The Personal Review

Stephen Lennhoff, "Rhythm & Blues"

2012-01-22T19:14:00.000-08:00

Boy-o-rama

Review of Stephen Lennhoff's film Rhythm & Blues

Why Rhythm & Blues hasn’t become a cult classic by now should be a mystery to anyone interested in the gay scene and its cultural by-products. A hilarious send-up of the world of male escorts in 1990s London, Rhythm & Blues (2000) was released around the time of the feel-good musical comedy Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and perhaps suffered by comparison. Originally attacked for bucking the trend toward uplifting, heart-warming stories that seem moralizing today, Stephen Lennhoff’s street-smart spoof replaces syrupy piety with pure camp and a dash of raw Warholiana—while also avoiding the soft-porn diversions of a Bruce La Bruce. Oddly enough, the film (already ten years old) evokes such classic 1970s heterosex comedies as No Sex, Please, We’re British! and the Carry On series with their stock-in-trade of sex-crazed pranksters played by the likes of Kenneth Williams and Leslie Philips (famous for that lecherous “helloooo!” line). But in Rhythm & Blues the heroes are all poofters, the dialogues are cleverer, and the plot is smartly stepped-up with queer twists and cheeky tweaks à la John Waters. And while no Divine graces its scenes with her raunchy magnetism, an irresistibly silly cast of characters takes up the slack, enjoying a fun-filled romp through the world of rent-boys, sex shops, bad art collecting, and other crimes against respectability.

When pretty-boy John (played by Paul Blackthorne of “24” and “ER” fame) shows up one day in the classic cruising grounds of a London cemetery, he is immediately sized-up by two outrageous drag queens who’ve already staked their turf. But the new kid on the block wants to make a bigger splash. Before the queens can get their chops in, John has teamed up with Byron (Ian Henderson), a motor-scootering skinhead and hustler who persuades his new friend to join the Boys Galore Escort Agency, in dire need of “a few good men.” The desperate proprietors Mitzi (Gary Fairhall) and Bethsheeba [sic] (Sue Tilling) are quick to recognize John’s earning potential. Within minutes, John and Byron are dispatched to the London mansion of one Bad Daddy, the agency’s most extravagant and beloved customer (Angus MacInnes of Hellboy, Witness, Star Wars). Meanwhile, a murderer has claimed a second victim from London’s club scene, grabbing the headlines and spreading fear through the gay community. Who might the murderer be? Rest assured, the sex-workers at Boys Galore have all been thoroughly vetted! But there’s something about Bethsheeba’s latest recruit—too perfect by half—that worries her. If only she could put her finger on it….

Later, Bad Daddy holds court in a sumptuous setting of fine antiques, objets d’art, first editions, and two intimates: his full-time partner, French puppeteer and would-be designer Jean-Claude and an ex-RAF officer named Harold, starved for new blood but looking for love. Byron’s and John’s arrival prompts a very fine discourse from Bad Daddy on the culture of rent boys, or what he calls “rhythm and blues”: an exchange system in which rich, cultured men like himself raise up the more beautiful, teachable boys from the flotsam of everyday life. John seems ideally suited for Bad Daddy’s pedagogy, while Byron, with his rough-trade manners, is beyond hope. “Stop interrupting me!” Daddy finally shouts in the midst of his squabbling company, “Can’t you see I’m pontificating? Do people interrupt the Pope when he pontificates? This is MY Vatican!” Ignoring him, Byron leaves the room to go to the toilet where he promptly shoots up.

A wild night of frivolity, drugs, private avowals and promised favors ensues. John struts his stuff in a private photo shoot and discusses philosophy with Harold (What IS better? Blakean friendship or Nietzschean will to power?) More rent boys are required; the agency is short, but some new boys are quickly rounded up, interviewed, and delivered to Bad Daddy’s badass address. This doesn’t prevent a progressive gay activist from trying to spoil the fun, but he’s quickly identified and rejected once Mitzi and Bethsheeba ferret out his hostile views of the British Monarchy. There’ll be no political interrogation of this agency’s swanky clientele!

And still another gay man’s mutilated body has popped up! Could it be the work of John—that seductive philosopher? Or Byron the addict (done because they was too menny)? Or perhaps Bad Daddy himself, indulging his cynical erotics of “rhythm and blues”? But now it’s time for a puppet show: the ridiculous “Garden of Love,” Jean-Claude's unintentionally funny allegory of failed artistic pretentions. The pageant elicits only eye-rolling and yawns from the party until the unexpected arrival of Byron, who, in a violent, drug-induced fit, attacks the puppets—and DROPS DEAD! Now the fun really begins!

Promoted as a film “with the good taste not to have any,” one could also say that Rhythm & Blues has the good sense to keep us guessing and amused with its boisterous mix of ribaldry, irony and grace. With a deft, witty script by Michael Jones and original songs by Marc Almond, Rhythm & Blues offers a refreshing, yet sly, tribute to sex, friendship, and male beauty that almost any fairy-minded person will enjoy. The film deserves a second look.

by David L. Sweet

Ellen Sussman, "French Lessons"

2011-11-08T19:09:00.000-08:00

Subordinate Conjunctions

Review of Ellen Sussman's novel French Lessons

I once taught English in Paris, so when I learned a novel set in Paris had been published, I became curious. After reading a hundred pages of Ellen Sussman’s French Lessons (Ballantine, 2011), I realized I had stumbled across a genre of literature I did not understand.

It’s a mystery to me why some people read only romances, or literature written with one gender in mind. Is it possible to write modern romances that veer dangerously away from convention, that say new and provocative things without losing one’s audience? And what about Paris? So many great novels have been written about Paris it’s hard to imagine anyone tackling it in our time. But there it is, still tempting the American writer with all its cultural cachet.

Unfortunately, Sussman’s novel about transnational love and language-tutoring turns the famed City of Lights into a Capital of Pain (no thanks to Paul Eluard). Like the genre it represents, the book discourages intellectual honesty or wonder, replacing both with slim plots and facile artistries, culminating in a preachy allegory in which one sex assumes proprietorship over human sensitivity and language while the other accepts its fate as a race of moral inferiors. We’ve been coddled and pampered for so long in our national media bubble, one almost despairs of anyone finding inspiration abroad again.

In Sussman’s frame narrative three French tutors meet for coffee one morning before setting off on their individual assignments: three needy Americans in a fog of cultural displacement. Verb conjugations might be more interesting than what happens, since the stories just confirm the obvious cultural claims that girls will be empowered and boys will be bored. The tutors—Nico, Philippe, and Chantal—have all slept with each other already because that’s just what French people do in the American imagination. But will the sick, old-world crew manage to seduce the naïve, new-world visitors? That’s the big question in this kind of novel and the answer is almost always No—at least not in any way that will challenge our assumptions about the French, about sex, or about love (the last presented as a purely American value provisionally bestowed on pretty French girls who curb their instincts for pleasure and self-abasement).

The beautiful Chantal is at the center of everything. We know this because Sussman got the idea for her story while living in Paris and arranging a tutorial for her husband. But the tutor turned out to be gorgeous, giving the author second thoughts. Although Chantal is already entangled with Nico and Philippe, she complains that her handsome tutee, Jeremy, hasn’t hit on her. It’s their last lesson and Chantal is ripe for conversion to the American Way because her boyfriend Philippe is a serial lady-killer and Nico, his replacement, seems inadequate (he’s a poet who writes about something naughty he did as a boy, but he’s no Rimbaud).

What Chantal needs is Mr. Right. Unfortunately, Jeremy is married to a famous American actress named Dana Hurley who, like Sussman, is paying for her husband’s French lessons! It’s clear Dana not only wears the pants in her marriage but symbolizes authority in the novel. We know this because all tutorial trails lead to her big film shoot on the Pont des Arts over the Seine. The promised liaison between Chantal and Jeremy is doomed from the start thanks to the tough, professional woman who enforces the American fidelity factor. In fact, Jeremy is just like Nico—sentimental, anxious to please, safely domesticated in his artsy cocoon as an interior decorator and architectural restorer. How cutely apt it all is!

The real man in this novel is the brash, handsome Philippe. But he must be exposed as the shallow French cad he is. Sussman makes quick work of him, sandwiching his story in the middle of the novel like a slice of gamey meat between two thick pieces of white literary bread. He never speaks—he’s always the object of some weirdly Lacanian gaze, fetishized as pure irresponsibility. His tutee is the frustrated Riley, mother of two and wife of Vic, an American exec. Vic, surprisingly, speaks perfect French, works with French colleagues, and is having an affair with his French secretary. Naturally, Riley hates him, and we do too. But Riley also hates Paris and the Parisians, with their beautiful language, their sophisticated mores, and their obnoxious habit of looking splendid and leisurely all day long.

Though Riley is a victim of her choices, Philippe must be singled out as a sexual predator who hungrily consumes the buttered croissant she offers him. But in the end, she realizes she doesn’t want an affair (she knows it’s sordid because Philippe’s apartment is “shabby”). She wants real love. She quickly returns to Florida and her mother who’s dying of cancer. Now that’s real. We are grateful to see Riley go, for everyone’s sake. Sex is not love: Sussman draws a clear, hard line between the categories. The sort of people who substitute one for the other, or who confuse them, are clearly defective in the view of post-millennial American romancers.

The last of the stories is actually the first in the trilogy, but it’s too long and boring to go into, except to say that Josie is in mourning for her deceased lover and arrives alone in Paris to find Nico. She comes to terms with her loss by playing a mind-game with herself and acting out a pantomime of young love with her tutor. Nico hopes to consummate the affair by running off with his client to Provence, but Josie fails to come to the station, leaving Nico with a pair of unredeemable tickets.

In the end, we realize that the only acceptable lover for the intended reader of this novel is a faithful spouse. Jeremy fills the role perfectly since he recognizes, despite Chantal’s charms, the superior claims of his wife. Who could fail to see the allure of star-power and legitimacy over mere prettiness or exoticism? But is the author asserting that money, success, and influence are the keys to a good relationship, or are they just helpful adjuncts to the real thing—a deep, soulful unity that comes to those who wait?

While these might seem the only alternatives, I think Sussman is after something else—something writ large in the figure of Dana Hurley, as a celebrity, an actress, a mother and a wife. More than anything else she signifies the woman-as-artist in her many spheres of influence, tempering and taming her man of choice with apparent effortlessness. The lesson? Cultivate your art, gentle lady reader! The story affirms a woman’s natural gift of expression—she is a true creature of language and feeling, unlike those male pretenders. And with that insight, one can guess the value Sussman places on her literary abilities, which seems quite high.

I’m glad there is an entire genre out there to help people feel good about themselves. What bothers me about novels like this, with their calculated mix of literary pretension and popular pandering, is the refusal to commit to anything but to protecting the target audience’s feelings, its narrow sense of dignity or outrage. It’s a genre for people who live for sensation but who shun ideas except as confirmation of cherished platitudes. And although some of Sussman’s Amazon fans consider the book racy, even “raunchy,” it’s hard to see why. Just because there are one or two scenes of people assuming the missionary position or exposing a pubis doesn’t mean anyone’s values are going to be challenged. No, it’s all about puffing up the usual suspects for mass consumption. So while I might envy the success of writers who have learned this little trick, I’ll reserve my admiration for those who haven’t.

Reviewed by David LeHardy Sweet

Tim Brown, "Second Acts"

2011-09-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

One Act Play

Review of Tim Brown’s novel Second Acts

Are there any second acts in U.S. history? With foreknowledge, could we have somehow acted differently and gotten it right? According to Tim Brown’s latest novel, Second Acts (2010, Gival Press), perhaps the best thing the Twenty-first Century has to offer the Nineteenth is Oprah Winfrey-style interview formatting with a dash of local suffragist or abolitionist spice. Nothing too radical, unless you want to get tarred and feathered—which sometimes happens in this otherwise delightful romp across Jacksonian America, when Chicago was still a skunk-cabbage patch and Wall Street got burnt to a cinder in the Great Fire of 1835 (an event we might consider re-enacting today!).

Set in the near future of our own time, Brown’s jaunty narrative (which won the 2010 London Book Festival Award for General Fiction) tells the story of one Dan Connor, an average but likable computer engineer, who rides a time warp back to 1833 to retrieve his adulterous, cocaine-snorting wife, Rachel. She’s ditched him for an egomaniacal, award-winning physicist named Bruce Bilton. With the help of his colleague Barry Stompke, Bilton has figured out how to break the time barrier, propelling himself out of the 21^st Century and back to the past with his other, less licit partner, Rachel, leaving Stompke behind to reap the rewards. Outraged, the jilted Connor forces Stompke to send him back too so that he can track down the randy pioneers. It’s not exactly clear why Connor wants Rachel back, except to spoil her plans and hopefully enjoy once again the great sex she’d already stopped giving him before running off.

On the road to finding her, he meets up with native-American squaw Listening Rabbit, or “Bunny,” who identifies him right away as a time traveler, thanks to her mystical powers. She is also a transvestite male, which our right-thinking hero fortunately discovers before making any social gaffes with her. Bunny’s cross-dressing or “two-spirit” lifestyle appears to have always been tolerated among her Potawatomi tribe; but having recently been jilted by her own husband for an actual female, she agrees to accompany her empathetic visitor from another future in a practical, if uneven, alliance (i.e., as his servant). Connor’s and Bunny’s unlikely but likable team-up amuses the reader but unsettles the westward moving folks they keep encountering on their journey east, thanks mostly to Bunny’s antics and yelps, her sexual adventures with men, and the harsh cultural judgments she offers on other native Americans she happens not to like. (Rival Huron women are routinely derided as dog fellators.) It’s one of the quirky realities of 19^th C life that Brown illuminates and exploits in his wacky fusion of historical and science fictions.

While told from Connor’s point of view, chapter by chapter, the story intercalates Rachel’s manic diary entries fraught with all the 21^st Century frustrations an independently-minded woman might experience in the backward backwoods of American history. Her entries always seem to be completed just before Connor arrives in time to discover he’s missed her. But instead of feeling freed of the shackles of marriage, Rachel finds herself oppressed by Bilton and 19^th Century gender codes. Despite rigorous prepping for their journey—one that Bilton had hoped to profit big from with his advanced scientific knowledge—Rachel must come to terms with her lover’s entrepreneurial deficiencies and spendthrift ways in a younger, less forgiving America. Flight is always prompted, not by Connor’s belated arrivals but by Bilton’s latest business debacle, usually the result of overestimating his own intelligence or underestimating his new contemporaries’ ignorance of basic physical laws.

By contrast, Connor’s narration represents the rational voice of the morally-centered white male hero working methodically to jump-start his broken marriage in an America that should seem utterly alien to him. But it’s clear that, despite the inconveniences and nasty prejudices, the 19^th Century fits Connor’s temperament fairly well. Armed in advance with a supply of pure-gold krugerrands, Connor is safely transported across Lakes Michigan and Erie to

the cities of Buffalo, Niagara, and finally New York itself, the Emerald City of the Americas in its economic adolescence. Unlike Bilton, Connor is propelled to the top of the social pyramid as an incipient philanthropic plutocrat. He’s even learned how to wield a mean bullwhip, either in self-defense, or—to the astonishment of his proto-leisure class chums—to smite a rampant boar! In a sense then, the book is also a sort of postmodern, pre-term Horatio Alger story wrapped up in a familiar Twainian jokiness, though most of it set in Manahatta.

The old patriarchal order seems gentlemanly enough at the top, albeit under the benign, watchful eyes of Connor’s new friends and flunkies: Mr. Gallatin, a former senator and current president emeritus of the National Bank in New York, and Mr. Pemberton, head of a detective agency that mistakenly traces Bilton and Rachel all the way to Louisiana (where they never once set foot). It’s hard to believe the aging Gallatin is already in a genuine struggle with Tammany Hall’s emergent political machine. In the end, it will take the intervention of another time-traveler who shows up later in the story to bring the city back from the brink of its more anti-democratic tendencies. (He will fail, more or less.)

Of course, it’s the ugly part of the 19^th Century that unsettles us most as readers. Consequently, the novel can’t always afford to go into it too much: to do so might disturb the comic effect of the book’s more generic aims, regardless of what hybrid elements are also at work. But Brown is too sensitive a student of American history not to remind us of its checkered past or its pockmarked present. Brown admits the big apple can get pretty wormy at nighttime when the muggers come out—and downright life-threatening in the Five Points district. But readers of Second Acts won’t have to tangle too much with the denizens of such places. Nor with the blacks—though at least one African-American manservant is on call, as well as a “negro” banjo-player who sings a version of “Turkey in the Straw” that tells the story of “Zip Coon” who becomes the first black President of the United States! (The singer turns out to be a white man in black face, prompting Connor’s one spontaneous moment of 21^st Century liberal ire.) Slavery is mentioned as a topic of continuing debate, but Connor never publicly takes sides, even if his sympathies are with the abolitionists. To do so would put him too much at odds with the establishment and with the success he’s managed to find in old New York.

In effect, he’s a postmillennial member of the silent majority! While Brown implausibly suggests that 19^th Century New Yorkers were racially and ethnically tolerant, it’s illustrated only in cases when the Other arrives in small numbers. This makes tolerant curiosity easy enough. It also makes life pretty good for Bunny, thriving in New York as an assimilated native-American who takes to wearing corsets and flounces, cooks exotic meals of wild game for Connor’s distinguished houseguests, and finally becomes a marriage counselor to paleface couples. She also ends up instructing Mr. Gallatin in the finer points of Potawatomi grammar as a native informant for this early founder of American ethnology.

On the other hand, Rachel—as a kind of proto-post feminist—also turns out to be in a minority of one. But unlike Bunny, she regularly takes issue with her surroundings. Indeed, she becomes the most adventurous of Brown’s 21^st Century protagonists, exploring and debating the country’s social and political fault-lines in its ante-bellum context. And while she, too, is gradually assimilated to New York society, she has moments of crisis she can only overcome by ideologically engaging with that society. She ends up organizing public lectures at the “Downtown Lyceum” to be given by the most radical speakers of her day—or at least, of their day. It is at one of these events that she and Connor come closest to meeting up before most of downtown New York goes up in smoke, the catastrophe that reunites the couple for the big come-uppance and for final reconciliation.

The great advantage of going back in time is that one might alter the course of history for the better. This is the view of one Sam Tilden who has followed Connor from an even later time (the year 2075) with the express purpose of ending slavery before the Civil War can take place! The great fear, of course, is that one might accidentally make things worse or even annul the conditions necessary for one’s future existence. The irony of Brown’s novel seems to be the fact that there really are no second acts in the way one would like—just a few improvised stunts that reaffirm the pathos of American imbecility and greed. Brown’s narrative suggests that a truly comic clash of discursive formations can only happen when visitors from the future avoid head-on confrontation and just let history be. When such conflicts become naked and raw, we get mass destruction—as Mark Twain’s conclusion to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court reveals in one of that book’s less amusing gambits. In Brown’s book, however, the great make-over-er, Tilden, sees his quixotic undertaking get snuffed-out in turn by historical realities no historically-displaced reformer could ever uproot alone. Tilden’s efforts produce almost the reverse of his desired effects, effects that confirm, not alter, the history we may or may not already know from the books: The so-called Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876, which resolved a disputed presidential election and led to the removal of all remaining Union troops at the end of Reconstruction—not to mention emboldening Southern Democrats who promptly began legislating Jim Crow laws in their respective states. The fictional Tilden of the future can only repeat the failed presidential candidate of the past he already was. Instead of trying to stamp out slavery, perhaps he should have focused on preventing the Hayes-Tilden Compromise that hastened segregation, an object-lesson for any future Al Gore who might be waiting out there.

In the end, the novel is a story of marital redemption, a fact that explains—by contradicting—the reference in the title to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quip that there are no second acts in American lives. Second Acts offers a philosophy of reform and forgiveness that our own culture of contests and political circuses mostly derides (consider the recent Wiener roast in American politics). In his eccentric, comical tale, Tim Brown manages to look critically at these derisive attitudes—though he, too, reaffirms them in a fundamental way, if one considers the broader spectrum of historic acts and political actions.

Reviewed by David LeHardy Sweet

Gide, Cocteau, Flaubert and Nerval in Egypt

2011-07-04T17:41:00.000-07:00

"Orientalist Divagations: Four French Authors in Egypt."

by David LeHardy Sweet

Studies in Travel Writing (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) 14.2 (June 2010): 197-213.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13645141003747272

http://www.studiesintravelwriting.com/issues.php?id=670

Alex Garland, "The Beach"; Michel Houellebecq, "Plateforme"

2011-07-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

"Absentminded Prolepsis: Global Slackers Before the Age of Terror in Alex Garland's The Beach and Michel Houellebecque's Plateforme."

by David LeHardy Sweet

Comparative Literature 59.2 (Spring 2007): 158-176.

http://pages.uoregon.edu/clj/SweetSlacker'sAbstract.html

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1022108/absentminded_prolepsis_global_slackers_before_the_age_of_terror_in/index.html

Shirley Johnston (author), Sherif Sonbol (photographer), "Egyptian Palaces and Villas"

2011-07-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

"A Reel Around the Fountain"

by David LeHardy Sweet

Al-Ahram Weekly (English edition). No. 799 (15 - 21 June 2006): 13. Book review of Egyptian Palaces and Villas by Shirley Johnston and Sherif Sonbol.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/799/cu4.htm

Edward Said, the Avant-Garde

2011-07-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

"Edward Said and the Avant-Garde"

by David LeHardy Sweet

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 25 (July 2005): English section, 149.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/4047455

David Lodge, "Thinks"

2011-07-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

"A.I. at Universal U."

by David LeHardy Sweet

The Nation 273.4 (July 23/30, 2001): 42 - 43. Book review of Thinks, a novel by David Lodge.

http://www.thenation.com/node/22763

Frank O'Hara, Jackson Pollock

2011-07-02T07:22:00.000-07:00

"Parodic Nostalgia for Aesthetic Machismo: Frank O'Hara and Jackson Pollock"

by David LeHardy Sweet

in Journal of Modern Literature 23.3/4 (Summer 2000): 375-391

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_modern_literature/v023/23.3sweet.html

John Ashbery

2011-07-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

"'And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name': John Ashbery, the Plastic Arts, and the Avant-Garde"

by David LeHardy Sweet

Comparative Literature 50.4 (Autumn 1998): 316-332

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1771527