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Catcher in the Wry
Long live Frank Portman’s King Dork.
By Zac Crain
A certain subset of the population knows Frank Portman as Dr. Frank, the erudite leader of the long-running punk-pop band the Mr. T Experience, or MTX for short. In these circles, he is revered for his sharp hooks and sharper wit, both of which are put to good use in such should-be classics as “The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful,” “We Hate All the Same Things,” and “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend,” to name but a very few. Dr. Frank has been plying his trade for the better part of two decades, but unfortunately, like most geniuses, he’s never really been acknowledged as such — until now. Sort of.
Finally, Portman is receiving the acclaim that has been so long overdue. He’s been the subject of fawning features and reviews in Entertainment Weekly and USA Today, and stores can’t keep his stuff on the shelves. But the sudden onslaught of affection is not for his music. It’s for his debut novel, King Dork, a school year in the life of Tom Henderson.
King Dork is meant as sort of an anti-Catcher in the Rye, and Portman regularly uses Tom’s inner monologue to revel in his distaste for that book. But here’s the thing: It ends up being a modern and arguably better (yes, I said it) version of the J.D. Salinger staple. Which I suspect Portman (or at least his editor at Delacorte Press) was aware of, since King Dork’s cover is a riff on the iconic look of Catcher.
Like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Tom — better known as Chi-Mo or Moe — is one of those kids who will never refer to his high school years as “the good old days.” Why? Because, as he says, “I’m small for my age, young for my grade, uncomfortable in most situations, nearsighted, skinny, awkward, and nervous. And no good at sports … There’s nothing special or ultimate about me. I’m generic.”
Except that, in Portman’s capable hands, he isn’t. Tom might not fit in with the so-called “normal” kids — the jocks and rich kids, as well as their significant others and various minions — but it’s clear that he’s meant for bigger and better things. High school is just a brief prison sentence for him, but fortunately he has a good cell mate in Sam Hellerman, his alphabetical-order best friend since the fourth grade. Their version of passing time by lifting weights in the prison yard is coming up with new bands that they are ostensibly members of, though the book is almost half over before they actually acquire instruments and start to figure out how to play them.
For the most part, these new bands are tiny little worlds for Tom and Sam to escape into, and they turn them into incredibly detailed fantasies, imagining new monikers as well as album and song titles, logos, cover art, and even how their names will be listed in the credits. They do plenty of escaping, coming up with 25 new bands between August and December alone. (My current favorites are the Elephants of Style, Tennis with Guitars, and the Underpants Machine.)
But Tom has plenty of other places to escape to. “It’s actually a complicated story,” he admits at the outset, “involving at least half a dozen mysteries.” The most pressing of these is his father’s death and how it relates (or doesn’t) to the collection of books Tom discovers in the basement. The only rival to that puzzler is the eternal unknown for high school (and older) guys: the opposite sex. Tom’s budding musical career is mixed in along the way, seemingly as a palate cleanser, until the book’s climax, when it turns out that the answer (or the key, at least) to all these mysteries and more is simple: “Start a band. Or go around saying you’re in a band, which is, let’s face it, pretty much the same thing.”
Of course, that didn’t completely work for Portman, at least in terms of record sales and worldwide recognition. His popularity only went up when he took a brief break from being in a band. But I guess going around saying you’re a writer doesn’t have the same effect. Actually, I don’t guess; I know. If only I’d had King Dork 15 years ago. (I guess I’ll just have to keep it handy for my son.)
King Dork is being aimed at the “young adult” market, and it should be: Hidden in plain sight among Portman’s prose are enough book and album recommendations to fill up a few shopping carts at Amazon.com. They’re the kind of cool-older-brother selections that, based on King Dork’s sales already, should make for a much more well rounded lower end of the 18-to-34 demographic in the next year or so.
But that “young adult” label doesn’t mean everyone else can’t crack King Dork’s spine; if you’ve been to high school, you’re qualified. If you hated high school, even better.
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Absurdistan
By Gary Shteyngart
(Random House, $33)
Russia’s
greatest export has been its literature, because the humor in it has a
skittish undertone, as though the threat of death is somehow looming
over the joke. Unfortunately, after Chekhov died, there was a dry spell
— for about a century. Isaac Babel, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Bulgakov
were three of the very few writers to produce great, amusing works
under Soviet rule.
Now that the Iron Curtain has been replaced
with something more like dirty gray curtains, we have a new generation
of Russian writers stepping forth from the rubble, among them Gary
Shteyngart. His first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,
won a bunch of awards and caused critics to run around in the streets
waving the book, screaming, and pulling out their hair, because finally
there was a displaced-immigrant story that wasn’t a triumph of the
human spirit. It was just, for the most part, a comedy.
Now with Absurdistan,
Shteyngart tells the story of Misha Vainberg, an obese Russian
immigrant who has lived in America for years but is sent back to Russia
because of an INS problem. Misha is a rapper and rich and almost
entirely Americanized. Stuck back in Russia, Misha just wants to get
out. So he goes to Absurdistan, the self-proclaimed “Norway of the
Caspian.” Misha arrives and finds himself in the midst of a civil war
between its two indistinguishable nationalities, the Sevos and the
Svanïs. Of course, Absurdistan is said to be oil-rich, and so its vast
and stretching orange landscape — somehow both Afghan and Martian — is
sprouting oil derricks all over the place, while the cities themselves
are a slop bucket of globalization.
The specific presence is
American. One of Misha’s associates explains: “The Americans have
really been helping us out. Xerox machines, free use of the fax lines
after nine p.m., discounted Hellmann’s mayonnaise from the commissary,
five thousand free copies of An American Life by Ronald Reagan.
We know what democracy looks like. We’ve read about it. We’ve been to
Century 21.” Misha Vainberg is a twenty-first-century immigrant, no
longer oppressed by tyranny itself but rather the tyranny of
dissatisfaction. He’s like a nihilist Yakov Smirnoff, sans the blank
audience stares. But it’s Shteyngart’s sense of the absurd that fuels
this oily novel, because, as Yakov might say, in Absurdistan, fuel
burns you. — J.D. Reid
Hotel California: The True-life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and Their Many Friends
By Barney Hoskyns
(Wiley, $26)
British music critic Barney Hoskyns, who previously chronicled the Los Angeles rock zeitgeist in his survey Waiting for the Sun,
crafts this vibrant history of the early ’70s SoCal scene and the rise
of the canyon cowboys and self-confessional singer-songwriters who
came to dominate the music of the me-decade. As Hoskyns observes, it
was an era populated by an unusual mix of characters: from the earnest
Jackson Browne to the brilliant but bed-hopping Joni Mitchell, the
mercurial Neil Young to the innocent Linda Ronstadt, and the wickedly
ambitious duo of Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Graduating from hoot nights
and folk-rock to private Learjets and sold-out stadium shows in just a
few short years, they prospered by selling an illusory dream of
California as a sun-kissed paradise, even though practically none of
the key players was a native of the state. Setting the music and the
musicians aside, the story here is really about a dramatic shift within
the entertainment industry itself. It’s a tale dominated by a new kind
of management and executive figures like David Geffen, Elliot Roberts,
and Irving Azoff, the first generation of record men to merge an
artist-friendly hippie demeanor with a ruthless business sense. Hoskyns
provides both a broad overview and plenty of finely etched detail,
showing how this small, incestuous community of individuals ultimately
came to dominate American music. He charts their path to multiplatinum
success and their later descent into madness and death, a farrago
fueled by a combination of drugs and rampant egos. Despite the author’s
best efforts to make a case for the artistic merits of the era, at
book’s end you’re left with a feeling that the lasting legacy of this
peaceful easy period isn’t in the music at all but rather in the bank
accounts of those who prospered. Still, it makes for a juicy and
engrossing read. — Bob Bozorgmehr
Sheetrock & Shellac: A Thinking Person’s Guide 
to the Art and Science of Home Improvement
By David Owen
(Simon & Schuster, $25)
Married
in 1978 just after college graduation, David Owen and his wife, Ann
Hodgman, moved into a New York City apartment. They knew nothing about
remodeling. Eventually, as babies arrived, remodeling and expanding
became necessary. Owen found watching the carpenters, plumbers,
electricians, and other craftsmen fascinating. He learned how to design
projects, then use tools to carry them out through a combination of
reading, question-asking, osmosis, and hands-on experimentation. A
talented journalist, Owen wrote about his experiences for the New Yorker and then in his own books.
His latest, Sheetrock & Shellac,
is constructed around the family’s renovation of an old house in rural
Connecticut, plus the building of a getaway second home, often referred
to as “the cabin” — about 10 minutes away by car. The practical tips
are numerous; it’s like reading a manual with a literary bent. The
philosophy is food for thought, as when Owen writes, “Home improvement
is an ongoing collaboration between a dwelling and its residents.
Changing our apartment changed Ann and me, too, because remodeling
works in two directions — as we shaped our living space, our living
space shaped our lives … Remodeling and construction are human
processes as well as structural ones, and they leave all the parties
altered, just as marriages and lawsuits do. Ann and I set out to turn
our apartment into the kind of place that we thought we wanted to live
in, and we ended up meeting it halfway, by becoming the kind of people
who, it turned out, would live in a place like ours.”
Never has
a how-to home-improvement manual contained so much deep thinking. Or,
phrased another way, never has a philosophical tract about the
relationship between human and house contained so much how-to
home-improvement advice. — Steve Weinberg
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Canon Fodder
A new version of an old book you should have already read.
Do you ever wonder what George Orwell would’ve thought about the real 1984, as opposed to his 1984? There were some futuristic events in 1984: the shuttles Discovery and Challenger zoomed to outer space, the first Apple Macintosh computer came out. But I’m talking about all that other stuff. For instance, that year launched both the Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” commercials as well as Hulkamania. I wonder if Orwell would’ve liked that Ghostbusters song or if he would’ve watched Miami Vice?
The point is, science fiction is for nerds, and I think that’s because the real 1984 came around and it wasn’t futuristic enough. It turned from a grim view of the future into nerd fantasy. With a little scrutiny, you can find some quality work in the genre. Along with 1984, there is Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, Ayn Rand’s Anthem — all great novels of dystopia. But We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is the forerunner to them all.
We (which Modern Library is publishing this month, newly translated from Russian by Natasha Randall) is narrated by D-503 — oddly, outnamed only by Yevgeny Zamyatin. In D-503’s future world, “The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.” This world is about productivity and about logic; there is no room for irrationality, i.e., love. Even the poets compose beneficial tomes, such as He Who Was Late to Work. D-503 works on a rocket ship during the day. The totalitarian regime is sending their totalitarian “happiness” to other civilizations out in space somewhere. At night, he cashes in a pink coupon for a night of passion with whomever he chooses; the coupons eliminate envy in the future, you see. One day, D-503 meets I-330, who happens to be revolting, politically speaking. D-503 finds his irrational number, his square root of negative one, his love for I-330. We is D-503’s fight for choice. Zamyatin pushed this book in Russia in the 1920s. It didn’t work. Luckily, they let him go die in poverty after booing him out of the country, rather than just shooting him like they did everyone else. — J.D.R.
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Where There’s a Will
… there’s a way to bust a gut laughing. By Zac Crain
Just a few short years ago, Will Ferrell was the new king of comedy in Hollywood, lionized for his star turns in 2003’s ElfAnchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and his tasty supporting roles in 2003’s Old School and 2004’s Starsky & Hutch.
His asking price quickly jumped to $20 million, and it was thought that
no fee was too high, because he was box-office gold. He was the new Jim
Carrey, and people were starting to wonder if he couldn’t be the new
Tom Hanks, too, transitioning from comedy to drama without missing a
beat.
Now, unfortunately, Ferrell has the stink of failure on
him, and that’s a tough odor to get rid of in the here-today,
gone-today (to steal a Chris Rock phrase) world of movie studios. He’s
not the Will Ferrell of Old School and Elf anymore. He’s the Will Ferrell of Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, the Bewitched remake, and Kicking & Screaming
I
haven’t given up hope yet. Sure, Ferrell became overexposed in the last
few years, taking seemingly any job that was offered to him. But that’s
what happens when the big checks start rolling in. You cash them as
quickly as possible, because who knows when that pipeline will run dry?
You’d do it, and so would I. The virtue of not selling out belongs only
to the already rich. Of course, some actors never really recover from
this phase of their career — Nicolas Cage comes to mind, and he’s
wearing the long, stringy wig from Con Air.
Ferrell still has a chance to redeem himself, and that’s why I’m so excited to see Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The film reunites him with his Anchorman
director, Adam McKay, and though some may scoff, Ferrell was never
better than he was in that movie. The problem with his string of duds
was that Ferrell was asked to be something approaching a normal guy. I
don’t want to see Ferrell trying to be a regular guy. I want him to be
just this side of insane, stomping blindly through a make-believe land
where he believes he is king and where plenty of other people believe
it too.
For an audience to truly appreciate his gifts, Ferrell needs a character he can believe in against all odds, like Ron Burgundy, Anchorman’s
clueless, chauvinistic center who says things like, “I’m very
important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of
rich mahogany.” That’s his best pickup line, and he’s absolutely sure
it will work, delivering it in his booming Robert Goulet-like voice.
It’s completely absurd, and totally perfect.
Talladega Nights,
then, would seem (from the trailer, at least) to be the ideal film for
Ferrell. His role as NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby is right in his
wheelhouse, the kind of guy who goes through life absolutely sure that
he’s the most important thing in it, with a coterie of hangers-on
assuring him of that fact at every turn. Like Anchorman’s
Burgundy, Bobby struggles with change, except this time, it isn’t a
female anchor encroaching on his turf. It’s effeminate French Formula
One racer Jean Girard (Da Ali G Show’s Sacha Baron Cohen), who’s out to take over NASCAR’s top spot. And like in Anchorman,
McKay has assembled a strong supporting cast for Ferrell to play off
of, including John C. Reilly, Gary Cole, Amy Adams, and Leslie Bibb.
Ferrell doesn’t have to do all of the heavy lifting, just most of it.
So, like I said, he has a great chance to redeem himself with Talladega Nights. If he doesn’t, well, I’ll always have Anchorman. Thank God for DVDs.
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Should You Stay or Should You Go?
That’s for you to decide. We can only list the pros and cons. By Zac Crain
Movie
Lady in the Water
About:
Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard star in this bedtime story from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan.
Pro:
Giamatti is great in everything he’s in, and Howard (the daughter of Ron) is an up-and-comer to watch.
Con:
Once a hot property (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable), Shyamalan has lost his fastball lately (The Village, Signs).
Movie
My Super Ex-Girlfriend
About:
Luke Wilson breaks up with Uma Thurman, realizing too late she has superpowers.
Pro:
Wilson is usually likable, and Thurman is riding high after the Kill Bill double feature.
Con:
Superhero comedies always sound better in theory.
Movie
Little Miss Sunshine
About:
A dysfunctional family (including Greg Kinnear and Steve Carell) travels cross-country for a beauty pageant.
Pro:
Carell is on fire lately.
Con:
He might be on the verge of overexposure (see: Ferrell, Will).
Movie
Miami Vice
About:
Michael Mann brings Crockett and Tubbs to the big screen, and there’s not a pastel-colored linen jacket in sight.
Pro:
Great director, solid cast, bulletproof idea.
Con:
Colin Farrell’s mustache. And seriously — no pastel-colored linen jackets?
Movie
Scoop
About:
Woody Allen reteams with Scarlett Johansson for another London-set thriller.
Pro:
The last time they got together (Match Point) was magic.
Con:
Maybe London worked for Allen only once.
Movie
The Science of Sleep
About:
Another off-the-wall fantasy from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
Pro:
If you’re making a movie about a guy held prisoner by his dreams, you want Gondry at the helm.
Con:
You might not want a movie about a guy held prisoner by his dreams.
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