Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Bathroom Reads #4: THE BIG LEBOWSKI: THE MAKING OF A COEN BROTHERS FILM by William Preston Robertson


Sometime around 1997/1998, I became very interested in the world of indie films, mainly through my discovery of the work of Quentin Tarantino. Luckily, the 1990s was a great decade for indie films in general, and from Tarantino I went on to explore the work of other directors such as David Lynch, Mary Harron, and, of course, the Coen Brothers. The first Coen Brothers film I ever saw was FARGO, sometime in the spring of 1998, around the same time that this book, THE BIG LEBOWSKI: THE MAKING OF A COEN BROTHERS FILM had been released. As there weren't many Coen Brothers books available at that time (aside from the screenplays, that is), I naturally purchased a copy, even though at that point I still hadn't even seen THE BIG LEBOWSKI, or a few of the other Coen Brothers films that predated it (such as BLOOD SIMPLE and HUDSUCKER PROXY)... though by the autumn of 1998, around the time I started freshmen year in college, I had eventually caught up with all of their older work and, of course, THE BIG LEBOWSKI itself, which I believe I rented in August 1998, after returning home from a vacation in Montreal. 

This book was written by William Preston Robertson (and edited by Tricia Cooke, Ethan Coen's wife). Robertson, a friend of the Coens from their college days (and who also provided some voicework for their films: he did the voice of the radio evangelist in BLOOD SIMPLE, for example), decided to devote an entire book to detailing a typical Coen Brothers film production, and this was the result. After a fascinating introductory chapter providing some information on the origins and early life of the Coen Brothers, he then devotes the rest of the text to showing how THE BIG LEBOWSKI was made, starting from the concept, to how the script was written, to interviews with not only the Coen Brothers but also the cinematographer (Roger Deakins), the production designer (Rick Heinrichs) and the costume designer (Mary Zophres). It's a quick and breezy read (not even 200 pages long), and unlike some of the other books I've covered in these entries I can usually finish it off in a week of bathroom visits. There are also a lot of photographs, plus many examples of storyboard illustrations and sketches for the costumes. 

The funny thing is, though, I'm not even a super-huge fan of THE BIG LEBOWSKI, and find the cult that has accumulated around it over the last two decades baffling. Don't get me wrong, it's still an enjoyable and well-made movie, very amusing at times and well-casted (and with a killer soundtrack to boot), but of the 10 or so Coen Brothers films I've seen I'm not even sure I would place it in their top 5. Perhaps the issue is that I find it a bit too self-consciously "zany" or "wacky" for my tastes (I have the same problem with RAISING ARIZONA incidentally) and I tend to gravitate more towards their darker or more somber works (BARTON FINK, MILLER'S CROSSING, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and so on... though I am super-fond of THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, which I guess is also pretty "zany" and "wacky"). 

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Bathroom Reads #3: GOODBYE 20TH CENTURY: A BIOGRAPHY OF SONIC YOUTH by David Browne


I purchased David Browne's GOODBYE 20TH CENTURY: A BIOGRAPHY OF SONIC YOUTH at the Barnes & Noble I work at back in the year it was published, which was 2008. I first began listening to Sonic Youth in college, maybe around the year 2001 or thereabouts, and for many years I considered myself a casual fan of the band at best, but over the last two decades they've grown on me, to the extent that this year I finally placed them on my "Top 10 Favorite Bands" list. One of the things that fascinates me about Sonic Youth (and which this book covers to some degree) is that they really weren't typical rock stars, in that they avoided excesses of sex and drugs, and followed a very frugal business model (the book mentions their interest in achieving modest record sales yet a fiercely loyal fan base, having creative autonomy, and maintaining longevity). Also, much like another artist that I covered in these installments (Alfred Hitchcock), the band were more observers than participants. The underground filmmaker Richard Kern makes the same observation in this book: he compared the band to being like Andy Warhol at the Silver Factory, saying that, in contrast to the freaky underground types they rubbed elbows with, outside of the chaos of their art the band were more like levelheaded businessmen with traditional/conservative middle class lifestyles: in this way, I can see a bit of myself in the band's approach to art and life (while on the subject, I also relate to their obsession with pop culture, and how it seems that the things they were into were either really super-mainstream and popular or super underground and obscure, with little middle ground: in some ways I myself am of the same aesthetic temperament). 

Browne (a former rock critic) does a very good job at writing a (nearly complete) biography of the band. Not only did he interview at length the four primary band members, but also many of their former band members, business associates, record label executives, and celebrity pals: everyone from Michael Gira to Lydia Lunch to Sofia Coppola to Chloe Sevigny. He also made the decision to divide the book into three parts, each dealing with a different era of the band's career. The first (and longest) part, "Rise," deals with the backgrounds of the different band members, the band's origins, and the recording of their earliest albums up to the classic DAYDREAM NATION and their signing with the Geffen record label: this section really captures the nihilism and grime of the early 80s NYC No Wave scene. Part Two, "Infiltration," mainly covers the first half of the 1990s and the peak of the band's brief flirtation with the mainstream: in some ways this is usually my favorite section to read, which is weird because I find much of the band's 90s output fairly weak (with a few exceptions). Part Three, "Refuge," covers the rest of the 90s and up to what was then the present day, concluding with the band releasing their second to last studio album (RATHER RIPPED) and transformation into "elder counterculture statesmen." 

Sometimes I do wish, though, that Browne had worked on the book a few more years before it was published. Had he waited until 2009, he could have included material on the band's final studio album, THE ETERNAL. Had he waited until 2011, he could have also written about the band's final concerts and eventual dissolution, which would have made his book then a complete history of the band, from beginning to end. As it stands now, it feels a bit incomplete, though of course, the year he had finished writing it (2007), he would have had no clue that the band would break up just four years later (and certainly at the time the band had no inkling about this themselves). Also, considering the bad blood that poisoned the band following Thurston Moore's affair with Eva Prinz (an affair which began, as far as I can tell, in 2010), perhaps the band would not have been as candid and forthcoming in their interviews with the author. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that Prinz had been in the Sonic Youth orbit for a number of years by that point, there's no reference to her in the book itself, save for an otherwise cryptic reference to former band member Jim O'Rourke's "problematic personal relationship at home." 

I've long felt that the mark of a good music book is that it makes you want to go out and relisten to the albums it covers after you read about them. When doing my annual readthrough of this book this year, I decided to relisten to all 15 of the Sonic Youth studio albums. Some of these albums I've heard many, many times... a few of them only a handful. In any event, and not counting their various side projects (THE WHITEY ALBUM), EPs, SYR releases or other offshoots, if I had to rank their albums from best to worst, it would probably be like this: 

1. Murray Street (2002)

2. Daydream Nation (1988)

3. Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (1994)

4. The Eternal (2009)

5. Evol (1986)

6. Sonic Nurse (2004)

7. Sister (1987)

8. Rather Ripped (2006)

9. Dirty (1992)

10. Washing Machine (1995)

11. Confusion Is Sex (1983)

12. Bad Moon Rising (1985)

13. A Thousand Leaves (1998)

14. NYC Ghosts & Flowers (2000)

15. Goo (1990)

Thursday, February 29, 2024

2024 Reading List Monthly Update: February

Books read in February of 2024:

"The Princess of Darkness" (Rachilde) 2-13-24
"i'm still growing" (Josiah Morgan) 2-15-24
"Winona" (Robert Rich) 2-16-24
"Alexandria: The City That Changed The World" (Islam Issa) 2-21-24
"Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)" (Mindy Kaling) 2-27-24
"Self-Portraits" (Osamu Dazai) 2-27-24
-

2024 Reading List Total:

-

1. "The Explosion of a Chandelier" (Damian Murphy) 1-7-24
2. "Empire of the Sun" (J.G. Ballard) 1-11-24
3. "The Consolation of Philosophy" (Boethius) 1-14-24
4. "CAW: Colossal Abandoned World" (James Champagne) 1-17-24
5. "The Green Fly and Other Stories" (Robert Scheffer) 1-19-24
6. "Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again" (Shigeru Kayama) 1-22-24
7. "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982" (Cho Nam-joo) 1-27-24
8. "The Planetary Omnibus" (Warren Ellis) 1-28-24
9. "A Song in the Night" (Daniel Mills) 1-31-24 
10. "The Princess of Darkness" (Rachilde) 2-13-24
11. "i'm still growing" (Josiah Morgan) 2-15-24
12. "Winona" (Robert Rich) 2-16-24
13. "Alexandria: The City That Changed The World" (Islam Issa) 2-21-24
14. "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)" (Mindy Kaling) 2-27-24
15. "Self-Portraits" (Osamu Dazai) 2-27-24

*= book I have read at least once in the past

+= book I have read before, but not this reprint/edition/translation

Currently Reading: 

"The Secret History" (Prokopios) 


Tuesday, February 27, 2024

My List of Publications (in Chronological Order)

 

* = uncollected short story

 Confusion (novel) 2006 (self-published via iUniverse)

“Kali Yuga” (short story) 2007 (appeared in Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground, Akashic Books, edited by Dennis Cooper) *

Grimoire (short story collection) 2012 (published by Rebel Satori Press)

“The Doubly Nature of Louis Wain” (article) 2012 (appeared in the zine Yuck ‘n Yum, edited by Ben Robinson)

“The Withering Echo” (short story) 2014 (appeared in Mighty in Sorrow: A Tribute to David Tibet & Current 93, Dynatox Ministries, edited by Jordan Krall)

Autopsy of an Eldritch City (short story collection) 2015 (published by Rebel Satori Press; included illustrations by O.B. De Alessi)

“Chaoskampf” (short story) 2016 (appeared in Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels, Snuggly Books, edited by Justin Isis) *

“XYschaton” (short story) 2018 (appeared in Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology, Snuggly Books, edited by Justin Isis) *

Harlem Smoke (novel) 2019 (published by Snuggly Books)

The Man Who Murdered His Muse (chapbook) 2019 (published by Eibonvale Press) *

“The Book of the Cobwebbed Ones” (short story) 2019 (appeared in the zine The Call #2, edited by Ben Robinson) *

“Dreamachine” (short story) 2019 (appeared in The Man From Düsseldorf: A Tribute to Claus Laufenburg, Snuggly Books, edited by Brendan Connell) *

“Providence Spleen” (short story) 2023 (appeared in Neo-Decadent Evangelion, Zagava, edited by Justin Isis) *

CAW: Colossal Abandoned World (chapbook) 2023 (published by Zagava) *

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Reminisces of a Bookseller at his 20 year Anniversary

Yesterday marked my 20 year anniversary as an employee of the Barnes & Noble company (specifically, store 2829 in Bellingham, Massachusetts). I began working there on February 24, 2004 (for the curious, the particular Barnes & Noble I work at first opened its doors to the public in 1996). This was around 7 months after I had graduated from Rhode Island College, and my father (who managed a different Barnes & Noble at that time) pulled some strings to get me an interview there. The interview was conducted by my first manager, Bambi (still my favorite manager of all the ones I had there, mainly out of a sense of loyalty: she was the one who hired me, after all), and even though this interview was strictly a formality I still took it super-seriously. I knew at the time that some people might have pointed out that I got the job via nepotism so I made sure that first year in particular to work super-hard, and indeed in all my years there I’ve almost never coasted or shirked my duties. I was also told early on to not discuss politics with both customers and co-workers, which is advice I’ve almost always followed to the letter (of course, this didn’t stop customers or fellow co-workers with trying to rope me into such discussions, but I would usually defer with some generic Warholism such as “Wow” or “Oh yeah?” or “Gee” whenever the topic arose).

I still remember that first shift well. It was a sunny Tuesday. Earlier in the day I dropped by the job I was leaving (the Stop & Shop supermarket in North Smithfield, where I had worked part-time for 7 years, starting in the spring of 1997) where I formally resigned from my duties. Then later on in the day I drove to work for the first time (it was a route I knew well as I had shopped at the bookstore in question in the past). I didn’t have a tape deck in my car then so I was forced to listen to the radio: I remember that as I arrived at the store “All Apologies” by Nirvana was playing. I spent most of that first shift either in the manager’s office (where the assistant manager on duty walked me through the paperwork), or seated in the café flipping through the various employee handbooks and taking voluminous notes on yellow lined office paper. I remember during my 15 minute break I was given a tour of the store where I met most of my co-workers (almost none of whom work there anymore, with one exception), and in my 30 minute meal break I went to the Newbury Comics across the street where I purchased A.R.E. Weapon’s 2003 self-titled debut album. By the time my meal was done the store was almost closed for the day, so I spent the remainder of my shift cleaning up in the kids section (or more accurately trying to clean as I still didn’t know where everything went). The following day, my second shift, I got my nametag and ID number, and was instructed how to both scan and shelve books. I can even remember one of the books I shelved that second day: the first ERAGON novel.
Initially I was hired to work in the Children’s department fulltime, and that’s mostly what I did my first year in 2004, though there were some shifts where I had to cashier (which I hated doing then, and still hate today: in fact these days I'm more a cashier than anything else, which I'm very unhappy about). It was pretty chill, one of the only stressful events being the one time where the Kids Lead was out and I was forced to do the children’s story time event (the book in question being DON’T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS). Towards the end of the year (around the time that GRAND THEFT AUTO SAN ANDREAS was released) I was promoted to a Lead position, and got my own “Zone” that I had to maintain every month: this Zone was comprised of Games, Humor, Computers, Science & Technology, Nature, Pets, Sports, Study Notes, Reference, Language, Audio Books, Travel, Law, Weddings, Self-Improvement, Home Reference, and Gardening. In many ways that time period I was a Lead (mainly 2005-2007) I kind of see as the store’s Golden Era... I used to enjoy having my own section to maintain, and we had a really great staff: most of the people working at the time were my age and it was a really motley crew of snarky wise-asses and (loveable) malcontents, who were really fun to work with: I had a lot in common with many of my co-workers back then and was much more sociable. But sometime around 2007-2008 they phased out the Lead positions, which always saddened me: the Lead position struck me as a nice middle ground for employees who wanted more responsibilities, yet didn’t want to be managers. For a time I worked as the Newsstand Lead (indeed, I still kind of see the Newsstand as “my” department even though I haven’t worked in it all that much these last few years now), but around 2010-2011 they got rid of that position as well... I think that’s around the time I switched to working part-time, for various reasons. Essentially, for the last 13 years or so I’ve kind of been a jack-of-all-trades, doing everything from cashiering to shelving to zoning to organizational tasks... you name it. Hell, sometimes when the mood struck me and the stars were right I’ve even hand sold books or memberships. The only thing I’ve NEVER done is work in café.
There have been a couple of memorable shifts over the years. The MOST memorable and craziest one was the midnight release party for the sixth Harry Potter book in July of 2005. Maybe I’ll talk about that one some other time. The BREAKING DAWN one in 2008 was nuts as well. I do remember though how different the store was back then, compared to what it later became. Like initially we had no info desk, just various computer kiosks scattered around the store (one of them being located right near Newsstand). Or how when I first started working there the Manga section was just a shelf or two: now it’s like 8 bookcases. Before everything got computerized, we would get a big binder in every month listing all the various projects that needed to be completed, and every day people would have to sign off on what carts they shelved or what sections they zoned... there was more accountability, then. Or how we used to do two children’s story times each week, and would sometimes have costumed characters. We used to sell newspapers, and my first year there we had a book club devoted to Wicca, Tarot and the New Age. We also had a bigger staff: we used to have two people shelving every morning, always had 2 cashiers working the registers, always had two fulltime people in Receiving. At the store’s height (in 2008) we once had a staff of around 45 people... now it’s not even 20. There was a shift last year where I found myself alone on the sales floor for a time, where I had to run the register, open that day’s shipment, shelve that day’s shipment, answer the phone, and help the customers. I remember thinking, “You’re one person trying to do four jobs at once. This isn’t fun anymore. Maybe it’s time to leave.” (I also thought this when I recently cashed out a young woman in her twenties who told me she remembered seeing me when she visited the store with her parents as a child, which made me feel very old).
Other random memories: the customer who was looking for a book by the author “Aesop Fables.” The time that the TWILIGHT books were so huge that Teen Romance briefly got retitled Teen Paranormal Romance. The time our store had a yellowjacket infiltration a few years ago (I still shiver thinking about that one). The time we got our first Nook eReader demo device and had to stand by it at all times as if we were guarding some holy relic. Laughing at crank calls and the woodenly acted corporate training videos we had to watch every now and then. Taking part in the annual Inventory and the hectic holiday seasons. Some of the more annoying customers, like the old guy who was constantly having us order obscure bibles (and then never buying them). And of course, some various old friends no longer there anymore, be it old co-workers (like Sean Winters) or promotional fixtures I had a fondness for, such as the Mass Market Paperback Tower, the Newsstand Power Column, and the New Release Hardcover Octagon table.
Over the course of my 20 years at B&N, I’ve maintained an extensive archive of related documents and artifacts related to my time at the store, which I’ve kept in a manila folder and a small Ziploc bag (these two storage devices then being placed in a much larger Ziploc bag). Included in these archives are employee handbooks (featuring the iconic author portraits drawn by Canadian artist Mark Summers, whose work also used to appear on our bags and on framed prints on our walls, back in the old days), the initial notes I took my first day on the job, promotional flyers for store events and Nook devices, thank you cards from management, many of my annual performance reviews (mainly from 2007, 2009, 2010-2015, 2017-2019, and 2022 + 2023), product placement maps, holiday employee guides, many of the staff recommendation cards I filled out over the years, weekly instore newsletters, old nametags, awards, and other miscellaneous items. The instore newsletters in particular make up a large portion of the archives. When I first started working there in 2004, the newsletter was named “What’s Up In The Store,” though in 2005 it was changed to “For The Love Of Books.” Newsletters were discontinued in 2006-2007, though 2008 and 2009 saw a new one start up, “The Store 2829 Weekly” (also later known as “The New 2829 Weekly”). This was later replaced by the short-lived “Barnes & Noble Store 2829 Newsletter,” later replaced again by “The Nameless Newsletter,” which mainly ran in 2011 and sporadically in 2012 and 2014 (and which was put together by another of my old managers, Melissa Rivard Lavendier). But there haven’t been any newsletters since 2014, for almost a decade now. Anyway, I’ve decided to share some pictures of my archive below.
In any event, now that I’ve hit 20 years, I’ve decided to get serious about looking for a new job. I’ve begun updating my resume and looking into various websites like Indeed and so on. Towards the end of 2022, during a somewhat contentious annual review, I told management that after my 20th year I would be leaving, though in my performance review last year I told them I wouldn’t be leaving on the very day I hit 20 years: that I would stay on for a short spell afterwards while seeking work elsewhere, as I wanted to give them fair warning. Maybe some other day I’ll post some more about why I want to leave, though for now, it will suffice to say that what it boils down to is a feeling of stagnation/burnout that results from working at the same place for two decades, a desire to prove that I can do something besides retail, disagreements with how the company is currently being run, things like that. Also, looking back at my first shift, I remembered there’s something fun about starting a new job: meeting new people, getting used to a new building, learning new responsibilities, and so on. I kind of miss that. My first year on the job, my boss Bambi asked me what the hell I was doing there, that I was too smart to be wasting my life in retail. I told her at the time that for me B&N was a stepping stone and after 5 years I’d probably move on. 5 years turned to 20. But it’s time to move on. And what better year to take a leap than a leap year?

The Ziploc bag housing my Barnes & Noble archive


The employee handbook I got on my very first day, and my original nametag (long retired)


These were the notes I took about my job duties my very first shift at the store


My 5, 10, and 15 year anniversary brooches and other miscellanea (supposedly a few years ago the company stopped doing brooches and switched to paper certificates)


A small sampling of the various staff rec cards I filled out over the years


The very last staff rec card I ever filled out, during last year's holiday season



Cards from various Bookseller Appreciation Weeks. A shame they left out "perverted," "sickly" and "bitchy"


Some (not all) of the various seasonal thank you cards I've gotten from the store over the years


The 2011 Holiday Employee Guide... from back when the store still held such meetings (always in November)


Newsletters from 2004-2005


This was the very first newsletter I got, which mentioned my hiring. I very quickly let it be known that I do. Not. Like. Being. Called. Jim.


Some of the Nameless Newsletters


More Newsletters


Newsletter announcing when I won the "Employee of the Month" contest (got a $50 gift card)


Some papers from various Harry Potter midnight release parties
























 





































Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Bathroom Reads #2: FRASIER: THE OFFICIAL COMPANION BOOK TO THE AWARD-WINNING PARAMOUNT TELEVISION COMEDY! by Jefferson Graham

 

I got this book at the (now closed down) Waldenbooks at Lincoln Mall sometime around its year of publication, which was 1996. My interest in sitcoms began in the first decade of my existence, which is to say the 1980s, when I became a fan of such shows as FAMILY MATTERS (a show I still adore) and PERFECT STRANGERS. However, this interest really expanded in the 1990s, which I now think of as the golden decade of the sitcom, the likes of which we shall probably never see again. My brothers and I especially loved FRASIER, SEINFELD and FRIENDS, and it still kind of boggles my mind that there was a time that NBC was broadcasting all three of those shows at once... we had no idea how good we had it. Which is not to say that I totally lost interest in the format after the 90s: HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, while flawed in some aspects, was still an entertaining show in its own way, and recently I've become fixated on the American version of THE OFFICE (of which I've currently seen the first five seasons). But in some ways, culturally speaking, the American sitcom just doesn't seem super-relevant anymore, unlike the 90s, where they were much talked about and "must see TV." It seems a shame, but comedy is hard (especially in today's climate), and for every one successful sitcom, it seems there are 99 failures. Trying to capture that almost magical mix of just the right cast, just the write sets, just the best writers... it's a hard alchemy to master, and few shows do. 

Of the aforementioned Big Three, for awhile FRASIER seemed like the odd man out, and maybe it still is. SEINFELD's popularity has never really dimmed, and FRIENDS went on to be embraced by an entirely new generation, some of whom hadn't even been alive when the show first aired. Yet FRASIER never seemed to have gotten that same level of posthumous pop cultural impact, for whatever reason, despite getting good ratings in its original run and being something of an awards darling: perhaps because the show lacked the "hip" factor of some of the other shows from that same era (it is perhaps telling that these days it's best known as a show that some people like to use to fall asleep to). Last year a new spinoff show began, somewhat unoriginally called FRASIER, and I still haven't seen one episode of it. 

Jefferson Graham's book is an official product, which meant he had a lot of access to the show and the people involved, which is always a blessing. This companion book features, among other things, the story of how the show FRASIER was conceived and developed, a list of the radio caller guest voices, profiles of all the main characters and interesting interviews with the actors who play them, a chapter on Moose (the dog who played Eddie), a chapter on the elusive and never-seen Maris Crane, a week in the life of the production of a FRASIER episode (specifically, the episode "You Can Go Home Again," the Season 3 finale episode), an episode guide (covering the first three seasons of the show), the full script for "The Good Son" (the show's pilot episode), and a trivia quiz. Also, and fittingly enough for a show known for its witty banter, many quotes from the episodes are liberally sprinkled throughout the text. My only real issue with the book is that I wish they had waited a few more seasons before its release: the first three seasons of FRASIER are very good, and even include a number of classic episodes, but for my money the show's peak era was seasons 4 through 7 (while on the subject, season 8 began showing signs of weakness, and 9 and 10 were pretty dire, though the show generally got its mojo back for its 11th and final season). 



Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Bathroom Reads #1: THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS: THE LIFE OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK by Donald Spoto

Over the years I've kind of created a small list of books that I tend to often read while in the bathroom, and sometimes at least once a year (and as someone who suffers from IBS, there are periods every now and then where I can spend a disturbingly long period of time in there). Although I've never put these books on my official reading lists because (unlike the books that DO end up on such lists) in some cases I haven't read every single word in them (like the copyright page or the bibliography or whatever), in an unorthodox and at times nonlinear fashion I have, in a weird way, read through some of these books so many times over the years that I almost can claim to have read them, albeit in an unofficial fashion. Anyway, over the course of this year I might do a few posts on here highlighting some of these loyal soldiers, who have gotten me through tough times.

* * * *

“There’s a devil in every one us.”

— Alfred Hitchcock

“Hitchcock’s private style and, opposed to it, his calculated bourgeois exterior, were signs of an inner division. He considered all life unmanageable, and his obsessive neatness (like his careful preparation of a film) was a way of taking a stand against the chaos he believed was always at the ready, to be fended off with whatever wit and structure one could muster. Social life he thought to be a giant hypocrisy. He carried the burden of disguise as all his suave villains do, and the attempt at elegance concealed the boyish secret, the second, hidden, imagined life. The paradox of Alfred Hitchcock was that his delight in his craft could never be liberated from a terrible and terrifying heritage of desire and its concomitant guilt.”

—Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock  

My introduction to the world of Alfred Hitchcock occurred in Fall semester of my Freshman year at Rhode Island College, in the autumn of 1998. One of the films we saw that semester was Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train. Although I had obviously heard of Hitchcock’s name before and knew of him, Strangers on a Train was the first film of his I ever saw, and I really enjoyed it. At another point in my days as a college student I took a class exclusively dedicated to the films of Hitchcock, which got me even more interested in his work. I can’t quite claim to be a Hitchcock expert, as of his 53 films, over the last 25 years or so I’ve seen around 20 of them: though of those 20 they do at least span the entire length of Hitch’s long career, from his early silent films to the British talkies of the 30s to his Selznick period in the 40s to his golden era of the 1950s and early 60s, and even some of his latter day films. One thing I do recall about the Hitchcock course I took back in college was, after we had seen The Birds, the professor told us about how Hitchcock had become very obsessed with the actress Tippi Hedren, and how we could read about it in the book The Dark Side of Genius by Donald Spoto. Shortly after that I went to the campus library (by far the place I spent the most time at during my years at RIC) and found the book in question: naturally, the first thing I did was read about the tumultuous friction that developed between Hitchcock and Hedren as the result of his obsession with her during the shooting of The Birds and Marnie. Later I purchased a copy of the book from the school store, and that’s the copy I still have to this day. As you can see, this book is well-used, to the extent that some pages are literally falling out, and there’s even a bit of water damage to it (I have no idea how that happened). It’s also one of the only books I own where I dog-eared some of my favorite pages: normally when I read a book I keep a separate sheet of paper nearby where I write down notes for the book I’m reading, as I like to keep my books in good condition. But with a book this old and beat-up, such decorum is not necessary.

Although I do not share many of Hitchcock’s indulgences (in particular, his addiction to food and drink), in many ways I can see a lot of myself in Hitch: a similar spiritual background in that we both had a Catholic upbringing, an obsession with order and routine as a way to stave off chaos, a fussy and compulsive neatness, a macabre fascination in the darkest passages of the human mind (which often manifested itself in an interest in the writings of the Gothics), a yearning for the creature comforts of life and a desire to avoid physical suffering at all cost, a Victorian love-hate squeamishness in regards to the human body and its operations, the desire to be an enigma, the adoption of a social pose of detachment/aloofness/snobbery (itself a brilliant disguise to mask a crippling anxiety; the actress Anne Baxter one summed him up memorably: “He had an extraordinary stillness, but then he could move with sudden speed — it was like lightning masqueraded in a Buddha’s casing”), and especially his abstaining from most human physical contact (one of his writers, Arthur Laurents, once said about him that “He thought everyone was doing something physical and nasty behind every closed door — except himself: he withdrew, he wouldn’t be part of it.” A statement proven by Hitchcock’s own admission to Spoto in 1975: “My exertion is all from the neck up. I watch”). Like Hitchcock, I also, from childhood, have had a terror of vomiting and nausea.

Hitchcock, in many ways, was a paradoxical figure, something that Spoto addresses in his book: “He was a profoundly Victorian Catholic, a rigid moralist, who ate and drank too much. He was a classical filmmaker and a manipulator of effects who loved a technical challenge. He was a childlike romantic living in an isolated, chilly gloom. Meticulous at work, he was cavalier and reckless about his health. Proper in public, he was inclined, if there was no microphone present, to outrageous toilet humor. He was the soul of gentility for the press, but he secretly reveled in the ugly, and coolly presented it for the audience’s consideration.” I’m also very fascinated in that for Hitchcock, the real fun of making movies was when he was alone with his writers, planning it all out on paper: but the actual filming of the movie he hated, because by then he had already filmed the whole thing in his head and had to rely on actors and technicians to try their best to depict his vivid fantasies. Funnily enough, Siouxsie & The Banshees (which I tie with Nine Inch Nails as my favorite band) were also big Hitchcock enthusiasts: the band named one of their singles “Spellbound” (inspired by the Hitchcock film of the same name), while the guitars in “Suburban Relapse” echo the violin screeches of Bernard Herrmann’s score for the infamous shower scene in Psycho (in 2014, Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin also compiled a 14 track CD for MOJO magazine, one of the songs being taken from Vertigo). Now that I think about it, I believe that Kim Gordon is a fan as well: one of her songs for Sonic Youth took its title from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Finally, I also admire Hitchcock’s almost Warholian style of self-promotion, and his method of trying to land a title for a project early on: in Spoto’s book, mention is made of how “Hitchcock felt that the lack of a definite title gave the production an atmosphere of the haphazard and a lack of focus — attitudes he shunned at all cost and energy.”

To return to Spoto’s book, I think it is a very interesting warts and all biography, one that spotlights both Hitchcock’s virtues and flaws. Some may accuse Spoto of playing the armchair psychologist, and certainly the book doesn’t shy away from some of Hitch’s more prurient desires and obsessions, but to be fair, in life, Hitchcock was often the same way. But I think a big part of the book’s appeal, to me, is that it’s very well-written. Consider the following passage from the book (my favorite passage, actually) on pg. 465, in which he makes a comparison between the works of Hitchcock and Hieronymus Bosch: “Seekers after the ideal and moralists in spite of themselves, Bosch and Hitchcock each spoke out of the sadness of his age and the experience of massive evil — and each addressed the terror of human isolation that he perceived within his soul, a terror that provided the strongest clue to the meaning of damnation. And finally, each artist regularly tucked himself into a modest corner of his own work as a signature; Bosch’s face and Hitchcock’s cameo are more than seals of authorship — they peer as players in their own nightmares.”

The last few sections of the book, dealing with Hitchcock’s physical and mental decline, his slide into chronic alcoholism and senility, and the loss of his will to live following the realization that he would never be able to do another film again, are almost unbearably poignant: the last few paragraphs of the book never fail to make my eyes water up whenever I read them:

“Gradually, the great final battle subsided. Arthritis had wracked his body, but in early April the pain oddly diminished. He slept more, and deeply, but then his liver failed, his kidney function slowed, and his tired, enlarged heart no longer responded to the modern device he had at first worn so proudly.

On the night of April 28/29, the doctor was called, and by early morning the family had gathered quietly. ‘I retire when I die,’ Hitchcock had said not long before. ‘One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes.’

The end came at 9:17 on the morning of April 29, 1980, without suspense, without violence. The terror, after all, had been met for years in his dreams and in his art. It was, as so often, a quiet, scarcely discernible moment, as if he had glimpsed the cloudless horizon that was always his image of serenity — as if his earlier, almost forgotten hopes had finally come back to gather round and had not, at the last, left him alone in the darkness.”

Hitchcock Films That I’ve Seen

The Lodger (1927)

The 39 Steps (1935)

Sabotage (1936)

Saboteur (1941)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) my favorite: it was also one of Hitch’s favorites as well

Spellbound (1945)

Notorious (1946)

Rope (1948)

Stage Fright (1950)

Strangers on a Train (1951)

I Confess (1953)

Dial “M” for Murder (1954)

Rear Window (1954)

To Catch a Thief (1955)

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Vertigo (1958)

Psycho (1960)

The Birds (1963)

Marnie (1964)

Frenzy (1972)


As an appendix to all this, I would also like to post here a short story that I wrote a couple of years ago, that revolved around a fantasized depiction of Alfred Hitchcock shooting a scene for his film Frenzy (and which I originally wrote for the Neo-Decadent Cookbook, but never formally submitted for whatever reason):

The Murder Mystery

 

“How would you choose to be murdered? Well, there are many nice ways.

Eating is a good one.”

—Alfred Hitchcock

 

                EXT. THAMES RIVER — DAY

 

                TITLE CARD: LONDON, AUGUST 2, 1971 (MONDAY)

 

T

HE SCENE IS a summery morning in London. Beams of sunlight make the windows of the nearby Modernist buildings gleam like the blades of enormous scissors poised over the chest of some chillily attractive blonde matron, and the mischievous bubbling of the Thames gives one the impression that the water is teeming with lascivious undines giggling at some private dirty joke. A crowd is assembled on the banks of the river near London County Hall. A film is being shot this day: the opening scene of Frenzy[1], Alfred Hitchcock’s 52nd film, and his first to be filmed in Jolly Old England in many a year. Like most Hollywood films, this movie is not being shot in a linear fashion; although they would be shooting the opening scene this morning, in fact the film’s production had begun a week ago, on July 26.

The Artist of Anxiety himself is seated on a sturdy folding chair off to the side like a Urizenic Budai, his face stern as Jove as he watches the preparations for the day’s filming begin to get underway. Seated next to him is the bespectacled and heavily side-burned writer and philosopher Colin Wilson, who is serving as a technical consultant for this picture, and every now and then he leans over to Hitchcock and the two men engage in some light banter on the subject of necrophilia (which is one of Hitch’s favorite topics of all), though at one point in their discourse the macabre lilt of the conversation switches over to a discussion on serial killers, in particular John Haigh, the so-called “Acid Bath Murderer,” and his disturbing dreams of blood[2]. A portable record player has been set up nearby, and Hitchcock is listening to the 3rd Velvet Underground album, the track currently playing being “The Murder Mystery.” For obvious reasons he likes the song title but the actual music and lyrics (like so much modern pop and rock & roll) makes no sense to him, and something about the implied chaos suggested by the song offends his sensibilities, in much the same way that the sensibilities of the populace of North Wales were offended by the Sapphic antics of the Ladies of Llangollen[3] in Plas Newydd in the 18th century (though he did find himself fascinated by the subject of transvestism as brought up in the opening track, “Candy Says”[4]): to distract himself from the chaotic so-called “music,” he begins whistling Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” (which he first heard on the set of Munrau’s Sunrise in 1927). From his vantage point he observes the actors (many of whom are discussing a recent episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus) get in their assigned places, watches as the crew members bustle about their tasks like Mod Myrmidons (all of his key male associates, he’s pleased to note, are properly dressed in coat and tie, no matter their age). Under the keen eye of Director of Photography Gil Taylor, cameras are being aimed at the actors like guns pointed at political hostages, while boom microphones tower overhead like Cubist giraffes. Everything seems to be running in a glabrous manner . . .  under a Lacerated Sky, a machine of flesh and blood fornicates in a Crystal Trench. Even the seagulls seem Spellbound by the spectacle.

Yet Hitchcock’s mind is elsewhere. Most people would agree that the idea of a man directing two films at the same time would be an impossible act. And yet, that’s exactly what Alfred Hitchcock is doing in London on this morning of August 2, 1971. Of course, as far as Hitchcock is concerned, the motion picture he is currently filming had already been completed months ago, long before the cameras had even started rolling. In his opinion, all his films were made in that little office in his bungalow on the lot of Universal Studios, a collaborative act between him and the screenwriter that saw them putting the whole thing down on paper. Therefore the creative part is over, and the actual filming is just a tedious obligation, a going through the motions. Now it was all in the hands of the actors, who naturally will try their hardest to bungle it up. Actors! How he loathes the sight of them! The cattle! //Thinking about cattle makes him think of cows, which makes him think of dairy farms, which makes him think of Grace Kelly, naked, her wrists bound and her body arranged in a submissive hogtied position, which makes him think of himself straddling her from behind, squeezing her tits cruelly and forcing them to secrete milk into rusty pails arranged beneath her bosom// He is reminded of an interview he had done with L’Express a few years back, around the time of the Torn Curtain debacle, where he had put forth his notion (not for the first time) that his films were 99% finished when the screenplay was complete, and how he dreamt of an IBM machine where one could insert a screenplay into the machine and watch as the film emerged complete from the other end.

At the moment his mind is crowded with black thoughts, like the armies of apocalypse ravens in his film The Birds. Many of his trusted collaborators from the past are long gone: James Stewart was too old to be a convincing leading man in his films any longer, Cary Grant had retired from acting, Ingrid Bergman had ditched him for Rossellini (whereas Grace Kelly had ditched him for Rainier III, the Prince of Monaco) . . . he has even lost Robert Burks (his old Director of Photography), George Tomasini (his chief Editor), and Bernard Herrmann, who had let him down by not gifting him with a much-needed “pop” soundtrack for Torn Curtain. His 72nd birthday was fast approaching and his health wasn’t getting any better (the same could be said for his wife, Alma, who had recently suffered a small stroke), and in recent days his normally bland dreams had become grim nightmares, surrealistic phantasmagorias where giant eyeballs gazed unblinkingly at him from some vast starless void, and where doors opened endlessly onto infinitely repeating hallways bathed in green light (which makes him recall a play he first saw in 1905, at the age of 6,  in which the villain accompanied the stage while bathed in green light, to orchestral music of a sinister nature. “I remember the green light – green for the appearances of ghosts and villains”). It annoyed him that he had failed to convince Nabokov to adapt the book currently being filmed into a screenplay. While initially happy to be back in London after so many years away he found the modernization of the city appalling, and the less said about the psychedelic nature of modern pubs the better; even Covent Garden had changed greatly from his memories of it as a child.

Better to reflect on happier memories: reading Victorian Christmas crawlers in his youth, his childhood obsession with the timetables for boats and trains, Confession with Father Newdigate at St. Ignatius College, his juvenile trips to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard (where he had seen amongst its collections shoes that had belonged to prostitutes slain by Jack the Ripper), his discovery of the work of Poe at the age of 16, designing ads for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company, attending murder trials at the Old Bailey Court, his past collaboration with Salvador Dali, the $15 million dollars that Psycho made at the box office, his annual wedding anniversary holidays with Alma at the Palace Hotel at Saint Moritz in Switzerland (where he would watch his family ski from the comfort of his room while he sipped a warm glass of Apfelwein), that visit to the Vice Museum in Paris where he had fingered the guillotoine blade that had beheaded Marie Antoinette, watching his daughter ski at Gabriel Valley, vanilla ice cream covered in Hine brandy, smashing tea cups after breakfast (a daily ritual), that time in 1956 when he pretended to strangle the actress Mary Scott on the set of Mr. Blanchard’s Secret, dinner at Anne Baxter’s house in Los Angeles in August 1959 (digesting dinner peacefully while stroking the head of her pet poodle Petunia), the note of gushing praise that David O. Selznick had sent him following the release of Rear Window, Rodin’s The Kiss, that time in the early 1940s when, on a train traveling from Boulogne to Paris, he had seen from his window a boy and a girl standing before a wall near an old factory, and how the boy was urinating on the wall while the girl held his hand, never letting go . . . the inner peace he felt at the sight of a well-organized desk, a cloudless and placid horizon, and, more so than anything else, food[5]. And there were still things to look forward to in the future: like teatime at 4:30, when he could gulp his troubles away (the Master always swallowed food and drink without chewing) with some vodka gimlets, or maybe a 1969 Meursault or a 1964 Chateau Margaux . . .  after all, a good red wine always reminded him of menstrual blood.

In some ways, Hitchcock was a prisoner of his own success, as he freely admitted (and like his hero Poe, he saw himself as a prisoner of the suspense genre). Most modern theatergoers saw him merely as a Suspense Specialist, a Master of the Macabre, suited only to direct spy thrillers and murder stories. Little did they know that, were he to make films to only please himself, the resulting movies would be far different from his usual fare: more realistic and dramatic, with less humor. Of course, the bastards at Universal would never let him get away with it: like most of the other studios the bean-counters just seemed to want pop films with youthful characters, anti-establishment elements, and nudity scenes. While waiting for his crew to finish setting up for the scene, he begins to daydream about one of these more unconventional film ideas of his, which he had first mentioned to François Truffaut at the end of 1967. The film would depict 24 hours in the life of a city, “. . .  a complete cyclic movement.” He can already see the movie in his head (the first scene, for example, would feature a fly crawling on the nose of a tramp lying in a doorway at 5 a.m.), and it is this second imaginary film he is directing in the back of the haunted palace of his mind, on this warm August morning on the banks of the Thames. Unsurprisingly, the film will focus on food: its arrival in the city, how it’s distributed and sold, who buys it, how it’s cooked, the different means by which it is consumed. And he even knows how the film will end: a pessimistic montage of sewers dumping garbage out into the oceans of the world. The theme: what people did to good things, the rottenness of humanity. Murder, by proxy of eating, was as vital to existence as breathing. In a manner of speaking, it was the ultimate whodunit, a mystery that could never be solved: why has God or Evolution conspired to create a world where the daily consumption of flesh and organic matter is necessary for the sustenance of its manifold inhabitants?

The producer notifies Hitch that shooting is ready to begin. Bored, his face mimicking the blank facial stare of madness oft refelected in the premature death mask aesthethic of his body of work, Hitchcock turns off the record player and directs his gaze to the scene below. Stunt woman Roberta Gibbs, portraying a murdered corpse, is floating face down in the Thames, completely naked, a necktie wrapped tightly around her neck, and once her body has drifted onto the polluted Shores of Hell two bobby-hatted constables race over to inspect the corpse. In the apaugasma of the morning sun her bare buttocks resemble two pale Shimizu white peaches. The growling in Hitchcock’s stomach resembles the chthonic church bells of St. Paul’s tolling funereal peals.

 

“Some directors film slices of life, I film slices of cake.”

—Alfred Hitchcock



[1] An adaptation of Arthur La Bern’s somewhat awkwardly titled 1966 novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square.

[2] "I saw before me a forest of crucifixes which gradually turned into trees. At first, there appeared to be dew or rain, dripping from the branches, but as I approached I realized it was blood. The whole forest began to writhe and the trees, dark and erect, to ooze blood. . . A man went from each tree catching the blood . . . When the cup was full, he approached me. 'Drink,' he said, but I was unable to move.” —John Haigh

[3] Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby

[4] Contrary to what some people might think, Hitchcock was fascinated by homosexuality and was very comfortable around homosexual actors.

[5] “I find contentment from food. It’s a mental process rather than a physical. There is as much anticipation in confronting good food as there is in going on a holiday, or seeing a good show. There are two kinds of eating— eating to sustain and eating for pleasure. I eat for pleasure.”

—Alfred Hitchcock, August 26, 1937