Deconstruction Zone
A complete directory of The Deconstruction Zone columns and various other writings by Rodger Jacobs for Pop Matters.
White Noise in the Kitchen Supplies Aisle (October 2009, Re: Print)
“—so, once again, I was washing my dishes at my usual time, five o’clock,” one of the ladies says, “and the sensation overwhelms me once more: I want to bake an apple pie like nobody’s business, a fresh, hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream melting all over it. I can literally smell it.”
Read the entire article here.
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Randy Quaid Arrested, Seventies Cinema Forgotten (September 2009, Short Ends and Leader)
In the sand-blasted terrain dotted by oil fields that is Marfa, Randy and Evi were taken down by the local constables for a felony warrant issued against them by the Santa Barbara County, California, District Attorney’s Office for burglary, defrauding an innkeeper (skipping out on your hotel bill basically), and conspiracy, all to the tune of $10,000.
Read the entire article here.
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Viva Las Vegas (September 2009, Re:Print)
Las Vegas can be a scary place to live, sort of like Bakersfield except with continuous sunshine and slot machines in every corner market.
Read the entire article here.
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Nine Booze-Soaked Books (September 2009, Re:Print)
Putting aside obvious selections like Charles R. Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, Malcolm Lowry’s harrowing Under the Volcano, or essentially anything written by Charles Bukowski, we present here a list of nine indispensible rye-saturated ruminations on the life of the rummy. Do not show up at your next AA meeting with any of these titles in your hip pocket because the vapors wafting from the pages will send everyone in the room falling off the wagon … hard.
Read the entire article here.
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Baseball and the Zen of Ian McEwan (September 2009, Re:Print)
Ian McEwan came to mind tonight while watching the Dodgers-Padres game on TV. God knows how baseball and a British novelist intersect but such are the wanderings of the human mind.
Read the entire article here.
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Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story (September 2009, Television Review)
Aside from putting food on the table of unemployed scribes, the main goal of the Federal Writer’s Project, crystallized by project director Henry Alsberg, was to research and create a series of state travel guides to serve the nation’s growing car culture. The 48-state guides produced over five years became America’s first oral history or, in the words of director Alsberg, “a genuine, valuable and objective contribution to the understanding of American life”.
Read the entire review here.
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Hal Ashby: Hollywood Rebel (September 2009)
Films and books strive toward a common goal: telling a story. And very few modern filmmakers are as good at spinning a yarn as the late Ashby was, the subject of a penetrating and applause-worthy biography, Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel, written by film journalist Nick Dawson.
Read the entire column here.
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Rabid and Rascally Creatures: Richard Brookhiser’s “Happy Darkies” (September 2009)
Like Richard Brookhiser, I was raised in a conservative American household, affording me an early inside look into the dysfunctional, paranoid, and unrelentingly bigoted mindset of “the moral majority” that ushered in the so-called Reagan Revolution in 1980 and, by default, its own demise as a power base in American politics almost a decade later.
It’s important that we understand these values-driven people, because the recent hemorrhaging of unregulated free-market economics and the blood of unjust wars and failed banana republic revolutions stains their hands and would most likely plague their conscience—if only they believed in something as quaint and abstract as a human conscience—but their rabidly anti-intellectual stance does not afford them that luxury.
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Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto (August 2009)
The connective tissue in Wurlitzer’s literary oeuvre is best summarized in a single line from Malcolm Lowry’s masterwork Under the Volcano, the story of the last desperate day in the life of Geoffrey Fermin, a dispirited alcoholic and former British consul in Mexico in the ‘30s.
“What is man” Lowry asks, “but a little soul holding up a corpse?”
Our story begins, appropriately, in Mexico.
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Out of Tune and Amplifed (June 2009)
The conceit that Shaper and Horwitz have scouted out “some of the most important and innovative songwriters working today” is highly personal and subjective; using the same standard of measurement we can safely assume that the janitor at the Hollywood Bowl can put together one hell of a classical music playlist and the usher at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts is qualified to write a biography of Shakespeare, forgetting the fact that the janitor is tone deaf and the usher is dyslexic.
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Depression 2.0: Sunday in Kerouac Alley (May 2009)
“How much money are you looking for, Scott?” I asked again, my irritation clearly palpable at this point. The mere idea of dodging into the ghetto of tabloids for a quick cash infusion represented a new personal low for me, but living “off the grid” often means making harsh ethical and moral decisions with little or no time to think, not with the landlord impatiently knocking at the door. “You have to set a price. How much do you want for the story?”
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Sherlock Holmes and the Shanghai Gesture (April 2009)
Holmes opened the violin case on his writing desk. “But surreal speculative fiction,” he continued, “holds precious little currency in the vacuous universe of modern publishing, dominated as it is with overheated pornographic tripe disguised as detective thrillers – no offense to your own fine skills in that genre, Watson – and cheap paperback morality tales written for monkeys with the cranial capacity of cantaloupes.”
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Little Murders: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (March 2009)
This is not Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation but, rather, Hunter S. Thompson’s Generation of Swine, the urban home front during the waning days of World War II, gritty and unvarnished, and chillingly reflective of modern sociology. There was a feral madness in the air 65 years ago, just as there is today. Everyone knew that the war abroad was going to end soon, once the Allied forces overwhelmed France, a reality that hangs over the novel like a portent of doom, but what nobody seemed to understand was where the United States would head next.
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Ishmael Reed’s Misguided ‘Pow Wow” (February 2009)
Reed’s obsession with Hollywood in his framework forward is downright shrill and monomaniacal, peppered with occasional bashings for professional working writers and book critics. “Most American critics concentrate on literature authored by whites,” Reed complains, “regardless of right wing propaganda that falsely claims that in American universities and colleges Toni Morrison has replaced Shakespeare.” (The right wing propagated that?)
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Conversing with Rudy Wurlitzer: ‘A Beaten-Up Old Scribbler’ (January 2009)
My conversations with Rudy Wurlitzer were not unlike a road journey itself with plenty of unplanned side trips along the way.
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The Vast Immensity of It All: Fear and Loathing on Sunset Boulevard (December 2008)
Faces of Sunset Boulevard is, without a doubt, one of the strongest statements about man’s dark fate in the West ever committed to paper in the author and photographer’s chosen form.
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Reinventing the Southern California Novel: Marissa Silver’s ‘The God of War” (September 2008)
Silver took the vital ingredients of a regional novel and composed an L.A. tale, but set many miles east — at the edge of the desolate Salton Sea — a wasteland that would have held tremendous appeal to T.S. Eliot.
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The Hardest Work Imaginable: Bukowski’s Wine-Stained Notebook (November 2008)
On the surface of it, all of the above may seem like dark Karl Rove-inspired fear mongering to provoke a desired response but fear, one must understand, is the lubricant that keeps the wheels of human progress greased. Charles Bukowski understood this concept all too well.
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The Panting Maniac: Chasing Lolita
Nabokov – a ruined Russian aristocrat, a world-famous lepidopterist, a distinguished academic and sought-after lecturer, and a sublime novelist who detested second-rate art and expressed indifference toward books with social or moral messages – made a curious bid for his own casting as the Almighty when he said in a 1962 BBC interview: “Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.”
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Samuel Fuller, The Poet of Potboilers (July 2008)
In The Films of Samuel Fuller, Lisa Dombrowski, associate professor of film studies at Wesleyan University, reveals a filmmaker who was first and foremost a writer. Fuller aggressively ignored film school conventions and classical rules of narrative, relying instead on his own instincts rooted in his years in the newspaper business.
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ALSO AT POP MATTERS BY RODGER JACOBS
Bleeding on the Page in the Middle of a Nervous Breakdown: Willy Vlautin’s ‘Northline’
Like the lost and lonely terrain in Sam Shepard’s short story collection Cruising Paradise (“An amazing book!” Vlautin enthuses), Vlautin writes of people and “places that might just as well (be) on the other side of the moon.” The masterful lyrics he has penned for Richmond Fontaine’s eight albums to date evoke desolate images of the deserts of Nevada and the American Southwest and the downtrodden characters who inhabit the less than hospitable land, usually passing their time in bars or broken-down casinos.
