Following up on all those “Hey Bills,” I’ve collected and posted all the “Ask Greils” of mine that Greil Marcus answered between 2017 and 2025. (Unlike “Hey Bill,” “Ask Greil” is still up and running--you can go ask him a question right now.) I think I gave Scott Woods--who launched and edited Marcus’s website greilmarcus.net, and then continued on with his Substack for the first few years--a nudge about taking the “Hey Bill” idea and doing something similar with Marcus. Christgau soon followed with his interactive forum for readers (“Christgau Sez”), one day there’ll be a “What Does Chuck Think?” on Chuck Eddy’s Substack, and eventually everyone up to and including the Pope will have their own variation. It’s the way of the world right now.
I thought Marcus would be even pricklier than James, but nothing of the sort--he's been, right from the start, gracious to a fault with readers. I can’t recall him being brusque with anyone more than a couple of times in almost a decade now. When he was really sick a while back, and hardly writing at all, new “Ask Greil” columns were still appearing regularly; I’m guessing it was rather important to him at the time.
Amusing footnote: all my “Ask Greils” are signed “Alan Vint," after a character actor from the early ‘70s--Two-Lane Blacktop, The Panic in Needle Park, Badlands--who I’m surprised never became a star. I was still a little put off that Marcus didn’t respond when I sent him a copy of Interrupting My Train of Thought in 2014; I made it a point not to send anything in the first year “Ask Greil” ran, but I couldn’t stay away, so I used the pseudonym as a compromise. By not writing in under my own name, I wanted him to know that I no longer cared what he thought about anything…or wanted him not to know…or something. That was back when I was still in my 50s and much more immature. I get along with everybody now.
-------------------
10/19/17
Greil - You mentioned Steph Curry recently, and I vaguely remember you writing something about George Brett singing “Doo Wah Diddy” after the Royals won the ’85 World Series somewhere. Do you have any favourite sportswriters, or are there any who wrote things that influenced you? I was thinking specifically of the baseball writer Bill James—who’s often named as a major influence by a variety of unlikely people—but also earlier writers: A.J. Liebling, Jim Murray, Roger Angell, etc.
– Alan Vint
I like the columnists I read in the San Francisco Chronicle: Bruce Jenkins, who is a great moralist (and the son of Gordon Jenkins, the great Capitol arranger behind so many Frank Sinatra recordings, and the author of, along with Goodbye: In Search of Gordon Jenkins, the delightful Shop Around: Growing Up Motown in a Sinatra Household [Music that Changed My Life]), and Scott Ostler, who has a great touch with what songs to use as sports metaphors and the best sense of humor in the business. I used to love the Chronicle‘s Ray Ratto, who was a nails-for-breakfast writer who thought everything was fixed—especially the first years of the NBA lottery, something that was staring everyone in the face but no one else had the nerve to mention.
-------------------
09/19/17
Greil - Have you ever written about Richard Berry’s work with the Crowns, Cadets, Flairs, etc.? I especially love a couple of songs: “The Big Break,” obviously a rewrite of “Riot in Cell Block #9” a year later (and just as wild, I’d say—Berry’s on both, I think), and the Flairs’ “She Wants to Rock.” In ’56, Berry and the Pharaohs put out “Watusi,” which is pretty much “Stranded in the Jungle” from the same year. It’s all a little confusing.
– Alan Vint
I’ve written about Richard Berry here and there. For me, it’s always been the prison trilogy: the Coasters’ “Riot in Cell Block #9” with Berry doing the spoken parts, his own “The Big Break,” and his little known “Next Time.” Legal-jeopardy discs were a big part of early Los Angeles R&B and rock & roll, partly because everyone knew the LA police force was racist and murderous to the core. In the fifties the likes of the Rodney King beating was about as remarkable as a traffic stop.
In 1994, for an Oakland conference of the Center for California Studies at the Oakland Museum called “Bright Lights, Mean Streets: California as City,” I set up the panel “Bop City: LA’s ’50s Rhythm & Blues” with Danyel Smith and Richard Berry himself. He was a complete charm, though there because he wanted recognition as a pioneer and an artist. He wasn’t scheduled to perform afterward, but he insisted on it. He was a powerful physical presence, but a legend in the flesh: I AM SITTING NEXT TO THE MAN WHO WROTE “LOUIE LOUIE”!
-------------------
08/28/17
Greil - Charles Pierce wrote this after Trump’s Arizona speech last week: “I have no more patience, and I had very little to start with. I don’t care why you’re anxious. I don’t care for anybody’s interpretation of why you voted for this abomination of a politician, and why you cheer him now, because any explanation not rooted in the nastier bits of basic human spleen is worthless.” So, a much trickier question, I think: What do you think about Trump voters? Is it unfair to treat them as a monolithic block, or, like Pierce, are you past the point of trying to understand motivation (if you ever thought that worth understanding in the first place)?
– Alan Vint
I don’t think it’s unfair to treat Trump voters as a block. I thought so when he was elected and I think so even more strongly now, after Charlottesville and Trump’s promotion of it as ordinary, historic American discourse. He ran an inescapably racist campaign, yes, against Hispanics and Muslims and even Jews, but at bedrock against black people. Research is beginning to show that the real determinant for Trump voters was what’s being called “racial resentment,” as opposed to, you know, racism, as opposed to economic distress, and that Trump voters had no trouble translating Make America Great Again to Make America White Again, but I don’t think research was necessary to understand that: it was the motor of his campaign and he made no secret of it. So every Trump voter, even if he or she did not vote for Trump because of his racist campaign, had to say, Well, there are other things more important, or He’s not serious, or Nothing will happen anyway: in sum, It’s not a problem for me. Trump voters either directly or objectively affirmed racism, and now the vultures are coming home to roost.
-------------------
08/18/17
Greil - Have you seen Adventureland or The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and if so, any thoughts on either? They’re my two favourite movies the past decade for pop music (or at least tied with Carlos).
– Alan Vint
I haven’t and don’t know anything about them, assuming the second isn’t about how cool it is to be in the Wallflowers.
-------------------
07/26/17
Greil - Any thoughts on the NPR list of 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women? Lists are mostly useful for arguing about, right? I thought it was pretty good—my personal omissions would include Dionne Warwick, the Jefferson Airplane, Yo La Tengo, and LiLiPUT. [See introduction to piece here.]
– Alan Vint
The point of a list is selection: ruthlessly, unfairly, perversely, both to start a conversation and to mock the whole idea of boiling anything in life down to a list. Dave Marsh’s The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made is not really a list: it’s a long walk through one person’s taste, sense of history, idiosyncrasy, love and hate.
With a list of 150 albums—as if the great moments are there—all kinds of factors come into play that deforms any sense of what is and what isn’t. Considerations of balance and fairness—the opposite of what a list should be—in terms of eras, race, ethnicity, genre, and on and on make decisions, not what do I love, what would distort the story if it were left out (or included). And there’s too much—when there’s room for anything and everyone, who cares?
I could say that any top list that puts Joni Mitchell’s Blue over Aretha’s I Never Loved a Man or X-ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents is a travesty, but really, you have to dive into the depths of 130-150 to grapple with the thing, and who will? The truth is, when you run through the whole thing, it’s dispiriting. The need to play fair has led to a pile of records, many of which are not really very good, and some of which aren’t good at all.
-------------------
06/20/17
Greil - Is “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” the most polarizing Dylan song ever? I’ve seen more than one person name it as one of Dylan’s worst, a blight on Blonde on Blonde, and in a recent commemoration of BoB’s 50th anniversary, Rob Sheffield called it “one profoundly annoying novelty song.” I don’t get it. For me, it’s Dylan at his wildest, funniest, and most brilliant—and I can’t believe they somehow snuck it onto Top 40 and turned it into a hit single.
– Alan Vint
When I first heard it it terrified me. It sounded like unleashed junkie madness. About two days later, with the radio playing it nonstop, I fell in love with it. It was completely unpredictably musically, so that it sounded different every time. There was no way to know who these people were. I listened for the shouting in the background. Everyone is having a fabulous time. But after the Blonde on Blonde sessions were over and Dylan had left, producer Bob Johnston kept the party going, and he and the musicians apparently took as much time as it takes to listen to it to record Moldy Goldies: Col. Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights Band and Street Singers Attack the Hits, which Columbia snuck out at the same time. “Secret Agent Man” is my favorite musically, though philosophically “The Name Game” has it beat. Either or anything else on the album makes “Rainy Day Women” sounds like “She Belongs to Me.”
-------------------
10/2/18
Greil - In a recent “Ask Greil” [1/8/18] you wrote there was something “too Big Star” about the Replacements. I take that to mean you’re also indifferent about Big Star—could you maybe expand on that? I held them at arm’s length for a long time too, but the last couple of years I’ve really started to love a few songs on their first album, “In the Street,” “Thirteen,” and “When My Baby’s Beside Me” especially. Do you find they share the same kind of self-consciousness you find in the Replacements? Also, did you see Nothing Can Hurt Me, the Big Star documentary from a few years ago?
– Alan Vint
The best I can say is that I find the music of both Big Star and the Replacements small. Self-contained. The world isn’t in it. There isn’t room for the world in it.
-------------------
9/6/18
Greil - You’ve obviously written a lot about Pauline Kael, and I think you’ve expressed admiration for Manny Farber, too. I remember a Rolling Stone piece on Andrew Sarris that—correct me if I’m wrong—was fairly negative.
I was wondering if you have any thoughts on three other film critics from the ’60s (well, two film critics and a third who was primarily a political writer): Stanley Kauffmann, John Simon, and Dwight Macdonald.
– Alan Vint
-------------------
Stanley Kauffmann was one of the great bores. I recall him fulminating about the use of the word movies, rather than film—saying if you’re going to call films movies, why not call books printies? Well, why not?
John Simon was on the same wavelength: a collection of his pieces was titled Movies into Film, implying that some who made mere movies might indeed, somehow, aspire to making films. To call him a snob degrades the word—as someone else described him, he was the sort of person who if he weren’t being paid to review movies he’d probably be embarrassed to be seen entering a movie theatre—or anyway, a screening. His judgment of actresses by their looks, or rather insulting and savaging actresses for not conforming to his taste, was, I’m sure, meant to provoke outrage, and thus raise his profile and make him more money, and also completely sincere.
He could be relied on to play those numbers on The Dick Cavett Show, and in that capacity he did provide me with an opening into a piece that eventually turned into the beginning of my book Mystery Train, and for that I’ll always love him.
I never read Dwight MacDonald on movies. I liked a lot of Against the American Grain.
-------------------
8/2/18
Greil - Any thoughts on 20th Century Women, the Annette Bening film from a couple of years ago? Among other things, Greta Gerwig explains the Raincoats to Bening, and Bening and Billy Crudup dance to Black Flag.
– Alan Vint
I loved the movie long before I read Jen Pelly’s interview with the director Mike Mills in Pitchfork, especially the way none of the characters dominated or displaced any other. But I treasure this story, which is also in her 33 1/3 book The Raincoats:
Pelly: The Raincoats scene—and the whole film, it
turns out—were inspired by critic Greil Marcus’ 1983 essay “Disorderly
Naturalism,” which served as liner notes to the Raincoats’ live ROIR cassette The
Kitchen Tapes. In it, Marcus unpacks how the music of the Raincoats
captures “the process of punk,” defined as “the move from enormous feeling
combined with very limited technique—more to the point, enormous feeling
unleashed by the first stirrings of very limited technique.”
Mills is himself a Berkeley-born, matriarchy-raised, art-schooled punk who’s done graphic design for the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth (including the cover of Washing Machine) and made videos for the likes of Yoko Ono and Air, not to mention wrote and directed the films Thumbsucker and Beginners. Mills spoke to me about his film’s Raincoats scene, its definition of punk, and more.
Pitchfork: Why were the Raincoats an appropriate band to anchor that moment?
Mike Mills: There are a bunch of reasons. That song came out in ’79, so
it’s totally perfect. As a movie called 20th Century Women, it’s great
to have a female punk band in there. And another is the way Greta talked about
the Raincoats: I showed her the Greil Marcus piece and she spun out her own
version of it. What Greta says in the movie is a processing of Greil’s
process-of-punk piece. Greta, in real life, also loved the Raincoats. We both
have a lot of respect for them. So it was a big honor for us. They’re actually
holding the 7” label in the scene; we got the record from [the band]. We felt
like we were on hallowed ground.
What Greta’s saying—about how, if their band was based on
virtuosity, it would detract from the rawness of the expression—it really
actually spoke to Dorothea, and her problem of not being able to say her inner
life. Being born in the ’20s, she didn’t have a culture that supported that.
These ’70s kids have a culture that supports it. So in a way, the Raincoats
weren’t just this cool cultural-musical reference. I was able to use it to
speak really directly to the problem of my characters. The theme of the movie
is expressed. Greta is going on and on about the Raincoats’ emotionality—and
how they’re saying something raw and messy and that they can’t control—and
that’s exactly what Dorothea can’t do in the movie, and needs to do.
The Raincoats’ music is really nonlinear. Your movie also
doesn’t sell you that false narrative of everything being neatly figured out.
My film doesn’t follow plot structure strongly, or it
doesn’t rely on that to hold the film together. It is sort of open-ended; the
characters are a little ambiguous. And everything about the Raincoats is
open-ended. There is a wobbliness to the music on that first record. I think a
lot of people really love that because there’s something more human and
inviting in the fragility of it. I definitely like that. In ways—mostly —the
writing—I’m trying to do that, too.
The Raincoats are so much about this beautifully flawed statement. In that way, they do sort of echo the philosophy of this film, which is trying to promote these imperfect connections between people, and imperfect people generally. Everyone can’t be who they thought they were supposed to be, or who they want to be. But within that mess, there are some nice moments of connection, or little moments of grace. I feel like the music is doing that same project in a different way.
-------------------
5/18/18
Greil - Who was a better president, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama?
– Alan Vint
That’s a book, not a paragraph, and it’s too early to write it, especially if the question is who most left the country changed for the better. Clinton left office in a scandal of his own making—the pardons not just of people under indictment but fugitives from justice. Obama’s was perhaps the most honest administration in history. But the question is bigger than that.
-------------------
1/11/18
Greil - Have you heard Nirvirna’s “Teen Sprite (Sleep Good Mix)”? It’s…something to talk about, I think. I love it. I can see where someone else might passionately hate it; I’d be more surprised if someone felt indifferent. I don’t think it discredits or makes a mockery of the original at all (how could it, and why would it?), and I’m also guessing that Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Courtney Love are aware that it’s out there and, simply by virtue of it’s not having been taken down, are okay with it. I hear it as a fascinating version of what might have been if one of the pop-metal bands at the top of the charts just before Nirvana came along had somehow come up with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” instead. And it sounds fantastic. If anything, it deepens my love of the original.
– Alan Vint
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” didn’t hit for me until I saw the video. After that the song spoke in its own voice and I didn’t see the video when I heard it—but whenever I do see the video I’m stunned, thrilled, awestruck by how complex, sexy, visceral it is.
The music here could be the K-Tel version. I’d feel better about it if Kurt Cobain weren’t dead and could laugh about it or not, himself.
-------------------
10/8/19
Greil - Any thoughts on Linda Ronstadt? I saw the new documentary last night. As a teenager in the ’70s, I thought she was gorgeous; I liked some of her singles, but I wasn’t really a fan. As a not-teenager 40 years later, I feel basically the same.
– Alan Vint
I think the proof of Linda Ronstadt, who made so many fine records (“You’re No Good” is my number one) is her on-paper totally phony punk album, the 1980 Mad Love, produced by the leader of the Cretones, as phony a punk band as the concept could allow, and the concept allows for an infinity of phoniness. It worked. It came across. It sounded new. It sounded like her.
-------------------
1/4/19
Greil - Any thoughts on any of the following: Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Deuce, Killing Eve, Stranger Things, Ozark, Big Little Lies, Sharp Objects? Pop music figures into all of them, to one degree or another.
– Alan Vint
I watched the first few episodes of Breaking Bad and found it tendentious and breast-beating. Plus I find Bryan Cranston one of the most tiresome actors around. So nothing there. Better Call Saul I found meretricious and self-flattering at the start and didn’t pursue it. I didn’t care about the people in The Deuce even though I would usually watch anything with James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Yes, lots of music oozing around but it was just ooze. Never watched Killing Eve, Stranger Things, or Ozark.
Sharp Objects I never missed. The use of music was as cutting as the title. It was predictable here, over there so unpredictable it could seem like a mistake—Sandy Denny in that Hispanic joint? The Everly Brothers singing “Rose Connolly”? Amy Adams and Led Zeppelin? I wrote about it in Real Life Rock Top 10 in the first installment in Rolling Stone in September. And Big Little Lies—that fantastic Elvis show! That was beyond unpredictable. I wrote about that in the April 19, 2017 Real Life Rock column for Pitchfork.
But I think the most faraway, tantalizing, seductive use of music on TV recently was in The Night Of. There was one song, playing in the background of a bar. I wrote the music director asking what it was. He didn’t know. Maybe it just showed up, I said, like this show, and stuck around til it found the right moment.
-------------------
9/27/20
Greil - With some trepidation: have you read, and do you have any thoughts on, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility? I’m glad I read it, and it did give me pause and got me to reflect on various things. It was also frustrating in a way that’s hard to pinpoint. Whenever I thought “Yes, but…”, it felt like there was nowhere to go, that everything has been closed off in advance.
– Alan Vint
I haven’t read it. Why should I? Please say more.
-------------------
8/21/20
Greil - As a Californian, do you have any thoughts on Kamala Harris? It would seem she has a very realistic chance to end up as president.
– Alan Vint
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m very patriotic to the Bay Area, so I’d like her even if I didn’t. I liked her Biden take down about “That little girl was me” because when she was being bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary in Berkeley I was living two blocks from there.
As a senator, she’s been the closest to Al Franken in questioning dubious people. As a speaker, she can seem programmed. As a DA, she defeated a very so-called progressive Democrat who was too progressive—that is, he didn’t prosecute a lot of people who belonged in jail. As AG, in California that’s traditionally been a stepping stone office, usually to governor. So she used that office as it’s been traditionally used—while making alliances with other AGs in group actions, which didn’t get her publicity but were effective.
Over the last few days, some polls show very dramatic tightening, with one poll showing Minnesota tied (which it probably has been all along—Hillary barely carried it) and CNN showing the national race effectively tied. Given what’s happened over the last two weeks, that either means Trump’s amplifying lunacy strategy—promising a third term, attacking immigrants as animals, endorsing QAnon—is working, that people are finding Biden the Man Who Isn’t There, or perhaps most likely are scared to death of a black woman. If that’s so, Kamala has her work cut out for her to present herself as someone people can imagine as president. And I’m not sure the Biden people, who will be running her campaign, will know how to do that.
At the moment I would say Trump has a 75% chance of winning. Before the sabotage of the Post Office, I figured the voter suppression would add 3 to 4 points to Trump’s legitimate position, but now I’d guess 7 to 10. And that’s a huge amount.
-------------------
4/2/20
Greil - You’ve seen a lot. At a societal level—meaning not something personal, like the death of a parent—is this the worst thing you’ve ever experienced? I’m 58, and it’s not even close.
– Alan Vint
It depends on what you or I mean by experienced. As a possible double trigger of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which almost killed my father at the age of one, and the Great Depression—as a rationally calculated threat to the future of the country and the world, to the future of my children and grandchildren and my wife and myself, to say nothing of our immediate future, i.e. dropping dead next week or next month, no, nothing is comparable.
But in terms of dread—carrying around at any moment of the day or night the sense that life could not continue as it is and in some sense doesn’t deserve to—in my experience, this does not compare to the depths of American depravities in the Vietnam War or the attempts to destroy American ideals by the Reagan, George W. Bush, or Trump administrations: for Reagan, I believe, a difference between his ideas of what those ideals are and mine, for Bush, a casual disdain for and congenital inability to comprehend anything outside of his own country club, and for Trump adherence to a foreign power for personal financial gain, which is to say treason.
Regardless of what anyone did or did not do on this crisis, it is a natural disaster and it does not have the moral dimension that for me, in my experience, which is what you’re asking about, defines the worst thing I’ve ever lived with. I’m not saying anyone else should feel or think as I do. I’m not saying, on any level, that I’m right. But there are ways in which for me seeing Trump stand during one of his daily events at the White House and degrade both anyone who is watching and the whole history of this country, its worst along with its best and even its ordinary life, is worse than what as a society and a future we are facing. It makes struggling for a decent future seem like a sucker’s game. That’s what keeps me up at night.
-------------------
3/2/21
Greil - in your Yoko Ono response [2/26], you said something you’ve written before: that artists know things the rest of us don’t. I’ve never really agreed with this. To me, they have the talent and imagination to express those things, to give voice to them, but we know them too, that’s why we respond to their work. There are so many strange lines in Dylan’s mid-’60s work that I understand immediately, although I couldn’t begin to explain what they mean. He can. Or maybe he doesn’t need to, he wrote them.
– Alan Vint
Maybe another way of saying that artists know things others don’t is that they see thing differently—which is a real reduction of what I mean, but maybe more acceptable. Which why it isn’t what I mean. Maybe a more psychologically accurate way to say it would be that artists think they know things others don’t, and are driven to try to say what that is. And there could be many motives in that, beyond the edification of humankind. Think of Robert Johnson (as I seem to do all the time these days). He could play the guitar in ways that others couldn’t. He could weave his voice into his guitar playing in ways that produced an impression of the uncanny: what is this feeling, how can he do that, where am I, the world doesn’t feel exactly as it did a minute ago, an element of unreality, or super-reality, has just been introduced. There is a secret language being spoken that while I myself can’t speak it I can understand, in some aspect of my being, every gesture, note, word, sigh, stop, fall, and close. And why might Johnson want to tell the world what he knows and, he feels, no one else does, to make his secret knowledge public? Hobbes argued that the motive behind the creation of Greek philosophy was to seduce more boys than the other guy—which is to say that the most base or selfish motives can lie behind the highest creation. For Johnson—maybe just to show the other guys up and get more women, which amounts to the very same thing. For Jonathan Edwards, the purpose of philosophy was to affirm “the beauty of the world.” Those are the words he used—not “The Beauty of God’s Creation.” He introduced a certain element of hedonism, or even paganism, into the idea. Maybe Johnson’s motive was also to affirm the beauty, the order, of the world, especially when, in his lyrics, he says that the world is disordered and he doesn’t understand why it is as it is, and refuses to accept it. But really, what the artist knows is not determinate. It’s the will to tell.
-------------------
6/1/22
Greil - I’m wondering if you’ve ever commented on Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” I don’t think it had much critical support at the time. I was 11 when it was a hit: it was one of my favourite songs from my favourite year then, and remains so today. I don’t think I’m alone in the deep impression it made on me: it’s been used memorably in episodes of both Mad Men and, more recently, Atlanta.
– Alan Vint
I’m kind of shocked that you had the concept of critical support in your head at the age of 11, not that the record needed it. It was a natural hit and made its own atmosphere. I liked listening to it, admired its craft, but it dried up for me very quickly, like “Live to Tell” and “Every Breath You Take,” which came on so strong, promising eternal wisdom and world domination and then became good songs you’d heard enough.
-------------------
12/22/22
Greil - I'm very interested in any thoughts you might have on the new Sight & Sound poll/list of the greatest films ever, just published last week [Dec. 1]: the ascension of Chantal Ackerman's Jeanne Dielman to #1, the much greater presence of female and black directors in the Top 100, the inclusion of much newer films, the disappearance of The Godfather Part II, Raging Bull, The Magnificent Ambersons, and others...All the stuff people have been arguing about all week.
– Alan Vint
I'm not the perfect person to answer this. I've never seen Jeanne Dielman, so maybe that disqualifies me from the start. I always thought the idea of Vertigo as the greatest film of all time was a joke—I'd rather watch North by Northwest (which is on this list) or The 39 Steps any time. If I were compiling a vote, I'd keep it to those movies that when I saw them said to me "This is what a movie can be!" and let me understand the form, the ambition it called for, the opening of infinite possibilities in telling a story and leaving behind a work that would thrill and trouble the minds of generations to come. For me, pictures that did this are Sunrise, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Godfather, City Lights, Citizen Kane, Way Down East (Griffith, 1920, not on list unless I missed it), The Lass from the Stormy Croft (directed by Victor Sjöström in 1917—not on the list), and Bonnie and Clyde (not on the list, unless again I missed it). And a few more. Otherwise it's just favorites and consensus and not wanting to seem uncool. If such a list has any use at all, it's to lead people to movies they might never have heard of or would never been otherwise inclined to see—Sunrise being the great example. But really, it's all bean counting. I don't like lists. I hate the internet meme of "The 10 Funniest Things JFK Ever Said, Ranked!" And that's what this is. I'd prefer something like "A few movies you might want to see after you're dead."
-------------------
1/16/23
– Alan Vint
I swear on the grave of Garfield Akers—wherever it is—that I will never get trapped by this game. But it’s like eating one potato chip.
I’m dubious about Warwick, unless she and Lesley Gore can be inducted together for the two-sided single “Don’t Make Me Over” and “You Don’t Own Me.” Lesley Gore deserved so much better. So much more. And Tommy James should walk right in. I always thought “Hanky Panky” was fluff until one day I was overwhelmed by its building intensity—and heard “Be Bop a Lula” uncoiling inside of it like a snake. “Crimson and Clover” was good on the radio but it wasn’t until I heard the long version with its endless tumbling fuzz-as-the-meaning-of-life guitar solos that I realized how much Tommy James wanted and how much he got. But it’s really his irresistible book Me, the Mob, and the Music that to me takes him there. Find someone who’s already in there who’s got their name on a book about the number one rock ‘n’ roll gangster—and Tommy James is far from the only one who could write it—so completely lacking in either apology or cynicism and I’ve got a nice velvet painting of Morris Levy you can have for free. Or a million dollars. Depending.
-------------------
11/10/23
Greil - Not a question, just a comment. Some TCM programming from the other night made me think of you immediately. They devoted the evening to films with "Weekend" in the title, much as, soon after the last election, they had a night of films with "Joe" in the title. Just after midnight, back-to-back, they had Godard's Weekend followed by Palm Springs Weekend, with Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens (and with Troy Donahue on the soundtrack). "Real Life Top 10 material, for sure," I thought.
– Alan Vint
-------------------
7/22/24
– Alan Vint
In the first couple of minutes, Biden seemed so barely there, confused, and unable to finish a thought—there never was a coherent argument—I couldn’t see how he could recover. He didn’t. When he said “We beat Medicare” I knew the hole was deeper than I’d ever imagined. Sure, he meant “We solved the Medicare funding problem, opened it up to negotiating drug prices, lowered the insulin premium,” but he threw it right into Trump’s wheelhouse and he predictably hit it out of the park.
I think the story is now set in stone. Trump’s support is
a mile wide and a mile deep. The ‘Save Democracy’ banner is meaningless on his
side. As I’ve argued before, I don’t think support for democratic government or
democratic political culture has amounted to more than 65 percent of the
country in our history, often it’s been far less, and it’s far less now. Many
people don’t want the burden of democratic choice, they don’t want more people
included in the polity rather than fewer, they don’t want the far more free
America we have now than before, they want someone to tell them what to do,
what to think, how it’s going to be, and get out of the way. Biden’s support
was, I believe, somewhat wider and far more shallow. I don’t believe he can
continue as a credible candidate. Harris can’t be thrown overboard. It would
confirm that she was never more than window dressing. It’s Biden’s fault that
she was buried in the administration when she should have been built up.
Biden could withdraw on the simple basis that “I care more about the country than myself,” endorse Harris as ‘my personal choice,’ and call for an open convention. Other than Harris no possible nominee is well known or fixed in the minds of most of the electorate. Which allows for self-definition and a new story. A well handled convention—dream on, with the pro-Hamas demonstrations guaranteed to disrupt it from inside and out—with an interesting, dynamic, well-why-not nominee—Whitmer, Shapiro, Warnock, Pritzker, Tester, Klobuchar—could come out of the convention with a flood of enthusiasm that could possibly be sustained or even built upon. And a strong candidate, even if they lose, could help protect the Senate, which will be the only check remaining if Trump reclaims power.
I don’t, at this moment, think any of this will happen.
The best hope is probably a heart attack.
— I wrote this soon after the June debate. Biden just dropped out, which I didn’t think he would. Though Dean Phillips’s he’s-too-old-he-can’t-win campaign looked silly by the end, he couldn’t have been more predictive: and since he never considered himself a serious alternative, but was trying to open the field, brave. At the moment it looks as if party names are rallying around Harris. It’s too late to gin up a Draft Whitmer-Shapiro-Pritzger-Kelly-Beshear movement; someone would have to step out and say they have a better chance of beating Trump and here’s why. As I said above, a candidate who is undefined can define themselves, and Harris is defined. Although a friend came up with a campaign slogan today: PROSECUTOR VERSUS FELON. Which Amy Klobuchar could run with too.
-------------------
1/8/25
Greil - Conceding all the inherent problems with “biopics,” I get the feeling there’ll be more and more of them in the coming years about pop stars from the ’60s through the ’90s. I’ve often thought there’s a good one to be made about Cass Elliot. She turned up in both Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Rocketman, the Elton John film, and also (obviously) in the two Laurel Canyon documentaries from a few years back. She strikes me as one of those people who was connected to everybody for a moment in the late ’60s and early ’70s—and, no surprise, I’m a big fan of a lot of music she made. Do you think there’s a film there?
– Alan Vint
I’m not a producer. But I’d imagine that over the years people have taken options on treatments for a Mama Cass picture. And they all hit the same wall. “After all, didn’t Charlize double her weight to win that Oscar?” “Yeah, but she didn’t have to die on camera with food on her mouth.” Oh. I know, that’s not supposed to be true. But movies are fables, and in this case the fable is already there.
-------------------
2/16/25
Dylan: “I don’t know.”
– Alan Vint
To me that’s weak dialogue, poor writing. The script asks a question and then can’t think of an answer.
