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Wednesday, December 17, 2003 Yellow Dog's a big disappointment. Martin Amis is such a problematic author. You say, "You should read Martin Amis, he's great." And people say, "Really, I read X, and it sucked." He has written a lot of dreck. Yellow Dog: sucks. Einstein's Monsters: sucks. Night Train: now, that really, really sucked. What was he thinking? And yet...Money was brilliant, one of the great books of the 20th century, one of the few, I felt, that really captured what it was like to live in a city in the late 20th. He made the rest of modern lit. seem so dull and Victorian. Which it mostly is. And Experience was excellent (you just have to skip the stupid, jejeune college letters he put in). And The War Againt Cliche-- it's a collection of book reviews, but I've read it five times. And it's huge, I don't believe I could imagine doing that with any other author. (Except Limonov, my favourite, but he's off on a tangent of his own). Amis once said he wrote for "the adolescent in the long black coat." But he seems to have stopped doing that, or is doing it only intermittently. Apart from his genius with language, he's been blessed with a rare gift: to see the world with fresh eyes, without assumptions, not taking things for granted. The hallmark of a true artist. To ask, as he says, "Why cars? Why buildings?" But he's squandering these gifts. Writing too fast, maybe? I can't imagine he needs the money. His teeth are fixed. Maybe it's all the alimony. Or maybe it's that British desire to be prolific, to keep chucking stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Yellow Dog didn't stick, for me. For me, Yellow Dog slid down the wall, leaving a nauseous stain... but anyway, back to *me* The semi-divine Leah McLaren asked me at a party on Friday, "A blog? What's that?" When I explained, she and her boyfriend said, "What? No money involved?" And she said "Why don't you have a column?" It was hard to explain. "It's good just for getting stuff off your chest," I said. "You don't even remotely have to please an editor, or come up with a topic, etc." But I suppose for a guy in my position to write for free is crazy-- I mean, Pam is also a little skeptical. So I told her I onyl spend fifteen minutes on it at a time. I have a kitchen timer on my desk, when it goes off I have to jump. Somehow it's a good excercise, to write fast, and anyway I like to work for free, don't tell anyone, I can't explain it. Yeah, Leah was charming as usual. This other guy: not so much. One of those typical parties where everyone was like, "Oh, hey, I don't normally smoke but can I bum one of yours?" Sure, sure. Then of course the party ran completely out of cigarettes and trying to be a mensch I handed out my last three. My last three: here, here, here. He put my last cigarette behind his ear. LM said to him, "Hey, X, you know that was Dave's last cigarette, if you don't want to smoke it maybe you should give it to him." Later I found out he didn't even smoke... He stuck it behind his ear and, boorishly drunk, chat chat chat. Fifteen minutes went by. The cigarette's still behind his ear. Finally, I say, "Hey, if you don't want that cigarette, I'll take it." "What? This?" he says, pulling it out. "Yeah." He starts waving it around. "You want it or not?" "No, I mean," I said, "if you're not gonna smoke it, I'll take it." "Why is it contingent on what I want? Why can't you just say whether you want it or not?" "O.K." I said. "I want it." Just then, a girl comes over, says, "Oh, hey, you got a cigarette, this party's completely out of cigarettes, where'd you get that?" "You want it?" he says, and gives it to her. So: that's it, man: they say "Living well is the best revenge," to which I would add, "LIving well and not only living well but being SEEN to live well, by all the pricks that dissed you on the way up." Oh, there goes the timer... Shit convinces me I've gotta live like P. Diddy to get back at all these bastards... So when Overexposure hits the big screen as a movie-- his supposed territory-- thanks to the GENUINE talent of yours truly, I'll send him a tasseled invitation to the screening-- with a pack of fucking cigarettes attached Wednesday, December 03, 2003 Yeah, "Bad Santa," c'est moi. Martin Amis was in town pushing product, Yellow Dog. I need to read this book. Reviews all over the map, but he's a great writer. Maybe this Tibor Fischer character, who lambasted him in an early review, was acting merely out of spite and envy. That was certainly the way it seemed, in part, and yet it was such an authoritative and self-convinced attack on the book that it seemed impossible it could be that simple and straightforward. Tibor Fischer's books-- well, first of all, they're "magic realism," which always provokes an immediate yawn of boredom from me-- it's like someone telling you a dream, anything could happen: "And then a rabbit became president of the United States," etc-- and even within the world of magic realism sound boring. So much of the literary world seems motivated by envy, spite, the desire to vent spleen... According to my friend and x-boss Daniel R., who interviewed him and (I am envious to discover) actually hung around with him and had some drinks and dinner with the "bad man of English letters" (he's in his fifties, he keeps getting called "the bad boy of English letters" which astonishes him, and me) the other day, it's actually starting to get to him. One of the problems of his particular type of fame: not only does he have to tolerate bad reviews, he gets interviewed about the bad reviews at every little whistle-stop. It's the first question he gets asked wherever he goes: "Whaddaya think about all the lousy reviews you've been getting?" Yeah, I'm green with envy Daniel had dinner with him. I guess I'm destined never to meet my hero-- actually my hero #2, #1 is Limonov, in many ways a subtler writer, posessed of "bright, clear thoughts," like Amis, but also a certain Eastern European darkness and wisdom it is unfortunately not mostly given to westerners to possess. A Russian "great soul," we don't really have them here. Maybe, maybe P. Roth, who is no do0ubt of Eastern European, Ashkenaz extraction, but...I don't know, he doesn't really seem to qualify. Oscar Wilde said: "Beauty is higher than genius, as it needs no explanation." Limonov saays: "Beauty is higher than talent, because talent is sort of an applied thing, and it is given to you for the world's benefit, is it not?" It's true: talent does not seem to give its possessor much happiness-- and in Amis's case I think particularly true. The world will take a long time to realize what a great writer it had in its midst, if it ever does. "He molps the floor with his contemporaries," as the Observer once said. Oh, here it is, my new favorite song-- everyone's new favorite song: "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard/And their life is better than yours/Damn right it's better than yours/I could teach you but I'd have to charge." No idea what it means, and yet it says something... Where was I? Oh, yeah, I was gratified to hear Money was finally included in a list of 100 best books of all time-- the Observer again, I think. Too bad it's only 20 years too late. I knew that the day it came out. I couldn't believe anyone was even allowed to write like that, let alone had the talent. He tries to pooh-pooh that book, but it's the one he'll be remembered for. He has also produced some real shit. Night Train? What the fuck was that? You have to remember you have fans, and your real fans will be let down when you are not at least speaking the truth, no matter how bad your thing is otherwise, and Night Train was just...well, he must have been having a lot of troubles in his life at that point. Write for yourself, is the motto. "Money was fun to write, I spent three years cackling away in my study," Amis says, and looking back he is alarmed at the "risks" he took (I'll say: he's got a scene where he tries to rape his girlfriend, she knees him in his "splayed and aching tackle" and he hits the deck and crawls on all fours to the cxxan where he pukes, "a very penitent crocodile," thinking, God, what a bad idea that was, I'll never try that again. Then there's a line break and the next sentence is: "Then I tried it again." A technique I *ahem* "paid homage to" in Chump Change, where my protagonist fucks up, swears never to do it again, then the next chapter begins: "Then I fucked up again.") So: write for self. Take risks. And I've gotta be more caqreful where I go out. Last night, someone said to me: "You smell nice, I would have thought you would smell like diapers or something." Then she turned to the person next to her and said: "Smell him. He smells great. Wouldn't you think he smells like diapers or something?" Because I inhabit the same house as my children, I guess... I stared at her in horror and disbelief. Why is it every night out has to include an exchange like that? Is it something about me? Do I invite this kind of thing? Or is it in fact other people who have no manners? I would never say anything remotely like that to anyone, even someone I despised. I'm always so flabbergasted by this sort of thing I don't know what to say, just smile. What would you do? What should one do? Monday, December 01, 2003 "Bad Santa," man. I got a kick out of it, Pam wasn't too crazy about it. She sat pretty grimly throughout. She just wasn't in the mood. You have to think drunken losers are funny. Which I do. Billy Bob Thornton is such a bad santa-- he's a bad santa in the way Harvey Keitel is a bad lieutenant in Bad Lieutenant-- i.e. really, really bad. It starts off with him sitting alone in his Santa suit slugging scotch then staggering out the back door of the bar to puke. Throughout the movie he's berated by an angry (black) dwarf who is his elf: what a loser BBT is, how pathetic, what a drunk. The only thing he's good at is cracking safes, he and the elf hide in the store on on Xmas eve and break into the safe. But he's getting worse at it and worse at it, after the first score he tells the elf (over scotches) he's gonna get out of the game and go to Miami and open a bar and the elf says "Yeah, right, you're gonna go down to Miami Beach and drink it all away by, like, March, and by the time I call you you're gonna put that Santa Hat on so fast you gonna get hat-burn." But then you see him behind the bar in a little beach bar in Miami beach and you think, "Hey, he got it together." But then the real bartender comes by and throws him out, saying, "Hey, get the fuck away from my bar! I told you never to go behind my bar again." BBT just stares at him as he tries to down as much of the drink he's holding in his hand as he can before the bar owner can literally toss him over the bar, into the sand... He goes back on the job and (the late) John Ritter plays the store manager. One day as he's doing his rounds, he hears noises coming from one of the "Plus size" change rooms, then he looks under the door of the change room (doesn't go all the way to the floor) and sees a pair of obvious Santa-pants around someone's ankles, and another pair of feet, lots of bucking and rocking, just as BBT is saying: "Yeah, baby, you ain't gonna shit right for a month." He tries to fire BBT but BBT comes back with a threat of a lawsuit for unfair practice against his black, midget sidekick, raises the spectre of a picket line full of angry black dwarfs with megaphones, picket signs, media, etc. Ritter backs off. Next, or later, BBT picks up a bartender who turns out to have a Santa fetish. He takes her out to his car: "Fuck me, Santa, fuck me!" "Can't I at least take this stupid hat off?" "No, leave it on." He shows up to work stumbling drunk, beats the shit out of some styrofoam reindeers with a huge candy cane, passes out drunk in the manger, etc etc. Obviously hates kids, Christmas, is a dark, bitter loner. All in all, a movie full of classic moments that didn't quite add up to a classic movie, for some reason. But well worth $13.00
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