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Second, though, and no less newsworthy: McNally Editions have their handsome new edition of Gavin Lambert’s great, great The Goodby People out now, with an introduction by yours truly. I’ve been foisting this book on folks quite a bit recently, but now that it’s out in its ideal form (and with a cover I think is superior to the previous, swimming pool design—is it mandated somewhere that books about LA should feature swimming pools on the cover?) I’m happy to do my foisting here.

It will probably sound hyperbolic when I say that of the three great books that anatomize the mood and manners of Los Angeles circa 1969/70 specifically—Play It as It Lays and Slow Days, Fast Company are the other two—I reckon Lambert’s is the best, but nevertheless I do. Something about the juxtaposition between Lambert’s nameless, Henry James-like narrator—a weary and resigned figure filled with empathy and irony—and the Manson-haunted void he describes really sends me. The extreme transience of the city’s residents, and their struggle to find the world beyond themselves real, is Lambert’s subject, and man, he makes the most of it.

Ten years ago, when I first lived in California, I worked at a movie studio that was like a great neglected estate. Its back lot jumbled up places, continents and centuries under the sky. A walk through its surprises and transitions reminded me of many human lives I knew. Later the studio sold much of its land and the bulldozers came, pulverizing the Last Chance Saloon, the entrance to a Chinese temple, the facade of a turn-of-the-century mansion. A desert appeared. Then boxes of metal and glass soared upward, above patios with relentless automated fountains. Office blocks, stores, restaurants and a hotel replaced that mythical country where Tyrone Power sought the Answer in the East, and Love was a Many-Splendored Things, and Gene Tierney, in a gingerbread house, was forever a Prisoner of it.

Now most of this has gone. When you drive past the lost world, along Santa Monica Boulevard toward the ocean, you see only the fringes of another ordinary, anonymous suburb. The tall new buildings on one side, with a few giant billboards recommending Scotch and new flights to Hawaii, and on the other the grounds of a country club. Still, if you knew its past, there’s a ghostliness behind the lack of charm.

Of course, the world he describes here—Century City, freshly-minted on what had been a portion of the 20th Century Fox lot—is itself a “lost world” by now. What I wouldn’t give for those Don Draper-coded billboards for Scotch and flights to Hawaii. But Lambert’s book is less voluptuous than Babitz’s, and less stringent than Didion’s, finding, instead, a kind of midpoint between the two postures. It’s tremendous, and makes for ideal spring reading:

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I’ll be back with more once my novel draft is done and dusted, but will leave this image of the walk I’m still taking every day, at least in my mind, when I knock off writing. May your paths all be comparably peaceful—

It does feel good to bid farewell to one creative phase and enter another, though. Having spent a decade writing a triptych (not initially planned as such, but the books do work in concert) about the motion picture industry, it’s nice to leave that world behind. One never knows, of course, but it seems unlikely I’ll be writing about that world again soon (or, indeed, possibly ever), at least not at length. THE GOLDEN HOUR paperback is out in a few weeks, so if you missed it in hardback you’ll have a more affordable shot. My own copies just landed, and I gotta say they look great. Go ahead and hit this button here. You’ll be glad you did, I promise.

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By way of a valediction for writing about film, I figured I’d reproduce an essay here that appeared a few months back in a wonderful magazine called The Panafold, which is mostly about art and architecture, and to which you should most definitely subscribe. My own piece was about the poetics of space in Michael Mann’s Heat, a film to which I had a weirdly personal relationship when it came out in ‘95, as I happened to be working for one of the film’s principals at the time. The essay, I suppose, is as much about various forms of ambivalence as it is about Heat itself, but I was glad to get to write it, and am happy to reprint it below. Not as happy as I am when I’m writing, however. For me, as for Tom Sizemore, the action is the juice.

In a movie theater in the East Village, I sank down in my seat and wept. This was thirty years ago. The film I was watching wasn’t particularly sad. It involved men and women—mostly, almost entirely, men—with guns: cops and robbers. One cop, with a posse of textureless henchmen, and a small gang of robbers. Heat was the name of this movie. If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the last decade, even if you’ve never seen the film, you’ve likely internalized some of its dialogue in the form of memes: “She’s got a GREAT ASS!” “For me, the action is the juice.” Which, fine. Al Pacino (as Vincent Hanna, the cop) eating scenery and Robert De Niro (as Neil McCauley, master thief) moving through each frame with feline circumspection, the watchfulness of a person for whom every step is a potential mistake, are the movie. You don’t need anything else, really. But Heat is a film about loneliness, and about the kind of obsessive, unidirectional chase that is familiar to every artist. It is also a film about Los Angeles, a place that I, as a not-quite-thirty-year-old writer exiled to New York, missed terribly in 1995, which may be why it hit me so hard.

I’d moved to Manhattan a year and a half earlier, in fact to work for De Niro—my job was to find books, intellectual property that might be adapted for him to star in or produce—and so there was, for me, an uncanny undercurrent of witness, a layer of intimacy most viewers would not have been privy to. Bob was my boss: someone who lacked the gregariousness of other actors I’d known, whose deep and abiding sense of personal privacy—I say I “knew” him, but this just meant that we were in rooms together occasionally—was magnified in the character he was playing. The person I saw at the office was modest, thoughtful, and swift. He never said anything more than he had to. The one onscreen, Neil McCauley, was towering and explosive. His silence had a quality of violent withholding. The character I was watching and the man I worked for were not the same, but swimming inside the one I could discern the contours of the other. De Niro hadn’t been at his best in a handful of his recent films—Mistress, Night and the City, A Bronx Tale, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—but here, in Heat, he was as great as he had ever been.

Los Angeles exists for almost everyone along similar lines—as sprawling, sun-stunned, and exposed—but in Heat its terms are inverted: the city is nocturnal, sodium-lit, hidden. The characters in the film seem almost as if they might only exist at night—the handful of scenes set during daylight hours find them masked under freeway overpasses, or (in the film’s most protracted daytime sequence) lost in the gray canyons of downtown, strafing Flower Street with automatic weapons—and this disrupts our sense of L.A. even further. Los Angeles is an early city for most of its residents. Traffic slows down by 11 PM. But for these people—safecrackers, demolitions experts, detectives from the robbery division—this is precisely when their working lives begin.

In a sense, all of this is a feint. Michael Mann, the film’s director, is from Chicago. De Niro and Pacino, of course, are both from New York: a less Californian pair of actors might be impossible to imagine. Yet somehow each manages to unseam the city a little; to remake Los Angeles—a sloppy, laidback place even at its most alluring—in his own elegant, nervous image. Mann, especially, rehearsed his story to death. Six years earlier he’d shot the exact same movie, its script barely altered, for television, under the name L.A. Takedown. L.A. Takedown is terrible—it lacks Heat’s poetry and performances—but it speaks to the director’s obsessiveness, his desire not only to get certain details of the criminal underworld he’s depicting right (he’d made Thief, yet another movie about a safecracker, in 1981; in some sense all three films work similar tableaux from different angles), but also to make every frame of his movie sing.

Stories of Mann’s attention to detail on set abound—he had special clothes hangers custom-made for a scene so they’d make the exact metallic sound he wanted when De Niro’s character backs someone into a closet, then swipes them aside in rage—but the result is less fussy than creamy, lavish, romantic. There’s scarcely a shot in the film that doesn’t glow with chromatic potential, that doesn’t summon the viewer to want to dive through the screen. If Heat was merely a romantic movie about crime, it would not be particularly memorable. If it was merely a meticulous one—shot across ninety-five locations in 107 days, relying heavily on natural light even for many of its nocturnal sequences, the film is a wonder of precision and specificity—it might not be memorable, either. But because it inverts almost everything one has been given to assume about Los Angeles, onscreen or otherwise, Heat attains the radiance of myth. The only swimming pool in the movie is seen but briefly, as McCauley traverses a backyard to assassinate a person who has set him up. The only movie theater is an abandoned drive-in, a cracked asphalt field that looks purgatorial. There are no Hancock Park manor houses or sprawling Beverly Hills lawns. Characters live on hillsides, in boxy little homes—or, in McCauley’s case, in a glass-walled Malibu house without a stick of furniture, not even a couch. The effect is at once desolate and opulent, a world in which nothing seems to matter except money and work. The pastel invitation of other standout Los Angeles films—the shell-pinks and butter-whites of Chinatown; the Richard Neutra and Lloyd Wright houses of L.A. Confidential—is nowhere to be found here, as Heat’s shooting locations splinter out into Downey, Whittier and Redondo Beach. It’s one city, one place—but it’s seen through the spidery lens of its true unifying force, which is neither civic pride nor landmark architecture but the naked, inexorable movement of capital.

This, of course, is Heat’s real subject, and the source of its contradictory (an ungenerous viewer might say “muddled”) politics. The film has much to say about money; what it might mean to earn it, as opposed to merely acquiring it. Other than Vincent Hanna, the cop, nobody in Heat’s cosmos has what one might call an honest profession. Even a doctor we meet is off-book, fly-by-night, while an ex-con who takes a straight job flipping burgers is promptly squeezed so hard by his corrupt boss that he has no choice but to quit. The film’s archvillain is a money launderer named Roger Van Zant, and a contrast is drawn between Van Zant’s perfidious, sleazy, amoral world—a world in which nobody seems to have any talent or do any real work—and that of Neil McCauley. McCauley is, after all, a thief and a sociopath—neither he nor his associates have any compunction about killing a civilian when pressed—but it is proposed that in some sense they are admirable, largely on account of their excellence. They don’t make mistakes. They are, in essence, artisans: people devoted to a form of labor that may be remunerative but which they are, ultimately, pursuing for its own sake. (“For me, the action is the juice.”) There isn’t an artist in the world who doesn’t ultimately relate to this, at least not a serious one, and so the feckless Van Zant (what does he do, besides make phone calls? He’s certainly not wielding an acetylene torch or an assault rifle in the dark, earning his keep with his nerve and capabilities) becomes a despicable symbol—but of what, really? Idleness? Philistinism?

It must be said that Heat is, in some sense, preposterous. Its title comes from an observation McCauley makes several times to his crew: that one should have no attachments, “nothing you are not ready to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” Good advice, if you’re a previously-convicted felon presently engaged in activities that could send you to prison for life. Goofy-ass bro-code if you’re . . . anyone else. And yet even this seems to lead us back to the meticulousness that is the film’s one true morality. It is obsessiveness—an obsessiveness that makes room for loyalty, as McCauley’s non-attachment doesn’t extend to his crew—that is “good” in Heat’s world: the pursuit of excellence almost as an end in itself. The film’s other villain, the menacing Waingro, is defined by his sloppiness. He’s a cowboy, “looking for anything heavy,” whereas McCauley is a craftsman, an expert. He won’t manage to live up to his credo—it’s his very attachment, both to other people and to his work, that will ultimately do him in—but he’s an artist, through and through.

All of this was legible to me thirty years ago. I was a young writer, struggling with a first novel I would’ve walked out on any of my own attachments to accomplish. De Niro was a great artist, a mature one, showing me what he could still do; more than I had assumed on the basis of his recent achievements. And I was 3,000 miles from home, the concrete densities of lower Manhattan boxing me in every day, intoxicated by this real city, still working out how I felt about where I was from. Heat fed Los Angeles back to me as mystery. I’d never seen it look this way before. I kept wondering if maybe I’d mistaken my own hometown all along. Had I ever even visited the city in which I’d spent my entire childhood?

And yet—many of L.A.’s beloved locations, places I’ve known all my life, do appear. Hennessey + Ingalls bookstore in Santa Monica; Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank; the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. During an early love scene between De Niro and Amy Brenneman, the lights of Downtown sparkle, oceanic, from a perch above Sunset Plaza. The movie’s most iconic scene, in which De Niro’s Neil McCauley and Pacino’s Vincent Hanna finally meet face to face, takes place in Kate Mantilini— a now-shuttered restaurant that seems to evoke pangs of anguished nostalgia in the hearts of almost every Angeleno I know. Of the Westin Bonaventure, Fredric Jameson once wrote that the hotel “aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city.” He found the Bonaventure incomprehensible, baffling and horrifying, and proposed that it ought to have no entrances, since it fails to connect with the world that surrounds it. In a sense, the Los Angeles of Heat is the same way: escape is dreamed of, and even proposed—Neil McCauley and Amy Brenneman’s Eady have plans to leave, together—but it is ultimately refused. The movie begins in a train station and ends in the fields surrounding LAX, Hanna and McCauley stalking each other through tall grass, hiding behind squat electrical buildings while airplanes (escape is so close!) roar overhead. Neither man can leave, though. They have to see their fate—which is the city’s fate—through to the end.

It is increasingly difficult to talk about space in America without talking about money. And in a sense, the poetics of Heat, in which Los Angeles is presented largely as an argument between the concrete realities of urban capital (a world of bank buildings, warehouses, refinery towers, overpasses) and the subjective ones of private experience (distant lights sparkling vaguely as you wind down the freeway at night; the saturated gray-blue of the Pacific outside your living room window in the hour of not-quite dawn), are entirely about the subjugation of one of these things to the other: a story of how the voracious mouth of the marketplace eats everything, even your dreams.

What dreams I had thirty years ago were about artistic freedom, which might be the only kind available to humans that one could call virtually unlimited. But creative freedom and economic freedom are bound, and as the latter is increasingly removed from us—stolen by people less like Neil McCauley (who reminds the patrons of a bank he is robbing that their own money is insured, and they stand to lose nothing) and more like Roger Van Zant—it becomes clear that even our creative freedoms are notional in a world of pure larceny. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and maybe no ethical production, either: without a viable public commons, without shared space both artistic and physical, all is lost.

This is the story Heat teased for me: one that is latent though not fully articulated throughout, and one that makes even the film’s obvious flaws—its narrowing masculine vision in which women are mostly caretakers and harridans, for one—seem less important. Because the city it describes is gone, gone, gone—and its vision of freedom; of capital liberated, however unethically, from far more unethical and predatory systems, is gone, too. Because not only Los Angeles but the industry it has long housed is decimated, and the glass Malibu house once inhabited by Neil McCauley—empty of furniture but filled with possibility, the dreams of artists and moguls alike—has burned down to ash. Kate Mantilini, where McCauley and Hanna shared their cup of coffee—the artist and the long arm of the state at rest in a moment of wary respect—is vacant. I drive by it every day, casting a sidelong glance at its shuttered tomb of stale air, of invisible light.

(Originally published in The Panafold issue #4, where it is accompanied by a handful of knockout illustrations, none of them, alas, of Kate Mantilini. Sigh.)

As that scene indicates, it’s not an easy watch—the most caustic, naked and uncomfortable of the vast crop of Hollywood divorce movies circa 1980 (see also: Kramer vs Kramer, Starting Over, An Unmarried Woman, etc etc etc).* Still, look at that: a scene that teeters right on the verge of being maudlin—a stoned divorcee in the bath overwhelmed with what might be self-pity—before turning on a dime. There are a million other, more broadly (and deservedly) familiar Diane Keaton performances that remain top of mind, but if you haven’t watched Shoot the Moon lately, or at all, I encourage you to do so. It’s streamable (rentable, I believe) at the usual places.

A friend of mine wrote recently wondering why this newsletter has been quiet of late. Truthfully I’ve been busy with other stuff. I wrote about Giorgio Armani’s effect on the Hollywood power brokers of the early 1980s by way of American Gigolo for GQ a few weeks ago, for example. I have a piece in the New York Review of Architecture about a feud between Roger Corman and the legendary critic Esther McCoy (she was not delighted by his aggressive remodel of a house on La Mesa Drive). I wrote a long piece that’s forthcoming in the excellent magazine The Panafold on the poetics of Michael Mann’s Heat, a piece of which I’m particularly proud (and which should delight any of you, uh, Michael Mann-heads—”Manniacs”—of which I know there are plenty), so I’d encourage a subscription there. Past all of this, though, I’ve been busy with a new book—a novel—which has nothing to do with movies, Hollywood, parents, talent agents, or even Los Angeles (at least not quite as we know it) at all. About this, in particular, I’m excited, and will say nothing except that it’s both a relief and a pleasure to be writing full-throated fiction again (“full-throated” in the sense that I reckon the last few books have been fiction too—by my reckoning they’re all novels—but this lacks any memoiristic subterfuge), and it’s likely to mean this newsletter will stay a little sporadic, but hey, all good. One thing the internet still seems to offer in bulk are words you can read for free. I’m sure it’s OK if I tithe fewer of them to this platform—which continues to seem of mixed appeal to me, more like all the other social media platforms we’ve torched through every passing day—for a while at least.

One more recommendation I’ll leave you with is a film I’d never seen until last weekend, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End. I suppose Skolimowski’s film—from 1970—isn’t exactly a bottle of sunshine either as it plays a bit like Harold and Maude if H&M were 1) set in a grimy English bathhouse, and 2) a supreme bummer. On the other hand it’s got Jane Asher (Paul McCartney’s gf throughout his Beatles tenure) in it, and she’s fantastic. Also soundtracked by Cat Stevens and “The” Can, two great tastes that somehow go together better than you’d think. If you’ve never seen that either: I highly recommend.

Lastly, I’ll be in conversation this Tuesday night with my friend David Leo Rice at North Figueroa Books to discuss his excellent—and very Lynchian—book The Squimbop Condition. David is one of my favorite practitioners of a fiction that is at once deeply disquieting and oddly rhapsodic (I’m hesitant to call it “surreal,” a term I dislike for all kinds of reasons, but it bangs). If you’re in LA and on the Eastside especially, come through! (You can do the folks at the shop the courtesy of RSVPing here. It’s free!)

If you’re in New York the following week, I’ll be speaking at The Harvard Club (?!?) on the evening of Tuesday the 21st. You’d have to be a member/alum for that one, but if you’re not and would like to attend email me. I might be able to finagle a guest list spot.

Since we’re brushing up against the topic of Hollywood divorce cinema—something that preoccupied me for a while while I was writing The Golden Hour—I’ll leave you with an image from 1989’s Sea of Love, a film that is NOT a divorce movie (it’s a serial killer/police procedural/Al Pacino + Ellen Barkin joint) and which falls outside the window of Peak Divorce Cinema (by my reckoning 1978-1983 is the sweet spot) but which posits Pacino’s detective as a divorced dad largely by including this shot of him taking a shower. I can’t even remember if a child is mentioned in this movie, but the implication seems to be that someone else has a say in his choice of bathroom decor. Either that or the set decorator was having a stroke when it came to this scene:

Then again maybe it was just a weird time, lewk-wise, for Al. Photos I just stumbled across of him arriving at the premiere for this not-particularly-good film with his then-girlfriend Diane Keaton—way to close the circle here—conjure a comparably awkward moment. (Maybe his optometrist was having the same stroke.)

Until soon—

I’ve been thinking, still, about Harold Brodkey. My previous post seems to have given the impression that I dislike him, or at least that I dislike his work. Fair enough: I did say that I’d never been able to finish The Runaway Soul and Stories in An Almost Classical Mode, his twin magnum opii, and I was pretty hard on his public persona, although I did note that the latter was charming (which it was, far more than you might imagine of a man given to rather grand pronouncements on his own talent). The thing is, I do like the work: not “finishing” those two books (which are in some sense—and I mean this as a compliment, i.e. not strictly from a reader’s perspective—unfinishable, or perhaps a better word would be inexhaustible) doesn’t mean I haven’t spent substantial time with both. I’ve read much, probably most, of both more than once and enjoyed them, although I suspect “enjoyment” isn’t the primary thing one is meant to derive from Brodkey and I still don’t think that “Innocence,” the fabled cunnilingus story, gets over, at least not for me. But there are writers, many of them among the greatest, whose body of work consists largely of multiple attempts on similar, or even identical, narratives, writers who effectively . . . I won’t say “wrote the same book over and over,” but orbited certain knots of experience so obsessively that the books contain significant repetitions. Marguerite Duras, possibly, is one such writer; Jean Rhys, definitely, is another. I am, I suppose, one of those writers myself, but in any case one finds echoes and rehearsals of previous or subsequent books in Melville, in Conrad, in Dickens, in Roth, in Kafka. Certainly one finds them in Henry James, maybe the ultimate such writer. (I’ve read The Golden Bowl three times, but have I “finished” it? God no. That book is unfinishable, in the best sense.) Which isn’t to be lawyerly, but Brodkey is for sure such a writer to the utmost. He told the same story over and over (the cunnilingus part only once, I think, but even that exists in multiple iterations), to an effect that was both—intentionally—taxing, sometimes overwrought, occasionally torturing certain points of contact to the edges of coherence but also very often astonishing. Since the last post wasn’t sufficiently clear on this point I’ll emphasize: Brodkey was good, actually.

One dyspeptic commenter on the previous post took exception: he seemed to be under the peculiar impression I was writing a formal review instead of, uh, a newsletter, and proposed that writing a piece wondering whether many writers might be better served by posting and promoting a little less was contradictory. (“If writers would be better served by silence, this essay isn’t helping,” was the gist of his complaint.) While it was cool to encounter a real live Mr. Gotcha in the wild (although I will admit his long comment brought a different meme to mind while I glanced at it), I was more swayed by a few other folks who weighed in with thoughtful appreciations of Brodkey. One, in particular, encouraged me to seek out a story called “Play,” which I may have read long ago (at times it can be hard to tell with Brodkey, given how often the same scenario can be enacted in different stories) but most probably not because “Play” seems unique—and memorably disturbing—even within Brodkey’s singular and often uncomfortable body of work. “Play” (the story is included in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode) is—there’s no other way to say this—a rendering of a pre-pubescent boy’s sudden sexual awakening in the presence of an even younger boy. Which is to say it’s a story that’s none too easy to talk about, let alone “recommend,” in 2025. It’s fucked up! On the basis of its subject matter one might be very much disinclined to spend time with a story like that. But leaving aside the fact the experience it treats is extremely difficult—is essentially the molestation of a seven-year-old by an eleven-year-old—the story itself (which thankfully isn’t graphic or even vaguely descriptive of what goes down until the very end, and even then in terms that are pretty elliptical) is good. Which is one of those distinctions that shouldn’t really require exegesis, but given that we’re still in an era where some people get squeamish about watching Polanski movies or reading Lolita (which is certainly no less specific than Brodkey’s story) I’ll go ahead and make it for clarity’s sake.

“Play” begins with two children under a bed: the narrator (the first sentence makes clear that this is a memory: “Sometimes, when I wake, I am eleven years old”) hanging, suspended, from a boxspring, climbing horizontally from coil to coil (“no part of me touches the floor”) while the younger boy, clad only in his underwear, clings to his chest. It is, for sure, a claustrophobic and perturbing scenario: the narrator is also mostly naked, and you can feel the boxed-in discomfort, physical and otherwise, of the whole scenario: “The bed-springs are a matted tangle of jungle growth; sweatily, intensely, I disturb the dust of habitation in the half-growth beneath the bed.”

Brodkey excels at these kinds of claustrophobic, half-exhilarating and half-nightmarish encounters between bodies. His stepfather’s embrace in “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft” is similar: the blend of adoration and terror there is intense, and is central to whatever experience Brodkey was trying to work out, over and over, in these stories. That’s what I mean when I say Brodkey may have had other things on his mind than “enjoyment”—these stories are grappling with some of the most intense horrors and problems that can exist in human relations—but fortunately here the narrator spirals away from this immediate situation into a broader contemplation of what “play” consisted of for the narrator and his cohorts, in and around the neighborhood, the games of stickball, football, Robin Hood, Tarzan, Space Search, Torture, etc (etc, etc, etc . . . etc) he and his cohort engaged in in approximately 1941 (the story never specifies a year, but one may assume the narrator’s age corresponds roughly with Brodkey’s, who was born in 1930). Most of the story consists of this: cataloguing and examining what these neighborhood kids got up to in ways that are insightful, funny, graceful, goofy. We don’t return to the younger boy, Randolph, and the scenario underneath the bed until we’ve gotten an extensive accounting of these various forms of play, on their undercurrents of both innocence and sadism, on the fact these kids are of course too young to have—or even understand—a fully adult vocabulary: “fuck was explained to me at least fifty times by older boys, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant . . . We lived in a sensual and passionate immediacy, as if the suburb were a walled and gated garden.” Nothing about this section is particularly difficult. If anything, it’s frequently lush, gorgeous, as with this characteristic sentence:

The blue jeans lie on the floor, the slightly smelly, stained sneakers, socks, the flimsy, discarded shirts, twisted, outspread, frail, their buttons like the eyes of fish.

How good is that? It’s fucking perfect, somehow, moving from all those jumbled-up and stinky sneakers and socks to the bright delicacy of those “flimsy . . . frail” shirts to land on a startlingly apt yet surprising metaphor. This story, like all of Brodkey’s stories, are filled with sentences like that (I’d say “he could write them in his sleep,” only he worked them so obsessively he clearly did not), and each one might be worth more than many writers’ careers.

Of course, the story has to return to that scenario under the bed—it holds its tension throughout because we know we will, we must—and when we do, the story zeroes in on its primal catastrophe: the narrator scissoring Rudolph with his legs until he arrives at his, uh, epiphany: “Five closely attached ascending sensations disconnected me . . . I was on the edge of a vast black emptiness . . . And I went over a—a thing, tumbled over the round globe, and off into the darkness, scattering warm, strangely liquescent sparks, uncolored but scorching: something scorched me; I felt something like a wire whip through me; it was drawn through me and then from me, eviscerating me; I was thrown into grief, into astonishment, into a strange nothingness, a blankness of feeling unlike anything I’ve ever known.” On the one hand, what? (“five closely attached ascending sensations?”), but—of course—we know what he’s talking about, uncomfortable as it may be. He bangs the point home a few sentences later with a reference to the “dime-sized” spot that has just appeared on his skivvies.

Why write—or I guess the real question would be, why read—something like this in 2025? On the one hand, stupid question: we should for the same reason we always did, because a literature that doesn’t attempt to reckon with difficult questions and complicated (unsettling, traumatic, morally gnarly, etc) experience wouldn’t be worth preserving. But on the other, given that there are an infinite variety of writers to read these days—another generational layer or two has accrued since Brodkey’s time—it’s not unreasonable to wonder why pay attention to Brodkey, specifically? To which I would say, simply, that very few writers, then or now, have plumbed consciousness—the actual thing, the often deeply unpleasant experience of being alive—with anything resembling Brodkey’s depth and unstinting attentiveness, or who could do it with such excellence on the level of the sentence. In that sense, his peers (Roth, Mailer, Updike, etc) came nowhere close, and the comparisons to Proust or Faulkner, seem less unreasonable. Did he actually achieve the heights of the latter two? Not quite (although in places he comes awfully close). But then again, neither have you or I.

Funnily enough, Brodkey did write an essay that addressed some of the other questions that came up in my previous post, though. In that essay, titled “How About Salinger and Nabokov, for Starters?” (you can find it in a collection called Sea Battles on Dry Land), Brodkey wrote about fame, about whether the novel still mattered, about the distinction between a public, famous novelist and a consequential one, and whether it was even possible to be both. (Salinger and Nabokov, for Brodkey, were both.) But Brodkey had no real time for fetishizing the state-persecuted writer, as his buddy DeLillo perhaps did. In response to a comment by George Steiner (made when he appeared with Joseph Brodsky, Mary McCarthy, and AA Alvarez on a televised panel called “Do Repressive Systems Produce Great Literature?” in 1982), he takes note of the “ugly romanticism” of imagining artists in repressive systems might produce greater, or more dangerous, art. “A state-endangered writer is, willy-nilly, a more romantic object of contemplation and aesthetically a more satisfying one since the problem of aesthetics doesn’t quite enter in. But in time the aesthetic question does dominate,” Brodkey writes. In the end, “Writers do have to produce good books or go unattended to.”

This, of course, is true—inescapably so. It will be as long as writers and books exist. My friend Chris Beha wrote me last week and noted that the silence of a DeLillo or a Pynchon was effective precisely because its withholdingness offered a sharp, and attractive, contrast to the Gore Vidals and Norman Mailers whose self-promotive energies seemed even more inexhaustible than their creative ones. Chris put it well, in general:

No one can speak on behalf of silence. Only silence can do that job. The trouble with silence, of course, is that most people will never hear it--and those that do are apt to misunderstand it. But that has always been the case. I think we are wrong to imagine that silence, exile, and cunning are simply not available to us in the way they were to Pynchon or Salinger or Delillo or Gaddis. But I think this gets it wrong. After all, people back then actually listened to writers. How much more tempting, in the age of Mailer, to speak up. How much more obvious that speaking up was the only way to get read. It has always been the case that those who won't speak up on behalf of their work are more likely to be ignored. The thing that Pynchon and Delillo did was to write work so undeniable that they naturally became objects of fascination, people from whom others wanted to hear, and it was against this desire for availability that their withholding was put into noticeable relief. I don't see why that couldn't still happen now. All of that is just to say that the thing to do is write something truly great and let the chips fall where they may. But that has always been the thing, hasn't it?

Indeed. Always has been, and I suspect always will be, insofar as all the posting and promoting in the world won’t make a good writer out of a shitty one. Whether it can actually do the reverse is an open question, but there have always been show ponies and there have always been stallions, so to speak. I know which one I’d rather be.

Look at this yoyo, my God. The eyebrows! The supercilious stare! For those who don’t remember—and I would imagine even within the well-read subscriber base of this newsletter there are those who might not—Brodkey rose to prominence (or some Manhattan-centric form of it, at least) with the 1959 publication of a short story collection called First Love and Other Sorrows and then spent the next three decades cultivating his own mythology via an unpublished novel called for most of its long-rumored existence A Party of Animals. This manuscript (one assumes he’s clutching a portion of it in the photo above) took on an apocryphal life of its own: it was thousands of pages long; it consumed eleven different file cabinets in his office; it was going to prove that he was “the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton” and that Brodkey was “the best living writer in English” (Brodkey didn’t make these assertions himself, he merely claimed that other people had said so—many people are saying—every chance he got); it was shuttled from Random House (to which it had been sold upon conception in 1964) to FSG (in 1970) to Knopf (in 1979), refinanced every five- or ten years with a yet-larger advance, occasionally appearing as a forthcoming title in publishers’ catalogs but never actually completed to anyone’s satisfaction, or at least not the author’s, until some abortive, partial, or alternate version was ultimately published, having arrived back at FSG, under a different title—The Runaway Soul—in 1991.

Even that cover tells you something, with the title practically a footnote compared to the author’s gargantuan name. And this, it should go without saying, seems a miserable way for a book or a writer to live. Maybe it wasn’t—Brodkey wasn’t exactly a recluse, and still cut something of a figure, at least reputationally, through the New York I arrived in in ‘94—but to spend thirty years on a novel only to have it fizzle upon arrival is depressing. Then again, well, you should read the article that goes with that New York magazine cover above. What an insane portrait of late 20th Century American literary culture emerges! Brodkey insists that John Updike stole his mojo (by basing the figure of the Devil in The Witches of Eastwick on him), that Renata Adler did the same in Pitch Dark, that he wants desperately to be free of literary politics but that Lish, Mailer, everybody just won’t let him! Somehow the person in this article gets taken seriously, and not only by himself! But there is one bit that emerges which I find delicious. At one point, discussing the writer’s daily round of telephone calls (Brodkey was an inveterate gossip, of course, and it’s worth noting that for all the egomaniacal preposterousness of his persona the writer emerges somehow as improbably charming) it comes out that one of his phone confidants is Don DeLillo. “We talk mainly about writing and death,” DeLillo is quoted as saying. “Those are our twin subjects.” When Brodkey asked DeLillo how he might better manage his fear of death (a reasonable question to ask the author of White Noise) DeLillo apparently advised him to watch more TV. “It worked so well,” Brodkey says, “I went out and bought a huge new television set.”

Killer advice, obviously, Don. But I was struck, too, by the improbability of this friendship. Because if Brodkey was a guy who might have considered being on the cover of New York magazine a thing of some importance, DeLillo was one who shunned (or at least claimed to shun) the spotlight. While I was writing The Golden Hour DeLillo was much on my mind and I kept tacked to my wall a brief address he gave in 1997 on the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng. In it, DeLillo writes:

“The deeper they conceal him—the more remote the cell, the smaller the cell, the colder and stonier the walls of the cell—the more vivid and living is the writer.”

It’s easy enough to question this. A lot of DeLillo’s pronouncements on the role of the writer from this era have an air of radical chic to them—much talk that drifts a little close to the sort of thinking that averred the 2016 election was sure to usher in a new golden era of punk rock—but over and over he returns, in the scattering of interviews he gave through the late 1980s and mid-nineties, to the idea that a writer ought to be culturally marginalized, ought to avoid the glare of the spotlight, that the best thing for a writer to do was not talk too much. “I’ve always liked being relatively obscure,” DeLillo told the Times in 1991. “I feel like that’s where I belong, that’s where my work belongs.” Needless to say, saying this to the New York Times and saying it in private are two different things, and it’s reasonable to suspect that DeLillo (whom I’ve never met, but who by various accounts really is a soft-spoken and deeply private man) nevertheless may have been simultaneously engaging in a bit of image-management. After all, he wasn’t Pynchon—he did grant interviews, and has made public appearances—and no one who was also thinking as much about Warhol, about cinema, about television and about crowds as he was (these themes being all over his work, particularly in Mao II) could have neglected to consider his own public persona. But DeLillo also told the Times:

“It’s my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. When you try to unravel something you’ve written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part. Here is a new map of the world: it is seven shades of blue. If you’re able to be straightforward and penetrating about this invention of yours, it’s almost as though you’re saying it wasn’t altogether necessary. The sources weren’t deep enough.”

This seems to me correct. And the fact that writers are by now forced (or at least expected) to be straightforward and penetrating about their books through endless q-and-as and niche podcast appearances—the posture of media refusenik isn’t really available anymore—is not incidental to the fact that no one in this country has written a book as good as Mao II, let alone Libra, in the three-and-a-half decades since. (Indeed, writers are these days invited to talk less about literature and more about their favorite taco trucks or luxury watch collections, a process that can’t help make even the ones who are good seem cheugy and embarrassing.) This is true in large part because that space for mystery—the expectation that a work of art should be one, in order to remain a work of art—has been obliterated. Obviously, any half-decent book eludes capture. We can say whatever we want about it, and the work of art remains whatever it is. But we do make them smaller, and ourselves dumber, by talking facilely about them, never mind that writers all essentially have to do so in order to be able to publish again. And when people lament or complain, here on Substack or anywhere else, about the state of the novel, whether it’s living or dead, whether men are reading them or not reading them, about whatever form of ideological or elite capture is dominating the discourse du jour, I always want to tell them this: that the problem is none of the above, but rather the fact that we should all stop talking, the better, as the late Shirley Hazzard said, to find out what we—or, better yet, what other people—actually think. Because the more literature, or at least literary culture, is reduced to the merely gossipy or discussible, the more it is boiled down to arrive at its ultimate 21st Century distillation, the creation of an ever expanding and increasingly meaningless series of lists (lists being something DeLillo correctly identified as “a form of cultural hysteria”), the less our literary environment can actually mean or matter to anybody. I have no idea what the “best” books of the 21st Century are and neither does anybody else—eventually, no doubt, history will arrive at some sort of maimed consensus that will surely be partially mistaken, but hopefully it will be better than this mostly lame and half-witted one—but I do know any number of great ones, most of them not represented on any such list (and the few that are certainly remain beyond the grasp of whatever capsule descriptions they’ve been assigned).

What about Brodkey though? Was the work any good or could he just wear the shit out of a Borsalino? The answer is, uh—and perhaps unsurprisingly—both. The Runaway Soul, and its companion volume of sorts, a brick-sized collection of stories that remixed and remodeled a lot of the same material under the title Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, which appeared two years earlier—is a mess. Both books have defeated me across multiple attempts to read them in their entirety. Both of them engage the adventures of one Wiley Silenowicz, a clearly autobiographical stand-in for Brodkey, and his adoptive parents S.L. (also sometimes called “Charley”) and Lila (sometimes “Leila”). Both of them are completely fucking exhausting (I defy you to make it through all thirty-one pages of his most famous story, “Innocence,” twenty-three of which are devoted—I chose my modifier there advisedly—to what is surely the longest description of a single act of cunnilingus ever written for publication or otherwise), and both of them contain sentences, paragraphs, pages on end that are totally amazing. Not amazing enough to prevent one from feeling exactly as Kasey Casem famously did once on a separate occasion, but amazing nevertheless. There is, throughout both books, a sense that Brodkey had been terrorized, indeed molested (neither book is explicit on this point, through Brodkey eventually would be) by his adoptive father, and a wildly vivid sense of parents as mythological giants, as demonic angels of both love and terror. (A story called “His Son in His Arms, In Light, Aloft” gives a good capsule sense of both projects.) They are, like most books probably, failures. They are also, unlike many books at all, shot through with glimmers of unmistakable genius, sentences so indelible I’ll never forget them. (An uncharacteristically short one that might be his best remembered—To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die—is pretty great, albeit faintly goofy.) But like many (most? all?) people, Brodkey never really got over his earliest experience, his childhood elations and terrors. As he put it in what is probably his best, and certainly his most readable, book, This Wild Darkness, the one in which he is more explicit about the abuse he survived as a child:

“I am a genius, or I am a fraud. I am possessed by voices and events from the earliest edges of memory and have never existed except as an Illinois front yard where these things play themselves out over and over again until I die.”

If those two sentences were the only things Brodkey ever wrote they’d probably be enough to make him worth remembering. Because there, after all, Brodkey shoves aside whatever desperate assertions of his ego made him such a sad-yet-laughable figure to render something that is probably in some sense true for everyone, something so heartbreakingly stark I might never get over it myself. He died in 1996, and This Wild Darkness chronicles the diagnosis and the disease—AIDS—that killed him. One can imagine that this was not the work for which Brodkey would’ve most wanted to be remembered, but it is certainly one for which he ought to be, as Marco’s great piece also makes plain. There is one margin, of course, beyond which all writers are forced to stop talking, one obscurity from which even the solicitations of New York magazine can’t save us. But it would be nice if we were permitted to stop talking before then. I suspect our lives, like our literary culture, would be better if we did.

One thing that jumped out at me was a story I wrote for the late, lamented Black Clock, a fantastic journal that was edited (out of CalArts) by Steve Erickson, whose novels you should investigate immediately if by any chance you happen to be unfamiliar with them. (Start, maybe, with Days Between Stations or the one from which the magazine took its name, Tours of the Black Clock.) Before it ceased publication in 2016, Black Clock’s contributors included—among other people—Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Miranda July, Jonathan Lethem, Maggie Nelson, Samuel R. Delaney, Susan Straight, Lynne Tillman, William T. Vollmann, and . . . me. It was always a pleasure to write for them, obviously, and Black Clock’s loss—like that of a million other literary magazines before it, from Antaeus to Open City (sigh) to Tin House—was a real blow to literary culture in general. Since the Black Clock archives aren’t anywhere online, I figured I’d post up a short story I wrote for the magazine’s “Psychedelic Issue” (the later Black Clock issues were themed) back in 2015.

Before I do, I gotta say: the response to The Golden Hour has been wonderful, not least here on the ‘stack, where it’s been the subject of excellent pieces by the excellent Naomi Kanakia, the redoubtable Henry Begler, and—a real embarrassment of riches—the sharp-minded Sebastian Matthews, who wrote about it more than once (!). To shout out these writers feels a bit like what Spy magazine used to call “Logrolling in Our Time” (real Gen X heads know) but as I’ve shouted them out before, and as I really do enjoy and admire each of their writing enormously, I’m happy to do it again, and deeply delighted and honored by their attention, and by that of every other reader who’s taken the time to read my . . . memoivel? Nonfiction novel . . . ish-type-thing? You decide

Buy The Golden Hour Here

OK, so . . . when I was invited to contribute to Black Clock’s Psychedelic Issue, I started by writing an inert—failed—story from the perspective of the (I think) late, great Clementine Hall. For those who don’t know, Hall was the occasional lyricist and muse of the 13th Floor Elevators (her husband, Tommy, was the band’s jug player, and can be seen in the clip below . . . blowing into an amplified jug, which provided the “psychedelic”—or irritating—tikkatikkatikka sound that runs through every Elevators song, including the one for which they are best remembered). That story sucked, but as my deadline crept up on me I spun around one day and wrote this instead, which features the Elevators prominently. (Why? The prompt for the issue was vague—a “psychedelic” theme could be interpreted any number of ways—but I’ve always been fascinated by the 13th Floor Elevators, who claimed never to have played a single note live or in the studio without dosing themselves with copious amounts of LSD beforehand, and whose existence in West Texas in the mid-1960s seems to have been pretty fraught, given that the hippie-to-cop ratio in Tx was presumably not as favorable as it would have been in San Francisco or LA. Hence I arrived at this story, which involves the psychedelic voyage of a young man (not me) on the campus of a liberal arts college (not exactly Hampshire College, my alma mater, but . . . not exactly not Hampshire either) circa 1985.

Poor Fox (of the story below)! And . . . poor Roky Erikson, seen shouting his lungs out in the clip above, a few years before a marijuana bust led to his being incarcerated for a few years at the Rusk State Hospital (“for the Criminally Insane,” it was referred to at the time), where he was subjected to involuntary ECT. Not so fun, I would imagine, but this story? If nothing else, this story—which is called “Bull of the Woods”— is that:

BULL OF THE WOODS:

I ate my first tab in the fall of ’85. It was cold and I could see my breath pluming upwards, drifting towards a sky that was milky and enigmatic to begin with. I stood in the middle of the quad, craning my neck at the strange Modernist cube of our dorm, all ruddy bricks and impenetrable windows. I wasn’t wearing any shoes.

“Hey, man.” My friend Microbe came over. “Aren’t you freezing?”

“Not really, no.”

“You sure?”

I was from California. My reputation rested upon a certain fearlessness about the weather. I didn’t own any winter clothes and was currently sporting just threadbare corduroys and a T-shirt that read, with or without irony, Go Climb a Rock. “Define ‘sure.’”

He scrutinized me. Good old Microbe, the experienced psychonaut. He knew something was up. “Isn’t it a little early for law school? You’re either fucking cold or you’re not.”

I stared down at my toes splayed atop the hard grassless mud, up at the branches that were brittle and, likewise, bare. “I guess it’s a little nippy.”

“What are you doing?”

It wasn’t really all that unusual to see one of us standing out here on the quad alone, paralyzed by indecision. Indecision was our métier. At any hour of the day or night you could see one or two of us wandering around in circles like disoriented mimes. Hamster College (as we referred to it, thanks to the network of subterranean tunnels that ran from building to building, an alleged means of keeping dry and warm in winter although we used them mostly for graffiti and psychic torment) was for the confused. Sexually, philosophically, academically. Seven hundred kids had been shipped off by our parents to a kind of work farm in northern Vermont, only none of us actually did any work. Well, some did. Others, like me, had attended a smattering of classes—Foucault, Todorov, Cognitive Development in Dogs—and then bailed out, devoting ourselves to fucking up in its purest form. “What do you think I’m doing?” I clenched my fist and I shook it in Microbe’s face, then opened it. “Drogas.”

“Really?” He was a bland-featured Michigander with frizzy hair. His face looked like a binky that had been thrown in the wash too long. After you stared at him awhile you forgot you were looking at a person at all—more like a stuffed bear whose nose was in the process of disintegrating. “What kind?”

I smiled. “I’m not telling.”

He’d done it. Everyone here had done it, it seemed. I was the lone remaining neophyte, at least when it came to LSD. Thus far the quad hadn’t revealed any mysteries: just the same scrubby little set of bunker-like dormitories, the white clapboard house of student-health services, and the dumpy brick dining commons, all clustered around whatever these trees were. The sky was an iridescent white, the ground a hard crust interrupted by tufts of dying grass; and the trees that I hoped would start talking soon were just sickly, deciduous trunks, sad candelabra. “Come on, then!” He yanked my sleeve. “Let’s go listen to Bull of the Woods!”

I’d hoped to spend a little more time in nature. Then again, this was our thing. “Alright, alright.” My feet slipped a little, kicking against the cold dirt. “Don’t have an aneurysm.”

He dragged me off to the dorms. Things were, just at that moment, getting interesting. I figured it was all happening outdoors.

“BULL OF THE WOODS…the new album from the 13th Floor Elevators….”

We listened to the radio promo first, some weird little tag Microbe had taped off a garage rock compilation album. A Don Pardo-ish voice raved over a set of muffled musical snippets.

“From one mind to another…to you the Elevators say…‘BARNYARD BLUES’!”

We were way into this as we were into the Electric Prunes’ Vox wah wah pedal commercial—whatever odd bits of Sixties detritus had washed themselves up for our delectation, the weirder and more psychedelic the better. Whether we appreciated these things for what they were, or if our enjoyment was a little more…considered, wasn’t clear to us at the time, and still isn’t now. Was it superiority we sought or was it a genuine recognition that all these doofuses in Beatle boots, those goons who glared from the cover of Hipsville 29 B.C. and What A Way to Die! were cooler than we’d ever be? Who knew? Except that these laughing punks, these acid-fed slugabeds from San Jose and Boulder (rumor had it one member of the Chocolate Watchband was now a professor of astronomy there) impressed us. They weren’t hippies, like those asshole Deadheads who clustered around the salad bar and wouldn’t let us in, nor were they visionaries like Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary, people who actually thought acid would lead you to knowledge. We’d heard all about that, those old heads with their Beethoven sonatas ringing through the woods at La Honda, their technicolor buses festooned with signs that read A Vote for Barry is a Vote for Fun! No, they were drifters, like Microbe and me, people destined to be forgotten by history but who’d made their peace with mediocrity early. And…what mediocrity, besides!

“Is that a…trombone?”

“No, man.” Microbe tapped his foot, twisted his head. We were lying on our backs on the floor of his dorm room that had a coarse gray coating like the baize on a pool table. “There are no trombones here.”

“You sure?”

BAAARNYAAAAARD BLUUUUZ….I knew nothing. I’d never lived or loved or been dosed by a reckless dentist before going home to write “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I only knew this record was wack. The current song sounded like “Season of the Witch” as performed by a cough-syrup-drunk hillbilly with a substandard IQ; the lyrics just dribbled out both sides of his mouth, forming continent-shaped stains on his bib. I was coming on, just, finally: The ceiling seemed to lower itself overhead, the drab lamp in the center of it glowing like a fiery tit.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and then started giggling. “Did I just say something about a trombone?”

Microbe was pissed. “Fuck you. Where did you get it?”

“Geezix.”

“What the? Geezix doesn’t—”

“No, Skeezix,” I said. “Skeezix. Sorry.”

“Oh.” Skeezix and Geezix were two guys who lived on our hall, not really germane here. All you really need to know is that everybody had a nickname (obviously), and that the two were neither related nor alike. Geezix came from Wyoming somewhere and Skeezix was from New York City, a skinny guy like a railroad spike in a trench coat, a real Times Square pervert in training. “Well, shit. How could you mistake those two characters?”

“I dunno.”

“Does he have any more?” Microbe, whose real name was Ira—he owed his nickname to hygiene, as we all did, really—sat up. He looked around. “Does he?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re tripping. Didn’t you at least have the decency to ask him if there was more?”

“No,” I said. “I was over in the Commons having breakfast and he just grabbed my jaw and force-fed me. It wasn’t like I had a choice.”

“Really? Blotter?”

I nodded. “What else would it have been?”

“And you didn’t think to spit it out and just…share it?”

“Come on, man.” You see why ‘Microbe.’ “That’s disgusting.”

“That little shit,” he fumed. “That’s just so uncool! Skeezix is a prick!”

I was pretty kindly disposed to Skeezix at the moment. I lay back down—no, wait. I was already lying down. I lay back further, feeling the floor tilt back like one of those zero gravity chairs, like I was wearing those boots Richard Gere wore in American Gigolo. Fuck.

“I’m gonna get some,” he said.

“You’ll be behind me.”

“I don’t care.” He got up and, though my eyes were closed, I could see perfectly well as he ambled across the room and stepped out into the hall. “Stay here.”

“Where am I gonna go?” My lips never twitched. The little tikkatikkatikka sound of the electric jug that was all over this record, as it was all over every song the Elevators recorded, tuned me right in. I could go anywhere without having to move. I watched him go down the hall, pound churlishly on Skeezix’s door with his fist, manage a few boorish negotiations (Skeezix himself was so high all the time that talking to him was like talking to a rhino; all you got was hide and horns and unintelligible grunting) before he came back in, working his jaw and feeling (I could see, even with my eyes closed) extremely self-satisfied.

“So.”

“So,” I mimicked. Dear God in heaven, that was a hard syllable to utter. My teeth now felt made of steel. “Wharrrrgh?” What happened, in other words. (I’m gonna go ahead and subtitle myself for a bit because…well, you know, because. Because the literal utterances of tripping children aren’t interesting to begin with, and there may have been quite the gulf between what I meant and whatever phonetic salad passed my lips.)

“That Skeezix is a reasonable man.”

“I’m sure.”

“This is the same shit he had earlier in the semester, that he got from that dude at Columbia. Not very speedy at all.”

“OK.”

“You’re going to enjoy this. This isn’t some boom-boom bathtub score-it-in-the-parking-lot-at-Worcester-Centrum-type shit. This is pure.”

“Stop talking.”

“I can see you’re enjoying it already. Foxy, I was worried about your first time. I always wanted to be a good chaperone for this experience.”

“[Redacted.]”

“You want me to flip the record over?”

I honestly don’t know what I said then. I opened my eyes and think I was surprised to realize it had stopped. Ah, Roky! Ah, Elevators! A bunch of fuckin’ goat ropers from Austin, Texas, had figured it all out. You didn’t even need to play music to hear it.

“Foxy. Hey, Foxy.”

Even transcendence gets boring after a while. When I finally opened my eyes I could see Microbe had joined me. His pupils looked like dinner plates. “What is it?”

“Shouldn’t we go outside?”

“I dunno,” I said. “Isn’t it…cold?”

“Since when did you care about cold, Inland Empire Man?”

I didn’t. “I don’t, but…there are extreme weather systems rolling in. Global blockages. I think there’s going to be another Ice Age, or at least another Cincinnati.”

“Oh.” He headed my gobbledygook off at the pass. “I have a pair of shoes you can borrow. Will that help?”

“GOD yes.”

“OK.” He shook his head. “Second Cincinnati averted. Now let’s get out of this room before it grows on us any further.”

Somehow, I managed to put his shoes, which looked like pontoons, hardcore clown shoes, on my feet. They were wingtips, which felt really weird without socks. “Jesus,” I said, “how do you drive these things?”

“Pretend they’re your fingers and you’re walking on your hands.”

God knows why, but this advice actually helped. Microbe handed me a coat and, because I wasn’t a total idiot and didn’t want to end up at Student Health Services with pneumonia (chlamydia, perhaps, but pneumonia? no fucking way), I took it. “Where are we going?”

“To the future,” he said. “The toppermost of the poppermost.”

“Don’t go all pre-Revolver on me, Johnny,” I said. “Stay current.”

I followed him outside. I wanted something, I realize now. Love, insight. We may have hated hippies, but I wanted the same things they did. I wanted to be changed. We left Microbe’s door open, but so what? Actions on hallucinogens have weird consequences. They either lead you into worlds of complication that are so baroque you forget, eventually, what caused them, or else they create little loopholes so elegant they lead you to God. By the time we’d wind our way back to the dorms, even if it was just five minutes from now, that door would seem nothing less than a gateway to Atlantis.

“Good grief!” It was dark as we stepped into the quad. “Have we been in there all day?”

“No, no,” Microbe said. “It’ll resolve.”

Sure enough, I’d been mistaken. I shook my head and…whoa there. Sunlight fell across my feet, my hands. “How’d I do that?”

“I dunno.”

I looked up into the sky and saw clouds scudding, drifting thickly across the horizon. Otherwise it was clear. “Damn,” I said. “I thought maybe that extreme weather situation I talked about was real.”

“It is real,” he said, and I had no idea if he was humoring me.

“What time is it?”

He shrugged. Neither he nor anybody else on this campus wore a watch. Professors didn’t, students certainly didn’t, and everyone pretty much went by the clock that was affixed to the library tower that was permanently stuck at 11:55. Or maybe it just happened to be 11:55 whenever anyone bothered to look at it. We lived by our circadian rhythms; classes happened whenever we felt like it, whenever we tumbled out of bed and decided it was time to go. Even the dining commons—staffed by students—opened and closed at odd hours. It wasn’t that long ago we had found ourselves having breakfast at four in the morning, prodding at cold French toast with our spoons, sipping evaporated milk. It was a mess. “Lunchtime!”

He said it with such enthusiasm I felt obliged to play my California bumpkin to the hilt. “Cowafuckingbunga, buddy! Let’s nosh!”

My high had smoothed out for a moment: Everything was crystalline and sharp, radiant and elegant; the tree bark looked supremely articulated. Even Microbe’s pallid Middle American face—frizzy hair, a turnip nose, button-black eyes—looked more human than Muppet. At last I’d found a world I could love!

“Don’t they have Jews in the Midwest?” My friend looked confused, so I added. “By ‘nosh’ I mean—”

“I know what ‘nosh’ means, you idiot! Look!”

I did look. I was looking. I could do nothing but look. But whatever it was he saw, I couldn’t find it. My world was crisp, and his, from the look of horror that was spreading across his face, must have been apocalyptic, melty and green. But it remained beyond the power of language to describe.

“Move it!” Inside the dining commons it was the hostile hour—lots of elbows and complicated maneuverings with trays, weird positions in which people were attempting to screen others out of line or else hide their food from grabbing hands. Which was weird because the commons never actually ran out of anything and all of the food besides cereal and ice cream—in fact, even that—was repellent.

“All right.” I took a plate of something writhing and red—probably lasagna, but it looked searingly, terrifyingly alive—and moseyed on over to the cashier who happened to be a girl I was in love with from afar. A sophomore, bare-armed in overalls, curls corkscrewing out from under a woolen hat. “Hi.”

I came from Riverside, California, and of the world—and by “the world” I mean absolutely everywhere that wasn’t the California desert, and this…mutant institution that was founded in the early 1970s, basically an Ivy college for people who hated rules—I knew nothing. I’d been to Los Angeles once. My father was a tenured professor of economics, and my mom, well, what could I say about her? Tennis player, drinker of vodka tonics, reader of many, many books. She had been his student when he was a TA, and now both were firmly committed to the rugged, weird part of the world in which they had each, somewhat accidentally, come to reside. Ours was the meth country, my mother used to sigh, affecting a sardonic wistfulness as we sat out on the back patio of our ranch-style home staring at the radio towers and phone lines, the infinite, hot, blasted landscape of the Inland Empire with its drab armadillo colors, Las Vegas without the neon or casinos.

“Hey, Foxy. Where’s your card?”

“I left it in the dorm. Can you comp me this delicious seafood salad?”

“Sure. Even though that’s not what it is.” She waved me past. In high school I’d had a girlfriend, or at least someone I’d slept with; that didn’t mean I’d been in love. Everyone here called me Foxy in part because of the reddish hair, in part because I was a desert creature, but also…well, I don’t exactly know why. Someone tagged me with it early on and it stuck. I was always sniffing under my pits to make sure there wasn’t some other, less comfortable reason. Do foxes stink? I took my tray and piloted it across the room, and found a table where I could sit by myself. I had no idea where Microbe had gone. He probably was still out there on the quad, watching the helicopters descend.

I had always wanted to be feral—to be, in some sense, an animal. Not just a mammal but a beast. I’d grown up in a civilized household, roughly middle class—upper middle class—and everything was so polite. No pornography, no violence, no shouting. No one had the initiative to be a monster. My father was a careless educator and my mom a lackadaisical low-wattage drunk; you couldn’t exactly rebel against that. You could try —there’d been a hardcore scene nearby when I was in high school, scads of bands with names like the Urnz and Smegmaniacs—but really, all that seemed stupid. The psychonauts of yore had something to push against. My parents, by which I mean America, weren’t positioned that way anymore. Which meant that this lysergic acid diethylamide that was sizzling through my system—the very shit that had set the Beatles on their collective Liverpudlian ass and made Bob Dylan write songs about the business of being born and driven Skip Spence to chase his bandmates around the studio with an ax and caused Syd Barrett to shave his eyebrows and melt Mandrax and hair gel over his face, the very thing, in whatever attenuated form, that had painted the culture day-glo— was nothing but a toy. An amusement. What a fucking waste.

“Hey.”

I looked up. The girl from the cash register was standing over me. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the face of your beloved on a hallucinogen before, but it is surprisingly like watching the face of your beloved perfectly sober. I felt on the verge of tears before she even sat down.

“Oh, hey,” I smiled, or at least did something with my mouth that felt appropriately gummy and hopeful. Her name, her real name, was Lula. Nobody called her anything else. She was Portuguese—her family was, though she’d grown up in Providence, Rhode Island. That was all I knew. “What have you got there?” I said, looking at her tray. “An orange? You know, they used to dose those with LSD.”

“Yep. But not this one.” She scrutinized me; her lips flexed, her curls trembled. “You’re having an experience, aren’t you?”

“Little bit.” I glanced down at my plate and saw that I had, in fact, brought my fist to rest in the lurid red center of my lasagna and that I actually had managed not to eat any of it. I’d simply mauled and mashed it across my tray. “Nothing too hairy.”

“That’s all right.” She smiled. Her face had the soft glow of an environmentally-sound light bulb, a kind of gentle radiance; her hair spilled brown and unruly around her shoulders, and she looked, just a bit, like the figure of an Italian Renaissance painting, a Titian maybe. “I’ll help you through.”

“You will?” I must have sounded overjoyed because her face cracked wide open in a goofy smile I wouldn’t have suspected she had. (Titian, my ass—this was more like Bernadette Peters in The Jerk.) She was a hippie, of course, which was part of the problem. She probably had seen the Grateful Dead, perhaps even listened to them rather than having the common sense to loathe them preemptively. I’d seen her playing hackysack in front of the second year dorm, which was why we were in this Montague/Capulet situation. I was surprised she even knew my name.

“Sure.” On our hall there was a sign: DEADHEADS with an arrow pointing one way, TALKING HEADS with an arrow pointing the other. By this peculiar compass we lived our lives. Politics, culture, it was all one and the same. “I’ve done it a million times.”

Until this moment I’d managed to hold the rest of the local stimuli at bay. I’d focused only on her face, and before that the lasagna, which looked pretty much the same only bloodier—but now my attention flowered out and I took it all in: freaks, students, innocent shaggy kids all gliding around with trays in their thrift store coats and woolen caps, the backdrop gray and transactional like an airport converted into a picnic area. They all looked so purposeful, which was amazing, considering—like Olympians whose event was general competence: Lunch Buying; Walking Without Falling. “I need to get out of here,” I said. It was like being at confession. She was the cathedral and all of us were bits of stained glass. “I need to get closer to nature.”

“Oh.” She bobbed her head and I followed it up and down, up and down. “I can help you with that too.”

“Stop! Help! Wait!!” Getting out of my clothes turned out to be a serious operation. She was sitting upright on her bed, in her room that turned out to be a perfect facsimile of Microbe’s and my own: a bunk, desk, dresser, with some books and clothes and pajamas strewn all over, along with a poster I don’t have to tell you depicted Bob Marley.

She came over and—with that patient, elegant grace with which so many women attend to the difficulties of men, if they happen to be so inclined—untied me. All she seemed to do was tap me on the shoulder; it was like being knighted.

“How’d you do that?”

She shrugged. Every move now carried contrails, aftershocks; a simple shrug was like a dog shaking off water. There I was, though, naked in the middle of her room. “Come on.” She pulled me onto her bed; we’d come up here with the express purpose of having sex (“Closer to nature, huh?” was what she said when we stepped outside the dining commons), but now I just couldn’t remember how to do it. Or rather, why. I’d bogged down in the conceptual middle. Insert Tab A into Slot B. Were we making an origami plane? Why didn’t the acid visionaries talk about this? Surely it wasn’t all revelation. Even Timothy Leary needed to eat a TV dinner once in a while, didn’t he?

I looked at her. Lula. The room had taken on some of her soothing glow; even the mantis horror that was Bob Marley no longer appalled me. I just accepted that I was afraid, that all this chaos was ongoing and all the melty parts of the world were going to go on doing what they did, deliquescing and coalescing by turns until they…what? “Just lie down,” she said, “you don’t actually have to do anything.”

So we didn’t. I didn’t. Fully dressed, she put her head on my shoulder.

“I like you,” she said.

“Why?”

But there was no “why?” I understood. There wasn’t anything at all.

Eventually we had sex. Of course we did: We were eighteen living away from home; given time and drugs and inclination, anyone our age would do anything. Given none of those things, we still would. Lula and I would wind up dating for years until eventually she’d break my heart. That afternoon she was just a child who opened a door. We lay there until twilight with her stroking my head and my own acid seizures lasting well into the day.

At last I sat up. “Look!” I pointed outside.

“Yeah?” How did the two of us even fit in that bed? It was tiny, so narrow we had to lie on our sides, knotted up like pipe cleaners.

“Snow!” It was the first truly lucid thing I’d said for hours. It was the first ordinary perception, though it was metallic, magical: The flakes looked like silver. Then again, maybe they were. “I’ve never seen it,” I said, and she laughed.

“You’re cute, Fox.”

“Maybe.” This might not have been the word I’d have chosen to describe me in that moment, impotent and acid-addled, a shy desert rat who’d found his way into her bed and then, then—

Other people were so organized. Other students even, kids who’d come to this place because we’d flipped a coin between it and Bennington, because we were too antisocial or too unintelligent—who knew?—to go to Harvard. This, this chaos, this uncertainty was how I’d staked my claim in the world. Maybe acid was for people like us, confusion’s princes, as that band we were listening to—the one Lula would torture me with for years—would put it, back at the beginning when they were still called the Warlocks. Maybe all that visionary shit was created in just this way, and Bob Dylan wrote “Desolation Row” as easily as he sneezed. I didn’t know and just then didn’t care.

“Let’s go outside,” I said.

Lula, sweet Lula, was as gentle as they came. Her father was a mob attorney, and when I met him the following summer, he cupped my round and stupid little face in his palm. So you’re the one, he said. The invalid? We were in a cake shop somewhere on Federal Hill, and I felt like I’d earned that designation, sitting with this rubicund man in a pink shirt, his gold watch scraping up against my chin like I was stuck in some scene from The Godfather or, worse, The Freshman. I’d already ruined my future by then, so it didn’t seem to matter if I fell to my knees blubbering about how much I loved his daughter, or if I kept cool, decorous, knocking back an espresso and behaving as if my deformity were simply an affectation I’d assumed to amuse him.

“Come on!” I said.

“Honey—”

I was still pristine, at that moment: None of these terrible things had happened yet. I was still up in Lula’s room watching the first snow of the season, which really was the first snow I’d seen. It looked like fast-moving, magical hair.

“Babe? Foxy?”

She kept babbling at me, but I knew what to do. Was I conscious of it? Sort of. I mean “conscious” the way a drowning man is conscious of a surface or a saguaro cactus might be that there are other things without spines. I rocketed out of the room, loosely aware that I was naked—aware, I mean, that there were other ways of doing or being things, but also aware that these didn’t seem to pertain to me right then—as I sprinted down the hall and into the quad. Freaks were everywhere at my school. I don’t think what I’ve told you has even begun to give you an idea. There was a cat who dressed only in goat skins (at least that’s what he said they were) and a trio of girls who’d formed a pact around the business of drinking their menstrual blood. What was a little nudity?

As I bolted out onto the quad, my feet were raw against the wet, slippery brick. People did this stuff in California all the time, stripped down to their bare essentials and hightailed it outside because they knew if they ran far enough—and it was never very far—there’d be a swimming pool to jump in and they could play the whole thing off. No such luck here. I was naked and on my own.

It was colder than I’d anticipated. Even a T-shirt and some thrift-store corduroys provided more protection than I’d known. The chill seemed to seep through my feet and shoot directly, bitingly to my crown like a body-length ice cream headache. Plus, it turned out snow is only frozen water. It looked so magical from up in Lula’s room, like powdered salt or lunar dust; out here it was a soft slippery crust that disappeared every time I touched it, each footfall making it evaporate into mere mud and grass.

I kept running. There was a gargantuan tree on the opposite end of the quad that felt—to me in my agitated state—like home base, like that thing that would explain it all. I didn’t even believe I was tripping anymore, although of course I was, and I would be until I woke in the student health center the next day. Frostbite, pneumonia. It turned out those aren’t just myths! I charged through the gray afternoon, that lowering twilight that reminded me, for want of another point of reference, of television static. Snow! Flakes! They came at me as fiercely, as seemingly impenetrable as a blizzard; but that’s just because everything was enhanced.

People were filing towards the commons, since I guess it was dinnertime already, and surprisingly few of them even glanced my way at first. Hey, someone must have said eventually, check out naked Foxy over there, since I could feel the slow pressure of their attention. But their regard was casual. Haven’t you ever seen a naked Californian before? And all of my own focus was on that tree. I found out later it was a Parkhurst elm, that it had stood in that very place for over a hundred years, but just then it was Gethsemane, a gargantuan set of antlers sprouting out of the earth. To my left, the people who lived on the TALKING HEADS side of my hall, those spectral, overcoated figures, were pausing on their way to the commons, tugging on their Export A cigarettes and checking me out, the year’s first real casualty; behind me, Lula came flailing out of her dorm, her voice rising reedily to the sky. I heard her calling my name but also laughing. It was too late to save me from humiliation; in fact it was too late to save me from anything. I swept my tongue behind my teeth riddled with her pubic hair. The tree rose before me, terrifying in its granite physicality. Flakes rained through its branches, pelting my bare skin. These felt amazing. And in the onrushing darkness, the collision of nightfall, LSD and freezing light, I heard Microbe approaching.

“Foxy, man, what are you doing? I was looking for you earlier. You won’t believe what happened to me!”

That’s the last thing I remember, before I reached the tree and started shimmying up the trunk. It’s hard enough to climb a tree with your clothes on, but I made it, or so they told me. My palms and chest would be completely raw once they got me back down, my thighs and biceps riddled with gashes and cuts. Eventually I got up there and squatted, hugging my knees in the crook of a branch and staring up towards where there should have been stars but weren’t. All I saw were streaks and holes.

“Come on down,” they said, the people who had come over to watch like a little mob of game-show hosts. “Come on down now.”

Meteors! Falling stars! Constellations of frozen fire!

“Come on down!”

But I stayed where I was, shivering as I watched these worlds—one after another bursting into the air—being born, never dying.

Casey Schwartz wrote a long and thoughtful profile for the cover of the Washington Post’s Book World this weekend. (That’s a non-paywalled archive link for those who’ve—ahem—canceled their subscriptions to the Bezos Bugle recently).

Lorraine Berry wrote a great profile for the LA Times yesterday, in which I have some rather pointy words for David Zaslav and blockbuster cinema.

There was an excerpt from the book in the Wall Street Journal last week. I got to chop it up with my old friend Richard Rushfield on The Ankler a few days ago, wrote a bit about Apple+’s The Studio for GQ (contra the lame Chinatown homages in episode 4, the show finds another gear in its upcoming episodes, particularly the season finale). Heck, there was even a sweet little piece about the book in AirMail this weekend.

All of this has been a blast, and I would imagine there’s more coming, though I won’t be devoting future newsletters to it. The book is out. It’s in the lap of the gods what happens next. I hope you’ll read it, however: I really aired it out and put everything I had into this book, which feels like a proper conclusion to a project I began almost a decade ago. If you’re in Los Angeles, come out and see me tonight in conversation with Tom Bissell at Diesel Books (starts at 6:30), or if you’ve got those East Side Rush Hour Traffic Blues, come by the LA Times Festival of Books on Saturday, where Griffin Dunne and I will be in conversation with David Ulin about our respective books. (Tickets required for that one: you can get ‘em here. If you’re in New York, come to the East Coast launch on May 1st at Powerhouse Arena (you’ll want for that one too, but they’re cheapies and they can apply towards purchase of the book). The Bay Area will see me on May 8th, with the boss Sterling Holywhitemountain, and May 15th will have me in Chicago at Exile in Bookville with my wondrous chum Deborah Shapiro.

It’s all happening! Come through! And I’ll be back on this site imminently—tomorrow, in fact—with a long piece that has nothing at all to do with THE GOLDEN HOUR, mercifully. I’m excited for all that comes next, and thank you, as ever, for reading—

Matthew

The seventies hadn’t really ended, as you can see from the photo above. These guys (with three exceptions, the agents were all men) look a little uncomfortable in their suits and ties. Pictured there are the partners: Bill Haber, Michael Ovitz and Rowland Perkins (seated), Martin Baum (the legend! He’d been agenting since the forties. He’d fought on Normandy Beach!), Ron Meyer—look at that tie! It’s practically a bib! —Michael Rosenfeld, and Steve Roth, who would soon be out on his ear because Ovitz couldn’t stand him. If you know anything about modern Hollywood history, you know who at least a couple of these guys are, and you probably know that the agency they founded, Creative Artists Agency, would go on to become a dominant force in the industry, and that Ovitz and Meyer, especially, would leave a lasting mark. Left out of the frame here is my father, Fred Specktor (I used the term ‘mom and pop shop’ advisedly, literally, above), who came over from the William Morris Agency around the time this photo was taken and who, in fact, is the only person out of all those forty-five employees still working at CAA as I type. CAA now has offices in Nashville, London, Shanghai, Beijing, Stockholm, Munich, New York, Atlanta . . . I mean, they’re everywhere, and the number of employees stretches deep into the thousands, but when I worked there the company letterhead claimed only a few satellite offices (London, Paris, Geneva) that didn’t really exist: they were switchboards, cutouts designed to make the company look big. But ‘Creative Artists Agency’ really was two dozen people on half a floor of an office building, the size of a family law office, and equally as many dogsbodies, of which I was one. I smoked weed downstairs in the garage—and did harder drugs with some of the assistants on weekends—pushed a mail cart down the hall delivering the trades and various deal memos, ran errands (on foot at first; eventually in a car, which I totaled one afternoon making a left on Lankershim Boulevard, as I was trying to get to Universal in a hurry), read scripts. Above all, I sponged it up. I was, naturally, the youngest person working there—I worked long hours during the summer, and shorter ones after school—but would you believe me if I told you it was a fucking blast? It wasn’t just the drugs (very, very good), or the movie stars, or the way that the movies and normal life seemed to bleed into one another. (One summer afternoon, sent out of the office to UCLA Library on a research project, I played hooky, joyriding in a borrowed E-type Jaguar to see Risky Business in a theater, then ran back to the office (stoned, panicking, afraid they’d notice I’d been gone too long), dashing across the lobby and into the elevator to realize, as the doors closed, I was alone with Rebecca DeMornay, looking exactly as she had onscreen twenty minutes earlier.) It was something else, an esprit de corps. It felt like a theater production, or a basketball team: the vibe was loose, chaotic, prankish, loud. An agent might hand me a check for a half a million dollars—no envelope; they’d want me to look at it—and tell me to run it across Century City Plaza to ABC in five minutes flat; Dustin Hoffman (who was borrowing a spare office during the casting of Tootsie) would smoke a cig with me, then convince some actress to chase him down the halls screaming at him just to mess with people. (She chased him into the conference room, where an important presentation was happening: I still remember her shouting, the queasy silence that followed, and the gales of laughter when Ovitz and the others suddenly got that it was a joke.) It felt like the montage sequences in Scarface, or (later) Goodfellas: the good times that unfold as the empire is being built. I was just a bag man—those checks really did feel like suitcases full of cash, as volatile as bombs—but I was a part of it. Later, I would understand what it all meant, that this giddy moment in time was part of a much, much bigger story, one that unfolded across many decades and which gets told in a book I have coming out next week, THE GOLDEN HOUR.

Pictured there is a relic. The CAAgents of 1982 weren’t gangsters, of course, but they had codes as if they were, and they had certain styles, identifying features. They all had vanity license plates (‘CAA’ followed by their initials) that they bolted onto their Porsches and Ferraris—you couldn’t do it if you were a trainee or an assistant; you had to be a Made Guy, a full-service agent—and they traveled in packs. There was a certain T-shirt (this you could wear if you were a junior: I had one) that was made I believe for a company softball game. There were two versions of this shirt I believe (the other was a baseball shirt, with red sleeves), but this was the more common one: company logo on the front, and a cartoon, which plays off a set of ancient Hollywood jokes (an agent will represent anything, including a talking dog, and of course, if your client does happen to be a dog, that dog wants what any other actor or writer client does), on the back. This was a real insiders thing: you had to work there, or be an important client, to have one. You’d slip one of these babies on on Saturday morning (or, if you were Ron Meyer—the one person who almost never wore a suit to the office—during the week), then slide behind the wheel of your Jag or Testarossa, maybe reach into your pocket for a little vial (etc) before you turned the key in the ignition. You were a player, man. You were an aristocrat.

I’d been looking for a version of that shirt for decades. Later (and lamer) agency tees crop up on eBay occasionally, but the original, of which there weren’t very many to begin with, has shown its face to me only once. My friend Chris Levinson, whose father, Richard, was a television writer and CAA client (he co-created Columbo, among other shows), owns one, but it is, as the image above indicates, in tatters. Which is why I decided to enlist my incredibly talented illustrator friend Samia Saad to create one in very small quantities. This was never, after all, an everyman type of item. You had to be someone (or know someone) to have it

Want one? Tap the button below for further details. There aren’t many of ‘em, and they’re made with love and care. Proceeds go to LA Ayuda, an organization offering wildfire relief for migrant workers, and if you want—if you’re quick—you can get with with a numbered-and-inscribed copy of THE GOLDEN HOUR too, so dip on in, won’t you? Your Porsche 911 is sadly not included, but you’ll feel like a Goddamn star when you wear it.

THE GOLDEN HOUR VINTAGE CAA T-SHIRT

THE GOLDEN HOUR is published in about ten days. If you’re in LA, you should come to Diesel Books in Brentwood on the 22nd (pub day!) to celebrate. I’ll be in conversation with the excellent Tom Bissell, and may have a special surprise or two in order. Details here:

April 22nd: LA LAUNCH w/Tom Bissell

At the LA Times Festival of Books, I’ll be in conversation with my friend Griffin Dunne, moderated by also-pal David Ulin, on April 26th at high noon. This will be great (tickets are required, but they’re freebies)

April 25th: LATFOB w/Griffin Dunne

If you’re in New York, catch me on May 1st at Powerhouse Arena, with the good Jason Diamond. This one’s ticketed too, and it’s gonna rule:

May 1st: NYC LAUNCH w/Jason Diamond

If you’re in the Bay Area, I’ll be with Sterling Holywhitemountain, a true king whose short stories you should get familiar with, at Book Passage on May 8th. There may be some extra trash talking at this one:

May 8th: Corte Madera w/ Sterling HWM

And in Chicago, I’ll be at Exile in Bookville on May 15th with Deb Shapiro. We’re gonna try to raise Saul Bellow from the dead (or at least Nelson Algren), but even if we can’t it’s gonna be a hoot-and-a-half.

May 15th: Chicago w/Deb Shapiro

I’ll hope to catch you out there on the road. T-shirts and tour dates aside, this book is a big deal to me, and involves so much more than the term ‘memoir’ tends to invoke. It’s a real epic. I’m super excited about it, and if you can’t make it to one of the above events (or even if you can! You have friends and family, upcoming birthdays and parents’- and sibling days and party favors to consider, after all) you can get it via an indie bookstore below. Hit it, won’t you? It’s better even than the T-shirt, and the shirt is pretty Goddamn cool.

Until soon—

These words—a kind of koan, really—kick off an article that ran in Esquire in July 1964, an article that’s been largely forgotten, but which has been on my mind lately. Vibe shift discourse seems to have died down, blessedly (was there a “vibe shift?” I’ll leave that to the John Ganzes of the world to sort out), but of course the vibes are always shifting, and of course, in 1964, they were shifting a little more aggressively than ever. The two guys who wrote the article, Robert Benton and David Newman, were the sort of people—smart, talented, perhaps a little showoffy but for good reason—who today might be writing for The Drift or N+1, but because they lived in a time when the mainstream media ecosystem had not yet collapsed, they both had staff jobs at Esquire. For the last few years I’ve had a picture of them tacked above my desk.

I love this image, which sums up their personalities just so: Newman (that’s him on the left) has that sharp, sardonic look of a Lenny Bruce or a Richard Farina—a guy who could just as easily have dropped a folk-rock record that would’ve gotten him tagged as a New Dylan and led to an inevitable flameout—where Benton looks mild but sharp, the sort of person who could put you down so subtly you wouldn’t even know it until the party was over and you’d already gone home. There’s something about these two, a kind of Frick and Frack quality. It’s possible they were total assholes. But they knew what was up.

“The New Sentimentality,” as they define it in the article, isn’t quite what it sounds like. It wasn’t some bend towards kitsch or extreme doses of exaggerated emotion, a call for a Sirk/Montovani revival. No, the New Sentimentality according to Benton and Newman was something else: a clearing away of bullshit, a Don Draper-coded sharpness that existed on the other side of the ginned-up pieties of the 1950s (“the Old Sentimentality,” as they put it). New Sentimental? The Beatles, Antonioni, Jean Shrimpton, Jeanne Moreau. Old Sentimental? Eisenhower, Grace Kelly, the Rat Pack. It seems simple enough on the face of it— “Old Sentimental” means square, right? —but it turns out . . . not so much. Nikita Khrushchev? New Sentimental. James Baldwin? Old. Proust? New Sentimental. Kerouac? Old. The determination seems to have more to do with a kind of sharpness and moral flexibility, a hint of aggression (Baldwin? Old, sure, but Malcolm X? New) that has to be the right kind of aggression (John Wayne? Pfft, Old). “Old Sentimental” isn’t even a pejorative, particularly (Jackie Robinson? Old), but Benton and Newman were sussing out a cultural change, one they were themselves going to have a hand in making.

This image, too, is pinned above my desk: an image of Faye Dunaway from Bonnie and Clyde, which was written by Benton and Newman while they were still employed at Esquire. Their futzing around with the New Sentimentality was a kind of prelude for them, a way to sound out a set of ideas they would shortly encode more fully in their first screenplay, which they banged out on weekends as a lark. These days, that very notion—the idea of writing a spec script, naively, romantically believing it stands a hope in hell of ever getting made—feels pretty Old Sentimental, but still they did it. It must’ve been quite a ride for Benton, who came from Waxahatchee, Texas, in particular. One minute he was watching Godard and Truffaut films at the Lyric Theater on the Upper West Side—just another audience member, enraptured by the European New Wave—and the next he was meeting with Godard and Truffaut themselves, as each director expressed an interest in Bonnie and Clyde (although neither would ultimately be the one to make it, of course). They wanted the picture to be raw, and real, to cut through the phoniness that dominated Hollywood (‘63 was Cleopatra, The Great Escape, Bye Bye Birdie and so on) by infusing it with New Wave style. And so they did. Bonnie and Clyde is a great film, of course, but these days I’m still more struck by that article, which seems far more modern—closer to the sort of discourse-bait you see on Twitter (or, ahem, here on Substack)—and which is filled with determinations that get weirder the more you squint at them (San Francisco? Old Sentimental, of course, but Manhattan? That’s . . . also Old, apparently) and which treads a peculiar line between libertarian self-focus (“Personal interest is the abiding motivation . . . your primary objective is to make your life fit your style”) and a kind of acute, and appealing, anti-romanticism. “A minor character who happens to excite us in a personal way is a real celebrity,” they say, using Timothy Carey as an example. If you’ve ever paid even the slightest attention to Carey (my friends and I whipped ourselves into a full froth obsession in our twenties after watching him in The Killing and in Minnie and Moskowitz), you’ll know exactly what it’s all about. “The New Sentimentality is about “what goes on in your head, really, and what goes on in your heart, really.” It’s striking, somehow, to realize that sixty years ago folks were already busy sorting things into these kinds of buckets: Old Vibes and New Vibes, what was Brat and what was Cringe.

Benton and Newman make an appearance in The Golden Hour, by the way. We take a fateful walk with Benton, one spring afternoon in 1963, while he’s still chewing on the ideas that will make their way into this article. Speaking of which—hooray! —my book is out in three short weeks! The pre-pub indicators have all been thrillingly positive: Kirkus gave it a starred review, as did Publishers Weekly. The New York Times featured it prominently in their spring nonfiction preview, and the mighty Jonathan Lethem, who knows what’s up, says of it: “The Golden Hour is sheerly a marvel: blink, and this study of the sunset of the cinema century turns into a memoir, or a non-fiction novel, or a lyric fugue on memory and loss – and all with a breath-held suspense that confirms Matthew Specktor as a narrative wizard.” There’s a bunch of other exciting stuff in the wings there, and now would be a great time to preorder it, which you can do via an indie store while receiving a better discount than you would via Am*zon if you smash this button here:

Pre-Order THE GOLDEN HOUR

(You’ll get it for 25% off if you use a code—”GOLDEN”—and 50%, apparently, if you do the whole sign-up-for-a-free-trial-and-cancel thing, which I know we all do these days more than we should, but it’s worth doing just this one more time because the hardcover is gorgeous and you can get it for the cost of a paperback if you want it, which you do, you do, you do.)

I’ll be reminding you of these dates, of course, but if you’re in LA, the launch is happening on pub day itself—April 22nd—at Diesel Books, where I’ll be joined by the estimable Tom Bissell. In New York, I’ll be at Powerhouse Arena on May 1st with our man Jason Diamond. In the Bay Area, I’ll be hitting up Book Passage with the excellent, excellent Sterling Holywhitemountain on May 8th, and I’ll be at Exile in Bookville in Chicago with the rad novelist and editor of B-side Editions Deborah Shapiro on May 15th. I’m very, very excited for these things too—it’s been a minute since I got to do real world events, as my last book came out smack dab in the middle of the pandemic—and I’ll hope to see many of you out there. But first, though, the book itself. It whips, I promise.

Preorders Are Good 🙏🏻

I’ll leave you with Timothy Carey chewing some scenery alongside Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks, and with the delightful discovery that “The New Sentimentality”—paywalled on the Esquire site—can be snagged as a PDF right here.

Until soon,

Matthew

p.s. there’s a great Brando story that appears in The Golden Hour too, but that I ain’t telling. Read and find out 🙊

No proper dispatch today—that’s under construction—but I did want to remind you all that I’m teaching later today, and if you feel like tuning in to hear me relay some questionable (but effective! useful!) wisdom about how narrators are the name of the game in fiction and memoir, ready to solve all your problems and/or provide your readers with some interesting ones, you can tune in here at 5 PM Pacific/8 Eastern.

https://myfivethings.com/class/matthew-specktor-writing-the-self-in-memoir-and-fiction/

Are there actually Five Things I’ve Learned about this? Have I truly learned them? I guess there’s only one way to find out, but I’m excited to join the various friends, colleagues and forerunners—Susan Orlean! Amber Tamblyn! Rebecca Makkai! Alexander Payne! Adam Gopnik! (lol, “meaching:” IYKYK) among others—on the Five Things I’ve Learned rolls. Tune in, if you’re free.

Back next week with some writing of substance. Until then—

“What’s that?”

Of course it didn’t matter if we were lost—the little bricks in our pockets were always going to be able to tell us where to go—but it felt providential, somehow, to have arrived in front of a museum we hadn’t read about, one that seemed a little more germane to a pair of visiting Americans, alas, than it might have at a different point in history. So we kept our phones holstered, paid a few euro and went inside.

This newsletter has been on an unplanned hiatus. Maybe not a “hiatus,” as it’s only been a month or two, but there’s been a lull as—as is my habit—I tried to figure out what to write next. Most of my writing life is spent this way, not writing but thinking, remaining generally stupid about what I might have to say until I’m ready to say it. It’s a luxury to live this way, to not feel obligated (or be obligated, by economic necessity) to rattle off takes and and ideas, and so I’m happy do to it, but I often feel a vague guilt over neglecting my practice. This isn’t to say I haven’t been writing—I reviewed Alissa Williamson’s book about Joan Didion in Hollywood, a book I liked less than I’d hoped I might, and I wrote about the Palisades Fire for the Hollywood Reporter; while I was traveling I drafted a long piece about the novelist Jarret Kobek, which will appear sometime in the next month or so—but this space, which is my own canvas, or one of them, has remained blank.

The Museu do Aljube is an antifascist museum that opened in 2015, but—perhaps you know this—the building that houses it was for a long time a prison. From the 12th Century until the early 19th it held religious prisoners, heretics; from 1820 until the early 20th Century it was a women’s facility, and then, in 1928, it was used to detain those who’d been arrested by the Salazar Regime. It remained in service as a political prison until 1964, when it closed, although Salazar’s Estado Novo lumbered on until 1974. The museum itself tells the story eloquently enough, more so than I am able to do here. On the top floor there are replica cells, and a telephone buzzer rings shrilly at intervals, the same sound the detained would’ve heard as they were summoned, one by one, to their fates.

Silence, of course, is a luxury—at times a necessity—for a creative person, but for a citizen, it can be dereliction. One thing you will, I hope, have noticed about this newsletter in the past is its general aversion to banging the nail too squarely on the head. I’m banging it now because if I don’t the nail will just hang there in space, jutting stupidly into the air. The politics of this newsletter are—you will, I hope, have noticed this too—antifascist, and if you’re not you might want to bounce. I don’t intend to spend much (or, really, any) time here lib- or resistance posting—this ain’t that type of newsletter—but I will say that mutual aid networks probably exist where you live too (if you live in LA, there’s a very useful directory of them to be found here), and if you’re not actively participating in at least one you should probably change that. Your neighborhood is full of people who don’t want to live in an oligarchic authoritarian state either, and meeting some of them in mutual aid work will do you a world of good too, I promise.

There are other newsletter topics on my mind at the moment, which means further dispatches from me are imminent. But for now I’ll just note that fifty years of fascism—forty-eight, I guess, is the exact sum between the military coup of 1926 and the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the Estado Novo for good—seems like a long stretch, more than I would prefer having to contend with here. But the tools of resistance remain as trusty as they ever were, and the answer remains what it’s always been: solidarity, solidarity, solidarity.

I’ll be back in a few days with other and better, as there’s a lot going on—I have a book out in just over a month, about which people have been saying some awfully nice things, including starred reviews in both PW and Kirkus, and I’m teaching a class on narrators for the lovely folks at Five Things I’ve Learned, which you can sign up for here—but for now I’ll just say . . . the long lens of history tends to soften things unduly. You can leave a museum and step back onto the street, then wander off to a cafe for a glass of wine, which is exactly what we did. You can take heart from the fact that fascisms end, and that all of them—whether incipient or fully established—are subject to the same laws of gravity. That’s encouraging, of course, but it’s hardly enough. Posting isn’t praxis and neither is scrolling, which is why I’m not going to fill this newsletter with further alarums, but again: mutual aid is the way. To quote my one-time boss in one of his funniest and most delightful (if, sadly, smallest) roles. “We’re all in it together.”

Until soon,

Matthew

(The view from my window at Schelling Studio1, Peterborough, New Hampshire)

The fellowship didn’t solve my problems. The book was just as elusive there as it had been in Brooklyn, but . . . each day as I sat down in my cabin I would look out the window and often see another one of the writers in residence flailing around with a butterfly net. It was a wonderful, comic sight, as Lewis—this was his name—was a stocky, cherubic dude in late middle-age with Coke-bottle glasses, almost unspeakably pallid and unathletic. The sight of him out there awkwardly waving his net (he didn’t appear to be very good with that thing) never failed to cheer me up, and eventually, after a week or so of eating dinner together and having my ass ritually kicked at the colony’s communal pingpong table (he was very, very, very good at that, it turned out), I asked him what he was doing. “I’m writing a book about butterfly hunting,” he said. “Like Nabokov?” I asked him. “No, no,” he said. “I’m not really interested in butterflies themselves. I’m interested in that anticipatory state that collectors experience before they catch anything. The catching itself is sort of beside the point.” As someone who spent a lot of time back then hunting for treasure in both book- and record stores that state was familiar to me, and so I was intrigued, but the book never appeared. Instead, Lewis—Hyde, was his last name—eventually wound up publishing a book called Common As Air, which was a history and a defense of the idea of a public commons, an argument against the enclosure of intellectual property.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about the disappearance of public spaces both virtual and physical that are not enclosed. By “not enclosed,” of course, I mean genuinely free from commercial encroachment, which none of our present approximations of a public square2—ghoulishly erosive for-profit engines all—are remotely. If you were to ask me where the despair that pretty much every sentient American feels at the moment (provided they’re not too rich, evil, or self-deluded to admit it to themselves, though I suspect even the rich and the evil feel it somewhere) originates, I would say it’s through the absence of a functioning public commons. Obviously there are other reasons, with which we should all be amply familiar by this point, and if you want to test your own conscience (but not if you want to sleep well tonight) you can go ahead and click here, but I would argue that even this particular horror largely sustains itself through the absence of a true public commons, and that the most perverse aspect of our contemporary situation remains the coopting of “free speech” discourse—in fact, of the very idea of “freedom” itself—by libertarian assholes who are fundamentally obsessed with privatization. Somewhere in The Golden Hour I make the case that the American cinema of the 20th Century was, in effect, a public commons, which is both true and untrue: “true” in the sense that a collective dream life, and a conversation about that dream life happening both inside the fourth estate and beyond its margins, cannot possibly be owned by anybody; wildly untrue, of course, insofar as both the movies themselves and the fourth estate were likewise for-profit engines. But I do believe that the erosion of that public dream life’s quality (insofar as movies, just like books, TV shows and other creative artifacts, are shaped and shepherded by publishers and platforms that have given up thinking about anything other than profit) and of the fourth estate are together the source of more misery, and are a greater amplifier of individual loneliness, than is usually assumed. When people say the movies (or the novel, or jazz, or anything else) are “dead,” this is what they mean: that the culture makes no space for them, and so, by extension, none for an intimate, noncommercial response.

All this crossed my mind yet again yesterday in reading this excellent, excellent Substack by Marco Roth. Nominally about a bad building in New York City, Roth’s piece is more fully about the enclosure of public space in an urban landscape and about what he aptly calls “the privatization of reality” by billionaires. Reality, of course, is the one thing that cannot be “privatized,” as each of these billionaires will learn whenever they run out of blood boys and whatever individual bomb, bullet, or terminal illness that is (inevitably, inescapably) headed for each arrives, but for now we are forced to pretend under their terms that it can be, and to trudge along with our headphones, our Netflix- and Spotify subscriptions, our daily doses of whatever algorithmic slop the platforms allow us3 , but for how long, exactly? “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,” Saul Bellow wrote in a novel I first read that summer at MacDowell (“if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining”), and in his 1983 book The Gift—which I read as soon as I got home from MacDowell and could snag Lewis’s books for myself—my butterfly-net-wielding friend writes “If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts arise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. Anything contained within a boundary must contain as well its own exhaustion. The most perfectly balanced gyroscope slowly winds down.”

Those italics, in fact, are mine, but that passage speaks soundly (as Hyde’s work in general does) to the limitations inherent in market oriented thinking, and of that dream (or nightmare, really) of infinite growth these vampires choose so avidly to imagine. I haven’t seen Lewis now for decades, but his books—particularly Common as Air and The Gift (subtitle: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property)—remain worthwhile. If that passage’s vaguely spiritual air (“the face of mystery,” etc) now seems—also—kinda cringe, I’d argue that this not down to the qualities of Lewis’s writing or his argument but is, rather, just another example of what we’ve lost. If it’s no longer entirely possible to speak of “artistic gifts,” or of the idea that one might pursue them for reasons other than money4, without a modicum of embarrassment, I’d ask you . . . why, exactly, do you suppose that is? Who, exactly, has foreclosed upon that aspect of the discourse, and to what end?

I’ll leave you all with holiday wishes, with the hope that whatever gifts you have or will exchange throughout the season are amply of the nonrefundable, pricetag-free variety—that what Lewis Hyde calls their “gift economy” value equals or exceeds their market value—and that our plutocrats will each be visited by three ghosts5, and with this song here by an old schoolmate of mine, which I had a long and memorable argument with my now-ex-wife about just as our marriage was coming to an end. She thought it was only a petulant complaint about a musician not getting paid for her labor where I said it was about the obligations one has to one’s talent, the impetus to make music whether or not one is paid for it. She may have been right. But I still think the song—just like you, and just like I do too—knows better.

Until soon—

5

In a sense, this is a rhetorical question. The fetishization of “style” in art—the so-called “aesthetic turn”—seems to have become, for the most part, a right-wing talking point1. I don’t care about politics, I care about aesthetics is slack thinking at best, reactionary nonsense (what was it Walter Benjamin said? “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life?”) at worst. To imagine “style” and politics can be separated is mistaken, but it also seems to me that to dispense with thinking about style altogether, to imagine that a book’s politics might be its most salient feature or provide a totalizing perspective from which to view it, seems similarly bogus. There’s no doubt that a slew of crummy books in recent memory have gussied up their progressive politics with aspirant “lyric” prose that might make anyone yearn for the plainness of Hemingway, and that—conversely—a lot of even-worse contemporary writing takes on gnarled and anachronistic textures that feel imported from the more baroque prose of the 18th or 19th Centuries (I’m certainly not going to link to it, but the neoreactionary horseshit coughed up by Claremont Institute types like Curtis Yarvin springs to mind here.) This isn’t really what I mean by “style” though. My buddy Sterling wrote a piece recently on beauty, something he talks about a lot and which I think some folks misunderstand as meaning “prettiness” when that’s not what he’s talking about at all. I reckon he means more what Joyce does in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a state of “aesthetic arrest.” I suppose what I mean in talking about style, if I had to define it, would be the management and manipulation of tone (or, rather, tones). Good writing, broadly speaking, has more than one. It’s always operating in more than one register. It’s the tension between these things, which are almost always in conflict with one another, that keeps the writing interesting. Without it, a book (story, paragraph—even a tweet, perhaps) tends to fall flat.

I’ll show you what I mean. Leaving aside Denis Johnson (pictured above in his cameo appearance in Alison Maclean’s adaptation of Jesus’ Son, precisely because nobody is better than Johnson when it comes the most aggressively conflicting tones), I found myself re-reading Charles Portis’s Dog of the South this weekend—shout out to Jonathan Lethem for reminding me I hadn’t read Portis in a while—and Goddamn. What an irresistible writer he was. One can see it from the book’s first few paragraphs, which in their charm and incongruity snap one straight to attention:

My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone. I was biding my time. This was October. They had taken my car and my Texaco card and my American Express card. Dupree had also taken from the bedroom closet my good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles. It was just like him to pick the .410—a boy’s first gun. I suppose he thought it wouldn’t kick much, that it would kill or rip up the flesh in a satisfying way without making a lot of noise of giving much of a jolt to his sloping monkey shoulder.

When the receipts arrived, they were in lumpy envelopes and the sums owed were such that American Express gave way to panic and urged me to call B. Tucker in New York at once and work out terms of payment. It was my guess that this “Tucker” was only a house name, or maybe a hard woman who sat by a telephone all day with a Kool in her mouth. I got out my road maps and plotted the journey by following the sequence of dates and locations on the receipts. I love nothing better than a job like that and I had to laugh a little as the route took shape.

What a killer opening. Leaving aside the obvious disjunct between the situation and the narrator’s response to it (were someone to run off with my partner, car, and credit cards, I’m not sure I’d be quite so relaxed about it), there’s also the way the hard charge of the first sentence gives way to the contradictory slowdown (“I was biding my time”) of the second, and a whole host of precise and/or ludicrous details—lumpy envelopes, “B. Tucker,” and best of all that “sloping monkey shoulder”—that tell us the narrator’s gonna be a gas to hang out with. By the time he gets around on the next page to talking about Hannibal and Hernando de Soto, it’s evident that this man belongs to a comic American tradition (his closest analog is probably Saul Bellow’s similarly cuckolded, and similarly pedantic, Moses Herzog), but of course that comic vibe is underpinned by—and alternates with—an inescapable sense of pain. A lot of writing—a lot of bad writing, frankly—can’t do this, or anything like it. It operates in one register, which is tedious. But it’s not just, or even necessarily, a matter of conflicting mood. There are other tensions that can galvanize a piece of writing just as well, as in this passage, which also struck me as excellent when I stumbled across it again yesterday:

In the afternoons I hiked up the big hill behind Occidental College, where I could look over Eagle Rock and Highland Park and out further, to the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica on the coast in the distance. The air was toasty and fragrant and a breeze pushed around clumps of wheatgrass on the dry hillside. From above, the undulating hills of Highland Park looked like ocean swells that had frozen and been slowly covered by dark green vegetation. Far below, cars moved silently along the boulevards and highways like droplets down branches. It seemed the whole city had been built on the bottom of a vanished sea.

When I got stuck I’d take long aimless drives into parts of town that no one talked or wrote about. The eternal Los Angeles is composed of infinite intersections full of nothing remarkable. These are the corners you move through while going elsewhere and stop at only when the signal says to. Each one offers a similar but always slightly different combination of peeling signage, concrete pathways, and buildings painted and repainted in so many layers of nameless color that it’s no longer possible to tell whether they’re new or very old. These places don’t ask to be discovered and are rarely remembered. Here the city is so devoid of historic significance and attraction that you wouldn’t know its tempo unless you deliberately attuned yourself to it.

It wasn’t unusual for me to end up on one of those nowhere corners at the end of an afternoon, when the sun stretches to its longest, lowest point, leaving a layer of low-tuned radiance on everything it touches. During that window, every surface holds the glow and for a passing moment it seems possible to see things as they are. Once a day, the light in Los Angeles can turn the most hideous and anonymous buildings into palaces; it can make the most forgotten worlds seem perfect.

This is from my friend Sam Sweet’s wonderful Hadley, Lee, Lightcap, and what makes it so good isn’t just the stately, sonorous quality of the sentences themselves—although that’s excellent—or the descriptive precision of the view from that hilltop, but a subtler tension between permanence and transience, which is so deeply embedded in every metaphor and image (the hills—permanent—being likened to ocean waves—transient—and the “eternal” Los Angeles being likened to Atlantis before being also being “devoid of historic significance”) that you can’t possibly escape from it. It’s a placid-seeming passage that’s fighting a war in every syllable, and its symphonic tensions are such that even when he lays on what could be an obtrusive poetic effect (as in the stretch of alliteration that happens with “longest, lowest point, leaving a layer of low-tuned radiance”) you barely even notice because those tensions are holding any rhetorical excesses at bay. It’s a passage about a place that’s really—as with all writing that’s worth our fullest attention—about time. That, to me, is what style is, really, and perhaps all it is: a byproduct of tensions that can’t possibly be resolved.

Such tensions are invariably political, of course. But they’re not only political2, any more than a person is only a set of data points. And they gesture towards something Ruby also nods to in Kushner’s book, citing a passage in which Kushner’s narrator refers to what she calls a “four AM self,” the person who might exist beneath their own political directives, postures and commitments, a stubbornly egotistical core that precedes ideology. Ruby seems to dismiss this notion (or, at least, to dismiss the novel) as fundamentally reactionary. Perhaps it is, having not yet read the novel, but I wouldn’t be so sure. Any novel—any work of art, really—worth our time is likely to be carried by competing impulses, political and otherwise, and of course it’s this very set of contrasts that allows anything to at least stand a chance of being good. (It’s why so many novels with righteous politics on the surface tend to fail. They don’t make room for their own contradictions.) Ruby never really comes clean on whether he likes Kushner’s novel or not (although it’s fairly clear, reading not far between the lines, that he doesn’t). Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter. Or else—he just doesn’t care.

Later,

MS

No one knows anything. This washy little proverb—what passes for “wisdom” in the provinces of the motion picture business—has been attributed to everybody from William Goldman to Louis B. Mayer, but really what I like about it is that no one even knows who said it. “No one knows anything” is what Hollywood says about itself, and it’s right up there with “it is what it is” in the world of dumb, irritating tautologies, but the remark has a faint, and consoling, utility as the post-election Takes Economy churns into high gear. Things happen, and by the time people are attributing causes to them, those causes have already changed shape and are getting ready to drive the next thing . . .

I started writing The Golden Hour in 2018. That feels like the Pleistocene now—really, forever ago—but I suppose it’s more accurate to say I conceived the book in 2018, then spent a long while drafting the proposal before I started writing it for real in late 2020. The idea was to write a kind of companion to Always Crashing in the Same Car, a mothership—a sprawling, panoramic mural to that book’s smaller still life—that would explain the conditions of that book’s questions about ‘failure’ and success. What was the American motion picture industry? Where did it sit—past tense very much intentional—in the context of Empire, and what does it mean now that this central common experience, the organizing cultural pastime of the 20th Century (“Wanna go to the movies?”), is effectively gone? That is to say, The Golden Hour is a book about work, about conflicts between labor, ideology and value, between culture and capital, and between people and corporations. It’s a story about the movies that’s really about the contraction that has occurred across every aspect of American (and non-American) life slowly over the last seventy years. I put everything I had into it, and no matter how Gen X I am about keeping the self-promotion here to a minimum, you can (and should!) preorder it here:

Preorder The Golden Hour

Or here, if you prefer:

No One Will Know U Paid Bezos

If you’re a critic, reviewer, Bookstagrammer, store owner, influencer, etc etc etc, please drop a note to my publicist, Brian Ulicky (brian@auderemedia.com), for an advance copy. And for those of you who don’t know, preorders are essential to the life of a book—they do a lot to drive everything from store placement to quantity to crucial buzz and enthusiasm—so please, please, please do preorder for yourself, for family and friends, for holiday gifts (that will arrive a month or three late, perhaps, but will be more appreciated for that!), etc. It’ll help me keep the lights on around here, and make it easier for me to write the next one.

Please? (It's Actually Cheaper Here)

So what’s in it? A good story about David Lynch, a better one about Sean Penn, French New Wave, the Black Panther Party, a painting by Jasper Johns, a goofy scene involving eleven-year-old me and a Quaalude, a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, what it was like to call Robert De Niro “Bob,” a fair number of things involving the ghosts of James Joyce and Don DeLillo, The Searchers, and, uh, many, many, many other people, places, and things besides. It’s a memoir, yeah, but much of the book is about other people, told from perspectives that aren’t my own. I couldn’t be more excited to share it with you all, so one last time, with feeling . . .

You Know You Want To

No one knows anything. Back when I was the world’s most reluctant studio executive, during the go-go nineties, I was endlessly amazed by the revanchist decision making of my employers, the way the fluke success of (to cite just one example of many I can recall) a killer snake movie over the weekend led my employers to green light one about a killer crocodile first thing Monday morning. Why would you do that? I wondered, as I stifled my yawns in the staff meeting. Don’t you know that in a year-and-a-half, when this movie is out, everything will be different anyway? Of course, different only occasionally means better, and back then Donald Trump (yes, he’s in The Golden Hour too, albeit mostly in prefigurative terms, playing around its margins) was just a real estate developer. No one knew anything then either. If today seems dire, that’s because it is dire. But that doesn’t mean it will remain dire, only dire, or that conditions can’t change in wholly unanticipated ways. They do all the time. They will here too, and while this turn for the worse may (or may not!) last as long as we imagine it will, to suppose that the left can’t rise again (or at all) would be the wrong supposition indeed.

As a reward for putting up with my panhandling, I’ll leave you with this delicious curio from those very nineties. The bit here is that a young Hollywood director has signed with Creative Artists Agency, and his CAAgents are working so hard on his behalf—tracking him down while he’s doing his laundry, calling him fifty times a day—that he’s feeling harassed. Sure it’s a bit like a Saturday Night Live skit gone rogue, but herein, too, are people you’ll find inside The Golden Hour: my late, lovely friend Jay Moloney, enigmatic talent agent Michael Ovitz at the peak of his powers, and, of course, my father (cameos here and here. Also appearing are Sly Stallone, Jean Tripplehorn, Ben Stiller (hey, wait, he’s in The Golden Hour too), Crosby, Stills & Nash, Brian Grazer wearing a fireman’s jacket, and, uh, one of the worst power ballads you’ve ever heard (fast forward to it if you like: it starts here). Made, I suppose, for agency training purposes, the internet is forever even for things that predate its existence:

I’ll be back soon, with other, far less wallet-oriented things on my mind. Until then—

Matthew

I got a letter from a friend the other day. Something he’s written—his latest—has been met mostly with negative reviews. My friend wasn’t complaining (“They may be right,” he said), but given that he’s had the kind of career that’s largely gone otherwise—rave reviews and major awards—he was absorbing an experience that was pretty much new to him. These days, of course, one is lucky to be noticed in the legacy media outlets, or what’s left of them, with a pan or otherwise, so I’m certainly not inclined to play any sad violins for my friend, but it did make me wonder, not for the first time, that much of the criticism I’m seeing on Substack these days is markedly more interesting—more partisan, more sticky and persuasive, somehow both more argumentative and more open-minded—than I’m seeing in those legacy outlets, and by far. It’s better, much better, even when it’s plain too that the involvement of an editor might have sharpened these pieces to a finer a finer point (not a criticism, more an observation that the legacy system has its merits, and the engagement of talented editors is one). But why?

A few weeks ago, I read a review that really stuck in my craw, a piece that seemed surpassingly bad from a critic I’ve generally found to be quite good, Parul Sehgal. Sehgal was, presumably/hopefully still is, an excellent critic, but a review of Garth Greenwell’s new book made me see spots. The review was a rave, and while I have no quarrel with Greenwell—the opposite, as what I’ve read of his has struck me, too, as fairly strong, sometimes excellent—but the review seemed to bleed a kind of self-congratulation, the odor of something excessively pleased with itself. Sehgal’s piece opens with a paragraph on the intractability of pain as a literary subject—a reasonable enough observation—and then swerves: “Perhaps it is a great anatomist of pleasure who can fill in some of the blanks in the story of pain.” There’s nothing wrong with this exactly (“sure, why not?” one thinks), but then . . . I dunno. She tells us Greenwell “has been lauded” for his writings about sex, and then: “his stately, sinuous sentences have brought a formal feeling to scenes of cruising.” After praising Greenwell’s writing for its “documentary precision” and this novel’s “almost showy” technical challenges, she backs up to wonder, “What sort of technology is a sentence? It can reflect, like a mirror; it can reveal, like an x-ray. It can arrange and bring order to chaos, like a pair of hands.”

What is it about all this, really, that gives me the ick, as they say? Is it the clanky alliteration (“stately, sinuous sentences” followed by “formal feeling”—yes, I see the Dickinson allusion there)? Is it the pontificatory cluster of metaphors, which range from the overfamiliar (mirrors, x-rays) to the only vaguely-sensical (a pair of hands can do a lot of things—back up a cursor to erase a lame sentence, for example—but “bringing order out of chaos” is not quite one of the many particulars that spring to mind)? Ultimately, I think it’s the fact that she’s working backwards. Greenwell’s excellence—the excellence of this particular novel—is presumed, and what she’s doing is merely demonstrating (or not even really ‘demonstrating;’ decorating) this presumption. Instead of arguing, working out her thoughts in front of us—pushing towards the borders of her understanding—she’s starting with her verdict (“this writer/book is excellent”) and then working inwards, lighting off fireworks to show us what she’s already decided she knows.

Being a house critic is a hard gig, and The New Yorker seems to kill ‘em off faster than most. Even the preternaturally gifted—besides Sehgal, I’m thinking of James Wood, Anthony Lane, Pauline Kael—tend to end up with a dulled edge, a steak knife becoming a butter blade practically overnight. I’ve always assumed that the reason for this is what Renata Adler isolated in her now-legendary NRYB takedown of Kael: that house critics are forced “to pretend that each day’s text is really a crisis,” in other words to inflate books (films, records: whatever it is one is tasked with reviewing on the regular) that might leave one more or less indifferent—as most works of art actually do, for everybody—into objects demanding a more intense, and therefore counterfeit, level of response. Sehgal’s recent takes on Sarah Manguso’s novel (which struck me as a violent, almost willful misreading of a book that, admittedly, takes no prisoners) and on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s current book, wherein the lede seems to offer a presumably-unintentional self-critique (“It is a truth only fitfully acknowledged that whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give an opinion column,” she writes, leading me to wonder what . . . kind of writing she imagines a house critic’s recurring slot to be, exactly?), suggest a talented critic whose compass needle may be spinning a bit. Hopefully she’s able to recalibrate at some point. Sehgal is far too good to wind up in what her Coates piece also terms a “live coffin.”

I recently encountered a different, shall we say more stringent, take on Greenwell’s novel here, from a writer named Naomi Kanakia. (I’ll say again, with feeling: this is not about Greenwell’s book, which I haven’t read. RT does not equal endorsement! This is about styles of approach, not about Greenwell’s book itself.) Kanakia is approaching the book not as a house critic—someone with a formal apparatus or a legacy platform already at her disposal—but as a reader. And in a sense—in one sense—she does exactly what Sehgal does in reverse. “A friend of mine has been texting me about the Garth Greenwell novel,” she begins, and when the friend observes that it’s “bad,” Kanakia responds “Of course it’s bad! Aren’t hype-machine books usually bad?” Even if this happens to be true (alas), this seems . . . unpromising. The presupposition that a book is bad seems a worse place to start than the presumption that it’s great, at least where criticism is concerned. It seems like what proceeds from there can only be in bad faith. But Kanakia dives right into it, excerpting a nice, chunky paragraph from the novel—about 500 words—and probing the excerpt not for its slightly unusual comma placement (which Sehgal somewhat mysteriously overpraises) but for its content, which she finds banal. (“Yes, if you’re the kind of person who meditates on global capitalism while eating a Snickers bar . . . you can write about that. But so what? Anyone can do that.”) “Banal” is a subjective judgment, of course, but there is something bracing about watching Kanakia tunnel into the text itself and react with incredulity (“Can you imagine reading page after page of this?”) before, towards the end, turning her questions back on herself. (“It’s possible I just don’t get it,” noting that people didn’t get Proust or late Henry James in their moments either, and that William Gaddis’s reputation was first rescued by a cantankerous critic named Jack Green, who didn’t much care for the mid-20th Century’s literary establishment either.

It’s possible that the pleasure in reading this piece comes because it is a pan, which, as we know, tends to be more enjoyable than reading a rave (albeit there’s often something just as performative, and as distorting, in legacy outlet pans as there are in legacy raves, but that’s a topic for another time). But I don’t think so. Kanakia’s response is vigorous. It’s delightful (unless you happen to be the subject of it, I’d imagine), and it feels like it’s cutting deliberately—violently, even—through a cloud of noise, doing something to clear a path for the signal, by which, of course, I mean the actual encounter between reader and book, where Sehgal’s piece does the opposite. Anyone responding less than rhapsodically to Greenwell’s book in light of Sehgal’s review would inevitably ask, Is there something wrong with me, that I don’t quite love this? Kanakia’s review, by folding that very question into itself, does the opposite: it clears room for a reader to have a more honest response. It does not, ultimately, disabuse me of my own curiosity about Greenwell’s book, or the inclination to read it myself. Is it a great piece of formal literary criticism? No, not really—that’s not what it’s aiming at—but it is lively, honest, intelligent, interesting! It strikes me somehow as being in far better faith than Sehgal’s piece, and is decidedly more rewarding to read.

Being a house critic is a tough gig, as noted, and the seductions of one’s own pretense to authority are difficult to resist, as The New Yorker, in particular, carries its own imperial baggage. I am reminded of a passage in Jonathan Lethem’s excellent Chronic City—a book that was itself obtusely received in its time by a house critic Jonathan Franzen once referred to as “the stupidest woman in America”—in which a paranoid critic named Perkus Tooth riffs on what he believes to be the mind-controlling properties of The New Yorker’s font: “to read The New Yorker was to find that you already agreed, not with The New Yorker, but, much more dismayingly, with yourself.” Tooth goes so far as to re-type New Yorker articles in courier font before reading, the better to resist their institutional gravity, and perhaps we needn’t go that far. But resist these seductions we must, and Substack seems—for now*—a viable place to do that.

I’ll close with a postscript from my, uh, friend Leonard, who seems to do an exemplary job in this audio clip of responding to his own critics. I have no idea where this is sourced from—what year this concert recording was made, or where—and the sound quality is rough, so listen with the volume turned all the way up (or on headphones if you can). When an audience member shouts “Cut the schmaltz, Lenny, “ Cohen responds with characteristic good humor, asking that the lights be brought up so he can see his accuser (“Why, you’re just a man, like me!”) and saying, among other things, “It may be schmaltz to you, but it’s real life to me.”

I love this exchange for a million reasons—it’s like a cooler, less petulant version of Dylan’s response to the legendary “Judas!” heckle—but most of all for this. The audience member is free to think whatever he wants—the reader may find the content of any given book “banal”—but it’s real life to Cohen, and so not diminished in the slightest. This seems right. After all, this here—literature, criticism, art—is real life to you and me too. It’s too important to fuck it up by treating books like coffee table artifacts, boring ratifiers of opinions we already know we have, rather than as living, reckless documents.

Until soon,

Matthew

*I say “for now” and mean it. The sudden influx of high-profile legacy media figures like James Patterson and Tina Brown,** both of whom have materialized on Substack in the past few days, strikes me as a very bad omen for the platform’s long term health and viability. Enjoy it while we may, I suppose.

** Someone—I think it was Vince Passaro, in Harper’s—once described Brown’s relation to contemporary letters as “like that of General Sherman to the state of Georgia” after she slashed the number of short stories The New Yorker published every week in half during her tenure there. I think about this often.

“So. What racket are you in?” I told him (“I’m a novelist”), and he shook his head and murmured, “Oh. That’s a tough racket. I tried that, but I just couldn’t hack it. It only worked out for me when I had a steady domestic life, and I—didn’t have that, most of the time.”

It’s difficult to convey, really, the temperature of our conversation, which wasn’t long, but wasn’t really short either: about twenty minutes. For some reason, we were alone together, the room was full, but it was just the two of us talking, and nobody came over to interrupt or to disturb the famous man, and I sort of enjoyed playing along, pretending I didn’t recognize him, or care who he was. I suppose I didn’t care who he was. Having lived in and around Los Angeles for a long time, having grown up in a crucible of the movie business, where usually the remit was to ignore famous people—they were family friends, business colleagues, or (later) personal friends, and in the end their celebrity was the least interesting thing about them—it was second nature not to care about such things, and I was far more interested in Cohen’s other qualities: his evident warmth and good humor, his sly and appealing way of seeming to deflect attention, his aura of interest and curiosity. My uncles and cousins are like that too. We talked for a while—he asked questions about my habits and routines—and eventually, because I couldn’t resist, I asked: “And you? What racket are you in?” He told me he was a touring musician. “Talk about tough rackets,” I said, and he smiled. “Yeah. There’s no real way around that, is there?”

All this was a long time ago. I don’t remember the year, exactly, but it was somewhere early in Obama’s first term, the swollen epoch in which the terminal patient had a temporary air of rude health, so to speak. For a brief while, I enjoyed this encounter, and my memory of it, as a kind of reminder that the life of a working artist even at its best is difficult, or at least not plush. A few years earlier Cohen had been embezzled out of the bulk of his life savings, and so had been spurred back on the road and into the recording studio, away from what might have otherwise been a period of comfortable retirement. It didn’t seem to bother him too much (though, naturally, I’m sure it did), not to the naked eye, and I liked his wry, old-timey way of putting it: “What racket?” Of course the arts are a racket! Everything is a racket. But (and, man, I can still see that little smile, that little ironic gleam) they’re the best racket, the only racket. If you’re going to die for something—and you should, because the only alternative is to die for nothing—die for those.

As luck would have it, because Los Angeles is a weird, weird place, I started running into Cohen with regularity. Not constantly, but often enough over the next few years that it began to feel a little peculiar: looking over to see him next to me at a stoplight; brushing by him on my way into an elevator; seated between him and Ed Ruscha at a dinner party to which I’d somewhat inexplicably been invited. Most of these encounters weren’t the speaking kind—he became more of an augur of fortune; Hey, I saw Leonard Cohen walking out of a Kosher market on Pico, this afternoon—and the few that were more or less repeated the first one. I never wanted to remind him we’d met (why would I? Our few conversations were substantive enough to be interesting, but not quite singular enough that he should be asked to remember them, or me), and the truth is, I liked it that way. I like art because I’m not tasked with searing myself into the consciousness of its maker, and also because I’m not tasked with the burden of knowing the person behind it. Not that I haven’t known and loved any number of artists, famous and otherwise, personally, but there’ve also been cases where the experience of knowing them was . . . not particularly additive, and so I was oddly charmed by having an amnesiac’s experience of Cohen: the same first meeting over and over. I will say that he seemed, always, the same: gentle, kind, and approachable. I never commented on who he was one way or the other: I either pretended I didn’t recognize him or (as with the dinner party) it was a given that everybody knew and so there was no need. I may have leaned on him a little hard at that party, mostly as refuge from the untalkative, almost inanimate, Ruscha—I felt like I was crammed between a person and a concrete wall—but it was the same conversation each time: writing, what it was like, how he’d found it discouraging, reading (usually poets, we discussed: Cavafy, Lorca). You don’t need an artist to be who you wish them to be—weirdly, it’s sometimes almost a relief when they turn out to be a real prick, a disappointment, since it does nothing to alter the attractions of the work, or its meaning—but it was charming to find Cohen almost exactly the way you’d wish him to be. Not to everyone, I’m sure, but to me, at least: a stranger he happened to meet many times.

What is the point of it, I wonder? Not of this story—I’ll come to that—but of the arts? It isn’t to make you a better person, it isn’t moral instruction, it isn’t about—another poet Cohen and I discussed a little—“How to Live, What to Do,” but it isn’t about mere distraction either. It’s really about what these encounters with Cohen were about—a recurring encounter with a stranger, with that stranger who also happens to be yourself—but it’s also true what Gilbert Sorrentino says in his wonderful, piercing story “The Moon In Its Flight:” “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.” Last summer—July ‘23, as I was pushing through the final set of changes before delivering the first draft of The Golden Hour to my editor—I started to feel funny. I don’t mean “funny” as in merely weird, alas, I mean uncomfortable, and then with shooting pains in my side. I was typing at a standing desk, shifting from foot to foot, before finally, one night, I went to the ER, where they discovered a kidney stone and, what was worse, a growth in my bladder. I had a surgery, two surgeries, to remove a cancerous tumor, and by the time I was done pissing blood (they got it, but since then there’s been a few courses of immunotherapy to protect against recurrence and periodic painful scopes to keep an eye on things) I was so freaked out I didn’t know whether to be grateful (were it not for that kidney stone, I would have been—I would be right now—in much deeper trouble) or terrified. I still don’t. Art helps, of course, with that—if you’ve got something to say, say it now, while you can—but not entirely. Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.

Of course, Cohen knew that. His work was in touch with death if it was in touch with anything at all, and the air of amusement and irony that rose from him—an air that he and I had in common, I suppose—spoke to that as well. I’ve always loved that kind of writer, and that kind of person, the most. People who seemed in some sense as if they were already dead, or who wrote like it. Denis Johnson was one of those. Charles Portis. Shirley Hazzard, even, in her moments of lethal detachment, the sentences that punch through a scene to sever an artery. But I was thinking of Cohen even as I wrote, shifting from foot to foot, pushing ‘send’ to deliver my manuscript before piling off to the hospital for surgery. My mother had met him a handful of times too, something I’d never mentioned to him. She knew him through her friend Judy Collins, the singer who first made “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire” famous, although that friendship dissolved sometime in the late sixties and I don’t believe she ever saw him again. She loved the songs, and Cohen’s own versions of them, and played those records to me over and over again in my childhood, and so they, too, were part of what made me an artist, and of what were, unfortunately, unable to rescue me from anything, just like they cannot rescue you either. But.

The last time I saw Leonard (and I suppose, in the end, I can call him that, right? “Leonard”), we were in the waiting room of a radiologist’s office in 2015. I was there for a scan, an unrelated matter that turned out to be nothing, and the room was empty except for—him, sitting in his suit, holding a styrofoam cup. I sat down and he looked up and smiled, without recognition. I reached for a magazine, then thought better of it.

“Excuse me. Are you Leonard Cohen?” Not because I didn’t recognize him, but because I wanted, for once, to make it legible, and I suppose to express my gratitude for his work, and his existence. Which suddenly seemed—an older man, a radiologist’s office—more tenuous than I’d previously assumed.

“I am.”

Somehow, it didn’t take. I said something about his work, and he said thank you, and then he turned it around and said, “And you? What racket are you in?”

He said it the same way, and then, when I told him again, he said the same thing: “Oh,” he said. “That’s a tough racket.”

So it is, I guess, but since then I’ve had tougher. And since then Cohen has died (going under on the eve of the 2016 election, which seemed ideal an ideal moment to say goodbye, even if his passing left me feeling a little extra bereft), and art seems less important than it did before (less, but also more, because that’s sort of how these things work: the capital-I Importance some things have when you’re younger gets replaced with a lower case iteration that’s also more urgent, and more intense), and the world seems worse, of course, but the thing is, all of this is a lie: the world is the same slaughterhouse it’s always been, certainly no better but arguably not “worse;” art does rescue some people from some things, even if it can’t spare them from the ultimate thing, and Leonard is still here, even if he’s also gone, turning to me with his cup full of orange barium sulfate and tilting it towards me, smiling. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to finish off this delicious beverage.” I have no doubt that stuff was nauseating. But of course, he finished it, down to its final drop.

Until soon,

At some point, Hollywood stopped making movies about working class people—or rather, it started making them as sentimental fables about upward mobility during the Reagan era, and then more or less dispensed with them altogether—and while the reasons for this are obvious (there’s no better way to bulldoze a people than to pretend they don’t exist), the fact remains that American cinema’s decline arguably starts here: with the studios’ abandonment of class as a meaningful aspect of storytelling. It’s something I’ve grown attentive to, in any case. Watching A Woman Under the Influence last weekend, with Sam, both of us were struck by the fact that Peter Falk’s blue-collar municipal worker could afford to live in a two-story, five-bedroom house—with three children, no less—in Hollywood, supporting his wife and family on a construction worker’s salary. Cassavetes spent a lot of time searching out that location, making certain that the house (which was an actual location, not a set) would correspond with the Longhettis’ economic reality. One can only suppose it did, but the same house (which last sold in 1979, for $44,000) would cost nearly $2 million today. This, by itself, tells you almost all you need to know.

When James Earl Jones died last week, I found myself ticking back through his memorable performances and then, when I landed on Matewan, thinking of John Sayles. Sayles hasn’t made a feature since 2018, but there was a time when Sayles’ movies, like Cassavetes’ in fact, occupied a modest if meaningful slot in American culture. His were genuinely independent films made outside the studio system, well before the term “independent cinema” was coopted by the likes of New Line, Miramax, etc. His 1980 debut, The Return of the Secaucus 7, was widely credited with inspiring The Big Chill a few years later, and he’d later go on to score modest hits with films like Eight Men Out (1988) and Lone Star (1995). The truth is, Sayles has had a fascinating, and rangy career—not too many Hollywood directors have won a MacArthur grant (1983), published a handful of novels (it’s been a long minute since I read it, but I recall 1991’s Los Gusanos, in particular, as being pretty good) *and* written a bunch of exploitation movies (The Howling, Piranha, etc) to keep the lights on—but I hadn’t watched any of his movies in quite some time. I remembered them as sort of workmanlike: solid, intelligent, and politically on-point, but lacking the intensity of direction and performance that (again) a Cassavetes or a Charles Burnett were able to achieve with comparable resources. The best of the lot, as I remembered it, was 1991’s City of Hope, a film that, generic title aside, managed a large cast and a broad canvas into something I recalled (I was twenty-five when I last saw it) as striking and moving. For a long time it was tough to see, but it’s rentable now in a number of the usual places (Amazon, AppleTV, etc), and free-with-ads for those who prefer it that way (I wouldn’t) on Pluto**, so we pulled it up a few nights ago for a viewing.

It holds up. In fact, better than “holds up,” as the film feels like a dry run for The Wire in miniature, with multiple storylines intersecting—that of a corrupt property developer and his son; a local alderman and his Nation of Islam constituents; a meek college professor falsely accused of sexual assault after a botched mugging—to excellent effect. If the film lacks the galvanizing irony of Robert Altman (Sayles’s most obvious influence here), it’s deft and assured, and the direction I once would’ve considered merely workmanlike seems confident and sharp, if never flashy. The cast (among others, David Strathairn, Lawrence Tierney, a young Angela Bassett, and Vincent Spano) is uniformly excellent as well. You might check it out if you haven’t seen it lately, or ever. It’s every bit as fresh—fresher, even—as it was in 1991.

I talked a bit more about class and Los Angeles with an English journalist named Samuel McIlhagga recently in a conversation that was published earlier this week, one I enjoyed as it strays a little from my usual interview beat.

Check out my conversation with McIlhagga for Protean Magazine here.

And if you happen to be in New York on September 23rd, I’ll be doing a panel discussion with Stacey Schiff and Roxana Robinson, and the actress Emily Mortimer, on the great, great Shirley Hazzard.

Tickets to the event are available here. It’s gonna be a great one, I promise.

Until soon,

Matthew

**

Summer’s over, I guess. In some ways, this one felt like it never quite began—Sam and I were ejected from our apartment in June, thanks to a water leak from upstairs that’s turned into an ongoing nightmare of construction, and so we’ve spent the past few months couch-surfing and hotel-hopping—but here we are. For a week or so we were up in Ojai, where I was able to finish off the last copy edits and legal queries for The Golden Hour, and then I found myself at loose ends. I’d burned through the handful of books I’d packed when we peeled out of our place and so I had to choose something to read off our hosts’ thankfully well-appointed shelves. My eye slid past the Zola, the water-logged copy of The Brothers Karamazov (I’ve read it recently enough, though the notion of it being read in a swimming pool, which this copy clearly had been, made me laugh) and settled on The Sheltering Sky, a book I’ve owned in multiple editions over the years but somehow had never gotten around to reading.

Why not? Particularly given that I’d read and enjoyed other Bowles novels over the years (Let it Come Down was a favorite, in my twenties) and a bunch of his short fiction as well, albeit “enjoyed” may be a rather hedonic term for the experience of reading something like A Distant Episode, one of the hairiest and most perturbing stories in the modern lexicon. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t gotten around to it. One might not require sweetness and light from the novel—I don’t—but an ambient temperature slightly higher than the far side of the moon’s, at least, is generally appreciated. Then again, there I was in the middle of an orange grove during a string of hundred-degree days. Not exactly as dry as Bowles’s Sahara, but fittingly hot, and fitting too as something to chase those copy edits with. Part of the reason I chose to go with Ecco for The Golden Hour was because the press’s founder, Daniel Halpern, had also founded the literary magazine Antaeus, a periodical I’d battened onto obsessively in the eighties. It was in Antaeus that I’d first read Bowles (who, I think, put up the money for Halpern to get it up and running) alongside Guy Davenport, Cormac McCarthy, Kay Boyle, Czeslaw Milosz, and a ton of other writers who were likewise formative for me. It seemed right to bookend the experience of writing The Golden Hour, then, by reading Bowles’s best-known novel, a book about which I’d managed to remain curiously ignorant. I knew that it, like much of Bowles’ fiction, was set in North Africa—in this case, Oran, and various points south—and that it involved an American couple whose marriage slowly disintegrates under the psychological and atmospheric stresses of the desert. I knew, of course, that Bertolucci had directed an adaptation in 1990, although somehow (perhaps it was the oily and off-the-mark-seemig casting of John Malkovich, Deborah Winger, and Campbell Scott as the three points of a love triangle) I’d managed never to see that either. But this was all.

Port, and Kit. These are the names of Bowles’s travelers, names that might border on the arch considering there’s no safe harbor to be had for either of these underprepared Americans (Oran is a port city, naturally, but the novel turns almost immediately towards the interior.) They’re already on the outs sexually, and a fellow American named George Tunner, who’s hitched on to them, has his eye on Kit. Port wanders off from the hotel that first night to a cafe in the old quarter, where he meets a man who leads him to a place beyond the city walls: a tent, and inside it, a girl . . .

Sexual wanderlust, naturally, will prove to be the least of Port and Kit’s problems. Soon, they will meet another American—a weaselly man named Eric Lyle, traveling with an older woman he claims is his mother—and their situation will devolve sharply from there, but I was struck immediately by the book’s ultra-vivid sense not just of its place but of a kind of residuum of experience, and of the glum erasures of colonialism.

The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things. “Since the day the first drink was served at this bar,” he thought, “how many moments of happiness have been lived through, here?” The happiness, if there was any, existed elsewhere: In sequestered rooms that looked onto bright alleys where cats gnawed fish heads; in shaded cafes hung with reed matting, where the hashish smoke mingled with the fumes of mint from the hot tea; down on the docks, out on the edge of the sebhka in the tents (he passed over the image of Marhnia, the placid face); beyond the mountains in the great Sahara, in the endless regions that were all of Africa. But not here in this sad colonial room, where each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room.

An excellent passage, but, as someone who’d always bracketed Bowles alongside, say, Burroughs and various other Beats (probably the closest thing Bowles had to a cohort besides his wife Jane), a surprising one. Bowles’s Moroccan exile may have seemed alluringly cool to a number of his American peers, people like Norman Mailer who credited him with “opening up the world of Hip” and inviting various nihilistic currents into contemporary literature, but The Sheltering Sky turns out to be a lot closer to Conrad, or even Flannery O’Connor (Eric Lyle’s “mother” is a spectacular grotesque, very much reminiscent of the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a story Bowles admired tremendously) than it is to Naked Lunch.

Bowles, of course, can’t be held liable for whatever misprisions may have sprung up around his work—for whatever hip or gaudy notions might have summoned tourists and writers to Morocco in his wake—and while the question of Orientalism has dogged him, perhaps not unfairly (Edward Said hated his work, as does Colm Toibin apparently), I took the novel down in a pair of sittings. Summer may be gone, but there are worse ways to beat the heat still.

In many ways, the most engaging thing to come out of reading The Sheltering Sky has been a reminder to turn back to Bowles’s wife’s work. In many ways, she was the stronger writer of the two, and pulling Two Serious Ladies, her only completed novel, off the shelf for the first time in several decades also, it has lost none of its radically alienated majesty. (Plus, one isn’t forced to consider Jane’s sexual tourism, as one is, alas, with Paul.) Their marriage may have been a strange one—like Kit and Port, they were sexually estranged for the bulk of its duration, albeit because they were each more interested in same-sex partners—but as a creative pairing it’s one of the more interesting unions of the 20th Century.

All for now, but I’ll be back soon with more on The Golden Hour, and perhaps on a figure that’s begun to entice me in advance of the next book, small inklings of which are starting to appear. Apparently it’s going to be scorching this week in LA, so Sam and I may well be forced to seek refuge elsewhere yet again,

Matthew

Lately I’ve been thinking about Generation X, that waffly and uncomfortable demographic I’ve loathed ever since it bothered to define itself and its alleged sensibilities in the nineties. Like the true Gen X-er I am, I rejected just about every primary text upon arrival: Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X, Less Than Zero, Reality Bites (God did I hate that one, the script for which I read a year or so before the movie arrived in theaters, and which struck me as hopelessly corny and synthetic), Pavement, Prozac Nation. I’ve since come around on a couple of those things, but the hapless, uncommitted posture that was ascribed to my generational cohort struck me as bullshit, some elder’s idea of what my friends and I were like, and so I denied it in my own, uh, hapless and uncommitted way. In other words, I was as Gen X in my attitudes as they come. (“Slackers aren’t real,” I told myself, as I flipped through a copy of Motorbooty magazine on the bus to my twenty-five-hour-a-week temp job in San Francisco, then spent the rest of my time sleeping in, hanging around record shops and playing basketball with my friends . . .) I was the perfect mark for all that stuff.

I think of all this both because I’ve finally finished a book that considers my own experience as being fully entwined with a generation’s—a “systems memoir,” is how I’ve described this book to those who’ve asked, very much along the lines of the systems novel only, y’know, a memoir—and because even my approach to this very Substack (occasional, something I write only when I feel like it) seems extremely Gen X. Last time I mentioned a paid tier, and I may still launch that, but something in me resists, whether it’s ambivalence around selling out (lol) or reluctance to create for myself a sense of obligation around it. It’s a luxury, I realize, but most writers should be free to write, or at least publish, when they feel internally impelled to, rather than churning the hamster wheel of the 21st Century media economy. That belief, of course, is extremely Gen X-coded, something I would imagine most of my Millenial and/or Gen Z friends would feel differently about, but all the same. No matter how I try, I can’t escape the attitudes—cynical, beleaguered, too self-conflicted to be small-l libertarian but too stubborn, really, to be anything else—I once insisted were neither my own nor my cohort’s when I was younger. Which only shows what I knew. When a reader wrote to me not long ago to (I paraphrase) thank me for “redeeming” Generation X after {redacted book title X/redacted author Y} with Always Crashing in the Same Car I thought the praise was a little extravagant, but I accepted the premise. Gen X, man. That’s me.

I thought about this recently when I went to the movies. Sam, my wife, wanted us to drive to Glendale to see a documentary. I was tired, not paying attention—I’d had a lightly painful/invasive doctor’s office visit the day before (Gen X: alas, we’re not so young these days)—and so I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go. But we piled into the car (“it’s a documentary about a record store,” she said, reminding me that her friend—our friend, now—Adam Goldberg produced it, and that Jonathan Lethem, my pal/our pal would be in conversation with the director afterwards), and off we went. I like record stores, even if I’m not sure I need too many documentaries about them, and so I went in with exactly the attitude you’d expect: a little grudging, but willing, relaxed. Hopeful, but not too hopeful. This could be good, I thought. But I had my curmudgeonly, Gen X doubts the movie was going to flip my switch all the way.

Well. The trailer for Chris Wilcha’s Flipside quotes a review that describes the film as “about a record shop the way Moby Dick is about a whale.” Which is true, so far as it goes. But the thing is, Moby Dick really IS about a whale—its whiteness, its various properties, and one man’s crazed pursuit thereof—where Wilcha’s film . . . is only partially, peripherally, elliptically “about a record shop.” Indeed, as the movie unfolds, lateral stretch by lateral stretch (first it’s about a record store—a dusty little outpost in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey called Flipside Records, where Wilcha clerked as a teen—but then it’s about Wilcha’s early success in his twenties with a documentary called The Target Shoots First, and then it wanders off to focus on a jazz photographer named Herman Leonard, and after that on an abortive project featuring Ira Glass), one begins to wonder what, exactly, the movie is really “about.” Not in an irritable way—the film is sure-footed, charming, and just pensive enough, with each zone of focus absorbing and delightful—but one remains unsure where Wilcha is going as he ropes in Judd Apatow, David Milch, David Bowie, an oddball Jersey comedian named Uncle Floyd, a writer named Starlee Kine. It becomes a matter of holding the movie’s many strands in equipoise, hoping he’ll be able to stick the landing.

In the end? Oh boy, he does. But how he does exactly—it comes down to a final scene and needle-drop, which left me in tears—is the pleasure of it. You know he’s going to, and yet you don’t see it coming. At some point in the screening I leaned over to Sam and said “This kind of reminds me of Always Crashing in the Same Car.” Which was an odd and slightly uncanny feeling—it seemed a kinship of spirit, subject and sensibility; nothing too explicit—as usually when I catch the face of one work of art shining through another that face tends to belong to somebody else. But I loved it, and somehow wasn’t surprised when I ran into a friend a few weeks later, the wife of a Gen X musician whose reformed band is presently on tour, who said “Hey, we saw a movie the other night that reminded us of your book.” Whatever watermark or thumbprint, likeness of feeling or mood, might link Wilcha’s work and my own, the comparison delighted me. And since Flipside, after a handful of screenings that garnered an avalanche of rave notices (this one, from the New Yorker, is nice), is finally available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, and various other streaming platforms of convenience, treat yourself, won’t you? I promise, you will be enthralled.

I’ll wrap this up with the assurance there really will be more—much more—coming soon. The Golden Hour, the aforementioned systems memoir that has eaten up my writing time over the last year or two and made this Substack far more occasional even than it would otherwise have been, really is coming soon. Copy edits and legal review is looming, and galleys will be off to the printers in a month. I’ll have more to say about that, and about the many, many doors that book opens onto—more, I think, than Always Crashing had—shortly. Until then, and for now, dive into Flipside. You’ll be a real lamestain if you don’t, so slip into some wack slacks and swing on the flippity flop with it at your earliest convenience.

Until soon—

Matthew