How To Frickin Make A Frickin Italian Frickin Dessert

I was so proud the first time I prepared homemade tiramisu that I almost ordered a chef’s cap. After a little bit of cursing, I learned how to fold and separate (um, dudes, that’s quite different from lift and separate, which I learned about long ago, if you’re following me here), I beat the hell out of everything, ladled it out perfectly, let it sit overnight, and our guests thought it was glorious. What a cook, what a man, what a plan, Panama.

What this dish looks like in a fancy restaurant. Mine looks like hell but tastes like heaven.

The very next day I opened our freshly-arrived copy of La Cucina Italiana, the bitchin Italian recipe mag, to find a feature on – no lie! – tiramisu! I started to read with great excitement until I completed the first frickin paragraph: tiramisu is such a SIMPLE RECIPE that it’s frequently the FIRST ONE Italian CHILDREN learn to prepare, so we’re going to tart up this INCREDIBLY EASY-TO-MAKE DISH with a few variations, thusly… All I could say was, vaffanculo, La Cucina Italiana! You just rained on my festa!

So now I’m sneered at by a magazine. Therefore, I will prove it wrong by showing you just how tough this dish is to make for normal guys. Behold my tiramisu recipe — with some genuine tips youse can use!

TIRAMISU

featuring Tom’s tips

3 large eggs, separated

¾ cup sugar

1 (8-oz) container marscapone

Pinch of salt

½ cup very cold heavy cream

2 cups brewed espresso or very strong brewed coffee [Tom: just triple the grounds], cooled to room temp

2 Tsp sweet Marsala wine

18 savoiardi (crisp Italian ladyfingers) [Tom: if the neighborhood grocery doesn’t have them, try Whole Foods or Fairway. If you can’t find them, forget this recipe and have some pudding for dessert instead]

¼ cup good bittersweet chocolate shavings (not unsweetened; shavings made with a vegetable peeler) or 2 Tsp unsweetened cocoa powder [Tom: hey. Kid. C'mere. Don't look around, you're fine. Let my boyz do the watchin. Now, kid. Do yourself a favor and just buy a honkin tin of Ghirardelli Sweet Ground Chocolate powder and fuggeddabouddit: the only person who will know the diff is your wife, who’ll be all upset because you didn’t grind any bittersweet shavings, but your diners will still call you a genius, and you’ll have enough of this stuff to avoid shaving for about five years’ worth of tiramisu. I'm just sayin, my brutha]

This is all the “shavin” you’ll ever need to do, stud hoss.

Beat together yolks and ½ cup sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed until thick and pale, about 2 minutes. Beat in marscapone until just combined.

With cleaned beaters, beat whites and salt in another bowl until whites just hold soft peaks. Add remaining ¼ cup sugar a little at a time, beating, then continue to beat until whites just hold stiff peaks. [Tom: if you do not know how to separate eggs, find out right now, or else have some ice cream tonight, because this recipe will not work otherwise, and by this point you will already have found out. If you still do not know, throw everything away, b/c you have already ruined your silly attempt at tiramisu.]

Beat cream in another bowl with cleaned beaters [Tom: no kidding: no water, not even a drop!] until it just holds soft peaks. Gently but thoroughly fold cream into marscapone mixture, then fold into whites. [Tom: get your wife to show you what “folding” food means.]

Stir together espresso and Marsala in a shallow bowl. Dip one ladyfinger in espresso mixture, soaking it for about 4 seconds on each side [Tom: much too long: these bad boys suck up the coffee instantly], and transfer to an 8-inch-square glass baking dish (1-quart capacity). Repeat with 8 more ladyfingers, trimming them [Tom: CRAMMING them! You're welcome] as needed to fit snugly into bottom of dish. Spread half of marscapone mixture evenly over ladyfingers. Make another layer in same manner with remaining ladyfingers and marscapone mixture. Refrigerate, covered, for at least 6 hours. [Tom: You don’t have to, but if you don’t let this sit overnite some ladyfinger ends may be crunchy…not what you want.]

Just before serving, sprinkle with chocolate. [Tom: HAAAAAAAH! That trusty Ghirardelli tin! Sit back and enjoy, and don’t forget to take yer bows!]

P.S. When the wife suggests spooning your tiramisu into a “trifle bowl,” either ask what in the heck that is, or else get her to haul it out her own dadburn self!

This, my little droogies, is a “trifle bowl.” Looks like more than a trifle to me. Go figure. Over and out.

Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

He’s the guy who made it possible for you, USA, to enjoy the movies not only as entertainment, but also as an art form. He broke through to the American public. He did it. Roger Ebert.

He wrenched the snooty cineaste consciousness away from the closest pop culture champion it had thus far been able to find, Pauline Kael, simply by appearing on tv — and for that he was pilloried his whole life. But by now this was no mere damp-eyed kid. By now, Roger Ebert knew, and communicated, as much about film as did Francois Truffaut and all his Cahiers du Cinema homm[i]es. Yes, Ebert “reviewed” movies on his show with Gene Siskel, another formidable mind, but you always understood they were (1) basically showing you the hits, and (2) even if there was something else behind, they didn’t have time to tell you about it at leisure. But they knew.

Earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, I ran into the same guy on line [not online!] for a few different screenings, and he always sat in the same spot at the Eccles Center, the high-school auditorium that’s the festival’s biggest single venue. I’d heard that Ebert had tended to do the same: was this his seat? Nope, the Sundance veteran said, and he pointed to another one that would have allowed Ebert to see the flick and then scoot away during the end-credit roll. Nobody, he said, NOBODY, allowed anyone else to bump Ebert from that particular seat for all those years. Good on you, Sundance.

I’m gonna let more erudite writers send Roger off, as you’ll see in the next week or two. But I wish I could have attended one of his master classes in which he went through a film shot by shot. I wish I could have been there at one of his forgotten-film festivals. Shit: I wish he was still alive. And that’s the whole deal.

4/5/13: Douglas Martin does a great job in the New York Times.

Churchy La Fame

On the heels of Janet Reitman’s splendid 2011 book INSIDE SCIENTOLOGY comes another superbly reported work on the world’s newest religion, GOING CLEAR by Lawrence Wright. This is the man who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning THE LOOMING TOWER, the single best source for anyone who wants to understand why 9/11 happened.

A staff writer for The New Yorker, Mr. Wright published “The Apostate,” a major piece in the magazine’s February 14, 2011 issue, on the Oscar-winning writer-director Paul Haggis, who left Scientology after 34 years of membership. The magazine is highly regarded for its meticulous fact-checking procedures, and the church is infamous for its extreme litigiousness. Thus, in September 2010, two Scientologists and their four attorneys met with a New Yorker team and brought with them “forty-eight three-ring binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet, to respond to the 971 questions the checkers had posed.” Mr. Wright looked at this material and realized he had just been handed the equivalent of years’ worth of research, albeit from the church’s point of view.

GOING CLEAR presents a different perspective than Ms. Reitman’s book, also the expansion of a magazine piece (hers in Rolling Stone), which benefited from impressive access inside the organization. Mr. Wright has three stories to tell: the history of Scientology, its attachment to Hollywood, and what he calls “the prison of belief,” which Paul Haggis finally escaped after spending more than half his life there. Like THE LOOMING TOWER, it attempts to answer very basic questions. How did this come to be? How can otherwise rational people believe in something so zealously? What is the attraction, and how is it preserved and nurtured?

The Commodore.

Scientology is of course the creation of pulp-magazine author L. Ron Hubbard. It evolved from “Dianetics,” “the modern science of mental health” whose auto-psychoanalytic properties intrigued people like legendary science fiction editor John W. Campbell (who, to be clear, also believed in mental telepathy and other psionic powers). A resulting work, DIANETICS, which Scientologists call “Book One,” was published in 1950 and became a mammoth bestselling sensation, enriching Hubbard beyond compare. But the scientific community was aghast, often vocally, which fanned in Hubbard a resentment of traditional psychiatry, quickly rising to hatred, that you can still see among the faithful when, say, Tom Cruise confronts Matt Lauer on the TODAY show.

Out of curiosity, I’ve tried to read DIANETICS more than once. I can’t get past thirty pages or so, because I always see before me a bit of verbal jujitsu that makes me recoil. As it begins, we are advised to have a reference book nearby, because we should never read past an unfamiliar word without immediately coming to understand it. That’s very good advice. Helpfully, DIANETICS provides footnoted definitions for potentially difficult words. But soon the footnotes become self-serving: for instance, we get only one particular connotation. And before long, Hubbard starts making up words. Now our trusty reference book is useless. All that’s left is DIANETICS.

An almost ridiculously prolific author with a galloping imagination, Hubbard sold fiction by the pound in the heyday of pulp magazines. He uses the same method for the official recounting of his own life, which is replete with verifiable falsehoods. So most non-Scientologists assume that the bizarre intergalactic cosmology which Hubbard concocted (it makes Philip K. Dick look like a Mennonite) was the cynical output of a space-opera aficionado. Certainly when Dianetics morphed into Scientology, and this “scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment” took on the trappings of a religion, great riches appeared which needed to be sheltered from taxation. Attaining higher and higher “OT” levels (Operating Thetan; don’t ask) costs hundreds of thousands of dollars: the next rung on the spiritual ladder is always just out of reach. Yet if “Commodore” Hubbard retreated to a sea-spanning yacht to avoid landlubbing lawmen, he still spent thousands of hours refining Scientological techniques, and Mr. Wright suggests this was unnecessary labor if the Founder only wanted to sit back and count the dough. It’s quite possible that Hubbard believed that with “auditing” and the “E-meter,” he was really onto something.

David Miscavige.

When Hubbard “dropped the body” on January 24, 1986, Scientology was at a crossroads. There were several senior members capable of moving the church ahead, but the most ambitious of all was David Miscavige, who used strategy, cunning and betrayal to seize power. As with Hubbard’s life and military record, nearly every unflattering assertion Mr. Wright makes about Miscavige is denied by the church in a flurry of footnotes, which are so numerous that it’s obvious lawyers placed them there: of course the church denies everything.

Miscavige is content to let others be the “face” of Scientology, perhaps still smarting from a disastrous 1992 appearance on NIGHTLINE that won host Ted Koppel an Emmy, and that Mr. Wright describes in excruciating detail. (Miscavige never went on television again after that public humiliation.) But, even more lavish and imperious than the Commodore, he has been instrumental in making real the Hubbard dictum that celebrity endorsements were the key to legitimizing Scientology. And the best place to find tender, self-doubting egos, hungry for any possible perceived advantage? Hollywood.

Miscavige and his colleagues cobbled together an A-list so broad that one aspect of their pitch actually became, look at the network you can tap! Though they’re not immune from financial solicitation, celebrities are treated quite differently from the rank and file, especially the pitiful souls working for subsistence in the central “Sea Org” under billion-year-contracts. The Scientology experience of such as Tom Cruise, John Travolta – and, once he made it in the movies, Paul Haggis – takes place in posh Celebrity Centres around the world. Most mundane members are cut off from outside friends and family, and if they “blow,” not only do they face huge unpaid bills for “auditing,” they’re also cut away from any family that remains within the church, inside the “prison of belief.”

Hubbard’s spacefaring story of the Galactic Confederation sounds like gibberish, and it may well be. But as Mr. Wright suggests, it takes a leap of, yes, faith to believe the underlying origin tales of any religion, from Joseph Smith and the angel Moroni to the Judeo-Christian oceangoing vessel that supposedly held two members of every single species on earth. Regarding the top of a faith-based hierarchy living in splendor and opulence, as did Hubbard and now Miscavige, look no further than the Catholic Church. As Mr. Wright notes, it doesn’t matter whether you think Scientology is a religion. The IRS does, and thus endeth the issue.

The LA headquarters on Sunset Strip.

Paul Haggis says he’s amazed that he bought in for so long. But nearly every Scientologist has had a very human reason to join the church, like most spiritual seekers in other faiths. (One common cause, as with other religions, is being born into it.) Most of Mr. Wright’s on-record sources are former members who “blew,” therefore they must be apostates and liars; this never-changing knee-jerk reaction by the church is what makes Scientology seem like the insular cult many believe it to be. But unlike most other faiths, the truth here is slippery, even on something as mundane as membership. Mr. Wright reports that the church claims 8 million members worldwide. They’d better be worldwide, because the Statistical Abstract of the United States estimates there are only 25,000 Americans who call themselves Scientologists, and as our very brave author wryly notes, “that’s less than half the number identifying themselves as Rastafarians.”

Callin’ Y’all’s Bluff

Remember when Texas Governor Rick (“Oops!”) Perry made some mild mutterings about secession? “There’s a lot of different scenarios,” he instructed a “Tea Party” rally in 2009. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot. When we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation…and one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”

English teachers can parse the preceding statement from here till summer break (history teachers can only roll their eyes), and they’re welcome to it, but Chuck Thompson went one step further. He took a thought experiment out to book length: what might happen if the Southern states actually did decide to leave the union and form their own country? His answer is the book’s title, BETTER OFF WITHOUT ‘EM: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession. Basically what he’s saying is, y’all go right ahead!

Now, let’s get one thing straight up top. I was born, raised and educated (“bred and buttered,” as they say in Ireland) below the Mason-Dixon Line. It’s true that I’m currently considered a “Yankee” because I live in New York now (the first rednecks I ever knowingly encountered were in my transplanted, thus newly acquired, 8^th-grade class in Jackson, Mississippi, where my faint Virginia accent pegged me to local ears as a “Yankee.” I had suddenly been thrust into such a strange clime that I couldn’t even summon the words to tell these budding young crackers that Richmond, Virginia was the frickin capital of the whole goddam Confederacy), but I was and remain proud of my Southern heritage, as I really hope you can possibly be of whatever yours is. (More industrious English teachers may start wasting time parsing that paragraph while I continue to talk to the class.)

Despite living close to half my life here in heathen New York City, I’m still a Southerner, and I’m fine with that. You can take the boy out of Dixie, but… Ask anybody. If you try to deny it, a psychological burr forms which can torment you for the rest of your life (Craig Claiborne may have suffered from this syndrome; Rex Reed appears now to be in its latter stages). Best to embrace it instead, like Willie Morris or Truman Capote or Tennessee – he’s really from Mississippi, chumps, just like Elvis! – Williams. Or me: I think the Deep South is fecund with terrific arts, eats, tunes, lore – it’s almost certainly the most colorful area of our country, and I’m one of its products, hoss. But now, having tried my best to establish my bona fides, I must end the apologia and turn to Chuck Thompson, who’s probably still unaware of the magnetic cultural force this region exerts above all others, even after visiting sporadically for some two years. See, he done stomped in and got all Godzilla on the South’s ass. But guess what, down-homies? He “might could” have a point. Two or three, in fact.

First, the ground rules. Mr. Thompson defines the seceders, the new Confederate States of America, as twelve contiguous states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Most of these were in the original Confederacy – you know, the one that defended against the War of Northern Aggression. He recognizes that his most glaring omission is Texas, also a Confederate state. (The Stars & Bars is one of the storied Six Flags Over Texas.) But it’s problematic. Anybody from the Deep South would tell you Texas is a Southern state. But Texans themselves might disagree: they’d say their state is sui generis, fiercely independent, not a joiner but a leader. For discussion purposes I’ll hand Mr. Thompson a Texas-less South, but that means it’s no fair when, on several occasions, he cites a stat and then defers: “it’s X in the South, Y if you count Texas.” You said we’re not counting Texas, OK? He will examine this new configuration through the prisms of religion, politics, race, college football, education and economics. This book is frequently funny, especially the chapter devoted to cheerfully bashing the NCAA’s perennially dominant Southeastern Conference, but there’s nothing frivolous about the reporting: every fact is exactingly sourced and footnoted so you can double-check if you’ve a mind to.

Mr. Thompson was raised by moderate Republicans (a vanishing strain which he personally admires) in Juneau, Alaska; his father was an official elector for Ronald Reagan in 1984. He’s perfectly aware that the South isn’t unique in any of its aspects: there are racists, religious fanatics and dipshit school boards everywhere. What’s special about the new CSA is the confluence of these cultural and spiritual traditions and beliefs, and the outsized influence this relatively sparsely-populated region wields over the rest of the country. (For example, nearly half of the obstructionist, gerrymandered House Republican majority, which retained that majority despite losing the popular House vote in 2012, hails from a former Confederate state.) But if the new CSA were ever to actually cut itself away, things would change in a…well, in a New York minute. Rick Perry aside (naw, just this once let’s include him), the very idea of Southern secession in the 21^st century is of course ridiculous, and by that I mean “worthy of ridicule.” So here it comes.

“We realize men have evil hearts and can’t be trusted,” the president of a secessionist group tells the author as a way of explaining the Southern worldview of, as he puts it, “fervent Christianity.” The twelve states in question are home to fully half the U.S.’s evangelicals and nearly every nationally prominent religious leader. Not all of them are white. A trip to the seven-acre New Birth Missionary Baptist Church complex in Lithonia, Georgia reveals demagoguery, money-grubbing and gay-bashing so intense that civil rights activist Julian Bond boycotted the 2006 funeral of Coretta Scott King because it was held there and presided over by notorious firebrand Bishop Eddie Long. In Mobile, Alabama, a spurious rumor that Muslims are about to build six mosques in town galvanizes the evangelical community. The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky just appears to be funny until Mr. Thompson discovers that it attracted 1.2 million visitors in its first three years (adult entry fee: $24.95), and founder Ken Ham received generous tax breaks to build a $150 million “replica” of Noah’s Ark. “This, apparently, is the kind of socialism Kentuckians can believe in,” the author writes. He seems to appreciate the difficulty of living a humble spiritual life in a secular society, but what worries him is “end-timers” who not only believe Armageddon is near but honestly can’t wait for it to happen. Southern secession would further distance such fingers from the nuclear button: Mr. Thompson observes that without the South, George W. Bush couldn’t have gotten anywhere near the White House. Yes, apocalyptophiles aren’t exclusive to the region, but why not improve the odds?

President Barack Hussein Obama – did you realize he’s black? – is many Southerners’ worst nightmare, upending generations of received wisdom. Amazingly, he has defied Mr. Thompson’s Seven Deadly Sins of Southern Politics: demagogic dishonesty, religious fanaticism, willful obstruction, disregard for own self-interest, corporate supplication, disproportionate influence, and military adventurism. This incendiary combination is what keeps the South in the pocket of the Republican Party, which has profited from pitting the region against the rest of the country. In a new CSA, Republicans would continue to rule supreme, but the makeup of the United States Congress — representing the rest of us — would be dramatically different. The fearless Mr. Thompson asks around to determine the redneckiest bar in deep-South Carolina, and dares to talk politics with the hulking biker types therein. (This place is so country that the house band has never heard of Marshall Tucker – and they’re from Spartanburg!) The resulting conversation makes no sense. Neither does the “pro-business” climate that has sucked auto-industry jobs from the industrial Northeast for decades, but at a fraction of the wages, and stripped of the union leverage that might possibly force any improvement. Manufacturers these days, claims Mr. Thompson, treat the South like a Third World country, so let it become one. Also puzzling is the bellicosity with which the region has always rattled military sabers, even at imaginary enemies. “Here’s a secret intel bulletin for all y’all who’ve never left Yoknapatawpha County and imagine the United States is constantly on the precipice of enemy invasion,” he writes. “The only way this country is ever going to surrender its liberty to a foreign power is if it keeps electing corrupt officials who auction it away to multinational corporations and overseas government interests in exactly the fashion that southern star chambers have been doing to their own people throughout their entire dyspeptic history.” Hyperbolic? Sure. But so is Bill O’Reilly, and y’all don’t seem to mind that.

Economics has always been a deep mystery. If Southerners hate big government, then why do they continue to take more away from the Feds than they give back, year after year after year? Get your government hands off my Medicare! was a hilarious placard at an early “Tea Party” rally, but too many Southerners simply don’t realize that they’re not entitled to their entitlements if their Republican puppet masters decide to snatch them away. Sorry, but if the South seceded, the rest of us would be getting a lot closer toward balancing our national books instead of subsidizing so many bloated, fried-butter-snarfing ER-bound deadbeats. (That sounded a tad harsh, even to myownself, but aren’t we all supposed to be acting like cold-hearted businesspeople?)

Now we come to education, the essential building block for everything else. Mr. Thompson doesn’t mean higher education here; there are many fine such institutions in the South (I was privileged enough to attend two of them, and consumed quality mind-food each time). Nope, we’re talking about basic education, the ultimate difference between sharecropping and shareholding. In the South, the notion of education for all has been under attack ever since the notorious flashpoint of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Following that judicial defeat, the region has steadfastly resisted progress (itself a loaded word among rabid Dixie conservatives) in learning. The first, doomed step was standing in the schoolhouse door. Then forced busing, with which earnest liberals actually twisted many public schools downward in the most egregious unintended consequence of the late 20^th century. (Southerners at the time were secretly delighted to watch “enlightened” Boston parents endure the same busing agonies and act identically. See, people are alike all over, they sneered, and this time they actually had a frickin point.) Finally came white flight, with those who could afford it abandoning public schools in favor of home-schooling or private “Christian academies” and other euphemisms for “you have to be white to attend.” Today’s Republican Party (most vocally in the South) wants to dismantle public education, or at least leave it in such a shambles that no thinking parents would dare entrust their kids to the system, and instead use public money on vouchers to help ferret the young’uns away. You can see this sentiment wafting through the knee-jerk opposition to President Obama’s proposal for universal pre-school: the early argument was that it’s “too expensive” (as if a permanently undereducated working class isn’t), and it might strengthen teachers’ unions by adding more public-school teachers to the mix (the candid and cynical underlying truth). Some of the most notorious foot-draggers are the Usual Suspects, such as Little Rock, Arkansas, which required President Eisenhower to send in the National Guard in 1957; today, it can’t find a school superintendent who is (a) capable and (b) willing to oppose a particularly boneheaded school board. Ten of the fifteen states with the lowest incidence of high-school graduation are in the new CSA, and remember, there are only twelve CSA states altogether (public schools are largely financed by property taxes, which are as low in the region as its test scores). Mr. Thompson watches in stupefaction as the Biloxi, Mississippi board closes the town’s best school, Nichols Elementary, which is 90% black, to “save $400,000 a year,” even though the district is running a $10 million surplus, and even as the Kellogg Foundation offers a $1.5 million grant to keep Nichols open for at least three years. Huh? Biloxi’s only African-American member of the City Council, which has no power over the school system, believes the board wanted “to make sure that white schools in this district never have to be embarrassed by being outperformed by a black school again.” Speculation, yes — but given that it wouldn’t have cost Biloxi a dime to respond to the public outcry and keep the school open, can you think of another reason? A new CSA would be able to hobble its future generations all it wants. It simply wouldn’t be our problem any more.

I may be doing this book a disservice by reciting a litany of criticism — it’s actually a major-league hoot, a great deal of fun. Mr. Thompson is as fair as he can possibly be, and never misses an opportunity to tell us that individually, his Southern hosts and interviewees tend to be nice, warm, gracious people. But then he turns “serious,” and messes with the real religion down home: college football. I’m kidding, though not about the importance of the college gridiron to the new CSA; it’s what basketball is to Indiana, what hockey is to Minnesota. But Mr. Thompson has a, well, ball taking down the mighty Southeastern Conference (he’s a University of Oregon grad). He claims the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), which has determined the best college football team since 1998, is stacked in favor of the SEC, and the reason is 15-year television contracts with ESPN and CBS which are worth a combined $3 billion. Yes, with a B. He believes SEC powerhouses regularly run up wins against weaker teams and otherwise game the system to make sure at least one of them is in contention every year, just as their tv partners want. I’m not the rabid fan Mr. Thompson is, but you be the judge — he seems to make sense to me. However, one thing is undeniable. If the CSA seceded, we would not only be able to establish an impartial way to test the SEC against other conferences, but the annual USA/CSA contest would also become more like a World Cup match in its ability to stir intense nationalistic emotion. The resulting fan frenzy would make the pros’ Super Bowl look like a grade-school kickball game.

This book makes you ponder. If the South seceded, we would sure miss some things about it, no doubt. Faulkner. Skynyrd. New Orleans. Bourbon. But we could still trade for bourbon, just as we currently do for every single dram of our Scotch whisky. We could still read our Faulkner and crank up our Skynyrd. And as for New Orleans, if this loony idea actually ever did come to pass, the CSA International Trade Commission would be down on its knees begging for tourists. So we’d get our beignets too. This thought experiment is a goof, but with some non-ironic points to make as well. A righteously indignant Southerner might reply, yeah, but I could write the same thing flipped around! You may be right. I invite you to do so, and I promise to review it here with cheerful equanimity.

My Sundance 2009

Another lightly dusted contemporary report written for my droogies at FWFR, which I’m also bringing over here for the record. From a four-year vantage point, I’m doing a little better than last year on the prognostication: I got Carey Mulligan right and pegged Zooey Deschanel’s cuteness, currently beamed to all over network tv. This is the last Sundance capsule I wrote before starting this here blog, wherefrom they now originate.

Some personal weather extremes were set. Warmest ever: it neared 40°F on Friday and actually rained, first time we ever saw that in Park City in January. Snowiest ever, too — on Saturday and Sunday, the heaviest snowfall we’d ever seen there: inch upon inch, which pleased the local ski industry. And, yeah, happiest ever: the ones we happened to draw were wonderful, and for the most part unusually uplifting. For the first time in six Sundance festivals, we didn’t see a single bad one. (Yes, lousy pictures do indeed make their way into Sundance — we have the optical scars to prove it.) So you’ll see a lot of four-star judgments in what follows.

Here is my early take on the fourteen we did catch, in the order in which we saw them.

AMREEKA**** A warm, delightful debut from Arab-American director Cherien Dabis. A Palestinian single mom struggling to raise her family in the West Bank unexpectedly receives a U.S. green card and relocates the family to Illinois — reluctantly, but mindful of the increased opportunities available to her teenage son. What ensues is by turns comic, infuriating, and heartbreaking. Nisreen Faour is splendid as the mother, but the real star is the writer-director, who has a long and fruitful career ahead.

THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE**** (U.S. Documentary Cinematography Award) I had no interest in fashion, Vogue or Anna Wintour before I saw this film, but that’s what good documentaries are for: to take you into new environments. We watch Wintour and her staff as they prepare the phone-book-sized September 2007 issue, the largest and most important on the annual Vogue calendar. The famously imperious editor in chief interacts with her staff and the mostly laughable denizens of haute couture, but underneath it all is a real tension between Wintour and her brilliant creative director, Grace Coddington, who oversees breathtaking photo spreads that the boss can decimate with the flick of a finger. Wintour even reveals some vulnerability, which will surprise anyone who takes her to be the inspiration for Meryl Streep’s character in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. Like me.

DARE**** A high-school romantic triangle with all kinds of combinations. Most interesting of all is that it takes three clichéd graduating-senior tropes — the good girl (Emmy Rossum); her puppy-dog, slightly nerdy friend (Ashley Springer); and the school’s Adonis (Zach Gilford) — and concentrates on each one in turn, time-shifting its ass off (this is gradually becoming a indieland cliché itself, as we discovered) and upending your preconceived notions of how they were formed and how they’re supposed to act. There is some serious subtexting going on here, and unlike most high-school movies, you’ll have no idea where it’s headed. Alan Cumming has a nice cameo as a returning school alumnus who made good on the stage and now instructs our starstruck acting-student ingénue in a way that can only be described as Muddled Method.

PETER AND VANDY*** Again with the time-shifting romance. But now with just two players. There are many lovely moments of tiny observed detail, but it was harder to fall in love with this movie because I didn’t fall in love with the couple. This is mean, but I whispered to Linda as the end credits rolled, “Glad to see Ethan and Uma working together again.” That’s how the two actors looked. It’s about how we can irritate each other if we get too close, but everybody knows that already. The jumping around in time kept us at an emotional distance which would have been fine if we’d had any empathy invested in the characters. Still: smart, real, occasionally funny, and these things are starting to look a lot more like real life than like simple frothy fables.

MOON**** (World Premiere) “Indie” science fiction. Sam Rockwell tends a mostly automated lunar station for the big company that provides Better Life Through Energy back on Earth. His three-year hitch is almost up, and the replacement and ferry home is on the way. A major plot surprise ends Act One, changing everything for the rest of the picture and making one particular role a tour de force. (At the Q&A, director Duncan Jones said he wouldn’t mind if people knew about it beforehand, and it may well be revealed in the forthcoming trailer, but you won’t get it out of me!) Some people are going to find this movie slow; it’s a chamber piece a la SOLARIS or SUNSHINE, very human-oriented. (If you hated either of those, you should probably avoid this one.) Visual effects are perfectly workable, though they might feel cheesy to anyone expecting a $100MM popcorn film. It’s not that at all. But it does tackle provocative Clarkeian/Dickian subject matter, and I liked it very much. Trudie Styler is one of the producers; she and her husband, one Mr. Sumner, were there are the preem.

EARTH DAYS**** (World Premiere, Festival Closing Film) A surehanded, inspiring documentary by Robert Stone on the history of the environmental movement. Using archival footage and new interviews with notables from Stewart Brand to Rusty Schweickart to Pete McCloskey, this piece cogently explains why, when and how, beginning long before the first Earth Day in 1970. The notion of ecology as a vital issue worthy of activism has its roots in Sixties counterculture, but as EARTH DAYS shows, it has since expanded far beyond that, and in most circles (George W. Bush cronies aside) has become given wisdom. Informative, provocative, and quite beautiful.

AN EDUCATION***** (World Dramatic Audience Award, World Cinematography Award) A luscious story (screenplay by Nick Hornby) set in London just before the Beatles-led youthquake. A brilliant 16-year-old schoolgirl who longs to study at Oxford (played to perfection by 22-year-old Carey Mulligan, who is going to receive huge attention for this movie) is swept off her feet by a rakish older man (Peter Sarsgaard) who even manages to captivate her stuffy, Oxford-obsessed father (an hilarious Alfred Molina). His type of education, though, is taught in restaurants, racetracks, and tony auction houses; and, best of all for the dazzled maiden, on the Continent. Will all this help or hinder her? Watch and see. Mulligan’s physical transformation from gangly coed to stunning sophisticate is an absolute wonder, and there isn’t so much as a note missed by director Lone Scherfig.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER***** The smartest, funniest, best-made thing I saw at the festival; I predict major commercial success when it’s released in the States on July 24. Yet another boy/girl time-shifter, but this one gets it right. Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a bored copywriter for a greeting card company, meets Summer (Zooey Deschanel) when she lands a job as his boss’s assistant. Their time together is real and fantastic, somber and farcical, knowing and clueless, exactly like real life, of which this flick will remind you frequently. The impressively savvy script feels wholly original, like the next step in romantic screen stories; it’s so confident that it’s able to make fun of movie clichés without seeming unwelcome. The two stars are beyond delightful: one demonstrates marvelous verbal and physical clowning that seems to come out of nowhere, the other finds dozens of little ways to let the camera show the girl of anybody’s dreams. You love them both, as characters and as performers. I’ll leave the film’s many surprises for you to discover, but just remember this: when the soundtrack strikes up a familiar Hall & Oates tune from the Seventies, you’re about to see the funniest four minutes of film in a very long time.

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY*** Rupert Isaacson is a British journalist and human-rights activist. His wife Kristin is a psychology professor from California. They seemed to have everything, especially when they produced a beautiful child, Rowan, in 2001. But three years later, their worst fears were realized when Rowan was diagnosed with autism. Having tried everything else to help him, they seized upon Rowan’s strange, deep affinity for horses, and set off on a horseback journey through Mongolia to meet with the world’s most powerful shamans. As we follow along, we get a very personal look at life with autism: inconsolable hours-long tantrums, all-too-brief moments of clarity and normalcy, and finally the hoodoo that the family can’t quite accept, only observe. Harrowing and thought-provoking at once.

MARY AND MAX***** (Festival Opening Film) The program calls the technique “claymation,” but the stop-motion images look shiny and pristine as they roll out the fable of a morose young Australian girl and her unlikely pen-pal, a lonely Asperger’s sufferer from New York City. The characters are as fancifully designed as anything from Aardman, but the sheer humanity of the imaginative story allows you to make that all-important jump: at some point — I don’t know exactly where it will arrive for you — they cease being animated characters and become just characters. The production is painstaking: there isn’t an instant of CGI, not even when raindrops are required. New York is presented as a dingy gray mass, enlightened only by the bits of color sent from Down Under. How does Pixar keep it up? Not with technology. Aussie director Adam Elliott and crew also know the answer: with story, story, story.

THE MAID (LA NANA)**** (World Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, Special Jury Prize For Acting—Catalina Saavedra) A longtime live-in maid for a Chilean family is getting stressed and unable to maintain the kind of service she’s given in the past, but is pathologically autocratic and unwilling to cede one inch of her turf to the helpers the family tries to provide for her. As the film begins, with a birthday party for the maid, we’re conditioned by years of movies to expect abuse from the family and sympathy for the downtrodden domestic — but in this film, it’s just the opposite. The family is warm and loving: it’s the maid who’s the basket case. Saavedra is well-known as a comedienne in her native Chile, but here plays straight, even a bit manic; the unsympathetic role will be exciting and refreshing for her many fans.

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC**** (U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize) Josh Harris is, as the marketing for this film asserts, the Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of. Way back when, at his startup Jupiter Communications, he helped introduce chat-rooms, some of them naughty, to Prodigy. He was worth $100 million at one point, but spent untold sums on a piece of performance art, “Quiet,” in which 100 artists lived in pods under 24-hour surveillance (it lasted 30 days until it was busted by FEMA as a millennial cult); and on an experiment in which he paid his girlfriend to live with him under the unremitting scrutiny of 32 motion-controlled cameras that even followed them into the bathroom. A visionary? Harris pegged Internet interaction years ago, pointing directly to our slow divestiture of privacy to outfits like Flickr and Facebook. Nuts? That too. This guy’s curse is that he consistently gets it right, but at least five years too soon. The pacing and editing are as frenetic as the subject, and nearly all of this — including both performance art projects, which are extensively depicted — was news to me.

THE COVE***** (U.S. Documentary Audience Award) Ric O’Barry trained Flipper — at least, the five dolphins who played him on the popular TV series. But as he got to better know these friendly, intelligent creatures, he became struck with remorse: taking them out of their natural habitat, even for Sea-World-like purposes, was clearly and demonstrably inhumane. Furthermore, fishermen in the Japanese town of Taiji, the world’s largest supplier of show dolphins, select for training only the finest specimens, worth as much as six figures each. The rest are herded by sound into a secret cove where hundreds per day are brutally slaughtered for meat – which nobody wants, since it turns out to be black with mercury! Following O’Barry (a pariah in Taiji who can only go there in disguise) and his singular passion, Louie Psihoyos and his crew intend to break Taiji’s strict prohibition against photography and trespassing and reveal its shame to the world with technology (some of it coming from similarly outraged ILM visual effects veterans) and sheer courage. This documentary is partly a polemic, partly a caper film, and partly an appeal to our most basic ideas of right and wrong. The climactic scene is as cathartic as anything I’ve ever seen.

PUSH: BASED ON THE NOVEL BY SAPPHIRE*** (U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Dramatic Audience Award, Special Jury Prize for Acting—Mo’Nique) By far the closest to a “typical Sundance film” of all we saw, and the achiever of an unprecedented (at least in our experience) feat: it won both the jury’s and the audience’s vote as best U.S. dramatic film. Precious, an obese New York high-schooler who has basically vanished inside the educational system, struggles with an horrific home life while she tries to learn to read to better herself. She is carrying her second child — both of them by her father. Her mother is a foul-mouthed harridan who abases her every day. (Mo’Nique, who plays this part, won a well-deserved special jury prize for acting.) It’s a raw, searing study by Lee Daniels which feels perfectly authentic; my caveat is that I really wasn’t in the mood to have my face rubbed in grit, and I can’t be sure when I will be again, and I don’t think many others can either. One very fine performer in this superbly acted film looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her. The credits rolled by: Mariah Carey! (2013 edit: This film was released in the U.S. under the title PRECIOUS.)

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My Sundance 2008

Here’s a lightly edited report on the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, our fifth, that I wrote for my friends at the Four Word Film Review and discovered in their archives. Thought I’d bring it over here for the record. It’s sometimes embarrassing to read my contemporary gut-fired opinions from five years ago. I was particularly wrong about HAMLET 2, which was such a commercial bomb that it probably ended the era of eight-figure Sundance deals. I don’t care: I have a DVD and it’s still funny as hell.

General comments: (1) It’s getting more and more crowded every year. People with tickets in their hands were turned away at some of the smaller venues, and in at least one case, people with passes. (We buy Awards Weekend passes, which let us into anything we want on the final weekend, but not if we’re tardy, which we never were. You have to plan your viewing geographically. Park City is a small ski resort, but during the festival a tight turnaround can sometimes be challenging.) (2) It’s getting more and more commercial every year. There are more premieres out of competition, which seem to be sponsored by studios. Just because a film screens at Sundance doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an indie, unlike in the past. All you can count on is that it’s never before appeared at any other festival. (3) There were more smiles than usual. The stereotypical Sundance movie is a dysfunctional group of humans slogging their way through whatever vicissitudes that bastard Life has handed them. Most families in the movies I saw were sure as hell dysfunctional, but unusually frequent this year was the LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE kind.

Here’s my early take, in the order in which I saw them:

THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH*** Loose adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel, close enough to attract his fans but hacked enough to piss them off. A friend/lover triangle in 1980s PA, with gangsters. Peter Sarsgaard masticates what little scenery there is, Nick Nolte provides his usual cragginess. Everything is perfectly professional but nothing soars like Chabon’s prose.

BLUE EYELIDS**** A quiet, engaging Mexican film about solitude and loneliness. A factory worker wins an all-expenses-paid vacation for two from her employer, but this wallflower (the latest example of a beautiful woman acting “plain,” more often conjured by Hollywood) has nobody to invite. She falls into a painfully awkward relationship with a similarly shy, awkward man. Do they want to be in love, or are they just striking out against their strangely mirrored lives of crushing ennui? Superb performances.

BALLAST** (Directing Award, U.S. Dramatic) I’m in the critical minority on this one: it won the juried dramatic Directing Award and one of our hosts ran into Michael Phillips (he frequently sits in with Richard Roeper), who effused about it. Variety raved, but I was still underimpressed. It’s a stark tale set in the Mississippi Delta which begins with a suicide(!), then follows a hardscrabble extended family as it tries to survive. The relationships reveal themselves only gradually. The director told us he wanted to depict the loneliness and depression of the Delta in winter, and he succeeded. I believe the jury honored him for directing a bunch of film neophytes (only one cast member had ever been in a movie before). But I found the pace glacial, and even the shining performance of newcomer Tarra Riggs couldn’t save it for me. This is a “festival film”; it has no commercial future whatsoever.

CHOKE**** Chuck (FIGHT CLUB) Palahniuk’s novel gets a jazzy, upbeat treatment from actor-turned-director/screenwriter Clark Gregg. The fabulous Sam Rockwell is a sexaholic, con man, and “historical interpreter” at a desultory Colonial theme park. His specialty is choking in tony restaurants so his carefully scouted wealthy marks can perform the Heimlich maneuver, and usually give him money out of horrified concern for his welfare. His institutionalized mother is sliding into dementia, his 12-step sex-addict group isn’t helping, and his tight-assed theme park supervisor (a riotous turn by the director) is constantly on his case. Rockwell is able to balance this script’s blend of dark, dark comedy and genuinely touching drama; he makes it look effortless. I think there’s too much sex in it for a wide audience’s taste, but I liked it very much.

DOWNLOADING NANCY* A vile little piece of pornography starring Maria Bello in the kind of performance they tend to call “courageous.” She’s so saddened and depressed that she regularly mutilates herself. One day she finds a guy on the Internet (Jason Patric, in another “brave” performance) who’s willing to play her games and even go farther. Rufus Sewell is her husband, who pays attention to her a little too late. Stay far away from this turkey unless you’re a masochist yourself.

UP THE YANGTZE***** As China completes the massive Three Gorges Dam, the rising Yangtze River is forcing the relocation of anywhere from 1 million to 4 million people. This remarkable documentary gives human faces to that cultural change. An illiterate farmer’s family lives from day to day in a crumbling riverside shack. His eldest daughter, who wants to continue her education, is forced instead to work on a luxury cruise ship that takes foreign tourists up the river for one last look. She’s treated well, and her family needs the money, but as we watch her gradual Westernization, we sense that something’s wrong, that more than just land is being flooded over. A beautiful job, aided by the gorgeous Chinese scenery.

CSNY DÉJÀ VU**** You sit down expecting a concert film, but it’s not that at all. This movie documents Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 2006 Freedom of Speech tour and, more importantly, the reaction to it. The boys do several of their hits (and make cheerful fun of their age and weight), but the bulk of the show is songs taken from Young’s incendiary LIVING WITH WAR album. The dice are definitely loaded in the band’s favor, but they do take pains to present another side too, most notably interviewing angry patrons in Atlanta who walked out of the show when CSNY struck up “Let’s Impeach the President.” What really grips you is how little has changed since these same musicians were protesting the war in Vietnam. Even the lyrics to Stills’ classic “For What It’s Worth” apply perfectly today; think about it. You hear a lot of music, but never an entire song: it’s a docu, not a music flick.

HAMLET 2***** My favorite film of the festival. An absolute beauty. It sold to Focus Features for a hefty $10 million. Also notable is that they told us it was a working cut slapped together just for the festival, but it looked plenty tight to me: it ran 1:32. It was added so late that it didn’t even make the advance catalog: we all found out about it when we got there. Steve Coogan is a failed actor turned high-school drama teacher who gets a great idea, expressed in the film’s title, but it’ll be a musical. I won’t say much more, except: 1) I predict that, unlike some recent Sundance darlings, this film will indeed find a wide audience, and if it does, Coogan finally becomes a US household name. 2) Since it’s a parody of the “inspirational teacher” genre, several of whose members are actually title-checked in the movie, this one, if successful, may do us the service of ending that little tributary, at least for now. 3) Within this film is the most hilarious musical number I have ever seen in a movie, and that includes “Springtime For Hitler.” I won’t give you the song title so as to avoid the Spoiler Police, but I guarantee it alone will make you laugh, and make you want to see this pants-wettingly funny flick.

TRIAGE*** Dr. James Orbinski, former president of Doctors Without Borders and a 1999 Nobel Prize recipient on behalf of the organization, travels back to Africa 15 years after he worked in incredibly dangerous conditions in Somalia and Rwanda, during civil war and genocide. The unspeakable things this man has seen defy description, but he’s trying to write a book about his experiences as he greets old friends and visits sites where horrors beyond belief were visited on human beings. Orbinski is personally reserved but inwardly angry as he tries to take the word “humanitarian” back from governments who have used it for their own purposes.

BOTTLE SHOCK**** A dramatization of events leading up to the Great Tasting of 1976, in which California wines competed against French vintages. We visit Bill Pullman’s Napa Valley winery, where he’s trying to craft the perfect Chardonnay with the help of his slacker son. A Paris wine-shop owner named Stephen Spurrier, played to snobby perfection by Alan Rickman, is setting up the tasting and has come to check out California. It’s kind of a Hollywood-type story, except most of it actually happened: not as hip as SIDEWAYS, but just as good a time for wine or Rickman lovers (the wordless scene in which he takes his first taste of guacamole is gorgeous). A promising subplot is casually tossed away in what I thought was a poor patch of screenwriting (or editing, to be fair), so there goes a star. Oddly, there were two movies in development about Spurrier’s event; this one did not have his cooperation, and rumor has it that he cares for neither his characterization nor Rickman’s realization of it.

HENRY POOLE IS HERE** Something to do with the healing power of faith or something. Henry Poole (Luke Wilson) buys a suburban house but is strangely uninterested in the price or its upkeep; he exists on alcohol in the unfurnished place and shuns all human contact. But there’s a cute little girl next door, and a neighbor who thinks she sees the face of Jesus in a water stain on the side of the house. We gradually learn what’s wrong with Henry, the little girl, and the growing group of churchgoers who come to worship at the “shrine.” The story is preposterous. This is a quiet piece by Mark Pellington, who normally comes at you with thrillers like ARLINGTON ROAD, but it just didn’t get to me. Innocuous enough, but save your money.

THE KING OF PING PONG**** (World Dramatic Award) Oddball but strongly likable story of a rotund Swedish lad whose one talent is ping pong, which he “coaches” at the local community center. He lives with his younger brother and their mother, and goes through his sad-sack existence with a blank face that actually grows more and more amusing as the movie proceeds. On spring break from school (it’s still snowy as hell in Sweden), he goes ice fishing, learns how to drive, discovers a shocking fact about his family, and makes the acquaintance of a mousy little co-ed whose hobby is making pencil drawings of muscular, well-endowed men. I loved meeting the characters, getting a little taste of their culture, and wondering how the tremendous juggling act of the story could ever be resolved. Nice job.

TROUBLE THE WATER**** (U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize) Hurricane Katrina on home video. Two filmmakers went to New Orleans to document returning servicemen whose homes had been struck, and serendipitously met Kimberly and Scott Rivers. Kim had documented the coming storm and the havoc itself on a camcorder (you’ve never seen this footage before), including scenes of great bravery and squalid conditions in their Ninth Ward house. The filmmaking partners then followed Kim and Scott and their family and friends in the long aftermath, including a relocation to Memphis and, finally, back home again. But this is not a pity party: it’s a story of resilience, determination, and strength. Every once in a while, but not much, we cut to a TV screen showing Bush or Michael Brown’s grinning faces to remind us of the idiots who were in charge, but this is not a finger-pointing polemic either. Kim wants to be a rapper, and actually made one defiant record. She performed it to the camera, and when she was through, the Sundance audience broke out into applause. Not just for the song, but for this tough woman which the mightiest storm was unable to defeat.

FROZEN RIVER***** (U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize) Christmas, rural upstate New York, near the Mohawk reservation. A mother struggles to raise her two sons; her husband has gambled away their savings and is gone. Chasing him, she encounters a Mohawk woman who forces her to drive an illegal alien smuggling run across the frozen St. Lawrence River. It turns out to be easy money. I will stop right there with the plot. This one has characters turning ways you won’t anticipate; brilliant performances by the two leads, Melissa Leo and Misty Upham; and a sense of place that is almost palpable. A grand achievement by writer/director Courtney Hunt, who developed this feature from a short she screened at Sundance a few years ago. I’m glad I didn’t see it, because it would have spoiled a delicious bit of tension at one point. This movie was produced for under $1MM.

THE WACKNESS**** (U.S. Dramatic Audience Award) Here’s one I thought I would hate, and was I wrong. All I’d heard was that Mary-Kate Olsen plays tonsil hockey with Ben Kingsley (and she does, bucko!). But that’s only :00:30 out of 1:50. It’s New York, 1994, and we’re hangin’ with some homies for the summer after they’ve graduated high school. But before you can say, “I don’t want to hang with these people,” the story widens. College-bound Josh Peck earns money selling pot from a pushcart. Kingsley is his shrink – who takes his payment in dope. He’s a Sixties holdout, you see. It’s basically a buddy movie between these two people. BEN KINGSLEY IS HILARIOUS THROUGHOUT, WHETHER HE’S SPEAKING OR NOT. Has he ever done broad comedy before? I won’t go into all the adventures these guys have, only note that Famke Janssen manages to turn herself into somebody you wouldn’t want to be married to!

And, like the sheriff in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, “Then I woke up.”

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Adverteasing

From THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT to MAD MEN – heck, from Paul Revere’s ride – there has always seemed to be a little cultural curiosity about the mysterious world of advertising and public relations, where sneaky Svengalis manipulate the masses into unnatural economic behavior. Seriously: DORITOS® DINAMITA® Nacho Picoso Rolled Flavored Tortilla Chips? Many writers have taken a shot at the profession, but it took a talented rookie to hit a homer. (Hey: mismatched metaphors! That’s right, Clio jury, I’m bad.)

John Kenney’s first novel, TRUTH IN ADVERTISING, delivers on each and every word of its title. It was written by a man who has spent seventeen years as an advertising copywriter. I’m simpatico, because I did fourteen, mostly at Southern regional shops, with the better part of a year in New York at an “agency” with only one client, Warner Books; in gangster-movie terms, we were the marketing equivalent of Tom Hagen. The first remarkable thing about Mr. Kenney’s book is how unchanged day-to-day ad-life became in the ensuing quarter century. (I took a detour into books proper, but yes, I remembair it well.) I plied my trade in the days before every art director’s work was digital. In olden times men were men, and wielded physical X-Acto® blades against tiny slips of paper to create pasted-up boards called “mechanicals.” Now your Mac does this for you, and every “mechanical” is perfect. But ADs still grumble. It’s in their DNA.

There’s a great deal of insecurity, even self-loathing, among artsy advertising types. It’s the only industry where people have to reassure themselves that they’re “creative” by using that word as a noun (referring both to the people involved and to the stuff they spit out). There are almost as many different awards presentations as in that other supernarcissistic racket, the movies. We’re makin art here, right? They give us trophies at Cannes, dammit! The answer, as most if not all eventually come to realize, is no, you’re not. You’re only making commerce appear to be as palatable as you possibly can. It may take a spoonful of sugar, but the frickin medicine still has to go down by any means necessary. When I was in the game I always tried my best, but I used to ground myself by remembering that advertising is nothing more than “s—t sculpture.” Yes, it can be made to look quite pretty, but no matter how much you preen and honk, you just can’t escape your medium. Genuine art comes from somewhere else, an ineffable place that you can no longer reach by responding to a mandate dictated by a client. The last folks who managed that lived in the Renaissance or went for Baroque, and even they felt free to ignore idiotic royal ruminations. Show me one single adman who can do the same.

I assumed this book would be an ironic gagfest, since Mr. Kenney has been slaying me for nearly fifteen years on the “Shouts and Murmurs” page of The New Yorker. He is smart and funny as expected, but though TRUTH IN ADVERTISING is indeed frequently hilarious (our pixieish New Yorker contributor is definitely driving the car), at its heart is a poignant, even wrenching tale of human passion, dysfunction and redemption. Hope I didn’t just scare you off. LAFFS GALORE TOO!

Mr. Kenney’s alter ego and narrator, Fin Dolan, is a fortyish veteran copywriter currently attached to a big diaper account, Snugglies. We open at a commercial shoot starring Gwyneth Paltrow which reveals the innate absurdity of throwing such herculean effort into thirty screen seconds, then we take a wildly funny and knowing tour of Fin’s agency and meet the quietly desperate people who work there – as I said, there’s been no evolution in 25 years, people-wise. (Hip ad folk used that “-wise” formulation in the MAD MEN era; listen to the Robert Webber character in 12 ANGRY MEN for genuine historic adspeak.) It develops that Snugglies wants to play in the big leagues and put together a spot for the quickly approaching Super Bowl; the broadcast time alone will cost $3.2 million. It’s the instant job of Fin’s team to come up with an idea deserving of this fortune, convince the client of same, then physically produce the commercial. The most promising thing everybody can summon is a tribute to Ridley Scott’s legendary Apple Macintosh commercial, which aired only once, on Super Sunday 1984. Yes, it’ll be the famous Orwellian Mac spot, only with babies and diapers. And we’re off.

Mr. Kenney has many surprises in store, for this advertising thread is only the foreground noise affecting a beautifully observed character, a man swimming in frustration and pain at a critical turning point in his life. We already know that Fin was engaged less than a year ago and that the wedding was called off, but that’s only part of what’s on his mind. The reader will discover the details, and all the rest of it, at Mr. Kenney’s pace, which is generally brisk but extends at the moments when it needs to. I’d wager the author is a better copywriter than his leading man (who allows that some ad writers, a few, are very good), but he is so convincing inside Fin’s head that I’d be surprised if at least some aspects of his personality weren’t autobiographical. This is the TRUTH part referenced in the title.

The pressure on Fin is unrelenting, but the Snugglies spot is only one aspect of it. Mr. Kenney draws Fin so artfully that you will learn some things about him even before he does. And there is wisdom and serious emotion from even the most cartoonish characters he encounters in his poopy-pants odyssey – Mr. Kenney doesn’t miss any opportunity for clowning, but a moment later he will startle you by rotating the jewel slightly and asking you to consider a different facet. From my beloved New Yorker wiseacre, this I didn’t expect.

I laughed in recognition, even across a generational chasm, and Mr. Kenney’s work earns my heartiest recommendation to all my friends from the adbiz. But what really swept me away were the portions of this lovely novel that have nothing whatsoever to do with advertising. That wasn’t the ticket I bought. But I wound up turning a profit anyhow.