Segue-Mania: 2023 Best Books and Films

Segue-Mania: Read and Watched in 2023

“What’s knittin’, kittens?” (Barbara Stanwyck, BALL OF FIRE, 1941)

As we learned from BARBIE’S (2023) progenitor JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (2001), “When the going gets tough, the tough make lemonade.” Plenty of tart and tasty treats pass the lips of Barbara (not Barbie) Stanwyck in her Preston Sturgis-penned screwball masterpiece THE LADY EVE (1941). For once, her opposite number (Henry Fonda) matches her spark, but she demurs, “I need him… like the axe needs the turkey.”

Such festive banter seems decades ahead of the similarly dialogue-driven 1935 novel A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD, by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Her all-talking, no-singing novel may be the driest, oddest piece of prose NYRB has yet rereleased. If you guessed that someone named Compton-Burnett might be inclined to follow her own stylistic star while portraying a strange retro-Regency mix of patriarchy and misanthropy… well, ten points to you and your house, with or without its head.

It's much easier to pin down the set and setting of Frank and Youman’s TINY IMPERFECTIONS (2020). Cloaked in a rom-com skirt and blazer, this breezy read hits every mark. The story’s backdrop: The Obama-era San Francisco boomlet. The story: a private school admissions officer’s foibles as a daughter, a mom, and a woman of color in a lily-white environment. Come for the Hayes Valley namechecks, stay for humor and heart.

Had TINY IMPERFECTIONS been set in Brooklyn, it surely would have namechecked DINER, whose DAY FOR NIGHT (2023) cookbook / photo album finally provides what the world has been ordering since opening night: 48 recipes and 160 full-color pages of mise-en-scène, atmosphere, and ambience, the real reason we dine out instead of using all those cookbooks we already have. (That said, the olive oil cake recipe deserves its own holiday.)

Was Diner one of the mandatory hipster big city stops for the protagonists of ROAMING (2023)? The Tamaki Cousins kindly collaborated on this graphic / comic masterpiece of three young women on break from their freshman year. Their hostel stay is depicted in swooping lines and minimal color wash, fine representations of the wet and wintery city. Maybe the comic’s protagonists will find their way to Diner when they graduate and move to The City in their twenties. Who knows, maybe they’ll get hired.

The bars and cafes of the 81-minute movie FALLEN LEAVES (2023) host people who are neither famous writers nor trained assassins. Their jobs are washing dishes, sorting merchandise, cleaning construction sites. With an economy that stands as the Finnish inverse of Wes Anderson’s WONDERFUL WORLD OF HENRY SUGAR (2023), Aki Kaurismäki’s characters lose jobs, find each other, and just might improve their lives together.

If not, there are certainly other ways of living. Attractive pickpockets and conceited conmen seem to be doing pretty well in Paris, at least according to Ernst Lubitsch’s pre-code sly wink of a rom-com, TROUBLE IN PARADISE (1935). How do you get a crook to fall for you? Just ask him, “When a lady takes her jewels off in a gentleman’s room, where does she put them?”

Crooks and cons abound in Fintan O’Toole’s incredible WE DON’T KNOW OURSELVES: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF MODERN IRELAND (2022). If it was easy as pie to combine memoir, hard reportage, cultural analysis, and tiptop writing, we’d all be bakers, living off olive oil cake and Cadbury Flake. Slightly less sui generis, but no less important, is Rosanna Xia’s CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE SEA: VISIONS FOR OUR VANISHING COASTLINE (2023). Xia doesn’t whine or scold. She just lays out the facts, the conflicts, and the options. Her emphasis on optionality positions us where we belong: in the place of democratic citizens with free will.

When considering free will, 21st century fiction tends to play with the multiverse. A century and a half ago, paths not taken found expression through twins in Mark Twain, and doubles in Charles Dickens. Zadie Smith’s excellent page-turning novel THE FRAUD (2023) features an ersatz heir among its Victorian cast of characters. Whether we agree with THE FRAUD’s characters or not, we always sympathize with them as they make their decisions, surrounding the book’s titular cypher.

IN THE CAFÉ OF LOST YOUTH (2006, translation 2016), one particular cypher captures the attention of the other patrons. They alternate narration in Patrick Modiano’s slim gem. One narrator composes odd catalogues of his fellow café visitors. Another narrator, an outsider, sees the café denizens better than they see themselves… and declines to intervene, favoring a strange code of honor. This touching multivocal novel’s conclusion should have been as obvious as a locomotive, but I never saw it coming.

We all know how American Apparel ends—not with a bang, but with a whimper. Kate Flannery’s STRIP TEES: A MEMOIR OF MILLENNIAL LOS ANGELES (2023) fills in the shortages between chambray shirtsleeves, the places behind white piping, the blanks betwixt the bodysuits. It stands out as the more guilty pleasure of two at fine cult-escape books out this year, the more mature pleasure being FORAGER: FIELD NOTES OF SURVIVING A FAMILY CULT by Michelle Dowd (2023). Oh, Los Angeles.

And oh, Beverly Hills. There, Phil Spector kept Ronnie of the Ronettes quite literally at gunpoint until her own barefoot escape from the mansion with an empty gold coffin in its basement. Phil and other predictably awful dudes thankfully cede center stage to the women and girls of the ‘60s girl groups in Flam and Leibowitz’s easy-reading oral history, BUT WILL YOU LOVE ME TOMORROW? (2023).

While the pre-Beatles girl groups were busting into US radio, Michel Legrand was composing tunes for the eternally watchable A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (1961). His commitment to artifice continued with THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964), which was shown on a few big screens last year, the better to abolish the thought of all dour earth tones, grays and browns, and blahs.

Grays, blacks, and slightly lighter greys pervade PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (1961), an ocean or two away from Cherbourg. Shōhei Imamura’s heartwarming and heartbreaking masterpiece deserves a screen like that big U2 McCube in Las Vegas. Can we pretend it debuted in 1963, and re-release it for its faux-60th anniversary? Just spit-balling here.

The 60th anniversary release of MY VERY OWN SPECIAL PARTICULAR PRIVATE AND PERSONAL CAT (1963) is its own miracle of a children’s book, an existentialist self-help book about boundaries as imagined by Gertrude Stein. The title hints at its characteristic cadence, which it carries throughout, like a signature scent.

Nineteen sixty-three’s style can’t be said to pervade PG Wodehouse’s release of that year, STIFF UPPER LIP, JEEVES (1963), which reads no different than the first dozen Wooster and Jeeves books, the first of which he published in 1919. Wodehouse reportedly had the same English teacher at Dulworth school as Raymond Chandler, whose classic noir THE LONG GOODBYE (1953) hardly aged a day between its composition and Robert Altman’s 1973 liquor-soaked adaptation.

Liquor-soaked poetry doesn’t get much higher than HIGH WINDOWS (1973). Altman’s Los Angeles looks more colorful, seedy, and sexy than Philip Larkin’s desultory hamlet of Hull, but Larkin certainly has more rhymes:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

(Larkin defaced his own his first draft as soon as he finished it, replacing “is endless” with “fucking piss,” which still rhymes, at least.

As sad as it is to consider liquor-logged Larkin battering his body with booze and treating other people no better, it’s a little late to call him up and ask him to change. The tension between creator and created has surely been around since the first blind warmongering misogynist storyteller, but Claire Dederer may have added something genuinely worthwhile to the discussion with MONSTERS: A FAN’S DILEMMA (2023). She declines to hide behind academic jargon or politics of the moment. One gets the sense that she’s holding art, ideas, and feelings up in the light, examining them, then changing the angle and inspecting again.

Dederer herself appears in MONSTERS as a whiskey-imbibing character, just as Lauren Oyler appears in her brilliant HARPERS cover story, “I Really Didn’t Want to Go: On the Goop Cruise” (2023). Narrative journos have self-descried since at least Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” so there’s nothing new here. That said, there’s something different when the auto-portrayed author makes comic books. Alison Bechdel serves as her own protagonist in ARE YOU MY MOTHER? (2013). She adroitly shifts POV and gaze in service of her self-examination. Nothing stops the pages from turning, and even though nothing happens, the story rumbles downhill, like dozen magic eight-balls on a steep slope.

Somewhat broader strokes and more conventional angles depict Kate Beaton in her graphic memoir, DUCKS: TWO YEARS IN THE OIL SANDS (2022). Apparently, there were some awards that went to other books last year. This is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a miscarriage of justice. Whatever it was, Ducks was better. And that includes the Argentine men’s World Cup team.

Equally divisive opinions spread like soft milk across the pages of the newly resurrected quarterly BOOKFORUM, (FALL 2023, #30.2). It boasts Carl Wilson on Sly Stone’s memoir, Hanif Abdurraqib on the Lou Reed bio, and pieces on both Julia Fox and Janet Malcolm. Not bad for ten bucks—and yet there were only 6,098 printed. Miss out at your own intellectual impoverishment.

Among the contentious (not to say unpopular) opinions absent from those BOOKFORUM articles, here’s a big one: SHALL WE DANCE (1936) and FOLLOW THE FLEET (1937) may be just as smile-inducing as SWING TIME (1936), the sole Astaire / Rogers film in Criterion’s stable. Remember, you read it here first, where the takes are as hot as a Prius’ catalytic converter. Having dropped that bomb, it’s time to take the advice of Barbara Stanwyck in BALL OF FIRE (1941): “Scrow, scram, scraw: the complete conjugation!”

Considered:

Ball of Fire, feat. Barbara Stanwyck. RKO, 1941.

Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig. Warner Bros, 2023.

Josie and the Pussycats, dir. Deborah Kaplan. Universal, 2001.

The Lady Eve, feat. Barbara Stanwyck. Paramount, 1941.

A House and Its Head, by Ivy Compton-Burnett. NYRB, 2021 (1935).

Tiny Imperfections, by Asha Youmans and Alli Frank. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2020.

Diner: Day for Night, by Tarlow, Gillard, Fidanza, and Johnson. Ten Speed Press, 2023.

Roaming, by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. Drawn and Quarterly, 2023.

Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet), dir. Aki Kaurismäki. Bufo, 2023.

The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar, dir. Wes Anderson. Indian Paintbrush, 2023.

Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Paramount, 1932.

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole. Liveright, 2022.

California Against the Sea: Visions for our Vanishing Coastline, by Rosanna Xia. Heyday, 2023.

The Fraud, by Zadie Smith. Penguin, 2023.

In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano, trans. Chris Clarke. NYRB, 2016 (2006).

Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles, by Kate Flannery. Holt, 2023.

Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, by Michelle Dowd. Algonquin, 2023.

But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups, by Flam and Liebowitz. Hachette, 2023.

A Woman is A Woman (Une Femme est Une Femme), music Michel Legrand. Euro International, 1961.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg), music Michel Legrand. Parc, 1964.

Pigs and Battleships (豚と軍艦, Buta to Gunkan), dir. Shōhei Imamura. Nikkatsu, 1961.

My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat, by Sandol Stoddard Warburg, illus. Remy Charlip. Enchanted Lion, 2023 (1963).

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, by PG Wodehouse. Scribner, 2000 (1963).

The Long Goodbye, dir. Robert Altman. United Artists, 1973.

High Windows, by Philip Larkin. Faber, 2015 (1973).

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Clare Dederer. Knopf, 2023.

“I Really Didn’t Want to Go: On the Goop Cruise,” by Lauren Oyler. Harper’s, May 2023.

“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese. Esquire, April 1966.

Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel. Mariner, 2013.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton. Drawn and Quarterly, 2022.

Bookforum, published by 1865 Publications. 2023.

Shall We Dance, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1937.

Follow the Fleet, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1936.

Swing Time, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1936.

Keeping Records

1.

In Warrior Two position (are yoga postures capitalized?), I heard the teacher intone, “Some of us are always reaching toward the future; some of us… lean back into the past,” and I thought, “that second one–that’s me!”

2.

While we stretched, the voice continued, “Does anyone know… what’s special about… today?” And I knew the answer, because as soon as class ended, I was headed out to get in line for Record Store Day. (The teacher said something about the seasons and stars.)

3.

Record Store Day is every day for some of us. Especially those of us who lean backward. There are also denim collectors, voice-mail savers, antiquarians, scrapbookers, and yearbook keepers.

4.

Today marks two months since my dad’s death, and I still have this lovely white retail-style paper bag, with strong twine handles, featuring the blue insignia of the University of California San Diego Medical Center. For a while it held his paperwork. Then I stuck the box with my dad’s ashes in it, then I filled it with other papers–things I wanted to bring to his memorial. Now it’s holding recycling. More paper.

5.

Paper. Past. Papa. Passed. Paper. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow, by the Rivingtons (1962, Liberty / EMI).

6.

I framed seventeen things, and stuck them up on walls. It didn’t make a dent in the piles of paper. At least the paper is vertical, so I actually have files, not piles, of paper. Like spine-out books and sideways-standing records. On Record Store Day, while driving home, I got paranoid about getting pulled over. My brain and body chemicals were so wired and wild, I forgot I wasn't driving on drugs.

7.

But that’s combining the consumer buzz with leaning back into the past. Forget records. What about the baby playing peek-a-boo, delighted to re-find the world as it was? Or the sleeper’s astral plane populated by the recent dead? I proudly threw my hospital parking receipt in my recycling bag. “There’s no reason to keep THAT,” I thought. But the hospital recycling bag outsmarted me. It’s still over there, between the records and the trash.

KEEPING RECORDS / SEVEN CENTS AUGUST 2023

Comics & Criterion

Seven Cents, March 2023

1. Oh, hello! I didn’t see you coming. But you know what they say: “If crime showed on a man’s face, there wouldn’t be any mirrors.”

2. At least, that’s what one character says in “We’re No Angels.” It’s a movie with Humphry Bogart and Peter Ustinov, and that lovely line is uttered by neither of them. Tough luck, boys.

3. David Mamet didn’t keep that dialogue for his 1989 film by the same name, in which Robert de Niro and Sean Penn “pass themselves off as priests and pass by the police”...

4. …into “the safety of Canada.” Well, it’s no “Canadian Bacon.” Or is it? Speaking of faux-philosophical films streaming on Criterion (I watch during my semi-stretching quasi-yoga pseudo-sessions before breakfast), consider this gem from Billy Wilder’s “Ball of Fire”:

5. Scene: Aged medical professor inspects Barbara Stanwick’s throat, notes “slight rosiness.” She replies, “‘slight rosiness?’ It’s as red as The Daily Worker and just as sore!”

6. Well, maybe you had to be there. And by “there,” I mean reading “Mary Worth” in the Sunday comics. “Mary Worth” (weekly since 1938) remains the longest-running soap opera comic, far outlasting my favorite, “Apartment 3G.” I miss those three sassy and stylish young roomies in their big city apartment. It was like “Friends” without the boys, as drawn by Patrick Nagel.

7. Only titular heroine Mary Worth would say, in full color, on the Sunday Comics page of the San Diego Union Tribune, in 2022: “The great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas defines love as ‘the choice to will the good of the other.’” So give the old gal some credit.

xo MHH

Seven Cents: January, 2023

Seven Cents

Hello Beautiful Human People,

1

Did you remember to vote? I see by this month’s American Rifleman magazine (the paper kind) that NRA Board elections are happening! The Nominating Committee nominated 30 members this year… but “Voting members may vote for no more than 25.” So for five of you all, tough tuchus.

2.

One NRA Director candidate statement: “Helped wife form G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Really Into Shooting) chapter.” To be fair, there are only 19 local chapters, so maybe this was a bigger achievement than… well, advancing from the nominated group onto the board.

3.

My $26-per-year soccer fan club–the umbrella organization for the Rose City Riveters and Portland Timbers Army–is holding elections, too. Maybe it would help if one of the candidates was the “Producer and host of REALIZE Your Concealed Carry Fashion.” But then you would have to explain why REALIZE is all caps. Is it an acronym? Initialism? What?

4.

Both of those candidate lists came metaphorically closely on the analogous heels of Lunar New Year, when we freelance journalists must submit all lists for “last year” (or “pasintjare” as we say in Esperanto). So: My top seven list includes the following lists:

5.

1) Top Seven magazines to which I subscribe. 2) Top Seven books I read last year that you can’t buy at the bookstore where I work. 3) Top Seven astrological signs for which I wrote horoscopes several years ago. 4) Top Seven Esperanto grammar rules. 5) Top Seven movies I re-watched on the Criterion Channel while doing half-assed pseudo-yoga. 6) Top Seven movies I watched for the first time while doing half-assed pseudo-yoga. 7) Top seven people who died last year to whom I feel a totally unreasonable connection.

6.

Esperanto pronouns–like the non-gendered third-person ĝi (say it however you want; it’s Esperanto!)--fall into grammar rule five. Esperanto has a lot fewer rules than most languages–only about sixteen–so if Number Twelve* doesn’t make the list, tough tuchus! (*Rule 12: There is no double negative.)

7.

The Esperanto discussion is… a lot of weirdos trying to be reasonable. Even the NRA nominating committee offers one moderate among thirty: “Promote election / retention of pro-gun candidates from BOTH major parties.” Ain’t no way I’m not gonna rock the vote for that guy!* (*Again: there is no double negative. Thank you, friends!)

love to you,

Matthew Hattie Hein

rhymes with consign

Seven Cents: December, 2022

Seven Cents

Hello, Beautiful Human People,

1.

Did you sneak away last year? We mean figuratively about the sneaking part. But if you visited a vacation rental or family house, please confirm or deny: those places have the best bookshelves.

-A fading old photo book of the general area.

-A charity compilation of recipes from local restaurants.

-A combination of photos and recipes, called “A Taste for the Eyes” or “A Lens on the Landing.” “Life… al fresco!” “La Vida Aloha.” “Wild Flavors.” “Good Meal Hunting”

(Reader suggestions are respectfully solicited.)

2.

Beyond the books stocked by the joint’s owners, what paperbacks have previous lodgers added to the shelf? A “Gone Girl” psychological thriller, or a “Cat Who Caught a Clue” Christmas cozy by a Dean writing as a Miranda? Will it be Tom Clancy, or Ken Follett?

If it hadn’t been for this paradox of limited choice (we call it a “spare-adox”), the chuckle-worthy eco-pulp of Carl Hiaasen might never have crossed our eye sockets one fine winter vacation years ago.

3.

Of course, there’s a fine line between spare-adox and Russian Roulette. To wit, James Patterson. The Ear Read This podcasters concocted a game suited to Patterson’s notoriously short chapters and blank prose. You’ll need a) at least two adults, b) a way to randomly pick numbers between one and one hundred, and… oh yeah, c) a Patterson.

a) Pick a number—you’re going to read the Patterson novel in random order. b) Read the that number chapter aloud (most are only a couple pages). c) Summarize the chapter in a few words, and write those words down next to the chapter number on your doc (or notebook). d) Compile a couple pages that clearly tell the tale of the Patterson, out of order. e) Cut-and-paste your one-sentence chapter summaries, so they’re in the correct order. f) Re-tell the novel by reading through your one-sentence summaries!

4.

More high-minded literary podcasts certainly exist. Consider the vintage audio of Jack Keroac clinking his glass while beguilingly recounting the tale of the Buddha’s awakening from The Paris Review.

The journal / tote bag / institution / podcast that is the mighty Paris Review also offers a fresh recording of Jessica Hecht dramatizing Joan Didion’s 1978 “Art of Fiction,” if that’s your idea of a good time. (It is.)

5.

“Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.”

When they’re not discussing the meaning of Marxian wisdom like that, the Marx Brothers Council podcast introduces heroes like educator Hannah Mira, who shows classic movies to her students in juvenile prison. Mira makes a great case for her curriculum’s success in a magical hour of audio inspiration.

6.

The Marx Brothers mirror scene from Duck Soup (1933) takes three minutes. Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin do it in half that time at the peak of Big Business (1988). Both films use only ambient sound for the old Vaudeville routine, resulting in strangely silent stretches during otherwise verbally frantic comedies.

Or, as one scholar has asked, regarding that mirror scene, “how can his self be materially located in a place different from the psycho-physical origins of the knowledge of that self?”

7.

How true! Probably! Every time we read that, we think we might understand it. But no.

Next time we’re on vacation, and there’s no good trash—no tattered Carl Hiassen or big World War history book—we can just keep thinking about “the psycho-physical origins of the knowledge of that self,” until you drop us a little line. Please. The sooner the better.

Love to you,

Matthew Hein

rhymes with swine