one of those weekends
posted by D @ 4:41 AM
0 comments
6.30.2006
6.29.2006
MUSIC
maybe it was that stephen malkmus article, i'm not sure, but i have been listening to a lot of rem's fables and reckoning lately... reminds me how i used to try to decipher lyrics as a kids -- like kohoutek:
Who will stand alone?
She carried ribbons, she wore them out
Courage built a bridge, jealous tore it down
At least it's something you've left behind
Like Kohoutek, you were gone
We sat in the garden, we stood on the porch
I won't deny myself, we never talked
She wore bangles, she wore bells
On her toes and she jumped like a fish
Like a flyin' friend, you were gone
Like Kohoutek, can't forget that
Fever built a bridge, reason tore it down
If I am one to follow, who will stand alone?
Maybe you're not the problem
Scissors, paper, stone
If you stand and holler, these prayers will talk
She carried ribbons, she wore them out
Michael built a bridge, Michael tore it down
At least it's something you've left behind
Like Kohoutek, you were gone
Michael built a bridge, Michael tore it down
If I stand and holler, will I stand alone?
maybe it was that stephen malkmus article, i'm not sure, but i have been listening to a lot of rem's fables and reckoning lately... reminds me how i used to try to decipher lyrics as a kids -- like kohoutek:
Who will stand alone?
She carried ribbons, she wore them out
Courage built a bridge, jealous tore it down
At least it's something you've left behind
Like Kohoutek, you were gone
We sat in the garden, we stood on the porch
I won't deny myself, we never talked
She wore bangles, she wore bells
On her toes and she jumped like a fish
Like a flyin' friend, you were gone
Like Kohoutek, can't forget that
Fever built a bridge, reason tore it down
If I am one to follow, who will stand alone?
Maybe you're not the problem
Scissors, paper, stone
If you stand and holler, these prayers will talk
She carried ribbons, she wore them out
Michael built a bridge, Michael tore it down
At least it's something you've left behind
Like Kohoutek, you were gone
Michael built a bridge, Michael tore it down
If I stand and holler, will I stand alone?
posted by D @ 7:56 PM
0 comments
INSPIRATION AND THE MOVIES
What inspires Hollywood? Before we reel off the obvious (money, power, Scarlett Johansson), check out the American Film Institute's list of the 100 "most inspiring" movies. It's quite an exhilarating collection. Only a true pleasure-seeker—a man who sits in dark rooms and waits for inspiration to pour forth from the screen—could bear all this goodness, beginning with It's a Wonderful Life, and surging through the reassurances of Gandhi, Forrest Gump, and Silkwood, before crossing the finish line, as it were, with Chariots of Fire. A cock-eyed optimist having not been located, I will offer some enthusiastically cynical pronouncements.
First, let's clarify what exactly Hollywood means by inspiration. To judge by the AFI list, we can define it three ways: Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Hanks. All three make numerous appearances on the list, beginning with Capra's It's a Wonderful Life in the top spot. Capra, of course, belongs at the head of the inspirational pack. Whatever you may think of his movies (also here are Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), he was monstrously effective, and he was cagey in how he whipped up sentiment. When comparing the feel-good methodology of Wonderful Life to Mr. Smith, for example, you might note that both star Jimmy Stewart as a stammering idealist who discovers, in his own indefatigable way, the inner menschood of humanity. Or you might note, on a much simpler level, that both films include choruses of "Auld Lang Syne."
Having never made it all the way through It's a Wonderful Life, I popped in the DVD and prepared to be inspired. From the opening scenes, in which angels talk to each other in heaven, you can feel Capra's light, unmenacing humor, his glad-you're-here-with-us-tonight style. We learn that Stewart's George Bailey has had each of his dreams—world travel, college, leaving his hometown— deterred by a series of obstacles, one of whom happens to be Donna Reed. All of this is folksy and conventional, and it's not until the movie's final section, in which Bailey goes broke and contemplates suicide, that the movie achieves its cable-ready power. For me, that final section is neither revelatory nor darkly funny enough. But, even so, who can watch the closing image—the town gathered in the Baileys' living room singing Christmas carols; Bailey's faith in himself restored—without being inspired to do, well, something? Capra's lesson is simple: Be a nice guy and hope the rest of humanity catches up with you.
That's textbook movie inspiration—also represented here by The Pride of the Yankees (No. 22), Fiddler on the Roof (No. 82), and other testaments to the indomitable human spirit. But apparently the AFI feels that there's more to movie inspiration than the heartwarming. For example, what's Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (No. 47) doing on the list? Its prescient vision and special effects might inspire awe, I guess. That might be the reason the AFI was inspired by Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (No. 58), a movie in which a man abandons his wife and children to commune with aliens. In fact, the more you peruse the list, the more elastic AFI's definition becomes. Inspiring also means "rousing" (Gunga Din, No. 74), "religious" (The Ten Commandments, No. 79), or simply "well-acted" (The African Queen, No. 48).
Perhaps the most efficient delivery vehicle for inspiration is the sports movie: Hoosiers, Rudy, etc. Leading the pack here, in the No. 4 spot, is Rocky. After another viewing, I decided that I just don't get Rocky. It's appealingly dopey, I guess, and you've got to admire the way Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the script, manages to use "yo" as every part of speech. But as David Thomson once put it, Rocky is a "fairy tale that fakes everything down to its own naivete." The working-class love story, the endless shots of Philadelphia slums—it's cold calculation posing as documentary flourish, similar to when politicians show up for "tours" of auto factories. Rocky feels like it has no ambitions other than to be inspiring and, as such, it feels completely phony.
Which is, I think, a nice way to divvy up the inspirational movies. There are really two kinds: There are movies that happen to be inspiring, and there are movies that have no reason for being other than to inspire. We can guess that David Lean might have had some larger ambitions when he made Lawrence of Arabia (No. 30); we might wonder about Robin Williams when he made Dead Poets Society (No. 52).
As to that second category—the pure inspirers—what exactly do the filmmakers think their movies will inspire a person to do? Read more Whitman? Call your mom and tell her you love her? It's just a hunch, but what I think inspiring movies do more than anything is inspire more inspirational movies. George Bailey begets Norma Rae who begets Forrest Gump who begets—well, whomever Russell Crowe is playing in the next Ron Howard film. It's a vicious cycle of inspiration, spanning decades. And it's enough to make anyone a cynic.
MOVIES I LIKE FROM THE LIST OF 100 MOST INSPIRING FILMS
2 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 1962
10 SAVING PRIVATE RYAN 1998 (inspiring?)
13 HOOSIERS 1986
17 ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST 1975
19 THE RIGHT STUFF 1983
23 THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION 1994
28 FIELD OF DREAMS 1989
29 GANDHI 1982
39 STAR WARS 1977
40 MRS. MINIVER 1942
52 DEAD POET'S SOCIETY 1989
53 SHANE 1953
60 THE KILLING FIELDS 1984 (inspiring?)
80 BABE 1995
84 SERPICO 1973
90 HOTEL RWANDA 2004 (inspiring?)
93 A BEAUTIFUL MIND 2001
98 THE KARATE KID 1984 (that scene where he stands on one leg -- that's inspiring)
99 RAY 2004
100 CHARIOTS OF FIRE 1981
Oscar Picks for Best Actor, 2025. mcsweeneys.net
Jonathan Lipnicki plays Philip Seymour Hoffman in his star turn as Truman Capote in Call Me Philip.
Lil' Bow Wow wows audiences playing Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in The Extra X Is for Sexy.
Kieran Culkin is Joaquin Phoenix in the inimitable role of Johnny Cash in Walk Around the Block.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas comes out of rehab to play Robert Downey Jr. as the silent-film actor Charlie Chaplin in Quiet, Please.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner in his fearless role as Denzel Washington in his fearless role as Malcolm X in Malcolm in the Middle.
What inspires Hollywood? Before we reel off the obvious (money, power, Scarlett Johansson), check out the American Film Institute's list of the 100 "most inspiring" movies. It's quite an exhilarating collection. Only a true pleasure-seeker—a man who sits in dark rooms and waits for inspiration to pour forth from the screen—could bear all this goodness, beginning with It's a Wonderful Life, and surging through the reassurances of Gandhi, Forrest Gump, and Silkwood, before crossing the finish line, as it were, with Chariots of Fire. A cock-eyed optimist having not been located, I will offer some enthusiastically cynical pronouncements.
First, let's clarify what exactly Hollywood means by inspiration. To judge by the AFI list, we can define it three ways: Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Hanks. All three make numerous appearances on the list, beginning with Capra's It's a Wonderful Life in the top spot. Capra, of course, belongs at the head of the inspirational pack. Whatever you may think of his movies (also here are Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), he was monstrously effective, and he was cagey in how he whipped up sentiment. When comparing the feel-good methodology of Wonderful Life to Mr. Smith, for example, you might note that both star Jimmy Stewart as a stammering idealist who discovers, in his own indefatigable way, the inner menschood of humanity. Or you might note, on a much simpler level, that both films include choruses of "Auld Lang Syne."
Having never made it all the way through It's a Wonderful Life, I popped in the DVD and prepared to be inspired. From the opening scenes, in which angels talk to each other in heaven, you can feel Capra's light, unmenacing humor, his glad-you're-here-with-us-tonight style. We learn that Stewart's George Bailey has had each of his dreams—world travel, college, leaving his hometown— deterred by a series of obstacles, one of whom happens to be Donna Reed. All of this is folksy and conventional, and it's not until the movie's final section, in which Bailey goes broke and contemplates suicide, that the movie achieves its cable-ready power. For me, that final section is neither revelatory nor darkly funny enough. But, even so, who can watch the closing image—the town gathered in the Baileys' living room singing Christmas carols; Bailey's faith in himself restored—without being inspired to do, well, something? Capra's lesson is simple: Be a nice guy and hope the rest of humanity catches up with you.
That's textbook movie inspiration—also represented here by The Pride of the Yankees (No. 22), Fiddler on the Roof (No. 82), and other testaments to the indomitable human spirit. But apparently the AFI feels that there's more to movie inspiration than the heartwarming. For example, what's Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (No. 47) doing on the list? Its prescient vision and special effects might inspire awe, I guess. That might be the reason the AFI was inspired by Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (No. 58), a movie in which a man abandons his wife and children to commune with aliens. In fact, the more you peruse the list, the more elastic AFI's definition becomes. Inspiring also means "rousing" (Gunga Din, No. 74), "religious" (The Ten Commandments, No. 79), or simply "well-acted" (The African Queen, No. 48).
Perhaps the most efficient delivery vehicle for inspiration is the sports movie: Hoosiers, Rudy, etc. Leading the pack here, in the No. 4 spot, is Rocky. After another viewing, I decided that I just don't get Rocky. It's appealingly dopey, I guess, and you've got to admire the way Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the script, manages to use "yo" as every part of speech. But as David Thomson once put it, Rocky is a "fairy tale that fakes everything down to its own naivete." The working-class love story, the endless shots of Philadelphia slums—it's cold calculation posing as documentary flourish, similar to when politicians show up for "tours" of auto factories. Rocky feels like it has no ambitions other than to be inspiring and, as such, it feels completely phony.
Which is, I think, a nice way to divvy up the inspirational movies. There are really two kinds: There are movies that happen to be inspiring, and there are movies that have no reason for being other than to inspire. We can guess that David Lean might have had some larger ambitions when he made Lawrence of Arabia (No. 30); we might wonder about Robin Williams when he made Dead Poets Society (No. 52).
As to that second category—the pure inspirers—what exactly do the filmmakers think their movies will inspire a person to do? Read more Whitman? Call your mom and tell her you love her? It's just a hunch, but what I think inspiring movies do more than anything is inspire more inspirational movies. George Bailey begets Norma Rae who begets Forrest Gump who begets—well, whomever Russell Crowe is playing in the next Ron Howard film. It's a vicious cycle of inspiration, spanning decades. And it's enough to make anyone a cynic.
MOVIES I LIKE FROM THE LIST OF 100 MOST INSPIRING FILMS
2 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 1962
10 SAVING PRIVATE RYAN 1998 (inspiring?)
13 HOOSIERS 1986
17 ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST 1975
19 THE RIGHT STUFF 1983
23 THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION 1994
28 FIELD OF DREAMS 1989
29 GANDHI 1982
39 STAR WARS 1977
40 MRS. MINIVER 1942
52 DEAD POET'S SOCIETY 1989
53 SHANE 1953
60 THE KILLING FIELDS 1984 (inspiring?)
80 BABE 1995
84 SERPICO 1973
90 HOTEL RWANDA 2004 (inspiring?)
93 A BEAUTIFUL MIND 2001
98 THE KARATE KID 1984 (that scene where he stands on one leg -- that's inspiring)
99 RAY 2004
100 CHARIOTS OF FIRE 1981
Oscar Picks for Best Actor, 2025. mcsweeneys.net
Jonathan Lipnicki plays Philip Seymour Hoffman in his star turn as Truman Capote in Call Me Philip.
Lil' Bow Wow wows audiences playing Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in The Extra X Is for Sexy.
Kieran Culkin is Joaquin Phoenix in the inimitable role of Johnny Cash in Walk Around the Block.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas comes out of rehab to play Robert Downey Jr. as the silent-film actor Charlie Chaplin in Quiet, Please.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner in his fearless role as Denzel Washington in his fearless role as Malcolm X in Malcolm in the Middle.
posted by D @ 6:02 AM
0 comments
6.28.2006
6.27.2006
RADIO FREE
Jack Is the Decider: How a radio format is a lot like George W Bush.
Slate.com
It's been a year since fans of WCBS-FM, New York's seemingly eternal oldies radio station, tuned in expecting to hear the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers and instead heard a smart-ass congratulating himself for daring to play the Scorpions and the Stray Cats. Infinity Broadcasting, the station's corporate owner, had abruptly switched WCBS to Jack, a new format billed as oldies for 25-to-54-year-olds. The legendary DJ "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, the man who introduced the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, had been replaced by "Jack" himself, a snarky 24-hour canned DJ created by Canadian voice-over king Howard Cogan. In lieu of a live human, most Jack stations employ "Jack," who's fond of lazily intoning the Jack motto: "Playing what we want."
That same day, an Infinity-owned oldies station in Chicago also went Jack; the company had previously flipped stations in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Seattle. In the two years since Jack made its U.S. debut in Denver, the format has also reached Dallas, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and at least 35 other markets, while Jack knockoffs with similar regular-dude names like "Mike" and "Hank"—and even a Spanish-language version, Jose ("Toca lo que quiere")—have sprung up around the country. But the Jacking of WCBS—"The Day the Music Died," as a Times headline put it—remains the real coup. New York's mayor reportedly promised Cousin Brucie he'd never again "listen to that fucking WCBS radio." "Hey, Mayor Bloomberg, I heard you took a shot at us in the Post," Cogan/Jack shot back in a WCBS promo. "What's with all the swearin' like a sailor? Fleet Week is over. It's just music." Yeah, Jack you, old man!
The basic idea of the Jack format, developed by the Canadian media company Rogers Communications, is simple: Any hit song from roughly the last 40 years is a Jack contender. Jack is widely believed to be commercial radio's response to the iPod. All those MP3 players out there set on permanent shuffle are a constant reminder of the mass ecumenical musical consensus that commercial radio routinely ignores. They prove the obvious fact that some people like "Sweet Child O' Mine" and some people like "Sir Duke," so why not play them both on the radio?
The typical playlist of Jack stations is said to be about 1,200 songs—about three times the industry norm—but in practice, Jack isn't that freewheelin'. A recent hour of WCBS programming featured, in rough descending order of awesome to abominable, songs by Prince ("Kiss"), Chic ("Good Times"), New Radicals ("You Get What You Give"), John Cougar ("Hurts So Good"), Stone Temple Pilots ("Plush"), Jet ("Are You Gonna Be My Girl"), Bruce Springsteen ("Pink Cadillac"), the Rembrandts ("Just the Way It Is, Baby"), Wings ("Live and Let Die"), .38 Special ("Rockin' Into the Night"), Journey ("Lights") and Whitesnake ("Here I Go Again")—overall, a representative summation of Jack's programming philosophy. From tenured classic rock to the one-hit wonders that seem to be the enduring legacy of '90s alt-rock, Jack is essentially a rock format, with occasional curveballs of pop, R&B, and dance music. They'll even toss in some hip-hop, provided the song is part of the funky-cold-medina'd canon that gets the dance floor moving at white weddings.
Whatever its faults, Jack is at least an acknowledgment that the radio industry's many rigid formats, however advantageous to advertisers, bear little resemblance to how people actually listen to music. Compared with most commercial stations, segueing from Whitesnake to Wings (a juxtaposition known as a "train wreck" in radio parlance) gives Jack an amateur status on par with college radio. But whatever Jack says about our music culture, it may say even more about our political culture.
The voice of the archetypical radio DJ has always been an amphetamine rush, a Wolfman Jack-type spewing slogans that flatter listeners by appearing to cater to their desires ("All the rock you crave!" "The hits of your life!"). Cogan's "Jack," by contrast, exists in a constant state of whatever—"unaffected by life," is how Cogan describes him. When he delivers lines like "news about Jack is really spreading—oh, wait, those are my cold sores," he sounds like a recent college grad who IMs his friends between songs to tell them about this hilarious temp job he scored reading lame radio copy. And this decidedly "non-Wolfman" Jack also makes no attempt to package the music as anything other than what he feels like playing. "People always ask us what our format is," he often says. "What's a 'format'?"
On the surface, this tactic is a yellowed page from the Gen X anti-marketing handbook, the "you're too smart for our corporate tricks, so we won't even try" approach. The format's name, Jack, springs from the same semi-ironic anti-corporate impulse that led United to spin off a budget airline called Ted. But Jack takes this to a whole new level by not even pretending to pretend. Who cares what "you" want? Jack's slogan is "Playing what we want." Ten years after the 1996 Telecommunications Act destroyed the quaint notion, enshrined by Congress when it created the FCC in 1934, that the airwaves are a public trust, we've arrived at the perfect slogan for the age of media deregulation—"Playing what we want" is a corollary of "Owning what we want." Jack provides a phone number for listeners to call and leave messages to be played on the air—but don't bother making requests, he sometimes says, because he ain't playing them. The first time I heard that, I wondered why anyone would think that a station manned by a 24-hour Jack-bot would play requests. The only possible reason for Jack to state the obvious is that he wants to rub our noses in it.
Why does Jack brag about not listening to listeners? For the same reason that Andrew Card once proudly said that the president thinks of the United States as a nation of 10-year-olds and himself as the father. Jack sells radio the same way Bush sells politics. Jack is the Decider. Just let Jack take care of everything—really, it'll be cool. Moreover, the way Jack successfully conflates what "we" (Infinity Broadcasting) want with what "you" (listeners) want requires the same attitude that has allowed Bush's handlers to package his obstinacy as moral clarity. Jack/George programs/governs from his gut; he doesn't care about requests/polls. You may question Jack's decision to spin Glenn Frey's "The Heat Is On"—considering he can play whatever he wants—but you've got to admire how he does so without apology.
Bush's approval ratings suggest that this strategy has surpassed its sell date in the political arena, and Jack's Arbitron ratings, which have varied across the country, have been consistently disastrous in New York. On the whole, the original listeners of WCBS are as charmed by the man who put a big "doughnut" in their Medicare coverage as they are by the country-club insouciance of the virtual jackass who replaced Cousin Brucie. Not that Jack cares. Sure, historians may one day conclude that nobody but Jack wanted to hear "The Heat Is On" (ever), and that anyone with common sense and sentient ears should have doubted any programming formula that suggested otherwise, but what difference will it make? By then we'll all be dead.
What economics tells us about penalty kicks
World Cup Game Theory
Slate.com
Now the World Cup starts in earnest. The mini-leagues of the group stage are over, and the first knockout match takes place today between Germany and Sweden. Soccer being a famously low-scoring game, such matches often finish in a draw and must be decided by penalty shootouts—a competitive form at which my own team, England, has a particularly harrowing record. Perhaps England's players should study a little more economics.
In soccer, penalty kicks pit the goalkeeper against a lone striker in a mentally demanding contest. Once the penalty-taker strikes the ball, it takes 0.3 seconds to hit the back of the net—unless the goalkeeper can somehow get his body in the way. That is simply not enough time for the keeper to pick out the trajectory of the ball and intercept it. He must guess where the striker will shoot and move just as the ball is being struck. A keeper who does not guess correctly has no chance.
Both striker and keeper must make subtle decisions. Let's say a right-footed striker always shoots to the right. The keeper will always anticipate the shot and the striker would be better off occasionally shooting to the left—because even with a weaker shot it is best to shoot where the goalie isn't. In contrast, if the striker chooses a side by tossing a coin, the keeper will always dive to the striker's left: Since he can't guess where the ball will go, best to go where the shot will be weak if it does come. But then the striker should start favoring his stronger side again.
So, what to do? The answer comes from a wartime collaboration between economist Oskar Morgenstern and mathematician John von Neumann. They produced a "theory of games," which mathematically analyzed situations of strategic interaction—that is, any situation where participants have to take into account the other side's responses. A free throw in basketball is not a strategic interaction, but a soccer penalty is. A "game" is a mathematical description of how all the possible payoffs to the different players vary with their different strategies—so if the goalkeeper jumps to his left while the striker shoots to the keeper's right, the striker will get a high payoff and the goalkeeper will get a low one.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern did not, in fact, analyze penalties, although von Neumann did produce a simple analysis of poker that still influences that game today. But rather than aiming to help footballers or gamblers, von Neumann and Morgenstern believed that game theory could illuminate anything from pay negotiations to waging war. The strategic question could be translated into game theory's mathematical language, solved like any old mathematical problem, and then translated back into the real world to explain what to do.
The trouble is that for these real applications, the wrinkles of reality always obscure whether ordinary people actually follow the strategies that game theory predicts they should. Yet penalty taking is different. The objective is simple, the variables easy to observe, and the results immediate.
Game theory, applied to the problem of penalties, says that if the striker and the keeper are behaving optimally, neither will have a predictable strategy. The striker might favor his stronger side, of course, but that does not mean that there will be a pattern to the bias. The striker might shoot to the right two times out of three, but we cannot then conclude that it will have to be to the left next time.
Game theory also says that each choice of shot should be equally likely to succeed, weighing up the advantage of shooting to the stronger side against the disadvantage of being too predictable. If shots to the right score three-quarters of the time and shots to the left score half the time, you should be shooting to the right more often. But as you do, the goalkeeper will respond: Shots to the right will become less successful and those to the left more successful. It might sound strange that at this point any choice will do, but it is analogous to saying that if you are at the summit of the mountain, no direction is up.
Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economist at Brown University, found that individual strikers and keepers were, in fact, master strategists. Out of 42 top players whom Palacios-Huerta studied, only three departed from game theory's recommendations—in retrospect, they succeeded more often on one side than the other and would have been better altering the balance between their strategies. Professionals such as the French superstar Zinédine Zidane and Italy's goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon are apparently superb economists: Their strategies are absolutely unpredictable, and, as the theory demands, they are equally successful no matter what they do, indicating that they have found the perfect balance among the different options. These geniuses do not just think with their feet.
OTHER
- my parents' 36th wedding anniversary today
- sad for australia, but i suppose that was the right call
- wimbledon off to a slow start
- A human face drawn 27,000 years ago in an oddly Modigliani style has been found in a cave in France...
- fatboy slim put on one of the better concerts i have ever seen in seattle in 1999.
MP3s
gold soundz - pavement
spider song - thom yorke
"For this Eraser outtake, Thom Yorke, in an eerie vocoder castrato, reimagines the venerable children's spider (of "itsy bitsy" fame) as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Nigel Godrich contributes ominous minimal blips and bloops and a skittering alien-cyborg backbeat evocative of c. 1995 cyberprn paranoia made flesh and then made robot-flesh and then run through a Cuisinart by a bigger, eviler robot. Yorke has never been more effectively or affectingly cryptic, as his portentous yarn hopelessly frays: Spider spider/ In my head/ Or are you/ Or are you/ Spider spider/ Water spouts/ Cut it up/ Drag it out/ To the streets and you are dragging it about/ Would that you could/ Would that you would
The glitch-seizure finale (wherein Yorke scats free-associatively until his words dissipate into schizophrenic phonemes) might be the sound of a hypoglycemic fetus being aborted in a nuclear holocaust. Not his strongest effort."
Jack Is the Decider: How a radio format is a lot like George W Bush.
Slate.com
It's been a year since fans of WCBS-FM, New York's seemingly eternal oldies radio station, tuned in expecting to hear the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers and instead heard a smart-ass congratulating himself for daring to play the Scorpions and the Stray Cats. Infinity Broadcasting, the station's corporate owner, had abruptly switched WCBS to Jack, a new format billed as oldies for 25-to-54-year-olds. The legendary DJ "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, the man who introduced the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, had been replaced by "Jack" himself, a snarky 24-hour canned DJ created by Canadian voice-over king Howard Cogan. In lieu of a live human, most Jack stations employ "Jack," who's fond of lazily intoning the Jack motto: "Playing what we want."
That same day, an Infinity-owned oldies station in Chicago also went Jack; the company had previously flipped stations in Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Seattle. In the two years since Jack made its U.S. debut in Denver, the format has also reached Dallas, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and at least 35 other markets, while Jack knockoffs with similar regular-dude names like "Mike" and "Hank"—and even a Spanish-language version, Jose ("Toca lo que quiere")—have sprung up around the country. But the Jacking of WCBS—"The Day the Music Died," as a Times headline put it—remains the real coup. New York's mayor reportedly promised Cousin Brucie he'd never again "listen to that fucking WCBS radio." "Hey, Mayor Bloomberg, I heard you took a shot at us in the Post," Cogan/Jack shot back in a WCBS promo. "What's with all the swearin' like a sailor? Fleet Week is over. It's just music." Yeah, Jack you, old man!
The basic idea of the Jack format, developed by the Canadian media company Rogers Communications, is simple: Any hit song from roughly the last 40 years is a Jack contender. Jack is widely believed to be commercial radio's response to the iPod. All those MP3 players out there set on permanent shuffle are a constant reminder of the mass ecumenical musical consensus that commercial radio routinely ignores. They prove the obvious fact that some people like "Sweet Child O' Mine" and some people like "Sir Duke," so why not play them both on the radio?
The typical playlist of Jack stations is said to be about 1,200 songs—about three times the industry norm—but in practice, Jack isn't that freewheelin'. A recent hour of WCBS programming featured, in rough descending order of awesome to abominable, songs by Prince ("Kiss"), Chic ("Good Times"), New Radicals ("You Get What You Give"), John Cougar ("Hurts So Good"), Stone Temple Pilots ("Plush"), Jet ("Are You Gonna Be My Girl"), Bruce Springsteen ("Pink Cadillac"), the Rembrandts ("Just the Way It Is, Baby"), Wings ("Live and Let Die"), .38 Special ("Rockin' Into the Night"), Journey ("Lights") and Whitesnake ("Here I Go Again")—overall, a representative summation of Jack's programming philosophy. From tenured classic rock to the one-hit wonders that seem to be the enduring legacy of '90s alt-rock, Jack is essentially a rock format, with occasional curveballs of pop, R&B, and dance music. They'll even toss in some hip-hop, provided the song is part of the funky-cold-medina'd canon that gets the dance floor moving at white weddings.
Whatever its faults, Jack is at least an acknowledgment that the radio industry's many rigid formats, however advantageous to advertisers, bear little resemblance to how people actually listen to music. Compared with most commercial stations, segueing from Whitesnake to Wings (a juxtaposition known as a "train wreck" in radio parlance) gives Jack an amateur status on par with college radio. But whatever Jack says about our music culture, it may say even more about our political culture.
The voice of the archetypical radio DJ has always been an amphetamine rush, a Wolfman Jack-type spewing slogans that flatter listeners by appearing to cater to their desires ("All the rock you crave!" "The hits of your life!"). Cogan's "Jack," by contrast, exists in a constant state of whatever—"unaffected by life," is how Cogan describes him. When he delivers lines like "news about Jack is really spreading—oh, wait, those are my cold sores," he sounds like a recent college grad who IMs his friends between songs to tell them about this hilarious temp job he scored reading lame radio copy. And this decidedly "non-Wolfman" Jack also makes no attempt to package the music as anything other than what he feels like playing. "People always ask us what our format is," he often says. "What's a 'format'?"
On the surface, this tactic is a yellowed page from the Gen X anti-marketing handbook, the "you're too smart for our corporate tricks, so we won't even try" approach. The format's name, Jack, springs from the same semi-ironic anti-corporate impulse that led United to spin off a budget airline called Ted. But Jack takes this to a whole new level by not even pretending to pretend. Who cares what "you" want? Jack's slogan is "Playing what we want." Ten years after the 1996 Telecommunications Act destroyed the quaint notion, enshrined by Congress when it created the FCC in 1934, that the airwaves are a public trust, we've arrived at the perfect slogan for the age of media deregulation—"Playing what we want" is a corollary of "Owning what we want." Jack provides a phone number for listeners to call and leave messages to be played on the air—but don't bother making requests, he sometimes says, because he ain't playing them. The first time I heard that, I wondered why anyone would think that a station manned by a 24-hour Jack-bot would play requests. The only possible reason for Jack to state the obvious is that he wants to rub our noses in it.
Why does Jack brag about not listening to listeners? For the same reason that Andrew Card once proudly said that the president thinks of the United States as a nation of 10-year-olds and himself as the father. Jack sells radio the same way Bush sells politics. Jack is the Decider. Just let Jack take care of everything—really, it'll be cool. Moreover, the way Jack successfully conflates what "we" (Infinity Broadcasting) want with what "you" (listeners) want requires the same attitude that has allowed Bush's handlers to package his obstinacy as moral clarity. Jack/George programs/governs from his gut; he doesn't care about requests/polls. You may question Jack's decision to spin Glenn Frey's "The Heat Is On"—considering he can play whatever he wants—but you've got to admire how he does so without apology.
Bush's approval ratings suggest that this strategy has surpassed its sell date in the political arena, and Jack's Arbitron ratings, which have varied across the country, have been consistently disastrous in New York. On the whole, the original listeners of WCBS are as charmed by the man who put a big "doughnut" in their Medicare coverage as they are by the country-club insouciance of the virtual jackass who replaced Cousin Brucie. Not that Jack cares. Sure, historians may one day conclude that nobody but Jack wanted to hear "The Heat Is On" (ever), and that anyone with common sense and sentient ears should have doubted any programming formula that suggested otherwise, but what difference will it make? By then we'll all be dead.
What economics tells us about penalty kicks
World Cup Game Theory
Slate.com
Now the World Cup starts in earnest. The mini-leagues of the group stage are over, and the first knockout match takes place today between Germany and Sweden. Soccer being a famously low-scoring game, such matches often finish in a draw and must be decided by penalty shootouts—a competitive form at which my own team, England, has a particularly harrowing record. Perhaps England's players should study a little more economics.
In soccer, penalty kicks pit the goalkeeper against a lone striker in a mentally demanding contest. Once the penalty-taker strikes the ball, it takes 0.3 seconds to hit the back of the net—unless the goalkeeper can somehow get his body in the way. That is simply not enough time for the keeper to pick out the trajectory of the ball and intercept it. He must guess where the striker will shoot and move just as the ball is being struck. A keeper who does not guess correctly has no chance.
Both striker and keeper must make subtle decisions. Let's say a right-footed striker always shoots to the right. The keeper will always anticipate the shot and the striker would be better off occasionally shooting to the left—because even with a weaker shot it is best to shoot where the goalie isn't. In contrast, if the striker chooses a side by tossing a coin, the keeper will always dive to the striker's left: Since he can't guess where the ball will go, best to go where the shot will be weak if it does come. But then the striker should start favoring his stronger side again.
So, what to do? The answer comes from a wartime collaboration between economist Oskar Morgenstern and mathematician John von Neumann. They produced a "theory of games," which mathematically analyzed situations of strategic interaction—that is, any situation where participants have to take into account the other side's responses. A free throw in basketball is not a strategic interaction, but a soccer penalty is. A "game" is a mathematical description of how all the possible payoffs to the different players vary with their different strategies—so if the goalkeeper jumps to his left while the striker shoots to the keeper's right, the striker will get a high payoff and the goalkeeper will get a low one.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern did not, in fact, analyze penalties, although von Neumann did produce a simple analysis of poker that still influences that game today. But rather than aiming to help footballers or gamblers, von Neumann and Morgenstern believed that game theory could illuminate anything from pay negotiations to waging war. The strategic question could be translated into game theory's mathematical language, solved like any old mathematical problem, and then translated back into the real world to explain what to do.
The trouble is that for these real applications, the wrinkles of reality always obscure whether ordinary people actually follow the strategies that game theory predicts they should. Yet penalty taking is different. The objective is simple, the variables easy to observe, and the results immediate.
Game theory, applied to the problem of penalties, says that if the striker and the keeper are behaving optimally, neither will have a predictable strategy. The striker might favor his stronger side, of course, but that does not mean that there will be a pattern to the bias. The striker might shoot to the right two times out of three, but we cannot then conclude that it will have to be to the left next time.
Game theory also says that each choice of shot should be equally likely to succeed, weighing up the advantage of shooting to the stronger side against the disadvantage of being too predictable. If shots to the right score three-quarters of the time and shots to the left score half the time, you should be shooting to the right more often. But as you do, the goalkeeper will respond: Shots to the right will become less successful and those to the left more successful. It might sound strange that at this point any choice will do, but it is analogous to saying that if you are at the summit of the mountain, no direction is up.
Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economist at Brown University, found that individual strikers and keepers were, in fact, master strategists. Out of 42 top players whom Palacios-Huerta studied, only three departed from game theory's recommendations—in retrospect, they succeeded more often on one side than the other and would have been better altering the balance between their strategies. Professionals such as the French superstar Zinédine Zidane and Italy's goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon are apparently superb economists: Their strategies are absolutely unpredictable, and, as the theory demands, they are equally successful no matter what they do, indicating that they have found the perfect balance among the different options. These geniuses do not just think with their feet.
OTHER
- my parents' 36th wedding anniversary today
- sad for australia, but i suppose that was the right call
- wimbledon off to a slow start
- A human face drawn 27,000 years ago in an oddly Modigliani style has been found in a cave in France...
- fatboy slim put on one of the better concerts i have ever seen in seattle in 1999.
MP3s
gold soundz - pavement
spider song - thom yorke
"For this Eraser outtake, Thom Yorke, in an eerie vocoder castrato, reimagines the venerable children's spider (of "itsy bitsy" fame) as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Nigel Godrich contributes ominous minimal blips and bloops and a skittering alien-cyborg backbeat evocative of c. 1995 cyberprn paranoia made flesh and then made robot-flesh and then run through a Cuisinart by a bigger, eviler robot. Yorke has never been more effectively or affectingly cryptic, as his portentous yarn hopelessly frays: Spider spider/ In my head/ Or are you/ Or are you/ Spider spider/ Water spouts/ Cut it up/ Drag it out/ To the streets and you are dragging it about/ Would that you could/ Would that you would
The glitch-seizure finale (wherein Yorke scats free-associatively until his words dissipate into schizophrenic phonemes) might be the sound of a hypoglycemic fetus being aborted in a nuclear holocaust. Not his strongest effort."
posted by D @ 5:55 AM
0 comments
6.26.2006
MOVIES
Superman Returns
A passing demographer, faced with a crowd lining up to watch “Superman Returns,” will find much cause for reflection. There, in heady profusion, will be the flower of American youth, all of them waiting—with that blend of sullenness and agitation peculiar to teen-age boys—to see whether the special effects will meet their fastidious standards. With them will be parents of both sexes, affecting tedium but actually in the throes of a hidden thrill, hoping for a nostalgic return to the Christmas of 1978, when they necked in the back row to the surge of the John Williams score and the voice of Christopher Reeve. Dotted here and there will be Supermaniacs—some of them sporting red underpants, others in panty hose of royal blue, none of them happily married. Last, and quite alone, will be a weary cinéaste, submitting himself to two and a half hours of blockbuster because, and only because, it represents a final chance to witness the union of Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando.
They do not physically meet onscreen, but, for fans of “On the Waterfront,” simply to see them together under the auspices of a single movie will be enough. Saint, her beauty still rendered mysterious by that faint air of distraction, plays the mother who adopted Superman when he first fell to earth, and to whom he now pays a return plummet, travelling back to the family homestead by fireball. Brando resumes the role of Jor-El, which sounds to me like a failed airline but is in fact the Kryptonish name of our hero’s father. What this entails is a posthumous holographic rerun of Brando’s meringue-haired turn from the original movie; as Jor-El drones instructions to his son (“You will see my life through your eyes”), moviegoers will be asking why, if the director, Bryan Singer, was hellbent on resurrecting a Brando performance, he had to pick this one. Why not bring back Terry Malloy, from “On the Waterfront,” mumbling reassurance from a bloodied mouth? Who wouldn’t take advice from Stanley Kowalski? Or Colonel Kurtz? One scene with him and even the Man of Steel would snap.
Superman, we learn, has been AWOL for five years. He claims to have been visiting his native planet, now a ruinous wasteland. Having dropped in on Mother, he travels to Metropolis in the guise of Clark Kent and retrieves his old job on the Daily Planet. Its editor is Perry White (Frank Langella), whose nephew Richard (James Marsden) combines the tasks of assistant editor and swain to Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). Lois herself, far from lying idle during Superman’s absence, has by now amassed (a) a son and (b) a Pulitzer Prize, for her essay titled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Hell hath no fury like an earthling scorned.
Also back in the saddle is Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), who has been refining his vocation as an anti-Robin Hood: stealing from the rich, giving to himself, and not even considering the poor. With his band of merry thugs, he grabs magic crystals from Superman’s arctic hideout, which is wondrously framed as a kind of frozen cathedral. What these are I never really gathered, but their potency is plain: just add water, and bang goes the power supply of the Eastern United States. Add more crystals to more water, and up from the seabed rises a fresh landmass, on which—if you are Luthor—you plan to build a whole new continent of your own devising. Picture my disappointment as I realized that, for all the pizzazz of “Superman Returns,” its global weapon of choice would not be terrorism, or nuclear piracy, or dirty bombs. It would be real estate. What does Warner Bros. have in mind for the next installment? Superman overhauls corporate pension plans? Luthor screws Medicare?
Spacey certainly enjoys himself in the part, there being nobody else for him to enjoy, and he sprinkles a few grace notes over the basic maleficence. “Krrrrrryptonite,” he trills, in celebration of Superman’s least favorite substance. Our villain’s dress sense, too, like that of Parker Posey in the role of his disposable sidekick, has a lustre and a fussy correctness that are tailored to within a quarter inch of camp. Spacey must be one of the few men in the business who can slip into chocolate corduroy and get away with it. I saw him onstage last year, when he played Dexter in a revival of “The Philadelphia Story,” and the arch tone of his delivery gave some of his speeches the swing and kick of a song; all that suavity came to naught, however, when you noticed the wrinkles in his tuxedo—not his fault, just a cinched theatrical budget. Here, in a film that cost more than two hundred million dollars, the clothing is without flaw (save for a polar-white overcoat, which Dick Tracy should have refused to lend out), but the character beneath is in tatters. Spacey dug around in Dexter, unveiling the wistful, Gatsbyish diffidence in the playboy; with Luthor, however, there is nothing to reveal. The actor may toy with his lines, but you feel a glazing of ennui as he realizes that the whole movie is stuck in toytown, where depth is against the law.
Bryan Singer, who last worked with Spacey on “The Usual Suspects,” has since moved on, if not up, to two helpings of “X-Men,” and now “Superman Returns.” It is clearly the fate of a smart young director—Hollywood would call it a reward—to be garlanded with the opportunity to stop making films about human beings and start attending to the preternatural. Every time another Marvel or DC product is dusted off, lavished with computer programs, and pumped up into a motion-picture event, we hear the same inflated claims: this superhero is different; we will uncover this man’s art and that man’s scope; we will show you what makes them tick, or levitate, or spin. Even Ang Lee fell prey, rummaging around for the soul of the Incredible Hulk, until it became clear that the poor old minty monster didn’t have one. The fact is that the only first-rate work to have fed off comic books was done by Roy Lichtenstein forty years ago, and the only comic-book movies to show any lasting swagger, like “Spider-Man” and its sequel, have hewed to the Lichtenstein line and mimicked the briskness and fluorescence of the painted surface. I have listened to Batman moan about how he will never fit in, and to countless mutants voice the same complaint, and, frankly, I don’t give a damn. The ethical duties of Superman leave me cold; I just want to watch him catch a falling car.
The latest actor to don the cape is Brandon Routh, who—whether on his own initiative or not—offers not so much his personal interpretation of Superman as his best impersonation of Christopher Reeve playing Superman. This feels constrained, to say the least, allowing us limited access to Routh’s potential charm, and it thickens our suspicion that we have seen the same tale told more cheaply before, although what, exactly, was so perfect about the 1978 project that it should warrant emulation? The new Lois Lane, Kate Bosworth, is not a patch on Margot Kidder, or, for that matter, on Teri Hatcher, in the TV series; much of Singer’s casting errs toward the drippy and the dull, and your heart tends to sink, between the rampant set pieces, as the movie pauses listlessly for thought. “You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior,” our hero says, “but every day I hear people crying out for one.” His principal solution is to thwart individual robberies, which is unlikely to put either the police or the international aid agencies out of business. As far as the film is concerned, however, such public service confirms him in the Christlike status among mortals that was predicted by his dad. “They only lack the light to show the way,” Brando declares, adding, “I have sent them you, my only son.”
Is that blasphemy? Will Christians object to the hero’s preferred floating technique, which is to descend quietly through space in the Crucifixion pose? I imagine not, if only because “Superman Returns” tries so hard to qualify as family viewing, which is another way of saying that its vague spiritual leanings resemble those of a sophisticated child. “The Usual Suspects” was a game by comparison, and yet the Spacey figure in that film, Keyser Soze, was an infinitely tougher conceit than the Man of Steel; he was a man with the ambitions of a superman, and the extremity of that delusion made him at once venomous, elusive to the touch, and richly entertaining. After that, any actual superman was bound to be a bore. “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and superman—a rope over an abyss.” That is Nietzsche, coiner of the Übermensch, and in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” he scorns what he calls “extraterrestrial hopes” in favor of those, rooted on earth, who struggle to overcome the weakness of their own humanity. That is a proper, if perilous, subject for grownup cinema, and I for one have grown tired of supermen, and superwomen, who start with such a flagrant advantage over the rest of us. Mind you, if Superman is such a paragon, how come he wants to save a species so universally dumb that not a single member of it recognizes him when he puts on a pair of glasses? - The New Yorker
Superman Returns
A passing demographer, faced with a crowd lining up to watch “Superman Returns,” will find much cause for reflection. There, in heady profusion, will be the flower of American youth, all of them waiting—with that blend of sullenness and agitation peculiar to teen-age boys—to see whether the special effects will meet their fastidious standards. With them will be parents of both sexes, affecting tedium but actually in the throes of a hidden thrill, hoping for a nostalgic return to the Christmas of 1978, when they necked in the back row to the surge of the John Williams score and the voice of Christopher Reeve. Dotted here and there will be Supermaniacs—some of them sporting red underpants, others in panty hose of royal blue, none of them happily married. Last, and quite alone, will be a weary cinéaste, submitting himself to two and a half hours of blockbuster because, and only because, it represents a final chance to witness the union of Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando.
They do not physically meet onscreen, but, for fans of “On the Waterfront,” simply to see them together under the auspices of a single movie will be enough. Saint, her beauty still rendered mysterious by that faint air of distraction, plays the mother who adopted Superman when he first fell to earth, and to whom he now pays a return plummet, travelling back to the family homestead by fireball. Brando resumes the role of Jor-El, which sounds to me like a failed airline but is in fact the Kryptonish name of our hero’s father. What this entails is a posthumous holographic rerun of Brando’s meringue-haired turn from the original movie; as Jor-El drones instructions to his son (“You will see my life through your eyes”), moviegoers will be asking why, if the director, Bryan Singer, was hellbent on resurrecting a Brando performance, he had to pick this one. Why not bring back Terry Malloy, from “On the Waterfront,” mumbling reassurance from a bloodied mouth? Who wouldn’t take advice from Stanley Kowalski? Or Colonel Kurtz? One scene with him and even the Man of Steel would snap.
Superman, we learn, has been AWOL for five years. He claims to have been visiting his native planet, now a ruinous wasteland. Having dropped in on Mother, he travels to Metropolis in the guise of Clark Kent and retrieves his old job on the Daily Planet. Its editor is Perry White (Frank Langella), whose nephew Richard (James Marsden) combines the tasks of assistant editor and swain to Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). Lois herself, far from lying idle during Superman’s absence, has by now amassed (a) a son and (b) a Pulitzer Prize, for her essay titled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Hell hath no fury like an earthling scorned.
Also back in the saddle is Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), who has been refining his vocation as an anti-Robin Hood: stealing from the rich, giving to himself, and not even considering the poor. With his band of merry thugs, he grabs magic crystals from Superman’s arctic hideout, which is wondrously framed as a kind of frozen cathedral. What these are I never really gathered, but their potency is plain: just add water, and bang goes the power supply of the Eastern United States. Add more crystals to more water, and up from the seabed rises a fresh landmass, on which—if you are Luthor—you plan to build a whole new continent of your own devising. Picture my disappointment as I realized that, for all the pizzazz of “Superman Returns,” its global weapon of choice would not be terrorism, or nuclear piracy, or dirty bombs. It would be real estate. What does Warner Bros. have in mind for the next installment? Superman overhauls corporate pension plans? Luthor screws Medicare?
Spacey certainly enjoys himself in the part, there being nobody else for him to enjoy, and he sprinkles a few grace notes over the basic maleficence. “Krrrrrryptonite,” he trills, in celebration of Superman’s least favorite substance. Our villain’s dress sense, too, like that of Parker Posey in the role of his disposable sidekick, has a lustre and a fussy correctness that are tailored to within a quarter inch of camp. Spacey must be one of the few men in the business who can slip into chocolate corduroy and get away with it. I saw him onstage last year, when he played Dexter in a revival of “The Philadelphia Story,” and the arch tone of his delivery gave some of his speeches the swing and kick of a song; all that suavity came to naught, however, when you noticed the wrinkles in his tuxedo—not his fault, just a cinched theatrical budget. Here, in a film that cost more than two hundred million dollars, the clothing is without flaw (save for a polar-white overcoat, which Dick Tracy should have refused to lend out), but the character beneath is in tatters. Spacey dug around in Dexter, unveiling the wistful, Gatsbyish diffidence in the playboy; with Luthor, however, there is nothing to reveal. The actor may toy with his lines, but you feel a glazing of ennui as he realizes that the whole movie is stuck in toytown, where depth is against the law.
Bryan Singer, who last worked with Spacey on “The Usual Suspects,” has since moved on, if not up, to two helpings of “X-Men,” and now “Superman Returns.” It is clearly the fate of a smart young director—Hollywood would call it a reward—to be garlanded with the opportunity to stop making films about human beings and start attending to the preternatural. Every time another Marvel or DC product is dusted off, lavished with computer programs, and pumped up into a motion-picture event, we hear the same inflated claims: this superhero is different; we will uncover this man’s art and that man’s scope; we will show you what makes them tick, or levitate, or spin. Even Ang Lee fell prey, rummaging around for the soul of the Incredible Hulk, until it became clear that the poor old minty monster didn’t have one. The fact is that the only first-rate work to have fed off comic books was done by Roy Lichtenstein forty years ago, and the only comic-book movies to show any lasting swagger, like “Spider-Man” and its sequel, have hewed to the Lichtenstein line and mimicked the briskness and fluorescence of the painted surface. I have listened to Batman moan about how he will never fit in, and to countless mutants voice the same complaint, and, frankly, I don’t give a damn. The ethical duties of Superman leave me cold; I just want to watch him catch a falling car.
The latest actor to don the cape is Brandon Routh, who—whether on his own initiative or not—offers not so much his personal interpretation of Superman as his best impersonation of Christopher Reeve playing Superman. This feels constrained, to say the least, allowing us limited access to Routh’s potential charm, and it thickens our suspicion that we have seen the same tale told more cheaply before, although what, exactly, was so perfect about the 1978 project that it should warrant emulation? The new Lois Lane, Kate Bosworth, is not a patch on Margot Kidder, or, for that matter, on Teri Hatcher, in the TV series; much of Singer’s casting errs toward the drippy and the dull, and your heart tends to sink, between the rampant set pieces, as the movie pauses listlessly for thought. “You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior,” our hero says, “but every day I hear people crying out for one.” His principal solution is to thwart individual robberies, which is unlikely to put either the police or the international aid agencies out of business. As far as the film is concerned, however, such public service confirms him in the Christlike status among mortals that was predicted by his dad. “They only lack the light to show the way,” Brando declares, adding, “I have sent them you, my only son.”
Is that blasphemy? Will Christians object to the hero’s preferred floating technique, which is to descend quietly through space in the Crucifixion pose? I imagine not, if only because “Superman Returns” tries so hard to qualify as family viewing, which is another way of saying that its vague spiritual leanings resemble those of a sophisticated child. “The Usual Suspects” was a game by comparison, and yet the Spacey figure in that film, Keyser Soze, was an infinitely tougher conceit than the Man of Steel; he was a man with the ambitions of a superman, and the extremity of that delusion made him at once venomous, elusive to the touch, and richly entertaining. After that, any actual superman was bound to be a bore. “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and superman—a rope over an abyss.” That is Nietzsche, coiner of the Übermensch, and in “Thus Spake Zarathustra” he scorns what he calls “extraterrestrial hopes” in favor of those, rooted on earth, who struggle to overcome the weakness of their own humanity. That is a proper, if perilous, subject for grownup cinema, and I for one have grown tired of supermen, and superwomen, who start with such a flagrant advantage over the rest of us. Mind you, if Superman is such a paragon, how come he wants to save a species so universally dumb that not a single member of it recognizes him when he puts on a pair of glasses? - The New Yorker
posted by D @ 7:35 AM
0 comments
6.23.2006
CULTURE
I'm not usually much of a play-goer, but I strongly recommend everyone see The Real Thing this summer in Toronto. One of the best plays ever, it's supposed to be a great rendering of it. I hope to catch it in the next few weeks.
THE REAL THING Featuring Megan Follows, Albert Schultz. Written by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Diana Leblanc. Presented by Soulpepper Theatre Company and the National Arts Centre. To July 29. Mon-Sat 8pm; Sat 2pm. $29-$54; $25 students; $18 rush; $5 youth rush (21 and under). Young Centre, 55 Mill, bldg 49. 416-866-8666. www.soulpepper.ca.
Soulpepper's current production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing is superb in every way. The acting, direction and design all combine to present this highly intellectual comedy from 1982 with precision and feeling. The title initially refers to love since a man and woman break up their respective marriages because they think they have found the "real thing" with each other. Yet, this is only the starting point for Stoppard's investigation using various plays-within-plays of our perception of reality in general, whether in the theatre, politics or personal emotion. What interests Stoppard is how thoroughly fiction influences our perception of reality.
Albert Schultz plays Henry, a successful West End playwright who uses his Noel Cowardlike wit as a defence against expressing emotion. He breaks up with his equally witty actress wife Charlotte (the excellent Kristina Nicoll) to take up with another actress, Annie (Megan Follows). The great virtue of Diana Leblanc's direction is how clearly she emphasizes Henry's moral education as the throughline in a play that can seem like a series of clever set pieces. Schultz delineates Henry's change with great subtlety as he gradually comes to accept that life is messier than his absolutist views have allowed. Follows is outstanding in expressing what is said and unsaid in "real" love that accommodates both fallibility and forgiveness.
BABIES & PUPPIES: CAN THEY CO-EXIST?
Reading the Humane Society of the United States' suggestions for how to prepare your pet for the arrival of your baby made me realize how negligent my husband and I had been before our daughter's arrival 10 years ago. In the months before her birth, I was supposed to be anointing myself with eau de baby wipe to get our two cats accustomed to new scents. I should have held, bathed, and diapered a swaddled doll in their presence. Thank goodness I didn't have a dog then, or I'd have to take it for walks accompanied by the doll in the stroller. (The HSUS does not offer counsel for what to do if the neighbors start worrying you're suffering from prepartum psychosis.) Finally, I should have familiarized my pets with baby sounds by playing a recording of an infant crying. I found one here: www.preparingfido.com. The sample is so enjoyable it made me yearn for "Teen Party Next Door" and "Broken Car Alarm."
Thankfully, our lack of preparation didn't prove too detrimental. Our cats initially boycotted the new arrival, but as the months went by they became remarkably patient playmates, letting our daughter conclude their tails were hairy, interactive baby toys. (I hovered to make sure things didn't get too interactive.) Indeed, children and pets have been happily mixing it up for millenniums, and now there's evidence that such interactions are good for children's health. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that children in multiple-pet households had about half the risk of developing allergies as children without pets—all those dog and cat licks might provide healthy stimulation to the child's immune system. But given that today's parents put locking devices on their toilets to protect their offspring, what are the sensible precautions one should take before baby and pet cohabitate?
The unbreakable rule of young children and pets is: Never leave them unsupervised. If things go wrong, particularly with a dog, tragedy can ensue. Cats don't typically present a biting hazard, but they often like to jump into a baby's crib or playpen to cuddle. It's unlikely, but a cat could suffocate an infant who's unable to push it away.
Rarely, a dog will mistake an infant for prey. Dr. Laurie Bergman, of the University of California Veterinary Medical Center in San Diego, helped clients turn around this potential disaster when their Jack Russell terrier was stalking their week-old baby. The couple was so terrified, they left the dog alone in the house and moved in with other family members. Dr. Bergman instructed the family to move back, keeping their dog outside for most of the day, so that it could get used to seeing the baby through the window. The dog was also allowed to go for walks on a leash with the baby in a stroller. By the time the son was a year old, the dog had accepted him as human, and they became happy playmates.
Owners must also convince the pet that the baby's arrival is not the worst thing to happen since the invention of spaying and neutering. Frequently owners make the mistake of only paying attention to the pet once the baby is down for a nap. The obvious conclusion in the pet's mind is, "Baby gone, life good." Dr. Marsha Reich, a Maryland veterinary behaviorist, says, "Try to find something that motivates the dog to couple with the baby. Throw the dog treats when you're nursing."
If pets are shunted aside, some may seek other ways to solicit attention. Shortly after one friend's first child was born, the cat, which had been ignored since the baby arrived, started limping dramatically on her hind leg. Many visits to the veterinarian later, the doctor remained unable to find a cause. Then one day the couple noticed that the cat only limped when it came upon the baby. Call it Munchausen's syndrome by feline.
Animal behaviorists warn that the most difficult moments in pet-child relations occur when the child becomes mobile. The animal is now confronted with toddling terror, and a once docile dog may growl and snap. But what looks like aggression is often fear: The dog finds itself cornered by a squealing, poking, pulling human. And the child, too young to realize a raised lip and growl means, "Please step away from the dog," continues to lunge.
Death by dog attack is extremely rare—about a dozen fatalities annually in the United States. But dog bites are common—around 4.7 million a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the 800,000 who need medical assistance, half are children, and the most frequent victims are between ages 5 and 9. Almost all the bites were inflicted by a known assailant—the family dog or that of a neighbor. (Those numbers become less alarming when you consider there are almost 70 million pet dogs in this country.) Animal behaviorists—who often are brought in to deal with the aftermath of a dog bite—say that attack statistics don't convey the dog's side of the story.
This is what happened to Sparky, a Dalmatian that bit a visiting 4-year-old boy. The boy had spent the day chasing the dog, climbing on him, and grabbing food from his bowl. Later, when Sparky was asleep, the boy approached him. The boy's mother heard Sparky growl just before her son was bitten on the face. The distraught owner called Dr. Bergman, wondering if she should euthanize her pet. Dr. Bergman instructed the owner to approach her dog, who was cowering behind the toilet. On Sparky's face were several small, crescent-shaped red marks. The boy had dug his fingernails in Sparky's face hard enough to draw blood. "It was a provoked bite," Dr. Bergman explained.
Then there's the other extreme in pet-child relations. Occasionally a pet will bond so completely with children that witnessing the daily upsets of child-rearing can become unbearable. Take the dog that Dr. Lynne Seibert, a veterinary behaviorist in Washington, was asked to help: The dog had become phobic about counting. Some detective work revealed that when the owner was about to discipline her toddler, she would give the child a warning of, "One, two, three." When the dog heard that, she knew her "sibling" was about to be punished. Seibert helped the owner desensitize her dog by sitting quietly with her, calmly counting.
Of course, the ultimate in pet-child devotion was portrayed in Peter Pan. Just think of the savings parents would reap if everyone could find a child-care provider like the Darlings': a "prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana. … She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse." - Slate.
McSWEENEY'S OPEN LETTERS
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BIRDS NESTING IN MY AIR CONDITIONER.
- - - -
Dear Birds,
While I am pleased that you have decided the air conditioner in my bedroom is the perfect place for you to reside, I feel obligated to voice a few concerns on behalf of the other inhabitants of our apartment. Please do not take this letter as a sign of ill will; I'm sure that if we can resolve these matters, peaceful cohabitation will be possible for many years to come.
Your habit of heralding each new day in song, while pleasant enough on weekdays, unfortunately becomes problematic on Saturdays and Sundays. We enjoy making the most of our weekends, but we don't necessarily feel we need to be roused at 5:30 a.m. to do so. In addition, your melodic chirping arouses the curiosity of our cats. You may have noticed the sustained scratching noises coming, from time to time, from our side of the air conditioner. In the future, we would greatly appreciate your taking your songs elsewhere during these periods. The insulation around the air conditioner is beginning to deteriorate, and we are running out of duct tape.
Our cats have also noted your extended family's frequent visits. Could you please restrict their flights directly outside our windows? Our cats have expressed a strong desire to join them in their cavorting, and I imagine that the cats, should they succeed in breaking through the window screen, would be surprised to learn that we live on the seventh floor. Also, your family's habit of garnishing our windows with excrement, while gracious, is beginning to lose its charm.
Speaking of family, let me be the first to congratulate you on your new arrivals! One small qualm: Though I have no doubt you are attentive and loving parents, I must ask that you feed your young with more frequency, as their cries for nourishment lack the variety and rich timbre of your own vocalizations.
My final concern has to do with the onset of summer. Since your fierce (though commendable) territoriality has precluded a thorough appraisal of your home, we are hesitant to turn on the air conditioner, fearing possible property damage and/or loss of life. The weather so far has been mild, but it is only a matter of time before high temperatures place us in a rather awkward position. I understand that birds generally head south during winter; however, in light of our circumstances, it would be optimal for you to take your vacation this summer instead. I'm afraid there is very little room for negotiation on this point. Our apartment gets unspeakably hot, and our concern for your well-being will evaporate as the mercury rises. Rest assured, you will be welcomed with open arms when you return (ideally in October).
Sincerely,
Vladimir Maicovski
Dear Neighbor,
Ever since last spring, when my girlfriend and I moved into the house next to yours, we've often wondered why you sit alone inside your pickup. I've witnessed you sitting inside your truck on several occasions, most recently when I pulled into my driveway tonight at 9:30 p.m. You always sit in a similar fashion to how I imagine undercover police officers sit: patient, content, yet searching for something. Sometimes you rest a hand on the steering wheel, lean an arm on the open window frame, and look as though you are about to drive away. Except you never do. You don't even start the truck. You just sit there. Alone.
You've made cordial small talk with me on occasion from the cab of your truck. There were a few times when I was out for a walk and saw you sitting in the truck. This is going to be awkward, I thought. And, sure enough, it was. As I pretended to fumble with my keys and hoped we'd avoid eye contact, you asked, "How are you doing?" On a cloudy day, you said, "Might rain." My two favorites were "Funny seeing you here" and "This truck, it sure is good." You see, it's not funny that you see me here—I live next door. And I certainly don't doubt that it's a good truck. Though I've never driven a late-'80s-model Chevy truck, especially one painted fire-engine red, I can say that I've certainly heard good things about them.
There have been days when you've spent more time in your truck than in your home. Sometimes your wife is home when you do this, sometimes not. When she is, I often wonder if she looks out the window and wonders why her husband is sitting alone in the cab of his truck. Most perplexing is when you sit in the truck during the hot summer months. You're a large man who has apparently had some medical problems—remember last summer when paramedics came to your house twice in one week? It gets very hot here, and I wouldn't leave a dog in the car, let alone a 50-something man who open-mouth-breathes loud enough for me to hear it from my balcony, 20 feet away.
Perhaps the radio reception in the truck is better than the reception in your house. I know that I can only listen to ESPN radio in my car, and I've sometimes left the engine running a few minutes after pulling into my driveway in order to hear a conversation finish up before a commercial break. But I've never listened to an entire show in the car. That would be silly. Or perhaps you simply enjoy the faux-leather upholstery of the bench seat in your cab. I would think that your legs would get stiff, but, hey, maybe that's just me. Maybe your favorite old recliner in the living room finally broke, and you simply enjoy the comfort of that seat. But I suspect you're avoiding something at home, some melancholy or despair that only sets in after you pass through that doorway. I have reached this conclusion for three reasons: (1) you sit inside your truck alone; (2) empty Budweiser cans are scattered in the bed of said truck; and (3) a handful of times, after you've sat in your truck for hours, you go into the house with a bouquet of tulips, presumably for your wife.
If you're doing this as part of a neighborhood-watch program, then let me thank you for attempting to keep our street safe. If you are doing this for any reason other than a neighborhood-watch program, it's kind of creepy. The other neighbors all wonder what the hell you're doing in there, and sometimes dogs, as they pass by your truck with their owners, bark at you. Still, it's your truck, and you are certainly free to sit inside of it alone whenever and wherever you see fit.
However, can you please not be shirtless? It just makes it all the more awkward when I have to walk past you when you're sitting alone inside your truck.
Sincerely,
Jay Varner
[ed. note -- i have quasi-similar experiences, sometimes, with our neighbour "Tony", an odd Aussie/American chain smoker and self-proclaimed sherriff of Alcorn. In order to get away from his conversational grip you need to always keep your legs moving. The second they stop, you're occupied forever...]
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MAN WEARING A T-SHIRT THAT SAYS "IT ISN'T GOING TO SUCK ITSELF."
Dear Sir,
My guess is that the message on your T-shirt functions in several ways. First, as a bold and plain statement that you are confident about your desires, confident enough to have them spelled right out across your chest (nice chest, by the way). Second, it implies that you are a man of action, perhaps a little impatient, but a man able to state exactly what he wants. I think that's a great quality. Very admirable. No dilly-dallying with you. Third, it is possible that the T-shirt is a protest against the design of the human body, a comment about the limitations of our physical being. Did you know, for example, that if we had one set of ribs less we would all be able to bend over and do the job for ourselves? I like to be reminded of that, and I love the idea that if it were somehow useful for survival, and presupposing that Darwin got most of his shit right, we might someday evolve to where we all have penises that could actually suck themselves. Wow.
On its own, your T-shirt hints at a fairly crappy sense of humor, unless, of course, you are wearing the message for a reason. You could be promoting health and safety in some way. Perhaps you are an aid worker from Borneo or Australia, where it would be important to know that a bite from a poisonous snake or insect isn't going to suck itself but is going to require immediate medical attention. In which case I'd have the information in at least one other language. It's also incomplete, and might inspire the wrong response. I think you will find that most doctors do not recommend that venom be sucked out of a bite but, rather, advise that a tourniquet be tightly tied above the bite or wound—in which case the text should read "It Isn't Going to Suck Itself and Neither Should You!" I would also suggest a diagram of a little snake or something, just to make it perfectly clear.
Alternatively, it is possible that you are a sex therapist who works with people who are so anatomically naive and sexually inexperienced that they don't actually know that a penis can't suck itself. Hell, for the longest time I believed that women shat out babies, that babies came out of their asses! I really did! However, as an adult, I take it for granted that my sexual partners will have a better understanding of these kinds of things, but it's good to be reminded that we shouldn't always make such assumptions. In which case printing it on a T-shirt is a very, very good idea, and saves on unnecessary explanations and conversation—provided our prospective sexual partners can read.
To close, a small complaint. After you got off the Metro, the other passengers had to sit between stations listening to a small child ask his father, "What can't suck itself, Dad? Dad? What can't suck?"
Sincerely,
Richard House
On Nelly Furtado
I'm not usually much of a play-goer, but I strongly recommend everyone see The Real Thing this summer in Toronto. One of the best plays ever, it's supposed to be a great rendering of it. I hope to catch it in the next few weeks.
THE REAL THING Featuring Megan Follows, Albert Schultz. Written by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Diana Leblanc. Presented by Soulpepper Theatre Company and the National Arts Centre. To July 29. Mon-Sat 8pm; Sat 2pm. $29-$54; $25 students; $18 rush; $5 youth rush (21 and under). Young Centre, 55 Mill, bldg 49. 416-866-8666. www.soulpepper.ca.
Soulpepper's current production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing is superb in every way. The acting, direction and design all combine to present this highly intellectual comedy from 1982 with precision and feeling. The title initially refers to love since a man and woman break up their respective marriages because they think they have found the "real thing" with each other. Yet, this is only the starting point for Stoppard's investigation using various plays-within-plays of our perception of reality in general, whether in the theatre, politics or personal emotion. What interests Stoppard is how thoroughly fiction influences our perception of reality.
Albert Schultz plays Henry, a successful West End playwright who uses his Noel Cowardlike wit as a defence against expressing emotion. He breaks up with his equally witty actress wife Charlotte (the excellent Kristina Nicoll) to take up with another actress, Annie (Megan Follows). The great virtue of Diana Leblanc's direction is how clearly she emphasizes Henry's moral education as the throughline in a play that can seem like a series of clever set pieces. Schultz delineates Henry's change with great subtlety as he gradually comes to accept that life is messier than his absolutist views have allowed. Follows is outstanding in expressing what is said and unsaid in "real" love that accommodates both fallibility and forgiveness.
BABIES & PUPPIES: CAN THEY CO-EXIST?
Reading the Humane Society of the United States' suggestions for how to prepare your pet for the arrival of your baby made me realize how negligent my husband and I had been before our daughter's arrival 10 years ago. In the months before her birth, I was supposed to be anointing myself with eau de baby wipe to get our two cats accustomed to new scents. I should have held, bathed, and diapered a swaddled doll in their presence. Thank goodness I didn't have a dog then, or I'd have to take it for walks accompanied by the doll in the stroller. (The HSUS does not offer counsel for what to do if the neighbors start worrying you're suffering from prepartum psychosis.) Finally, I should have familiarized my pets with baby sounds by playing a recording of an infant crying. I found one here: www.preparingfido.com. The sample is so enjoyable it made me yearn for "Teen Party Next Door" and "Broken Car Alarm."
Thankfully, our lack of preparation didn't prove too detrimental. Our cats initially boycotted the new arrival, but as the months went by they became remarkably patient playmates, letting our daughter conclude their tails were hairy, interactive baby toys. (I hovered to make sure things didn't get too interactive.) Indeed, children and pets have been happily mixing it up for millenniums, and now there's evidence that such interactions are good for children's health. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that children in multiple-pet households had about half the risk of developing allergies as children without pets—all those dog and cat licks might provide healthy stimulation to the child's immune system. But given that today's parents put locking devices on their toilets to protect their offspring, what are the sensible precautions one should take before baby and pet cohabitate?
The unbreakable rule of young children and pets is: Never leave them unsupervised. If things go wrong, particularly with a dog, tragedy can ensue. Cats don't typically present a biting hazard, but they often like to jump into a baby's crib or playpen to cuddle. It's unlikely, but a cat could suffocate an infant who's unable to push it away.
Rarely, a dog will mistake an infant for prey. Dr. Laurie Bergman, of the University of California Veterinary Medical Center in San Diego, helped clients turn around this potential disaster when their Jack Russell terrier was stalking their week-old baby. The couple was so terrified, they left the dog alone in the house and moved in with other family members. Dr. Bergman instructed the family to move back, keeping their dog outside for most of the day, so that it could get used to seeing the baby through the window. The dog was also allowed to go for walks on a leash with the baby in a stroller. By the time the son was a year old, the dog had accepted him as human, and they became happy playmates.
Owners must also convince the pet that the baby's arrival is not the worst thing to happen since the invention of spaying and neutering. Frequently owners make the mistake of only paying attention to the pet once the baby is down for a nap. The obvious conclusion in the pet's mind is, "Baby gone, life good." Dr. Marsha Reich, a Maryland veterinary behaviorist, says, "Try to find something that motivates the dog to couple with the baby. Throw the dog treats when you're nursing."
If pets are shunted aside, some may seek other ways to solicit attention. Shortly after one friend's first child was born, the cat, which had been ignored since the baby arrived, started limping dramatically on her hind leg. Many visits to the veterinarian later, the doctor remained unable to find a cause. Then one day the couple noticed that the cat only limped when it came upon the baby. Call it Munchausen's syndrome by feline.
Animal behaviorists warn that the most difficult moments in pet-child relations occur when the child becomes mobile. The animal is now confronted with toddling terror, and a once docile dog may growl and snap. But what looks like aggression is often fear: The dog finds itself cornered by a squealing, poking, pulling human. And the child, too young to realize a raised lip and growl means, "Please step away from the dog," continues to lunge.
Death by dog attack is extremely rare—about a dozen fatalities annually in the United States. But dog bites are common—around 4.7 million a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the 800,000 who need medical assistance, half are children, and the most frequent victims are between ages 5 and 9. Almost all the bites were inflicted by a known assailant—the family dog or that of a neighbor. (Those numbers become less alarming when you consider there are almost 70 million pet dogs in this country.) Animal behaviorists—who often are brought in to deal with the aftermath of a dog bite—say that attack statistics don't convey the dog's side of the story.
This is what happened to Sparky, a Dalmatian that bit a visiting 4-year-old boy. The boy had spent the day chasing the dog, climbing on him, and grabbing food from his bowl. Later, when Sparky was asleep, the boy approached him. The boy's mother heard Sparky growl just before her son was bitten on the face. The distraught owner called Dr. Bergman, wondering if she should euthanize her pet. Dr. Bergman instructed the owner to approach her dog, who was cowering behind the toilet. On Sparky's face were several small, crescent-shaped red marks. The boy had dug his fingernails in Sparky's face hard enough to draw blood. "It was a provoked bite," Dr. Bergman explained.
Then there's the other extreme in pet-child relations. Occasionally a pet will bond so completely with children that witnessing the daily upsets of child-rearing can become unbearable. Take the dog that Dr. Lynne Seibert, a veterinary behaviorist in Washington, was asked to help: The dog had become phobic about counting. Some detective work revealed that when the owner was about to discipline her toddler, she would give the child a warning of, "One, two, three." When the dog heard that, she knew her "sibling" was about to be punished. Seibert helped the owner desensitize her dog by sitting quietly with her, calmly counting.
Of course, the ultimate in pet-child devotion was portrayed in Peter Pan. Just think of the savings parents would reap if everyone could find a child-care provider like the Darlings': a "prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana. … She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse." - Slate.
McSWEENEY'S OPEN LETTERS
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE BIRDS NESTING IN MY AIR CONDITIONER.
- - - -
Dear Birds,
While I am pleased that you have decided the air conditioner in my bedroom is the perfect place for you to reside, I feel obligated to voice a few concerns on behalf of the other inhabitants of our apartment. Please do not take this letter as a sign of ill will; I'm sure that if we can resolve these matters, peaceful cohabitation will be possible for many years to come.
Your habit of heralding each new day in song, while pleasant enough on weekdays, unfortunately becomes problematic on Saturdays and Sundays. We enjoy making the most of our weekends, but we don't necessarily feel we need to be roused at 5:30 a.m. to do so. In addition, your melodic chirping arouses the curiosity of our cats. You may have noticed the sustained scratching noises coming, from time to time, from our side of the air conditioner. In the future, we would greatly appreciate your taking your songs elsewhere during these periods. The insulation around the air conditioner is beginning to deteriorate, and we are running out of duct tape.
Our cats have also noted your extended family's frequent visits. Could you please restrict their flights directly outside our windows? Our cats have expressed a strong desire to join them in their cavorting, and I imagine that the cats, should they succeed in breaking through the window screen, would be surprised to learn that we live on the seventh floor. Also, your family's habit of garnishing our windows with excrement, while gracious, is beginning to lose its charm.
Speaking of family, let me be the first to congratulate you on your new arrivals! One small qualm: Though I have no doubt you are attentive and loving parents, I must ask that you feed your young with more frequency, as their cries for nourishment lack the variety and rich timbre of your own vocalizations.
My final concern has to do with the onset of summer. Since your fierce (though commendable) territoriality has precluded a thorough appraisal of your home, we are hesitant to turn on the air conditioner, fearing possible property damage and/or loss of life. The weather so far has been mild, but it is only a matter of time before high temperatures place us in a rather awkward position. I understand that birds generally head south during winter; however, in light of our circumstances, it would be optimal for you to take your vacation this summer instead. I'm afraid there is very little room for negotiation on this point. Our apartment gets unspeakably hot, and our concern for your well-being will evaporate as the mercury rises. Rest assured, you will be welcomed with open arms when you return (ideally in October).
Sincerely,
Vladimir Maicovski
Dear Neighbor,
Ever since last spring, when my girlfriend and I moved into the house next to yours, we've often wondered why you sit alone inside your pickup. I've witnessed you sitting inside your truck on several occasions, most recently when I pulled into my driveway tonight at 9:30 p.m. You always sit in a similar fashion to how I imagine undercover police officers sit: patient, content, yet searching for something. Sometimes you rest a hand on the steering wheel, lean an arm on the open window frame, and look as though you are about to drive away. Except you never do. You don't even start the truck. You just sit there. Alone.
You've made cordial small talk with me on occasion from the cab of your truck. There were a few times when I was out for a walk and saw you sitting in the truck. This is going to be awkward, I thought. And, sure enough, it was. As I pretended to fumble with my keys and hoped we'd avoid eye contact, you asked, "How are you doing?" On a cloudy day, you said, "Might rain." My two favorites were "Funny seeing you here" and "This truck, it sure is good." You see, it's not funny that you see me here—I live next door. And I certainly don't doubt that it's a good truck. Though I've never driven a late-'80s-model Chevy truck, especially one painted fire-engine red, I can say that I've certainly heard good things about them.
There have been days when you've spent more time in your truck than in your home. Sometimes your wife is home when you do this, sometimes not. When she is, I often wonder if she looks out the window and wonders why her husband is sitting alone in the cab of his truck. Most perplexing is when you sit in the truck during the hot summer months. You're a large man who has apparently had some medical problems—remember last summer when paramedics came to your house twice in one week? It gets very hot here, and I wouldn't leave a dog in the car, let alone a 50-something man who open-mouth-breathes loud enough for me to hear it from my balcony, 20 feet away.
Perhaps the radio reception in the truck is better than the reception in your house. I know that I can only listen to ESPN radio in my car, and I've sometimes left the engine running a few minutes after pulling into my driveway in order to hear a conversation finish up before a commercial break. But I've never listened to an entire show in the car. That would be silly. Or perhaps you simply enjoy the faux-leather upholstery of the bench seat in your cab. I would think that your legs would get stiff, but, hey, maybe that's just me. Maybe your favorite old recliner in the living room finally broke, and you simply enjoy the comfort of that seat. But I suspect you're avoiding something at home, some melancholy or despair that only sets in after you pass through that doorway. I have reached this conclusion for three reasons: (1) you sit inside your truck alone; (2) empty Budweiser cans are scattered in the bed of said truck; and (3) a handful of times, after you've sat in your truck for hours, you go into the house with a bouquet of tulips, presumably for your wife.
If you're doing this as part of a neighborhood-watch program, then let me thank you for attempting to keep our street safe. If you are doing this for any reason other than a neighborhood-watch program, it's kind of creepy. The other neighbors all wonder what the hell you're doing in there, and sometimes dogs, as they pass by your truck with their owners, bark at you. Still, it's your truck, and you are certainly free to sit inside of it alone whenever and wherever you see fit.
However, can you please not be shirtless? It just makes it all the more awkward when I have to walk past you when you're sitting alone inside your truck.
Sincerely,
Jay Varner
[ed. note -- i have quasi-similar experiences, sometimes, with our neighbour "Tony", an odd Aussie/American chain smoker and self-proclaimed sherriff of Alcorn. In order to get away from his conversational grip you need to always keep your legs moving. The second they stop, you're occupied forever...]
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MAN WEARING A T-SHIRT THAT SAYS "IT ISN'T GOING TO SUCK ITSELF."
Dear Sir,
My guess is that the message on your T-shirt functions in several ways. First, as a bold and plain statement that you are confident about your desires, confident enough to have them spelled right out across your chest (nice chest, by the way). Second, it implies that you are a man of action, perhaps a little impatient, but a man able to state exactly what he wants. I think that's a great quality. Very admirable. No dilly-dallying with you. Third, it is possible that the T-shirt is a protest against the design of the human body, a comment about the limitations of our physical being. Did you know, for example, that if we had one set of ribs less we would all be able to bend over and do the job for ourselves? I like to be reminded of that, and I love the idea that if it were somehow useful for survival, and presupposing that Darwin got most of his shit right, we might someday evolve to where we all have penises that could actually suck themselves. Wow.
On its own, your T-shirt hints at a fairly crappy sense of humor, unless, of course, you are wearing the message for a reason. You could be promoting health and safety in some way. Perhaps you are an aid worker from Borneo or Australia, where it would be important to know that a bite from a poisonous snake or insect isn't going to suck itself but is going to require immediate medical attention. In which case I'd have the information in at least one other language. It's also incomplete, and might inspire the wrong response. I think you will find that most doctors do not recommend that venom be sucked out of a bite but, rather, advise that a tourniquet be tightly tied above the bite or wound—in which case the text should read "It Isn't Going to Suck Itself and Neither Should You!" I would also suggest a diagram of a little snake or something, just to make it perfectly clear.
Alternatively, it is possible that you are a sex therapist who works with people who are so anatomically naive and sexually inexperienced that they don't actually know that a penis can't suck itself. Hell, for the longest time I believed that women shat out babies, that babies came out of their asses! I really did! However, as an adult, I take it for granted that my sexual partners will have a better understanding of these kinds of things, but it's good to be reminded that we shouldn't always make such assumptions. In which case printing it on a T-shirt is a very, very good idea, and saves on unnecessary explanations and conversation—provided our prospective sexual partners can read.
To close, a small complaint. After you got off the Metro, the other passengers had to sit between stations listening to a small child ask his father, "What can't suck itself, Dad? Dad? What can't suck?"
Sincerely,
Richard House
On Nelly Furtado
posted by D @ 7:27 AM
0 comments
6.22.2006
POT POURRI
Every day, experts bombard us with prognostications on Iraq, bird flu, Bolivian cocoa, global warming, and the fate of the Euro. Who checks their predictions?...
The cello made the deepest blue of all instruments, claimed artist Wassily Kandinsky. Colour, he said, was a kind of keyboard. What did he mean?...
Why is art such a bad investment?
Email me if you can think of a good caption for this cartoon:
Malcolm Gladwell's Basketball analysis, continued:
Most under-rated, in order:
Josh Childress
Tyson Chandler
Eddie Jones
Chris Duhon
Mike Miller
Delonte West
Antonio Daniels
Shane Battier
Luther Head
Drew Gooden
Here are the ten most over-rated.
Al Harrington
Carmelo Anthony
Zach Randolph
Richard Hamilton
Chris Webber
Nenad Krstic
Allen Iverson
Mike Bibby
Antwawn Jamison
Ricky Davis
Nice to see Colangelo doing something.
MUSIC
On REM's Reckoning:
No one ever seems to mention the stature that R.E.M. held in the early-to-mid eighties anymore. It sort of feels like it all never even happened. I wonder if younger people who weren’t around at the time even realize how godlike people used to think R.E.M. were.
With all of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s revivalism going on, it’s interesting that there hasn’t been a single band (to my knowledge, anyway) really influenced by early R.E.M. R.E.M.’s stylistic formula might have been too idiosyncratic, but it was also perhaps too complex and subtle. It may be accurate to say that R.E.M. evolved into more of a folk-rock band by the time of 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction, but if people were calling them “folk-rock” before that, it probably just had a lot to do with the fact that Peter Buck was playing single note lines and arpeggios on a Rickenbacher guitar, a sound too easily tagged as “Byrdsian.” (Maybe the slight southern accents in the vocals contributed to the sense that it was “folk,” too?)
You put on “Harbourcoat,” the first song on 1984’s Reckoning, however, and what you are hearing are basically power pop chords. There are some interesting bootlegs of early R.E.M. playing a whole repertoire of original material that predates the songs on their early records. On a lot of this stuff, their roots in power pop are quite evident. (R.E.M. actually recorded one of these songs, “All the Right Friends,” for the soundtrack to the 2001 film Vanilla Sky. The song is featured on In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003.) “Harbourcoat” is not just unique power pop because of R.E.M.’s folk-rock aspects, however (or because it was highly unusual for a power pop band to have weird, Dadaist lyrics!); it’s unique because it’s more overtly dance music-oriented. Listen to drummer Bill Berry’s hi-hat. In the intro (actually the song’s chorus played without any vocals), he plays straight eighth notes, but mixes it up with some quarter note attacks on upbeats where he opens and closes the cymbals (a technique known as a hi-hat “choke”). In the verses, he alternates between hitting the hi-hat only on upbeats (plus some chokes for accents) and a sixteenth note beat.
The reason why certain hi-hat beats involving sixteenth note patterns or “syncopation” (the accentuation of upbeats, in this case) seem to have something to do with a song’s danceability is a topic a little beyond the scope of this article. This use of the hi-hat was certainly a very common feature on disco records, however. From my limited study of the genre, disco tempos generally seem to range from about 100-130 beats per minute. Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” played at about 95 BPM, feels like the slower end of the disco beat spectrum, while Amii Stewart’s “Knock on Wood,” played at about 145 BPM, feels very quick. “Harbourcoat” is at about 158 BPM. This velocity of tempo has more to do with new wave danceability than it does with disco, but adding dance beats to power pop certainly compounds the dance element of the music.
Some of the early R.E.M. material on the bootlegs mentioned above is a kind of fast roots rock music (they used to cover Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”), and this stuff naturally worked as new wave dance music, too. (“Permanent Vacation,” an early song in this style, was also revived fairly recently and is available now as an iTunes exclusive.) Related, and also seemingly intended as new wave dance music, were songs less roots-rock oriented and more punk, as in their first single, “Radio Free Europe.” On Reckoning, both “Second Guessing” and “Little America” would seem to be of this style. Both are quite fast (“Second Guessing” at about 170 BPM and “Little America” at about 163 BPM). Notice once again how Bill Berry uses a sixteenth note hi-hat beat on “Little America,” working these dance beats not only into power pop songs but more punk-oriented songs as well.
The other of these two tracks, “Second Guessing,” may be the great lost single from Reckoning, with a tight structure and some gorgeous, low register background vocal parts. Even more gorgeous are all the contrapuntal vocal melodies and harmonies on “Letter Never Sent,” a more mid-tempo (approximately 142 BPM) power pop tune featuring yet more of that hi-hat dance beat action. Without going into a whole musicological analysis attempting to support the argument, there’s a degree of simultaneous strength and beauty to this music that feels, to me, like it beats R.E.M.’s contemporaries in this area hands down—Husker Du, Meat Puppets, Replacements, Sonic Youth, fIREHOSE, all of them. Camper Van Beethoven, at their best, might have equaled R.E.M. in this area, but only for moments here and there. R.E.M. pull gorgeous stuff off left and right on Reckoning and its predecessor, Murmur.
“So. Central Rain,” probably the most well known song on Reckoning, is another mid-tempo power pop tune. Peter Buck’s intro is, of course, a classic Rickenbacher guitar sound. The Rickenbacher is certainly one of the signature sounds of early R.E.M., but they did a lot with it in the studio, getting a real variety of tones from overdub to overdub and from song to song. The quality of the guitar sounds was perhaps the most significant difference between the early records, produced by Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, and the subsequent Fables of the Reconstruction, recorded in 1985 with veteran English folk-rock producer Joe Boyd.
Mike Mills plays some great lead bass and melodic bass counterpoint in the verses of “So. Central Rain.” Mills’ piano playing on the song is pure honky-tonk, however, and this element changes the character of the song considerably. R.E.M.’s dabbling with country has been sporadic, but it is perhaps most prominent on Reckoning. Peter Buck’s guitar playing on “Camera,” especially the appoggiatura lick right before the vocals come in at the beginning of the chorus, would be another example. One of the most signature uses of the appoggiatura in country music is the piano playing on Floyd Cramer’s classic country instrumental “Last Date,” a song which R.E.M. (perhaps not so coincidentally) recorded a few years later. The same style of piano playing is featured on Charlie Rich’s huge 1973 country hit “Behind Closed Doors,” which (also perhaps not so coincidentally!) Michael Stipe used to sing a capella onstage during the tour supporting this album.
Recorded originally as a bit of a joke, the country version of the group’s early song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” on Reckoning was some kind of holy accident. “Rockville” works absolutely archetypically as a country song, its I-ii-V chord progression in the chorus perhaps having something to do with the ii-V-I progression in Lynn Anderson’s classic country hit “Rose Garden.”
If “Camera” is a little bit country, it would also appear to be third album Velvet Underground-style balladry, however. Nailing it down a little bit further, it’s more “Pale Blue Eyes” than it is “Jesus” or “I’m Set Free.” “Time After Time,” another song on Reckoning, is actually more “I’m Set Free,” but look at how Peter Buck mixes it up. His repeating guitar riff heard at the beginning and continuing through the verses might have something to do with the guitar riff in “The Murder Mystery.” His droning second guitar part that comes in on the second verse is pure “Venus in Furs.” Buck’s D major modal riff in “Seven Chinese Brothers” might also have been a “Lady Godiva’s Operation” variant.
Reckoning might be overlooked in some ways. If it is looser than the great mood piece Murmur, it is also quite possibly a better collection of songs on the whole. The performances also seem to have been more dynamic, and the overall vibe of looseness never affects the quality of the sound. If anything, the looseness and spontaneity of Reckoning perhaps creates a context in which the many subtleties of the record are just taken in as one. While the album certainly works as a nice set, the ten songs on Reckoning impose themselves less on the listener as a program than any other album that R.E.M. has made.
Every day, experts bombard us with prognostications on Iraq, bird flu, Bolivian cocoa, global warming, and the fate of the Euro. Who checks their predictions?...
The cello made the deepest blue of all instruments, claimed artist Wassily Kandinsky. Colour, he said, was a kind of keyboard. What did he mean?...
Why is art such a bad investment?
Email me if you can think of a good caption for this cartoon:
Malcolm Gladwell's Basketball analysis, continued:
Most under-rated, in order:
Josh Childress
Tyson Chandler
Eddie Jones
Chris Duhon
Mike Miller
Delonte West
Antonio Daniels
Shane Battier
Luther Head
Drew Gooden
Here are the ten most over-rated.
Al Harrington
Carmelo Anthony
Zach Randolph
Richard Hamilton
Chris Webber
Nenad Krstic
Allen Iverson
Mike Bibby
Antwawn Jamison
Ricky Davis
Nice to see Colangelo doing something.
MUSIC
On REM's Reckoning:
No one ever seems to mention the stature that R.E.M. held in the early-to-mid eighties anymore. It sort of feels like it all never even happened. I wonder if younger people who weren’t around at the time even realize how godlike people used to think R.E.M. were.
With all of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s revivalism going on, it’s interesting that there hasn’t been a single band (to my knowledge, anyway) really influenced by early R.E.M. R.E.M.’s stylistic formula might have been too idiosyncratic, but it was also perhaps too complex and subtle. It may be accurate to say that R.E.M. evolved into more of a folk-rock band by the time of 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction, but if people were calling them “folk-rock” before that, it probably just had a lot to do with the fact that Peter Buck was playing single note lines and arpeggios on a Rickenbacher guitar, a sound too easily tagged as “Byrdsian.” (Maybe the slight southern accents in the vocals contributed to the sense that it was “folk,” too?)
You put on “Harbourcoat,” the first song on 1984’s Reckoning, however, and what you are hearing are basically power pop chords. There are some interesting bootlegs of early R.E.M. playing a whole repertoire of original material that predates the songs on their early records. On a lot of this stuff, their roots in power pop are quite evident. (R.E.M. actually recorded one of these songs, “All the Right Friends,” for the soundtrack to the 2001 film Vanilla Sky. The song is featured on In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003.) “Harbourcoat” is not just unique power pop because of R.E.M.’s folk-rock aspects, however (or because it was highly unusual for a power pop band to have weird, Dadaist lyrics!); it’s unique because it’s more overtly dance music-oriented. Listen to drummer Bill Berry’s hi-hat. In the intro (actually the song’s chorus played without any vocals), he plays straight eighth notes, but mixes it up with some quarter note attacks on upbeats where he opens and closes the cymbals (a technique known as a hi-hat “choke”). In the verses, he alternates between hitting the hi-hat only on upbeats (plus some chokes for accents) and a sixteenth note beat.
The reason why certain hi-hat beats involving sixteenth note patterns or “syncopation” (the accentuation of upbeats, in this case) seem to have something to do with a song’s danceability is a topic a little beyond the scope of this article. This use of the hi-hat was certainly a very common feature on disco records, however. From my limited study of the genre, disco tempos generally seem to range from about 100-130 beats per minute. Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” played at about 95 BPM, feels like the slower end of the disco beat spectrum, while Amii Stewart’s “Knock on Wood,” played at about 145 BPM, feels very quick. “Harbourcoat” is at about 158 BPM. This velocity of tempo has more to do with new wave danceability than it does with disco, but adding dance beats to power pop certainly compounds the dance element of the music.
Some of the early R.E.M. material on the bootlegs mentioned above is a kind of fast roots rock music (they used to cover Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”), and this stuff naturally worked as new wave dance music, too. (“Permanent Vacation,” an early song in this style, was also revived fairly recently and is available now as an iTunes exclusive.) Related, and also seemingly intended as new wave dance music, were songs less roots-rock oriented and more punk, as in their first single, “Radio Free Europe.” On Reckoning, both “Second Guessing” and “Little America” would seem to be of this style. Both are quite fast (“Second Guessing” at about 170 BPM and “Little America” at about 163 BPM). Notice once again how Bill Berry uses a sixteenth note hi-hat beat on “Little America,” working these dance beats not only into power pop songs but more punk-oriented songs as well.
The other of these two tracks, “Second Guessing,” may be the great lost single from Reckoning, with a tight structure and some gorgeous, low register background vocal parts. Even more gorgeous are all the contrapuntal vocal melodies and harmonies on “Letter Never Sent,” a more mid-tempo (approximately 142 BPM) power pop tune featuring yet more of that hi-hat dance beat action. Without going into a whole musicological analysis attempting to support the argument, there’s a degree of simultaneous strength and beauty to this music that feels, to me, like it beats R.E.M.’s contemporaries in this area hands down—Husker Du, Meat Puppets, Replacements, Sonic Youth, fIREHOSE, all of them. Camper Van Beethoven, at their best, might have equaled R.E.M. in this area, but only for moments here and there. R.E.M. pull gorgeous stuff off left and right on Reckoning and its predecessor, Murmur.
“So. Central Rain,” probably the most well known song on Reckoning, is another mid-tempo power pop tune. Peter Buck’s intro is, of course, a classic Rickenbacher guitar sound. The Rickenbacher is certainly one of the signature sounds of early R.E.M., but they did a lot with it in the studio, getting a real variety of tones from overdub to overdub and from song to song. The quality of the guitar sounds was perhaps the most significant difference between the early records, produced by Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, and the subsequent Fables of the Reconstruction, recorded in 1985 with veteran English folk-rock producer Joe Boyd.
Mike Mills plays some great lead bass and melodic bass counterpoint in the verses of “So. Central Rain.” Mills’ piano playing on the song is pure honky-tonk, however, and this element changes the character of the song considerably. R.E.M.’s dabbling with country has been sporadic, but it is perhaps most prominent on Reckoning. Peter Buck’s guitar playing on “Camera,” especially the appoggiatura lick right before the vocals come in at the beginning of the chorus, would be another example. One of the most signature uses of the appoggiatura in country music is the piano playing on Floyd Cramer’s classic country instrumental “Last Date,” a song which R.E.M. (perhaps not so coincidentally) recorded a few years later. The same style of piano playing is featured on Charlie Rich’s huge 1973 country hit “Behind Closed Doors,” which (also perhaps not so coincidentally!) Michael Stipe used to sing a capella onstage during the tour supporting this album.
Recorded originally as a bit of a joke, the country version of the group’s early song “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” on Reckoning was some kind of holy accident. “Rockville” works absolutely archetypically as a country song, its I-ii-V chord progression in the chorus perhaps having something to do with the ii-V-I progression in Lynn Anderson’s classic country hit “Rose Garden.”
If “Camera” is a little bit country, it would also appear to be third album Velvet Underground-style balladry, however. Nailing it down a little bit further, it’s more “Pale Blue Eyes” than it is “Jesus” or “I’m Set Free.” “Time After Time,” another song on Reckoning, is actually more “I’m Set Free,” but look at how Peter Buck mixes it up. His repeating guitar riff heard at the beginning and continuing through the verses might have something to do with the guitar riff in “The Murder Mystery.” His droning second guitar part that comes in on the second verse is pure “Venus in Furs.” Buck’s D major modal riff in “Seven Chinese Brothers” might also have been a “Lady Godiva’s Operation” variant.
Reckoning might be overlooked in some ways. If it is looser than the great mood piece Murmur, it is also quite possibly a better collection of songs on the whole. The performances also seem to have been more dynamic, and the overall vibe of looseness never affects the quality of the sound. If anything, the looseness and spontaneity of Reckoning perhaps creates a context in which the many subtleties of the record are just taken in as one. While the album certainly works as a nice set, the ten songs on Reckoning impose themselves less on the listener as a program than any other album that R.E.M. has made.
posted by D @ 6:36 AM
0 comments
6.20.2006
Not a Cute-Kid Story
By JEFF JOHNSON
Recently my wife and I were out for dinner with our son, Fritz, who is 2, and the 10-year-old upstairs-neighbor girl we were baby-sitting. Except for Fritz, we spent the meal quizzing one another.
"You've interviewed Hilary Duff?" the little neighbor girl asked me between bites of a chicken skewer.
"Yep," I replied, grabbing a skewer for myself.
"Whoa!" Her eyes bulged.
"You're like 38 times smarter than her though," I quickly pointed out. "Trust me."
"Really?"
"Yes."
I said this not to disparage Duff, but (a) because it was true and (b) because as a new parent, I take proper measures to double-reinforce confidence in any child I encounter. Even if I only pass them on the street. This often makes running the simplest of errands a daylong affair, and it is why I generally avoid Park Slope.
Then the little upstairs-neighbor girl looked down at Fritz and asked us, "What do you think he'll be when he grows up?"
Before we could answer, Fritz looked up at the girl and shouted, "Poop." (He's potty training at the moment, though he is mainly in a phase when he's only announcing it.) And of course, the little upstairs-neighbor girl laughed, and so did we. Cute story, right? The end, right?
You're damn right it is.
This is the kind of sickeningly sweet, seemingly innocuous family story that can attach itself to a child via parental retelling and chortling for the rest of his life. Tell a kid enough times that he once told the little upstairs-neighbor girl that he thought he was gonna be poop, and the kid starts thinking he is poop. And "Poop" turns out to be the guy in the frat house who tries to snort jambalaya in order to make his frat brothers (who hate him) laugh, and the only person who truly gets a chuckle out of this is the emergency-room doctor's 12-year-old son the following morning while riding to private school in his mother's Audi. So when my kid is 13, on the verge of either joining the tennis team or the smoke-marijuana-in-the-woods team, I'm not gonna trot out the "Hey buddy, you said you were gonna be poop" story.
Here's another cute-kid story, a sort of Siamese twin to the above story, which sounds nice enough until you realize that Siamese twins sometimes share a lung, and they wear tight and poorly assembled tuxedo jackets and dockworkers pay a nickel to throw peanut shells at them.
I had a hydrocele when I was young. This meant that my scrotum briefly filled with fluid and swelled up. My parents got mileage out of this story for upward of 20 years. My mother took to referring to it as my "problem," and any time any child around me had so much as a hangnail, she'd bring it up.
Neighbor lady: Jerry chipped a tooth.
My mom: That's nothing. Jeffrey, tell Mrs. Toothchippema about your problem.
Me: That was seven years ago!
Mom: Jeffrey, why don't you tell her?
Me: I had a problem.
Neighbor lady: We know that, dear. What was it?
Me: My scrotum filled up with water, apparently.
As I remember it, every time I got to the word "apparently," a giant quittin'-time whistle would materialize, then sound, and every person who lived in my city would come outside and laugh until no noise was coming out of their mouths. Things went downhill from there. It has obviously played a role in my "earning potential" and is the reason I still cannot get a decent night's sleep until I have wept for 75-odd minutes.
So now that I'm a dad, here's my plan:
Fritz, age 11: What was I like as a little kid?
Me: Well, none of us are geniuses, but you were pretty sweet.
Fritz, age 19: Did I ever do funny stuff as a kid?
Me: Nothing special comes to mind, but we loved you.
Fritz, age 37: What was I like as a kid?
Me: You were a good kid. You liked saltines.
And finally, when my kid is a very reasonable 55-year-old who drives whatever the future equivalent of a Buick Century is, and he has changed 18,000 diapers, and his own son is a successful astronaut/cat burglar, and I'm on my deathbed and we are both very weary of everything we've spent years concealing from each other, and he asks, "Did I ever do anything funny as a kid?" I'll say, "You claimed you would grow up to be poop."
And he will not blush. His wife will be too grossed out by my condition to even be in the room with us. In fact, no one in the room will be someone he'd ever conceive of being romantically involved with. The nurses will be stocky Latvians with hair-sprouting warts. So there will be no embarrassment possible. And he won't even pause. He'll just say, "Eh, it figures." Then he will wink at me, and I will die, and he will inherit my vast empire. None of which I have now, but I've got about 53 years to rake it in, once I shake off the wounds inflicted by my parents and stop explaining to my aunts what my "problem" was.
By JEFF JOHNSON
Recently my wife and I were out for dinner with our son, Fritz, who is 2, and the 10-year-old upstairs-neighbor girl we were baby-sitting. Except for Fritz, we spent the meal quizzing one another.
"You've interviewed Hilary Duff?" the little neighbor girl asked me between bites of a chicken skewer.
"Yep," I replied, grabbing a skewer for myself.
"Whoa!" Her eyes bulged.
"You're like 38 times smarter than her though," I quickly pointed out. "Trust me."
"Really?"
"Yes."
I said this not to disparage Duff, but (a) because it was true and (b) because as a new parent, I take proper measures to double-reinforce confidence in any child I encounter. Even if I only pass them on the street. This often makes running the simplest of errands a daylong affair, and it is why I generally avoid Park Slope.
Then the little upstairs-neighbor girl looked down at Fritz and asked us, "What do you think he'll be when he grows up?"
Before we could answer, Fritz looked up at the girl and shouted, "Poop." (He's potty training at the moment, though he is mainly in a phase when he's only announcing it.) And of course, the little upstairs-neighbor girl laughed, and so did we. Cute story, right? The end, right?
You're damn right it is.
This is the kind of sickeningly sweet, seemingly innocuous family story that can attach itself to a child via parental retelling and chortling for the rest of his life. Tell a kid enough times that he once told the little upstairs-neighbor girl that he thought he was gonna be poop, and the kid starts thinking he is poop. And "Poop" turns out to be the guy in the frat house who tries to snort jambalaya in order to make his frat brothers (who hate him) laugh, and the only person who truly gets a chuckle out of this is the emergency-room doctor's 12-year-old son the following morning while riding to private school in his mother's Audi. So when my kid is 13, on the verge of either joining the tennis team or the smoke-marijuana-in-the-woods team, I'm not gonna trot out the "Hey buddy, you said you were gonna be poop" story.
Here's another cute-kid story, a sort of Siamese twin to the above story, which sounds nice enough until you realize that Siamese twins sometimes share a lung, and they wear tight and poorly assembled tuxedo jackets and dockworkers pay a nickel to throw peanut shells at them.
I had a hydrocele when I was young. This meant that my scrotum briefly filled with fluid and swelled up. My parents got mileage out of this story for upward of 20 years. My mother took to referring to it as my "problem," and any time any child around me had so much as a hangnail, she'd bring it up.
Neighbor lady: Jerry chipped a tooth.
My mom: That's nothing. Jeffrey, tell Mrs. Toothchippema about your problem.
Me: That was seven years ago!
Mom: Jeffrey, why don't you tell her?
Me: I had a problem.
Neighbor lady: We know that, dear. What was it?
Me: My scrotum filled up with water, apparently.
As I remember it, every time I got to the word "apparently," a giant quittin'-time whistle would materialize, then sound, and every person who lived in my city would come outside and laugh until no noise was coming out of their mouths. Things went downhill from there. It has obviously played a role in my "earning potential" and is the reason I still cannot get a decent night's sleep until I have wept for 75-odd minutes.
So now that I'm a dad, here's my plan:
Fritz, age 11: What was I like as a little kid?
Me: Well, none of us are geniuses, but you were pretty sweet.
Fritz, age 19: Did I ever do funny stuff as a kid?
Me: Nothing special comes to mind, but we loved you.
Fritz, age 37: What was I like as a kid?
Me: You were a good kid. You liked saltines.
And finally, when my kid is a very reasonable 55-year-old who drives whatever the future equivalent of a Buick Century is, and he has changed 18,000 diapers, and his own son is a successful astronaut/cat burglar, and I'm on my deathbed and we are both very weary of everything we've spent years concealing from each other, and he asks, "Did I ever do anything funny as a kid?" I'll say, "You claimed you would grow up to be poop."
And he will not blush. His wife will be too grossed out by my condition to even be in the room with us. In fact, no one in the room will be someone he'd ever conceive of being romantically involved with. The nurses will be stocky Latvians with hair-sprouting warts. So there will be no embarrassment possible. And he won't even pause. He'll just say, "Eh, it figures." Then he will wink at me, and I will die, and he will inherit my vast empire. None of which I have now, but I've got about 53 years to rake it in, once I shake off the wounds inflicted by my parents and stop explaining to my aunts what my "problem" was.
posted by D @ 10:20 AM
1 comments
MORE MUSIC VIDEOS
2Pac and Dr. Dre: "California Love"
1996
Directed by Hype Williams
Three minutes and 19 seconds into the "California Love" video, there's a shot of Tupac Shakur slapping hands with Dr. Dre and managing to look badass while doing a butt-dance. In that brief moment, Tupac transcended the video's cheesed-out concept and showed the raw, furious, defiant charisma that made him rap's messiah. But then, as cheesed-out video-concepts go, "California Love" is pretty much perfectly conceived and executed: California as post-apocalyptic dancefloor warzone, Mad Max's Thunderdome as future-club, Roger Troutman leaning coked-up out of a helicopter with a voicebox chord sticking out of his mouth, Dr. Dre in an eyepatch. Hype Williams has the decency to shoot this monstrosity in the same bleached-out grainy film stock as the movies he's parodying, and even Chris Tucker manages not to fuck this one up. "California Love" is the greatest rap video ever made.
Journey: "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)"
1983
Directed by Tom Buckholtz
Can be found on Journey: Greatest Hits DVD 1978-1997: Music Videos & Live Performances DVD
The guys playing air keys had to be in on the joke, but Steve Perry looks like he's auditioning for On the Waterfront.
David Brent: "If You Don't Know Me By Now"
2003
Directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant
Can be found on The Office: Christmas Special DVD
To explain the joke is to ruin the joke. If you don't know David Brent by now, you will never never never know him.
(No you won't.)
Air: "Kelly Watch the Stars"
1998
Directed by Mike Mills
Can be found on Talkie Walkie Japanese import CD/DVD
Crazy how so much kitsch-- slo-mo ping-pong, retro couture, acoustic guitars, out-of-body experiences, French people, and Pong for crissakes-- coalesces into a superlatively fun and surprise-filled play on the tired sports nail-biter. Doesn't hurt any that Kelly is totally crushworthy.
Björk: "Triumph of a Heart"
2005
Directed by Spike Jonze
Can be found on Triumph of a Heart DVD
It's that same old song: Girl is vaguely but essentially dissatisfied with cat; girl leaves cat and goes out for night of debauchery and soul-searching; soul-searching turns into a cappella orgy and bruises to the forehead; cat (who has undoubtedly been peering into his soul as well) picks up girl from the side of the road, immediately recognizing the passionate young pixie he fell for all those year ago; couple basks in renewed love and performs dance of happiness (and also cat becomes huge). Love is the answer.
2Pac and Dr. Dre: "California Love"
1996
Directed by Hype Williams
Three minutes and 19 seconds into the "California Love" video, there's a shot of Tupac Shakur slapping hands with Dr. Dre and managing to look badass while doing a butt-dance. In that brief moment, Tupac transcended the video's cheesed-out concept and showed the raw, furious, defiant charisma that made him rap's messiah. But then, as cheesed-out video-concepts go, "California Love" is pretty much perfectly conceived and executed: California as post-apocalyptic dancefloor warzone, Mad Max's Thunderdome as future-club, Roger Troutman leaning coked-up out of a helicopter with a voicebox chord sticking out of his mouth, Dr. Dre in an eyepatch. Hype Williams has the decency to shoot this monstrosity in the same bleached-out grainy film stock as the movies he's parodying, and even Chris Tucker manages not to fuck this one up. "California Love" is the greatest rap video ever made.
Journey: "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)"
1983
Directed by Tom Buckholtz
Can be found on Journey: Greatest Hits DVD 1978-1997: Music Videos & Live Performances DVD
The guys playing air keys had to be in on the joke, but Steve Perry looks like he's auditioning for On the Waterfront.
David Brent: "If You Don't Know Me By Now"
2003
Directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant
Can be found on The Office: Christmas Special DVD
To explain the joke is to ruin the joke. If you don't know David Brent by now, you will never never never know him.
(No you won't.)
Air: "Kelly Watch the Stars"
1998
Directed by Mike Mills
Can be found on Talkie Walkie Japanese import CD/DVD
Crazy how so much kitsch-- slo-mo ping-pong, retro couture, acoustic guitars, out-of-body experiences, French people, and Pong for crissakes-- coalesces into a superlatively fun and surprise-filled play on the tired sports nail-biter. Doesn't hurt any that Kelly is totally crushworthy.
Björk: "Triumph of a Heart"
2005
Directed by Spike Jonze
Can be found on Triumph of a Heart DVD
It's that same old song: Girl is vaguely but essentially dissatisfied with cat; girl leaves cat and goes out for night of debauchery and soul-searching; soul-searching turns into a cappella orgy and bruises to the forehead; cat (who has undoubtedly been peering into his soul as well) picks up girl from the side of the road, immediately recognizing the passionate young pixie he fell for all those year ago; couple basks in renewed love and performs dance of happiness (and also cat becomes huge). Love is the answer.
posted by D @ 6:23 AM
0 comments
one of those hot, hot weekends at the cottage -- my brother diving into georgian bay
posted by D @ 5:22 AM
0 comments
6.19.2006
The Simpsons: Soccer match between Mexico and Portugal
This match will determine once and for all, which nation is the greatest on Earth.
This match will determine once and for all, which nation is the greatest on Earth.
posted by D @ 2:54 PM
0 comments
REAPPRAISING RADIOHEAD
New Yorker
Radiohead doesn’t sell as many records as some other major rock groups, like Coldplay or U2, but it has hundreds of thousands of fans in the United States, who have stuck by the band for fourteen years—even though the spacious, colorfully ambient music that the group has been making lately is unlike the traditional guitar rock it débuted with. Last year, Spin voted Radiohead’s 1997 album, “OK Computer,” the No. 1 album of the past twenty years, and this month readers of NME, the influential British weekly, voted it the fourth-best album of all time, behind Oasis’s “Definitely Maybe” and two Beatles albums. “OK Computer” is this generation’s “Dark Side of the Moon”—complex and catchy songs surrounded by wobbly, atmospheric music that suggests that the band is up to more than fans will ever figure out, even if they listen to the album every day. I seem to know about a hundred of these fans, and they constantly urge me to give the band a chance. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much point in doing so.
The lead singer and main songwriter, Thom Yorke, has essentially three singing styles: a tired snarl, a reedy drone, and a light falsetto. His performances rarely get far before the words dissolve into a moan. On early Radiohead albums, Yorke’s lyrics were sombre expressions of juvenile anomie: cars are dangerous, robots are no fun, plastic surgeons do sad, thankless work. After that, his lyrics became shorter and more oblique, often ending in sentence fragments that were repeated again and again, as if such persistence would give the words greater meaning. (“I will eat you alive,” he groans fifteen times in “Where I End and You Begin,” from 2003.) While Yorke sings, the band makes a wide, soupy sound that seems both a product of and an invitation to stoned passivity.
Yet several of the band’s songs got lodged in my head, and after seeing Radiohead perform three times in the past two weeks and listening repeatedly to its recordings—including Yorke’s plangent, largely electronic new solo album, “The Eraser”—I’ve discovered that with each successive record the fog around the music dissipates a little and Radiohead’s luminous teamwork comes more clearly into view.
I still don’t like Yorke’s lyrics, and I wish that the melancholy that Radiohead favors were not the status quo for so many rock bands. But then the group, which consists of four men in addition to Yorke, is not, strictly speaking, much of a rock band: catharsis, speed, and violence are generally absent from its work. Radiohead’s gift is in creating compositions thick with intricate harmonies. At a performance in Boston earlier this month, the melody of “Fake Plastic Trees,” from the 1995 album, “The Bends,” sounded like the second theme of a Schubert string quartet: Yorke’s voice mimicked the timbre and varied dynamics of a violinist bowing. While deforming the words, he revealed the melody’s elegance, which I couldn’t hear before I saw him sing it. Yorke, as his early sponsor Michael Stipe once did, plays his voice the way his bandmates play their instruments, and he has impressively consistent pitch. Radiohead sounds like an instrumental band that happens to have a singer.
In Boston, the stage was decorated with ten rhomboid-shaped screens, which hung behind the musicians. At first, the screens were covered with glowing green dots. Later, they displayed closeup video images of the band members, or parts of them—the drummer Phil Selway’s hands, Yorke’s head from below, the neck of Colin Greenwood’s bass guitar. Live, the band is as fluid and sparkly as it can be arid and mopey on recordings. Yorke does much more than sing. By the fifth song, he had already played guitar, keyboards, and a pared-down drum set. For the airy, gorgeous “Morning Bell,” from “Kid A” (2000), he was in his falsetto mode, singing brightly and playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano, while Selway locked into a clipped pattern and Greenwood plucked a small, hopeful figure high on the neck of his bass.
The band is recording a new album, and on its current tour is trying out at least twelve new songs. Several reprise the hushed, hypnotic mood of “Amnesiac” (2001) and “Hail to the Thief” (2003). The lovely “Videotape,” which invokes death and Mephistopheles (Yorke opens with “When I’m at the pearly gates, this’ll be on my videotape”), slowly ramps up and then down, the guitars and the drums bobbing around Yorke’s piano chords, emphasizing different beats of the rhythm, as if three songs were slowly becoming one.
Most of the new songs are surprisingly upbeat. “15 Step” pivots on a stuttering drum-machine pattern and prompted Yorke to dance across the stage in a happy jig, his arms raised above his head like a club kid’s. For “Bodysnatchers,” Yorke began alone, playing a short, bluesy riff—a surprisingly conventional figure. Then the band joined in: Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood, both on guitar, and Phil Selway, who launched into a single-minded Krautrock drumbeat. At first, Yorke’s melody sounded like a paraphrase of George Harrison’s “Within You, Without You,” but, as the notes smeared into one another, Yorke sang what may be the ultimate Radiohead lyric: “I have no idea what I’m talking about, I am trapped in this body and can’t get out.” After a few verses, he worked himself up to a peak of wordless sound, while the guitars played odd, dissonant chords. Suddenly, the guitars dropped back in quiet unison, then surged forward again for an intense but brief coda that was as close to straight rock and roll as anything the band played that night.
More typical was the arrangement for “Everything in Its Right Place,” a pulsing song built around Yorke’s gentle vocals and twinkly electric piano chords, which recalled Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way.” O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood—Colin’s brother and the band’s unofficial co-leader—were on opposite sides of the stage, each hunched over a small electronic box called a Kaoss pad that allowed them to record and manipulate samples of Yorke’s piano and singing. When the band left the stage, the devices remained, playing the distorted bits in an endless loop.
After a second encore, Yorke came to the front of the stage, grinning widely. The crowd howled. He rubbed his hands together, as if they were cold, and held them up, palms out, as if he were about to perform a magic trick. It seemed spontaneous, half greeting, half nervous tic, and the audience responded by holding out their palms to him. Smiling, Yorke repeated the gesture three times.
Radiohead has much in common with the Grateful Dead, including passionate fans who follow the band from city to city, trade bootleg recordings of shows, puzzle out the meanings of the band’s cryptic lyrics, and (in Boston, at least) dance badly while smoking expensive-smelling weed. But Radiohead’s main interest is not improvisation, nor do the band’s affinities to modern classical music and electronica mask the fact that its dominant syntax is pop. The songs mutate briskly, and are larded with hummable motifs. Even when Jonny Greenwood is fiddling with a radio and Yorke is ululating toward the great unknown, the band obeys an internal clock that arrests its elaborations before tedium defeats wonder. Most of the songs aren’t long—only a few last more than six minutes, even live. The band plays nimble, bright-eyed arrangements of dense, heavy-lidded music.
Radiohead no longer has a contract with EMI and says that it has no plans to sign with a label. However the band chooses to release its next record, it can still make a handsome living by touring and selling merchandise. Labels spend a lot of time and money worrying about illegal downloading and file-sharing. What they should be worried about is more bands like Radiohead, which could make major labels a relic of the twentieth century.
RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Not every single New Yorker was focussed on the Rufus Wainwright concert last Wednesday; a cabdriver from Côte d’Ivoire, who was taking one concertgoer to Carnegie Hall, was listening to a tape of a Mandinka-speaking Muslim preacher, which a friend back home in Abidjan had sent him. But certainly in a particular crowd, one that has a sizable membership in this city—Gay Men and the Women Who Love Them—people had been buzzing about this concert for two months. Rufus Wainwright was going to—can you believe this?—re-create the famous, and famously fabulous, concert that Judy Garland gave at Carnegie Hall on April 23, 1961. That’s right: fabulous. Get the record. Then we’ll talk. Wainwright’s concert sold out immediately, so a second was added, the following night—that sold out immediately, too. E-mails went back and forth: Was this really a good idea? Was it proper, appropriate, really a homage, or was it an insult to the memory of the woman many consider to be the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century? Was it just a bad idea? Was it a funny idea—and, if so, was that a good thing? Maybe: after all, Garland herself had a wicked sense of humor. Whatever was going to happen, it counted as a mustn’t-miss event. In anticipation of the concert, Time Out New York had been running short weekly pieces under the heading “Countdown to Judy,” and now her fans, and Wainwright’s fans, were ready to blast off.
Outside Carnegie Hall before the show, the atmosphere was surprisingly subdued. Perhaps fans were nervous, for Wainwright and for themselves—people who love Judy Garland don’t want to have their feelings upset, and there was so much room for error in this enterprise. Older people wondered whether the thirty-two-year-old Wainwright would get it—there was a time not long ago when young gay men actively shunned Judyism as a suffocating remnant of pre-Stonewall closetedness. (In Greenwich Village in the eighties, Judy Garland albums were seen lined up on the curb, their owners dead of AIDS.) But Wainwright was very publicly gay, and his interest in replicating the show had much to do with the music—he has EGBDF in his DNA (his parents are Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III), and at the age of eight he’d be woken up by his mother at three in the morning to sing “Over the Rainbow” as a way of signalling to guests that it was time to go. (Like Garland, Wainwright has had trouble with drugs. Luckily, he has cleaned up his act, and shows no sign that he will waste away before his time, as Garland did, thirty-seven years ago this week, at the age of forty-seven.)
Inside, venders were doing a tidy business: a representative of the U.S. Postal Service was selling sheets of the Garland stamp that was issued earlier in the month, on the occasion of her birthday, and a man sold pins made from the stamps, for three dollars. He said that he considered Garland to be one of three tragic figures of the twentieth century; another was James Dean, and he couldn’t remember the third. Bummed by the fact that programs inexcusably ran out—come on, Carnegie Hall—people went to their seats braced for a measure of disappointment. But as soon as the orchestra struck up the opening notes of the overture, a medley of some of Garland’s signature songs, the audience became both more relaxed and more excited.
Wainwright was understated compared with Garland—meaning that there were fewer sequins involved. He wore a white shirt that had sparkly navy-blue stars on it, and a suit whose color the J. Crew catalogue would call stone, with black tuxedo stripes on the legs. (Let’s just not discuss the brown belt.) For the second act—following an intermission in which the ladies’ rooms were hauntingly empty, with the wind howling across the lonely tiled plain—he switched to a shiny silk top hat and tux. Wainwright’s nasal voice is supple and liquidy, and it carries tones of amusement, sadness, and I-am-what-I-am-ness. He mostly stayed away from Garland’s well-known patter—“I know, I’ll sing ’em all, and we’ll stay all night!”—but did talk about his relationship with his muse. “I wanted to be Dorothy—on good days. On bad days, I wanted to be the Wicked Witch. I would put on an apron and my father would stand there with a Scotch in his hand and go, ‘Oh, my God.’ I would place my mother’s shoes in this diabolical circle; I would take one of her finest gowns, from, I don’t know, Laura Ashley”—the mention of the doyenne of un-fabulousness got an enormous laugh—“and I would step into the shoes, and I would melt.” The concert didn’t have the electricity of Garland’s album (it did have an appearance by Lorna Luft, Garland’s younger daughter), but if it wasn’t quite a night of magic it was still a triumph, and a moving one, especially when McGarrigle came out onstage for the encore, to play piano accompaniment to her son’s rendition of Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”—a song that Garland didn’t sing, and yet an apt end to the evening. Mom had tears in her eyes when it was over, and so did almost everyone else.
New Yorker
Radiohead doesn’t sell as many records as some other major rock groups, like Coldplay or U2, but it has hundreds of thousands of fans in the United States, who have stuck by the band for fourteen years—even though the spacious, colorfully ambient music that the group has been making lately is unlike the traditional guitar rock it débuted with. Last year, Spin voted Radiohead’s 1997 album, “OK Computer,” the No. 1 album of the past twenty years, and this month readers of NME, the influential British weekly, voted it the fourth-best album of all time, behind Oasis’s “Definitely Maybe” and two Beatles albums. “OK Computer” is this generation’s “Dark Side of the Moon”—complex and catchy songs surrounded by wobbly, atmospheric music that suggests that the band is up to more than fans will ever figure out, even if they listen to the album every day. I seem to know about a hundred of these fans, and they constantly urge me to give the band a chance. Until recently, I hadn’t seen much point in doing so.
The lead singer and main songwriter, Thom Yorke, has essentially three singing styles: a tired snarl, a reedy drone, and a light falsetto. His performances rarely get far before the words dissolve into a moan. On early Radiohead albums, Yorke’s lyrics were sombre expressions of juvenile anomie: cars are dangerous, robots are no fun, plastic surgeons do sad, thankless work. After that, his lyrics became shorter and more oblique, often ending in sentence fragments that were repeated again and again, as if such persistence would give the words greater meaning. (“I will eat you alive,” he groans fifteen times in “Where I End and You Begin,” from 2003.) While Yorke sings, the band makes a wide, soupy sound that seems both a product of and an invitation to stoned passivity.
Yet several of the band’s songs got lodged in my head, and after seeing Radiohead perform three times in the past two weeks and listening repeatedly to its recordings—including Yorke’s plangent, largely electronic new solo album, “The Eraser”—I’ve discovered that with each successive record the fog around the music dissipates a little and Radiohead’s luminous teamwork comes more clearly into view.
I still don’t like Yorke’s lyrics, and I wish that the melancholy that Radiohead favors were not the status quo for so many rock bands. But then the group, which consists of four men in addition to Yorke, is not, strictly speaking, much of a rock band: catharsis, speed, and violence are generally absent from its work. Radiohead’s gift is in creating compositions thick with intricate harmonies. At a performance in Boston earlier this month, the melody of “Fake Plastic Trees,” from the 1995 album, “The Bends,” sounded like the second theme of a Schubert string quartet: Yorke’s voice mimicked the timbre and varied dynamics of a violinist bowing. While deforming the words, he revealed the melody’s elegance, which I couldn’t hear before I saw him sing it. Yorke, as his early sponsor Michael Stipe once did, plays his voice the way his bandmates play their instruments, and he has impressively consistent pitch. Radiohead sounds like an instrumental band that happens to have a singer.
In Boston, the stage was decorated with ten rhomboid-shaped screens, which hung behind the musicians. At first, the screens were covered with glowing green dots. Later, they displayed closeup video images of the band members, or parts of them—the drummer Phil Selway’s hands, Yorke’s head from below, the neck of Colin Greenwood’s bass guitar. Live, the band is as fluid and sparkly as it can be arid and mopey on recordings. Yorke does much more than sing. By the fifth song, he had already played guitar, keyboards, and a pared-down drum set. For the airy, gorgeous “Morning Bell,” from “Kid A” (2000), he was in his falsetto mode, singing brightly and playing a Fender Rhodes electric piano, while Selway locked into a clipped pattern and Greenwood plucked a small, hopeful figure high on the neck of his bass.
The band is recording a new album, and on its current tour is trying out at least twelve new songs. Several reprise the hushed, hypnotic mood of “Amnesiac” (2001) and “Hail to the Thief” (2003). The lovely “Videotape,” which invokes death and Mephistopheles (Yorke opens with “When I’m at the pearly gates, this’ll be on my videotape”), slowly ramps up and then down, the guitars and the drums bobbing around Yorke’s piano chords, emphasizing different beats of the rhythm, as if three songs were slowly becoming one.
Most of the new songs are surprisingly upbeat. “15 Step” pivots on a stuttering drum-machine pattern and prompted Yorke to dance across the stage in a happy jig, his arms raised above his head like a club kid’s. For “Bodysnatchers,” Yorke began alone, playing a short, bluesy riff—a surprisingly conventional figure. Then the band joined in: Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood, both on guitar, and Phil Selway, who launched into a single-minded Krautrock drumbeat. At first, Yorke’s melody sounded like a paraphrase of George Harrison’s “Within You, Without You,” but, as the notes smeared into one another, Yorke sang what may be the ultimate Radiohead lyric: “I have no idea what I’m talking about, I am trapped in this body and can’t get out.” After a few verses, he worked himself up to a peak of wordless sound, while the guitars played odd, dissonant chords. Suddenly, the guitars dropped back in quiet unison, then surged forward again for an intense but brief coda that was as close to straight rock and roll as anything the band played that night.
More typical was the arrangement for “Everything in Its Right Place,” a pulsing song built around Yorke’s gentle vocals and twinkly electric piano chords, which recalled Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way.” O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood—Colin’s brother and the band’s unofficial co-leader—were on opposite sides of the stage, each hunched over a small electronic box called a Kaoss pad that allowed them to record and manipulate samples of Yorke’s piano and singing. When the band left the stage, the devices remained, playing the distorted bits in an endless loop.
After a second encore, Yorke came to the front of the stage, grinning widely. The crowd howled. He rubbed his hands together, as if they were cold, and held them up, palms out, as if he were about to perform a magic trick. It seemed spontaneous, half greeting, half nervous tic, and the audience responded by holding out their palms to him. Smiling, Yorke repeated the gesture three times.
Radiohead has much in common with the Grateful Dead, including passionate fans who follow the band from city to city, trade bootleg recordings of shows, puzzle out the meanings of the band’s cryptic lyrics, and (in Boston, at least) dance badly while smoking expensive-smelling weed. But Radiohead’s main interest is not improvisation, nor do the band’s affinities to modern classical music and electronica mask the fact that its dominant syntax is pop. The songs mutate briskly, and are larded with hummable motifs. Even when Jonny Greenwood is fiddling with a radio and Yorke is ululating toward the great unknown, the band obeys an internal clock that arrests its elaborations before tedium defeats wonder. Most of the songs aren’t long—only a few last more than six minutes, even live. The band plays nimble, bright-eyed arrangements of dense, heavy-lidded music.
Radiohead no longer has a contract with EMI and says that it has no plans to sign with a label. However the band chooses to release its next record, it can still make a handsome living by touring and selling merchandise. Labels spend a lot of time and money worrying about illegal downloading and file-sharing. What they should be worried about is more bands like Radiohead, which could make major labels a relic of the twentieth century.
RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Not every single New Yorker was focussed on the Rufus Wainwright concert last Wednesday; a cabdriver from Côte d’Ivoire, who was taking one concertgoer to Carnegie Hall, was listening to a tape of a Mandinka-speaking Muslim preacher, which a friend back home in Abidjan had sent him. But certainly in a particular crowd, one that has a sizable membership in this city—Gay Men and the Women Who Love Them—people had been buzzing about this concert for two months. Rufus Wainwright was going to—can you believe this?—re-create the famous, and famously fabulous, concert that Judy Garland gave at Carnegie Hall on April 23, 1961. That’s right: fabulous. Get the record. Then we’ll talk. Wainwright’s concert sold out immediately, so a second was added, the following night—that sold out immediately, too. E-mails went back and forth: Was this really a good idea? Was it proper, appropriate, really a homage, or was it an insult to the memory of the woman many consider to be the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century? Was it just a bad idea? Was it a funny idea—and, if so, was that a good thing? Maybe: after all, Garland herself had a wicked sense of humor. Whatever was going to happen, it counted as a mustn’t-miss event. In anticipation of the concert, Time Out New York had been running short weekly pieces under the heading “Countdown to Judy,” and now her fans, and Wainwright’s fans, were ready to blast off.
Outside Carnegie Hall before the show, the atmosphere was surprisingly subdued. Perhaps fans were nervous, for Wainwright and for themselves—people who love Judy Garland don’t want to have their feelings upset, and there was so much room for error in this enterprise. Older people wondered whether the thirty-two-year-old Wainwright would get it—there was a time not long ago when young gay men actively shunned Judyism as a suffocating remnant of pre-Stonewall closetedness. (In Greenwich Village in the eighties, Judy Garland albums were seen lined up on the curb, their owners dead of AIDS.) But Wainwright was very publicly gay, and his interest in replicating the show had much to do with the music—he has EGBDF in his DNA (his parents are Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III), and at the age of eight he’d be woken up by his mother at three in the morning to sing “Over the Rainbow” as a way of signalling to guests that it was time to go. (Like Garland, Wainwright has had trouble with drugs. Luckily, he has cleaned up his act, and shows no sign that he will waste away before his time, as Garland did, thirty-seven years ago this week, at the age of forty-seven.)
Inside, venders were doing a tidy business: a representative of the U.S. Postal Service was selling sheets of the Garland stamp that was issued earlier in the month, on the occasion of her birthday, and a man sold pins made from the stamps, for three dollars. He said that he considered Garland to be one of three tragic figures of the twentieth century; another was James Dean, and he couldn’t remember the third. Bummed by the fact that programs inexcusably ran out—come on, Carnegie Hall—people went to their seats braced for a measure of disappointment. But as soon as the orchestra struck up the opening notes of the overture, a medley of some of Garland’s signature songs, the audience became both more relaxed and more excited.
Wainwright was understated compared with Garland—meaning that there were fewer sequins involved. He wore a white shirt that had sparkly navy-blue stars on it, and a suit whose color the J. Crew catalogue would call stone, with black tuxedo stripes on the legs. (Let’s just not discuss the brown belt.) For the second act—following an intermission in which the ladies’ rooms were hauntingly empty, with the wind howling across the lonely tiled plain—he switched to a shiny silk top hat and tux. Wainwright’s nasal voice is supple and liquidy, and it carries tones of amusement, sadness, and I-am-what-I-am-ness. He mostly stayed away from Garland’s well-known patter—“I know, I’ll sing ’em all, and we’ll stay all night!”—but did talk about his relationship with his muse. “I wanted to be Dorothy—on good days. On bad days, I wanted to be the Wicked Witch. I would put on an apron and my father would stand there with a Scotch in his hand and go, ‘Oh, my God.’ I would place my mother’s shoes in this diabolical circle; I would take one of her finest gowns, from, I don’t know, Laura Ashley”—the mention of the doyenne of un-fabulousness got an enormous laugh—“and I would step into the shoes, and I would melt.” The concert didn’t have the electricity of Garland’s album (it did have an appearance by Lorna Luft, Garland’s younger daughter), but if it wasn’t quite a night of magic it was still a triumph, and a moving one, especially when McGarrigle came out onstage for the encore, to play piano accompaniment to her son’s rendition of Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”—a song that Garland didn’t sing, and yet an apt end to the evening. Mom had tears in her eyes when it was over, and so did almost everyone else.
posted by D @ 11:37 AM
0 comments
6.15.2006
AMERICAN FOOTBALL
Ben Roethlisberger is out of hospital. Apparently Roethlisberger means idiot in Pittsburghese.
"He [Cowher] talked about being a risk-taker and I'm not really a risk-taker. I'm pretty conservative and laid back, but the big thing is to just be careful," Roethlisberger said at the time. "I'll just continue to be careful. I told him we don't ever ride alone, we always ride in a group of people, and I think it makes it even more safe." said Roethlisberger.
from fittedsweats.blogspot.com:
Sorry. I realize this is everywhere by now. He said the above in reference to not wearing a helmet when he rides his motorcycle. I guess trading a career in professional football for good old fashioned brain damage (not mutually exclusive btw) is cool.
That's like saying "I'll be more careful when I hold lit matches near my penis. The fire can't really get that hot. Plus my penis is covered up with this thick rag that I've gotten really wet with gasoline. Shouldn't be a big deal. Then I think I will give a truck driver a small mountain of crystal meth, and I will put on my rollerblades and ski behind his truck. I'll do it in the summer, so it isn't so icy out on the highway. I don't take risks. Then I'm gonna start my lawn mower, and flip it over cause I need to get a good look at how the blade spins. But I don't want to disturb anyone, so I'll take it about 75 miles from the nearest hospital, and I'll throw my cellphone into the creek beforehand so it doesn't get chopped up. I'll probably make love to some Thai shemale prostitutes before that, but I won't use a condom. That would ruin it. They've also told me that they like to make cardhouses using credit cards, so I sent them all of mine, and when they get bored they'll just come over and we'll get it on. But not before I try to talk some sense into this rabid grizzly bear that has been taunting Western PA. I don't have any clean shirts, so I'm just going to make one out of these old bloody steaks I have lying around. Then go sleep near its cave. I'm gonna guzzle a shitload of medicated cough syrup too, just so I am calm."
Basically Ben, you can either truly be safe, and keep winding up in the end zone during the Super Bowl and guarantee that you're grandchildren will never have to work, or you can keep riding your cycle and watch the game from the confines of a wheelchair at a tavern, telling every one how awesome you once were while looking around for spare dimes and/or teeth under the jukebox.
TENNIS
McEnroe was gushing over Federer during the first set of the French Open final. Mats Wilander's comments:
"Nadal is the first player to challenge Federer in any way. After the first set today, Hewitt would have thrown in the towel, Roddick would have thrown in the towel. Everyone says Federer is too good, and he is too good, but they don't have the balls that Nadal has. After the first set Nadal says if you play the way you played the first set then it's true you are the greatest..."
"Federer is a fighter and he should know he has the game to win the French Open. Whether he has the game to beat Nadal at the French Open is another question, but let's hope he doesn't pull a Pete Sampras and (that) he keeps coming back because he's fun to watch — he's the most fun player to watch."
"When you don't care that's when you come up with no balls. I think Roger Federer, today, unfortunately came out with no balls. The first set was a very aggressive in terms of shot making, in terms of hitting the shot, but it was not an aggressive mind set. It was like 'Whoa, let me see what happens when I hit it.' And it goes in and it goes in and it goes in and it goes in in the whole set. It took two points in the second set and that was finished. It was over, it was never going to come back again...He should have realized in the second set, surely, after two games 'Wow I'm not hitting the ball quite as well let me try going back to the game plan', which surely couldn't have been staying at the baseline as much as he did because if that was the game plan then he should have been getting another game plan, really. So I think he choked because I don't believe he thinks he can beat Nadal from the baseline. I can't imagine that. Because if he can't beat him from the baseline on hard courts then he can't beat him from the baseline on clay. That's crazy."
"Unfortunately for Federer, I think what happened is he hit the ball so well early that he forget about the game plan. That's really must what have had to have happened."
"I'd much rather watch Federer move than Nadal move, Federer is so smooth. He's unbelievable."
"He's not the best player ever, not by a long shot yet. You face him (Federer) against Jimmy Connors and I don't know that he's going to beat Jimmy Connors for two reasons here (Wilander points to groin)....Sports is about balls and about heart and you don't find too many champions in any sport in the the world without heart or balls. Against Nadal they shrink to a very small size and it's not once. Federer is going to win one in 10 (times) from the baseline against Nadal."
_________________________________________
Art in Europe.
Devastated by USA World Cup team's first-round loss, nation grounds to a halt.
Why Doesn't my Code get its own movie and book? by Sam Morse
Ben Roethlisberger is out of hospital. Apparently Roethlisberger means idiot in Pittsburghese.
"He [Cowher] talked about being a risk-taker and I'm not really a risk-taker. I'm pretty conservative and laid back, but the big thing is to just be careful," Roethlisberger said at the time. "I'll just continue to be careful. I told him we don't ever ride alone, we always ride in a group of people, and I think it makes it even more safe." said Roethlisberger.
from fittedsweats.blogspot.com:
Sorry. I realize this is everywhere by now. He said the above in reference to not wearing a helmet when he rides his motorcycle. I guess trading a career in professional football for good old fashioned brain damage (not mutually exclusive btw) is cool.
That's like saying "I'll be more careful when I hold lit matches near my penis. The fire can't really get that hot. Plus my penis is covered up with this thick rag that I've gotten really wet with gasoline. Shouldn't be a big deal. Then I think I will give a truck driver a small mountain of crystal meth, and I will put on my rollerblades and ski behind his truck. I'll do it in the summer, so it isn't so icy out on the highway. I don't take risks. Then I'm gonna start my lawn mower, and flip it over cause I need to get a good look at how the blade spins. But I don't want to disturb anyone, so I'll take it about 75 miles from the nearest hospital, and I'll throw my cellphone into the creek beforehand so it doesn't get chopped up. I'll probably make love to some Thai shemale prostitutes before that, but I won't use a condom. That would ruin it. They've also told me that they like to make cardhouses using credit cards, so I sent them all of mine, and when they get bored they'll just come over and we'll get it on. But not before I try to talk some sense into this rabid grizzly bear that has been taunting Western PA. I don't have any clean shirts, so I'm just going to make one out of these old bloody steaks I have lying around. Then go sleep near its cave. I'm gonna guzzle a shitload of medicated cough syrup too, just so I am calm."
Basically Ben, you can either truly be safe, and keep winding up in the end zone during the Super Bowl and guarantee that you're grandchildren will never have to work, or you can keep riding your cycle and watch the game from the confines of a wheelchair at a tavern, telling every one how awesome you once were while looking around for spare dimes and/or teeth under the jukebox.
TENNIS
McEnroe was gushing over Federer during the first set of the French Open final. Mats Wilander's comments:
"Nadal is the first player to challenge Federer in any way. After the first set today, Hewitt would have thrown in the towel, Roddick would have thrown in the towel. Everyone says Federer is too good, and he is too good, but they don't have the balls that Nadal has. After the first set Nadal says if you play the way you played the first set then it's true you are the greatest..."
"Federer is a fighter and he should know he has the game to win the French Open. Whether he has the game to beat Nadal at the French Open is another question, but let's hope he doesn't pull a Pete Sampras and (that) he keeps coming back because he's fun to watch — he's the most fun player to watch."
"When you don't care that's when you come up with no balls. I think Roger Federer, today, unfortunately came out with no balls. The first set was a very aggressive in terms of shot making, in terms of hitting the shot, but it was not an aggressive mind set. It was like 'Whoa, let me see what happens when I hit it.' And it goes in and it goes in and it goes in and it goes in in the whole set. It took two points in the second set and that was finished. It was over, it was never going to come back again...He should have realized in the second set, surely, after two games 'Wow I'm not hitting the ball quite as well let me try going back to the game plan', which surely couldn't have been staying at the baseline as much as he did because if that was the game plan then he should have been getting another game plan, really. So I think he choked because I don't believe he thinks he can beat Nadal from the baseline. I can't imagine that. Because if he can't beat him from the baseline on hard courts then he can't beat him from the baseline on clay. That's crazy."
"Unfortunately for Federer, I think what happened is he hit the ball so well early that he forget about the game plan. That's really must what have had to have happened."
"I'd much rather watch Federer move than Nadal move, Federer is so smooth. He's unbelievable."
"He's not the best player ever, not by a long shot yet. You face him (Federer) against Jimmy Connors and I don't know that he's going to beat Jimmy Connors for two reasons here (Wilander points to groin)....Sports is about balls and about heart and you don't find too many champions in any sport in the the world without heart or balls. Against Nadal they shrink to a very small size and it's not once. Federer is going to win one in 10 (times) from the baseline against Nadal."
_________________________________________
Art in Europe.
Devastated by USA World Cup team's first-round loss, nation grounds to a halt.
Why Doesn't my Code get its own movie and book? by Sam Morse
posted by D @ 10:24 AM
0 comments
6.14.2006
R.E.M. VIDEOS
LOW - R.E.M.
(innovative. uses a group of paintings from the University of Georgia Art Department)
E-BOW THE LETTER - R.E.M.
(i've always liked the idea of hanging lights on my wall like this.)
CRUSH WITH EYELINER - R.E.M.
(captures the swagger of this song well. spike jonze is the best video director of our time. interestingly the video reminds me of lost in translation, made by spike's wife at the time, sofia coppola)
RADIO FREE EUROPE - R.E.M.
(1983 -- TV debut. peter buck's moves alway make me laugh. they haven't changed in 25 years.)
BE MINE - R.E.M. and THOM YORKE
(wow -- hadn't seen this before)
MAN ON THE MOON - R.E.M. and BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
LOW - R.E.M.
(innovative. uses a group of paintings from the University of Georgia Art Department)
E-BOW THE LETTER - R.E.M.
(i've always liked the idea of hanging lights on my wall like this.)
CRUSH WITH EYELINER - R.E.M.
(captures the swagger of this song well. spike jonze is the best video director of our time. interestingly the video reminds me of lost in translation, made by spike's wife at the time, sofia coppola)
RADIO FREE EUROPE - R.E.M.
(1983 -- TV debut. peter buck's moves alway make me laugh. they haven't changed in 25 years.)
BE MINE - R.E.M. and THOM YORKE
(wow -- hadn't seen this before)
MAN ON THE MOON - R.E.M. and BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
posted by D @ 12:32 PM
0 comments
FILM
Down in the Valley
Stylusmagazine.com
Talking to NPR about his role as out-of-place modern cowboy Harlan Carruthers in Down in the Valley, the actor Edward Norton commented that “modern life entombs us and drives us to seek ways to start over.” Starting over is central to the myth of the Western, of course, and never far below the surface of any American story of reinvention—so powerful that it almost makes films like Malick’s The New World prequels. Norton, also a producer for this film, reportedly spent many hours with writer-director David Jacobson watching classic Westerns. So his Harlan undergoes a kind of deranged hyper-reinvention that is about taking the Western in the wrong way.
Claiming he’s just arrived in L.A. from South Dakota, the 30-ish Harlan takes up with 15-year-old Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood). When she invites him to the beach, he quits his job to go. Soon he’ll lose his lodging and the remnants of his shaky, patched-together self over her too. Tobe has Harlan’s pants off as soon as she gets inside his seedy kitchenette. If Harlan is a time-bomb, Tobe is a handful. In one scene she throws a tantrum that requires her sheriff’s officer father, Wade (David Morse), to restrain her, reminiscent of the harrowing climactic scene in Wood’s 2003 breakout film Thirteen. But Harlan’s stories crumble, as Wade is sure they will, and Tobe pulls back from him on her own. Not soon enough: Harlan shoots her in an impulse terrifying for its very brevity and takes off with her little brother Lonnie into the hills. Wade pursues them on horseback to a bloody showdown.
Well, unsurprisingly Harlan isn’t from South Dakota. He’s from just down the coast—Dan something, an identity so insubstantial that we barely catch his name or the town he’s really from. In this light, that he’s never been to the beach until Tobe takes him suggests the dreary confines of a life he’s tried to leave.
Despite the easy reference to Scorcese’s Taxi Driver—both Harlan and Travis Bickle practice their fast-draw with Colt .45’s in front of a mirror—the setting here is distinctly West coast, and the tone cinematically older that 1970’s disaffection. Harlan reminds more of Lee Marvin’s portrayals of young punks in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Budd Boetticher’s recently resurrected Seven Men From Now. Despite his capacity for belligerence, Harlan’s painstaking practice is about finding someplace to fit in. Harlan would like to be part of Tobe’s family, with a father who plays guitar and a little brother he could teach stuff to. When Tobe refuses to run off with him, Harlan quickly takes Lonnie instead, and it’s almost a more fitting match.
Down in the Valley also presents another version of modern life’s “entombment” than the closed walls, dark hallways, and dead-end alleys of New York City—a softer, deceptively open version. The first sound we hear is the whiz of traffic on the San Fernando Valley freeway. Jacobson puts Harlan, Tobe, and Lonnie near these freeways right away, where they can see those round, brown California hills and that large California sky through the mesh fences and the netting of overhead wires. This is urban sprawl so rapid and haphazard that it’s left scraps of land like the ridges above the freeway and the tiny pocket beyond where old Charley (Bruce Dern) keeps a few horses. The freeways provide the illusion that you’re going somewhere, that you could get away—a constant provocation to the restless. Of course our cowpoke’s job is pumping gas, and of course Harlan and Tobe first glimpse is of one another through a car window—which for many Americans doubles as a sort of portable, street-level movie screen.
Down in the Valley boasts always competent, sometimes excellent acting. As Tobe (“short for October”), Evan Rachel Wood is convincing both losing her head and coming back to her senses. She has three films opening in the next year, including the screen version of Augustin Burrough’s Running With Scissors, and this movie is reason to anticipate any future work she does. After years mired in TV type-casting and mostly forgettable films, David Morse deserves good character roles like this more often. Rory Culkin gives a finely directed, restrained performance as the watchful, susceptible little brother, Lonnie. Jacobson has fashioned particularly queasy possibilities for this youngest character. After target practice with Harlan, Lonnie could easily shoot someone. And in Harlan’s coaching in overcoming fear of the dark, we glimpse how the bond between John Muhammad and a younger John Lee Malvo might produce the DC snipers.
Edward Norton’s Harlan is remarkable. He’s famously made his bread and butter since Primal Fear out of playing roles as much about performance itself as other aspects of character motivation. From their collaboration Jacobson has tailored his plot so that the film’s action follows and enlarges this by-now resonant side to Norton’s own work and so makes it the film’s heart. Just as Harlan is not what he claims, Down in the Valley’s plot works as a series of junctures at which we don’t know if what we see is what we get. We often share this uncertainty with those on-screen. When old Charley accuses Harlan of stealing the white horse, we wonder along with Tobe whether Charley’s playing a joke or off his medication. When Harlan shoots Tobe and later himself, the camera abruptly cuts away each time. When Harlan and Lonnie stumble onto a Western film set at dawn, Harlan’s eyes wide with wonder—for a disorienting moment, maybe this is, who knows, a dream sequence?
Mostly Jacobson succeeds with—and survives, perhaps—these swerves into uncertainty; this film is far more engaging emotionally than its obvious recent mate, Wim Wenders’ disappointing Don’t Come Knocking. There is a trace of unwieldiness here, as when a singer’s voice isn’t quite under control. And Down in the Valley presents conventions from the Western movie in pretty distilled form. Both Harlan and Wade resort to guns. Harlan’s a man on a white horse. When he hides it in the garage of a tract house, the horse tries to kick its way out, and so on. Yes, clunky. But part of what I like about that hokey movie set that the characters pass through is the dimension it adds to the housing tract construction site—Americans are still building sets upon which to enact modern life, still practicing so we look right.
Toronto's new opera house opens to the public today:
Down in the Valley
Stylusmagazine.com
Talking to NPR about his role as out-of-place modern cowboy Harlan Carruthers in Down in the Valley, the actor Edward Norton commented that “modern life entombs us and drives us to seek ways to start over.” Starting over is central to the myth of the Western, of course, and never far below the surface of any American story of reinvention—so powerful that it almost makes films like Malick’s The New World prequels. Norton, also a producer for this film, reportedly spent many hours with writer-director David Jacobson watching classic Westerns. So his Harlan undergoes a kind of deranged hyper-reinvention that is about taking the Western in the wrong way.
Claiming he’s just arrived in L.A. from South Dakota, the 30-ish Harlan takes up with 15-year-old Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood). When she invites him to the beach, he quits his job to go. Soon he’ll lose his lodging and the remnants of his shaky, patched-together self over her too. Tobe has Harlan’s pants off as soon as she gets inside his seedy kitchenette. If Harlan is a time-bomb, Tobe is a handful. In one scene she throws a tantrum that requires her sheriff’s officer father, Wade (David Morse), to restrain her, reminiscent of the harrowing climactic scene in Wood’s 2003 breakout film Thirteen. But Harlan’s stories crumble, as Wade is sure they will, and Tobe pulls back from him on her own. Not soon enough: Harlan shoots her in an impulse terrifying for its very brevity and takes off with her little brother Lonnie into the hills. Wade pursues them on horseback to a bloody showdown.
Well, unsurprisingly Harlan isn’t from South Dakota. He’s from just down the coast—Dan something, an identity so insubstantial that we barely catch his name or the town he’s really from. In this light, that he’s never been to the beach until Tobe takes him suggests the dreary confines of a life he’s tried to leave.
Despite the easy reference to Scorcese’s Taxi Driver—both Harlan and Travis Bickle practice their fast-draw with Colt .45’s in front of a mirror—the setting here is distinctly West coast, and the tone cinematically older that 1970’s disaffection. Harlan reminds more of Lee Marvin’s portrayals of young punks in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Budd Boetticher’s recently resurrected Seven Men From Now. Despite his capacity for belligerence, Harlan’s painstaking practice is about finding someplace to fit in. Harlan would like to be part of Tobe’s family, with a father who plays guitar and a little brother he could teach stuff to. When Tobe refuses to run off with him, Harlan quickly takes Lonnie instead, and it’s almost a more fitting match.
Down in the Valley also presents another version of modern life’s “entombment” than the closed walls, dark hallways, and dead-end alleys of New York City—a softer, deceptively open version. The first sound we hear is the whiz of traffic on the San Fernando Valley freeway. Jacobson puts Harlan, Tobe, and Lonnie near these freeways right away, where they can see those round, brown California hills and that large California sky through the mesh fences and the netting of overhead wires. This is urban sprawl so rapid and haphazard that it’s left scraps of land like the ridges above the freeway and the tiny pocket beyond where old Charley (Bruce Dern) keeps a few horses. The freeways provide the illusion that you’re going somewhere, that you could get away—a constant provocation to the restless. Of course our cowpoke’s job is pumping gas, and of course Harlan and Tobe first glimpse is of one another through a car window—which for many Americans doubles as a sort of portable, street-level movie screen.
Down in the Valley boasts always competent, sometimes excellent acting. As Tobe (“short for October”), Evan Rachel Wood is convincing both losing her head and coming back to her senses. She has three films opening in the next year, including the screen version of Augustin Burrough’s Running With Scissors, and this movie is reason to anticipate any future work she does. After years mired in TV type-casting and mostly forgettable films, David Morse deserves good character roles like this more often. Rory Culkin gives a finely directed, restrained performance as the watchful, susceptible little brother, Lonnie. Jacobson has fashioned particularly queasy possibilities for this youngest character. After target practice with Harlan, Lonnie could easily shoot someone. And in Harlan’s coaching in overcoming fear of the dark, we glimpse how the bond between John Muhammad and a younger John Lee Malvo might produce the DC snipers.
Edward Norton’s Harlan is remarkable. He’s famously made his bread and butter since Primal Fear out of playing roles as much about performance itself as other aspects of character motivation. From their collaboration Jacobson has tailored his plot so that the film’s action follows and enlarges this by-now resonant side to Norton’s own work and so makes it the film’s heart. Just as Harlan is not what he claims, Down in the Valley’s plot works as a series of junctures at which we don’t know if what we see is what we get. We often share this uncertainty with those on-screen. When old Charley accuses Harlan of stealing the white horse, we wonder along with Tobe whether Charley’s playing a joke or off his medication. When Harlan shoots Tobe and later himself, the camera abruptly cuts away each time. When Harlan and Lonnie stumble onto a Western film set at dawn, Harlan’s eyes wide with wonder—for a disorienting moment, maybe this is, who knows, a dream sequence?
Mostly Jacobson succeeds with—and survives, perhaps—these swerves into uncertainty; this film is far more engaging emotionally than its obvious recent mate, Wim Wenders’ disappointing Don’t Come Knocking. There is a trace of unwieldiness here, as when a singer’s voice isn’t quite under control. And Down in the Valley presents conventions from the Western movie in pretty distilled form. Both Harlan and Wade resort to guns. Harlan’s a man on a white horse. When he hides it in the garage of a tract house, the horse tries to kick its way out, and so on. Yes, clunky. But part of what I like about that hokey movie set that the characters pass through is the dimension it adds to the housing tract construction site—Americans are still building sets upon which to enact modern life, still practicing so we look right.
Toronto's new opera house opens to the public today:
posted by D @ 11:54 AM
1 comments
