Pauline Kael

There's some movie where Matthew Modine keeps referring to that one as "Il Piano" by the guy who did Johnny Suede

it is a terrible adaptation of James but it's also just terrible. isn't it? don't make me watch it again.

i had a picture of joan didion up on my wall when i was 19 too. as well as pauline kael. i was pathetic. and frank o'hara! what was he doing there? and a scary picture of edvard munch. and a picture of winnie cooper from the wonder years. ah, youth...

I'm with morbs on portrait. Good, weird adaption.

Adaptation

it's not that i wasn't interested in that article, max, i just kind of don't want to read it because i love them both. i do think pauline kael would be more fun to go to a movie with. they seem to share a view of woody allen fwiw.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, November 2, 2011 12:36 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i dont like hearing about them fight. i think i would choose JD in the end though.

the piece is not actually that good fwiw but the details about JD and PK are fun

Enjoy the writing of hers I've read (the essay on Kane, that was years ago now).

The notion (upthread) that you hould read a writer for solely writing can only go so far -- do want a writer to have some overlap w/tastes but I like to see the mind working through the writing, and if it gets too cranky (as seems to be implied here) then its not going to work.

well, i didn't mean you should read every writer just cuz they have a great style or have a great way with words. its certainly helpful if there is personality or a point of view that you can latch on to. or it makes a writer more enjoyable to read for a lot of people. probably a good reason why a lot of people don't read henry james! cuz they can't find anything to grab hold of. or something to identify with. despite the fact that he certainly had a way with words. and pauline kael wouldn't have been so inspirational to me if i hadn't wanted to go along on her ride with her. on the other hand, i've been reading christgau for decades and i admire his language and sentences and i don't agree with him pretty much 99% of the time about anything. its not a dealbreaker for me. to not agree with someone. if i think they are good at what they do. you can learn a lot from someone like pauline kael even if you violently disagree with her. is all i meant.

people want to agree with people, basically. in order for a lot of people to love a writer or artist, they like to agree with them in some way. i think. this isn't really a requirement for me. kael's hated oliver stone is a good example. i've found his images/imagery really compelling and exciting in a visceral way over the years and i don't care at all about his message/politics/ideas/writing. maybe being a metal fan helps.

just checked her bibliography on wikipedia and realised there may not be anything of hers collected in book form that i haven't read -- though i read the last two books-worth as it came out in the new yorker, and haven't traded up (the new yorkers are all lined up on a high shelf, and it's pretty much impossible to find anything in them)

louis menand wrote a pretty good piece on her in the new york review of books -- it made a bit too much, too glibly, of her link with postmodernism, but was good on her sceptical approach to any pre-coded theory of "what cinema is" (actually this is totally from memory: i'd have to dig it out to be more exact)

richard cook -- my main mentor as a writer and editor -- was a fan, which i guess is where i picked it up from: he always had a copy of "when the lights go down" in the office at the wire (he was still reviewing a lot of films in the 80s) (he was also imo one of the best british film critics of his time, totally forgotten now, and uncollected....)

My copy of the bio was in the mailbox when I got home today. Don't know if I've been happier to see something in the mail since I got my APBA tabletop baseball game in the late '70s.

i still have that great book of interviews. red cover. don't know how hard that is to find these days. it has to be out of print. i would think.

i'm not a huge fan of wolcott, tbh, but i think i have to read this

i was wrong. just looked. they still have it on amazon and elsewhere.

which great book of interviews, scott?

yeah i feel the same way. kinda got my fill of wolcott/kael with his vanity fair piece but now i think i do actually want to read it. i was also a really big fan of nyc in the 70's. kinda my favorite place to be in the 70's.

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Pauline-Kael-Literary/dp/0878058990

this one.

though amazon u.k. might be more your speeeeeed.

oh, never read that -- i see there's a francis davis "last conversation" also, think i have a kael binge coming on

I thought for sure I had that interview book, but I don't see it on the shelf, just Afterglow. I'll have to order that. I've got the Stanley Kauffmann book in the same series (probably why I confused them):

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Stanley-Kaufmann-Literary/dp/1578065666/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1320269083&sr=8-8

I highly recommend the Davis book. For reasons that baffle me, Greil Marcus hated it.

intra-paulette envy :)

where does davis write these days? he was a contributor when i edited wire but i lost touch with him when i left

Dunno. I did sit in front of him and TG at the Film Forum a while ago. He was still writing about jazz at the Voice last time I checked.

i used to talk to francis at a record store a friend of mine owned in philly. he lives in philly. i have to say, he didn't know me AT ALL, and he was extremely positive and really inspirational to me at the time. i had just started writing for chuck at the voice and he -francis- gave me some much needed confidence when i needed it. i read his books years before because of my dad the jazz cat.

Yeah, I used to know some guy who worked in that record store with him.

i have three of FD's books -- the great one on blues and two of the collections -- and i think that i feel that he's more acute and insightful on jazz than he is on film (where he always very eloquently seemed to be saying what other people were also all saying) (though that was somewhat a major problem in film-writing in the 90s, now that i think of it); he was lovely to work with, and i has editor-contributor lunch with him once when he was visiting london, though i don't recall a thing we talked about

s/b i can has editor-contributor lunch

That blues book was really good.

Scott - didn't mean to pick on you, btw, and I've been reading Raymond Durgnat this week so looking for more collected writing on film. Manny Farber is one of my favourite writers who was so open to everything (or at leats that is how Negative Space reads to me, although I am guarded about collections), and you go on a journey w/that book. One of my faves of all time!

I'm fine for people to be critical of things I like, but as long as they aren't cranky about it. Just the fact she wasn't open at all to some things does annoy. I want an angle (positive or negative) on something I've seen.

The Didion-Kael thing is funny, because I swear just a week ago or so I was wondering what they thought of each other. (I guess just prompted by them both being in the culture-press a lot the past month.) Not at all surprised by the enmity. They each seem like a kind of person the other would find irritating. Their writing, their approaches to the world, are so different.

Oh and while we're on the subject of Francis Davis, I'll just say I just bought and read one of his jazz collections and loved it. Have not read his film writing.

two complete opposite prose stylists yet they're both native californians of roughly same generation, fascinated by the movies

Yeah I was trying to think of the right metaphor to contrast them. Fire and ice is too cliché. Maybe something like, river and sand.

microwave oven and refrigerator

one's lou reed, the other is metallica

Mitt Romney and GOP primary voters.

skrillex and kode 9

it makes complete sense to me. her dissing of didion. kael was a foe of preciousness or what she saw as preciousness. which is different from a delicate touch which she could certainly be a fan of. and she had her own battle of the sexes going on too. there were definitely women who rankled her in a way that a lot of men (characters/types) didn't. i think i identified with her years ago in her distaste for what she might have considered unearned self-importance. (her disdain for cassavettes and bergman for instance) since that time i have reconsidered my own views in that i no longer feel that anyone earns anything ever and can fake or feign any damn thing they want and if it is compelling i don't care how they arrived at it or what path they took. i'm a big fan of spiritual short-cuts. it saves time. suffering is for the birds.

i was always a fan of didion's dead-eyed gaze and valium haze in fiction. but i was also a big fan of valium back then. and, for the record, though i saw her point, i always loved cassavetes because i would happily watch gena rowlands standing still for two hours and i would also happily watch peter falk stand still for two hours and for that matter i could happily watch john cassavetes stand still for two hours. and if they are actually moving i could watch them for four hours or more.

i was gonna say. peter falk, at least, should be muttering to himself for those two hours.

peter falk on stage alone in compete improv mode would have been top ten movie for me if it had happened. it should have happened.

oh man -- Kael is worth reading just for her head-scratching over Cassavetes films.

i just saw a crazy peter falk movie a couple weeks back that i'm sure everyone knew about already. now i can't remember the damn title. alan arkin was in it too.

this thread is definitely gonna drive me back to the well. gonna have to dig out the old battered paperbacks. but that's fine with me.

the in-laws?

I enjoyed Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club; he's the best of The New Yorker's house intellectuals. But the querulousness with which he approached her in that essay mark mentioned annoyed me; he was flabbergasted over the idiosyncrasies that every critic who's reviewed her in the last two weeks has lingered over.

or big trouble. the 80's movie.

Serpentine.

in big trouble you get to see cassavetes direct my hero beverly d'angelo.