A Grand Illusion

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

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

Anybody heard it yet? I’m unconvinced by “Black Sweat.”

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

The Kooks – Naive

They know that I know and we all know that naiveté’s got nothing to do with chicken-scratch guitars and cute accents.
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Morrissey – You Have Killed Me

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

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

Massive Attack – Live With Me

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

Prince – Black Sweat

Now that it’s supercool to admit to buying his new records, what does the little guy do? Layer his matchless falsetto over a backing track Eddie Murphy would have jump, jived, and wailed on in a 1982 episode of “Saturday Night Live.”
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Hell hath no fury like Randy Quaid scorned:

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

Quaid, the lawsuit alleges, was hoodwinked:

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

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

Hell hath no fury like Randy Quaid scorned:

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

Quaid, the lawsuit alleges, was hoodwinked:

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

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

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

Anyway, me on Rosanne Cash in The Village Voice.

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

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

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

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

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

Link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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