December 8, 2007
Stephen Hunter captures Baltimore ... and sex tourism, and more
OK! Here is an older post -- and much revised and I hope improved post -- from just before my blog got broken back around July 25, when my Web host moved from California to Ohio and my shopping cart also got wrecked in the process. I've finally got the wonderful Richard Kersey at SlickRicky.com to get me up and running again, with this entry lost however. Now I will figure out this newfangled Movable Type 4.0. To resume ...
Anyone interested in Baltimore should not miss this terrific essay by Stephen Hunter, the movie critic for the Washington Post (and formerly the Baltimore Sun).
Hunter channels Tom Wolfe's various takeouts on hair (most especially in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) here:
Hat tip to my former Sun colleague Duncan Moore for pointing this one out.
Hunter looks at how both Cal Ripkin and John Waters are in the news. Hunter notes how Waters transformed the view of outsiders of Baltimore into his own vision:
That image of Baltimore, changing merrily, became the Baltimore of record: so unhip it was hip, so uncool it was cool. Long forgotten is the fact that in the beginning many Baltimoreans hated Waters for his trick of processing an elegant, intellectual city with powerhouse financial, advertising and shipping chops into a kind of Happy Valley U.S.A. of mild, funky rebels and hair enameled lifeless and piled to the stars. Soon the Waters view prevailed, not necessarily a bad thing, and everybody bought into it. "Hon," that exemplar of down-home Bawlamore charm (and not mumbled, embittered Baltimore condescension), became so positive an identifier it was featured on a welcome-to-Baltimore sign on the B-W Parkway.
It's okay. That's the way it goes. When the legend conflicts with the truth, print the legend, as John Ford knew. Waters is not a documentary filmmaker; he's a mythmaker, a parable-spinner, an illusion merchant. But you can't forget what's there, too, a vast, flat, hot tragedy, where young men pop each other at record pace and nobody seems to know why or what to do. In a few happy glades -- Federal Hill, Homeland, Canton -- one can live as elegant an urban life as anywhere in America, enjoying a Georgetown at Patapsco River basin prices. But go out on Federal Hill at night, and you see before you the Inner Harbor all agleam, the bold new downtown skyline, and have the sense of a town that seized on the fame and momentum Waters and Ripken lent it, and did its best to become what it seemed to be.
But don't listen to the sirens that blaze into the dark night, or pay attention to the blinking police and emergency service vehicles that look like blood-red pulsing pinpricks in the dark seen from the sleek buildings around the harbor far from where the real dying happens far too frequently.
(Baltimore)'s a place of funky neighborhoods, populated by happy peasants, some of them cross-dressed. The defining mark is the hairdo, a kind of individual tower of protein, a high-rise lacquered in place by aerosol droplets so that the ziggurat is as motionless as if built by slaves on the Mesopotamian plain. As for the men, the hair is weighted with glowing unguents that play sparkle games with the light.
I think the wildly individualistic hairdos that once defined Baltimore are disappearing as the older set dies off. What you now have to visit the Honfest to see, used to be just everyday Baltimore. We seem to be getting more homogenous as time goes on.
But on to the important point. Baltimore can be Heaven, Hell, or Camp, or sometimes all three.
It depends on whether you are walking along the Canton waterfront promenade or playing soccer at Tudor Arms (Heaven), or getting stabbed and beaten to death with a shovel in Washington Hill (Hell).
Hell was perpetrated on a Marine on leave who was murdered in June, according to police charging documents, by a girl I've known since she was 8 years old, maybe four blocks northeast of our house.
Then we have Baltimore as Camp -- Travolta as Edna Turnblad in "Hairspray," with her "arhnin' (ironing) and howled elastic "no" ("noeeeewwwh-ha" in Balmerese).
The "Hell" aspect seems to be predominately lately, with two savage beatings of individuals overpowered by youth gangs: that of Hopkins financial analyst Zach Sowers near Patterson Park by four yout's -- they took his watch, credit card and $10 and he remains in a coma -- and a female bus rider outnumbered nine to one.
Edna Turnblad, played by John Travolta, and daughter Tracy, played by Nikki Blonsky.
Now with these observations about Baltimore made, let's return for a bit to the writing of Stephen Hunter.
I heard from Stephen with a thank after this blog entry originally went up in July -- a little note of appreciation that made me want to bow like Wayne and Garth chorusing, "We are not worthy," and also shamed me into realizing that Steve deserved a lot more praise than in my original quick-hit blog entry.
Some background. I first encountered Stephen face to face at the Baltimore Sun when I was sent back, circa 1988, from the copy desk to the Features Department. Everyone in Features called him "Hunter." He wore a short beard and cargo pants and had a powerful, animal-like quickness as he moved around the department, rolling to his desk to file stories, spending most of his time elsewhere, screening films.
As a fill-in assistant features editor, I couldn't believe my luck when I was asked to edit Steve's reviews, which I already enjoyed tremendously just as a regular reader of the paper. I found Steve reliable, observant and tremendously skilled at just nailing the essence of any movie he reviewed, and doing so with elegant, precise and darned funny text.
So here I was going to be the first person to read a future Pulitzer Prizewinner's reviews. I could feel Steve's eyes on me from across the room as he surreptitiously tried to see if his first reader would react with a smile or laugh out loud. He often succeeded.
Editing his reviews consisted really of reading for pleasure and changing nothing, but on one or two occasions, I made the tiniest of suggestions -- one word for another -- and he enthusiastically agreed each time.
For a writer, le mot juste, l'idee juste, the exactly correct word and concept, forcing your brain to really THINK all the way to the implications of a work of entertainment ... it's hard work, like chipping rocks in the prison yard. So many writers skim on the surface and never get to the perfection that even a simple movie review can aim for.
I've taught travel writing on book tours to Colorado and San Francisco and tried to make it clear to those present whenever they are writing, to ponder, "What do I think about this. Why is it important?" Notice and then dig and polish.
I taught as an example part of a chapter on the Yucatan, in my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, where I write about having a panic attack on top of the Maya pyramid of Tikal. As a writer, first you describe the panic, and then you have to dig awfully deep to really understand why you want to share it with others ... does the panic suggest something about the awfulness of the human sacrifices at Tikal, or how a phenomenal travel destination can induce trembling wonder?
Somehow Steve could arrive in one afternoon at the sort of insight that would take me 17 revises (yes, that's a real number for some of the chapters in my books). And do this routinely.
Read his reviews of "Lord of the Rings" ...
I suppose if you're shooting three movies back to back on the other side of the world and it's one of the biggest gambles ever in the entertainment industry, a detail might have slipped your mind. In Jackson's case, that little detail was shampoo. He either couldn't afford it or he forgot all about it. The result is that you never saw so many greasy, tangled, thorny, wet, lusterless protein brambles as are on display in this movie. Viggo Mortensen, with a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou, leads the troop.
(Director Wolfgang) Petersen is an old pro. His is a narrative sensibility, and he's capable of keeping the story moving and subplots straight. He's got an eye for beauty too, though mainly of the male kind. He so loves the image of the helmeted, husky warrior boys, bulgy of bicep, lean of loin, aglow of sweat, eyes feral and fierce in the slits of their art-deco steel pots, that he hits it over and over and over. Many a gay man will consider this the ultimate date movie.
One morning -- the portents have been over-dramatic -- the Mayans arrive in force. And why, you wonder, would the Forest People not even have heard of them and made no preparations, as they are about two days' march from a Mayan urban center? The only answer is that it suits the political agenda of the picture, which is to subvert notions about the "innocence" of native peoples and the "guilt" of usurpers from the outside. In other words, in Gibson's worldview, the Mayans are to the Forest People exactly as, sometime later, the Spaniards would be to the Mayans. It's all a question of empire prerogative.
The results are not pretty.
Many times after we've seen a movie, Lamont gets to have the entire review read to him aloud as he pulls on his work shoes near my computer.
And, I've had a note to myself for ages to commend Stephen for his fantastic review of Heading South
, titled "The Job Of Sex in the Third World." Here is possibly one of the best ever examples of Hunter owning his topic:
, titled "The Job Of Sex in the Third World." Here is possibly one of the best ever examples of Hunter owning his topic:You see it all over the Third World, anywhere poverty and beauty converge under balmy skies, and the liquor is sweet and hits hard. A Westerner, north of 45, with fallen arches, hair, belly and spirit, clearly no longer sexually competitive in the meat markets of the big city, shows up, hunting an arrangement.
The arrangement will be with a younger, suppler body, owned by a younger, duller, more beautiful person. The two will share not an hour of anonymous sex, a la the streetwalker and her beau, but something tangentially more dignified: a kind of ersatz relationship, with life narratives exchanged, laughs and drinks sampled to lubricate the awkwardness, day trips to the mountains or the monuments to eat up the afternoon hours, and then discreet nights of sweat and bliss. Finally, certain monies will be quietly exchanged, "gifts," not payments, addresses passed between the two for the letters that will never get written, the photos that will never be sent, and ... that's it.
Hello, Monday morning, back in the office. Hmm, you look so refreshed. Have a good time down south? That glow in your face? You must have gotten good weather. Meanwhile, you are thinking, Good Lord, I didn't even notice the weather.
This passage has all the knowledge and the insight one could possibly muster to separate common notions of sex tourism as evil exploitation from the reality of a relationship, albeit an ersatz one, with "life narratives exchanged." I flashed when I read this on my event-packed several days with a Bahamian lobster fisherman with whom I spent a staggering amount of time talking and dancing and strolling and sharing meals, as I recounted in Romance on the Road.
It was challenging to return to a conference around the National Desk of the Washington Post and think, "Well, I just had an X-rated vacation ... now it's back to this dead world."
What is astounding also is Hunter's concluding sentence about the film "Heading South."
"It's quietly terrific," he writes, words that shocked me to read ... so many light-years from pretty much the entire universe of white male reviewerdom who can't stand ... you can feel them getting sick at the very assignment ... to sit through "Heading South," which must feed every insecurity known to the paunchy cubicle worker lacking the sculpted body of a Caribbean beach boy.
Thanks Stephen on behalf of your readership for nailing so many reviews like Michael Jordan winning a threepeat via a hotly contested jumper.
To learn more about our era's most gifted reviewer, here's some links:
An excellent profile in the Baltimore Sun:
Stephen's astounding take on the Virginia Tech massacre:
Oh, and on to yet another tangent, check out this credit to Weyman Swagger on the Unofficial Stephen Hunter Web site:
Weyman Swagger: He's actually a photo editor on my old paper, The Sun, and a grizzled old truck-driver looking man, without college education and a little rough and hilly in his ways. He's also a brilliant natural editor, who has helped me immeasureably; he knows things the pros in NY don't and my books are much the better for his ideas. I don't always use them but they are usually so provocative that they jigger me into something that works. He's also a very smart perceptive line reader, who's got a sense of voice and timing and colloquialism bar none. It's a privilege to have him help me.
I had no idea! One of my favorite people at the Baltimore Sun, photo editor Weyman Swagger, helps Hunter with his books.
I shouldn't be so surprised. Weyman and I used to collaborate on that old newspaper tradition of creating stories for a mock front page whenever someone leaves the paper. When a colleague named Bill Higgins moved along to the Minneapolis paper, we wrote a spoof of him becoming a champion ice fisherman -- full of deliberate factual errors and internal contradictions -- and laughed so hard at our own creation (yes, this violates the first rule of comedy) that we thought we might as well just delete the whole thing, we'd had so much fun just creating it.
Weyman and former colleague Peter Meredith also collaborated on hilarious send-ups of AP stories capturing all the peculiarities of wire stories -- comparing the acreage of foreign countries to U.S. states or portions thereof ("the size of East Texas"), the mysterious AP-speak on updates and corrections slathered across breaking stories, the goofy quotations. Many on the internal Sun e-mail loops enjoyed their running collaborations on stories about coupon-stealing rings, lists of notable vehicle accidents involving cows, surfboards, chainsaws or Kelvinators, and even some stories written entirely in a pretend version of Dutch that could be readable in English.
Disclaimer: Hunter once praised and warned me in an e-mail reading something like, "You're too obviously intelligent for this place, you'll have to hide it better." It's the kind of compliment that really creates a lifelong buzz ... and creates an added loyalty to the speaker ... and tells a little truth about how being too smart is just as tough, or tougher, than being not smart enough, in most workplaces. I know I would praise and enjoy Steve's reviews only 0.0001 percent less without that little career moment.
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