Silverlake Blvd.

Knausgaard's My Struggle, volume 4

 

I remember being so exasperated with My Struggle exactly one year ago that I gave up. But I tried again, persevered, and found myself hooked.

 

Now I’ve just finished volume four. It begins and ends with an 18-year-old Karl Ove teaching elementary school in a tiny, remote village in northern Norway. We get introduced to his colleagues, students and neighbors in Håfjord, and he dutifully begins his first serious attempts to write. But then he gets dragged into village social life.

 

The occasion of his first alcoholic blackout in Håfjord prompts a review of his complete history of blackouts, which by artful steps disguised as artless rambling turns into a 200-page digression about Karl Ove’s last two years at home.

 

In contrast to the preceding volumes, the prize creep here is not always Karl Ove. We’ve been warned about his father, but here we see his catastrophic effect on everyone around him. Even his mother becomes cold and distant.

 

It’s impossible not to identify with 16-to-18-year-old Karl Ove’s depths of humiliation and peaks of exhilaration. He’s tired of waiting for his life to begin. He doesn’t have a clue what he should do with himself, but he’s near-bursting with volatile passions and aversions. His longing to get laid leads to endless absurd situations. His mania for music proves more productive: he starts reviewing albums for a local newspaper. The writing, and publishing leads to thinking writing as what he wants to do. Writing could be, above all, a way out … of his Mom’s house, his Dad’s house, of Kristiansand.

 

As in the other volumes of My Struggle, the information about all these matters is conveyed in brief, factual-sounding descriptive episodes. Matters are taken up and then dropped—then picked up 70 pages later. Scenes are deliberately not well-composed to make a point.

 

This makes the style sound flat and casual; it’s anything but. Knausgaard fabricates an impression of casualness. His pointless anecdotes and tirades that go nowhere are sequenced to contrast and resonate ironically.

 

And there are echoes that reverberate from other volumes—bathing caps, favorite bands, comically interrupted writing sessions, arguments about not knowing how to drive, and endless amounts of drinking, drinking, drinking, …. 

 

The device of a digression framed by a nearer-in-time beginning and end is also how volume two is structured. It lets readers know what’s significant in all that miscellaneous information. You not only get the background but are propelled forward.

 

Then there’s also Knausgaard’s humor, which ranges from slapstick to grim. Karl Ove’s penis is already familiar to readers of My Struggle, but in this volume it pops up whenever there’s a need for comic relief.

 

Which there often is. Karl Ove’s dad isn’t on stage a lot in this volume, but his presence permeates it. The ghastly party when he remarries the day his divorce is finalized, ending which him phoning and cursing out his own father and mother, is terrifying/hilarious Knausgaard at his best/worst. Then there are “recollections” prompted by the discovery—after he died—of journals he kept. The grown-up Karl Ove marvels, “he wasn’t only much more than my feelings for him but infinitely more, a complete and living person in the midst of life.”

 

We also get a glimpse that his father’s influence goes even deeper, when young Karl Ove’s account of some event is dismissed by his grandparents, and “… I gained a reputation for being unreliable, I was someone who made things up; in other words, I was like Dad. This was ironic because it there was one resolution I had made it was never to lie, precisely on account of him.”

 

[Image: Le Désespoir (Jean-Joseph Perraud, 1869)]

Built for speed

The Futurism of a century ago is an antique. Its artifacts—by Boccioni (above) and company—have acquired a patina’d period charm. They don’t evoke the movement’s loudly proclaimed enthusiasms—savagery, inhumanity and speed—so much as naivité, high spirits and good humor. That contradiction, plus the ignominious history of the movement’s embrace of Fascism, tends to categorize it among Modernism’s many dead ends.

 

Yet on the other hand, Futurism seems to be triumphant these days. What else is George Miller’s new Mad Max extravaganza but a celebration of speed, violence, and—in the words of Futurism’s 1909 manifesto—the “racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath”?

 

Miller delivers all the required elements of current pop spectacle. It’s an artfully distilled 120-minute car chase, from which all the bad taste of conventional blockbusters has been scrupulously avoided. The cinematography by John Seale is subtle and nuanced. It creates an intricately detailed and toyable fantasy world. It gives rowdy boys slogans (“shiny and chrome”) and styles to emulate (How many shirtless, hunky, white-painted War Boys will we be seeing next Halloween? Do not miss the hilarious comments on WIlton Silver Color Mist's page on Amazon)

 

And yet it is not a celebration of speed, humanity or anything else. There’s satirical moments, but the dominant mood is uncomplaining fatalism—a disenchanted Futurism appropriate for our time.

 

 

Right after seeing Mad Max Fury Road, we had an opportunity to see one of its predecessors: John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Grand Prix. The Academy has been having a wide-screen series, and in this movie the screen was not only wide (“Super Panavision 70”) but often split into a grid of simultaneous, disconnected scenes—a cool, mid-century Saul Bass-y take on Futurist simultaneity. It’s appropriate that it won Oscars not only for editing but also for sound and sound effects. There were extended racing sequences whose audio component consisted exclusively of engine roars. They were often deafening, but always delicately calibrated. Is it a coincidence that LaMonte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music experiments with drone music started about the same time?

 

Eva Marie Saint was on hand to make the audience roar when she remarked that her personal ranking system actually placed Yves Montand above her other famously sexy co-stars (Marlon Brando and Cary Grant.)

 

But the most transporting mechanism in L.A. these days has to be Chris Burden’s Ode to Santos Dumont, briefly performing at LACMA. Too big to be a toy; too small to be overwhelming; it’s a big friendly pet. It floated around its corral with a dreamy slowness, gently and unsystematically unspooling. Another image for another--unheroic but hopeful--aspect of our time.

 

Motown the Musical & Available Light

 

Last Friday there was Available Light at Disney Hall, the week before there was Motown at the Pantages. Though Motown wasn’t exactly a revival, both shows employed nostalgia—along with brilliant performers and unforgettable music—to make an impact.

 

Some of the performers in Motown presented original interpretations of the famous songs, and not just impersonations of the famous recording artists: e.g. Jesse Nagar’s Smokey Robinson and Jarran Muse’s Marvin Gaye. But it almost didn’t matter. One of the lessons of the show was that the songs are classics on the order of Cole Porter, and “Dancing in the street,” “I heard it through the grapevine,” “Money,” “Please, Mr. Postman,” “Stop, in the name of love,” “What’s going on,” … can make an impression even with the most imperfect and fragmentary presentation.

 

There was no obvious nostalgia during Available Light, but the whole event was framed as a revival of the 1983 premiere down the street at what is now called the MOCA Geffen. Instead of a pre-performance talk, there was a post-performance reunion of Lucinda Childs, John Adams and Frank Gehry on stage. I wasn’t paying much attention. I was still reeling from Adams’s overwhelming music. The cool stop and start pattern making of Childs’s choreography served as a necessarily opaque foil. It could be seen as a field upon which different emotions could be applied ad lib. Or the varying structure underneath.

 

They both reflect the joy of their original inspirations, and--by contrast--the murky eras they transcend.