Mini-Notes from the Oscars

Mini-Notes on the Oscar: with the caveat that I was mildly drunk as of the first commercial break.
That Chris Connelly dude from MTV: time flies, and it's tragic.

Ellen DeGeneres: Adequate.

Pan's Labyrinth: Robbed.

Jack Nicholson: Lex Luthorm research.

Al Gore: I was never a huge fan, but...wish we could all go back, no?

Ennio Morriconne: One of the greats. No wonder he looked sour, though; he knew Celine Dion was gonna spoil things.

Screen Shadows: Creeeeee-py.

Toby Maguire and Kirsten Dunst: Blatantly high.

Dreamgirls: Jennifer Hudson stole the movie, but let's face it, it's Beyonce's bootylicious I want on my screen.

Melissa Etheridge's girl is hot. Ellen's girl is hot (and ten years younger). It pays to be a lesbian.

The Mexicans winning: We gotta make the Border wall higher.

Little Miss Sunshine: Overrated! Overrated!

Montages: Most movies are cooler in 30-second doses.

Sven Nykvist died?: Shit, I'm devastated. That's it for Woody Allen.

Philipe Noiret, Peter Boyle, Robert Altman:?: This is so sad!!!

Jack Palance: Fucker had it coming!

Sexiest Man to Portray Truman Capote!: Nice dig at Phillip Seymour Hoffman's fatty plainness.

The Devil Wears Prada: Sucked ass. Forcefully.

Helen Mirren is hot. And 61. But hot. But 61.

"Someone dropped their rolling papers.": It's sooo sad that this the most transgressive Ellen will get.

Reese Witherspoon: Nothing's gonna cure that shin, baby.

Peter O'Toole: Looks just like my grandfather. The one I wish I had.

Forest Whitaker's cheesy New Agey speech: Made me tear up. It's the wine, I sooo swear.

Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas: Only one of these is actually still making good movies. Guess who?

Martin Scorsese: Yes, yes!!!! Finally!!!!

Dianne Keaton's neck: Just fine! Why the hell does she feed Nora Ephron's inhibitions?

The Departed: Good. Good. 'Cause there would be ranting if "Little Miss Sunshine" won.

That's that from Hollywood. Or my apartment. Hey, after the third bottle of wine, it looks plenty glamorous!

Where am I running to, exactly?

Since you're being insistent, I'll tell you why I got beef with Ludacris' ubiquituous "Runaway Love" (ft. Mary J. Blige, doncha know). In case the rock you live under doesn't get radio reception, it's a ditty about little Lisa, Nicole, Stacey and Erika who are all prepubescent and being similarly abused. The chorus exhorts them to "runaway, love" convincingly, until the end, when it inconsistently tells them "don't you keep runnin' away." Oh, ok. Two lines later: "I'll run away with you." Well, what's it gonna be?!?



But it's not the sloppy lyrics that annoy me. And it's not the sob stories. Pop has an illustrious history of mining generic misery: TLC's "Waterfalls," Everlast's "What It's Like," Ben Folds' "Brick" and Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun" all come to mind. I'm down with sentimentality.

It's not how half-baked the stories are. One little girl is abused by alcoholic adult, the other by drug-addicted adult, (see how he switched that there?) I know Luda can tell very specific stories about shit that went down at the club on Saturday night, so why can't he be bothered to make these girls come to life in any way? It's like he knows of the existence of little girls by way of the accountant who told him to fling them a single. Even the girl's names feel fake: Little STACEY got caught in a drive-by? Are you positive it wasn't little Shaniqua?

No, what gets to me is the song's "solution" to the little girls' problems. It strikes me as downright evil. Read it below, and imagine Ludacris' voice wavering between concern and pick-up:

"Yeah, I can only imagine what you're going through, ladies/Sometimes I feel like running away myself/ So do me a favor right now and close your eyes/And picture us running away together and/When we come back everything is gonna be OK."

In other words: "Buy my record, little girl. You'll be abused AND hurtin' $15.95."

Not to sound like a coot, but these "ladies" are 9 years old: should they be picturing themselves running with Ludacris anywhere? I'm all for the curative powers of pop, but shouldn't they be listening to something more salubrious? Learning how to bringsexyback to the playground?

Come on, Luda, at least give them a hotline or something.

Was it rage or regret...or the two?

A couple of days I posted about the experience of hearing "Smalltown Boy" at the supermarket. Hearing Danny Wilson's "Mary's Prayer" (in a shoe store) over the Christmas holidays inspired this essay on sophisti-pop, in which I ruminate on the sons and godsons of Bryan Ferry. This handy guide (co-penned with Thomas) tells you what you need to own, although frankly you won't need it: "Shattered Dreams" is playing at a CVS Pharmacy near you.

Sad.

With every album released since the breakthrough Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams' talent shrivels noticeably. Hal Willner's the ideal producer; too bad he doesn't have enough to do.

Yes, their actions were their own...

Reflections inspired by Fangirl's post: I bought Entertainment in 1998, a few weeks after Second Edition and Pink Flag. Beautiful prose on their behalf (collected in the regrettably out of print SPIN Alternative Record Guide helped. When I was struggling to rid myself of the most powerful infatuation of my life that winter, those albums did their best to make things worse.

The last few years have seen a revival of interest in all things post-punk, and while the bands retain their vigor most of the criticism doesn't. The failed compromise interests me than the confirmed masterpiece. And this is where Go4's Hard enters the picture. Thanks to VH-1's constant rotation, "Is It Love" unshackles itself, massages its wrist and ankles, and rises unsteadily. I wish I'd heard it when I was writhing like a crab on its back. You can understand why Nile Rodgers was first approached as producer: it's got the straightforward dance groove Go4 had seemed incapable of recording. But Go4 were a band incapable of bad faith; even this bonafide dance hit (#8 on the Billboard Dance Chart!) shudders with the fear of impending doom first heard on "What We All Want" and "Natural's On It." On Hard it's one more corpse the listener bumps against; on Brief History of the Twentieth Century, it's out-on-bail before the life sentence of "We Life As We Dream, Alone." (Although there's a solid re-appraisal of Hard here.) So what if guitarist Andy Gill makes like a sullen Phil Oakey (is that even possible?)? Resigned, disgust tasting like stale vomit, he injects a burst of pre-millienium tension before yielding to the conventions of love -- and love songs. "Is It Love?" wonders if there's a difference:

No one lives in the future
No one lives in the past
The men who own the city
Make more sense to me too
Their actions are clear
Their lives are their own

Chilling pronouncements -- or confessions, given by a man who's endured unimaginable torture (watch the video: Gill and his gang wander through a third-rate discotheque with less animation than the corpses in "Thriller"). Listen to the slow burn of the synth strings beneath "Their actions are clear"; they're the saddest notes I've ever heard in a Go4 song, immediately calling to mind Songs of the Free's "I Will Be A Good Boy." You can accept Gill's realization that the capitalists are humans too, or you can believe the mumbled baritone hiding behind syncopated rhythm guitar, as if ashamed. The indentured black singers shout, "It's alright!" but he's not listening to these reassurances; it's too painful. Some California band calling themselves the Red Hot Chili Peppers want him on the phone.

From the Just Heard On the Muzak Station file...

Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy," quietly thumping at a Publix supermarket. I must say: it's the most adventurous re-contexualization I've heard in weeks. Think about it: is there any place less likely to inspire loneliness than a suburban supermarket? The meat counter, wine aisle, and the dairy lane with my beloved Manchego cheese remind me of why the accumulation of peripheral consumer goods is great fun if you can afford it; and that Karl Marx is a lot more fun to read than his crabby post-graduate acolytes (it also reminds me of how Edmund Wilson's portrait of Marx in To The Finland Station is the masterpiece of portraiture that his own fiction didn't approximate). The ghosts of Poly Styrene and Jonathan Richman would understand.

Half-hearted

The infuriating Half Nelson has the additional misfortune of being the third addict-in-crisis film I've screened in four months. While its Sundancing isn't as self-congratulatory as Sherrybaby's, no way does it touch Oliver Assayas' Clean, whose mercilessly straightforward narrative and demotic manner has still convinced a lot of critics that it's ho-hum. Like most films by new American directors, Half Nelson can't approach its subject without sensationalizing it, whether by slathering a obtrusively ambient soundtrack or employing the tackiest cross-cutting in a sex scene since Monster's Ball. Politics are a carapace behind which the filmmakers retreat from engagement and irony; at any rate the references to Gandhi, the Duelfer report, and clips of the Attica riots remind us of a real world in which these people and events had not-so-subtle efects, and it's beyond the filmmakers' grasp to remind us of how young dummy Ryan Gosling may have once articulated his not-dumb views (when Gosling's Dan emphasizes the importance of dialectics in history to his blank junior high students, I wondered whether the filmmakers meant dianetics). I had no idea how the audience was supposed to react to the complacency of Dan's liberal family, getting drunk on red wine after a cheerful dinner like the gruesome ex-hippies in Running on Empty, mourning the collapse of their ideals (we actually get such a scene between Dan and his mother in which she muses aloud, like a Joan Didion character, and Dan rightfully looks like he's about to blow snot on her).

According to Half Nelson, if you're a crack addict you don't read, call your girlfriend, or affect sincerity when your co-workers make conversation. I've known several habitual coke users, none of whom possessed a gram of Dan's privilege, with more winning personalities. Only a student understands him, but no wisdom pours out of the mouth of this babe, only a gaze that could freeze an Eskimo. Gosling's rapport with Shareeka Epps is Half Nelson's biggest strength: the scene in which she uncovers his secret, with Gosling's fake non-chalance crashing against her fake outrage, should be shown on Oscar night. Gosling himself has a loose, mocking/self-mocking defiance that deserves a better outlet. Scenes with Epps suggest that the filmmakers dampened his considerable sexual charisma for fear of – what? Half Nelson's racial politics are screwy enough.

Jukebox Unabridged

Alfred beat me to the punch as far as referencing the steamrolling excellence of the Stylus Singles Jukebox. All Saints' kinetic new corker is up for analysis, and here's the full extent of what I had to say:

I admit I haven't really kept up with these girls since they taught my Anglo-ignorant ass that for British people the alphabet runs right from "A" to "Zed," but this song's an absolute blast, doing all the kinetic, dynamic things we adore Girls Aloud for doing, possibly doing them better. By far the most interesting line is the offhand admission "acting like I'm a teen," a striking reminder that All Saints may age but their audience largely doesn't. Doubtlessly most of their fans know of no other way to act.
[9]

As far as I know, I think only one of my blurbs just flat-out didn't make the cut, so here's a quick pisstake on The View's "Same Jeans" fwiw:

Sounds like the Libertines if you replaced Pete Doherty with one of the Proclaimers. Admirably peppy but thoroughly tame. Hope they’re not aiming to conquer the States either, ‘cause I can tell ‘em right now it ain’t happening without a name change. Nope, nothing says “teenage hijinks” like sharing a band name with a menopausal morning TV program. They may as well have dubbed themselves The Regis and Kelly Band.
[5]

I thought about posting all the comments I sent to P&J that didn't get posted. I may still do it, but spending my time trying furiously to keep up with the Stylus Jukebox makes all that stuff feel so last year.

Briefly...

I won't rant about the Grammys. Regarding The Police's performance of "Roxanne," however, let me say this: how much cooler would it have been for the guys to perform their sinister 1986 remake of "Don't Stand So Close To Me," as a statement of purpose (look where we left you and when you last cared about us) and as a giant fuck-you to nostalgia?

Busy...

Posting will be light in the next few days as I finish a long sophisti-pop essay and introductions. There's also the matter of a book proposal.

In the meantime read this for reviews of current singles. Here's a sample:

Take That
"Shine"

Over a piano hook and harmonies yanked from a Spoon record, Take That make like what’s-his-name from Maroon 5, complete with vocal grit for authenticity’s sake. Now that Robbie Williams has proven to be a failure at selling superficiality, his former mates have a chance to settle the score by selling authenticity. The results prove that winsome and arch are adjectives best suited for a Pet Shop Boys record (hey, didn’t Robbie hire them too?). [2]

M.I.A.
"Bird Flu"

This isn’t so much a song as it is a racket, but not a charmless one. Outkast’s “Morris Brown” killed marching-band drums so decisively last year that M.I.A. making like Gwen Stefani is going to have work doubly hard to convince fans that the follow-up to Arular deserves a 1000-plus thread on ILM. [6]

Bloc Party
"I Still Remember"

I must admit: this acquired poignancy upon reading Kele’s it’s-so-hard-being-a-homo interview in The Guardian, but his heavy breathing has never been put to lovelier use. When Kele sighs, “You could have asked me for it” while a guitar chimes and curls like it’s 1991 and The Ocean Blue’s puritanical primal urges represented the golden mean of adolescent longing, I wish I could lend him my copy of The Line of Beauty. Despite the necktie and his friend’s name carved on the park bench the lack of details on a track almost as hortatory as Silent Alarm’s vague manifestos indicate a band ready for arenas in the expected manner: getting anthemic without anthems. In short, either this is either a band ready for the big time or a band sufficiently confused about it to avoid humor as strenuously as the lyrics avoid specifics. [7]

LOOKOUT IT'S PAZZ & JOP

The results are out, so lacking in je ne sais quois that I only knew about them after seeing an ILM update. What's surprisingly unsurprising: the lack of enthusiasm for Dylan and Joanna Newsome, although somehow they wound up topping the poll and making the final ten, respectively; how shitty the layout is, not including the number of ads; Stephen Thomas Erlewine putting Donald Fagen's Morph the Cat in his Top Five; Anthony Miccio's shout-out to the intricacies of Hinder making the final round of comments; the Larry Levan comp limiting its appearances to Thomas' ballot and mine.

Briefly

The New York Times has an excellent story about Cuba's renascent Jewish Community. Like everyone else in Cuba, the community, without a rabbi and largely dependent on foreign aid, is in a constant struggle to keep its traditions alive.

As Maritza Corrales, a Cuban historian who lives in Havana and the author of “The Chosen Island: Jews in Cuba,” remarked, “To be Cuban and Jewish is to be twice survivors.”

I Am Afraid of Yo La Tengo Cuz They Will Beat My Ass

I'm getting too old to withstand the impact of feedback squalls, especially when four of them buffet you over the course of 125 minutes. Besides that, Yo La Tengo's performance at Studio A last night overcame inaudible vocals (Georgia Hubley's "Little Eyes" was unintelligible) and poor acoustics to demonstrate how a noise trio can, in effect, test the limits of their imagination. It's been noted often how YLT's songs chronicle a happy marriage (a marriage that's essentially a triad, as James McNew is essential), a happiness forged no doubt from tension and conflict (you try touring with your spouse); but their musical chemistry renders songs like I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass' "Sometimes I Don't Get You" into full-bodied but unconvincing plaints*. Even this irony feels warmly reassuring: they're in the on the joke, and they know the audience knows (here's where Kaplan's rockcrit training helps).

Like I said, I wished they'd have canned the feedback, despite the ample pleasures of watching Kaplan yield to his guitar like he's just heard "I Heard Her Call My Name" at the soundcheck a few hours ago. I realize that it's impossible to concentrate when you're thinking about the eight o'clock class you must teach in a few hours. But YLT rewarded our patience with a superb encore, during which the band duly played audience requests (a lovely, squeaky "Autumn Sweater," its Farfisa tones warm and reassuring; and "Decora") and joked with a crowd which had never seen YLT play in Miami before. YLT are such nice people that they invited their painfully unfunny comedic opening act to drum on a superb T-Rex cover dedicated to Miami's "Jewish people."

*McNew actually looked younger than when I last saw them in 2003. Feedback – the elixir of youth!

I REALLY SHOULD BE WATCHING MORE INDIE VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE

Or poring through more issues of Magnet. I have to admit I had a pretty hazy conception of what the dudes in The Rapture looked like before I saw ‘em in the flesh last night. Basically, I knew Luke Jenner had a curly-floppy ‘do and that’s about it.

Suffice to say, the group that ambled onstage at the Cat’s Cradle looked absolutely nothing like the image I held in my head of the band that wrought the dance-punk fuckery of Echoes and the slick cock-rock of Pieces of the People We Love. That incongruity may not have been the overriding problem with the show itself, but it was certainly a symptom.

Simply put, The Rapture just didn’t have the stage presence to pull off the music they make in the studio, at least on this night. On wax they come off all street-scuzzy and invitingly lecherous, Pistols fans who’ve just discovered Zeppelin or club kids who’ve just discovered both. In person the band is standard-issue indie, fronted by a shaggy-headed cutie-pie when only a leering bozo showing off his cock bulge will do.

See, it wasn’t just physical features either. Musically, the Rapture was suitably tight, but only in rare instances did anyone in the band exude even a rudimentary degree of showmanship (Jenner stage-diving at show’s end, mainly). If they sounded like The Shins or Pavement the band’s visual presentation would be perfectly peachy, but music that thrives on sex and ugliness demands complementary panache. Imagine if Roxy had performed wearing oversized football jerseys and sweatpants and you’ll get some idea of the touching awkwardness I felt when Jenner tamely unleashed his best Bob Plant impression on “The Devil.” Perhaps the lack of ocular stimulation on stage explains why a ridiculous little mosh pit repeatedly broke out amidst the first few rows of the crowd.

(penned by Josh Love, the victim of log-in problems and his crack addiction).

Beware of Al Green

Any fan of Al Green's big hits must needs explore the studio albums which, despite intelligent defenses, are still underrated. Livin' For You's great "Beware" is a song very much worthy of your attention.

"There is even a new word for black fans of indie rock: `blipster'"

BLACK PEOPLE CAN ROCK!

Yes. In its latest study of gobsmacked irrelevance, The New York Times has uncovered evidence that "people of color" actually listen to music played by white people on electric guitar. The article, an expertly paced piece of hysterics, makes errors early and glaringly with an enthusiasm that's almost contagious. The histrionic opening:

WHEN Douglas Martin first saw the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a teenager in High Point, N.C., “it blew my mind,” he said. Like many young people who soothe their angst with the balm of alternative rock, Mr. Martin was happy to discover music he enjoyed and a subculture where he belonged.

Except, as it turned out, he didn’t really belong, because he is black.

The generalizations:

But 40 years after black musicians laid down the foundations of rock, then largely left the genre to white artists and fans, some blacks are again looking to reconnect with the rock music scene.

The un-parseable:

The next few decades saw several successful and influential black musicians who crossed genres or were distinctly rock, such as Prince, Living Colour and Lenny Kravitz, and rock melodies and lyrics have been liberally sampled by hip-hop artists.

Restricting its evidence to the contemporaneous and obvious:

At the same time, the hip-hop industry’s demand for new samples has increased the number of rock songs appearing on hip-hop tracks: Jay-Z’s latest album features contributions from Chris Martin of Coldplay and R & B artist Rihanna’s current single samples the New Wave band Soft Cell.

Finally, the omissions. How the fuck can you write this kind of thing and not mention James Brown? Otis Redding? The Temptations? Bad Brains? What about ska and two-tone bands like The English Beat and Specials? If I linger too long over Jessica Pressler's silence on Parliament-Funkadelic, I might get very upset (you'd think that the totemic Talking Heads' use of Bernie Worrell would warrant a mention).

Besides, it's obvious that it's white audiences who've traditionally had a problem with blacks encroaching on their domain (of which this article is but the latest example). Recall the treatment Prince got when he opened for the Stones in 1981 (he was booed, spit on, and had to dodge bottles; you think Keith and Ronnie offered Kleenex?), or the colonialist subtext to the coverage of (the utterly dull) Living Colour; they were given a pass by the likes of Rolling Stone because they essayed "issues" like cults of personality and their leader Vernon Reid was an eloquent provocateur before he started a rock band. Speaking of critics, where are Armond White? Cary Darling?

At most times I scoff at the notion of a liberal media elite; but parochialism, as this article demonstrates, knows no political allegiance.

Carolinacation

Caught the still-limber Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert Monday night for purposes of review in my local daily (I'm not linking to the review cuz I wrote it too long and subsequently it got hacked up into barely-recognizable pieces). It was my first time seeing the Chili Peppers, and by far the biggest surprise was finding out just how fucking insane people are over John Frusciante. I guess if you read Guitar World or whatever you're probably already aware of his exalted stature, but I'm like the majority of my fellow critics in being completely cut off from that demographic of "real rock" holdouts.

Standing in front of a dude who spent the entire show repeatedly screaming "fuck 'em up Johnny!" I started thinking that it's strangely dissociative how guitar-hero rock is virtually moribund as a commercially viable genre (hardly any emo bands flash technical prowess, and even butt-rock outliers like Nickelback aren't known for their shredding) while at the same time there are clearly A LOT of people who are hungry for larger-than-life axe masters, to the point where people unabashedly worship a (now) unassuming dude like Frusciante, who's plenty talented but never struck me as some kind of Claptonesque deity.

Looking at the way thousands of people utterly lost their shit over Frusicante, it's hard to understand how guitar-driven rock isn't still a commercial force. Over the long haul I'm sure MTV's played a significant role in the phasing-out of the unkempt, self-indulgent shredder (who has the time for solos anymore?), and it's equally clear that the mainstream rise of hip-hop and country means fewer kids are being weaned on hoary rock epics.

Still, if there are things left to be done with a guitar, it would seem like the time is ripe for another six-string icon. Guys my age are just now having kids they can brainwash into liking grunge, and judging from the number of 50-ish dudes at the Chili Peppers show I'd say even boomers are amenable to crossing the generation gap in fealty to the almighty axe.

Good day Sunshine

James Wolcott's recent review of Little Miss Sunshine (which should be retitled Little Miss Sundance in honor of the film labs in which this inexplicable mini-phenomenon was rehearsed and schooled as thoroughly as Abigail Breslin's character) is close enough to mine to make me wonder if he gets his daily dose of AGI, but it's worth posting because the film's recent Oscar benediction reminds me that there are plenty of people who think it's the shit. During a movie discussion in class last week one girl admitted that although she'd missed it in the theater she owned a DVD copy; she's seen it three times. "The grandfather is so much like my abuelo!" she giggled. She was dressed conservatively.

Stepin Fetchit, eat your heart out

I am relieved that the Oscars, for parity's sake, honored three black stereotypes: the Savage (Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland), the Noble Savage (Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond), the Minstrel (Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls), and Mama (Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls). And Eddie Murphy played them all in The Nutty Professor.

Bohemian Parody

"Bohemian Rhapsody"'s middle section, a tricky studio concoction, was not exactly a match for a rock show. On the other hand, a Queen concert that didn't include it would have ended with Freddie's lynching, so the band usually circumvented the problem by playing the record when the mock-opera started and abandoning the stage. The audience did the rest of the singing.



My Chemical Romance's chemopera "The Black Parade" often feels just like that: the band walked out and left other people's records playing. There's "A Night at the Opera," yes, and "The Wall", but it doesn't end there. "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness"? Yup. A little Ziggy Stardust? Check. The Doors' cover of "Alabama Song"? Indeed. Could "Cancer" possibly be a nod to Rufus Wainwright? Is that Green Day I hear? Heck, is that Blink-182? Yes, "Teenagers" is a great song, but it was pretty great when it was called "Bang-a-Gong" too.

But in spite of the way they jam their influences down your ear canal, "The Black Parade" is the first great screamo record, the first you don't have to be a part-time employee at Hot Topic to truly get into. It still has the bleak, black eye-shadow worldview of MCR's previous two, but it has ambition, which is more than I could ever say for Thursday or Fall-Out Boy.

And the songs are there all the way through. "Welcome to the Black Parade" may be the one to haunt modern rock radio for the next few years, but "I Don't Love You" and "Disenchanted" are wonderful ballads, "Dead!" "House of Wolves", and "This is How I Disappear" are propulsive enough to make you forget how silly the lyrics can get in their attempt to be nasty, and a tossed line like "I'm just soggy from the chemo" from "Cancer" has just the right amount of creepiness in it. Only the unnecessary Liza Minelli cameo in "Mama" threw me a little off.

But for all their histrionic "it takes the young to TRULY understand death and the meaninglesness of existence," it sometimes sounds like MCR has gotten their info on illness and death from ER reruns. Of course, if I was ten years younger I wouldn't even have noticed: there's so much here to lap up if you're of a certain age, and something tells me a lot of kids are going to remember this one very fondly a decade from now.

At my grand old age of 25, I can't take the teenager anthems as seriously as I would like. As it turns out, parents DO understand: they're just too busy working their asses off so you can get your damned Wii for Christmas.

David Bowie essaying a straightforward love song is usually cause to head for the hills (rather like learning that Paul McCartney will record one of those I'm-gonna-play-all-the-instruments-cuz-I'm-a-pop-genius albums he does from time to time). Generally the poseur is most moving when he reminds us that he is one, albeit one blessed with a preternatural gift for wicked guitarists, and versatile rhythm sections that can top or bottom as the occasion demands. Think of "Word on a Wing," "Be My Wife," or "Soul Love," in which love and narcissism are inseparable. Or the obscure "Win" from Young Americans: he learns the Bryan Ferry trick of digging so deeply into parody that he achieves an addled kind of pathos (if background vocalist Luther Vandross had recorded it himself the lyric's ironies would have exposed his questionable sexuality). Something similar occurs in 1995's "Strangers When We Meet," featuring one of Bowie's very best vocal performances, imbuing lyrical decoupage with palpable lust.

"Absolute Beginners" has never held sway; in my Bowie canon it would probably rank in the upper thirties (somewhere between "African Nite Flight" on the high end and [yes] "Too Dizzy" on the low end). This big British hit from the film of the same name (it peaked in the high fifties here) has a predictable chord structure, a pinched Bowie vocal as an unwelcome reminder of his deficiencies, and lyrics whose rather hamhanded insertion of the film title (like "Against All Odds," right?) adduced the song's boilerplate nature. Take a look at the single sleeve. Note the wide grin. When Bowie attempts "normality" he's truly frightening -- even scarier than the emaciated splendor he displayed here.

So why is it a minor triumph? Producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley -- responsible for nearly killing Elvis Costello's career with Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World -- surround Bowie with a yearning string section (as expressive as Bowie is blank), a non-cliched saxophone solo that may or may not be played by Bowie himself, and a glorious percussion breakdown at the 6:30 mark in which congas, timbales, cowbells herald the recapitulation of the song's vocal and musical hook. It's the only post-Let's Dance moment Bowie in which sympathetic production reminds the poseur of his limitations so that he can transcend them.

Two Weirdoes

I've just emerged from under Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day".

It feels like a library shelf crashed down on me and I've slowly eaten my way out to daylight through the musty pages of ancient boys adventures with titles like "The Troublesome Three and the Yellow Menace." But what begins like a not-exactly-timely parody of Tom Swift adventures becomes truly Pynchonian (i.e: a novel about pretty much everything), and if the mere size seems intimidating, I can testify it's worth it: 1000+ pages, and nary an indigestion. Pynchon has a reputation for difficulty, but that eludes me: behind the large casts and errant narrative he's positively EASY to read, and he's a prankster first and foremost. Often he's even sophomoric: He may be discussing the fourth dimension, but he interrupts himself, entranced with a fart joke.

But it's a funny one.

Another Thomas, Thomas Harris, has returned to the thing he does best. Or the thing he used to do very well. Or the only thing he can do, in fact: provide something for Anthony Hopkins to do when he's not throwing his gravitas around the screen in increasingly samey characters.


"Hannibal Rising" charts Hannibal Lecter's childhood youth in spastic, screenplay-ready episodes that made me forget that Harris was once a really gripping writer of thrillers. This time even the gorier moments are sort of bloddless. Worse of all, the book explains away Hannibal's seductive brand of evil by using a comic book trope fans of the X-Men (and Magneto) will recognize.

Yes, you guessed it: The Nazis did it.

In case you doubt my meaning, the first Thomas' book is the one to go with.

Mum's the word

Curse of the Golden Flower: Miles removed from Hero and House of Flying Daggers, as the focus isn't on the lives and loves of outsiders cruelly twisted by the hand of empire but rather the royal players themselves behaving badly, causing the deaths of faceless thousands in the process. So, really more histrionically tragic than nobly so. The first two-thirds is a slowly-revealing palace intrigue that manufactures plenty of compelling drama even without much hand-to-hand combat, but the run-up to the denouement is numbingly vast in a bloodletting that offers neither emotional sustenance or real visceral thrills. I'm guessing Gong Li won't get any Oscar love, but it's hard not to juxtapose her performance against Mirren's in The Queen, one literally poisoned into hysterical madness, the other culturally poisoned into disconcerting calm.

Most delicious irony - given the film's subject matter, that the only genuine bond of self-sacrificing love occurs between a mother and her son.

Bad Ad?

Threading at the farther edge of Illusionate concerns, but since we do take on random pop culture bits... I have a tiff with slang. Has anyone seen that after-Christmas cellphone commercial? The one where the father (a Carl Winslow-type) meets his offspring at the breakfast table, recaps on their gifts,(AWESOME cellphones, we are to believe), and then asks the kids: "What did Daddy get." "Aftershave?" says the daughter, (with a guilty lilt that conveys: "We didn't put you in a home, so be grateful"). Then Daddy provides the punchline. At first I was completely shocked by what I took to be the father's response. I thought, almost simultaneously: a) WHAT?! b) Why has this affable pater familias resorted to prostitution? c) Why is he telling the kids? d) Is he complaining? e) Bragging?

I'm relating this because I just saw the ad again, and I heard better. Daddy's reply is actually:

"No, Daddy got hosed,"

Instead of: "No, Daddy got hoes!" (Which was my first assumption.)

This commercial is badly phrased. It puritanically skews what we all know Daddy was trying to say: "No, Daddy got SHAFTED." But in the bowdlerizing process, something got lost and confusion emerged. I get that getting hosed is the same as getting shafted, being buggered, or generally being forced to copulate, (all sorts of feminist and gay diatribes could be hung on exactly why we assume that getting the shaft is supposed to be a less than pleasant experience on the subservient end) but I guess hosed has a milder connotation- you might be accidentally garden-hosed by your suburban neighbor as he/she tends to the lawn. Still phallic.
Still the punchline does not work.

I'm not quite sure why this ad's phrasing just bothers me. I think Flaubert might have understood.

2006: Pity and terror

Like Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth re-imagines war as absurd and wanton. "Sides" are irrelevant: the winner is the one who has a temporary monopoly on violence. Pauline Kael's description of Vivian Leigh's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire -- it evokes "pity and terror" -- comes closest to capturing what Guillermo del Toro has accomplished in Pan's Labyrinth. A few dissenters have chastised the film for failing to give the Spanish Civil War its proper dramatic heft, but in the performances of Sergi Lopez and Maribel Verdu, the almost bovine servility of the women, and the numbed infliction of cruelty, I was reminded of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Picasso's Guernica and some of Hemingway's fiction from the period. The matter-of-fact manner in which Del Toro stages the sadism of Lopez's Capitan Vidal is matched by Ofelia's confrontations with assorted monsters (the one in the picture above may be the scariest goblin I've ever seen filmed).

*************

Here are my favorite films of 2006:

Pan's Labyrinth
Children of Men
Marie Antoinette
Clean
The Death of Mister Lazarescu
Inside Man
L'Enfant
Volver
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Changing Times

Political compass

Take this quiz and chart your results. According to the chart, I'm a social libertarian with rather centrist economic principles (no surprises there).

And, according to this chart by speakout.com, I'm a "moderate liberal."

Romeo in black jeans

Maybe I decided to write about Michael Penn's "No Myth" because March was the first album I ever bought on CD (the first CD single I bought: The Cure's "Lovesong"). Listening to it years later, it's an uneven, frustrating collection; Penn's smart, as you'd expect, but not smart enough to hire a rhythm section when he thinks drum programs will do. He's enamoured with leaden extended metaphors that crumble upon scrutiny ("Cupid's Got a Brand New Gun," "Battle Room"). "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is a personal touchstone ("Brave New World"). But "Invisble," the dusky "Innocent One," and "No Myth" are original takes on sexual politics undergirded by a delectable surliness. Surely Aimee Mann is capable of less.

Here's my essay on "No Myth."

It's a hard rain, alright...

As I feared, Bryan Ferry is recording an album of predictable Dylan covers. We remarked here that Ferry may pull off a miracle as wondrous as his 2002 cover of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; and I'm not unopposed to Ferry contributing piano, harmonica, and those wizened pipes to the loosey-goosey arrangements of his longtime backing band. Still...

The track listing:

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
Simple Twist Of Fate
Make You Feel My Love
The Times They Are A-Changin'
All I Really Want To Do
Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Positively 4th Street
If Not For You
Baby, Let me Follow You Down
Gates Of Eden
All Along The Watchtower

Say, say, say: it's a state of shock!

December-January is the period in which I listen to the least new music; I usually replay favorites. This week it's been Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Alexander O'Neal's first album, The Beatles' White Album (which I now own for the first time on CD), Dusty in Memphis, and Paul McCartney's All The Best, which has since been supplanted by 2001's Wingspan but is still the best single disc Macca comp extant, not least because it's the only place you'll find "Say, Say, Say," the gynormous Michael Jackson collaboration that still sounds opulent and state of the art.

Since there were hits roughtly six months from one another a comparison between "Say, Say, Say" and the Jackson's "State of Shock" is instructive. Here you have the world's biggest star expanding his popularity (how high can he go??) by hitching himself to the two biggest acts of the sixties. On the McCartney single Jackson feels like an appendage; it's like Macca left Jackson's part blank until he knew which token black singer had signed the contract. The track is fulsomely sexless, like lots of McCartney songs; usually when a singer struggles to keep his distance as assiduously as McCartney does here he instead creates some welcome homoerotic tension. There's none of that on "Say, Say, Say." Nothing's at stake: the words and music exist to sell a McCartney record (Jackson could be singing the "Sister Susan" part in "Let'Em In)." Expert kids' music recorded by two children who'll never grow up, suitable for "Sesame Street."

"State of Shock," on the other hand, exists to sell a reified Stones track, complete with "grungy" guitar lick and grunts. Since Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson are an even more ludicrous pairing than Jackson and Macca there's no point wasting time on who's doing whom a favor (although I should point that Mick was so desperate for any kind of solo name recognition that he let The Jacksons have a big chunk of his dearly beloved money to get it). "Beat It" is a better rock song than "State of Shock" or, for that matter, almost anything on Undercover. The version Jagger sang with Tina Turner at Live Aid is interesting in a pneumatic sort of way.

With liberty and justice for all...white people

When it came time for the always-disparate Stylus staff to select the year's best albums, there seemed to be a higher-than-normal degree of consensus surrounding a few records in particular. They weren't necessarily #1s or even top 5s on everyone's lists, but a surprisingly robust number of staffers (especially given our oft-divergent tastes) found places for the likes of Ghostface, TV on the Radio, Hot Chip and the Knife (I voted for all four).

Still, in arguably our hivemindin'-est year of all (particularly when it came to Ghostface), we've got nothing on film critics. I'm fully aware of course that their options are significantly more limited than ours in terms of material, but in scanning the Metacritic compilation of critic top-10 lists in order to jog my own memory of films I'd seen in '06, I was startled at the numbing uniformity. Some might argue the pickin's were slim, but this lockstep granting of laurels came at the expense of several great, and greatly overlooked films.

Now, I'll be honest: I don't even remotely resemble a film critic, and the list of noteworthy films I haven't seen (mostly due to a similar lack of access as Alfred recently alluded) would arguably outshine the ones I have. So it's quite possible "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Old Joy" and "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" are all better than the crap I liked; I'm just surprised such a paucity of critics ventured outside a relatively small cluster of widely-heralded flicks.

01 Half Nelson - maybe the only time this year I walked out of a theatre feeling truly affected.

02 The Proposition - showed up on only a handful of the dozens of Metacritic lists; I think Ray Winstone may have given the performance of the year.

03 Inside Man - impeccable mainstream stuff.

04 The Queen - Mirren was fabulous regardless of what Alf says; I actually got a bit misty when the little girls hands her the flowers, and that almost never happens to me with movies.

05 CSA: Confederate States of America - wickedly funny and criminally underrated; on par with the best of the Chappelle Show (p.s. - it's also the source of the title of this post, in case it wasn't obvious).

06 Borat - brutally, probably unfairly, mocked the region of the country I've lovingly called home since birth, and still I howled.

07 The Matador - technically released in December of '05, but I don't think it was reviewed until early '06 by most critics and I only caught it this summer on DVD.

08 Thank You For Smoking - Katie Holmes' duplicitous reporter is transparently silly, but the father-son stuff redeems it.

09 Scoop - of course Scarlett Johansson impersonating Woody Allen while acting alongside Woody Allen is ridiculous, but it never tries to be more than a lightweight trifle and surprisingly satisfies because of it, much like another of Scarlett's underrated pics, In Good Company; lord knows she's still miles better here than in The Black Dahlia.

10 Little Miss Sunshine - undoubtedly the year's most critically divisive film - some saw charmingly skewered brilliance, others witnessed put-upon eccentricity; I'll lean towards the former mostly because I thought the ending was irreverently liberating rather than exploitative and cheap.

Honorable Mention:
V for Vendetta
Over the Hedge
Dave Chappelle's Block Party
An Inconvenient Truth
Down in the Valley

Better than Expected:
The Night Listener
Scoop
A Scanner Darkly

Disappointing:
The Departed
For Your Consideration
A Prairie Home Companion

Just Plain Sucked:
Miami Vice
Hard Candy
The Black Dahlia
Lady in the Water