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Had to give a public talk about James Bond (at the closing of a “Bond at 50” exhibit co-organized by GQ), so I talked about Bondiana and its on-and-off relationship with camp. It went over pretty well, actually! Here are some quick notes from it, just in case.
The main thesis is that all Bonds, after rebooting with a different actor, start out more earnest than we tend to remember, and lapse farther and farther into camp as they go along. The most jarring example is, of course, the somber From Russia with Love (1963), whose entire plot is “Bond has to steal a decoding gizmo from the Soviets,” followed directly by the crazed nuclear swing of Goldfinger (1964); but each sub-series goes through a similar cycle. The seeming exception is Timothy Dalton, but his two films actually prove the rule: The Living Daylights, campy as a glitter bomb, came from a script intended for the previous Bond, Roger Moore, and License to Kill was the actual, if failed, reboot.
My theory is that this strange dynamic has less to do with the actors’ personalities (Connery, Moore, and Craig could all function in both modes, though Brosnan was a born featherweight), or the mood of the times (the ultra-kitschy Die Another Day came out a year after 9/11), or the film influences of the era (Casino Royale owes a huge debt to Bourne, but it's just as much of a corrective to the damage wrought by Austin Powers). I think it has more to do with the audience’s own strange desire-and-guilt cycles regarding Bond. Which, in turn, occurs because we’re not entirely sure if these are superhero movies or not. We want Bond to be larger than life, then balk when he gets to that size and demand deflation. Bond has such a unique place in the culture – teaching grown men what cars to drive, watches to wear, and Scotch to drink while also wowing the twelve-year-olds like any caped crusader -- that we want to be both adults and children about it, to attach and detach, and our irony switches keep flipping on and off around him, sometimes ten times in the same scene (the genius of Skyfall is that it recognizes this dynamic and plays directly to it). This flux, of course, is the perfect breeding environment for camp, per Sontag’s vintage definition. Which, by the way, came out the same year Goldfinger did: 1964. Sontag would have made a dynamite Pussy Galore, wouldn’t she.
Lately, I've become convinced that pop conspirology, a favorite Russian pastime, is a projection of discomfort with slackened gender roles. It's not just about the "Jews" or the "world government" any more. It's about weird semiotic clusters organized around degrees of perceived masculinity. For instance, in the modern Russian mind, "Americans" are "Jews." "Jews" are "gay." "Americans" are thus also "gay." "Liberals" may stand for American stooges (as in Putin’s speeches) or Jews (as in Zakhar Prilepin’s “Letter to Stalin,” full of anti-Semitic dog whistles), but their defining traits are feminine - softness, pliability, indecisiveness - and so they are "gay" above all (cf. "liberast," the popular online conflation of "liberal" and "pederast"). Once united in this way, the tags become completely interchangeable, defying all logic. For instance, feminists: semiotically speaking, they are gay, of course, and liberal - and thus they are also American and Jewish ("The last names of the participants say it all," writes a nationalist blogger in response to a recent round table on feminism I attended: "Krongauz, Goralik, Idov". For him, feminism is a Jewish conspiracy, too). And round and round it goes. Meanwhile, Communists can be "Jews" but they can't be "gay," because they are associated with masculine qualities. Only the gay-Jew-American-liberal cluster works perfectly in all directions, because it's held together by the same notion of effeminacy.
You can play the same game with the American extreme right if you substitute "European" for "American." That's how you end up with the crypto-FrenchGayLiberalJewishArabCommunistAtheistMuslim "other" that lives in the head of a wingnut. (And in the White House, haha).
I owe my entire life in its odd present shape to Nora Ephron. She never took credit and never even accepted my thanks for it. In fact, even as we shared many friends, I haven't managed to speak to her in person once. (She was generally great at not speaking. Remember, for over 30 years she was one of the four people who knew who Watergate's Deep Throat was). In this combination of massive influence and total unknowability, Ephron remains the closest presence in my life I have to - sorry, don't gag, as she likely would - an angel.
At the tail end of 2005, I was a broke ex-cafe owner with a sideline in snarky unpaid music reviews for Pitchfork. For the last two months, I had worked as a bartender at Lucien, a bistro on the corner of First Avenue and 1st Street run by a manic-depressive French psycho. My marriage had barely survived the strain of the cafe experiment and wasn't in the best shape either. I had written a short comic essay about all of the above for Slate, but the magazine kept putting off the publication, since it was "evergreen."
For New Year's, Lily and I pooled our little remaining money and went to a bed&breakfast near Rhinebeck, to get the hell away from everything and everyone. On December 30, while we were on our way up there, Slate suddenly put up the story. So when I checked my email on December 31 (this was back when you'd check your email once a day), there were a few readers' letters in the inbox (this was back when readers wrote letters to the author). Including one charmingly titled "Your blog," which seemed to be a generational thing - older people use "blog" for "post." "I think you should write a small funny book about this," it said. "You probably already have an agent, but if you don't, I'm forwarding it to one I know. I even think there's a small and charming movie here. Best, Nora Ephron."
I remember staring dumbfounded past the computer screen and into a window, where rather Hollywood-looking snow was falling in earnest, and realizing this email had just changed everything an email can change. I spent about an hour composing a two-line answer, and then Lily and I went out into the snow. The agent was Binky Urban, the small funny book became Ground Up which became Kofemolka which got me this job which got me to the hotel in Milan where I am now typing this, and I never got to thank Nora Ephron - she would have none of it, even when I interviewed her as a source once over the phone, for a silly story about the Apthorp, she got off the phone as soon as I began talking about that email, and now the address sitting in my inbox like a little gold coin among plastic chips (@aol.com, of course, as befits the author of You've Got Mail) won't work.
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Давайте, что ли, поговорим про питчинг. Русского слова, увы, нет ("заявка" не годится). Мне почти каждый день присылают идеи для статей. Что прекрасно. Но средняя идея звучит примерно так: "Я люблю и знаю баскскую кухню/морских ежей/Акунина, давайте я напишу про нее/них/него". (Оставим в стороне людей, которые хотят писать колонки, с ними все ясно; мое любимое письмо из этой категории содержало вопрос "Возможна ли публикация моей фотографии рядом с текстом, и если да, то какого размера?"). Или: "Я еду в Патагонию/Судан/Швамбранию. Не нужен ли вам материал оттуда?" Или: "Мой дядя работает в морге. Давайте сделаем охренительный гонзо-репортаж про быт патологоанатомов".
Это, увы, не питч. Это даже не идея. Автор просто заявляет свой круг интересов.
Полноценный питч целиком посвящен ответам на кучу незаданных вопросов. Например, о чем именно статья, в каком жанре вы ее видите, кто ее главный герой, в чем заключается ее основной сюжет/конфликт, каков ее примерный формат, как вы планируете подойти к ее репортажному аспекту (с кем налажены контакты для интервью, какие вспомогательные материалы будут использованы), каков инфоповод (почему нашему читателю важно об этом знать и почему именно сейчас), и, наконец, почему именно для этой статьи вы лучший из всех возможных авторов. При этом не мешает дать легкий намек на ваш стиль письма, но не обязательно; лучше приложить ссылки на пару ваших других статей. И - важнее всего - все это должно уместиться в одну страницу.
То есть, страшно сказать, для удачного питча где-то треть статьи уже должна быть написана. Пусть даже только у вас в голове.
Вот, например, более-менее приемлемый питч.
Покер.
У нас никогда в стране столько не играли в покер, как после официального запрета 20 июля 2009. Я сам - из этого, последнего призыва.
Катраны везде. Турниры, кэш.
В проф. покер ушли шахматные гроссмейстеры и перекочевали “знатоки” (Друзь и Поташов - постоянные пассажиры корабля-казино, который каждую неделю навигации выходит из Петербурга в нейтральные воды).
В Москве живет Иван Демидов - в 2008 занявший второе место на “чемпионате мира”,т.е. Main Event WSOP. У нас про него в википедии куцая статья.
Говорят, милейший парень. Есть выходы.
По закону в России четыре зоны для покера. Там творится бардак. Никто туда не хочет ехать. Самая удобная между Сочи и Краснодаром, но со стороны Краснодара (это я уточню) нет нормальной дороги.
В Москве где только не шпилят. ХХХ рассказывал про точку прямо на Красном Октябре. + home games с приглашенными дилерами или без них.
Покер - шанс на вторую карьеру для застоявшегося интеллектуала. Возможность зарабатывать головой. Или это только иллюзия.
В общем, там есть о чем писать. Я очень в теме, даже слишком.
Несколько сетов редакторского бадминтона спустя получилась эта статья. Вообще, думаю, имеет смысл вывешивать здесь успешные питчи после публикации результата.
Ну и чтобы попусту не трепаться, не без стыда прилагаю пару собственных питчей, которыми терроризировал разные издания в свою бытность фрилансером.
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THE RESTAURATEUR OF RUSSIA (The New Yorker, 2006, отказали)
Dear Dana,
Allow me to run a brief feature pitch for you. I am very excited about this.
A lot has been said about the Vegas-like nouveau riche paradise that is the new Moscow, with its parade of gaudy clubs and mega-restaurants. Moscow's high-profile eateries make Megu look like Long John Silver's: multi-story affairs in redwood and gold, live fish splashing in babbling indoor brooks, etc.
What's not immediately apparent is that just about all of those restaurants belong to one man, Arkady Novikov. The author of the so-called "Novikov System" that streamlines and homogenizes every aspect of the business, he owns over 50 high-end restaurants - Italian, French, Japanese, Georgian, Armenian - as well as several fast-food franchises and mid-level bistro chains. He is well-connected in the Kremlin, of course; his next venture, a Russo-Japanese fusion restaurant, has the Northern Fleet as a corporate partner. If he goes out of business (or, more precisely, out of favor: there is serious doubt whether his empire actually makes money), the entire Moscow dining scene will be wiped out.
This is fascinating on several levels. For one thing, it's amazingly representative of the general tendency of Putin-era Russia: pawning off centralized pseudo-enterprise as freewheeling capitalism. The Russian media don't see anything weird about one person owning every restaurant in town: Novikov is a legitimate celebrity (he is the Russian spokesman for American Express).
But there's more to the story. Novikov, a former chef, actually knows what he's doing. His "system" results in blindingly clean, super-efficiently run kitchens (I was allowed into a couple). The produce is a bit homogeneous but perfectly consistent: Novikov's last coup was to buy vast stretches of farmland, taking over his purveyors. His method is a bizarre hodgepodge of Soviet, American and Japanese business practices; his progress is admirable and ominous at the same time.
If you're interested, I would be able to arrange interviews with Novikov, and even follow him on a routine tour of his properties in Russia, Uzbekistan and Italy. I am also in touch with top Moscow food critics; finally, my own past reporting makes me a good candidate to write this. I had a recent cover story in the New York magazine about small businesses in New York, and a bit of a hit on Slate with an essay about the trials of running a coffee shop.
Thank you,
Michael
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APOCALYPSE DAU (GQ, 2010, приняли)
Deep in Ukraine, a tyrannical film director is busy reenacting both Apocalypse Now and Synecdoche, NY in real life. For the last four years, Ilya Khrzhanovsky has been holed up in the city of Kharkov shooting a biopic of a famed Soviet physicist, ruling his cast and crew of thousands with an iron fist reminiscent of Stalin himself. He is still at it. He says he'll be done by 2012, maybe. Some say he’s not planning to stop at all.
Entitled simply Dau after the physicist Lev Landau’s nickname, the film mostly takes place in the 1930s. In 2006, the director picked the run-down Kharkov to impersonate the Moscow of that period. Massive set construction ensued. Whole streets were built from scratch. Khrzhanovsky soon revealed himself to be a fan of the “total immersion” technique for both the cast and the crew. Upon arrival on set, everyone had to pass through a kind of checkpoint where they were forced to give up all accoutrements of modernity: cell phones, sneakers, laptops. They were instead given out period clothes - over a thousand pairs of shoes were cobbled by hand for the purpose - and a stipend of period money, which they could use to buy authentic Soviet food from on-set stores. The performance was happening on both sides of the camera. And it soon began to spiral out of control.
Dau was only Khrzhanovsky’s second feature (his first one, Four, had a brief U.S. arthouse run), but his behavior on the set belied his inexperience. As months and then years passed by, he became more dictatorial. He demanded whole elaborate sets to be destroyed and rebuilt on a whim, once halting the entire production for weeks until a second story could be added to every mock façade – so that, in one shot, the camera could tilt up. He fired actors and cameramen mid-shot. He burned through personal assistants, PAs, interpreters (whom he needed to communicate with the German director of photography). The German stuck around for the first three years of the shoot. He finally begged off the production in 2009.
But within the film’s Russian crew, something more fascinating was happening. Shell-shocked people returning back to Moscow from the Kharkov set report that the film’s massive crew is now more akin to a cult or a sect. (“I’m surprised there weren’t any extras’ heads on poles around the camp,” wrote film critic Stanislav Zelvensky). Krzhanovsky, a fascinating character, had obvious features of a born cult leader. From the age of 16 on, he was famous in Moscow's artistic circles for his incredible skill at picking up women. Stories abound about him - a slight, bespectacled Jewish man -- going up to strange women at Moscow's intelligentsia haunts Jean Jacques or Cafe Mayak, ordering them to "come blow me in the restroom" (a phrase that sounds even worse in Russian), and getting exactly that. On the film's set, he's found these persuasion skills a new arena. The $10 million budget long depleted, Khrzhanovsky persuaded hundreds of people to keep working for him for free. Many have moved to Kharkov permanently, taking their families along. To them, the director became, as one of his many fired interpreters recalls, a kind of Stalin figure: feared, hated, adored, but at any rate absolutely central to their world. The film itself – a mere biopic of a physicist! - appears to have fallen by the wayside, as Khrzhanovsky became more and more interested in running his mini-Soviet Union in real life.
I propose my own little trip into this heart of darkness. I've made contact with Khrzhanovsky, and he has extended me an invitation to come see the shoot in late June-early July. I believe I could get great access to all sides of this crazy tale, including a possibility of original photos from the set. I also have lined up interviews with many people involved in the production, from much-abused PAs to the film's original producer.
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Well well well. This is, unless it's a fake (and if it's a fake, it's a pitch-perfect one),* a 1977 Soviet review of Star Wars. The section tags on the left and on the bottom read "Mass Culture '77" and "Their Sensations." Translation below.
*UPDATE: Through the magic of instant Facebook feedback, we now have a testament to the review's authenticity: a gentleman who remembers reading it in 1977 and obsessing over it.
CINE-HORRORS IN SPACE
This summer, a new wave of cinematic psychosis washed over American movie theaters. According to the press, War of the Stars, by American director George Lucas, is beating all box-office records: 60 million dollars in the very first month of release. Morning to midnight, War of the Stars plays to packed auditoriums. To get in, one needs either to spend several hours in line or to buy a scalped ticket for an unbelievable price of 50 dollars.
And thus, after demons, mass catastrophes and giant sharks, the American screens are now home to a horror of truly cosmic proportions: monstrous tyrants terrorizing our galaxy. Waging the battle against them are the film's heroes -- a round-faced princess, a village youth, an old knight of the Round Table, an ape-man and two robots. One of those, the giant, gilded Tripio, has the gift of human speech; the other, Artu-Detu, looks like an automobile and expresses himself with "space" signals.
The film's plot, as reported by the French weekly L'Express, is quite primitive.
But to scare the denizen even further, the film's creators deploy the perfect weapon - a laser beam that the characters use in battle like a rapier. Time and again, nightmarish monsters fill the screen: a lizard man, faceless gnomes, a live mummy with the tube-riddled head, fantastical animals... In conjunction with the shooting of this soul-chilling "masterpiece," which the director George Lucas calls "a futuristic Western," several analogous commercial operations have been implemented in the U.S. Ballantine Publishers have put out an eponymous novel. Marvel Comic Book, a publishing house specializing in comics, struck a deal with Fox film studios and, having divided the script into six parts, have begun to publish a monthly comic album with the War of the Stars plotline. Soon after that classic mass-culture attributes - pins, T-shirts, advertising posters, soundtrack records - have appeared too. And come New Year's, the shops should be receiving shipments of children's toys as well: a miniature Artu-Detu, capable of producing the same sounds as its inspiration, and a gilded Tripio. The film's main "discovery" - a toy laser rapier - hasn't been invented yet, but the work on its creation has already begun.
In the next few weeks, the American screens will host the next installment of War of the Stars, which is likely to be as mediocre as it is to be lucrative. No surprise there. The mass audience willingly "gobbles up" such pieces of "art," all in order to leave the theater feeling that the life outside is nice after all.
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