“Fellini manages to accomplish with film what mostly abstract painters do; namely, to communicate an emotion without ever saying or showing anything in a direct manner." 

-David Lynch

To this day David Lynch’s favorite film remains Otto e Mezzo, directed by Federico Fellini: Western Europe’s sorcerer of confectionary delights and unending motion, the man who put the “dolce” in La Dolce Vita.  Lynch's stated reason (quoted above), even if one were to take him at his word — and we must, of course, for no filmmaker has ever been known to misrepresent themselves to us — seems a strange instance of gravitational pull, particularly in the light of the formal strategies both men developed over time. Lynch has always favored a blunt pictorialism that, in its bluntness, borders on the language of Imagism: the studied simplicity of the language used to complex, powerful effect. Fellini, in 8 ½ and through much of his career, by contrast, unleashes upon the viewer an insanely fluid, brutally precise camera ballet. Here, in these conflicting dialects, we have ribbons of ideology swirled together like candy: a blur of four-wheeled luxury from the New World zooming past the region’s splendor into that brotherhood of man, that socio-economic nirvana imagined by Karl Marx in the Old.

It is the custom of illuminated manuscripts to transform sacred words into shimmering icons which break, easily, beyond the sensory limitations of simple text, rendering ordinary letters into evocative, animate visual form that invites the eye to idle awhile at the brink of transcendence, rather than stand at a distance, remote and unyielding, daring to be comprehended, accepted, believed. Strange and barely recognizable wildlife appears on vellum leaves, creatures that wind and unwind in ceaseless whirlpools of bejeweled abstraction. Or they are, if you prefer, the spirited exoskeletons of snakes, dragons, waterbirds — Celtic and Germanic obsessions meeting the Apostles of Christendom. Emerging in the British Isles between 500–900 C.E., The Lindisfarne Gospels provide an arena, lapidary and starlit, where paganism devours Christianity while also birthing the religion anew into what can only be described, if you're honest, as “motion pictures.”

Put simply, movies are books, volumes of light, zoetic leaves and letters that move beyond their trellis, leaving us to decipher a purely visual enigma; all the more impossible to contain within mortal consciousness because the light of this steadfastly irrational art has swallowed up the text. There are those, however few in number, who have claimed to decode this cryptic iconography. But mysteries remain, not unlike those — strange, delved, bewildering — contained within the  gospels of Christianity.

These mysteries urge upon us a wholly radical reconsideration of silent cinema, of the book in film, of whispering pages. Pages fluttering like leaves. Of Stan Brakhage, who gave us a series of works entitled The Book of Film — yet otherwise seemed incapable of regarding the universe independent of its sensual properties. Of Hollis Frampton and Peter Greenaway and even Wes Anderson, and certainly of Robert Beavers, who incorporates the sound and motion of turning pages, placed in relationships and analogies with other actions, as with the moving of birds' wings in flight. The films of David Gatten, which deeply engage with the idea, even the history of books.

This is not, in other words, the middlebrow notion of film as pure, narrative-bearing text that we are confronting. This is Mallarme’s concept of the book, the Proustian model of the book. It is its ultimate realization, par excellence, and by far the most apposite. Works that require different modalities of reading/touching words and saccadic rhythms involving different velocities of hyphenation and partial retention and compound phrases through the softest of collisions, where we come up against the everlasting mystery of the silent voice, the ‘little’ voice inside each of us; an imagined external voice that reads to us quietly, that is ours but seems to be another's. This voice is not the voice of the author nor the voice of a corporeal stand-in for somebody who may once have read to us the most thrilling book in the world somewhere in our long-ago childhood. It just is. 

Night Tide, as much as any work in any canon, is guided by that voice, from which a strange, and strangely hushed, invitation steps forth and lingers in the air: beckoning you with the satiny force of its resident sideshow mermaid, whose foretold underwater death lends her a mythic sense of bereavement, somewhere on the same scale with America’s deceased open roads and lost prairies. Linda Lawson (Mora), despite her offscreen life as a marvelous nightclub chanteuse, never sings in any conventional sense. Throughout the film, her breathy speaking voice expresses intense, alien musicality lurking behind an opaque and equally lyric curtain of melancholia. Her words become almost incantatory, summoning one gnostic boardwalk from the film’s various grubby locales. As if she were inviting us to come to Malibu to live above a merry-go-round, take breakfast with a hot sailor and a hotter mermaid, spend endless hours in Venice Beach, of all places, with an old rummy sea captain, listening to the strange tales behind the morbid souvenirs of his life.

Would the bravest of men dare to look right in the eye of a seahorse, that horse-headed question mark, freshly surging from the depths to the surface of dream?

This handsome son of the sea, rising more vertically than the latest model elevator, this centaur whose mere presence is disturbing enough to put everything into question, what other could better symbolize Klee’s work?

Through all my years, the daily comics (“the funnies” as they were once called) have been my nearest thing to religion. At home in the late 1940s, we subscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer as well as the Evening Bulletin, then  the largest-circulation evening daily in the country.

Sometime in there, the Inquirer Sunday color comics took on a new glossy sheen, using what I recall as a Rotogravure process, while the Bulletin retained the standard muted, non-reflective color on Sunday, once they absorbed the Record (which folded in 1947). The Bulletin itself succumbed in 1982. (When it closed, the paper held a week-long sale of items; I picked up their newsroom dictionary, the Webster’s Second International, glued to a bright blue stand, along with a surprisingly comfortable wooden rolly desk chair.)

Today’s daily strips I still download. Lots of fun, but lacking the tactical fondness of the printed page. But I’m not aiming at a rampage through all the newspaper comics of yesterday. This is a paean to Will Eisner’s The Spirit, the visual anchor of my pre-teen years.

 The Spirit came out in a unique format for a newspaper “strip,” an eight-page tabloid (half-news-page) Sunday supplement folded into the comics section, in full color, a complete story each week. In our Philly suburban area, it ran in the Bulletin. It had started nationally in 1940, along with two backup features, later dropped, as an attempt by a small newspaper syndicate to insert a “comic book” into Sunday newspapers.

You don’t often hear people referencing Philip Wylie these days, but from the late Twenties through the late Sixties, he was one of the most popular, prolific, influential and at times controversial writers in America. Wylie not only wrote novels, short stories, and articles for everything from the Saturday Evening Post and Popular Mechanics to Harper’s and academic journals, but newspaper columns and screenplays as well. Part of the problem, why he’s so thoroughly forgotten today, may be that even in his lifetime, as ubiquitous as he was, he was almost impossible to pin down. In many ways, he was reminiscent of Gore Vidal, and it’s entirely likely, and for the same reasons, Gore Vidal will be just as sadly forgotten forty years from now.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Wylie grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and graduated from Princeton in 1923. He began writing science fiction and mystery stories for the pulps, and his 1930 novel Gladiator has long been rumored to have been the central influence on the creation of Superman. Other stories and novels were said to have inspired Flash Gordon and Doc Savage. In the early Thirties he also began writing screenplays, working on both Island of Lost Souls and James Whale’s The Invisible Man. But Wylie was a polymath with a solid working knowledge of psychology, biology, physics, anthropology, sociology and engineering, elements of which would work their way into not only his science fiction, but his social criticism, his writings on policy issues, even articles about deep sea fishing and gardening. A 1952 article on growing orchids led to a nationwide gardening fad. He wrote cleverly and thoughtfully about gender issues, and though grossly misinterpreted at the time as a misogynist, Wylie, as a male writer, was actually decades ahead of his time. He wrote about UFOs and education. He railed against censorship of any kind. He touted the importance of civil defense preparedness years before backyard fallout shelters or duck and cover drills came into vogue. His incredibly popular “Crunch & Des” stories, about the adventures of a charter fishing boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in a short-lived 1955 television series starring Forrest Tucker, and his 1933 novel When Worlds Collide was adapted into George Pal’s 1951 apocalyptic sci-fi epic.

His 1945 speculative short story “The Paradise Crater” envisioned the Nazis using Uranium 237 to develop an atomic bomb. Problem was, the Manhattan Project was still underway, the first atomic test was still a few months down the pike, and no one was supposed to know anything about Uranium isotopes, let alone their role in the development of nuclear weapons. As a result, Wylie found himself placed under house arrest until it could be determined he wasn’t a spy. Ironically, his continued interest in the science and sociology of nuclear war (it would be at the heart of several novels and countless non-fiction essays) earned him a job as an advisor to the precursor of the Atomic Energy Commission.

In 1973, Brian De Palma released Sisters, his Siamese twin mystery thriller starring Margot Kidder and Charles Durning. After a string of social satires which, to be honest, haven’t aged very well, Sisters was De Palma’s breakthrough film, the one that would cement the form and style for which he’d come to be known. A year later he released the horror/comedy/glam rock opera Phantom of the Paradise starring the great Paul Williams. Hitting theaters more than a year before Rocky Horror, Phantom combined elements from Faust, Phantom of the Opera and about a dozen other sources into a bright, fast, wicked comic book satire of the music business. The film went on to become a cult favorite.

Originally published in 1933, Nathanael West's short novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, paints a comically black portrait of the human condition and the world as a whole.  A cynical newspaper editor hires an earnest and kind-hearted would-be reporter simply to prove to himself that the kid is as craven and rotten inside as everyone else in this stinking world. Toward this end, he hands the kid the “Miss Lonelyhearts” advice column. The letters from the lost, the crippled, the beaten and forsaken, and the helpless—people looking for some kind of salvation or simple hope—make up the heart of the book, but even beyond the letters, every one of West’s characters is plagued by some deep ugliness. And in those early years of the Great Depression, the world that surrounds them all is no less bleak. The misery runs to such absurd depths, in fact, that sometimes the only thing a reader can do is look on in astonished horror or recognition.

The book didn’t sell very well (perhaps people didn’t need any reminding that we were all fucked), which makes it all the more amazing that the rights to the book would be snatched up by Hollywood and turned into a film not just once, but three times over the next quarter-century.

When 20th Century Fox acquired the rights shortly after the book’s publication, the initial question must have been “how do we present this material to a glum Depression-era audience?” Well, the answer was simple. You hire Lee Tracy, toss the novel out the window, and rewrite it as a frothy screwball comedy. It was the oldest and most beloved of Hollywood’s ways of dealing with literature.

Directed by Alfred L. Werker (a busy contract director since the late ‘20s) and written by Leonard Praskins, Advice to the Lovelorn stars Tracy as Toby Prentiss, an undependable reporter who is punished for missing a big story by being forced to take over the “Miss Lonelyhearts” column. (The name of the column was the only element of West’s novel to survive the adaptation). Prentiss’s attempts to sabotage the humiliating assignment backfires, however, when his unconventional and shocking bits of advice become a big hit and boost the paper’s circulation. The usual predicaments and hijinx ensue, most of them involving his girl Louise (Sally Blane).

A momentary dark turn opens the third act, when Prentiss’s mother dies after he gives her some medicine bought from a crooked druggist he’d been plugging in his column. It’s not long, though, before things turn wacky again and wrap up nicely and neatly and happily.

While it’s understandable why Fox didn’t want to go plumbing the shadowy corners of human misery in 1933, one has to wonder if West was disgusted with what had been done with his novel, or if he was just happy with the check. After all, it was that same year that he signed a contract to be a scriptwriter for Columbia.

{NOTE: During his lifetime, Charles Manson was rarely allowed to speak on his own terms. At least not without being interrupted, edited, or interpreted in order to leave him sounding like a gibbering hippie lunatic spouting incoherent nonsense. That’s what we do to people whose ideas pose a viable potential threat to the status quo. Before anyone has a chance to hear directly what the likes of Manson or the Unabomber have to say, tell the mob it’s all incoherent gibberish, and no one will pay the slightest attention. Who has the time to waste listening to nonsense  from a crazy person? Problem solved.

With the passing of one of the most insightful and important thinkers of the 20th century, a man who had been mythologized nearly out of existence while being touted as the most Evil Bugaboo the World Has Ever Known, we would like to offer him the simple respect of letting him at last speak for himself. Below is the testimony Manson offered in his own defense during the Tate-LaBianca murder trial in 1970. It’s worth noting that the jury was ordered out of the courtroom when he took the stand, and so never heard any of the following.}

There has been a lot of charges and a lot of things said about me and brought against the co-defendants in this case, of which a lot could be cleared up and clarified…

I never went to school, so I never growed up to read and write too good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid,  and I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don’t understand…

In 1932, Richard Sharpe Shaver was working on the assembly line at a Ford auto plant in Detroit when he began noticing something strange. Every time he picked up his spot welder, he found he could hear the thoughts of the other workers all up and down the line. If that wasn’t odd enough, he also began hearing the anguished screams of what he determined to be people being beaten and tortured in caverns miles beneath the earth’s surface. Shaver concluded that it was the unique configuration of the coils in his spot welder that allowed him to access these thoughts and distant sounds.

Disturbed by this, understandably enough, Shaver soon left his job with Ford. Around this same time, his brother died, a loss which affected him deeply, and he got married and had a baby daughter. Then he vanished for much of the next decade. In that time his wife died and her relatives took custody of his daughter, telling her her father was also dead.

In the 1930s, writers like Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain made some serious headway toward rehabilitating crime fiction. What had long been dismissed as a gutter genre aimed at lowlifes, the undereducated and the psychically damaged started to be taken more seriously as a legitimate literary form. The success of film adaptations of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Postman Always Rings Twice only helped matters. With the exception of Cain (who could get pretty nasty), the books themselves remained fairly traditional and straightforward tales of stalwart detectives on the trail of nogoodniks and sinister types. It’s up to the detective to solve a mystery, see that justice is served, and once again re-establish the conventional social order.

When the second generation of American hardboiled fiction began to emerge in the ’40s and ’50s, writers like David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Horace McCoy and Cornell Woolrich more often than not followed Cain’s lead. Reflecting the nation’s postwar ennui and paranoia. Their novels became much darker, more violent, more nihilistic, and deeply disturbed. The new world had grown more openly depraved, and there was no social order left to restore. The focus moved away from do-gooder (if eloquently wisecracking) detectives toward the criminals themselves.  It could be argued that the crime pulps of the ’50s effectively undid all those advances in public perception, returning crime fiction to the gutter that spawned it.

On Wednesday night, November 6, bands of supporters of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv roamed through Amsterdam, waving national and team colors. Though they were ostensibly there to attend a UEFA Europa League match between Maccabi and Ajax  of Amsterdam, they took to the streets and chanted “Death to the Arabs” and “Why are there no schools in Gaza? Because there are no children”, celebrating the slaughter their nations has carried out over the course of nearly fourteen months. They attacked and destroyed a taxi, tore down one Palestinian flag and burned another. In short, they acted as if they were home in Israel where, protected by the police and army, any and every form of racist language and violence is permitted. The display of Palestinian flags is forbidden in Israel, and the fans acted as if Amsterdam was an occupied city and that Israeli mores and laws ruled. They acted like a combination of soccer hooligans and right-wing terrorists. In acting this way, the Israeli fans taunted Amsterdamers, particularly Arab Amsterdamers, and in tense times received the response they should have expected. Was this antisemitic violence or anti-Israeli violence? This is an entirely valid question, since there are no reports of Dutch Jewish citizens or sites being attacked. For Arabs, the enemy had shown its face in their hometown, and that enemy is Israel.