THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS. What are the best books of 2002? Judging from many of the lists I've seen, Ian McEwan's Atonement and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated are leading contenders. In the non-fiction category, the latest volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson seems to be a front-runner--whether or not Michael Kinsley read the book before giving it a nod for its National Book Award. I've also heard good things about James Smith's Bad Hair, the compendium of horrific hairstyles published by Bloomsbury USA.

Another very good book that, I fear, was overlooked by many critics and readers is Jonathan Tel's Arafat's Elephant, a collection of short stories set mainly in Israel. Published early in 2002 by Counterpoint Press just as the company was disbanding, the book probably also suffered from having a relatively unknown author as well as a title that would be a turn-off for many book dealers and book buyers. Considering the escalation of Middle Eastern violence in the months following 9/11, anyone looking for escapist fiction was not likely to be sold by the lead story "A Story About a Bomb," no matter how cleverly written it and its companions were.

Nevertheless, Arafat's Elephant does not deserve obscurity because of the unfortunate circumstances of its release and its scant, albeit positive, critical reception. For readers who appreciate Escheresque literary puzzles, Tel's tale-telling--replete with doubles and caricatures--wields the surrealistic allure of a desert mirage. One review can be found at the website for the Austin Chronicle.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NEW YORK OBSERVER. About ten years ago, an acquaintance brought the New York Observer to my attention. She told me that anyone interested in the publishing biz should read this weekly paper, which boasted industry-related gossip as one of its strong points.

Since I got that tip-off, I've become much more familiar with the Observer, mostly as a result of the numerous free "trial subscriptions" that come my way. Those "trial subscriptions" stand out among the wonderful and sad things about the salmon-tinted paper. Wonderful because the Observer's quality writing--charming, witty, enthusiastic, thoughtful--deserves to be read by many people, and sad because those who appreciate the paper the most probably don't see the point in paying for it with when they can have it posted to them at no cost.

So here's wishing the Observer well on its 15th birthday. For about two-thirds of its existence, I have enjoyed its front-page caricatures, its coverage of matters related to Thomas Pynchon, and the contributions of calender queen Alexandra Jacobs, film critic Andrew Sarris, columnist Ron Rosenbaum (here's a sample column that touches on the experience of seeing the Hitler-fable film Max), and even gossip monarch Rex Reed (here's his rollicking report on guesting the Minelli-Gest wedding), to name just four of the writers on its roster. On a purely personal level, I was tickled to see coverage of the PGA golf tournament by Josh Benson, who peppered one report with allusions to the high school that we both attended. I don't know Josh (who must have attended the school generations after I did) but I certainly recognized the name of our mutual gym teacher, Stan Louckes. I love that kind of detail, that kind of coincidence.

And then there's Countdown to Bliss, the giddy engagement column by Anna Jane Grossman.

HOBBIT HIPHOP. Lords of the Rhymes offers a hiphop parody of The Lord of the Rings that samples a horrid little ditty called "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." The lifted line "Bilbo, Bilbo Baggins, he's only three feet tall" was rendered decades ago by none other than Leonard Nimoy.

I've had virtually no luck surfing the web for the notorious video that shows Nimoy performing "The Ballad..." with what looks like a bevy of pointy-eared beach bunnies, but this audio file of "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" is reminder enough that William Shatner was not the only Star Trek star to explore the outer realms of musical trekploitation.

ROBERT ALTMAN: IMAGE CONSCIOUS. Last night Robert Altman sat in the back of a Film Forum theater and watched his movie Images (1972) for the first time in about 20 years. The print was beautiful, the film fascinating. After the audience gave the director a standing ovation, he came forward and offered very brief remarks.

"I could cut twenty minutes out of it," Altman said of Images in "answer" to a question about how the names of the cast members were apparently reshuffled as the names of the film's characters. Then the director suddenly waxed affectionate and nostalgic.

"I was really infatuated with what I was doing," he recalled, almost apologetically.

Finally, Altman seemed to make a full retraction. "I wouldn't cut any of it," he said in defense of his movie.

So I guess we won't see a shorter Images: The Director's Cut any time soon—even though such an alternative strikes me as potentially worthwhile. I feel that way not just because of my interest in Altman and Images, but because, to the best of my knowledge, few if any Director's Cuts turn out to be shorter than the theatrically-released versions. (Just try to imagine an Apocalypse Now Redux Redux that lasts a mere 90 minutes.)

Images can accurately be said to belong to the genre of "psychological" or "hallucinatory" movies that, as Pauline Kael has pointed out, has a lineage that goes at least as far back as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). It can be said to be a cousin (to varying degrees) of Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), Cul-De-Sac (1966), Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976) as well as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) and Altman's own Three Women (1977).

The film effectively conveys the anguish of its main character, Cathryn (Susannah York), who lashes out violently in a struggle to distinguish between reality and hallucinations. What makes her plight especially disturbing to me was her solitude, her efforts to combat her problems privately instead of doing whatever she could to get outside help. Those closest to her don't seem especially helpful, either, adding to her isolation and desperation. If her story is any indication of what some people with mental illnesses must endure, my sympathy for them has grown as a result of seeing this movie.

Images is very much a product of the great burst of cinematic expression that followed the establishment of the ratings code in the United States. The nudity, violence, and obscenity heighten the intensity of its investigation of long-avoided "real-life" issues of language, imagination, identity, and sexuality. Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is stunning, and the eclectic score by John Williams (Altman called him "Johnny") should surprise anyone who, like myself, associates him mainly with the orchestral bombast he contributes to Steven Spielberg movies.

POETRY SLAM TO POETRY JAM. I first experienced the power of performed poetry in the mid-Eighties, when I attended readings by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Robert DeNiro was at one Yevtushendo tribute at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, reading from "Babi Yar," but his rendition wasn't the one that blew me away. To my surprise, DeNiro's performance was pretty much the kind of blasé poetry reading I had come to expect, lacking the intensity of his screen and stage performances. (My favorite DeNiro moment that evening occurred after we had evacuated the building due to a bomb scare. The star of Taxi Driver returned my "goodbye" wave as he departed in the backseat of a cab.)

It was not DeNiro, but Yevtushenko himself who raised my poetic consciousness at the church and another event with Allen Ginsberg at the Village Gate. Yevtushenko's dramatic, incantatory readings made me realize just how powerful a poetry recital could be, integrating poetics with singing and dramatics. Suddenly I had a much better idea of how classical poets had worked their magic.

I had similar experiences attending poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café about ten years ago. The performances were wildly inconsistent, but the brilliantly ad-libbed hosting of MC Bob Holman and the readings by poets such as Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz, and Edwin Torres were thrilling, titillating, tickling, and even transcendent at times.

Another poet I saw at the Nuyorican slams was Tracie Morris, but it wasn't until I saw her at another venue that I witnessed how powerful her own performances could be. That venue was Harlem's Apollo Theater, at a program devoted to the Roots of Hiphop. Morris delivered a poem that I had heard before at the Nuyorican, but at the Apollo I saw for the first time how a hiphop crowd responded to her, clapping in time and shouting back at her.

The Nuyorican crowd had never grooved along with a poet the way the Apollo crowd did. At the Apollo, Morris was in her element. Suddenly, she struck me as a much more moving poet than I had suspected her of being.

Over the years, performance poetry continued to merge along with hiphop into mainstream US culture, in books, movies, and audio recordings as well as live events. And now Russell Simmons, producer of HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, is now presenting the critically-acclaimed Broadway poetry revue Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

When the show's nine poets took the stage last night, I couldn't ignore how they seemed to have been packaged like hiphop poetry's version of the Spice Girls or the Backstreet Boys. They were diverse in a Benetton kind of way, charismatic and obviously "representative" of different types, though blondes were only present in the poems themselves. The poets flaunted their "differences" like badges, clearly buying into identity politics, often along ethnic and class lines.

But once the performances were underway, the intensity of the readings eliminated most of my skepticism about the packaging. Like other poetry performances I admired, the show offered great examples of the form as a means of entertainment, enlightenment, and exuberant self-expression. The performers excelled at keeping the audience in their sway—as attuned to the wordplay as the Apollo audience had been—adding to the theatrics in the same way.

Now that hiphop poetry has come out of the giddy world of slams and arrived mass-marketed in the media and the Broadway stage, I wonder whether it will continue to emerge as a newly popular form of literary entertainment. So far it's been a thrill to see it take shape over the past two decades.

I'D LOSE THE DRESS. The results of the New Yorker Caption Contest are in. As you may recall (but probably won't), the uncaptioned cartoon depicts a prison cell. Inside, a hardened convict stands, speaking to an angel (complete with halo, wings, and smock) sitting on the lower half of a bunk bed. On the top bunk are some books; a pin-up hangs on the wall. In the foreground, there's a desk topped by a mug and some blank sheets of paper.

I had a great time concocting captions. A great time...except for the long stretches when I lost myself in a fog of creative obsession. During those spells as a captive of the caption I became the convict. I emerged with dozens of captions, including the following:


Maybe you weren't meant to be a caption writer.

Don't feel bad. Johnnie Cochran doesn't write back to me, either.

And I thought Lizzie Grubman had suffered a fall from grace.

Of course it's not your fault. It's the system.

I don't care if you have friends in high places. The top bunk is mine.

Maybe you'd feel better if you used the weight room.

Frankly, I would have preferred one of Charlie's Angels.

Frankly, I would have preferred one of Charlie's Angels. But you'll do.



I also came up with a couple of captions that would have special appeal for movie fans:


Let me get this straight. After saving George, you also took the fall for Uncle Billy?


If you can't sleep at night, it isn't the coffee or the bunk. It's your wings and it's your halo, too.



The "George" caption alludes, of course, to a neglected plot point in the beloved Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life. The "coffee/bunk" caption refers to the lesser-known Preston Sturges movie Christmas in July, which revolves around a dreamer who enters the slogan "If you can't sleep at night, it's not the coffee--it's the bunk!" in a slogan-writing contest sponsored by a coffee company. That's the caption I entered in the contest--not because I thought it would win, but because there was an irresistible appeal in making such a tribute to Sturges. Not every cartoon contest will feature a coffee mug and a bunk and an angel who looks extraordinarily fatigued.

Anyway, the winner of the contest was "I'd lose the dress." So it goes.