Me on the new Stevie Wonder in Seattle Weekly.

Red Mountain, Brokeback River...same story

The first review of Brokeback Mountain in a mainstream publication. J. Hoberman realizes that Ang Lee's adaptation of the E. Anne Proulx story is the culmination of a genre rather than its end:

The western has always been the most idyllically homosocial of modes—and often one concerned with the programmatic exclusion of women. This is hardly a secret and thus the true cowboy love between tight-lipped Ennis and doe-eyed Jack precipitates the not-so-latent theme of early-'70s oaters like The Wild Rovers and The Hired Hand—not to mention Andy Warhol's hilarious disco western Lonesome Cowboys and its more conventional Hollywood analogue Midnight Cowboy. (Conventional up to a point, that is: Midnight Cowboy not only made a gay fashion statement but included Joe Buck's incredulous cri de coeur, "Are you telling me that John Wayne is a fag?!")

David Thomson detected a similar repressed homo hysteria in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, in which Robert Redford and Paul Newman can barely contain their delight in each other's company:

She knows that the real romance is those two handsome boys and their endless conversational double act. And she is obliged enough to Sundance for going through the amatory motions with her (because men were still gentlemen in those days), but she knew what Sundance's little moustache meant all along. We all knew - same way we all knew when "W' slapped "Brownie" on the back and told the world what a good job he's done. The message is clear: some guys just have no sense when it comes to being with other guys

Speaking of containing delight, neither could Phoebe. Would she care to post an early draft of her review?

Palpatine issues Order 66

In the Vatican's newspaper, Monseigneur Tony Anatrella outlines the Catholic Church's new position on homosexuality and its effects on humankind It's made me chuckle to myself all day:

In no case is this form of sexuality a sexual alternative, or even less, a reality that is equivalent to that which is shared by a man and a woman engaged in matrimonial life

So "this form of sexuality" is "even less" viable as an equivalent to marriage? Let the purges begin.

Krauthammer re torture

Charles Krauthammer's recent column on the McCain torture amendment bears careful reading; it's far more balanced than what we might come to expect from the likes of The Weekly Standard. Here's his proposal:

Begin, as McCain does, by banning all forms of coercion or inhuman treatment by anyone serving in the military--an absolute ban on torture by all military personnel everywhere. We do not want a private somewhere making these fine distinctions about ticking and slow-fuse time bombs. We don't even want colonels or generals making them. It would be best for the morale, discipline, and honor of the Armed Forces for the United States to maintain an absolute prohibition, both to simplify their task in making decisions and to offer them whatever reciprocal treatment they might receive from those who capture them--although I have no illusion that any anti-torture provision will soften the heart of a single jihadist holding a knife to the throat of a captured American soldier. We would impose this restriction on ourselves for our own reasons of military discipline and military honor.

Outside the military, however, I would propose, contra McCain, a ban against all forms of torture, coercive interrogation, and inhuman treatment, except in two contingencies: (1) the ticking time bomb and (2) the slower-fuse high-level terrorist (such as KSM). Each contingency would have its own set of rules. In the case of the ticking time bomb, the rules would be relatively simple: Nothing rationally related to getting accurate information would be ruled out. The case of the high-value suspect with slow-fuse information is more complicated. The principle would be that the level of inhumanity of the measures used (moral honesty is essential here--we would be using measures that are by definition inhumane) would be proportional to the need and value of the information. Interrogators would be constrained to use the least inhumane treatment necessary relative to the magnitude and imminence of the evil being prevented and the importance of the knowledge being obtained.

The question is, would one trust this administration with not just enforcing these standards, but understanding what "the least inhumane treatment" is? Would John Yoo or Alberto Gonzalez have clarified this?

No more biopics!

Sorry, but Capote, Ray, and Walk The Line have little in common. Capote is the best of the three. By concentrating on one episode in the title character's writing life, director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman shun the layers of apocryphal nonsense which have attached themselves to Capote as firmly as Capote himself did to the likes of Bianca Jagger and Nancy Reagan. We have a film in which the creators, with little cant and with great delicacy, give the title character the space to condemn himself for his own bad faith. In its attention to the often violent collisions between the artist and his environment – is creation a mimetic process or one requiring the artist's intervention to produce the desired results? – Capote says more than 8 1/2.

Walk The Line is more like Ray, only not as good. Where Taylor Hackford showed the legend making music, James Mangold shows us a one-dimensional, pill-poppin' basso who incidentally wrote and performed some great songs; it was a Lifetime movie with spiffy production values. At no point is the Cash persona deconstructed; Mangold, his screenwriter, and Joaquin Phoenix really did believe The Man in Black bullshit (in Ray, we do see Ray Charles as the calculating sumbitch he was canny enough to become when it suited his purposes).

Finally, the film's creators ignore the most interesting character. In Reese Witherspoon's hands, June Carter sparkles with a vitality and wit that Phoenix's Cash never approaches. Like Miller's treatment of Harper Lee in Capote (played with quiet avidity by the amazing Catherine Keener), Carter's marginalization upholds the fallacy to which every man succumbs when he produces a film about a Tex Bad Boy: art is for boys.

But Elvis' legs were never this perfect

Madonna now has 36 Top 10 hits, tying Elvis' record.

For your pleasure, vol. 1

If I believed in God, I'd thank him for these tunes; and ask him to help my readers find them:

The Mekons, "Only Darkness Has The Power" (1989)

Singer-guitarist Tom Greenhalgh spends the night in bed with his girlfriend. When morning comes, he's afraid to leave, for reasons he's too frightened to articulate. "I'm not going to explain myself, it's not that important to me," he says, the tremor in his voice quite audible through a skein of ugly guitars. Of course, articulating fear and rage is exactly what one expects from these members of the class of '77; this is the only song in which punks admit their mission's impossibility – and it comes 12 years too late. "Do you trust me to tell the truth? Do you trust me?" Greenhalgh croons, before the chorus circles him once more, and the ugly guitars scare him under the covers again.

Madonna, "Gambler" (1985)

Little-known gem, eclipsed by the success of "Crazy For You" on the otherwise forgettable Vision Quest soundtrack. This is Madonna at her most slatternly, her lower register drawing strength from the synthesizer and drum machines making an unholy racket. It's also more convincing pseudo-satire than "Material Girl." Only Shakira could get away with this today (and kinda does, on "Don't Bother"). Why haven't any of Maddie's umpteenth compilations ever included this? Because she doesn't want to show Lourdes her dirty panties.

Karyn White, "Romantic" (1991)

Another obscurity, "Romantic" was the biggest hit for Karyn White, going to #1 on the Hot 100 in the fall of '91. Before "Romantic" she scored three top 10's, none of which get much airplay anymore except on urban quiet-storm stations ("Superwoman," "Secret Rendezvous," and "The Way You Love Me"). Like fellow neglected late '80s/early '90s R&B songstress Jody Watley, White was at her best when she eschewed self-expression and allowed producers to set her innocuous voice in a boisterous setting -- in this case a Jimmy Jam-Terry Lewis song and production stitched from Alexander O'Neal and Janet leftovers. One of the last new jack swing hits before the Top 40's acclimitization to hip-hop sent every diva except Mary J. Blige and Mariah Carey to the clearance bin.

Kelly Osbourne, "One Word"

Here's the reason why this song and Visage's "Fade To Grey" -- the piece from which it draws its chords, melody, and Old Europe here-by-the-Seine vibe -- flopped in the States. We Yanks have zero patience for anomic limeys with asymmetrical eyeshadow playing synthesizers and quasi-limeys with asymmetrical eyeshadow playing with our notions of what respectable celebrities do.

Ah, it's just too exhausting to really care

The Likud party is all about peace. From The Financial Times:

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's former finance minister, yesterday denounced his long-time rival Ariel Sharon as a "dictator" a day after the prime minister quit the Likud party to form a new centrist movement to stand in the next elections, scheduled for March 28.

There's more.

The Likud party, which Mr Netanyahu hopes to lead, would move away from the "one-man rule of Sharon, who apparently doesn't recognise democracy and is setting up a party of puppets", he told Army Radio.

And of course, buried in the story's penultimate paragraph:

Meanwhile, Israel yesterday approved the construction of 350 new homes in one of the biggest settlement blocs in the West Bank, Maale Adumim. The Palestinians say such expansion, opposed by the US, encroaches on land they need for a future state.

I'm thinking of posting everytime Israel approves new settlement developments. I don't understand how anyone could seriously mouth the words "Israeli withdrawal" in reference to what they did in Gaza.

From the National Journal:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

I am a formalist!!

Thank you, Josh, for helping me realize what I am.

You knew this was coming

At first, the Vatican's declaration that it will not tolerate sexually active homosexual clergy seems beside the point; heterosexual clergy can't be sexually active either. But this move bespeaks an attempt by Pope Benedict XVII to initiate a Palpatine-like purge of anyone with gay metachlorians:

In September, Vatican-directed inspectors started visiting all 229 American seminaries. Part of their mission is to seek any "evidence of homosexuality" at a time when some Catholics have put forward the highly contested premise that gay priests were more likely to be responsible for criminal behavior such as serial, same-sex molestation.

Of course, the Church's unyielding devotion to the questionable psychology which links pedophilia with homosexuality is a large part of the problem.

And the Vatican can't be too keen on this development.

Often foolish and quite consistent

Re the new Madonna, Confessions On A Dance Floor: I'm still hung up over "Hung Up," the ravishing "Sorry" is her best second single since "Deeper & Deeper" if not "Express Yourself," the allusions to her influences and her own work are subtle and sometimes winningly deployed (my favorite: the "Papa Don't Preach"-meets-"Die Another Day" strings on "Forbidden Love"), and the infamous "I Love N.Y." has beats and stereo effects that Annie wishes she could afford. Finally, while Stuart Price gets the cred for Dance Floor's post-trance yumminess (the album is the aural equivalent of the fluorescent hand-me-down's Madonna wears on the cover), it's his co-producer who shapes these things into songs with indelible vocal melodies (her best, most unremarked talent).

I agree with Thomas: the album thumps rather too eagerly. We miss "I Deserve It" and "White Heat" and "Waiting" and "Candy Perfume Girl": the decent filler and leaden ballads she insists on including and nevertheless add flavor and getsalt (the self-titled debut did the best job of hiding them: one per side, short and painless). Its most eccentric moment is the sample of Hebrew prayer adorning "Isaac," a dandy bit of exotica which should please "Desert Rose" fans. Dance Floor's consistency is wearying and worrying. If Maddie's Kwicky Kabbalah can purge her muse of impurities with such ruthlessness, then Tom Cruise joined the wrong cult.

Honey, would I lie to you?

My review of the new Eurythmics comp, which you should buy only if you can't find a copy of their 1990 Greatest Hits (you're not checking your used CD store often enough) or are reluctant to own Touch or Be Yourself Tonight (in which case, you're a fucking loon).

El Comandante – sick?

The Miami Herald quotes CIA sources revealing that Fidel has Parkinson's.

That Teddy...what a bear

Just to show that the Bush administration doesn't have a monopoly on torture, here's an excerpt (as quoted in Edmund Morris' superb biography Theodore Rex, as rich as a novel) from the testimony of an Army officer to the Sesnate Committee on Military Affairs in 1902, which convened to hear testimony of the abuse of Filipinos by American soldiers during the occupation:

A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit on his arms and legs and hold him down by either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin...is simply thrust into his jaws...and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose...until the man gives some sign of giving in or becoming unconscious...His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but who cannot drown.

This was known as "the water cure." Sounds like waterboarding away.

There is a difference. The Roosevelt administration swiftly condemned the torture. He instructed his Secretary of War Elihu Root to dispatch this cable: Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder, and habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture againstn our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman cruelty of any kind on the part of the American army."

Whereupon Roosevelt ordered the court martial of the general who allowed the torture to happen.

Bush-whacked again

Whoever thought that 12 years of silence would tame Kate Bush's eccentricities should return to their Tori Amos records. No review I've read of Bush's Aerial has acknowledged how weird this record is. Fathomlessly weird. A weirdness that's as much shaped by domesticity as it is by Romantic and Gothic fiction. There's a murky song about Elvis on a cliff which sounds as if he's singing from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean ("King of the Mountain"), another about a housekeeper who gets an orgasm while washing her boss' clothes (the chorus is -- all together now -- : "Washing ma-c-h-i-i-i-i-n-n-e..."), and one in which Bush's laughter duets with a flock of twittering birds. The latter is found on Aerial's second disc, titled A Sky of Honey (the first is, of course, called A Sea of Honey).

I don't want to get all Second Sex on you, but no man could have created, let alone populated, a world like this, in which feminine responses to desire are given the aural and compositional space commensurate with their strength. Actually, maybe there is someone: Kid Rock's sonics often match his lyrics. If you're thinking that this comparison dishonors Bush, you're giving her too much credit. Explain the difference between a teenage girl keeping a journal with a flowered cover and whose ravishing entries are written in green ink, and her male classmate boasting about the size of a girl's tits to his buddies.

Is this twaddle any good? Stay tuned.

This is why Anthony Lane is so goddamn funny:

The hint becomes a yodel toward the end, as Matthew Macfadyen strides grimly through a wet meadow, at some ungodly hour, with Keira Knightley squarely in his sights. He has donned a long coat, which sways fetchingly in the mist; obviously it was copied from a Human League video of the nineteen-eighties, but I’m damned if I can remember which one. For her part, Knightley has been crisp and quick throughout—more girl than woman than seems fit, perhaps, and a boyish girl to boot, but ready and able to hold her own in any rally of wits. Now, like the queen in “Aliens,” she extends her famous underbite and gets down to business.

--review of Pride & Prejudice

It's Miller time

The Washington Post has a great interview with newly-ex New York Times reporter Judith Miller which sheds a lot of light on her character, including extensive quotes from Miller herself, her friends and fellow NYT staffers past and present -- some effusive in their praise, others highly critical. The picture the article paints is a fair one and draws the reader into the middle of the two, extreme perceptions of Miller that have been thrown out by the media since the Valerie Plame scandal erupted. The first is that of Miller as journalistic martyr sworn to protect the First Amendment with cape billowing in the wind. The other paints Miller as an attention-hungry harpy that is less reporter and more shrill seductress slithering through sources and the legal system to mislead the nation about WMD, the war in Iraq and the truth behind the Valerie Plame affair.

The end result is a manic, insecure and energetic woman that is desperate to remain in the public eye. As the story points out, Miller kept a detailed "jail journal" on the off chance she could score a book deal. And despite numerous awards (Pulitzer, Emmy, DuPont), found her work edited for bias on numerous occasions by the Times editorial desk. She was fervent in her pursuit of "the great story," but equally questionable in how she got there (I still think "entanglement" is the right way to describe her relationship with Scooter). But, like I said, it's not a black and white situation. I suggest giving the story a read and forming your own conclusions.

Graphic novel reviews

My latest graphic novel reviews are up. Registration required!

It had to happen.

A review of the worst album I've heard this year.

What's love got to do with it? Absolutely nothing

I don't agree with Justin's take on The Ronettes' "Be My Baby". Aggressive, yes. Voracious too ("For every kiss you'll give me/I'll give you three"); and thanks to Ronnie Spector's slightly flat vocal she's the embodiment of every 16 yr-old girl who wished her boyfriend would crawl thru her bedroom window instead of dropping her off for the night. For the guy on the other end, it's flattering to date a girl with this insatiable a sexual need, but it's also unpleasant and creepy, which is probably producer Phil Spector's (and Ronnie's husband) point.

Thus, when Justin asserts that "`Be My Baby' echoes the recent past without anticipating the changes to come...hardly a feminist highpoint, even if Ronnie did sing the hell out of it," I think he's too hung-up on academic definitions of feminism. The drumbeats that echo into eternity, the wan backing vocals of the other Ronettes, the string section -- female teenage angst had never been flattered with such grandiosity. But he demurs:

Her economic offer places her in a subservient position (emotionally and physically), and her plea sounds more like a male fantasy of female desire than it does an honest proclamation of a woman's right to want.

I give Spector more credit. His production and arrangement, by virtue of its meticulousness, actually legimitizes Ronnie. We may not want her as a girlfriend, but at least she's a human being, with recognizable passions. (To Justin's credit, he seems aware of the paradoxes and acknowledges at a later point, after a rather good interpretation of how Ike Turner exploited wife Tina, that there's "something problematic" about reducing Tina [and Ronnie too?] to "an archetype.")

Let's look at another great artist: Eddie Money. Remember his Top Five hit from 1986? You can all sing "Take Me Home Tonight." Betcha it was the first time you'd ever heard Ronnie Spector, appended to coo, rather wobbily, the chorus of her biggest hit. Besides his no doubt benevolent gesture to give a childhood icon some work, what on earth was Money thinking? Consider: hoary, white, mulletted he-men don't usually allow their women a chance to speak their minds, even when, in this case, all they're doing is validating the male singer's grotesque egoism. "Take Me Home Tonight" recontextualizes "Be My Baby" as the plea for subservience of Justin's nightmares.

The members of the interpretive community of Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish's dreams would include both the audience and the context in which the song is recorded, as well as its form (which, of course, leads us to formalist and structuralist interpretations, and too much thinking about what I wanted to forget about grad school).

What I finally think about Madonna's "Hung Up,"(along with thoughts on Gorillaz feat. Shaun Ryder, Depeche Mode, Mariah Carey, and others):

The decision to sample the best ABBA song of all time may smack of desperation from the producer of this year’s most haunting remix (that’s Stuart Price and “Mr. Brightside”), but the source material becomes putty in the hands of the greatest dance artist of all time, whose silly accent and ever-more-irrelevant lyrics are no longer encumbrances. It’s clear now that Madonna embraces Kabbalah because it provides her with so many fungible mantras and taglines; and since great dance music is composed of nothing but mantras and taglines she sublimates her once-considerable charisma into pure will-to-power – an evolution that would have been a horror if it had happened to Whitney Houston. It can’t last forever: as a dance artist approaches 50, time goes by so slowly, slowly. Even so, I’m relieved she loves bass sequencers as much as she loves God.
Score: [10]

Imagine a mash-up of "West End Girls" and "Lucky Star"...

Apparently there are two rather obvious allusions to Pet Shop Boys music on Madonna's forthcoming Confessions On A Dance Floor. This PopJustice interview with producer Stuart Price (aka Jacques Lu Cont, creator of the marvelous remix of "Mr. Brightside") explains how and where.

The Pet Shop Boys have hired Trever Horn (!) to produce their new album, due next spring.

The end of gay culture = it's about time

This recent essay by Andrew Sullivan takes for granted that gayness is a culture, rather than (perhaps?) a construct created by like-minded sexual iconoclasts looking for solace. Since the icons and argot of gay culture have no totemic value for me -- I'm a member of the generation, after all, that grew up in the wake of the sacrifices made by his -- I am more inclined to not just accept but revel in the confounding of sexual divisions which the Internet and the so-fucking-what attitude of the next generation (like my students) have wrought, both of which have been genuine palliatives. Sullivan:

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist--or that they won't create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that "gayness" alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.

I can only say, as he comes to each wistful, reductive conclusion, "AMEN!"

By the way, I command my fellow sodomists to respond if they disagree with my conclousions.

PS: Kudos on the Pet Shop Boys epigraph.

Isn't he lovely?

My review of the new Stevie Wonder, for your delectation.

Mysterious Skin

One of this year's best films was just released on DVD. Searching, empathetic, and even a bit frightening, Mysterious Skin shows what happened when the lives of two boys on the same Little League team (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbett) molested by their coach intersect when they enter young addult hood. The greatness of Mysterious Skin lies in director Gregg Araki's willingness to accept a creepy fact barely alluded to in other recent films about child abuse (One-Hour Photo, The Woodsmen): the victims just may enjoy the sexual contact.

I'm no fan of Araki's past films, which are without exception amateurish and puerile (The Living End, The Doom Generation, Nowhere); but there's a grown-up quality and a pathos I would never have expected (and you all know how I love being wrong). For example: Araki's acceptance of his characters' ridiculous passions (third-rate TV shows about UFO's, Slowdive records) is refreshing, worthy of My Own Private Idaho-era Gus Van Sant. We find out what it's like to live in a small Kansas town in which you've fucked everyone at the bar. Elizabeth Shue's promiscuous mom isn't a trailer-trash stereotype; she's an older woman who loves sex and her boy in equal measure.

Finally, it's also got the film music I've heard this year: Harold Budd's minimalist score – ominous bleeps and unexpected swells – underpins every scene.

Panic on the streets of...well, everywhere.

Morrissey, with new producer Tony Visconti (of David Bowie and Marc Bolan), is prepping a new album, tentatively titled Ringleader of the Tormentors, for a spring release.

Husker Don't?

And speaking of refreshing, this take on Husker Du's purportedly epochal New Day Rising goes from boredom to ecstasy to exhaustion as unpredicably as the Husker's own "Games." I was always a Flip Your Wig fan myself. And prefer Sugar anyway.

It's those damn Beatles again

Refreshingly stupid take on Beatlemania, inspired by the publication of Bob Spitz's exhaustive The Beatles: The Biography (which, of course, I'll read eventually). The stupid part consists of the Ringo jokes:

If you said "Ringo Starr" around a person of moderate intelligence, he would assume you were making a hilarious joke about the lovechild between Kenneth Starr and a VHS cassette containing the 1998 horror film Ringu.

Did you know Machiavelli is a frequent guest on "The O'Reilly Factor"?

Some rather intelligent remarks about strategist/self-promoter Dick Morris courtesy of Jonah Goldberg:

I know some folks around here are friends or friendly with him. But I am consistently amazed people take him as seriously as they do. He is brilliant, but he is also a deeply amoral pragmatist. The problem with analysts like him is that their insights are only useful when self-interest isn't in play. Since they have loyalty to no larger ideas or principles, they can be acute observers of politics. But such Machiavellianism is also a hindrance, because principles and a moral vision also help us notice when we're letting our self-interest intrude. When they are absent, self-interest reigns supreme.

And he has dreadful taste in hookers.