Ask the average person who Harry Nilsson is, and if they're of a certain age they'll probably scrunch up their face and say, "The name sounds familiar..." and if they're under 40 they probably won't have the faintest idea.
But mention "Me and My Arrow," or "Without You" or "Everybody's Talkin'" or say "Put de lime in de coconut," and odds are good that no matter their age, their eyes will light up with recognition: "Oh, that guy! I love that song!"
Recently while digging around the Internet I stumbled across the fact that Harry, who died in 1994 just before the big L.A. earthquake, was buried at Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park in Westlake Village. I drive past that place all the time -- it's next to our local Costco, Pet Smart, and Staples -- and I never knew Harry was there.
A little further digging revealed that in the final years of his life, Harry lived right here in my hometown of Agoura Hills. Agoura seems a strange place for such a successful musician to have lived; it ain't exactly Malibu -- it's not even Westlake Village. On a little more investigation, I learned that Harry, whose career had taken a sharp downturn in the late Seventies owing to his general iconoclasticity, his refusal to tour or play concerts, and his notorious carousing with John Lennon, was financially wiped out when his business manager embezzled all his money, for which she did two years and never had to make any sort of restitution.
I never met Harry, but I've occasionally met people who knew him (including Lennon, and the great Van Dyke Parks), and my producer/co-conspirator on nine years' worth of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was Fred Wolf, who single-handedly animated Harry's film The Point, which is awesome and full of win and which you should see immediately. For some reason, discovering that Harry had lived here made me want to pay him a visit.
I'm not a terribly morbid person by nature. The only time I've been to a celebrity grave was to see Oliver Hardy, who's buried near the old Disney TV animation building, where I used to work. But as someone who has loved Nilsson's music his entire adult life, I felt compelled to pay him my regards.
And so Audry and I headed out this morning, armed with the exact GPS coordinates of the gravesite, and went looking for Harry. We found him at the top of this hill, just east of Lindero Canyon Road.
Audry put a flower on the stone.
The notes of Harry's song "Remember" were transcribed and hand-etched on the stone by Van Dyke Parks himself. Among the many musicians at the funeral was George Harrison.
Turns out the several famous people are buried here, including Artie Shaw, Jack "King" Kirby, and Karen Carpenter. On our way back, we encountered one of them:
Strange thing about being in a cemetery: you think about the people there, and wonder what their lives were like, what worried them, what was important to them, what upset or delighted or enraged them -- and you instantly realize that none of it matters now. It reminds you that whatever you're worried or upset or angry or afraid about ultimately is going to be meaningless. And maybe that's a good thing to think about once in a while. Gives you perspective.
Apropos of that, here is Harry's song "Think About Your Troubles," from The Point:
Ever wonder whatever happened to the old Johnson-Smith Catalog? You know, the one with the X-ray specs and fake dog poop? It grew up and mutated into this unbelievably awesome website, where you can buy handerpants and yodelling pickles and paintings of squirrels in their underwear! Check it out!
In reading Chip Delany'sAbout Writing, I came across the following provocative sentence:
"One way or the other, directly or indirectly, good fiction tends to be about money."
I think (hope?) what Chip is referring to is not money per se, but its effects on people -- in their circumstances, in having or not having it, in the pursuit of it, and in the effects it has on peoples' emotions.
It's a great way to force you to think about fiction from a different angle, but I think it's overstated. (I imagine Chip would be the first to agree.) He's also left himself a couple of outs, through the qualifiers "good" (no one is going to always agree with you about what constitutes "good" fiction) and "tends to be about" (which allows for exceptions).
Money of course is representative of various aspects of both our survival (food, shelter, etc.), which motivates fictions both complex (Les Miserables) and simple (any Road Runner cartoon), and our aspirations: achieved, thwarted, gained but to no good end, and even (in the case of a book like Siddhartha) rejected. (Money is such a ubiquitous part of human existence that you could just as easily say that most good fiction tends to be about clothes. After all, we all wear 'em.)
Equally interesting, Chip says that you pretty much can't write fiction without establishing your characters' financial circumstances. Fascinating and true. But again, I think we do this in order to provide context for the characters' emotions and behaviors.
Money, in the long run, is just paper and metal. Even in the real world, it's basically symbolic. Personally, I think fiction -- most fiction -- good, bad or indifferent fiction -- is about only one thing:
Something stands in the way of what I want.
The "something" may be an antagonist, or circumstances, or myself -- and ideally it's a combination of all three. This too is an over-generalization, and is considerably more simple-minded than Chip's statement -- but I think it comes fairly close to describing the essence of storytelling, for what it's worth.
From an unpublished novella called "Wonderland," which I finished in 1999:
"Her words seemed to thaw out some sort of ice dam inside of me..."
From Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, published this year:
"[He] felt some ice dam in his heart break apart..."
Okay, maybe he says it better than me, but still... Get out of my head, Russo!
I won't say my story's better, but it does have lots more time-travelling, senseless killing, half-baked superheroes from the future, revelations of a higher intelligence in the universe and playing of the game "Monopoly" than Russo's book. (Both have marital breakups in them, though the one in my story only lasts for about ten seconds.) I'm just sayin'.
I just received an email from Foyles Bookstore (the place where we bought all those books when we were in London), and among the new-release announcements was a list of the chain's top ten bestselling books. At the top was that new Dan Brown thing, of course, but I was surprised to see the great ItaloCalvino'sInvisible Cities at number nine. Wow -- a 35-year-old structuralist postmodern meta-novel on a bestseller list in 2009! I love England.
There were some other good books in the bottom nine, which makes me wonder if Foyles' clientele is divided between people who read Dan Brown and people who read real books.
Of course, a more likely reason for a best-seller list crammed with good books is that nobody buys books anymore unless they're written by Dan Brown, and the titles that actually manage to sell a copy or two the rest of the week make up the rest of the list.
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a review of a new DVD edition of three Toho films: The H-Man, The Battle in Outer Space, and Mothra. The piece was insightful, largely favorable, and nearly a page long. (You can read it here.)
Schnikey! How the Times have changed! In 1956, NYT critic Bosley Crowther called the original Godzilla "an incredibly awful film" and derided everything about it, including the acting. (Ironically, a few years later Crowther's review of Ikiru cited the performance of the film's star, Takashi Shimura, as "measuring up with the top film actors anywhere." Shimura was, of course, one of the leads in Godzilla, and many other Toho monster movies. Think this is just a typical example of 1950's cultural insensitivity? Five years ago, when Godzilla was re-released here in its original uncut, non-Americanized version, Roger Ebert dumped grief all over the acting, while almost simultaneously placing Ikiru in his "100 Greatest Films of All Time" list.)
So how is it that these campy "Ho-Hos from Toho" have become respectable? Part of the reason is that camp itself has become respectable. Multiculturalism has played a part, too: Japan isn't as weird and different as it used to be. And then there is the rise of Geek Culture, where pop-cultural artifacts like the Toho films are studied seriously and people like Quentin Tarentino champion the work of Ishiro Honda, director of the original Godzilla and most of the other Toho monster and SF movies through 1974. (Indeed, the early scenes of Tokyo in Kill Bill Part 1 utilize leftover miniatures from Godzilla Final Wars. And Tarentino showed Honda's War of the Gargantuas to Uma Thurmon and Daryl Hannah prior to filming, explaining that he envisioned their climactic fight scene as a "War of the Blond Gargantuas.") The availability of the uncut, undubbed original versions of almost all the Toho monster films on DVD have also improved their reputation of late.
But I think the biggest reason is the qualities of the films themselves, which are only now beginning to be appreciated. For starters, they are rich in emotion and thematic subtext. I first saw Godzilla on television when I was nine; I knew enough about special effects to immediately recognize that the monster was not an armature puppet like King Kong, but a man in a rubber suit. As a huge fan of stop-motion animation, I felt that using a suit was cheating somehow. But the film stayed with me because it was in some strange way a deeper emotional experience than most other giant monster movies: it had sadness to it; you saw the people, displaced, damaged and suffering because of Godzilla's rampage (reflecting Japan's devastation in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I later realized). As Terrance Rafferty wrote in the New York Times, reviewing the recent release of the uncut version, Godzilla has a "haunted, elegiac quality." The films of Ray Harryhausen may have vastly superior special effects, but with one or two exceptions they are dramatically inert. The effects in a Honda-directed Toho film may look cheesy, but the movies deliver emotion and atmosphere in spades.
This, I think, is because while Honda was basically a journeyman director, he was extremely talented. After all, you don't get to be Akira Kurosawa's assistant on virtually all of his major films by slinging cheese. As AK himself said of Honda: "His films are full of his sincere humanity and his tender personality -- films like Godzilla. I like it very much. His films have remained popular because there were shot honestly and sincerely -- they're naturally good." (Kurosawa himself expressed a strong desire to direct a Godzilla film, to which the head of Toho snapped, "Your films already cost too much! You'd bankrupt the studio!")
But for me the enduring quality of Honda's monster movies is their atmosphere. Most were made during the Showa-30 era which marked the beginning of postwar Japan's "Economic Miracle," and this atmosphere drenches the films as thoroughly as the Gothic atmosphere of the Universal horror films of the 30's. The films have a type of strangeness, both artificial and optimistic, that you can't find anywhere else. Surrealism is one of the natural hallmarks of SF and fantasy (I defy you to show me anything in La Chien Andalou that tops the image of King Kong looking through the window of Fay Wray's hotel room), and Honda's genre films dish it out by the bucketload. As Tarentino has said: "Nothing in an Ishiro Honda film looks real. But everything looks cool."
With their defiantly artificial sets, the world of these films is the world of the film studio: interiors and many exteriors (even city streets) are shot inside soundstages. And of course when the monsters begin to fight, the whole world is enclosed inside a soundstage.
For my money the best of Honda's monster films is Rodan (1956). It's not just a really good monster movie, it's a really good movie, period -- well-plotted and thoughtful, genuinely scary, with a scale that relentlessly grows from the intimate to the colossal. At the beginning of the film, a mining town is menaced by monstrous 10-foot-long insects that emerge, unnervingly, from the murky waters of a flooded mine, feasting on unfortunate miners and ultimately crashing throujgh the ricepaper walls of the miners' houses. Shigeru, a supervisor, investigates the deepest part of the main shaft and vanishes, only to turn up a few days later with total amnesia. As he recuperates, a mysterious flying object, barely glimpsed, is terrorizing the sky, flying so fast that its shockwave destroys several aircraft. Then, as Shigeru lies dazed in his hospital bed, his girlfriend notices that the eggs are hatching in a bird's nest outside the window; she brings the nest over to his bed to see -- and as one of the eggs cracks, his memories come crashing back. He recalls that he came to a massive underground cavern beneath the mines, containing hundreds of the huge insects -- and a huge egg, 150 feet tall. As he watches in horror, the egg cracks open, and the head of a giant reptillian bird emerges -- and proceeds to eat one of the giant insects like a falcon plucking up a tiny maggot. And that's just the baby Rodan! Oh, and by the way, there are TWO of them!
The rest of the film is mainly Rodan(s) kicking the hell out of Sasebo, a city near Nagasaki. Like most of the Toho monster films, the minature work is brilliantly excecuted and photographed in a way that guarantees you'll know they're miniatures. It's a lot of fun, but the sequence of Shigeru's memory-return is one of the finest in cinema. And its masterstroke is the shot where the camera dollies in on the little bird nest, and one of the tiny blue eggs starts to crack, and the previously silent orchestra suddenly blasts out a bone-rattling chord of existential doom. That, boys and girls, is surrealism of the highest order.
Enjoy the original Japanese trailer for Mothra, below.
About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. (Chip’s astounding knowledge, erudition, and writing chops have always been a source of profound irritation for me.)
The Jewish War by Josephus. Found my father’s copy of this old Penguin – printed in Isreal! – last June in NYC. You can only read a few pages at a time. Dense, but chock full of violence, treachery, depravity, and other Roman goodness, written by one of the most fascinating characters in literature – a Jewish historian and commander of the Jewish army in Galilee who became a Roman citizen; upholder of Jewish tradition to the Romans, Roman apologist to the Jews, and a guy for whom the phrase “You can’t please everybody” apparently held no terror. I am reading his famous account preparatory to reading Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Josephus.
Emmy-winning writer (Star Trek: The Animated Series, Transformers, Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). I warped your childhood beyond all recognition.
