Bush To Iraqi Militants: 'Please Stop Bringing It On'
WASHINGTON, DC—In an internationally televised statement Monday, President Bush modified a July 2003 challenge to Iraqi militants attacking U.S. forces. "Terrorists, Saddam loyalists, and anti-American insurgents: Please stop bringing it on now," Bush said at a Monday press conference. "Nine months and 500 U.S. casualties ago, I may have invited y'all to bring it on, but as of today, I formally rescind that statement. I would officially like for you to step back." The president added that the "it" Iraqis should stop bringing includes gunfire, bombings, grenade attacks, and suicide missions of all types.

MUSIC RECOMMENDATIONS
from Pitchforkmedia.com

Feist: "Mushaboom"
This is inspired. It was clear, from the murky demo of "Mushaboom"-- the one that featured the one-time Broken Social Scenester howling a bare melody over the din of traffic pouring through her bedroom window-- that Feist was sitting on a beautiful song, but this studio version, the lead single from the forthcoming Let It Die... yeah, just perfect, a home run. In the span of four minutes, it flirts with three possibilities, first imagining itself as a sparse, percussive march (performed on wooden floors), then as a gushy, introducing-the-band vamp sequence that shifts the spotlight restlessly between the piano player, the horn section and the lead guitarist (all previously unseen) and then-- most incredibly-- as a raft of unresolved choral vocals and plinking glockenspiels that casually out-Vespertines half of Vespertine! And all of it built around that tensile vocal melody, so sweet and so natural that you can't believe it hasn't been written already.

Loretta Lynn
Van Lear Rose
[Interscope; 2004]
Rating: 9.3

Like so many honky-tonk singers of her own and previous generations, Loretta Lynn was always a little country-come-to-town, a rural-raised girl in the big city whose pre-fame struggles lent her music grit and authenticity. Born in a Kentucky mining town called Butcher Hollow, a teenage bride and a mother several times over before she even arrived in Nashville, Lynn sang with a hill-country accent (notably different from typical Music Row stars) and with the unchecked candor of her toughening experiences. In this smoothly defiant voice, she sang of her man's and her own cheating ways, as well as the hardships of motherhood, wifehood, and celebrity as if each were one and the same-- and they probably were.

In Nashville, she was a rough in the diamond: Her hard-edged songs like "Fist City" and "Rated X" were backed by pristine countrypolitan production-- mostly courtesy of Owen Bradley-- which helped sell her to a wide audience. At the same time, the disparity between her voice and her accompaniment created a fascinating rural/urban friction that never let listeners forget that she was less a superstar than a small-town girl at heart. Crucial to her image and her success, the depth of Lynn's noncelebrity is perhaps why her old material still bristles and burrs even today.

On her new album, Van Lear Rose, producer and admirer Jack White (who dedicated White Blood Cells to Lynn in 2001) immediately erases that friction with a rawer, in-one-take live sound that adds texture to her songs without overpowering her voice. White's intention isn't to update or revise Lynn's music or her persona, but simply to recast her voice in a new setting, to make her sound like she's right back in Butcher Hollow.

To this end, White has corralled a backing band that consists not of Nashville veterans, but of young 'uns from the decidedly non-rural locales of Detroit and Cincinnati. Dubbed the Do Whaters by Lynn ("I named them that because they got in there and did whatever we needed them to!" she explains in the liner notes), the group consists of The Greenhornes' rhythm section Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler, with Blanche's Dave Feeny adding elegant pedal steel and slide guitar flourishes. Together, they prove a dynamic backing band, able to set a warm country atmosphere but not afraid to make some rock noise.

And they do just that on the first single, "Portland, Oregon". Lynn and White exchange verses about sloe gin fizzes and drunk lovin', recalling her adultery duets with Conway Twitty but with more of a boisterous sound, courtesy of White's Zep blues riffs. On "Mrs. Leroy Brown", the band bang out a bar-stormer to match Lynn's adventures riding around town in a pink limousine. Even bigger than that limo, though, is the unmistakable smile on her face as she disses her man and his floozy: "I just drawed all your money out of the bank today/ Honey, you don't have no mo'."

If Van Lear Rose recasts Lynn's sound, it also revisits the subject matter of her earlier hits, following her stories through to their sometimes dire ends in songs like "Women's Prison" and "Family Tree". But on the album's most memorable songs, Lynn tells her own story, singing in no other voice but her own, and it still soars with surprising grace and with all the sass and intimacy of her younger self. Most of Van Lear Rose is autobiographical, relating her life in both Butcher Hollow and Nashville with evocative detail and steady candor. The title track, for example, recalls her father's stories about her mother and "how her beauty ran deep down to her soul." Her voice trembles with a tender, nostalgic wistfulness, especially when she remembers how the miners teased her dad: "You're dreamin', boy, she'll never look your way/ You'll never ever hold the Van Lear Rose."

After the spoken-word reminiscence "Little Red Shoes" and the devastating widow's lament "Miss Being Mrs.", Van Lear Rose ends with "Story of My Life", which is exactly what its title purports. The coal miner's daughter happily relates the events of her life-- early marriage, motherhood, stardom-- leading up to the present, but instead of dwelling on hardship and tragedy, she sounds satisfied, even joyful. It's perhaps a testament to her modesty that she winds up this autobiography in less than three minutes, but by song's end, her contentment feels undeniably hard-won and admirable: "I have to say that I've been blessed/ Not bad for a country girl, I guess."

Lynn's triumphant return on Van Lear Rose isn't exactly unprecedented: Ten years ago, Johnny Cash won a younger audience with the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings, and George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson have all released strong albums late in their careers. Nor is it surprising that fans would flock to such sturdy music, that critics would celebrate such a comeback or pursue such a great story. But the rating above does not reflect critical sentiment as much as it does critical amazement: Van Lear Rose is remarkably bold, celebratory and honest. It's a homecoming for a small-town musician gifted with poise, humor and compassion, but at its very heart, it's happy to be just a kick-ass country record.

Song Title Changes in Billy Joel's Back Catalogue, In Light of His Recent Car Accident into a House on Long Island

New York State Department of Transportation of Mind

Scenes from an Italian/Jew Driving a French Car into a Colonial House

We Didn't Start The Fire, But Did Take out a Row of Hedges

She's Got the Right of Way

Movin' In (Hydroplaning Citroen's Song)

Tell Her About It (The Insurance Agent’s Song)

Say Goodbye to Bayville Avenue, Say Hello to Someone’s Living Room

Watch Out for the Piano, Man!

Don't Ask Me Why, I Wasn’t Even Drinking

Music for the week of April 26th, 2004

Cherry blossom girl - Air
What's happening, brother? - Marvin Gaye
Voice of harold - REM
Satisfied mind - Johnny Cash
Vaccination scar - Tragically Hip
Angie - Lassigue Bendthaus
You know you're right - Nirvana
Can't hardly stand it - Charlie Feathers
Angie's night - Beat Hunters
Have mercy - Loretta Lynn
Portland, Oregon - Loretta Lynn

I miss Vancouver every day:

Book Review

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

"[What] your life amounts to in the end [is] the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up-look at the respective piles. There's nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man's condition, as Montaigne says."

Life, as understood by Logan Mountstuart, is a series of random events, not events which are fated, controlled by a higher power, pre-destined, or the result of carefully made decisions. Though particular events in the life of one individual may have cataclysmic importance to that individual -- both for the better and for the worse -- they rarely have any effect on the mass of humanity, and no external power controls world events. Since there's no blame to apportion for whatever good or bad luck we may have in life, a person may choose to enjoy the good times, seek out happiness wherever possible, and live life to the fullest, come what may, or sit back passively and just endure whatever happens.

Logan Mountstuart is one of the former types, a man who recognizes that "Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary -- it is the respective proportions of those two categories that make life appear interesting or humdrum." But Mountstuart also believes, even as a young student, that one can look for and find the extraordinary even within the ordinary. We see Mountstuart and his two best friends, Peter Scabius and Ben Leeping, as 17-year-old school students, evaluating events and performance in terms of whether they are "magnificents" or "sub-magnificents," and they deliberately devise challenges for each other which force them to do things which are difficult and not natural to them. With each challenge, the end result involves both good luck and bad and has lasting effects.

Mountstuart is revealed here through his personal journals, begun in 1923, when he is seventeen, and continuing to the time of his death in 1991. "We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being," Mountstuart informs us. "A true journal presents us with...riotous and disorganized reality. The various stages of development are there, but they are jumbled up, counterposed and repeated randomly." Though he is a fictional character, the reader comes to know Mountstuart intimately, both as an individual, growing and changing, and as an Everyman, someone who participates in and is affected by the seminal events of the 20th century, after World War I. Whether these are literary, artistic, social, or historical milestones, Mountstuart and his friends are there. By both particularizing and universalizing his characters, Boyd creates a novel in which an exciting plot is crucial, since universal characters, by definition, cannot be unique. With the novel's broad focus on world events, we see the characters primarily as they are affected by external, rather than internal, forces.

Because Logan Mountstuart is a writer, both of books and of feature stories for magazines, he is able to travel and to know the other writers and artists of the period. When he meets such luminaries as Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian Fleming, the reader has the vicarious fun of being there and meeting them, too, since Mountstuart, as a person, appears to be very much like the rest of us, a man with normal concerns and interests, trying to get ahead, often unable to control his impulses. He buys early paintings by Paul Klee and Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso draws a quick portrait of him and signs it. He engages in intellectual discussions about Braque, Picasso, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Bloomsbury group and generally keeps the reader aware of the many literary and artistic achievements which occurred in concert with important events in western history.

It is in his depiction of the historical moment that Boyd shines. By describing events through Mountstuart's experience, he is able to give a human face to people and circumstances which have influenced our history, and his choice of small details, often unique, offers a new slant on some familiar events. Some of the tension of the Spanish Civil War, for example, is reflected by the simple fact that Gen. Franco controls the Canary Islands, which is where all the country's cigarettes come from--only his troops have access to them. Mountstuart's supply of cigarettes from home gives him entrée to the nicotine-starved Republicans. The youth of Barcelona and Valencia, preparing for war, are depicted in their passion and fervor, and Mountstuart contrasts them with the "pinched, grey-faced, downtrodden populace" of London. He is particularly good at showing simultaneous events--Franco at the gates of Barcelona while Hitler is entering Prague--and his explanation of Neville Chamberlain's giving up of the Sudetenland resonates as an honest and even logical attempt to avoid the desperation of war.

Eventually, Ian Fleming, who works for the Secret Service, gets him a job in Naval Intelligence, and he suddenly finds himself working for the government as a "spy" on the Duke of Windsor, the exiled former king, when he is appointed Governor of the Bahamas, making sure that the Duke's German sympathies do not make him a pawn of the enemy. Because he is imprisoned at the end of that assignment, Mountstuart does not know when the war ends, and he discovers that the devastation of war matches that of his personal life. Post-war, Mountstuart continues to be involved with the world of artists and writers--and world events--eventually spending several years in Nigeria, where he covers the Biafran War and works as a teacher. Later, as an old man, he becomes involved with a "kollective," which has connections to the Red Army Brigade.

Any Human Heart is a testament to life itself. Mountstuart lives the credo of the "Cosmopolites," a group of French poets about whom he wrote a book early in his career: "[The Cosmopolites] are all about romance, about life's excitement and adventure and its essential sadness and transcience. They savour everything both fine and bittersweet that life has to offer." Mountstuart's personal life is tumultuous, with marriages, children, affairs, and deaths, but in the end he has LIVED it, despite the accidents of history and the bad luck which has changed it.

For the reader the book is a fast read, despite its length, filled with personal stories and colored by world events. Mountstuart's belief that life is the aggregate of one's good luck and bad luck--that things just happen--leads to a novel in which there can be no underlying thematic pattern, a novel which, like Mountstuart's view of life, feels more accidental and episodic than planned, with the passage of time serving as the primary framework. Mountstuart himself accepts what happens to him, though it often saddens him, and does not agonize over what he might have done differently--he does not believe that he could have changed things. In that regard he remains one-dimensional, in many ways an Everyman for the history of the times. Fun to read, the book offers a new "take" on many events which have shaped our own times, offering no lessons for the future, other than to live life, despite its ups and downs. As Mountstuart himself points out, life ultimately is a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child."

Songs of the Week

The darker days of me and him - PJ Harvey
For the driver - Ron Sexsmith
Hello it's me - Todd Rundgren
True love will find you in the end - Wilco
Each coming night - Iron & Wine
A satisfied mind - Johnny Cash
Believe - Macha
The sign - Mountain Goats
Good times a goo goo - Bran Flakes
Sweet thing - Chaka Khan
Sunshine of your love - Spanky Wilson
Oh, me - Nirvana
Made of stone - The Stone Roses
A good man is hard to find - Sufjan Stevens

Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope, and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy you must be wise.

-- G. Santayana

712

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—he passed us—
The Dews drew quivering & chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity—

- Emily Dickinson

MUSIC
Ron Sexsmith -- Retriever

Throughout the latter half of the '90s, Canadian troubadour Ron Sexsmith was a reliable source of tasteful folk songs for the kind of music fan who distrusts genius and values classicism. Then came 2001's Blue Boy and 2002's Cobblestone Runway, two records that expanded Sexsmith's vocabulary with the addition of, respectively, gruff country-rock overtones and Joe Henry-esque electronic textures. Now, Sexsmith has taken yet another turn with the richly orchestrated pop of Retriever, an album which suggests what would happen if the hooks of Marshall Crenshaw circa 1982 met up with the sophistication of Elvis Costello today.

Retriever is unmistakably a Sexsmith effort, complete with his sweetly shaky voice, his spare guitar twang, and his fluid melodies. But while Sexsmith's music once seemed both too precise and too remote, on Retriever, he brings a subtle urgency to a set of songs that could double as proverbs. From the opening line—"I'm a bit run down, but I'm okay"—Retriever offers warnings and reassurances, as Sexsmith indicates repeatedly that he's discovered something of value that he's not going to let out of his sight.

The album builds in intensity as it goes along, opening with three consecutive midtempo pop songs (peaking with the George Harrison-esque "Not About To Lose") before varying the pace with the hymn-like piano ballad "Tomorrow In Her Eyes," the impassioned "From Now On," and the acoustic lament "For The Driver." Then Sexsmith hits the best song of the record, and perhaps his career: "Wishing Wells," a "time to put away childish things" command set to a swinging beat and propulsive guitar.

"Wishing Wells" lies at the center of this set, which makes plenty of observations along the lines of "I fear sometimes we ain't got a hope in hell." But the soul of Retriever resonates in songs like the seductive "Whatever It Takes" and the romantic "How On Earth," in which Sexsmith gives thanks for love. The record closes with the line "Though in your house sorrow dwells / It never stays / I know it well," a note of sublime comfort from an artist who, after a decade, seems to be finding his voice while still conjuring words worth saying.

FINANCE

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MUSIC

Madvillain

In the early nineties, thanks to performers like Dr. Dre and his muse Snoop Doggy Dog, hip-hop became geometrically more popular than it had ever been. In the mid-nineties, multitasking figures like Puff Daddy helped make it a brand. As this happened, hip-hop gained a self-consciousness, as all successful art forms do, and a set of beliefs: hip-hop, sayeth the faithful, is made with two turntables and a microphone; graffiti and break dancing are the appropriate activities if you aren’t rapping or d.j.ing. And with Scripture comes orthodoxy: parvenu superstars rapping about guns and women and sampling popular songs are somehow betraying the original ideals; these new popular artists are “rap,” not hip-hop; hip-hop isn’t about sampling well-known songs like Rick James’s “Super Freak” and talking about champagne—it involves “skills” and an affinity for the “truth.” It sounds, in short, like Sunday school.

Hip-hop, of course, did start with people rhyming over well-known songs, and very few hip-hop records have actually been produced with only two turntables and a microphone. This fact hasn’t stopped the revisionists. As hip-hop became the lingua franca of youth all over the world and artists like Jay-Z and Eminem made remarkable and remarkably popular records, a parallel subculture of independent labels and artists grew up around a doctrine that was almost puritan. These independent artists rue the perfidy of apostate millionaires, and moan about pop stars who abandoned the true faith. Wanna-be prophets dream of chasing the moneylenders out of the temple, even though the moneylenders built the place.

Some independent acts prove their devotion by exulting in musical and linguistic obscurity, like slightly hipper stamp collectors. Some m.c.s spend so much time scolding the popular m.c.s that they come across as schoolmarms, switches in hand. Others are so committed to resurrecting various “golden ages” of hip-hop—1979, 1988, 1993—that their work is not much different from that of Renaissance-fair revivalists dancing around the maypole. Independent pop—not just hip-hop—has in many ways become a version of graduate school, a safe zone where artists can eke out a living, take their time doing specialized work. In most cases, this is the last thing a popular musician should be doing. But on “Madvillainy” (Stones Throw) the duo Madvillain—the m.c. MF Doom and the producer Madlib—demonstrate that hiding out can be the right move. Madvillain’s music is accessible but idiosyncratic, catchy but soaked in noise, lighthearted but full of abstractions. Madvillain is why independent hip-hop isn’t such a bad idea; this group needed breathing space.

Some fourteen years ago, MF Doom (Daniel Dumile) signed with a major label, Elektra, as part of the group KMD, which included his brother Subroc. In 1991, KMD put out “Mr. Hood,” a delightful, unusual record that was often lumped with De La Soul’s 1989 album “3 Feet High and Rising.” De La Soul combined playful samples of well-known funk songs and a friendly, Day-Glo graphic sense. KMD was a darker, stranger group, and never quite fit that template. Doom, then known as Zev Love X, has a slightly obstructed voice, as if his tongue were too big for his mouth. KMD’s samples made reference to racial unease. In 1993, Elektra dropped KMD, and refused to release its second album, “Black Bastards,” reportedly because of controversial artwork (a drawing of a Sambo figure hanged on a gallows). Later that year, Subroc was hit and killed by a car.

Doom resurfaced with his new name—from Marvel Comics’ Dr. Doom—in the late nineteen-nineties, releasing a few independent twelve-inch singles and then, in 1999, the full-length album “Operation: Doomsday.” It was a furiously odd thing, assembled from sweet nineteen-eighties R. & B. and nailed shut by Doom’s glottal, pained rhymes. (Doom has since released records under the names Viktor Vaughn and King Geedorah.)

Doom’s partner in Madvillain, the West Coast producer Madlib, was born Otis Jackson, Jr., and emerged in the mid-nineties with the group Lootpack. He established himself in 2000 with “The Unseen,” an album by his alter ego Quasimoto. (He created the character by speeding up his voice slightly.) As hip-hop producers were moving toward keyboards and drum machines and away from samples of records, which are expensive to license, Madlib stuck stubbornly to samples of jazz and rock records—especially jazz records. His sound was distinct enough to avoid anachronism: of a tradition but unique. In 2003, Madlib was given access to the vaults of Blue Note records, and he created a long, effective montage of sixties and seventies jazz called “Shades of Blue.”

Madlib and MF Doom are both comfortable with what might be called the “casual noise” of hip-hop, the sonic by-products of the act: spit hitting a microphone, the crackle of an old record, the sibilant hum of a low-resolution digital sample. The voices and samples on “Madvillainy” sound as if they’d been coated with dust, fried, dropped, rolled around, and then fried again.

But “Madvillainy” is hardly a difficult record. MF (which stands for Metal Face, among other things) Doom, who appears on the cover masked, looking like an extra from “Alexander Nevsky,” takes a deep pleasure in words: alliteration, internal rhymes, and pure sound. The point of “Madvillainy” is largely poetic—celebrating the language of music and the music of language. It’s not hard to quote Doom. From “Money Folder”: “Egads, she got enough style to start three fads.” From “Raid”: “The metal fellow been rippin’ flows / since New York plates were ghetto yellow with broke blue writing.” (Who wouldn’t like to hear more rhymes about license plates?) There are many references to science fiction and TV. Doom can turn a corner with a quote reminiscent of “Star Trek” or “The West Wing” (“Sir, request permission to be candid.” “Granted”), touch on commercials (“Better get Maaco”), and end with an enticing metaphor all his own (“more soul than a sock with a hole”). Thankfully, Madvillain doesn’t define itself against the mainstream. The only reference to popular m.c.s comes in a song called “Figaro”—Mozart’s guy—and it’s deliciously subtle: “The clever nerd / the best m.c. with no chain ya ever heard.”

Most of Madlib’s beats are made from samples of records, though it is hard to say which ones, even in a general way. Is the lovely, decaying piano figure in “All Caps” from a jazz record? An English skiffle record? A documentary about whales? “America’s Most Blunted” begins with a sample of Steve Reich’s “Come Out,” and then stumbles into a swaggering funk pattern. The three instrumental tracks are some of the album’s best moments, brief as they are: “Do Not Fire!” could be the theme of a Cuban kung-fu movie, and “Supervillain Theme” sounds like the work of an accomplished rock band from a country that the United States does not maintain diplomatic relations with.

After a few repetitions, a sample becomes known but doesn’t necessarily stop being strange. The imperfections in whatever is being sampled are retained, the stresses and flaws and cracks. There is a tactile quality to “Madvillainy,” which leads us to the smoking gun of the record, if there is one: marijuana. There are repeated allusions to weed and several samples of a 1971 record called “A Child’s Garden of Grass: A Pre-Legalization Comedy.” The key sample: “In fact, everyone finds that they’re more creative stoned than straight.”

For most of us, this is poppycock, but Doom and Madlib succeed in translating the heightened physical sensitivity and associative facility of the stoned mind into concrete sound. Madlib, especially, seems able to hide music inside other music. His samples lie on each other like double exposures, or like a cassette tape that allows the previous recording to bleed through the new one. “Strange Ways” sounds like several songs constantly competing to achieve dominance. Doom, happily, is undisturbed. The narcissism of the stoned can be a gift.

But not always. Quasimoto appears as Lord Quas on the mildly philosophical “Shadows of Tomorrow”: “Today is the shadow of tomorrow, today is the present future of yesterday, yesterday is the shadow of today, the darkness of the past is yesterday.” Somewhere, a dorm room is missing its poster.

Madvillain was thinking more clearly when this album was assembled from scenes into narrative. The twenty-two songs on “Madvillainy” cohere and zip by. (Once or twice, Doom drifts over the beat without engaging it.) “Madvillainy” makes a convincing case that, however you choose to pray, two of hip-hop’s many dogmas still obtain: Every sound can make a song. All words make sense.

Hollywood Publicity
from slate.msn.com

Not long ago, the momentous news came that Tom Cruise had split with Penélope Cruz, his girlfriend of just over two years—a breakup that concludes one of the more glittering chapters of Hollywood fantasy. Strangely, though, this wasn't the most momentous split Cruise experienced that week. That honor belongs to a break that took place a few days prior between Cruise and his publicist, Pat Kingsley, a partner in the firm PMK, who's been shepherding Cruise's public persona for the past 14 years. (The responsibility now passes to Cruise's sister Lee Anne DeVette.)

Cruise and Kingsley are more than simply the world's biggest movie star and Hollywood's most powerful flack. In the terrain of celebrity image control, they are like Lewis and Clark—explorers who charted the path that other stars quickly tried to follow. Their breakup isn't just the end of the most successful partnership of its kind. It may well mark the demise of the very tactics this tandem perfected. There may never be another flack quite as powerful as Kingsley or a star quite as inscrutable as Cruise. In an age of scandal and nonstop scrutiny, Cruise is a curious celebrity conundrum: the world's most famous movie star and the one about whom the least is known or understood.

To understand Cruise, it helps to understand Pat Kingsley. Kingsley cut her teeth as a "planter"—that is, a person who plants items in celebrity columns—with a Hollywood PR firm in the early '60s. At that time, high-profile columnists, in the mold of Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons, wielded all the power, while press agents scrambled after them, jostling for mentions of their clients. (This vicious imbalance was illustrated smartly in the sour 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success.) Movie stars themselves were under contract to big studios, which coddled these precious investments by buffing their images and hushing up their scandals.

By the early 1970s, however, the studio system was all but dismantled. Stars had become free agents, contracting out their services on a picture-by-picture basis. No longer protected by studios, stars began hiring personal publicists to craft and control their press. Still, the publicist's job essentially involved fielding phone calls and arranging photo shoots. Then along came Kingsley and her firm, PMK, which she founded in 1987, to rewrite all the rules.

As a publicist, Pat Kingsley is best-known for saying, "No." She was the first publicist to demand a cover story in exchange for an interview. She was the first to request—and often receive—approval over the writers and photographers assigned to cover her clients. She asked potential interviewers to submit lists of questions for preapproval. (Jodie Foster, for example, was not to be asked about John Hinckley Jr., and Kingsley pulled Calista Flockhart from a Today show interview when the show's producers would not agree to forgo questions about her weight.) She demanded that writers and photographers on press junkets for Cruise's movies, such as Far and Away and A Few Good Men, sign over the legal rights to their articles and images, so that PMK could control—or prohibit—the distribution of these words or photos in the future. If an editor or journalist perturbed her—by writing an article she felt was unflattering—she might refuse them future access to her entire clientele. Given the breadth of her roster—which has included Cruise, Foster, Richard Gere, Al Pacino, and many more—this was a hefty stick to shake.

Journalists often characterize Kingsley as a bully. Her clients praise her as a fierce and protective mother hen. In any case, her demands worked—in part simply because she had the chutzpah to propose them, and in part because as media outlets battled for celebrity interviews there was always an editor waiting on Line 2 who'd be happy to acquiesce to her demands. During Kingsley's heyday, publicists acted as bouncers, stationed out in front of Hollywood's celebrity VIP lounge, granting entrance only to select—and obedient—journalists. In turn, magazines such as Vanity Fair and People presented their interviews as dispatches from inside this exclusive club. Under Kingsley's reign, celebrity access became the coin of the realm, and publicists controlled the purse strings. Tom Cruise, Kingsley's star pupil, benefited from this new economy more than anyone. His Teflon-coated persona became the very model of the modern, expertly managed public image.

Not only is Kingsley and Cruise's partnership over; so too is the era it symbolized. Today, magazine editors, struggling to regain the upper hand, attempt to anoint stars, rather than kowtow to existing ones. New magazines—particularly the revamped US Weekly, under the editorship of Bonnie Fuller, and its imitators, such as In Touch—have succeeded with a different approach. Their tone is not chummy with the stars but chummy with the readership. They run gossipy stories—rich with quotes from unnamed sources and loose-lipped "friends" and illustrated with wire-service photos—that aren't reliant on access to their subjects. These articles are less like missives from the celebrity party than catty chatter among fans on the outside of the barriers, heckling affectionately as the stars come and go.

Partly this is due to the fact that the exploding infotainment economy—on the newsstand, on cable TV, on the Internet—has resulted in a market glut of fresh faces. The WB and UPN alone churn out photogenic young "stars" by the truckload, while reality-show winners like Trista and Ryan are heralded alongside Jen and Ben. And each new movie season brings a batch of aspiring celebrities—Rufus Sewell! Skeet Ulrich! Rosario Dawson!—that magazine editors are more than happy to throw on their covers, to see which ones stick.

This shift is also no doubt influenced by the advent of the Web, a medium in which fans can gather to speculate endlessly about their favorite celebrity obsessions. And it's an outgrowth of cynicism: By now, we've repeatedly seen the media curtain pulled back to reveal the machinations of flacks like Kingsley. (As journalists are rebuffed by publicists, the "I was rebuffed by a publicist" exposé has become a mini-genre of its own.) Readers and the outlets that court them now concern themselves with talking about stars rather than talking to them. This shift has greatly devalued the currency of celebrity access—the very bargaining chip with which publicists have for so long maintained their power.

It is hard to imagine an actor succeeding today by issuing strict terms of engagement and consistently avoiding questions about his private life. He'd simply be trampled by the media herd as it stampedes toward the next young hunk. The modern publicity model is embodied instead in a star like Colin Farrell, the young Irish actor who's been heralded as Cruise's heir. In truth, Farrell is an anti-Cruise. Rather than protecting his secrets, he pre-emptively unfurls spectacular tales of debauchery. His rowdy off-screen antics—the boozing, the carousing, the on-again-off-again dalliances with Britney Spears—have buoyed his stardom far more than have his actual movies. And the media, not surprisingly, celebrate his candor. A Vanity Fair cover story on Farrell from 2002 feted him as "a movie star not programmed by publicists," even though his "honesty" is as calculated a strategy as anything Kingsley might have concocted.

Kingsley elevated the flack from media caddie to professional storyteller—she was, in effect, narrating the story of Tom Cruise, highlighting certain plot lines while burying unflattering details. But flacks can no longer control the story line—nor is it, in our far more permissive age, as important for them to. Celebrities like Farrell or Britney Spears can only hope to keep their heads above water while body-surfing from scandal to scandal. They may even realize that it's important to give us things to talk about. Otherwise, we might just start talking about someone else. Cruise and Kingsley's tight-lipped tactics were revolutionary in their day. But they now seem as antiquated as the charms of a silent movie star, made obsolete by the dawning of the talkies. In this new climate, the terse refusals of a publicist are drowned out in the roar.

Kurt Cobain
from Slate.msn.com

Monday, April 5, marks the 10-year anniversary of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's suicide. When Cobain ended his days with a gun, he stunted a promising career and left many questions unanswered. In November 2002, the following article explored the depths of Cobain's angst, his troubled marriage, and possible reasons for killing himself by analyzing Nirvana's last single, "You Know You're Right," released eight years after the songwriter's death:

Somewhere up in pop star heaven, wearing the same ratty cardigan that he wore on MTV Unplugged, Kurt Cobain is no doubt enjoying a last, bitter laugh over the release of a brand-new Nirvana single, "You Know You're Right." A keen student of fame, the author of endless jeremiads against the evils of the recording industry, the greatest rock star of the '90s could not help but feel satisfied by a week in which the release of Nirvana's final studio recording propelled the band's greatest-hits album to No. 3 on the Billboard charts. The release of the first new Nirvana song in almost a decade came in the same week that selections from Cobain's private notebooks and diaries were released in a lavish coffee-table book in which Kurt himself predicted the end: "And in 10 years when Nirvana becomes as memorable as Kajagoogoo," Kurt wrote in his diary, "that same very small percent will come to see us at reunion gigs sponsored by Depends diapers, bald fat still trying to RAWK at amusement parks. Saturdays: puppet show, rollercoaster & Nirvana …"

With the release of Nevermind, in 1991, Cobain had been widely acclaimed as the musical spokesman for the anger and longing of his generation—his crackling blue eyes were lit by the same alternating currents of gentleness and rage that lit up his songs. Three years later, when he blew his head off in his garage, he was clearly a world-class mess—alone, angry, depressed, suffering from constant stomach pain, sick and tired of being a rock star, furious at himself, venting his famous passive-aggressive anger on nearly everyone around him, and regularly injecting heroin.

Unlike most post-mortem rock releases, "You Know You're Right" is not B-side material or the result of recording studio wizardry—it's a real Nirvana song that was recorded less than three months before the Cobain's famous suicide. If his life was a mess, Cobain was at the peak of his powers as a vocalist and songwriter—the most gifted and popular writer that rock music had seen since Lennon/McCartney. "You Know You're Right" is a defiant movement away from the surface softness of ballads like "Dumb" and "All Apologies" that he had written for In Utero and then recorded again—softly, with cellos—for MTV Unplugged. It was a song for the kids who grew up in places like Aberdeen, Wash., the logging town where Kurt was born—kids who slept on friends' couches, listened to Black Sabbath, and found work cleaning floors, just like Kurt did before he became famous.

The song begins with Kurt in one of his Gollum-like moods of dependence and resentment, tiptoeing around emotions that are bound to explode. "I will never follow you/ I will never bother you," the singer promises, his voice simmering with rage. As the weight of the resentment grows, his voice revs upward into the supercharged Boeing-engine whine that could channel more stress than any other sound on the planet:

I will move away from here
You won't be afraid of fear
No thought was put into this
I always knew it would come to this

In earlier versions of the song, recorded live during Nirvana's shows and sound-checks of the previous months, Cobain had used a different line for "No thought was put into this"—the memorable but very Nirvana-like one-liner "I am walking in the piss." The change made the song better. "No thought was put into this" was more subtle and offered a more direct contrast with the singer's claim to foresight; it would also sound better to executives at the commercial radio stations that had made In Utero the best-selling album in America.

Otherwise, "You Know You're Right" is not a particularly accommodating song. "Things have never been so swell/ I have never failed to feel," Cobain continued, raising the pitch of his anger even higher, ending in a drawn-out "pain" on which the band explosively freaks out, leading to the draggy, underwater chorus of "You know you're right."

Here the "you" of the song is clearly the singer himself—the "I" of the preceding couplet. But when the chorus is over, a new target comes into view. "Let's talk about someone else/ Steaming soup against her mouth" the singer suggests, his voice rising back to the same pitch where he left off before. "Nothing really bothers her/ She just wants to love herself." With guitars building to a heavy, industrial crescendo, the accumulated strain in the vocal is again released in the phrase "You know you're right." Repeated over and over again, the singer's attack on himself is now turned against a new target—his wife.

Given the available evidence, it seems fair to say "You Know You're Right" is about Courtney Love—and that the release of the song marks the beginning of yet another chapter in the ongoing negotiation between the rock star and his wife about their famous marriage. Love has helped prevent the release of "You Know You're Right" until the end of 2002—eight years after it was recorded and eight years after Nirvana's commercial peak. She also made sure to first record her own version of "You Know You're Right" with her own band, Hole—a version in which she deliberately alters the lyrics, reversing the emotional dynamics of the song.

"Let's talk about someone else," Love's version begins, repeating the lines that her husband wrote. "She just wants to love herself." But Love was much too clever a survivor to be imprisoned for long in her husband's narrative of their difficult marriage. In Love's version, Kurt Cobain wasn't going anywhere; she was the one who was leaving him—but only in Kurt's frightened, childish, insecure mind. So, she rewrites her dead husband's song:

She moves away from here
She just wants to love herself,
I won't move from here
You won't be afraid of fear.

Responding to what is now positioned as Cobain's own fear of abandonment, Love would heroically remain by his side—the perfect rock 'n' roll widow.

It is very difficult to hear the "new" Nirvana song as a song; instead, it's a clue—to the state of Cobain's marriage, or the reasons he killed himself. Cobain's death was hardly the accidental result of partying too hard, or mixing pills with booze—he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Why? Was it the record companies? The fame? The drugs? These questions haunt the new song because Kurt Cobain killed himself, which makes the experience of listening to the song fascinating and macabre—but not exactly musical. It's a way of merchandizing the rock star's death—the musical equivalent of a "Kurt Is Dead" T-shirt.

Nor is the new Nirvana song particularly new, at least not to hard-core Nirvana fans, who have been familiar with the bootlegged live versions of the song when it was called "On a Mountain" or "Autopilot." "You Know You're Right" is not even necessarily the best unreleased Nirvana song. My own favorite is "In His Hands"—a song Cobain wrote for Nevermind, in which he accurately foresaw the predicament that he would later blame on fame, heroin, and his wife: "Giving medications, in a lighted room/ Wouldn't want to fake it, I know I should." Proceeding from a weariness of the super-stardom he had discarded before it ever happened, Kurt then launched into a sly, perfect parody of the Who's "We're Not Gonna Take It," changing the time-signature and rewriting the lyrics: "We're not gonna make it, well I don't mind," he sang. "Wouldn't want to fake it, but I have this time/ Giving conversations, to whom they don't know/ Taking medications till my stomach's full."

Cobain knew perfectly well that he wouldn't enjoy being a rock star. Like "In His Hands," "You Know You're Right" is interesting because it clearly shows the artist between styles; the fact that it sounds like transitional material makes it unlikely that the song would have appeared on a record if Cobain were alive. As a talented commercial artist and a famous control freak, Kurt knew that each new style had to appear new and completely separate, a discrete dot that could be easily connected to the dot that came before. "You Know You're Right" was part of one of Kurt's transitions—but to what? Bachelorhood? Becoming the new Black Sabbath? Or to recording his own sad-core version of Dylan's Basement Tapes—detailing the evils of the music business? We'll never know. As a commercial artifact, what's special about the new Nirvana song is the high-quality mix—the pure, clear studio sound that can be effortlessly absorbed into the creamy, overproduced flow of commercial radio. The mix makes the song sound particularly out of date—a heavy, depressing, industrial bummer.

"You Know You're Right" is finally a necessary coda to Cobain's short but influential career. "We simply wanted to give those dumb heavy metal kids (the kids who we used to be) an introduction to a different way of thinking and some 15 years of emotionally and socially important music and all we got was flack, backstabbing and Pearl Jam," the star explained some months before his death. But the desperately honest, do-it-yourself American punk scene that Cobain wanted to share with the metalheads was already dead; the music that Cobain loved was made all the way back in the '80s, by bands like the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, Bad Brains, and the Pixies, who wrote songs that privileged emotional and musical directness, simplicity, and literate craft. By 1994, Nirvana was the last great punk rock band in America. It was also the greatest pop band in the world. The Kurt Cobain who wrote "You Know You're Right" couldn't live with the person he had become. Still, he would definitely have taken some pleasure in knowing that his last recording would be released eight years too late—so that his wife, his bandmates, and his record label could make millions off the crass merchandizing of his ugly, disturbing suicide. He wrote his story of stardom, disillusion, and betrayal before he ever became famous; now history has—sadly—proved him right.

Music for the weekend of April 2/3/4, 2004

Sarah Harmer - Dandelions and Bulletholes
Dusty Springfield - Just a little lovin'
Simon & Garfunkel - The Only Living Boy in New York
The Wedding Present - Dalliance
Bob Dylan - The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Wilco - Theologians
Todd Rundgren - Hello it's me
Gilbert O'Sullivan - Alone again
10cc - I'm not in love
Inbreds - Any sense of time
Nico - These days
Beck - Mexico