NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
Men Just Want Mommy?
A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."
I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers. Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods. In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.
In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm. The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?) Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection. As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.
As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. "The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands.
A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.
So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to. I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble. "I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."
MUSIC
1+1+1=1: from The New Yorker
In July of 2003, Jeremy Brown, a.k.a. DJ Reset, took apart a song. Using digital software, Brown isolated instrumental elements of “Debra,” a song by Beck from his 1999 album “Midnite Vultures.” Brown, who is thirty-three and has studied with Max Roach, adjusted the tempo of “Debra” and added live drums and human beat-box noises that he recorded at his small but tidy house in Long Island City. Then he sifted through countless a-cappella vocals archived on several hard drives. Some a-cappellas are on commercially released singles, specifically intended for d.j. use, while others appear on the Internet, having been leaked by people working in the studio where the song was recorded, or sometimes even by the artist.
After auditioning almost a thousand vocals, Brown found that an a-cappella of “Frontin’,” a collaboration between the rapper Jay-Z and the producer Pharrell Williams, was approximately in the same key as “Debra.” The two songs are not close in style-“Debra” is a tongue-in-cheek take on seventies soul music, while “Frontin’” is hard and shimmering computer music-but the vocalists are doing something similar. Brown exploited this commonality, and used his software to put the two singers exactly in tune.
Both Beck and Williams are singing in an impaired but enthusiastic shower-stall falsetto. Williams’s goofy come-on-“Don’t wanna sound full of myself or rude, but you ain’t looking at no other dudes, because you love me”-is both musically and conceptually in sync with Beck’s own daft chorus: “Girl, I wanna get with you, and your sister. I think her name is Debra.” Brown’s collage sounds not like two songs stitched together but one single theme song for inept Romeos everywhere. After several months of work, he completed the track, called it “Frontin’ on Debra,” and posted it on his Web site. With an enthusiastic push from Beck, “Frontin’ on Debra” was made commercially available in October on iTunes.
“Frontin’ on Debra” is an example of a “mashup,” in which, generally, the vocal from one song is laid over the music from another. The best-known mashup in the United States is an unauthorized album-length project called “The Grey Album,” assembled by Brian Burton, known professionally as Danger Mouse. The vocals are from Jay-Z’s “The Black Album,” and the musical bed is a highly processed and reorganized version of the Beatles’“White Album.” Occasionally compelling, “The Grey Album” is not a great example of a mashup, because the musical bed is processed so radically that its source is sometimes not clear. One of the thrills of the mashup is identifying two well-known artists unwittingly complementing each other’s strengths and limitations: bacchanalian rapper Missy Elliott combined with morose English rock band Joy Division, ecstatic Madonna working with furious Sex Pistols. The most celebrated mashups are melodically tuned, positing a harmonic relationship between, say, Madonna’s voice and the Sex Pistols’ guitars.
Mashups find new uses for current digital technology, a new iteration of the cause-and-effect relationship behind almost every change in pop-music aesthetics: the gear changes, and then the music does. If there is an electric guitar of mashup, it is a software package called Acid Pro, which enables one to put loops of different songs both in time and in tune with each other. Mark Vidler, known professionally as Go Home Productions, explained some other benefits of digital technology to me in London not long ago: “You don’t need a distributor, because your distribution is the Internet. You don’t need a record label, because it’s your bedroom, and you don’t need a recording studio, because that’s your computer. You do it all yourself.”
A legally cleared album of mashups called “Collision Course” is currently in the Billboard Top Ten. It is a sort of “Black Album” footnote, a combination of Jay-Z’s work on “The Black Album” and other albums, and the music of Linkin Park, the multiplatinum rock band. “Collision Course” is not a particularly good mashup-Linkin Park’s adequate rhyming and bleating vocals only detract from Jay-Z’s authority and swing-but it’s a good example of why major record labels have taken so long to embrace the form.
As Jennifer Justice, of Carroll, Guido & Groffman, Jay-Z’s law firm, explained, “Jay’s song ‘99 Problems’ uses two huge samples and has four different credited publishers. That’s before you’ve added anyone else’s music to it, which would be yet another publisher or two. Making a mashup with that song means the label issuing the mashup has to convince all the publishers involved to take a reduction in royalty-otherwise, it won’t be profitable for the label. The publishers are not going to agree to this if we’re not talking about two huge artists. With Jay-Z and Linkin, it’s like found money, but less well known artists might not be sexy enough or big enough.” This may be true, but lawyers and considerations of profit have little to do with how mashups happen, or why they keep happening. In April of 2000, an English bass player and MTV v.j. named Eddy Temple-Morris inaugurated a radio show called “The Remix” on London’s XFM network. A remix, traditionally, was simply a song taken apart and enhanced by the addition of new elements but not actually combined with another song. Temple-Morris played remixes, many of them rock songs reworked by dance-world producers, and mashups made by friends of his like the producer Garret (Jacknife) Lee. By the end of the year, Temple-Morris was receiving unsolicited CD-Rs from people using aliases like McSleazy and Osymyso.
In October of 2001, a d.j. named Roy Kerr, calling himself the Freelance Hellraiser, sent Temple-Morris a mashup called “A Stroke of Genius,” laying Christina Aguilera’s vocal from “Genie in a Bottle,” a lubricious pop song, over the music from the Strokes’“Hard to Explain,” a brittle, honking guitar song. “Stroke” is a perfect pop song, better than either of its sources. What was harmonically sweet in the original songs becomes huge and complex in the combination. Aguilera’s vocal is an unabashedly expressive ode to her sexuality, and her control over it. (She will unleash the genie from her bottle only if rubbed the right way.) The Strokes’ track is compressed and jittery, as if made by hipster robots, but the chord changes are lovely. The original vocal, by Julian Casablancas, is a good rock snarl, but it is a delivery more of attitude than information. Each song targets a demographic that wants nothing to do with the other-teen-agers texting their friends while cruising the mall, and twenty-somethings drinking cheap beer in expensive New York bars-but Hellraiser brokers an amazing musical détente between the two styles. Stripped of “Genie in a Bottle”’s electronic beats, Aguilera’s sex-kitten pose dissipates, and she becomes vulnerable, even desperate. The opening lines now sound less like strip-club small talk and more like a damsel pining from a tower: “I feel like I’ve been locked up tight for a century of lonely nights, waiting for someone to release me.” After another line, she shifts into a wordless “oh, oh” that lays over the Strokes’ chord changes so deliciously you can’t imagine why the song didn’t always do that. After hearing it twice, you can’t remember when it didn’t.
In fact, “A Stroke of Genius” is so good that it eventually led Freelance Hellraiser to do official remixes for Aguilera and others, and he has just completed, at Paul McCartney’s invitation, an entire album of McCartney remixes. “Stroke” also inspired a fourteen-year-old named Daniel Sheldon to start a Web site called boomselection.info. “The Remix” remains England’s main hub for mashups, but the rest of the world is being served through Sheldon’s site and getyourbootlegon.com, a message board started by Grant McSleazy, who recently graduated to doing legitimate remixes of Britney Spears. I visited Temple-Morris at the XFM studios in Central London in October. He is a tall, rangy man who gestures quickly and smiles almost constantly. His basic mode is deep enthusiasm and his favorite word is “love,” which he uses without irony. “We get our wrists slapped by the record companies and publishing companies and whatever,” he said. “But these days there’s much more love, there’s much less paranoia.” Temple-Morris was broadcasting “The Remix” as we talked. He moved briskly behind the console, speaking continuously to the seven or eight people in the room. In mid-conversation, he smiled, nodded, and leaned toward the microphone. The “on air” light went on without warning, and the track playing in the studio cut off abruptly.
“Love it. Want to take it out to dinner. Wanna marry it. There are some tunes, I don’t know what it is, it’s the rolling beat, it’s that incredible bass line, it’s just, there’s something really, really sexy about this record. And so I thought, I’ve got to play you a new really sexy record that I found.” Temple-Morris proceeded to play a record that, under normal circumstances, would have seemed fairly sexy, but, following his salesmanship, sounded like the National Anthem of Sex. This is Temple-Morris’s gift: he was born to the job of loving music and persuading others to love it as much as he does. Also in the room was Mark Vidler, a.k.a. Go Home Productions, one of the more reliable mashup-makers. Once a graphic designer working for a company that made travel pillows, and long before that a guitarist in a rock band called Chicane, Vidler, too, was converted in October of 2001. “I heard ‘A Stroke of Genius’ on the radio and I thought, That’s clever. I could do that,” he said. By April of 2002, Vidler was making his own mashups. His first was called “Slim McShady,” a combination of Eminem and Wings. “I created it on a Saturday, posted it on the Tuesday, and got played on the radio that Friday, on ‘The Remix.’”
Vidler is responsible for several mashups that have the same uncanny brilliance as “Stroke of Genius.” “Girl Wants (to Say Goodbye to) Rock and Roll” brings Christina Aguilera back to sing over the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll.” “Ray of Gob” combines Madonna’s “Ray of Light” and the Sex Pistols’“God Save the Queen,” and both Madonna and the Pistols admired it. Mashup artists like Vidler, Kerr, and Brown have found a way of bringing pop music to a formal richness that it only rarely reaches. See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.
BUSINESS
Interesting articles lately on the rise and fall of Michael Ovitz at Disney. Amazing:
http://newyorker.com/printable/?press/050110pr_press_releases
FILM
The Sea Inside
New York Times Review
As the camera restlessly circles the sky and the ocean, taking in the radiance of northern Spain, ''The Sea Inside,'' the story of a quadriplegic activist fighting for the right to die, struggles to transcend the disease-of-the-week genre to which it belongs. Yet there is no escaping the fact that the true story of Ramón Sampedro, a former ship's mechanic seeking a final exit after three decades of agonizing immobility, is defined by its theme.
To its credit, the movie avoids becoming a formulaic dialogue that pits religious and secular cheerleaders against one another in predigested arguments. Even so, the characters (some of them composites) often feel like schematic formulations intended to balance the story. And the deepest philosophical questions posed by euthanasia are only glancingly addressed, most often in Ramón's bitterly ironic remarks. The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book ''Letters From Hell.'' Sensitively portrayed by the great Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Ramón regards his life in the wake of a crippling accident in his mid-20's as a cruel, cosmic joke. In his imagination, he is still as he was before: a Zorba-like force of nature who once sailed the world. Now the only thing sustaining his spirit is his acute mind, which torments him with dreams of a physical life that is just a memory.
In the film's most remarkable sequence, Ramón, bedridden in his family's house in Galicia overlooking the sea, suddenly stirs, then lurches unsteadily to his feet. For a second, you wonder if his condition all these years has been an elaborate hoax, or if a miracle has occurred. As he steals out of the house and flies to the beach to join his beautiful lawyer Julia (Belén Rueda), the Puccini aria ''Nessun dorma,'' which he is playing on a phonograph, swells over the soundtrack, and they fall into a rapturous embrace. Then Ramón snaps to attention. It's only a fantasy that the filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar has milked for its last drop of heartbreaking impossibility. Because Julia, who is helping Ramón prepare his latest court case challenging the laws against euthanasia, is also seriously ill, he believes that she will be especially sympathetic to his cause. When, later in the film, she falls downstairs and calls out for help to a man who obviously can't come to her rescue, the situation feels like an arm-twisting emotional ploy.
Mr. Amenábar, the gifted 32-year-old director of ''The Others'' and ''Open Your Eyes'', is clearly fixated on the shadowy area between life, death and the spirit world. This time he forsakes science fiction and ghost stories to put his spin on a famous case history. On Jan. 12, 1998, the 55-year-old Sampedro ended his life by drinking cyanide in an elaborately planned ritual that was videotaped and shown on Spanish television. His assisted suicide involved 10 collaborators, in addition to a cameraman. Each participant in the step-by-step process contributed to the ritual without having enough knowledge of the process to be legally indicted for murder. After his death, hundreds of supporters of his cause wrote letters, confessing to having aided and abetted him.
''The Sea Inside'' presents a teasing paradox. Unambiguously pro-euthanasia on one hand, it shows how Ramón, bedridden and unable to move, infused many of those around him with a charged sense of life's possibility. Mr. Bardem, acting above the neck (except in brief flashbacks and fantasies), creates a complicated male character, volatile and witty, with a poet's soul. An excellent makeup job has given the 35-year-old actor the thinning, grayish hair and doughy pallor of a physically inactive man 20 years his senior. We meet the members of Ramón's religious farming family, who slave to keep him alive but refuse to help him in his battle to die with dignity. Surrounding him are his father, Joaquín (Joan Dalmau); his angry brother, José (Celso Bugallo), who vehemently opposes any suicidal assistance; Ramón's attentive sister-in-law, Manuela (Mabel Rivera); and his young nephew, Javi (Tamar Novas), who regards his uncle as a father figure. Frequent visitors include Gené (Clara Seguara), a right-to-die activist, and her boyfriend, Marc (Francesc Garrido).
Two women enter his life. The first, Julia, embraces his cause, becomes his soul mate, and helps him produce a book of poems. The second, Rosa (Lola Dueñas), is a beleaguered single mother with two children, who visits Ramón after seeing him on television and falls in love. When she tries to convince him that his life is worth living, he caustically suggests that she is really seeking some meaning to her own life. Anyone who really loves him, he insists, will help him die. Will she or won't she? In the end, suspenseful narrative devices that worked so effectively in a gothic fantasy like ''The Others'' feel contrived when applied to what's supposed to be a true story of life, death and the living hell from which Ramón finally escapes.
Men Just Want Mommy?
A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."
I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers. Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods. In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.
In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm. The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.
(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?) Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection. As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.
As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. "The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands.
A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.
So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to. I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble. "I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."
MUSIC
1+1+1=1: from The New Yorker
In July of 2003, Jeremy Brown, a.k.a. DJ Reset, took apart a song. Using digital software, Brown isolated instrumental elements of “Debra,” a song by Beck from his 1999 album “Midnite Vultures.” Brown, who is thirty-three and has studied with Max Roach, adjusted the tempo of “Debra” and added live drums and human beat-box noises that he recorded at his small but tidy house in Long Island City. Then he sifted through countless a-cappella vocals archived on several hard drives. Some a-cappellas are on commercially released singles, specifically intended for d.j. use, while others appear on the Internet, having been leaked by people working in the studio where the song was recorded, or sometimes even by the artist.
After auditioning almost a thousand vocals, Brown found that an a-cappella of “Frontin’,” a collaboration between the rapper Jay-Z and the producer Pharrell Williams, was approximately in the same key as “Debra.” The two songs are not close in style-“Debra” is a tongue-in-cheek take on seventies soul music, while “Frontin’” is hard and shimmering computer music-but the vocalists are doing something similar. Brown exploited this commonality, and used his software to put the two singers exactly in tune.
Both Beck and Williams are singing in an impaired but enthusiastic shower-stall falsetto. Williams’s goofy come-on-“Don’t wanna sound full of myself or rude, but you ain’t looking at no other dudes, because you love me”-is both musically and conceptually in sync with Beck’s own daft chorus: “Girl, I wanna get with you, and your sister. I think her name is Debra.” Brown’s collage sounds not like two songs stitched together but one single theme song for inept Romeos everywhere. After several months of work, he completed the track, called it “Frontin’ on Debra,” and posted it on his Web site. With an enthusiastic push from Beck, “Frontin’ on Debra” was made commercially available in October on iTunes.
“Frontin’ on Debra” is an example of a “mashup,” in which, generally, the vocal from one song is laid over the music from another. The best-known mashup in the United States is an unauthorized album-length project called “The Grey Album,” assembled by Brian Burton, known professionally as Danger Mouse. The vocals are from Jay-Z’s “The Black Album,” and the musical bed is a highly processed and reorganized version of the Beatles’“White Album.” Occasionally compelling, “The Grey Album” is not a great example of a mashup, because the musical bed is processed so radically that its source is sometimes not clear. One of the thrills of the mashup is identifying two well-known artists unwittingly complementing each other’s strengths and limitations: bacchanalian rapper Missy Elliott combined with morose English rock band Joy Division, ecstatic Madonna working with furious Sex Pistols. The most celebrated mashups are melodically tuned, positing a harmonic relationship between, say, Madonna’s voice and the Sex Pistols’ guitars.
Mashups find new uses for current digital technology, a new iteration of the cause-and-effect relationship behind almost every change in pop-music aesthetics: the gear changes, and then the music does. If there is an electric guitar of mashup, it is a software package called Acid Pro, which enables one to put loops of different songs both in time and in tune with each other. Mark Vidler, known professionally as Go Home Productions, explained some other benefits of digital technology to me in London not long ago: “You don’t need a distributor, because your distribution is the Internet. You don’t need a record label, because it’s your bedroom, and you don’t need a recording studio, because that’s your computer. You do it all yourself.”
A legally cleared album of mashups called “Collision Course” is currently in the Billboard Top Ten. It is a sort of “Black Album” footnote, a combination of Jay-Z’s work on “The Black Album” and other albums, and the music of Linkin Park, the multiplatinum rock band. “Collision Course” is not a particularly good mashup-Linkin Park’s adequate rhyming and bleating vocals only detract from Jay-Z’s authority and swing-but it’s a good example of why major record labels have taken so long to embrace the form.
As Jennifer Justice, of Carroll, Guido & Groffman, Jay-Z’s law firm, explained, “Jay’s song ‘99 Problems’ uses two huge samples and has four different credited publishers. That’s before you’ve added anyone else’s music to it, which would be yet another publisher or two. Making a mashup with that song means the label issuing the mashup has to convince all the publishers involved to take a reduction in royalty-otherwise, it won’t be profitable for the label. The publishers are not going to agree to this if we’re not talking about two huge artists. With Jay-Z and Linkin, it’s like found money, but less well known artists might not be sexy enough or big enough.” This may be true, but lawyers and considerations of profit have little to do with how mashups happen, or why they keep happening. In April of 2000, an English bass player and MTV v.j. named Eddy Temple-Morris inaugurated a radio show called “The Remix” on London’s XFM network. A remix, traditionally, was simply a song taken apart and enhanced by the addition of new elements but not actually combined with another song. Temple-Morris played remixes, many of them rock songs reworked by dance-world producers, and mashups made by friends of his like the producer Garret (Jacknife) Lee. By the end of the year, Temple-Morris was receiving unsolicited CD-Rs from people using aliases like McSleazy and Osymyso.
In October of 2001, a d.j. named Roy Kerr, calling himself the Freelance Hellraiser, sent Temple-Morris a mashup called “A Stroke of Genius,” laying Christina Aguilera’s vocal from “Genie in a Bottle,” a lubricious pop song, over the music from the Strokes’“Hard to Explain,” a brittle, honking guitar song. “Stroke” is a perfect pop song, better than either of its sources. What was harmonically sweet in the original songs becomes huge and complex in the combination. Aguilera’s vocal is an unabashedly expressive ode to her sexuality, and her control over it. (She will unleash the genie from her bottle only if rubbed the right way.) The Strokes’ track is compressed and jittery, as if made by hipster robots, but the chord changes are lovely. The original vocal, by Julian Casablancas, is a good rock snarl, but it is a delivery more of attitude than information. Each song targets a demographic that wants nothing to do with the other-teen-agers texting their friends while cruising the mall, and twenty-somethings drinking cheap beer in expensive New York bars-but Hellraiser brokers an amazing musical détente between the two styles. Stripped of “Genie in a Bottle”’s electronic beats, Aguilera’s sex-kitten pose dissipates, and she becomes vulnerable, even desperate. The opening lines now sound less like strip-club small talk and more like a damsel pining from a tower: “I feel like I’ve been locked up tight for a century of lonely nights, waiting for someone to release me.” After another line, she shifts into a wordless “oh, oh” that lays over the Strokes’ chord changes so deliciously you can’t imagine why the song didn’t always do that. After hearing it twice, you can’t remember when it didn’t.
In fact, “A Stroke of Genius” is so good that it eventually led Freelance Hellraiser to do official remixes for Aguilera and others, and he has just completed, at Paul McCartney’s invitation, an entire album of McCartney remixes. “Stroke” also inspired a fourteen-year-old named Daniel Sheldon to start a Web site called boomselection.info. “The Remix” remains England’s main hub for mashups, but the rest of the world is being served through Sheldon’s site and getyourbootlegon.com, a message board started by Grant McSleazy, who recently graduated to doing legitimate remixes of Britney Spears. I visited Temple-Morris at the XFM studios in Central London in October. He is a tall, rangy man who gestures quickly and smiles almost constantly. His basic mode is deep enthusiasm and his favorite word is “love,” which he uses without irony. “We get our wrists slapped by the record companies and publishing companies and whatever,” he said. “But these days there’s much more love, there’s much less paranoia.” Temple-Morris was broadcasting “The Remix” as we talked. He moved briskly behind the console, speaking continuously to the seven or eight people in the room. In mid-conversation, he smiled, nodded, and leaned toward the microphone. The “on air” light went on without warning, and the track playing in the studio cut off abruptly.
“Love it. Want to take it out to dinner. Wanna marry it. There are some tunes, I don’t know what it is, it’s the rolling beat, it’s that incredible bass line, it’s just, there’s something really, really sexy about this record. And so I thought, I’ve got to play you a new really sexy record that I found.” Temple-Morris proceeded to play a record that, under normal circumstances, would have seemed fairly sexy, but, following his salesmanship, sounded like the National Anthem of Sex. This is Temple-Morris’s gift: he was born to the job of loving music and persuading others to love it as much as he does. Also in the room was Mark Vidler, a.k.a. Go Home Productions, one of the more reliable mashup-makers. Once a graphic designer working for a company that made travel pillows, and long before that a guitarist in a rock band called Chicane, Vidler, too, was converted in October of 2001. “I heard ‘A Stroke of Genius’ on the radio and I thought, That’s clever. I could do that,” he said. By April of 2002, Vidler was making his own mashups. His first was called “Slim McShady,” a combination of Eminem and Wings. “I created it on a Saturday, posted it on the Tuesday, and got played on the radio that Friday, on ‘The Remix.’”
Vidler is responsible for several mashups that have the same uncanny brilliance as “Stroke of Genius.” “Girl Wants (to Say Goodbye to) Rock and Roll” brings Christina Aguilera back to sing over the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll.” “Ray of Gob” combines Madonna’s “Ray of Light” and the Sex Pistols’“God Save the Queen,” and both Madonna and the Pistols admired it. Mashup artists like Vidler, Kerr, and Brown have found a way of bringing pop music to a formal richness that it only rarely reaches. See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.
BUSINESS
Interesting articles lately on the rise and fall of Michael Ovitz at Disney. Amazing:
http://newyorker.com/printable/?press/050110pr_press_releases
FILM
The Sea Inside
New York Times Review
As the camera restlessly circles the sky and the ocean, taking in the radiance of northern Spain, ''The Sea Inside,'' the story of a quadriplegic activist fighting for the right to die, struggles to transcend the disease-of-the-week genre to which it belongs. Yet there is no escaping the fact that the true story of Ramón Sampedro, a former ship's mechanic seeking a final exit after three decades of agonizing immobility, is defined by its theme.
To its credit, the movie avoids becoming a formulaic dialogue that pits religious and secular cheerleaders against one another in predigested arguments. Even so, the characters (some of them composites) often feel like schematic formulations intended to balance the story. And the deepest philosophical questions posed by euthanasia are only glancingly addressed, most often in Ramón's bitterly ironic remarks. The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book ''Letters From Hell.'' Sensitively portrayed by the great Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Ramón regards his life in the wake of a crippling accident in his mid-20's as a cruel, cosmic joke. In his imagination, he is still as he was before: a Zorba-like force of nature who once sailed the world. Now the only thing sustaining his spirit is his acute mind, which torments him with dreams of a physical life that is just a memory.
In the film's most remarkable sequence, Ramón, bedridden in his family's house in Galicia overlooking the sea, suddenly stirs, then lurches unsteadily to his feet. For a second, you wonder if his condition all these years has been an elaborate hoax, or if a miracle has occurred. As he steals out of the house and flies to the beach to join his beautiful lawyer Julia (Belén Rueda), the Puccini aria ''Nessun dorma,'' which he is playing on a phonograph, swells over the soundtrack, and they fall into a rapturous embrace. Then Ramón snaps to attention. It's only a fantasy that the filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar has milked for its last drop of heartbreaking impossibility. Because Julia, who is helping Ramón prepare his latest court case challenging the laws against euthanasia, is also seriously ill, he believes that she will be especially sympathetic to his cause. When, later in the film, she falls downstairs and calls out for help to a man who obviously can't come to her rescue, the situation feels like an arm-twisting emotional ploy.
Mr. Amenábar, the gifted 32-year-old director of ''The Others'' and ''Open Your Eyes'', is clearly fixated on the shadowy area between life, death and the spirit world. This time he forsakes science fiction and ghost stories to put his spin on a famous case history. On Jan. 12, 1998, the 55-year-old Sampedro ended his life by drinking cyanide in an elaborately planned ritual that was videotaped and shown on Spanish television. His assisted suicide involved 10 collaborators, in addition to a cameraman. Each participant in the step-by-step process contributed to the ritual without having enough knowledge of the process to be legally indicted for murder. After his death, hundreds of supporters of his cause wrote letters, confessing to having aided and abetted him.
''The Sea Inside'' presents a teasing paradox. Unambiguously pro-euthanasia on one hand, it shows how Ramón, bedridden and unable to move, infused many of those around him with a charged sense of life's possibility. Mr. Bardem, acting above the neck (except in brief flashbacks and fantasies), creates a complicated male character, volatile and witty, with a poet's soul. An excellent makeup job has given the 35-year-old actor the thinning, grayish hair and doughy pallor of a physically inactive man 20 years his senior. We meet the members of Ramón's religious farming family, who slave to keep him alive but refuse to help him in his battle to die with dignity. Surrounding him are his father, Joaquín (Joan Dalmau); his angry brother, José (Celso Bugallo), who vehemently opposes any suicidal assistance; Ramón's attentive sister-in-law, Manuela (Mabel Rivera); and his young nephew, Javi (Tamar Novas), who regards his uncle as a father figure. Frequent visitors include Gené (Clara Seguara), a right-to-die activist, and her boyfriend, Marc (Francesc Garrido).
Two women enter his life. The first, Julia, embraces his cause, becomes his soul mate, and helps him produce a book of poems. The second, Rosa (Lola Dueñas), is a beleaguered single mother with two children, who visits Ramón after seeing him on television and falls in love. When she tries to convince him that his life is worth living, he caustically suggests that she is really seeking some meaning to her own life. Anyone who really loves him, he insists, will help him die. Will she or won't she? In the end, suspenseful narrative devices that worked so effectively in a gothic fantasy like ''The Others'' feel contrived when applied to what's supposed to be a true story of life, death and the living hell from which Ramón finally escapes.
posted by D @ 1:19 PM
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