A Grand Illusion

I’m in agreement with Pauline Kael that, with the wondrous exception of L’Avventura, the rest of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s oeuvre doesn’t quite hold up. A montage — like the one the Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Biases played to a befuddled audience when he received the honorary Oscar in 1995 — seems the best way of honoring him: Jeanne Moreau’s night walk in La Notte, her senses alive to the excitement and terror of city life; Alain Delon’s feline torpor in Eclisse; that waiting-for-a-Woody-Allen-parody tennis match between mimes in Blow-Up.

Thanks to Sony Picture Classics, I got a chance to rescreen The Passenger, his second and last American film. Yawning loudly upon watching the crappy videocassette edition that was extant in the early ’90s, I was riveted this time by Antonioni’s beautiful, unsettling juxtaposition of man and architecture, of man and landscape, whether it’s David Locke (Jack Nicholson) sharing a smoke with a Tuareg nomad in North Africa, or standing before an Andalusian mountain, gradually accepting the consequences of his identity-theft (Clair Denis has obviously paid close attention). A Borges-ian riddle, The Passenger is also — if not just — a swanky head trip. You can take the identity swap folderol seriously or not; Antonioni’s so genial a director that while you’re arguing about the film’s metaphysical import he’s already moved on to photographing the quotidian (a girl chewing bubble gum, a man pushing a bike up a mountain) with an affectless curiosity that David Lynch no doubt admired. Affectlessness does have its limits; we should be grateful that, despite Kael’s ministrations, the zombie-like Maria Schneider never did become the international icon for aging male lions which Last Tango in Paris positioned her as. As for Jack, with superstardom awaiting him (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was released a few months later), his commitment to the project never flags. He doesn’t do much but walk, brood and frown puzzlingly at Schneider (no wonder we love Jack: he’s human like the rest of us), but this is one of his more unheralded quiet performances: his character’s self-contempt oozes from every pore.

Nicholson’s commentary track, to which you can listen without cutting into your film time since there’s so little dialogue, is a model of intelligence and concision (and stamina; Jack sounds like he’s got strep throat). If L’Avventura intimidates you, as it should (two hour-plus rendering of the spiritual isolation of vapid rich people), The Passenger is an excellent condensation of the Antonioni style.

I’m in agreement with Pauline Kael that, with the wondrous exception of L’Avventura, the rest of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s oeuvre doesn’t quite hold up. A montage — like the one the Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Biases played to a befuddled audience when he received the honorary Oscar in 1995 — seems the best way of honoring him: Jeanne Moreau’s night walk in La Notte, her senses alive to the excitement and terror of city life; Alain Delon’s feline torpor in Eclisse; that waiting-for-a-Woody-Allen-parody tennis match between mimes in Blow-Up.

Thanks to Sony Picture Classics, I got a chance to rescreen The Passenger, his second and last American film. Yawning loudly upon watching the crappy videocassette edition that was extant in the early ’90s, I was riveted this time by Antonioni’s beautiful, unsettling juxtaposition of man and architecture, of man and landscape, whether it’s David Locke (Jack Nicholson) sharing a smoke with a Tuareg nomad in North Africa, or standing before an Andalusian mountain, gradually accepting the consequences of his identity-theft (Clair Denis has obviously paid close attention). A Borges-ian riddle, The Passenger is also — if not just — a swanky head trip. You can take the identity swap folderol seriously or not; Antonioni’s so genial a director that while you’re arguing about the film’s metaphysical import he’s already moved on to photographing the quotidian (a girl chewing bubble gum, a man pushing a bike up a mountain) with an affectless curiosity that David Lynch no doubt admired. Affectlessness does have its limits; we should be grateful that, despite Kael’s ministrations, the zombie-like Maria Schneider never did become the international icon for aging male lions which Last Tango in Paris positioned her as. As for Jack, with superstardom awaiting him (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was released a few months later), his commitment to the project never flags. He doesn’t do much but walk, brood and frown puzzlingly at Schneider (no wonder we love Jack: he’s human like the rest of us), but this is one of his more unheralded quiet performances: his character’s self-contempt oozes from every pore.

Nicholson’s commentary track, to which you can listen without cutting into your film time since there’s so little dialogue, is a model of intelligence and concision (and stamina; Jack sounds like he’s got strep throat). If L’Avventura intimidates you, as it should (two hour-plus rendering of the spiritual isolation of vapid rich people), The Passenger is an excellent condensation of the Antonioni style.

Daring the posters at The Corner to defy him, Sean Wilentz (author of the mammoth The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln) penned an article in the new Rolling Stone entitled, “The Worst President in History.”

I know. This is the same magazine which cooed delightedly when Bill Clinton wished that the Constitution didn’t set a term limit for the Chief Executive so that he could run for a third term. But the catalogue of failures makes for grim reading, and, Wilentz suggests, it ain’t gonna get better:

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — [James] Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, [Herbert] Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

Meanwhile I looked at smilin’ old Tony Snow, the White House’s new press secretary and someone I’ve always sorta liked, and wonder how he’s going to give coherence to an adminstration that ain’t got none anymore.

X-Men star Sir Ian McKellen bitched that his character Magneto doesn’t get enough nookie — with Professor Charles Xavier.

“He hasn’t been given a love line, which I think is a pity. It would be wonderful if the camera hovered over Magneto’s bed, to discover him making love to Professor X.”

The idea sounds delicious in theory, of course; but it would be unfair on Magneto, since Professor X can manipulate him into orgasm.

Since I watch more films these days than I listen to music (D.W. Griffith would have loved Netflix), I want to write more about them. I’ve published a couple of reviews in Stylus already, and I’m going to be contributing to a new section called Scenes, the film counterpart to Seconds, in which a writer “dissects a moment in song.”

For my first entry I chose Ernest Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), as close to perfection as romantic comedy gets, with a tone and glamour as alien to cinema as David Bowie’s ethos was to most rock music. Get thee to Criterion’s special edition, like, now.

Regarding Alexander O’Neal’s Hearsay, Justin can hear little beside affirmation of what he disliked about late ’80s R&B: “Hearsay doesn’t separate itself from everything I wouldn’t listen to when it came out.” Meanwhile I have no hesitation in affirming its status as an all-time fave, probably in my top 10 — quite an achievement considering that I only heard the album last December.

Elsewhere Josh reminds us of the eccentric Janet Jackson-Jam-Lewis troika. How does someone so vocally innocuous convince us over the course of five albums that she’s a Superbowled sex kitten with aberrant notions of what makes a good time?

Regarding Alexander O’Neal’s Hearsay, Justin can hear little beside affirmation of what he disliked about late ’80s R&B: “Hearsay doesn’t separate itself from everything I wouldn’t listen to when it came out.” Meanwhile I have no hesitation in affirming its status as an all-time fave, probably in my top 10 — quite an achievement considering that I only heard the album last December.

Elsewhere Josh reminds us of the eccentric Janet Jackson-Jam-Lewis troika. How does someone so vocally innocuous convince us over the course of five albums that she’s a Superbowled sex kitten with aberrant notions of what makes a good time?

As producers of and songwriters for Cherrelle, the S.O.S. Band, the Human League, Alexander O’Neal, Karyn White, New Edition, Mary J. Blige and, of course, their greatest collaborator Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis would probably make my list as the best creators of chartbound pop music of the last 20-odd years.

Stylus Magazine had dedicated the whole week to Jam & Lewis, beginning yesterday with Thomas Inskeep’s fine omnibus essay and Jeff Siegel and Mallory O’Donnell’s takes on Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” and New Edition’s magnificent “If It Isn’t Love.” Today I re-assess Jam-Lewis’ work on Human League’s misbegotten Crash.

Tomorrow: two very different analyses (by Justin Cober-Lake and myself) of Jam-Lewis’ greatest non-Janet Jackson opus: Alexander O’Neal’s Hearsay. Look for: a panel review of assorted Jam-Lewis goodies, a comprehensive study of their association with Janet, their post-Janet highlights; and, on Friday, the English perspective, by Marcello Carlin.

Neil Young’s set to record an anti-Bush album. One tune is rather cryptically titled “Impeach the President.” The music world holds its collective breath. Neil initially liked Reagan, you know.

I cannot describe the rush provided by the Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Happy When It Rains” when driving home on a Saturday night with a bellyful of wine and good eats.

I cannot describe the rush provided by the Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Happy When It Rains” when driving home on a Saturday night with a bellyful of wine and good eats.

Morrissey, Ringleader of the Tormentors

I’m euphoric that Moz has finally owned up to liking cock; now he can go get some instead of indenturing poor Tony Visconti to enliven plodding midtempo songs whose lyrical explicitness their creator mistakes for honesty but is really the flipside of a middle aged pussyhound yielding to his urges. And we all know how gross that can be without the requisite irony. Anthony: “I used to laugh about boomer artists given attention long after their sell-through date, but the `four stars for Storyville‘ impulse doesn’t seem so generation-specific now.”

Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, Show Your Bones

At first this album dragged. It was my fault: all these guys got from me in 2003 was a polite thumbs-up, while under my breath I mumbled something about the half-life of postpunk referents. I was convinced they wanted to make a thick-sounding rock album – what else could they do? But I wasn’t convinced they could make a good one. So what if “Gold Lion” is Sleater Kinney-meets-Love-&-Rockets? Not when Karen O wants to belt like Chrissie Hynde, always a good thing (on “Cheated Hearts” she even mimics Chrissie’s catch-in-the-throat). The kids won’t download “Dudley” when they need a ringtone like they did for “Maps,” and I know why: an admission that partying destroys even the most perfect love is not the message teenagers want to hear. Or hot young bands. So I give the Yeah’s the credit for saying yeah.

Ghostface, Fishscale

He loves pussy almost as much as Morrissey loves explosive kegs between his legs, loves high-quality coke. He still finds time to hang with the Wu, hates it when black youth get away with, ahem, murder (it’s their mama’s fault: the kids don’t get spanked enough). His ever-more-surreal anecdotes toughened by terse backbeats, most clocking in under three minutes (”Underwater” is creepy like PJ Harvey circa 1995), Ghostface will never blow up like Kanye, but this knowledge doesn’t embitter him – hell, if it did, we might have something even more compelling than the album of the year.

Rush, “Ghost of a Chance”

My 17-year-old self, dutifully listening to my best friend’s CD copy of Chronicles after being dragged to catch the Roll the Bones tour, would have blanched at 31-year-old me tearing up the second time the chorus to this 1992 ballad-by-numbers comes around. Unmoved by the sub-Zep material and malnourished album concepts of their ’70s work (what, lyricist/drummer Neil Peart thought dystopian reveries made better cover art than ELP’s Tarkus?), I’m surprised by how compelling their ’80s stuff is, when Alex Lifeson’s quasi-Police skank did Andy Summers better than Andy Summers and the lyrics – in essence Peart’s Guide to Ayn Rand– acquire touching resonance; they’re aimed for the kids, and if it helps them get through high school, hey, I’ll distribute copies of Power Windows myself.

Despite what you may have read, invading Iran is not on the Bush adminstration’s agenda. It’s got other worlds to conquer, of which the most recalcitrant is the classical music world. Ask Condi and Yo Yo Ma.

I can’t think of a single issue more dull than “immigration reform” – a total non-starter. Here’s Fareed Zakariah’s smart take.

I can’t think of a single issue more dull than “immigration reform” – a total non-starter. Here’s Fareed Zakariah’s smart take.