Author: chrisbarsanti

A freelancer like those of yore, I write and edit for cold hard cash from the highest bidder in the land -- or just the occasional kind word. You can find links to my scrivenings at http://chrisbarsanti.net/.

Screening Room: ‘Elton John: Never Too Late’

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Elton John and John Lennon backstage at Madison Square Garden, 1974. (Sam Emerson)

The new documentary Elton John: Never Too Late just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It should be coming relatively soon to Disney+.

My review ran at The Playlist:

The makers of “Elton John: Never Too Late” wisely didn’t try to be completists. After a half-century-plus of touring as well as recording approximately eleventy thousand albums and musicals, attempting a complete survey of Elton John’s output in one film is a fool’s errand. However, the film ends up covering enough of his career that the resulting gaps are more noticeable than they should be. Viewers will leave the movie with a good-enough appreciation of his work, but not necessarily any deeper an understanding of the man than could be gleaned from viewing “Rocketman“…

Writer’s Desk: Work to Create

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Philip Glass (Nancy Lee Katz, 1992)

In the 1970s, Philip Glass had become an American composer to watch. Celebrated and also vilified, his minimalist work got attention. But it didn’t pay the bills. In fact, Glass lost money pretty much every time he took his ensemble on tour. So how did he get by? The son of Baltimore immigrants, Glass did whatever he had to do. Working a crane at a steel foundry. Driving a New York cab in the Taxi Driver days. Running his own moving company (sometimes advertised in the Village Voice as Prime Mover). Also being a self-taught plumber.

Which led to this encounter when Glass was installing a dishwasher in a Soho loft sometime in the 1970s:

While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish…

The very obvious moral of this story? Some artists have sponsors. They are the lucky ones. For the rest of us, do what you have to do to pay for paper, toner ink, and the electric bill.

Even if that means installing an art critic’s dishwasher.

(h/t Ted Gioia)

Screening Room: ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics’

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My review of the new documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics (which just screened at both Venice and Telluride film festivals), was published in The Playlist:

It might be challenging for some viewers to take activists seriously when they are speaking in tongues. But that is exactly what Petra Costa does in her edgy yet empathetic documentary ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics.’ Overlapping somewhat with the events chronicled in 2019’s ‘The Edge of Democracy,’ her epic account of Brazil’s recent whipsawing political battles, this film takes a step back from the action to investigate how the nation’s governance devolved into a near-permanent state of crisis. A crucial and underappreciated factor, according to Costa, is the rocketing surge of a politicized strain of evangelism that aims to accelerate rather than alleviate chaos…

Writer’s Desk: Writing Solves Problems

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When she was a teenager, Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) started journaling, as many of us do. After penning the usual things (what was happening in her life, thoughts about books she was reading), she realized there was a purpose for the journal.

It was a tool. As she wrote in Granta:

I had discovered that writing – with whatever instrument – was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do. You can think without writing, of course, as most people do and have done throughout history, but if you can condense today’s thought into a few symbols preserved on a surface of some kind – paper or silicon – you don’t have to rethink it tomorrow … The reason I eventually became a writer is that writing makes thinking easier…

Sometimes you have to write your way through something to understand it. You may even have to start writing without knowing your destination. Writing orders your thoughts, whatever they are.

Screening Room: ‘Between the Temples’

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Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane in Between the Temples (Sony Pictures Classics)

The new comedy Between the Temples opens later this week in limited release. Find it if you can.

My review is at PopMatters:

There is an honesty to Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples which belies the stylistic flourishes and alt-comedy sensibility. Moment after moment provides grist for some great epiphany or cute punchline that never quite comes. That is not to say it”s a comedy without laughs; “Can we have a shotgun bat mitzvah?” feels like a contender for one of the year’s best snort-funny lines. No film where a rabbi (TV Funhouse and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog creator Robert Smigel) putts golf balls into a shofar can be accused of taking itself too seriously…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Keep Things Vague

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In 1972, Jorge Luis Borges was a sage of literature. Seventy years old, blind, and feted around the world for his delicately phantasmagoric fiction, he was visited by Fernando Sorrentino, a dedicated fan. They talked for a week.

Here’s a piece of advice Borges gave Sorrentino, noted by Faena Aleph:

I believe that a writer should never attempt a contemporary theme or a very precise topography. Otherwise people are immediately going to find mistakes. Or if they don’t find them, they’re going to look for them, and if they look for them, they’ll find them. That’s why I prefer to have my stories take place in somewhat indeterminate places and many years ago…

Anybody who has written or tried to write fiction with specific contemporary settings which depart in any way from their lived experience knows what he is talking about. Doing such work requires a lot of work that goes beyond writing. Research, interviews, all of it.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. If everybody wrote like Borges, we would have no Dreiser, Wolfe, Bellow, and so on. But there is something to be gained from just writing a story of sensation, thoughts, and actions with no or little regard for where it takes place.

If nothing else, it’s liberating.

The Writer’s Year 2025 calendar is on sale now.

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Be Afraid of the Fear

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Rita Dove: An American Poet (Eduardo Montes-Bradley)

At some point it gets easier. Eventually you have written enough that the panic and indecision just disappears. At that point, the words flow like fine wine. Isn’t that how it works?

Not necessarily. Consider Rita Dove. A Pulitzer-winning poet and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, she was also the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. As the poetry business goes, Dove is pretty close to its peak.

In this 2016 interview, she talks about the confidence that comes from her long career:

The process has become a lot easier because even in the depths of despair—which happens more often than people might imagine—I have the example of all the other poems I’ve written and I know I’ve been through this before, so things will probably turn out fine…

But alongside that self-assurance (I can do this. I’ve done it before) is that nagging problem every writer faces now and forever (But can I?):

I’m still terrified every time I approach a fresh page…

If you are lucky enough to be successful as a writer, don’t assume that everything will suddenly become clear. It probably won’t. But that uncertainty, the not knowing, that’s where creation lives.

The Writer’s Year 2025 calendar is on sale now.

Shameless Self-Promotion: ‘The Writer’s Year 2025’ on Sale Now

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As mentioned a few weeks back, I decided it was time to put all these writing tips and quotes into printed form. Fortunately, the good folks at Workman Publishing agreed. That is why as of this week, you can now get your very own copy of The Writer’s Year: 365 Days of Inspiration, Prompts, and Quotes for 2025.

I’ll repeat what you can find inside, cool stuff like:

  • Illuminating quotes from the greats (James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Ray Bradbury)
  • Prompts to start your story
  • Recommended reading lists
  • Handy tips on everything from cliches (easy but bad) to rewriting (annoying but good)

It’s at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and a lot of other fine stores, like those kiosks that sell calendars at the mall during the holidays.

Writer’s Desk: How Do Ordinary Humans Sound?

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Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the great crime writers, was once asked by a man how she wrote such realistic dialogue between male characters. Did she have a big family or a lot of male friends?

Her answer was to the point:

I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also…

Sayers is being sarcastic, yet also true. Imagine what ordinary people sound like when you hear them speak. Then use that to inspire the sound and style of your dialogue.

Screening Room: ‘War Game’

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I reviewed the new documentary War Game for Slant:

Much of the criticism thrown at Alex Garland’s Civil War centered on it presenting the titular conflict without really explaining its origins. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s documentary War Game goes the other way by showing in very specific ways not how a modern-day American civil war might be fought but how one might start…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Imagine Your Reader

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When asked by The Paris Review to describe the ideal reader of his works, Anthony Burgess came up with a highly specific characterization:

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age…

After taking a moderately more serious approach to the question, Burgess admitted that yes indeed he does like to have a wide audience, but acknowledging that there are limitations:

I like to devise a plot that can have a moderately wide appeal. But take Eliot’s The Waste Land, very erudite, which, probably through its more popular elements and its basic rhetorical appeal, appealed to those who did not at first understand it but made themselves understand it. The poem, a terminus of Eliot’s polymathic travels, became a starting point for other people’s erudition. I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror…

Reader’s Corner: ‘American Gothic’

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I wrote about the exhibition and book “American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson” for Rain Taxi Review of Books:

Like many great collaborations, the iconic partnership of Gordon Parks and Ella Watson was an accident. In 1942, only a couple of years after the Kansas-born and Minnesota-seasoned Parks had left the Twin Cities, he started a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. In his autobiography A Choice of Weapons, Parks described talking to FSA head Roy Stryker about the challenges of “using my camera effectively against intolerance.” Stryker, whose agency was tasked with fighting poverty and had already hired the likes of Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange to visualize the devastation wrought by the Great Depression, had some advice for Parks: Pointing to a Black “charwoman” mopping the hallway, Stryker said, “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.” Parks spent four months with Watson at her work and home. The result is one of the most visually striking and quietly charged photo series of the twentieth century…

Reader’s Corner: Charles Burns and ‘Final Cut’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Comics-Graphic Novels, WritingLeave a comment

I interviewed cartoonist Charles Burns (Black Hole) about his new graphic novel Final Cut and the creative block that led up to it for Publishers Weekly:

Whenever he tried to start a new project, it fizzled out. “I went for months and years,” Burns, 68, says via phone from Philadelphia. “This is shit,” he remembers saying to himself. “I should know how to do this.” Facing what he calls the worst creative frustration of his career, he found himself thinking, “Maybe this is it. Maybe I don’t have anything at all.”

So, to prove he still had something in the tank, Burns set himself a small goal: finishing a seven-page story. If he couldn’t do that, he told himself, he’d have to start doing something else…

Final Cut comes out in September.