Love goes on anyway

My Grant McLennan obit. A few challenges. It was difficult to avoid sentimentality, and I wanted to describe for the uninitiated what McLennan's music sounded like.

Robert Forster on the Go-Betweens' official message board:

Today I went to the website and read some of the magnificent tributes that have flown in for Grant. People for some days have been telling me of the beautiful things written there. And today I felt well enough and strong enough to go in and read. I thank you all. In time I shall read every one of them. I see familiar names scattered from our past. The vast majority I don't know. All of you Grant and I have met through our music. Your words and thoughts I find very, very moving. I sense the love and understanding for Grant and his music, and I take the support you send to me to my heart.

These last days I have Grant in my head. He talks to me in odd moments. I hear him... and I always will.

"Maybe I think too much for my own sake"

Stephen Thomas Erlewine's review of the new Brian Eno-helmed Paul Simon record Surprise (sorry: the credits read, "Produced by Paul Simon, Sonic Awareness by Brian Eno") has got me intrigued. Simon's always been the kind of singer-songwriter maligned for being what he isn't, by which I mean: people would admit to liking him if he was more like James Taylor or Jackson Browne, instead of being uncategorizable. Anyway, as someone who hates Simon & Garfunkel almost as much as the Eagles and the Doors and adores Graceland, I'd love to know if Surprise is aptly named. He even plays lots of guitar, which is always a treat.

"Whatever I have is yours, and it's right here"

I remember when I first heard "Bachelor Kisses." In the spring of 2000 I was visiting Manhattan for a journalism convention. I bought the Go-Betweens' Spring Hill Fair, after years of Robert Christgau encomia and memorizing Eric Weisbard's entry in The SPIN Alternative Record Guide. Like all the best McLennan, "Bachelor Kisses" tugged at the memory: specific yet avoiding the literal. I hadn't yet experienced what the beautiful vernacular of his bridge spelled out ("Don't believe what you've heard/`Faithful''s not a bad word"), but he convinced me that I could, and the inexorable tug of McLennan's voice and guitar did the rest. I fell in love.

Here's an ILM thread, filled with reminiscences of critics who interviewed him and fans who loved him.

The official ABC News obit.

A list of the songs you should download, like, now:

"Your Turn, My Turn"
"Two Steps, Step Out"
"Cattle & Cane"
"Slow Slow Music"
"In the Core of a Flame"
"Right Here"
"Bye Bye Pride"
"Streets of Your Town"
"Easy Come, Easy Go"
"Put You Down"
"Lighting Fires"
"Stones For You"

Finally, Steve Kilbey, late of The Church and McLennan's collaborator (Jack Frost), has written the most touching obit to date, going to the heart of Grant's singularity:

grant seemed to have a way of opening up his mouth
and singing instant choruses
hed plucked outta the ether
words flew to him
he walk with melodies at his beck n call

R.I.P.

Grant McLennan - R.I.P.

I just heard. Apparently he died in his sleep. As soon as I find out more information I'll edit and update. Likewise if anyone has learned anything else, drop me a line.

Anyone who knows me knows how much The Go-Betweens' catalogue has meant to me over the years, so I'm not sure what to write just yet.

See ya

One more domino falls. With Porter Goss gone, speculation mounts: conflicts with Director of National Intelligence John Negraponte? the President got wind of the burgeoning Randy Cunningham-Brent Wilkes imbroglio (which I am only now trying to understand)? If there's anything else I'm missing, let me know.

Adolescence: the disease for which there is no cure

Keep your eye on Mallory O'Donnell; he's got the goods. In this reevaluation of The Cure's rather forgotten 1990 remix album Mixed Up, Mallory evokes without condescension the adolescence mindset for which Robert Smith's miserabilism serves as the ideal soundtrack. The essay is too long, and its diffuseness makes certain ideas hard to parse (Mixed Up representing "the exact moment at which profound self-reflection commingles with pure sensuality" sounds right, even though I'm not sure what he means), but, of course, so is adolescence; and for many of us in high school Robert Smith's so-smooth-it-even-feels-like-skin fantasias conveyed the erotic languor which sure smelled great when we were bored of Morrissey's strained attempts at distance. Conveyed it too well, perhaps: these days The Cure remind me of earnest conversations in vacant lots, watching the video of "High" after mediating a frigid confrontation between two best friends, and my own strained attempts at heterosexual courtship.

(As for Mixed Up: the place to go for the super remixes of "Lullaby" and "Hot! Hot! Hot!!" and one of the best singles, "Never Enough." The mild heresy of a "rock" band issuing a remix album in 1990 now looks like a shrewd hipster move -- now looks like orthodoxy).

"And I ride and I ride..."

I'm in agreement with Pauline Kael that, with the wondrous exception of L'Avventura, the rest of Michaelangelo Antonioni's oeuvre doesn't quite hold up. A montage -- like the one the Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Biases played to a befuddled audience when he received the honorary Oscar in 1995 -- seems the best way of honoring him: Jeanne Moreau's night walk in La Notte, her senses alive to the excitement and terror of city life; Alain Delon's feline torpor in Eclisse; that waiting-for-a-Woody-Allen-parody tennis match between mimes in Blow-Up.

Thanks to Sony Picture Classics, I got a chance to rescreen The Passenger, his second and last American film. Yawning loudly upon watching the crappy videocassette edition that was extant in the early '90s, I was riveted this time by Antonioni's beautiful, unsettling juxtaposition of man and architecture, of man and landscape, whether it's David Locke (Jack Nicholson) sharing a smoke with a Tuareg nomad in North Africa, or standing before an Andalusian mountain, gradually accepting the consequences of his identity-theft (Clair Denis has obviously paid close attention). A Borges-ian riddle, The Passenger is also -- if not just -- a swanky head trip. You can take the identity swap folderol seriously or not; Antonioni's so genial a director that while you're arguing about the film's metaphysical import he's already moved on to photographing the quotidian (a girl chewing bubble gum, a man pushing a bike up a mountain) with an affectless curiosity that David Lynch no doubt admired. Affectlessness does have its limits; we should be grateful that, despite Kael's ministrations, the zombie-like Maria Schneider never did become the international icon for aging male lions which Last Tango in Paris positioned her as. As for Jack, with superstardom awaiting him (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was released a few months later), his commitment to the project never flags. He doesn't do much but walk, brood and frown puzzlingly at Schneider (no wonder we love Jack: he's human like the rest of us), but this is one of his more unheralded quiet performances: his character's self-contempt oozes from every pore.

Nicholson's commentary track, to which you can listen without cutting into your film time since there's so little dialogue, is a model of intelligence and concision (and stamina; Jack sounds like he's got strep throat). If L'Avventura intimidates you, as it should (two hour-plus rendering of the spiritual isolation of vapid rich people), The Passenger is an excellent condensation of the Antonioni style.

You get that? As bad as James Buchanan

Daring the posters at The Corner to defy him, Sean Wilentz (author of the mammoth The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln) penned an article in the new Rolling Stone entitled, "The Worst President in History."

I know. This is the same magazine which cooed delightedly when Bill Clinton wished that the Constitution didn't set a term limit for the Chief Executive so that he could run for a third term. But the catalogue of failures makes for grim reading, and, Wilentz suggests, it ain't gonna get better:

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- [James] Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, [Herbert] Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

Meanwhile I looked at smilin' old Tony Snow, the White House's new press secretary and someone I've always sorta liked, and wonder how he's going to give coherence to an adminstration that ain't got none anymore.

Auto-erotica, X-Men style

X-Men star Sir Ian McKellen bitched that his character Magneto doesn't get enough nookie -- with Professor Charles Xavier.

"He hasn't been given a love line, which I think is a pity. It would be wonderful if the camera hovered over Magneto's bed, to discover him making love to Professor X."

The idea sounds delicious in theory, of course; but it would be unfair on Magneto, since Professor X can manipulate him into orgasm.

Scenes

Since I watch more films these days than I listen to music (D.W. Griffith would have loved Netflix), I want to write more about them. I've published a couple of reviews in Stylus already, and I'm going to be contributing to a new section called Scenes, the film counterpart to Seconds, in which a writer "dissects a moment in song."

For my first entry I chose Ernest Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), as close to perfection as romantic comedy gets, with a tone and glamour as alien to cinema as David Bowie's ethos was to most rock music. Get thee to Criterion's special edition, like, now.

"Can't you give me something else to talk about?"

Regarding Alexander O'Neal's Hearsay, Justin can hear little beside affirmation of what he disliked about late '80s R&B: "Hearsay doesn't separate itself from everything I wouldn't listen to when it came out." Meanwhile I have no hesitation in affirming its status as an all-time fave, probably in my top 10 -- quite an achievement considering that I only heard the album last December.

Elsewhere Josh reminds us of the eccentric Janet Jackson-Jam-Lewis troika. How does someone so vocally innocuous convince us over the course of five albums that she's a Superbowled sex kitten with aberrant notions of what makes a good time?

The lovers win every time

As producers of and songwriters for Cherrelle, the S.O.S. Band, the Human League, Alexander O'Neal, Karyn White, New Edition, Mary J. Blige and, of course, their greatest collaborator Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis would probably make my list as the best creators of chartbound pop music of the last 20-odd years.

Stylus Magazine had dedicated the whole week to Jam & Lewis, beginning yesterday with Thomas Inskeep's fine omnibus essay and Jeff Siegel and Mallory O'Donnell's takes on Janet Jackson's "Nasty" and New Edition's magnificent "If It Isn't Love." Today I re-assess Jam-Lewis' work on Human League's misbegotten Crash.

Tomorrow: two very different analyses (by Justin Cober-Lake and myself) of Jam-Lewis' greatest non-Janet Jackson opus: Alexander O'Neal's Hearsay. Look for: a panel review of assorted Jam-Lewis goodies, a comprehensive study of their association with Janet, their post-Janet highlights; and, on Friday, the English perspective, by Marcello Carlin.

Even George W. Bush Has Got Soul

Neil Young's set to record an anti-Bush album. One tune is rather cryptically titled "Impeach the President." The music world holds its collective breath. Neil initially liked Reagan, you know.

"But your lyrics spoke gold and honey..."

I cannot describe the rush provided by the Jesus & Mary Chain's "Happy When It Rains" when driving home on a Saturday night with a bellyful of wine and good eats.

For your pleasure, vol #4

Morrissey, Ringleader of the Tormentors

I'm euphoric that Moz has finally owned up to liking cock; now he can go get some instead of indenturing poor Tony Visconti to enliven plodding midtempo songs whose lyrical explicitness their creator mistakes for honesty but is really the flipside of a middle aged pussyhound yielding to his urges. And we all know how gross that can be without the requisite irony. Anthony: "I used to laugh about boomer artists given attention long after their sell-through date, but the `four stars for Storyville' impulse doesn't seem so generation-specific now."

Yeah Yeah Yeah's, Show Your Bones

At first this album dragged. It was my fault: all these guys got from me in 2003 was a polite thumbs-up, while under my breath I mumbled something about the half-life of postpunk referents. I was convinced they wanted to make a thick-sounding rock album – what else could they do? But I wasn't convinced they could make a good one. So what if "Gold Lion" is Sleater Kinney-meets-Love-&-Rockets? Not when Karen O wants to belt like Chrissie Hynde, always a good thing (on "Cheated Hearts" she even mimics Chrissie's catch-in-the-throat). The kids won't download "Dudley" when they need a ringtone like they did for "Maps," and I know why: an admission that partying destroys even the most perfect love is not the message teenagers want to hear. Or hot young bands. So I give the Yeah's the credit for saying yeah.

Ghostface, Fishscale

He loves pussy almost as much as Morrissey loves explosive kegs between his legs, loves high-quality coke. He still finds time to hang with the Wu, hates it when black youth get away with, ahem, murder (it's their mama's fault: the kids don't get spanked enough). His ever-more-surreal anecdotes toughened by terse backbeats, most clocking in under three minutes ("Underwater" is creepy like PJ Harvey circa 1995), Ghostface will never blow up like Kanye, but this knowledge doesn't embitter him – hell, if it did, we might have something even more compelling than the album of the year.

Rush, "Ghost of a Chance"

My 17-year-old self, dutifully listening to my best friend's CD copy of Chronicles after being dragged to catch the Roll the Bones tour, would have blanched at 31-year-old me tearing up the second time the chorus to this 1992 ballad-by-numbers comes around. Unmoved by the sub-Zep material and malnourished album concepts of their '70s work (what, lyricist/drummer Neil Peart thought dystopian reveries made better cover art than ELP's Tarkus?), I'm surprised by how compelling their '80s stuff is, when Alex Lifeson's quasi-Police skank did Andy Summers better than Andy Summers and the lyrics – in essence Peart's Guide to Ayn Rand– acquire touching resonance; they're aimed for the kids, and if it helps them get through high school, hey, I'll distribute copies of Power Windows myself.

Yah Condi Be There

Despite what you may have read, invading Iran is not on the Bush adminstration's agenda. It's got other worlds to conquer, of which the most recalcitrant is the classical music world. Ask Condi and Yo Yo Ma.

I can't think of a single issue more dull than "immigration reform" – a total non-starter. Here's Fareed Zakariah's smart take.

Tom DeLay: May the love of God warm your heart

...now that you're going to be out of Congress in a few months.

Singles

This week's singles:

Belle & Sebastian - The Blues Are Still Blue

Stuart Murdoch’s transformation from wannabe folkie miniaturist to wannabe rocker generalist reminds me of Jake Gyllenhaal going from emo dork Donnie Darko to the swaggerin’ cowpoke Jack Nasty, er, Twist: unexpected, ingratiating, and a little awkward, which is probably the point, until you notice the bulge in his crotch; he knows he looks great. Less awkward, however, than Murdoch. Who can say whether his latent fondness for the grand gesture proves to be more than another role; but I’m glad he’s as bored with mumbled miserabilism as his audience. Score: [7]

Toby Keith - Get Drunk & Be Somebody

See, I thought the title was “Get Drunk and Beat Somebody.” At the risk of looking like an asshole, that’s the sort of song I expect Toby Keith to sing, not some limp-wristed empowerment ode qua Gretchen Wilson number. Score: [6]

The Fray - Over My Head

Now that the vein of American rock bands emulating Pearl Jam has been exhausted, young would-be scenesters look across the Atlantic for inspiration. Arena-size intimacy is Coldplay’s specialty, with a dollop of angst suitable for The O.C. I’ve been told that pianos are the new electric guitars. Grade: [4]

But he's still a real smart guy!

I adore Steely Dan, and Donald Fagen's The Nightfly is a real beaut, but his new one is a real snooze. Here's my take.

His name is Prince, and he's Number One

Prince lands his first number-one album since 1989's Batman soundtrack, as well as his first number-one debut. And he does it without giving copies of 3121 away at concerts.

Anybody heard it yet? I'm unconvinced by "Black Sweat."

Sloppy seconds

This week's singles roundup. I'm not infatuated with the Prince and Morrissey singles.

The Kooks - Naive

They know that I know and we all know that naiveté's got nothing to do with chicken-scratch guitars and cute accents.
[1]

Morrissey - You Have Killed Me

Adducing Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini sure doesn't dampen the suspicion that Moz's self-pity has swelled to match his paunch, although clearly he wants his fans to savor these directors' taste for rough trade (since most his youngish fans are, what, 20-something Chicanos I doubt it). His voice breathless and strained, he's lucky that Tony Visconti's muscular production compensates, more Ossessione than Teorema.
[6]

Guillemots - We're Here

Theremins, swooping backup vocals, string sections, and Laid-era James—these young aesthetes are more ambitious than Keane and Travis. Transcending their influences shouldn't be too difficult. Unless they start to believe their own press.

Massive Attack – Live With Me

Still pining for that halcyon moment when Jennifer Lynch had a film career, these men craft yet another peerlessly arranged and engineered bit of love-grunt vacuity. That their new singer sounds like Mark Antony only humidifies the air of drippy melancholia.

Prince - Black Sweat

Now that it's supercool to admit to buying his new records, what does the little guy do? Layer his matchless falsetto over a backing track Eddie Murphy would have jump, jived, and wailed on in a 1982 episode of "Saturday Night Live."
[5]

[5]

Randy Quaid: "It's the gift that keeps on givin', Ang..."

Hell hath no fury like Randy Quaid scorned:

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Los Angeles, accuses the filmmakers of getting Quaid to cut his seven-figure asking price by portraying Brokeback Mountain as a "low-budget, art-house movie with no prospect of making money." Only later, it says, did Quaid learn Brokeback was a Hollywood-backed production with a budget worth "millions more" than he'd been told.

Quaid, the lawsuit alleges, was hoodwinked:

"Defendants took advantage of Randy Quaid's devotion to filmmaking as an art form and his support of 'true' art films to obtain his performance in Brokeback Mountain," the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit's biggest eye-opeener: who knew that Randy Quaid commands a seven-figure price tag?

Rosanne Cash: On death and such

I haven't played it in a couple of weeks (that last marvelous Bobby Bare record is the one record I'm playing to death), but I'm pretty sure Rosanne Cash's Black Cadillac will end up in my top 10 of 2006. Like her late father's duet partner Bob Dylan, Rosanne understands that album-long meditations on death have gotta approximate an Irish wake (or, hell, Cuban if you've ever attended one) in sound if not ethos. Black Cadillac is no Love & Theft, but it's sure not Interiors either, for which we're all grateful.

Anyway, me on Rosanne Cash in The Village Voice.

"...The sudden appearance of Morrissey's testicles..."

The Guardian's review of Morrissey's Ringleader of the Tormentors makes it seem as if Moz had just recorded an audiobook of The Joy of Gay Sex.

Doggy-Style, Bitch!

Every once in a while a very talented artist outdoes himself and the entire academy by molding or casting or chiselling the perfect sculpture. Here is one such case. Below you can see a very tastefully done Britney Spears ready to give birth doggy-style on a bearskin rug. Because we all know when we think about Britney Spears, we all think, "doggy-style on a bearsking rug, bitch!"

In the words of Daniel Edwards, "The monument also acknowledges the pop-diva’s pin-up past by showing Spears seductively posed on all fours atop a bearskin rug with back arched, pelvis thrust upward, as she clutches the bear’s ears with ‘water-retentive’ hands."

Not as awe-inspiring as the "doggy-style, bitch!" comment overheard in a Fort Lauderdale apartment complex mere blocks for Las Olas Blvd and Riverfront - The Venice of the Americas - but it'll do, Edwards, it'll do.


Link

B is for Banal

Sorry, Ian, but this was enjoyable fluff (better than Batman Begins, lacking the subtextual tug of X-2 or the second Spider Man movie); but why should we take this hokum seriously? Hugo Weaving ("doing an imitation of James Mason in his most hyper-civilized and elocutionary roles, though Mason was acidly witty, and Weaving is merely formal and condescending" -- David Denby) in a Guy Fawkes mask wants to blow up Parliament. I mean, geez: we're supposed to clap along? Parliament represents everything the Chancellor's regime destroyed!

With materal this pulpy any serious discussion about Contemporary Parallels would be de trop. Weaving's character was even more sinister than John Hurt's Chancellor: his strained allusions to Macbeth, the roses he leaves his victims, the rather sadistic mind-fuck he gives Portman, and, that favorite comic book/graphic novel trope, falling in love with the heroine in time to Redeem Himself. He wears a mask! He's good with knives! He quotes The Count of Monte Christo!

This is a film whose intentions are muddled by creators uncomfortable with the demands of pulp (I haven't read Alan Moore's graphic novel but if The Watchmen is any indication he can juggle moral ambiguities without the Wachowski brothers' evident strain). In case we missed the point the director soaks us in violence done by the purported hero that's no different than what the totalitarian state does: the execution of the police in the final third is slowed down so that we don't miss any evisceration, laceration, or spurt of blood our Pillor of Righteousness inflicts on the evildoers.

Stephen Fry-playing-Oscar-Wilde was fine, but I'm not sure the director told him what kind of movie he was starring in; nor was he introduced to the rest of the cast. The always-terrific Stephen Rea was more convincing as a man of pained conscience than Natalie-as-Falconetti. The only scene suggesting that vigilantism might exert a terrible price on its practicer takes place between Weaving and an old doctor (Sinead Cusack), who accepts her complicity with a grace she's too shrewd to confuse for absolution.

Those of you who read graphic novels: Alex, Ian, et al. If I'm wrong, say so.

Taking sides: Punchy vs Slinky

Is it faint praise when I say that the new Yeah Yeah Yeah's single reminds me of a lot of things I've heard before? While the little I've heard of Show Your Bones suggests that I'm going to dredge the sophomore-slump cliche one more time, "Gold Lion" is punchy enough to force me to rue the day I dismissed the YYY's as one more eyeliner-sportin' act enfeebled by post-punk envy.

In this week's singles roundup, neither the YYY's, Kanye trying his damndest to reignite interest in his fading album, Coldplay manque, nor sincere Aussie Keith Urban approach the grace of Amadou and Mariam, who can assemble a groove with less sweat than Karen O can yelp.

"A performance that would be merely silly and self-indulgent if it were not also scandalous"

Last night Andy noted that The Miami Herald will not often run a really nasty reviewsm(though I got away with a scorching Eagles concert write-up three years ago). How reassursing that The New York Times has no such scruples. Take a look at this one of Cate Blanchett starring in a new production of Hedda Gabler.

Krauthammer: "Pagans and polygamy"

I'm not sure what to make of Charles Krauthammer's latest column. Analyzing the decline of heterosexual marriage vis-a-vis gay marriage and polygamy, he sounds more wistful than wrathful :

I'm not one of those who see gay marriage or polygamy as a threat to, or assault on, traditional marriage. The assault came from within. Marriage has needed no help in managing its own long, slow suicide, thank you. Astronomical rates of divorce and of single parenthood (the deliberate creation of fatherless families) existed before there was a single gay marriage or any talk of sanctioning polygamy. The minting of these new forms of marriage is a symptom of our culture's contemporary radical individualism – as is the decline of traditional marriage – and not its cause.

At least in viewing the gay-marriage as a tectonic shift in society rather than evidence of moral decline, his hand-wringing doesn't have the hectoring quality of most social conservatives.