Only days before the season, and possibly series, finale of Southland, the visually hyper-articulate and brutally kinetic LAPD drama that TNT rescued from NBC in the wake of the Jay Leno prime-time experiment, the future of this show remains uncertain. It should not be this way: Southland is in the highest tier of cop shows, of dramas, of any kind of show, on any kind of channel. With its perfect clarity of presentation, its visceral, dynamic, adrenaline-rush aesthetic purity, its ruthless psychological and emotional precision – its violent catharsis – this show stands above all others. It takes nothing for granted, including its viewers. Nothing is extraneous in Southland: it is the definition of spare, minimalist truth. You have to run to keep up, and this is just as it should be. The writers, directors, actors, crew, all of them strip back the unnecessary flesh of typical dramas to reveal the bare bones of reality, of people in unforgiving, challenging situations, whether those situations last a few moments, or for years. Behind it all, Los Angeles rises; the city has rarely been so thrillingly and excitingly used as a milieu. The simple matter-of-factness of the downtown skyscrapers or the Capitol Records building appearing in the shot as the camera whips and plunges and sometimes, sometimes, holds still for a moment, gives the images a heft and punch they do not normally have. When you think about how many books, TV shows and movies have used the city, this is a remarkable achievement. The show is on its way to other places, in a hurry, so it does not have time to stop and check out the sights; we see them anyway, and they have a greater impact this way. The compelling dedication of everyone involved in this enterprise, from its creator and writer Ann Biderman through the crew, the other writers, to the leads including Michael Cudlitz and Ben McKenzie as the patrol cops, is palpable. Somehow, amidst the fury and the pace, the entire team manage to find oddly moving, quiet codas that expand emotionally inside you like devastating, slow-motion, hollow point mood bullets. You don’t even realize it’s happened as you stare at a pair of sneakers hanging from a phone wire, or a poster of Where The Wild Things Are, the shot held, and held, and you wonder why you are crying. That the Southland team can conspire to pull off such moments along with the wild kinesis of the action is a testament to the creativity of all involved. There are precious few shows that deserve the investment and time of their TV channel: Southland is obviously one of these few. It has an effortless quality and authenticity. These are only some of the reasons why TNT should do what NBC could not, and give Southland the time and space to truly become the show it is meant to be. Because, astonishingly, even though it is already in the top echelon of TV shows, there is more that Southland could give us, if it was given a full season to truly spread its wings and take full, uncompromising flight; to fully explore its interweaving storylines and its large cast of psychologically detailed characters. TNT – don’t you want to be the network that took Southland all the way?
Tag Los Angeles
you don’t love me yet / the only truth
You Don’t Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem’s smooth, spacious exploration of an LA band’s potential moment of glory, is a precise and lovely book. As his latest, Chronic City, is about to hit bookstores, it’s worth revisiting Lethem’s charmingly motley collective: singer Matthew, guitarist Bedwin, drummer Denise, and lynchpin bassist Lucinda, whose personal journey forms the bedrock of the novel, grounding its more raw and experimental tendencies, just as her controlled basslines anchor the band’s chaotic musical explorations.
The band is an elusive concept, to themselves and to the world: their name flickers and changes throughout; they cannot be defined and therefore never fully achieve cultural reality, or perhaps are the only truth in the city of make-believe. Lethem’s finesse in evoking music is rare: the depictions of the band’s rehearsals have the quiet assurance of authenticity; they read like Anthony Kiedis’ descriptions of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ jams in his autobiography Scar Tissue, which, like You Don’t Love Me Yet, feels like a hymn to LA as much as anything (“…sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the city of angels…”). In particular, Kiedis’ recounting of a chaotic Saturday Night Live performance in the early nineties recalls Lethem’s band’s first radio moment, when all their possibilities coalesce, and anything could happen. In the early nineties, musically, anything could have happened: Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Chili Peppers, U2’s Achtung Baby and Zooropa albums, their Zoo TV tour, all of it an exhilarating collision and evolution of everything that had gone before. Lethem’s novel is not so wild or chaotic: it’s smooth, gleaming with a quiet glow from within, like listening to an iPod in bed, deep into the night. He shows us LA hipsters in the light of their own helpless gleaming. The city is smooth, measured. They exist in its contemporary spaces, its lofts and clubs, its radio stations, the static and sound waves that contain souls. Their life is music, they breathe chord changes and talk melodies. It’s a world of legendary DJs, doomed art installations, ephemeral connections, and a misplaced kangaroo. It’s also about sex, complaining, being a rock star, the last of the rock gods or the first of the new stars, living in the glass and steel of Los Angeles in what could be the nineties or the future. Lethem nails the desperate intensity of human couplings: the speed of the emotional vertical take-off, the slow spiral back to earth from the sexual cosmos, the pain of re-entry, the brutality of the hard landing. He handles all of this with grace, elegance, streamlined writing, the literary equivalent of gleaming, molded architecture, all reflective surfaces and hidden structures. The words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters change with digital smoothness, the barely perceptible transitions of an iPod moving from one song to the next. It’s a world of smooth lines and clear light. It’s the golden light over the Pacific as the world sinks into a clear dusk. It’s deft. Even the kangaroo has an emotional clarity.
“Too many times I have wanted to turn around and walk away… you can’t provide what I need from you anyway.” The Ahn Trio.
Like dancer Kayla Radomski’s anguished, strenuous yet light-on-her-feet interpretation of the Ahn Trio’s All I Want, Lethem communicates the desperation and pain of wanting someone on their way to being, or already, out of reach. You Don’t Love Me Yet communicates it with beautiful lines, sensual movements, and a deep appreciation and powerful understanding of love, music, souls and humanity.
In Search Of The Miraculous / lighting up the sky
“….a riddle’s just the thing for a dreamer…” Tom Waits.
Not an easy thing, to talk about ‘the miraculous’ without irony. It exists, however you want to define it or refer to it, and we all, in our own way, seek it. And we all have our own version of what it means, which is miraculous in itself, that one concept can survive and in fact be enhanced by having six billion possible meanings, and probably more ways than that of finding it.
We’re human; aren’t we all really looking for the miraculous, one way or another? We might not call it that, but whether we look for it in love, religion, sex, dancing or reality TV, or maybe all of the above, maybe all at the same time, it’s what being human is all about. We need something beyond ourselves, which by the way, just to help you out, is usually found within us. We just need help bringing it to light, if we’ve gone into the darkness to find it, which, being human, we often do, especially as writers, artists, dancers, dreamers and other holy and degenerate chroniclers of the human condition.
“I tell you that I wanna go, but I wanna stay…” The Ahn Trio.
Hubert Selby Jr has words quoted elsewhere in this blog about the risk of not coming back from that darkness. Transforming yourself emotionally in the name of art can be dangerous. You can read that figuratively, emotionally, psychologically, or simply literally. Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader vanished at sea while attempting to complete his enigmatic work, In Search Of The Miraculous. Even back in 1973, it was meant with ironic detachment. It was to be comprised of photographs of a walk through Los Angeles from the freeway to the ocean; photographs from a similar trek in Amsterdam, and details from the Atlantic crossing he undertook, just him in a small boat, the solitary journey during which he disappeared. The Los Angeles photos are evocative in their directness, William Eggleston by way of Weegee. Each one is accompanied by a lyric fragment of a song by the Coasters’ (“I’m searchin’, I’m searchin’ every which way…”) and what could have been mundane and everyday is now something other, something more. It’s simultaneously a deconstruction and a celebration. They coexist, and their coexistence is essential for the miraculous. Like lovers. Transcendence can only occur from opposition.
“All I want is what you got… I know I’m gonna lose myself this way…” The Ahn Trio.
It doesn’t really need saying at this point, but let’s say it anyway: the miraculous is everywhere, and often shows up when you’re not even looking for it. It’s re-watching the first twelve episodes of Californication and realizing all over again how deftly the irreverence sits with the emotional body blows, the brutal human truths. It’s watching a dancer called Kayla Jenee Radomski from a place called Aurora delivering a wrenching performance to the Ahn Trio’s All I Want, lighting up the sky with moves drenched in wanting and loss and desperation that remind you exactly what it feels like to hurt for someone. It’s watching a performance like this and realizing that writers just have to grasp that sometimes words just aren’t even close to being enough to compete with the eloquence of the body. It’s seeing your lover smile for the first time as your lover. It’s seeing your lover smile for the three thousandth time, and still feeling it light you up. It could be a first kiss… or the last kiss… slow-fading memories of how it used to be, or what could have been… or knowing how things could be. Or breathing clean air on a bright shiny morning and for once, not feeling any pain.
“…why’d you have to wait, where were you, where were you?” The Fray.
‘The miraculous’ can be any or many things, and it’s probably not what you expected. It may not be what you were hoping for, and it might come later than you wanted. You might call it and it doesn’t return your messages… but it is there, always. And if it isn’t (and forgive me for this, because I’m writing this on an iPhone), there’s probably an app for that. Once your higher power of choice gets into the app development market, we’ll all be OK.
Until then, you could do worse than follow the lyric that starts this post, and listen to some Tom Waits. Whatever you choose, miracles await.
"…tiptoe through our shiny city, with our diamond slippers on…"
The National, singing in Fake Empire, a song which recently achieved exposure during the closing moments of Southland, a new cop show set in LA, directed in the unforgiving glare of the sun and the submerged, deep shadows of the LA night, with pin-sharp, brutal clarity. The track contains a multitude of emotions tightly wrapped in the beaten cadences of Tom Waits’ poetry and the loneliness of Jack Kerouac’s American nights. The moment when despair and hope collide and it could go either way. This constant wonder of being alive. Everything is bright, everything is in shadow, and you go quietly through the shades in the valley of the sun, because to go any other way might make it all real, and you don’t know yet if you want darkness or wonder. Tiptoe, then, for now. Just like falling for someone, just like writing a novel; you plunge in with abandon and yet you tread carefully, because you don’t know yet what this thing may be, what it could become. You sense its power but don’t know it, although you want it more than you can say. You can only will it into existence. You want it, you want him, you want her. It’s all so close in your mind, so faraway from where you are. The chorus of the song tells us: “we’re half-awake, in a fake empire.” Maybe that’s the state we’re all in. Maybe that’s what it means to be conscious, to be human. To feel, to be in love. It’s our job as writers to find this out; it’s something only we can do.
"…[the novel’s form] arises in a freedom that no-one can delimit and whose evolution will be a perpetual surprise."
Milan Kundera speaks in concise philosophical truths. His recent essay in seven parts, The Curtain, is a characteristically precise analysis of the art of the novel, and the art of being a novelist. He wields a critical scalpel like a master conceptual surgeon, with complete steadiness of hand and purpose. The text is studded with hard gems of insight. “Description: compassion for the ephemeral.” His cultural world-view can be rigid, and he admits as much, although he follows this by letting us know that it’s the correct view. We can allow this; he’s earned it. “The unbearable lightness of being,” “the beauty of a sudden density of life.” Even in translation, his aphoristic tendencies survive with clarity. He marshals a global coterie of authors, and culls their writings (novels, stories, letters) to weave a tapestry of thought and novelistic philosophy. In the process, he generates a steady stream of ideas, any one of which could fill a chapter, or even a book. It would be breathless were it not for Kundera’s utter control of the material, his iron grip on the evolution of the novel across societies, cultures, nations and moments in history. Naturally, any writer reading The Curtain will find resonance with those ideas that most closely dovetail with their own, but there is much to learn in this book, from the many writers included within. Kundera calls on Flaubert for assistance on multiple occasions, most deeply when he quotes the author of Madame Bovary talking about his mission as a novelist: “I have always done my utmost to get into the soul of things.” What more could we ask for from a novelist? By truthfully, genuinely getting into the soul of your story, your characters, everything else will follow. As Kundera says, “in the art of the novel, existential discoveries are inseparable from the transformation of form.” It’s the one and only real rule of writing: be true to the story. Get into the soul of it, and it will take the shape it needs. The characters will inhabit their organic world, truthfully. Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth, a brilliantly composed contemporary noir thriller about werewolves and dogcatchers in LA, is written in brutally spare, beautifully simple blank verse. When asked why, Barlow described how, once he started writing it, starting deep in the heart of the story, the form it had to take became apparent. From Flaubert’s cinematic journeys into the modern consciousness, through Kundera’s conceptual renderings, to Barlow’s lovelorn wolves howling up at the dying skies of LA, one thing is always necessary: get into the soul of it; or, as Oasis put it in their most recent album title, dig out your soul. The truth will be there.
dreaming between the lines 