Song Of The Week: "The Randall Knife" - Guy Clark

Of all the spoken word songs Guy Clark has penned, the ode to his father, “The Randall Knife,” is the best one. More than simply a love letter to his deceased father, the song is a paean to connecting with a parent and a reflection on the way that we invest objects with emotion—in the case of Clark, his father’s Randall knife.

Those familiar with Clark’s catalogue will know that there are two versions of the song out there, the shuffling, almost smiling cut off of Clark’s 1983 album Better Days and then the somber on released 12 years later on Clark’s 1995 Dublin Blues. But while the first version averts the depth and sadness of the lyrics, the version on Dublin Blues demonstrates that sometimes songs require not an extra line or a variation on the melody, but some protracted reflection on their themes, in order to be complete.

Indeed, Clark’s legacy will reside in the Dublin Blues version of the song, a take that not only fully embraces the weird complexity of the knife, but allows us to sit closer to Clark in the aural space of the song. The notion of ‘stripping-down’ a song is one that I harp on fairly often in my posts on Pueblo Waltz and this one will be no exception; the removal of the heavier mix found on the Better Days version of the song results in an elegant slimming, not an ungainly weight change.

Crucially, this ‘strip-down’ allows us to focus on the lyrics, which feel slightly trodden upon by the arrangement in the first version. The second version allows the listener to fully embrace the weird complexity of the knife, perhaps the most famous lyrical symbol in Clark’s catalogue (slotting in right above “the cape” and the “coat from the cold”). What impresses me about Clark’s knife is its status as an object of memory. It is, as Clark frankly points out, not a tool—“almost cutting his [father’s] thumb off / when he took it for a tool”—but an object “made for darker things.”

Clark leaves those “darker things” to imagination, only offering in passing the fact that his father took the knife with him to fight during World War II. But whether the blade was ever used to kill —is somewhat of a moot point, because the knife sat in a drawer for most of Clark’s life, not being used at all, living as a knife vested with memory more generally, not the memory of blood. Besides his father’s almost thumb-removal, the only time Clark notes it having been used is when he takes it with him to a Boy Scout jamboree, breaking “half an inch off, trying to stick it in a tree” (if the “Jamboree” / “in a tree” rhyme sounds like mine, it isn’t—Clark owns that cleverness).

The emotional center of the knife’s journey—the memory stuck to it—is the forgiveness shown by Clark’s father when the Boy Scout admits to breaking the blade. His father shows no anger, putting it away in a desk drawer “without a hard word one.” Clark doesn’t on those five words in the first version quite the way the does in the second, punching each one home with a solemn weight behind it.

At the end of the song, Clark does not claim that he ‘understood’ his father, but rather that he “found a tear for [his] father’s life / and all that it stood for.” Looking at the lyrics, it’s hard to say whether or not Clark achieved and ‘understanding’ of his father in that moment—it’s even harder to say whether or not we achieve any kind of understanding. But I don’t think that we, as listeners, are expected to see into the character of Clark’s father. All we can do is recognize the way in which simple objects can mediate our relationships with others, particularly after death.

Dreaming Of Trains On Interstate 80

I’m sorry, July. I failed you. Five mediocre blog posts (and one great one by Kayla!) and it was my laziest month on record since…well, since May. As is always my excuse: I’ve been busy! Recently, I’ve had tons of things to do, including a fantastic camping trip to the far flat reaches of eastern Ohio. I wish I could say that I salvaged some artistic shreds of insight from that trip (as I did with Boston and my visit to the MFA [which I have yet to write about!]), but I didn’t run into any art museums on my journey along I-80.

You know—it was mostly rolling green hills and rain and semis with their running lights bristling like giant diesel-powered Christmas trees. The only thing noteworthy of Pueblo Waltz that occurred on the journey to and from was the lovely interlude of reading Denis Johnson’s all-too-brief novel(la) Train Dreams.

Recently announced as one of three novels on the shortlist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (there was no winner), I felt that I had to dig into Johnson’s short book because a) why not read something short-listed for the Pulitzer? and b) it clocked in at just over 100 sparsely-texted pages. As it turns out, there might have been nothing more appropriate than sitting down in a family diner in middle-of-nowhere, Pennsylvania to chow down on a combination of omelet, steak, and hash browns than Johnson’s cozy little book.

The novella focuses on the life of Robert Grainier, a laborer in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20^th-century. Part of me feels that explaining any of the details of Grainier’s hardscabble existence would be spoiling some of the joy of reading about them. The other joy of the novella is Johnson’s exacting language, which resides somewhere between the concision of Hemingway and the whip-tight prose of Annie Proulx.

Indeed, there is something of “Big Two-Hearted River”-era Nick Adams in Johnson’s Grainier, who is quiet and steadfast and concentrates mighty hard on the mundane tasks of day-by-day frontier life. Sprinkled within the chronicle of Grainier's tough life (logging, helping build railroads, feeding himself) there are places in the text where Johnson’s language crackles with descriptive brilliance. One of the most delightful passages is when  a middle-aged Grainier looks out across a sunset landscape in the Pacific Northwest:

“Beyond, he saw the Canadian Rockies still sunlit, snow-peaked, a hundred miles away, as if the earth were in the midst of its creation, the mountains taking their substance out of the clouds. He’d never seen so grand a prospect. The forests that filled his life were so thickly populous and so tall that generally they blocked him from seeing how far away the world was, but right now it seemed there were mountains enough for everybody to get his own” (Johnson 112).

In that way, Train Dreams has a literary firepower similar to another American western epic, Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It. Both books revel in the brazen storytelling of a simple tale and the intricate way that language can be molded around it. Highly recommended for a summer highway read. 

Guest Post: 3 Reasons "The Newsroom" Is Remarkably Problematic And 1 Reason I Can't Stop Watching (For Now)

Jeff Daniels plays a news anchor dissatisfied with the state of network news on The Newsroom; via salon.com

By Kayla Safran


As a huge fan of The West Wing, The Social Network, and other work by Sorkin, I was extremely excited for the premiere of the new HBO drama The Newsroom last month. The promise of a clean, flashy new television show with Sorkin’s whip-fast writing and an excellent cast was alone enough to shake my summer television blues. But, like many other fans and critics, I have found each episode increasingly painful to sit through, and I’ve come to a point where I feel I am only continuing to watch in order to collect more evidence about its issues.

Here are three of the problems that I have been able to sort out:

1. Politics

I knew going in that I would struggle with Sorkin’s politics, as I had occasionally with The West Wing, but I had the hope that because the story was centered around a news program there would be extra effort to present both sides of the issues with equal respect. The West Wing, I thought, had done a good job of presenting conservative characters and their viewpoints as being just as earnest and decent as the liberal ones. However, to my grand disappointment, The Newsroom has managed to be more liberal and more self-righteous about its liberalism than The West Wing ever was.

The perfect example of this is the lead character, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). He is rude and moralizing, a self-dubbed “civilizer,” and the show constantly applauds him for it! Although it’s been noted in passing dialogue that Will is a Republican, he hasn’t yet in five episodes presented a single conservative viewpoint. In fact, his rants about the economy, the Tea Party, and the Koch Brothers sound to me like those of your average left-wing progressive.

My problem here is not necessarily Sorkin presenting these viewpoints (although I strongly disagree with most of them), but rather him presenting them as the moderate and reasonable viewpoints of all educated people—it leaves the impression that anyone who thinks differently must be crazy, stupid, corrupt, or all of the above, which as a young conservative I find incredibly frustrating and even a bit offensive. Even if you agree with Sorkin’s political opinions, you can’t deny that the tone of his writing is incredibly closed-minded and its politics skewed, while simultaneously parading about being the exact opposite. I see this tendency among many liberals in real life, but never with such a lack of subtlety as on The Newsroom.

2. Women

Others have critiqued Sorkin in the past about his female characters and the gender stereotypes he perpetuates in his writing, but I think my friends may understand why a feminist-y critique coming from me suggests a really serious problem. I like that Sorkin has written smart and powerful female characters for this show. But on The Newsroom he gives all the women a characteristic that makes them look ridiculous next to the men: they are all absurdly socially incompetent.

For example, newly-promoted assistant producer Maggie (the awesome Alison Pill), is talented and hard-working, but also a bit lacking in confidence, which makes her a very believable character. But her love life—specifically the love triangle between her, her boyfriend Don (Thomas Sadoski) and the very handsome and goofy Jim (John Gallagher, Jr.)—turns her into an unprofessional, irrational mess. More than once during a production meeting Maggie blurts out inappropriate comments about Jim sleeping with her roommate for the whole room to hear. (Don’t even get me started on the roommate—I’ve never seen so many female stereotypes rolled up into one character without any intended irony.) In real life, Maggie’s behavior, I would hope, would get her fired, but on The Newsroom it just makes her a ‘typical woman.’

The show’s economics analyst Sloan (Olivia Munn) is also presented as socially incompetent—hyper-educated and beautiful, she amounts to what I imagine Aaron Sorkin would consider the perfect woman…with the exception of her one ‘gigantic flaw’—she can’t give good relationship advice, engage in chitchat, or generally function in a social setting. If, in the character of Sloan, Sorkin is trying to write a quirky character—like a Zooey Deschnael on New Girl, or an Ellen Page in Juno—it’s simply not good writing. But if my instincts are right, I think that Sorkin is revealing that he can’t handle or doesn’t like the idea of woman who is not ‘stupid’ in one way or another. In Sorkin-World (or at least The Newsroom), only men can be charming, good-looking, and intelligent at the same time.

3. Cable News

A main plot point, and frequent topic of lecture on the show, is the idea of “doing the news right.” McAvoy is first introduced as the “Jay Leno of news anchors,” who receives consistently good ratings because of his neutrality. He is quickly encouraged by a number of other characters, especially MacKenzie McHale, his ex-girlfriend/exec-producer and Charlie Skinner, his boss, to forget the ratings and speak his mind.  The only problem with this premise is that they’ve got the whole thing backwards—today’s network news industry is characterized by extreme bias receiving high ratings (hello FOX News, MSNBC) and the quiet, more neutral reporting falling behind (hi CNN). While I noticed this mix-up on my own, Joe Muto, writer for Slate and ex-FOX producer, writes on the subject more eloquently and has the insider knowledge to back it up. Check it out for yourself.

Additionally, I think that being bias and vitriolic (like The Newsroom’s McAvoy) only makes the news worse, not better. But maybe Aaron Sorkin and I simply disagree on the premise that news should simply tell the news, and not try to lecture the public on what and how to think…. I guess I’ll let that one go.

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As the season has progressed, the show has only gotten worse. Not just because of the three reasons above, but also because the narrative arcs are pretty boring and the characters insist on preaching at one another (and the viewer) rather than talking. Additionally, in terms of the plot, because all of the news stories are pulled out of last year’s headlines (rather than realistic but fictional stories like Sorkin used on The West Wing), nothing can really surprise us when all the major development are literally old news.

The one and only reason I won’t stop watching, at least for now, (besides wanting more reason to hate on it) is that I am a huge sucker for TV romances, and I won’t be satisfied until Maggie and Jim get together. They are young and good-looking and their relationship/flirtation is rather adorable. So, I’ll give you that one, Sorkin.

Aurora And What It Means For The Movies

Arguably, there are more important conversations to be had regarding the horrifying movie theater shootings that occurred in Aurora, CO early Friday morning—expression of condolences for family members of the deceased, gun safety, and how to deal with mentally ill criminals—but this entire situation can’t help but lead me to wonder: what does this mean for the movies?

Of course, for Christopher Nolan’s new film The Dark Knight Rises in particular, it means bad things. Very bad things. There’s no need to explain that blaming Nolan’s film for the violence is a stupid and incredibly narrow-minded way of dealing with this trauma; that much should be obvious to anyone reading this. But the blunt reality is that many people remain distraught with the film for quite some time and will likely not see it this weekend. In fact, one friend commented immediately after finding out, that he was going to wait “until that one comes out on DVD”…as if the shootings had forever altered the context of the film for him.

In terms of the movie world as whole, though, several commentators have already offered up the distressing insight that the movie-going experience will never be the same after this. While this strikes me as a bit of a blasé claim (what about the global movie-going experience?), I think that there’s some truth to this idea, at least in the context of the United States. Historically, if Aurora comes to represent the death of the traditional movie-going experience, then it will be seen as no more than the straw that broke the camel’s back.

After all, movie theater culture has been on the way out for a long time now. Stretching back to the introductions of the VHS in the late 1970s and the DVD in the mid 1990s and, finally, the digital age—with its swath of legal and illegal movie-watching services and options in the 21^st century—the traditional movie theater model has never faced so much competition. It’s a death that no coroner wants to call, but the film industry has been aware of it for quite some time. Ticket sales since 2002 have been on a decline despite an increase in U.S. population, while Netflix, for example, grew to almost 25 million subscribers by the end of 2011 after having only a paltry 670,000 subscribers in September 2002.

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What do we stand to lose from this transition? What do we stand to gain?

If we’re being positive about this shift in movie culture, then I’ll have to point out that a serious film buff gets more bang for his or her buck with a subscription based service like Netflix. Movie theaters—especially those showing 3-D films—more or less fleece their customers: when most showings are somewhere between $13 and $14 for a showing, a matinee showing for under $10 (or any price negotiated with the flick of a student ID card) feels like a godsend. In the long run, we save money by watching at home, not in the theater.

After the events of early Friday morning, it turns out that there’s an additional positive aspect: we’re safe. Movie theaters—unlike, say, train stations, tall buildings, airports, sports stadiums, concert halls, and any other large public-gathering place you can think of—have always been thought of in our culture as safe places. Which is, as lots of people have learned today, kind of an odd assumption. Why should a movie theater be any safer than a concert venue?

However, part of the allure of the movie theater since the inception of the industry has been that appeal to sanctuary. It would be a useless exercise trying to draw together examples from literature, music, and, obviously, film that has drawn on this idea of the movie theater as safe haven. How many protagonists have we witnessed seek shelter in those plush velvet seats? How many couples have we seen hunker down in the flickering darkness? There are simply too many iconic moments to bother cataloguing. You probably have a series of those scenes chasing through your mind right now.

If we’re looking to the negatives of this situation, I offer that it’s exactly that notion of the theater that we have to lose. There is no other ‘public’ experience that measures up to that of a movie theater. In my lifetime, not live theater nor musical concerts nor religious ceremonies—only movie theaters have had the ability to layer that fabric of non-awareness over my overactive consciousness. When we watch a film, we travel somewhere else. We exist outside of time. As Italo Calvino says (whom I could quote over and over again with regard to the cinema experience, thanks to his essay “A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography”), the movie theater “swallowed [him] up…in a suspension of time, or in the duration of an imaginary life, or in a leap backwards to centuries before” (Calvino 43). If there were anything in our society that could even loosely compete for the title of ‘time machine’ or ‘teleportation device,’ it would be the movie theater. Neither the television nor the computer, in my mind, come even close to offering the same opportunity as the movie theater.

For one, neither operates on the basis of a shared experience. It is the shared-ness that is crucial to film. Film toes a curious paradox in that way—it is both a wonderfully solitary and yet socially engaging experience. I am reminded of this whenever I go to see a film by myself: that moment when you laugh at a funny bit in a film and hear other people, perfect strangers, laughing at the same joke, that moment has a kind of magical resonance, an inexplicable kind of wonder.

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I offer this question to those who often watch television or films alone among the comforts of home: when was the last time you laughed out loud at a joke? when was the last time you gasped in amazement? or muttered wayward advice at a character? In my own experience, I find that my reactions are muted when I am alone with a film—the same level of engagement is simply absent. I would offer that, ironically, solitude in the film experience imposes a kind of self-consciousness. We know that we’re alone and we can’t help but wondering whom we would be reacting for if we laughed out loud. Simply put, it seems to me that there is less enjoyment in a solitary film experience than in a communal one. (The horror genre, I find myself admitting, is an exception to the rule. Horror films are as deliciously terrifying in the theater as they are alone in a one’s darkened [or lightened…] living room.)

So will we keep going to the movies? Or does Aurora represent the end of an era? Will the concept of the American movie theater recover from the wave of indirect bad press it’s on the verge of receiving? I can’t offer any answers. All I can say is that despite the recent tragedy and the security measures that will likely be implemented as a result, I will continue to go to the movies. Quite simply, there’s nothing else like it.