A Grand Illusion

You know how Procter and Gamble executives proudly donate 70% of their paychecks to Satan, who collects (presumably in person) every Halloween? The rumor that Tabitha King has been doing most of her husband’s writings is about as old, and a lot more credible.
The conspiracy theory camp should have a field day with “Lisey’s Story,” Stephen King’s most recent (and most self-conscious) attempt to write “serious literature.”

“Lisey’s Story” is a wind-beneath-my-wings story about the over-looked wife of a famous horror writer coming to terms with, well, whatever it is that chicks come to term with in chick lit. Her place in the world? Her ability to roar? Who knows?

A reverse “Bag of Bones”, the book exhibits most of late-King’s bad tics: descriptions that go on and on and on. And on. Static stream-of-consciouness passages that would leave Joyce begging for a werewolf to jump out. But the deal breaker, the real deal-breaker in “Lisey’s Story,” are the smuckings. See, Lisey and her husband share this cutesy husband-and-wife language in which smuck replaces fuck. This is toootally smucking cute, the first two smucking times it happens, but then it smucking begins to grate as you realize it is not going to smucking stop until the last smucking page. And there are a smucking LOT of THOSE.

King is seldom less than entertaining, (hey, I’m a fan), and there are a lot of things to recommend the book, but 5,673 smuckings might just be too many. I suspect “serious” reviewers might throw it a bone: “There are no vampires in THIS one! Now we can read without guilt.”

But Stevie, I liked you because when everyone else was writing “serious literature” you were writing about wonderfully unserious zombies. What hapenned, man?

An email exchange with Thomas last week and this ILM thread inspired me to unearth my cassette copy of The Bangles’ Different Light. Great they weren’t, but that their Billboard ambition kept them from greatness is touching in its way; and despite the number of failed mainstream accomodations there was something admirable about this California girl-band’s determination to bring the work of Alex Chilton, Prince/Christopher, Paul Simon, and Jules Shear to shopping malls and Columbia House memberships. Critics slight Different Light because the once-is-enough gimmick “Walk Like An Egyptian” diverted attention from album tracks that failed to match the best of the preceding All Over the Place (1984); but …”Egyptian” and “Manic Monday” coax the likes of “September Gurls” and “If She She Knew What She Wants” into revealing their considerable charms. Different Light epitomizes the mid-eighties dialectic: how do you wrest art from accomodation this brazen? As solid as All Over The Place is, Different Light’s tensions — how it revolts and beguiles — never resolve with the satisfying click we experienced with its predecessor; it’s constantly asking us to examine our relationship with the term “sell-out” (I tried to find contemporary parallels and came up with Celebrity Skin; too meta maybe?) . The title track is a tetchy manifesto, its harmonies and guitar fury compensating for a flaccid chorus. “Following” remains the album’s sleeper: written and sung by bassist Michael Steele, it’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” recast as a threat uttered by a big-haired, dowdy, husky-voiced young woman who is herself negotiating a neutral space between her boyfriend’s disinterest and intermittent lust.

But “If She Knew What She Wants” is a jangle-pop marvel, superior to anything on any Rain Parade album or even R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction, despite a synth part gunking the 12-strings and Debbi Peterson’s drums. Hoffs has never recovered from the dismal farrago that was 1989’s Number One hit “Eternal Flame,” in which she overplayed the charm; she came on like the classic clinging-vine girlfriend who affected coyness just so’s she could get your promise ring. But there’s no distance between Hoffs’ delivery and the lyrics of “If She Knew What She Wants”; she’s so arch and knowing you can practically see the thought-bubble. What is on paper a rather smutty joke intended to be sung by a man becomes in The Bangles’ hands a coded message whose irony indicts the writer and his locker-room bull. With Debbi and Vicki Peterson providing super harmonies, this is every bit as potent an example of we-got-the-beat female solidarity as The Go-Go’s “This Town” or “Our Lips Are Sealed.” (That The Bangles had the nerve to subsequently write and record “Eternal Flame” flashes anew, as Philip Larkin wrote, to refresh and horrify.)

PS: Their cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter” smokes. Simon & Garfunkel who?

To seperate Annette Bening’s performance from the film in which it plays so central a role is impossible; context is all, alas.

I haven’t read Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors, which has remained on the best-sellers list in its hardcover and paperback incarnations for the last three years. Let me make a crass deduction: some fraction of its success is due to the American public’s hunger for the palliating polysyllabic jargon which has tainted our language as much as it’s helped the public understand what ails them. It soothes, it medicates, retained by the body instead of being excreted or pissed out.

The film doesn’t take Bening’s hysterics seriously; it doesn’t take any of its characters seriously. Absent a dose of the kind of wise irony that mediates derision and complacency, Running With Scissors anestheticizes its audience with Hollywoodian humanism, in which characters wear mental illness like actors did those little red AIDS bows in the early nineties: the phony solidarity signifies defiance against the straight world; sexuality is merely a universal condition, like halitosis and untrimmed toenails. The film’s purportedly gay protagonist is allowed more chemistry with adopted sister Evan Rachel Wood than with the thirtysomething man (Joseph Fiennes) who deflowers him (in the book Burroughs describes a virtual rape). I felt more sympathy for the monstrous absent father, played with subtly gradated despair by Alec Baldwin (Stephanie Zancharek: “Watching him, I kept thinking of the Delmore Schwartz poem `The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me,’ a lament about the limits, and the clumsiness, of the bodies our spirits are locked up in.”). How does Burroughs escape? By moving to New York City, of course. That director Ryan Murphy doesn’t trouble young Burroughs’ imagination with fantasies of what NYC must be like during the most hedonistic period of the century (the late seventies) is indicative.

The creator of “Nip/Tuck” craves acceptance too, demonstrating his fealty to Hollywood tradition by effacing its own history; like mental illness, it’s enough to simply allude to history for brownie points. It never occurred to Murphy that in casting Jill Clayburgh, the has-been star of the unbelievable but honest An Unmarried Woman, he tipped his hat to an era in which neuroses was at least probed and tested. Running With Scissors casts her as a morose hausfrau who munches on cat food while watching “Dark Shadows.” Refusing makeup in an attempt to look “ugly” in the classic Hollywood way of signaling a comeback (a la Gloria Swanson and Ellen Burstyn), she shows up Bening’s self-congralutatory bravura; and since Clayburgh is such a good sport, she’s given a last scene between her and Joseph Cross that’s Academy Award baiting of the most heinous kind.

Jane Dark’s written the most beautiful description of how Scritti Politti’s White Bread, Black Beer sounds:

It was like the dream of Brian Wilson that Brian himself could never really approach, of an easy listening album that was at the same time a work of genius. And if Scritti was occasionally compelled to murmur the the titles from an entire Run-DMC album in a distantly pretty bridge, or coo angelically to the effect that punks jump up to get beat down, sounding exactly as if he was blessing the beasts or inventing a lullaby for a child who had been dead for two decades, well, this was the sense of the album, though sense was not very much at stake. Something else was, though it was hard to be sure what, exactly, and this mystery was the album’s greatness, or perhaps it was the invention of a previously unknown category of pop music, or the way a voice can trace its own history, and the relation of the individual to history, or how it felt to live in a beautiful and perfectly numb present, at the edge of a hole into which years and things one loved kept falling.

Camille Paglia sits down with Salon for this fearless, contrarian interview. Subjects: “Robo-Hillary,” the Bush administration’s provincialism, Democratic hypocrisy over the Mark Foley page scandal, and Fox News (”what is this shibboleth about Fox as some sort of satanic force in American politics? Get over it!”). A sample:

After three or four days of it, as soon as I heard Foley’s name, I turned the sound off or switched channels. It was gargantuan overkill, and I felt the Democrats were shooting themselves in the foot. I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. When a moralistic, buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people distrust them. Why don’t the Democratic strategists see this? These tactics are extremely foolish. Gay men through history have always been more vulnerable to public hysteria than are lesbians, who — unless they’re out there parading around in all-leather bull-dyke drag — simply fit more easily into the cultural landscape than do gay men, who generally lead a more adventurous, pickup-oriented sex life.

Every critic has his blind spots. Mine was the best-selling male artist since Elvis. Garth Brooks’ “Cold Shoulder” is playing while I type this. Other than “Friends in Low Places” and the Billy Joel cover his catalogue is a mystery to me. Your insights are welcome.

The Boredoms’ music floats in too much amniotic fluid for my taste, but I give them another chance. Josh is conciliatory. Mike Powell is downright generous – and almost converted me.

In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson writes, “A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.” I wish I’d written about Jenny Lewis’ “Rise Up With Fists!” in February; let’s say that it’s taken seven months for me to assess its truths. Most of the songs on Rabbit-Fur Coat range from good to excellent, but the third track is sung in a voice so unwavering and graceful that I can understand why the surrounding tracks carpeted its path with palm fronds*. “What am I fighting for? The cops are at the front door,” Lewis sings. “I can’t escape that way, the windows are in flames.” Imminence as plashless as Lewis’ seeks neither comfort nor escape. She’s as beyond death-or-glory shtick as Joe Strummer was on “This is England.” History isn’t the nightmare from which she can’t awake — the present is. What good are maxims? This is how she feels.

Emerson again: “I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”

*Chrissie Hynde on “Hymn to Her” comes to mind — the dusky tonal control — although Hynde, uncharacteristically, exposes herself to such a degree that her voice dredges painful ambivalences in a line like “Something is lost, something is found” that Lewis has long since abandoned.

I came way late to the party for The Wire, but over the past couple of months my better half and I have knocked out almost the entire first three seasons on DVD, only lacking about three more episodes in season 3 to be fully caught up to the fourth installment. Of course, here is not the place for up-to-the-minute breakdowns of the ongoing campaign, ’cause I’m a cheap bastard and therefore ain’t gonna pay $12 a month to watch season 4 as it happens, especially when I’m only now just catching up.

The only point I’m trying to make here is that watching The Wire has apparently ruined almost every other form of dramatic entertainment for me. I’d swallowed almost every episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit with satisfaction, mollified by its one-and-done approach of putting a neat little bow on the end of every show. Suddenly, however, it seems almost ridiculously tame and rigid (I’m aware it was never exactly the grittiest of shows), the characters never even alluding to the bigger picture of their war on crime except to engage in the occasional awkward swapping of Dem Party talking points. The bad guys are sometimes humanized, sure, but the simple fact that they pretty much never recur ensures we’ll always side with the heroes.

And I know it’s totally unfair to hold a 2 1/2 hour movie against a 40-odd hour show, and I know the film wasn’t necessarily aiming for street-level realism, but even The Departed left me sour to a degree. Perhaps 40 hours of Jack Nicholson’s character would have plumbed fascinating depths, but as it was he verged on coke-and-whore caricature, quoting Joyce and Lennon as twin pillars of an Irish Catholic survivor of the 60s. As complex crime lords go he’s got nothing on Stringer Bell’s frustrated social striving, using Robert’s Rules of Order to govern meetings with street dealers and ultimately realizing his illegal empire can’t buy institutional legitimacy. Likewise, the ways in which Damon and DiCaprio’s occupational pressures hampered their respective trysts with the shrink were nowhere near as gut-wrenching as watching Kima distance herself from her partner and new baby. I thought Baldwin and Wahlberg were the standouts of the entire cast with their verbal pungency and hair-trigger tempers, but that only puts them about dead-level in my book with Rawls and Burrell.

And don’t even get me started on the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the crimes themselves. The use of text messages and calls to “Mom” in order to warn against encroaching police were canny, but had absolutely nothing on The Wire’s ever-evolving games of one-upsmaship between detectives and dealers (cell phones beget pay phones beget burners).

The thing is, I actually quite liked The Departed too. It had plenty of clever moments and I thought Leo was far more distinctive than Alfred apparently does. He’s just no Jimmy McNulty.

Ahistoric, as nutritious as a pink cookie, Marie Antoinette is the biopic that America deserves. Certainly no one could have directed but Sofia Coppola. “I always liked that period of France, the 18th century, the white wigs,”she admitted recently. “I always thought that visually it was an interesting, fun period.”

I take her word for it. Not for Coppola the earnest analogies between epochs that her contemporaries make as rehearsals for Academy Award ceremonies; Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette makes Norma Shearer’s look like Madame Defarge. This is a film of which the Bret Easton Ellis of Less Than Zero would have proud. Dunst is the blank, busty girl dancing to Bow Wow Wow and “Ceremony” in your hometown ’80s club* (snuff makes a dandy substitute for cocaine). How telling that Coppola regards her most famous utterance — “Let them eat cake!” in response to the starving millions clamoring for change — as a distortion attributed to rabble-rousing newspapers. Rousseau is Dunst’s Deepak Chopra, inspiring “soul-searching” of the pastoral kind: the young queen retreats to Triannon to tend lambs with her curly-haired moppet of a daughter; and compared to the bewigged intrigue of which the royal court at Versailles is composed, who could argue? The conclusion is moving in a manner not acknowledged by any of the reviews I’ve read: the emo King Louix XVI (a jowly Jason Schwartzman) and his queen impassively sit at their dinner table while outside the mob calls for their heads. It’s like every eighties movie in which the parents confronted their errant children about throwing a block party while they were on vacation.

This is the kind of film which delivers on the frivolity of its trailer but whose frankly risible aims turn the stomach. It’s not often I declare that I had a great time and hated myself afterwards. It’s Coppola’s most striking film to date, and — for those who go for that kind of thing — the demonstrably auteurist statement her father has (to date) never made.

*Coppola scores the coronation of Louis XVI to The Cure’s “Plainsong”: she reveals the pubescent will-to-power obscured by its huge synth-swell intro. “Mope-rock” feh.

If anyone can confirm whether Ne-Yo composes music as well as lyrics, I’d appreciate it. His thin, high tenor is serviceable; the lyrics find clever Smokey Robinson-esque variations on wolfish vulnerability (he wonders whether “the little wrinkle on your nose when you make your angry face” in “When You’re Mad” excites him in a way that his girlfriend’s laugh doesn’t) and love-man narcissism (pleading his lover to fuck in front of the mirror “so that I can watch you enjoying me” is worthy of Bryan Ferry). The melodies, however, are indelible, which is higher praise than Ne-Yo himself (judging from the album sleeve photos of lyrics jotted on yellow pads) has accepted.

If there’s a better hook I’ve heard all year than the one sweetening “Sexy Love” then I don’t have ears. Never let it be said that Ne-Yo hasn’t studied his Motown collection: the plucked harp hook comes quick and unembellished, there’s call-and-response vocals, a bridge, a chorus, and then the bridge and chorus trade places. Its ooh-ooh-ooh’s recall Jeffrey Osborne’s last pop Top 40 hit, “You Should Be Mine (The Woo Woo Song)” but sung by a serviceable tenor whose anonymity mitigates the rather gross post-coital admission (Ne-Yo covered her in jizz and she liked it); a better singer might have massaged his ego all over this*. He’s like a teenager who’s become infatuated with his girlfriend after they make love for the first time — a rare breed as we all know, since our first instinct is to head for the hills. If nothing else on In My Own Words is at “Sexy Love”’s level, give Ne-Yo credit for fulfilling the promise he made to his audience on “So Sick” — he wrote his own classic and (almost) made his own album as irrelevant as the insincere chart fodder he’s quick to dismiss (”So Sick” is Ne-Yo’s “Panic,” except he’s peeved while Morrisey’s pissy).

* El Debarge an exception, maybe?

The Pet Shop Boys have become such a savvy live act that these days their strengths and weaknesses on record dovetail with their performances. Their kind of dance music is too elegant (”tweed-thump,” let’s call it) for the staid venues they often book; Neil Tennant’s voice has grown increasingly wan; their non-existent American profile suppresses audience enthusiasm for their post-1988 material. (I was helpless with embarassment when the crowd returned to their seats as “Left To My Own Devices” segued into “I’m With Stupid.”)

At the Jackie Gleason Center for the Performing Arts (really), the Boys mixed rarely played singles and album tracks (”Heart,” “Shopping,” and “Dreaming of the Queen” made welcome appearances) with tracks from current album Fundamental; “Minimal” and “Integral” thumped like new classics. I blame budget cuts for the second-rate dancers and Tennant’s mere half-dozen costume changes (big points for the Russian kommissar getup he sported for “The Sodom & Gomorrah Show,” which, incidentally, got the Andrew Lloyd Webber treatment it deserved). Tennant, wearing a top hat and jacket like David Copperfield’s Mr. Murdstone for most of the evening, radiated bonhomie and slyness, the best kind of funny uncle. Age hasn’t withered Chris Lowe’s blankly sexy miming at the keyboard or his way with a yellow raincoat.

Bah humbug to the caviling. The audience represented Miami at its best: Euro muscle-queens, fag hags, and the occasional hetero couple gingerly mouthing lyrics. It drowned out Tennant during the impressive muscle-flexing which comprised the concert’s final third: “Where The Streets Have No Name,” “It’s A Sin,” and “Go West.” Hell, my group (my straight best friend, his coworker, and her 17-year-old nephew) drowned me out. At their best the Boys prove that middle-age doesnt signal encroaching twilight so much as a stranger kind of dusk.

So I caught Clapton in concert Sunday night at the RBC Center in Raleigh. You can read the review here (written in about an hour and a half, immediately following the show to meet deadlines, so be kind). Ridiculous traffic going into the arena due to the presence of the State Fair across the street. Long story short, I spent 45 minutes on a single exit ramp, my car overheated, and I had to abandon it and walk the rest of the way to the show. Rockandfuckingroll, right?

Anyway, it was mostly your typical retrospective play-the-hits kind of show, perhaps a bit surprising for how liberally it drew from the ‘89 Adult-Contempo classic Journeyman (I’m betting that’ll please Alfred). On one hand, Clapton’s never been even good as a blues singer, and whether it was his advancing age or just the rigors of live performance he sounded even more pinched and hoarsely growly than usual (not to be confused with the equally-unpleasant but far more effective sinister snarl Jagger perfected in the 80s).

Luckily, there’s still great passion and pyrotechnics in his axe. Clapton’s even been ballsy enough on this tour to bring along hotshit guitarists Derek Trucks and Doyle Bramhall II and let them take frequent center stage for solos (with Trucks also performing Duane Allman’s slide parts on the Derek and the Dominos selections). This is roughly equivalent to Magic Johnson challenging Dwyane Wade and LeBron James to a game of HORSE (if EC was pushing three bills of course), but clearly Slowhand’s technique hasn’t deteriorated nearly as badly as Magic’s jumpshot and the sexagenarian more than held his own.

For a show full of 10+ minute blues-rock jams, it was a satisfyingly no-frills affair. Effects, banter, and set transitions were handled with a minimum of fuss, and only rarely did the solos tread towards tedium, mostly aiming for volume and thrills instead.

I’ve been informed the Coen brothers are indeed on tap to direct the film adaptation of No Country for Old Men, which makes my Fargo comparison a little too prescient.

Dear Bros.:

You ALREADY did Fargo. You already did the folksy sheriff and the absurdist escalating violence.

Now it’s set in New Mexico, so it’s different?

I’m sure it will be a good movie. Birds of a feather do flock together.

This is a two-part post. I’m preparing to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and before I venture into the “searing postapocalyptic novel” (notice the missing dash)”destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece,” I’m going to reminisce on my reaction to the incredibly overrated No Country for Old Men.

I extracted a few things from No Country for Old Men:

One: Life’s bad now, it’s not like in the good old days, when everybody knew their place, and gumdannit, no one needed no drugs.

Two: The moment people stopped calling each other “sir” and “ma’am”, THAT’S when it all went to hell, see?

Three: If your name is Cormac McCarthy, you’re not just writing a thriller. Oh, NO. It’s LITERATURE. Never mind that you took the sheriff from Stephen King’s Misery. If Richard Farnsworth wasn’t going through your head’s casting office, you don’t know your good hearted, salt-of-the-earth old sheriff types. Never mind that Fargo did it all so much better. Never mind A Simple Plan, never mind all those Tarantino-esque movies. You’re above all that. You’re Cormac McCarthy! When YOU do that same old thing, you are expanding the territory of American fiction- as the Newsweek blurb would have it.

Hmmm.

And now he’s done it again, with The Road.

Imagine- just bear with me- this is going to blow your mind- what if- what IF technology failed us tomorrow, and there were no, like, CELL PHONES, what would happen! Oh, God! That Cormac McCarthy, he’s created a new genre, the post-apocalyptic novel!

Sorry, the “postapocalyptic” novel, no dash.

Not to be vitriolic or anything.

No Country for Old Men was a good, familiar thriller from an old coot. The rest was hype.

I shall report from the end of The Road and I have no problem with crow if you add a little ketchup on the side.