Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

You think with a review like this, it’d rate more of a bottom-line summation of “Skim it.” But hey, I’m not complaining…

Today a book of mine is published: Scarface Nation, which my publisher has subtitled “The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America.” You can buy it here. Yes, it’s primarily about the 1983 Al Pacino-Brian De Palma film (publication coincides with its 25th anniversary), but it’s also about Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface starring Paul Muni, and about the fascinating 1930 pulp novel that inspired the character, Armitage Trail’s Scarface, and about all things Scarface, from its effect on hiphop music to its pervasiveness in YouTube political videos. (One that didn’t make my book’s deadline: check out McCain-as-Scarface here.)
Sending a book out into the world is of course at once exhilarating and underwhelming. On the one hand: Yay! It’s done and can be found in Barnes & Noble. On the other: Oy! B&N is only stocking two copies of it at my suburban store?
But today I had a nice experience. After asking at the information desk where the devil I might find Scarface Nation (not on the New Books table—that’s the kind of placement a publisher has to pay for, and mine is thrifty), the cheerful B&N employee insists on escorting me to the movie-books section and we discover it together. We talk a bit, I show him my picture on the back to prove my authorship, he returns to his post, I move the two copies to the New Books table. Then I go poke around the magazines (a new issue of Black Belt featuring “Reality-Based Fighting”! a new issue Poetry with a section on “visual poems”! I snap up both to purchase).
As I’m walking to the cash register, the helpful employee brings along his manager, a smiling woman who says she’d be glad to have her store host a book-signing for me as a local author. She gives me her card; I tell her the name of the publisher’s p.r. person. She promises me I’ll sell “a lot of books.” This is very kind and optimistic. I remember the last time I published a book and did a reading at a Philadelphia Borders. Five people showed up: my wife, two friends, and two people who looked as though they needed to get in from the cold outside. Purchases that night: 0.
Did you know that Al Pacino went through nine suits to shoot the final, copiously bloody, “Say hello to my little friend!” machine-gun shoot-out in Scarface? Oh, this book is just full of fun facts like that…

John Leonard, who died Nov. 5 at age 69, was a dizzyingly inspirational critic. Lots of people are going to write appreciations of his extraordinary body of literary criticism, and although I am here to speak for his television criticism, I will inevitably include some of Leonard’s observations about books, because for him, one informed the other.
When he began simultaneously reviewing books and TV in the early 1970s, he wasn’t someone who wanted to make you feel it was okay to like pop culture (and he was then writing at a time when his readership often wanted such reassurance). No, Leonard’s writing stood as proof that high and low culture could and should spark off each other, yield up fresh juxtapositions and ideas. He didn’t merely write about watching TV, he Leonard-ized the experience, noting that we tuned in “wishing merely for a chortle or a pipe dream, suspecting our cable box is just another bad-faith credit card enabling us to multiply our disappointments, we are ambushed into sentience.”
Leonard’s crammed prose was a series of cultural references packed into sentences so densely that they exploded in your head. Lots of critics write year-end summation pieces; only Leonard could summarize 1971’s TV-year thus: “The mind is a vacuum tube. The memory is artificial turf, videotape, consisting of images of George Plimpton and Archie Bunker; beneath it lies the bodies of four thousand lobotomized network vice-presidents, sewn together at their pineal glands and Achilles’ heels… FCC commissioners and the bureaucrats of public television scrimmage with cleated prose and padded brains.”
Twenty-six years later, showing not a trace of abated energy, he praised an episode of Homicide: Life On The Street that focussed on a long interrogation scene by saying, “for a single hour in March, for which Tom Fontana won the Emmy he deserved, I learned more about the behavior of fearful men in small rooms than I had from any number of better-known movies and serious plays and modern highbrow novels by the likes of Don DeLillo, Mary McCarthy, Alberto Moravia, Nadine Gordimer, Heinrich Boll, and Doris Lessing.” With Leonard, this wasn’t idle cultural name-dropping—he had read and written about all of those novelists. That comparison was not idly made; he had also spent the year watching Northern Exposure and Roseanne (”about joblessness and lesbianism as well as bowling”) and Picket Fences and the TV-movie “Roe V. Wade, with Holly Hunter as a Supreme Court case.” He had his blind spots (he couldn’t get past Archie Bunker’s bigotry to appreciate All In The Family’s craft and sociological impact), and he had his TV crushes (Blair Brown and Veronica Hamel felt his prose caress many times). But he remained not merely sensible and passionate but revelatory. No one could review a travel documentary with a sentence like this, a glorious example of the way one of Leonard’s signature devices—the list-sentence that becomes in itself a form of criticism: “We wandered with a shopping list—Greek light, German sausage, Russian soul, French sauce, Spanish bull, Zen koans, hearts of darkness, the blood of the lamb, and a double-knuckled antelope humerus from Oolduvai Gorge. We’d rub our fuzzy heads against the strange, and see if something kindled.” We’d rub our fuzzy heads against the strange—that’s poetry as much as it is criticism, and Leonard spun it out without warning, without pretence, like a newspaperman on deadline delivering a staggering gift.
Over the years I have often repeated to writers who bitch about lack of recognition the story Leonard told in his first collection of criticism, 1973’s This Pen For Hire, that he started writing TV reviews for Life magazine. But when he became the editor of the Times Book Review, he was told “it was considered inappropriate” for a Times man to write about that lowly medium, and so he continued writing about TV, but under a pen name, Cyclops. “Life still receives letters thanking the magazine for getting rid of me in favor of Cyclops,” Leonard wrote, “or demanding my return and the firing of Cyclops. So much for a distinctive prose style.”
But it is precisely his prose style that made anything Leonard wrote immediately identifiable. He was the first great TV critic. Of those who followed, James Wolcott, Tom Carson, Mim Udovich, and Clive James are the only other ones who can touch him. But none of them—and few of us—can rub our fuzzy heads against the strange and come up with thoughts as clear and complex as those of John Leonard.

You can hear me radio-review Dylan’s latest official-bootleg release here.

From the fine De Palma A La Mod blog comes this information:
Snoop Dog is currently on tour, and the screens behind the stage are showing clips from “Scarface” edited with Snoop-reenacted versions of them.
Does Brian De Palma know about this? Does Universal? I say, more power to Snoop Dogg…