Segue-Mania: 2023 Best Books and Films
Segue-Mania: Read and Watched in 2023
“What’s knittin’, kittens?” (Barbara Stanwyck, BALL OF FIRE, 1941)
As we learned from BARBIE’S (2023) progenitor JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (2001), “When the going gets tough, the tough make lemonade.” Plenty of tart and tasty treats pass the lips of Barbara (not Barbie) Stanwyck in her Preston Sturgis-penned screwball masterpiece THE LADY EVE (1941). For once, her opposite number (Henry Fonda) matches her spark, but she demurs, “I need him… like the axe needs the turkey.”
Such festive banter seems decades ahead of the similarly dialogue-driven 1935 novel A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD, by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Her all-talking, no-singing novel may be the driest, oddest piece of prose NYRB has yet rereleased. If you guessed that someone named Compton-Burnett might be inclined to follow her own stylistic star while portraying a strange retro-Regency mix of patriarchy and misanthropy… well, ten points to you and your house, with or without its head.
It's much easier to pin down the set and setting of Frank and Youman’s TINY IMPERFECTIONS (2020). Cloaked in a rom-com skirt and blazer, this breezy read hits every mark. The story’s backdrop: The Obama-era San Francisco boomlet. The story: a private school admissions officer’s foibles as a daughter, a mom, and a woman of color in a lily-white environment. Come for the Hayes Valley namechecks, stay for humor and heart.
Had TINY IMPERFECTIONS been set in Brooklyn, it surely would have namechecked DINER, whose DAY FOR NIGHT (2023) cookbook / photo album finally provides what the world has been ordering since opening night: 48 recipes and 160 full-color pages of mise-en-scène, atmosphere, and ambience, the real reason we dine out instead of using all those cookbooks we already have. (That said, the olive oil cake recipe deserves its own holiday.)
Was Diner one of the mandatory hipster big city stops for the protagonists of ROAMING (2023)? The Tamaki Cousins kindly collaborated on this graphic / comic masterpiece of three young women on break from their freshman year. Their hostel stay is depicted in swooping lines and minimal color wash, fine representations of the wet and wintery city. Maybe the comic’s protagonists will find their way to Diner when they graduate and move to The City in their twenties. Who knows, maybe they’ll get hired.
The bars and cafes of the 81-minute movie FALLEN LEAVES (2023) host people who are neither famous writers nor trained assassins. Their jobs are washing dishes, sorting merchandise, cleaning construction sites. With an economy that stands as the Finnish inverse of Wes Anderson’s WONDERFUL WORLD OF HENRY SUGAR (2023), Aki Kaurismäki’s characters lose jobs, find each other, and just might improve their lives together.
If not, there are certainly other ways of living. Attractive pickpockets and conceited conmen seem to be doing pretty well in Paris, at least according to Ernst Lubitsch’s pre-code sly wink of a rom-com, TROUBLE IN PARADISE (1935). How do you get a crook to fall for you? Just ask him, “When a lady takes her jewels off in a gentleman’s room, where does she put them?”
Crooks and cons abound in Fintan O’Toole’s incredible WE DON’T KNOW OURSELVES: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF MODERN IRELAND (2022). If it was easy as pie to combine memoir, hard reportage, cultural analysis, and tiptop writing, we’d all be bakers, living off olive oil cake and Cadbury Flake. Slightly less sui generis, but no less important, is Rosanna Xia’s CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE SEA: VISIONS FOR OUR VANISHING COASTLINE (2023). Xia doesn’t whine or scold. She just lays out the facts, the conflicts, and the options. Her emphasis on optionality positions us where we belong: in the place of democratic citizens with free will.
When considering free will, 21st century fiction tends to play with the multiverse. A century and a half ago, paths not taken found expression through twins in Mark Twain, and doubles in Charles Dickens. Zadie Smith’s excellent page-turning novel THE FRAUD (2023) features an ersatz heir among its Victorian cast of characters. Whether we agree with THE FRAUD’s characters or not, we always sympathize with them as they make their decisions, surrounding the book’s titular cypher.
IN THE CAFÉ OF LOST YOUTH (2006, translation 2016), one particular cypher captures the attention of the other patrons. They alternate narration in Patrick Modiano’s slim gem. One narrator composes odd catalogues of his fellow café visitors. Another narrator, an outsider, sees the café denizens better than they see themselves… and declines to intervene, favoring a strange code of honor. This touching multivocal novel’s conclusion should have been as obvious as a locomotive, but I never saw it coming.
We all know how American Apparel ends—not with a bang, but with a whimper. Kate Flannery’s STRIP TEES: A MEMOIR OF MILLENNIAL LOS ANGELES (2023) fills in the shortages between chambray shirtsleeves, the places behind white piping, the blanks betwixt the bodysuits. It stands out as the more guilty pleasure of two at fine cult-escape books out this year, the more mature pleasure being FORAGER: FIELD NOTES OF SURVIVING A FAMILY CULT by Michelle Dowd (2023). Oh, Los Angeles.
And oh, Beverly Hills. There, Phil Spector kept Ronnie of the Ronettes quite literally at gunpoint until her own barefoot escape from the mansion with an empty gold coffin in its basement. Phil and other predictably awful dudes thankfully cede center stage to the women and girls of the ‘60s girl groups in Flam and Leibowitz’s easy-reading oral history, BUT WILL YOU LOVE ME TOMORROW? (2023).
While the pre-Beatles girl groups were busting into US radio, Michel Legrand was composing tunes for the eternally watchable A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (1961). His commitment to artifice continued with THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964), which was shown on a few big screens last year, the better to abolish the thought of all dour earth tones, grays and browns, and blahs.
Grays, blacks, and slightly lighter greys pervade PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (1961), an ocean or two away from Cherbourg. Shōhei Imamura’s heartwarming and heartbreaking masterpiece deserves a screen like that big U2 McCube in Las Vegas. Can we pretend it debuted in 1963, and re-release it for its faux-60th anniversary? Just spit-balling here.
The 60th anniversary release of MY VERY OWN SPECIAL PARTICULAR PRIVATE AND PERSONAL CAT (1963) is its own miracle of a children’s book, an existentialist self-help book about boundaries as imagined by Gertrude Stein. The title hints at its characteristic cadence, which it carries throughout, like a signature scent.
Nineteen sixty-three’s style can’t be said to pervade PG Wodehouse’s release of that year, STIFF UPPER LIP, JEEVES (1963), which reads no different than the first dozen Wooster and Jeeves books, the first of which he published in 1919. Wodehouse reportedly had the same English teacher at Dulworth school as Raymond Chandler, whose classic noir THE LONG GOODBYE (1953) hardly aged a day between its composition and Robert Altman’s 1973 liquor-soaked adaptation.
Liquor-soaked poetry doesn’t get much higher than HIGH WINDOWS (1973). Altman’s Los Angeles looks more colorful, seedy, and sexy than Philip Larkin’s desultory hamlet of Hull, but Larkin certainly has more rhymes:
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
(Larkin defaced his own his first draft as soon as he finished it, replacing “is endless” with “fucking piss,” which still rhymes, at least.
As sad as it is to consider liquor-logged Larkin battering his body with booze and treating other people no better, it’s a little late to call him up and ask him to change. The tension between creator and created has surely been around since the first blind warmongering misogynist storyteller, but Claire Dederer may have added something genuinely worthwhile to the discussion with MONSTERS: A FAN’S DILEMMA (2023). She declines to hide behind academic jargon or politics of the moment. One gets the sense that she’s holding art, ideas, and feelings up in the light, examining them, then changing the angle and inspecting again.
Dederer herself appears in MONSTERS as a whiskey-imbibing character, just as Lauren Oyler appears in her brilliant HARPERS cover story, “I Really Didn’t Want to Go: On the Goop Cruise” (2023). Narrative journos have self-descried since at least Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” so there’s nothing new here. That said, there’s something different when the auto-portrayed author makes comic books. Alison Bechdel serves as her own protagonist in ARE YOU MY MOTHER? (2013). She adroitly shifts POV and gaze in service of her self-examination. Nothing stops the pages from turning, and even though nothing happens, the story rumbles downhill, like dozen magic eight-balls on a steep slope.
Somewhat broader strokes and more conventional angles depict Kate Beaton in her graphic memoir, DUCKS: TWO YEARS IN THE OIL SANDS (2022). Apparently, there were some awards that went to other books last year. This is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a miscarriage of justice. Whatever it was, Ducks was better. And that includes the Argentine men’s World Cup team.
Equally divisive opinions spread like soft milk across the pages of the newly resurrected quarterly BOOKFORUM, (FALL 2023, #30.2). It boasts Carl Wilson on Sly Stone’s memoir, Hanif Abdurraqib on the Lou Reed bio, and pieces on both Julia Fox and Janet Malcolm. Not bad for ten bucks—and yet there were only 6,098 printed. Miss out at your own intellectual impoverishment.
Among the contentious (not to say unpopular) opinions absent from those BOOKFORUM articles, here’s a big one: SHALL WE DANCE (1936) and FOLLOW THE FLEET (1937) may be just as smile-inducing as SWING TIME (1936), the sole Astaire / Rogers film in Criterion’s stable. Remember, you read it here first, where the takes are as hot as a Prius’ catalytic converter. Having dropped that bomb, it’s time to take the advice of Barbara Stanwyck in BALL OF FIRE (1941): “Scrow, scram, scraw: the complete conjugation!”
Considered:
Ball of Fire, feat. Barbara Stanwyck. RKO, 1941.
Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig. Warner Bros, 2023.
Josie and the Pussycats, dir. Deborah Kaplan. Universal, 2001.
The Lady Eve, feat. Barbara Stanwyck. Paramount, 1941.
A House and Its Head, by Ivy Compton-Burnett. NYRB, 2021 (1935).
Tiny Imperfections, by Asha Youmans and Alli Frank. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2020.
Diner: Day for Night, by Tarlow, Gillard, Fidanza, and Johnson. Ten Speed Press, 2023.
Roaming, by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. Drawn and Quarterly, 2023.
Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet), dir. Aki Kaurismäki. Bufo, 2023.
The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar, dir. Wes Anderson. Indian Paintbrush, 2023.
Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Paramount, 1932.
We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole. Liveright, 2022.
California Against the Sea: Visions for our Vanishing Coastline, by Rosanna Xia. Heyday, 2023.
The Fraud, by Zadie Smith. Penguin, 2023.
In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano, trans. Chris Clarke. NYRB, 2016 (2006).
Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles, by Kate Flannery. Holt, 2023.
Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, by Michelle Dowd. Algonquin, 2023.
But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups, by Flam and Liebowitz. Hachette, 2023.
A Woman is A Woman (Une Femme est Une Femme), music Michel Legrand. Euro International, 1961.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg), music Michel Legrand. Parc, 1964.
Pigs and Battleships (豚と軍艦, Buta to Gunkan), dir. Shōhei Imamura. Nikkatsu, 1961.
My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat, by Sandol Stoddard Warburg, illus. Remy Charlip. Enchanted Lion, 2023 (1963).
Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, by PG Wodehouse. Scribner, 2000 (1963).
The Long Goodbye, dir. Robert Altman. United Artists, 1973.
High Windows, by Philip Larkin. Faber, 2015 (1973).
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Clare Dederer. Knopf, 2023.
“I Really Didn’t Want to Go: On the Goop Cruise,” by Lauren Oyler. Harper’s, May 2023.
“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese. Esquire, April 1966.
Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel. Mariner, 2013.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton. Drawn and Quarterly, 2022.
Bookforum, published by 1865 Publications. 2023.
Shall We Dance, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1937.
Follow the Fleet, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1936.
Swing Time, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1936.
