of Mark Twain’s critique of James Fennimore Cooper—very witty, once read, never forgotten.
LBD --
Thank you for that.
Jon as Mark Twain -- it's a comparison I never would have thought of (Jon doesn't affect folksiness IRL), but I like it.
"Fool for Love was brutally affecting, and True West was the funniest night I’ve ever had in the theater (owing in part to Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, whose presence belies another Leaf point)."
To belie means to disprove. Leaf was saying that good acting is hard, and that Shephard's plays convinced talentless amateurs that they could be good. I'm not sure what point the commenter 50 free is making here. If he/she can elaborate I'd appreciate it.
Anyway, Uma Thurman, a former subject of yours has been in the news. I'm only interested in the looks angle. It's hard for me to say whether Uma is less beautiful than her gorgeous mother. I guess in a way yes, but I think Uma is so stunning I can't make up my mind, and don't ask me WHY I think Uma is stunning, it's just a gut reaction. I know she's not "perfect" but who cares? She's fucking hypnotic.
But her daughter by Ethan Hawke is to me, meh. Truly a case of regression to the mean.
That must be tough for both mother & daughter. Uma supposedly went thru an ugly duckling period but I call bullshit. In her select class, everyone knows that tall and gawky grows up to be our sort of person. But Maya Thurman Hawke is just an slightly taller than average gal, and has slightly better than average features.
http://stellar.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/maya-thurman.jpg
What do you think? I say pretty but not in mom or grandma's league. Low minors at best.
Anon
Anon --
You're making the point that our reactions to looks are purely subjective (when it comes to Thurman vs. her mother), and I agree, but I basically had the same reaction as you to Thurman when I first saw her, and I wouldn't have had that strong a reaction to her mother, even if her features are classically more perfect.
Just took a look at that picture. The daughter is quite pretty, but you're right, no Uma. But that's sort of setting up an unfair comparison. It's rare that any outlier -- IQ-wise, athletic ability-wise, or looks-wise -- has a child who is their equal in that area. Maya Hawke is quite pretty by almost any standard, just not by the standard of movie stars or models.
Yes, I've seen pictures of Uma when she was young and awkward, and I agree, she was stunning then too. A lot of times what you'll find with women who are professionally beautiful is that they may have had a little work done. then they can say they went through an "awkward" or "ugly duckling" phase as if that's what it was, but in fact it would be more indicative to say, "That was my pre-plastic surgery phase." Such would be the case for such famous beauties as Scarlett Johansen and Michelle Pfeiffer and Marilyn Monroe.
That pic of Maya shows her at her best. There are many others that are not so good. Anyway I agree that she's pretty but simply not the OMG gorgeous her mom & grandma are.
It's not an unfair comparison. I'm comparing her to her mother & grandmother. If I were to pick some other Hollywood starlet, say, Emma Rogers, and compare Emma to Uma, that would be unfair. Emma Rogers is another regression to the mean. Her father is Eric Roberts, her aunt, Julia. She is also a regression to the mean. But she's regressing to a lower mean than Maya, because neither Eric nor Julia (again, in my opinion) are in Nina & Uma's category of extreme, almost otherworldly, good looks.
Both Maya and Emma make up well, but nearly any decent person could, given the excellence of professional makeup artists.
An interesting subject!
Anon
Emma Roberts:
http://celebmafia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/emma-roberts-scream-queens-photocall-2015-comic-con-in-san-diego_1.jpg
Why is this girl famous?
Anon
Anon --
I like this subject, too, partly because for some reason no one ever talks about it. It's considered bad form, or people are afraid of coming across too superficial, or something like that. But everyone is influenced by looks, and anyone who says they're not is lying.
I actually think it is an unfair comparison. Great beauties rarely have offspring who can achieve that same extraordinary magic, even if they have perfectly nice features, as Maya has. Just as Nobel Prize-winning scientists almost never have offspring who will achieve their special magic. So it's unreasonable to expect that special magic to be reproduced, especially since great beauty is almost a genetic accident. Tippy Hedren gives birth to Melanie Griffith, Janet Leigh gives birth to Jamie Lee Curtis, Debbie Reynolds gives birth to Carrie Fisher, the list is endless. What bothers me is when those offspring are given roles that call for great beauty, and simply don't live up to it.
Anon --
True (in response to your 4:55 comment); you've pretty much answered the question yourself.
I used to be somewhat dismissive of Ethan Hawke until I listened to an audiobook which he narrated. Outstanding “acting” with only his voice as an instrument. When given intelligent writing to read, he sounds quite intelligent as well. I had misjudged him based on the dreck he had appeared in earlier in his carreer.
Twain’s Fennimore Cooper essay really isn’t folksy but pretty straightforward. Well worth looking up, it’s only a couple of pages long but has a wealth of good advice about concise and accurate writing wrapped up in humor.
Twain was a newspaper writer earlier in his career and he has a newspaperman’s impatience with overblown prose. I find that many authors I love (Earl Derr Biggers, Michael Connelly, et. al.) were newspapermen and their writing is much crisper and cleaner due to the discipline which was characteristic of news writing “back in the day”. I grew up reading the simple “who what where when how” lead paragraphs of news articles and can’t abide the “feelings feelings feelings” openers of contemporary “news” articles which take forever to arrive at their agenda driven murky “point” authors attempt to make.
LBD --
Just read it. It WAS funny. My favorite line, from "the rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction":
"7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the "Deerslayer" tale."
I never read Cooper, though I loved the movie "The Last of the Mohicans."
I always liked what Twain said about Jane Austen:
"Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
Agreed about concise writing.
"A wrong turn for drama".
There is countless drama in the world. There are sociopaths and phycopaths that one can investigate and write about on many internet blogs. There is in fact a site that could be construed as the Wikipedia of murders. Every story is incredible until that story is verified and found to be true!
I personally can claim to have known one as he was in my high school freshman home room. He was big. He was very aggressive. He thought that he was the king rooster. Everyone here. he thought was relatively easy prey. Easy Eloi thought the large morlock(orc).
Europeasant --
Agreed, endless drama. But it's one thing to show sociopaths and psychopaths as they are, another to portray them as heroes who are the real victims of the rest of unfeeling society, as Leaf says that Shepard did. (I'm not familiar enough with all of Shepard's work to judge for myself).
Yes, Murderpedia, I'm familiar with it, have ended up there countless times. They often have a lot more "color" about serial killers tan Wikipedia does.
I promise you, you've known more than one sociopath in your life; they're 3 or 4% of the population. Most of them we don't get to know well enough to realize what they are, but they're definitely out there.
I believe I'm too disconnected with writers, Hollywood, actors, etc to make comments about them. I don't really remember seeing Sam Shepard in any movie (no, I didn't see The Right Stuff) so his passing was missed. Not into plays.
Having read your piece on Jon Leaf was good. Seems like the world could use more people like him in it than Shepard but the masses don't appreciate people like Leaf.
"Intelligent people rarely get “offended.” To claim offense in the middle of a discussion is in fact tacit admission that one has lost the argument, so one must claim hurt feelings in order to bring open and honest discussion to an end." - sums up or society today.
Dave
Anecdotal: my wife has a master's degree and I'm just a high school graduate. Sometimes she does things where I shake my head and laugh. We get along swimmingly.
Dave
Dave --
I read one or two Shepard pieces early on, then forgot about him, other than seeing him in various movies.
Yes, I don't think it's coincidence that a guy as smart as Jon turned away from liberalism in general.
Dave --
Degrees are not the same as IQ points, much as those with the former like to think their credentials imply a plentitude of the latter.
It occurred to me that the actor John Malkovich looks like the killer, Brendt Christensen. As far as actors, John Malkovich and Jack Nicholson have always struck me as a bit creepy.
- Susan
Susan --
Ah, Brendt Christensen. I'd forgotten about him. I'd say Malkovich looks (and I'm sure sounds) creepier.
I don't know.... While I wholeheartedly agree with the Voltaire quote (I really abhor the practice of sanctifying the dead by virtue of the fact that they're dead) and will probably save it up to use on many future occasions of being annoyed at whitewashing another dead scumbag, I just can't quite join this swipe at Shepard. Not that I'm a fan of his work. I am neither fan or foe. Like many of you, I haven't read or seen his plays to say one way or another. Reading ABOUT his work, I can at least be intrigued by what he was maybe attempting to do.
The main reason I'm squeamish about joining a smackdown on Shepard is because Sam Shepard seems to have been a decent, humble sort of guy. I don't think he consciously capitalized on the fact that he was dating famous and/or beautiful people. I also don't think his work is showcased because of its American-style Communist bent (the egghead-intellectual sort). That's just not true. American communist intellectuals don't have that much power. Rambo wins EACH AND EVERY TIME WITHOUT EXCEPTION over any obscuntarist Shepard play in any average American city on any given day.
In the end, I think Shepard became Shepard the accidental star because of luck and circumstance. He moved in that weird and hard-to-fathom melting pot of the 1970's New York art scene from which emerged a lot of artistic 'superstars' not deserving of the fame -- like Patti Smith, like Mapplethorpe, like Warhol... He emerged on a scene oddly marked with some sort of magnetism (and copious amounts of moneyed patronage), and that's why he ended up famous.
Ambivalent Misanthrope --
You're not really disagreeing with Leaf's assessment of Shepard's work here, which was the main thrust of his article; nor are you disagreeing with Leaf's contention that Shepard was pretty much a pretentious artiste who affected the *image* of a great artist without really being one -- even though Shepard was very successful at marketing himself that way.
What you're saying is that he's really not that bad a guy. I don't think Leaf was saying that he was; his point was more that Shepard somehow fooled the public into thinking he was a great playwright when in fact he wasn't. Also, while it may be true that he didn't capitalize on the fact that he dated famous and/or beautiful people, it does seem that he capitalized on his fame to date famous and/or beautiful people, which was more an end than a means.
"In the end, I think Shepard became Shepard the accidental star because of luck and circumstance. He moved in that weird and hard-to-fathom melting pot of the 1970's New York art scene from which emerged a lot of artistic 'superstars' not deserving of the fame -- like Patti Smith, like Mapplethorpe, like Warhol..."
You're completely agreeing with Leaf there, though Leaf's emphasis wasn't so much on the 70's scene as it was on Shepard's role in the theater community.
I admit when you put it that way, you're right -- I am agreeing with Leaf.
I'll also admit that, despite my distaste for sanctifying the dead when they don't deserve it, I feel bad for him in a posthumous kind of spirit. I looked at an article about him with a picture of him about a year before his death, when he was already ill, and it pulled on my heartstrings. It's a devastating way to go (not that any death is a 'good' way), and frankly, I would have rather seen other types in his seat -- complete with scathing eulogy after they eased the planet of the burden of their existence.
But yea -- he is guilty as charged.
Ambivalent Misanthrope --
I guess you're just a more agreeable personality than you realize.
Nobody is saying Shepard was a bad guy who deserved a bad end in any way, merely that he was overrated as a playwright.
And you're right, there are people who deserve bad ends.
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