Late Nights with the Hipster in Chief

President Obama's duet with Jimmy Fallon drew praise
and blame from entirely predictable circles.

The brouhaha over President Obama’s appearance this week on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon followed predictable lines. Fox News commentators claimed Obama has cheapened the office. Their opposite numbers at MSNBC rallied to the President’s defense, to nobody’s surprise. Lawrence O’Donnell coupled the Obama/Fallon footage with the first President to appear on a scripted entertainment show, Richard Nixon on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

Unaddressed amid this artificial controversy lingers the real question: what is the role of the American President in today’s world? Should the person elected to that office hold himself (or herself) aloof from the glitz of entertainment? Or is the President a celebrity on a par with rock stars and actors? The answer, if we look at who voters have favored all the way back to the Founders’ time, seems plain: the President, for good or ill, is very much a pop culture figure.

When Nixon appeared on Laugh-In, he was considered an accidental candidate, likely to win only because his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, couldn’t wash off the stink of Lyndon Johnson. Voters in that newly technicolor world remembered Nixon’s televised 1960 debate with John Kennedy, when Nixon’s disdain for stage makeup made him resemble a pile of old socks. Appearing on Laugh-In let America see he was in on the joke—that he was their President.

Nixon had the aid, that year, of former Mike Douglas producer Roger Ailes. Later, Ailes would produce Rush Limbaugh’s ill-considered TV program, before shepherding Fox News into existence. Ailes brought his TV experience to bear on his political goals, and helped bring politics into the television age. If one man holds the bag for weird on-camera behavior by candidates and office-holders, that man is Roger Ailes.

Candidate Nixon made his age, unhipness,
and confusion the very heart of the joke.

But Ailes didn’t have a patch on Ronald Reagan. Though many commentators note Reagan’s background in Hollywood, his wartime contribution to America’s PR machine is much more interesting for his political career. Though he never faced a live bullet during World War II, Reagan had the benefit of a high-pressure education in how to tweak an audience’s feelings. He knew how to make us laugh, cheer, cry, cuss, and fall in love—on command, like a puppy.

Admirers called Reagan the Great Communicator, but reread his most celebrated speeches. He produced stirring quotes in abundance (“Well, there you go again;” “Tear down this wall!”), yet few policy statements. And Americans rewarded him for that. Compared to the notoriously inarticulate Jimmy Carter, or the stultifying Walter Mondale, Reagan won votes by giving tired, overloaded voters something exciting and unambiguous to hang onto.

The techniques Reagan pioneered found their ne plus ultra in George W. Bush. Twice Bush ran against knowledgeable but dull opponents, and won, as much as anything, on the fact that he looked like a real human beside starched shirts like Gore and Kerry. Even his supporters admitted Bush ran vague campaigns (though he seemed a model of specificity compared to Barack Obama), but he played the right emotional keys to keep voters’ eyes and ears on him.

Few Presidents have courted the media so blatantly as to appear on a midnight comedy talk show (though John Kerry, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bill and Hillary Clinton [separately] talked politics with Jay Leno). But over a dozen Presidents from both parties have attended the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Many have tried stand-up comedy. And why shouldn’t they? Candidates and office-holders perform for journalists regularly.

Comedy has always weighed in on politics;
turnabout is fair play.

My examples to now have focused on Presidents in living memory, though that’s been more expedient than deliberate. Because Presidents have copious camera time, we simply have more to observe today than prior generations. Yet Presidents have always made pop culture statements. Abraham Lincoln did not make classic speeches for posterity; transcripts of slick language in newspapers made him worth remembering centuries later.

Even Thomas Jefferson, often painted as stiff and doctrinaire, could work a crowd. His decision to ride his own horse in his inaugural parade, with neither a hat nor a powdered wig, made a deliberate statement as to who he believed he had been elected to serve. This marked a turning point in American history, when pretense became a political liability. But it was also a high-water mark in deliberate messaging.

President Obama simply continued the tradition of using the tools of his time to carry the message where it needs to go. How many people who would tune out another Presidential speech paid attention because of the format and venue? Sure, slow jamming the news lacks the faux gravitas of Disney’s Hall of Presidents. But it carries the mark of communications genius, and refined cultural savvy.

The Joy of Middles and Unfinished Ends

Lloyd Alexander

I discovered fantasy literature as a kid when I read Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Derived from Welsh myth, and utilizing the episodic story structure of The Mabinogion, Alexander created an arc in which the dreams all children share (what if my destiny looms larger than my circumstances?) come true for one youth. Though laced with magic and adventure, these elements really matter mainly as they help our hero discover his true adult identity.

The first four volumes each ended with the promise that the story would continue. The hope of more, that somehow this epic could unfold in any direction. So it came as a shock when the end came. Narnia ended, I felt, when the story had played itself out, but Prydain wasn’t done. Alexander even made that plain in his explanation that more took place after the final chapter. We just didn’t get to see it. The story was done, and all the possibilities closed down.

This was the first time I spotted a reality that eventually became the largest concept in my treasury of literary axioms: middles are the best part of any book. I will go to the mat with you on any book you name. Beginnings carry the need to explain character, situation, and conflict, while endings have the burden of putting a bow on all those concepts. Middles simply revel in untrammeled possibility. When we imagine books we love, we always recall the middle.

Since I’ve already mentioned fantasy, consider Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Though arguably the Twentieth Century’s most influential book, it lags in both the early and late chapters. Tolkein felt the need for such intricate introductions and explanations that the Council of Elrond runs nearly as long as some entire novels. And observe how filmmaker Peter Jackson elided Tolkein’s long, talky denouement. Only the middle doesn’t suffer from either scene-setting or resolution.

Joseph Conrad

If you want a more mainstream example, consider Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, acknowledged classics both, present us with lush stories that probe at the inner recesses of the human soul. They also don’t so much resolve as peter out. By his own admission, Conrad had difficulty writing endings, but this didn’t stop him feeling the need to close every door he opened. Thus these masterworks sputter in the final pages.

Many classic writers understood this truth, and thus didn’t try to enforce pat endings. Shakespeare left so many doors open in Hamlet that uncounted authors have tried to write sequels. What happened to Horatio and Fortinbras after the final curtain? What happened to the state of Denmark after every claimant to the throne killed every other claimant? The very unsolved nature of these questions gives it power.

Unfortunately, most sequels have been undisputed stinkers. I blame the authors’ evident need to solve every debate definitively. Only Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which butters its bread with existential ambiguity and, if anything, asks even more questions, merits our time. Nor is this problem unique to Shakespeare; consider all the authors who write sequels to the Odyssey or Pride and Prejudice—and how few are actually are worth reading.

Shakespeare, Homer, and Austen knew that, if they left important plot threads open, we would write our own stories. Even if we don’t literally put pen to paper, we tell stories to ourselves. We ask questions, we speculate on possibilities, and we put ourselves into the shoes of our favorite protagonists. We make meaning not from the completion of every concept the authors put on the page, but in the ability to join the story, which we can only do if the story remains open.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Based on that, I will make one exception to my axiom about middles. Perhaps you’ve thought of favorite stories that only ramp up in the final pages, like Virgil’s Aeneid, Goethe’s Faust, or Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. All these books have earned their reputation over the course of generations, even millennia. And they share one common trait: all three were left incomplete at their authors’ deaths. They don’t have endings, only middles.

Perhaps that’s why ongoing series novels dominate the current publishing domain. Maybe audiences like middles so much that they want stories to hang on. Though one particular conflict may resolve, our characters’ arcs remain intact, and continue to live in a world where anything can happen. Because we want to believe anything can happen in our world, as Lloyd Alexander taught me to hope so many years ago.

Jane Shore's Incisive Images and Daring Verse

Jane Shore, That Said: New and Selected Poems

Poets publish collections like this one when they are preparing how they want to be remembered. These little surveys of their careers allow them to create the image they hope will follow them when they cannot write anything new. Jane Shore has done a good job at that, charting her path from young poet to insightful elder with deft grace. She presents herself here as somebody well worth remembering.

Based now at George Washington University, Shore’s career, excerpted here, has taken her all over the contemporary American poetry map. Her earliest poems reflect the image-driven tone in Twentieth Century poetry. Verses like "The Lifeguard" and "Clock" present a world viewed through a lens of such unique content that she could not be mistaken for anyone else. Shore openly acknowledges her debt to Elizabeth Bishop in some poems, and lovingly quotes from Emily Dickinson and Randall Jarrell. Yet notice the casual intimacy of these lines from "Young Woman on the Flying Trapeze":

Shooting with his Bolex,
my father kept nature in perspective.
He caught the trapeze artist catching
his partner in midair, swinging

in and out of my line of sight.
I was five. In nightmares, the body
falls straight into the dreamer's eye;
he wakes before hitting bottom.

Did I blink then, did I glance away,
the moment that she tumbled
like an angel out of heaven?
I don't remember, but I saw her fall.

I particularly like how these opening lines to a much longer poem emphasize not only memory, but also the memory of memory. This duality, of self as observer of self, reflects the inner turmoil that accompanies modern Jewish life; that is, the knowledge of oneself as both a member of a community, and an outsider. Shore is at once joined with others, and separated, a divide that makes its way into many of her best poems.

Shore expands on this layered approach in her mid-career poems, which have a primarily autobiographical thrust. The memory of a Garment District childhood cantilevers images to recreate the tension between urban American life and Shore's Jewish heritage. Christianity permeates her poetry, like it does in our culture, making her innate difference a choice which she must make fresh every day, as in these lines from "The Holiday Season":

The electric eye of the mezuzah
guarded our apartment over the store,
as innocent of Christmas
as heaven, where God lived,
how many stories above the world?
Was He angry when He saw
all the windows on my street—
the assimilated grocer's, druggist's,
even my father's store—
lit up like an Advent calendar?

I enjoy Shore's early and mid-career poems, but I have to admit, in a poetry market that has more writers than readers, not much makes these conventional verses stand out from the crowd. Beyond a doubt, the best poems in this book are the most recent. I can't excerpt from these poems like from her prior career stages, because they have a very different structure. And that's what makes them most readable.

Shore's newest poems tend to start in a light, conversational tone, as though surprised to find themselves forced into verse format. But as they progress, they ascend into higher, more incisive language that, in the closing lines, takes the reader by surprise. Shore's "big finish" generally consists of subverting our expectations, or juxtaposing two unexpected truths, or just saying what we need to hear in a way only Jane Shore could say it.

These progressions through the author’s stages are driven by subtle, concise image. When Shore talks about, for example, her beloved Chatty Cathy doll, which demands to be fed, but which she must not feed, she never has to say the word “futility.” The knowledge of her doomed actions permeates every image she draws out. And when Shore’s childhood recollection gives into that futility, we feel her sense of disappointment keenly, without ever needing to be told.

Thirty-five years after her first book, Shore has a robust career to look back on. Her highlight book, though slim, contains no useless or ornamental poems. She probably will not receive the recognition she deserves, in a society grown indifferent to poetry. So perhaps I can pay her no greater compliment than to say that reading this book inspired me to get up off my dusty sofa and write some new poetry of my own. I hope it lives up to the high standard she sets.

Sober, Naked, and Bleeding in an Orange County Sunset

Dan Barden, The Next Right Thing

Some days a good man can't catch a break. I mean, hell. You’d think, if your Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor died with smack in his arm, people would stop coming after you long enough to mourn. And that’s where you’d be wrong, bucko. Because an ex-cop with an assault jacket can’t leave that happy crappy alone. He has to poke where it hurts. He has to find the truth. And if the truth drives everyone away, well, ain’t nothing comes free in this world.

The best mystery protagonists have some monkey on their backs, and Dan Barden’s Randy Chalmers, is no different. But unlike the noir tradition, Randy cannot hide his self-destruction behind the savoire faire of drink and womanizing. That would blow the AA cool he’s spent eight years building. So his risks become outsized, his death wish exaggerated to the point of rueful comedy. Randy reads like the bastard son of Sam Spade and Brother Bill W.

Barden’s nihilistic, mordantly slapstick novel takes a simple premise, of a man with a question he needs answered, and pushes it as far as it will go. As Randy pursues his quest with relentless aggression, he blinds himself to what everyone else can see: that his demand to know the truth has become a substitute for his addiction. He embodies how disaster begets disaster. Yet we cannot help but respect his single-minded devotion to the mentor he loves.

Because that “once a junkie, always a junkie” bull he’s getting from the cops is no damn good. Randy’s sponsor, Terry Elias, had too much reason to live. He took no shellack of anyone, and he punched through everybody else’s pretenses, so Randy won’t believe he just tossed over fifteen years of sobriety for a syringe full of fake happiness. Come the heck on. Why would the guy who punctured everybody else’s pretenses die wrapped up in his own?

In addition to an excellent character, Barden hits us with remarkable voice. Randy’s foul-mouthed attempts to justify his behavior take on the ring of poetry, as he buries his own motivations in a Chinese puzzle box of self-delusion and moralisms. We know we can’t trust him to tell the truth about himself, yet we can’t help but listen to him spin his line of malarkey. He just does it so well.

Dan Barden

Randy reminds me of that friend we all have, the one where we cover our faces because we can’t believe he just did what he just did, yet we peek through our fingers to see what he’ll do next. You know the guy I mean. The same inappropriate tendencies that tell us to hold him at arm’s length also keep us coming back for more. Randy Chalmers’ very public flame-out is just too funny and charismatic for us to stay away.

Like the best tragedy, Randy has far to fall when he collapses into himself, and he takes a lot of people with him. After nearly beating a perp to death as a Santa Ana patrol cop, and losing his marriage and daugther to the bottle, he struggled his way to the top. He’s now an award-winning home designer, hired by the cream of Laguna Beach society. So when he goes off on a dry drunk, ignoring all the warnings, he becomes almost Sophoclean in his pathos.

In short, Randy Chalmers is a completely awful human being—and we can’t help rooting for him all the way. We want him to survive this horrible death spiral, even though we know he won’t. I can’t recall how long since I last saw a character of such compelling public amorality.

Unfortunately, Barden flinches at the end. After we watch Randy destroy everyone he loves in pursuit of the truth, we get two long, talky chapters in which he explains how he didn’t really lose everything. This concluding reversal suggests Barden couldn’t completely commit to his nihilistic vision. He has to slap a bandage on everything that came before. He did so well right up to that conclusion, that it feels soft for him to salve his character in the denouement.

That limitation notwithstanding, Dan Barden has created a book that isn’t quite like anything else on the market today. I can forgive him a flinch after the risks he took in the story up to that point. A character like this, in an edgy story that mostly doesn’t let us look away, is a rare enough bird to stand out in today’s competitive book space.

The Movie Maker Learns To Type

Kevin Fox, Until the Next Time

Ever since Sidney Sheldon spooled a sheet of Boise Cascade into his old manual typewriter, every movie maker has wanted to write a book. In the back matter of his second novel, The Disappeared, MR Hall admits he started novel writing because it lends him perceived legitimacy. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as such; Stef Penney proved a good writer is a good writer, regardless of medium.

But Penney and Hall learned the difference between writing media. Books, which tell their stories with language and operate on a slow-moving part of the audience’s psyche, are not interchangeable with the screen. TV and movies, based on images and movement, speak to our reptile brains, which is why Will Ferrell is no PG Wodehouse. TV writer Kevin Fox, who produced Lie to Me, one of my favorite recent shows, proves that knife cuts both ways.

You can read Fox’s debut novel one of two ways. If you treat it like the suspense thriller the marketing boyos purport, you have an anarchic mishmash of stereotypes, boilerplate storytelling techniques, and short, frenetic scenes better suited to the big screen than to fixed type. If you treat it like a Monty Pythonesque satire of the thriller genre, then the confusing formulaic building blocks become part of the joke. I just can’t tell which approach Fox intends.

On his twenty-first birthday, Sean Corrigan inherits the journal of an uncle he didn’t know he had, along with a stack of cash, an airline ticket to Ireland, and a sacred mission to uncover the truth. Unfortunately, several pages are missing from the journal—apparently the pages containing the most important secrets of his fugitive uncle’s life. Every time Sean buttonholes somebody relevant to the decades-old mystery, he repeats some variation on this dialog:

“Your uncle bore some dark, threatening secrets.”
“Can you tell me about him and his secrets, please?”
“It doesn’t matter, and it’s not my place to tell.”

It got to where I couldn’t decide who I wanted to slap more, Sean or his various interlocutors. On the one hand, Sean’s frustrating passivity made me want to grab his lapels and shout at him to grow a pair. On the other hand, everyone around him wants to burden Sean knows something about him, to the point where it strains credibility. Dick Nixon wanted to hang Uncle Mike out to dry, and Sean never heard that story? From anybody? Ever? Please.

The bog standard foreshadowing becomes so tedious that the book descends into parody territory. Sean reads the entire journal in one sitting, yet releases it to us in dribs and drabs, so not only does everyone know more than Sean, but Sean knows more than us. The story intercuts between the past and present so furiously that you can hear the soap operatic organ music at scene changes. No character steps outside safe movie stereotypes at any point.

Fox offsets this shortcoming, at least somewhat, with his Mamet-like language. Because this novel alternates between two first person narrators, it would be easy for a writer unused to differing voices to write both parallel narratives in largely the same voice. Instead, Uncle Mike speaks like a hard-bitten cop from the Cool Disco age, while Sean really does sound like a confused Clinton-era slacker. And both speak like they’re talking, not typing.

Unfortunately, this virtue underscores my problem with the rest of the book. Fox creates a story that caroms through its paces with the clip of a TV miniseries. Characters who supposedly loom large in the protagonists’ lives exist only in glimpses brief enough to fit in a single take of film. Life-altering exchanges take only one or two pages. This is TV pace, not novel pace. The characters speak so well because Fox is writing TV dialog.

With its concise scenes and eager clip, I bet this would make good television. It easily mixes gothic suspense, police procedure, family drama, and even comedy. The language is so natural and easy that it would require very little adaptation. And, though it’s too long to compress into a single feature film, the TV miniseries format would let the camera explore Fox’s subtle, mordant world view.

But this book, as a book, is either a joke notable for masterful deadpan, or the reductio ad absurdum of its genre. Because of the author’s background in TV drama, I think he means it seriously. But that can’t be, because it’s so banal. Okay, then, joke it must be. Wokka wokka.