Truth to Power

You can contest whether the Red Sox have the best fans in baseball.  As a long-timer, I am suspicious of the carpetbaggers.  You can debate whether Fenway is a lyrical little bandbox or a back-crunching, miserable-clubhoused trap.  But you cannot deny that the Red Sox have the best announcer in baseball in Joe Castiglione.  

Castiglione's a low-key guy.  He doesn't have a dopey catchphrase, or any sense of hysteria.  He loves the Sox, but he loves the game, first and foremost.  He delivered one of the best succinct calls I've ever heard in my life last summer, when he declared a ball "Back, track, wall, gone."  And what other announcer, anywhere in the league, would mount a passionate defense of Teddy Roosevelt's right to win the Presidents' Race at Nationals Park by citing the details of Roosevelt's childhood health?  Or recite the details of a career of a Senators player nicknamed the Washington Monument as a riff on Adam Dunn's weight?  I love the guy, seriously.  His voice emanates from my two World Series beer openers.  But I could listen to him--and frequently do--all night.

Emo Vampires

With all due respect to the magnificent Charlie Jane Anders, Season-7-Spike is indeed a whiny pain, but wasn't Buffy's thing for vamps a way of grappling with her lack of humanity? Making vampires a little less bad is a way to let humans realistically get with them--and be a little less good.

What's Ailing Criminal Intent?

Law & Order: Criminal Intent ought to be the best franchise in Dick Wolf's procedural empire.  The show has an excellent cast, even down to the bit parts.  Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright and monologuist Eric Bogosian is the captain of the Major Case Squad.  For years, Tony-nominated stage actor Courtney B. Vance was the Assistant District Attorney assigned to the Squad.  Quirkmeister Jeff Goldblum joined the cast this year as a replacement for Chris Noth, who may be better known as Sex and the City's Mr. Big, but did stronger work across the Law & Order franchise as Det. Mike Logan.  And no matter Vincent D'Onofrio's more questionable choices of roles, he's done remarkable work as an actor, and fully inhabits Det. Robert Goren to an extent that's almost uncomfortable.  Criminal Intent's 2007 transfer to the USA Network was designed to bolster its flagging ratings, but it also freed the show to be more outre than it could be on network television, a plus for a show that specializes in particularly heinous murders.  But something in the show isn't working, and I'm trying to figure out what it is.

It may be that the show's producers are taking their new license to kill a little too far.  Last season was marked by the gratuitous and unnecessary murder--her heart was cut ot--of Goren's nemesis, the terrific Nicole Wallace (Olivia D'Abo).  That plot that also involved the deterioration of Goren's mentor, after his daughter became a serial killer in an earlier episode in an effort to get her father's attention.  You get the idea.  In earlier seasons, the crimes themselves were less sensational--for ezample, the beating murder of an Orthodox Jewish convert who was seeking a divorce--but they were more deeply grounded in communities and established cultures.  The latest seasons of the show have given viewers sicker killers, but not necessarily more interesting or carefully sketched ones.  I miss the episodes where Goren solved a crime by empathizing with an Asperger Syndrome, or a lonely, isolated woman who became the accomplice of a murderer.  The show was at its best when the crimes were as interesting as the characters who committed them.  At its best, the show, in the limited time available in each episode, made those character sketches both deep and shaded.  In recent years, the show seems to focus on the crimes instead, and to have settled on red as the hue of choice.

But worse, the producers and writers have worn the grooves of their A-Squad characters too deep.  They filled in Goren's backstory, giving him--and then executing--a serial-killer biological father, and killing off his schizonphrenic mother.  But the death of Goren's parents hasn't freed him for future discoveries.  He acted out for a while, but beyond that, hasn't moved forward.  Eames (Kathryn Erbe) hasn't done much interesting since she served as a surrogate mother for her sister, though she apepars to be poised to have chosen a bad boyfriend somewhere in her past.  The B-Squad's been through a rapid rotation in recent years, and while there is some promise in the pairing of Julianne Nichols and Goldblum, it's not yet clear if the latter is going to do anything more than skip work to watch "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and rely on his intuition.  It might be time for the A and B Squad to switch places for a while, if only to give the B cops time to develop a little chemistry, to give D'Onofrio a break from shouting at suspects and a chance to catch his breath.  His writers, it seems, could benefit from a similar chance at renewal.

Slumming

I'll have more to come on Drag Me to Hell next week at The Atlantic Online, but it says a great deal that the actors who were slumming playing the various ethnic gypsy/medium/crooked fortuneteller/dude who is around to get possesed by a goat demon all seemed to be much more relaxed into their roles, and to be having much more fun, than the negligible leads, Alison Lohman (lacking all her spark from Matchstick Men) and Justin Long, who may have to consider plastic surgery if he wants to escape his Mac ads.

Blonde Bombshells

Even though I don't agree with everything in Jonah Weiner's piece about Lady Gaga up at Slate, I'm glad that someone wrote it. Gaga, for those not in the know, has risen to the cover of Rolling Stone as a performer of deeply catchy club tracks, and for a vigorous eschewal of pants. But she's also made headlines by outlining a deeply self-serious philosophy of her pop music. "Her pretentiousness," Weiner writes, "the heady name-dropping, the high-concept video, the wild get-ups—hangs halolike around her music, encouraging us to consider the songs in a different and more radiant light."

Now, I am the person in the world who least needs convincing that pop culture should be taken seriously. But most of my conviction that popular movies and music, comics, fashion, etc., are genuinely important comes from an impatience with critics and audiences who dismiss the forms and as a result, overlook high-quality content. Star Wars is a terrific set of movies about accepting your responsibility as an adult member of a community. Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a heartbreaking exploration of solipsism, creativity and family. Hell, Vena Cava's collection for the Gap is a good opportunity to explore why the "tribal" trends that are all over a couple of season's worth of collections are at minimum a pain (although I'm still buying the dress) and at worst culturally insensitive. But--and I've thought about it quite a bit--I'm not entirely sure Lady Gaga is worthy of that level of scrutiny, especially when Robyn is out there, not getting the attention she deserves.

Robyn sneaked into my ears in the late 1990s, when her singles "Show Me Love" and "Do You Know What It Takes" made the U.S. airwaves, and I never really forgot the aural impression. Even singing formulaic, non-specific love songs, something about her stuck. But it took me a moment to recognize her again when Robyn reemerged as an indie auteur in 2005. In 1997, Robyn stood out both for her slight vocal style, perfectly suited to express vulnerability or to work with chilly electronic production, and for an attractive but short angular haircut and for favoring flattering but not form-fitting clothes at a time when the pop tarts who surrounded her were baring belly rings and shaking their extensions. Today, Robyn's moved even further away from any association with mainstream pop stars, and Lady Gaga has more in common with those starlets than with Robyn.

I suppose wearing a dress made of bubbles on the cover of Rolling Stone, or painting your lips in a grotesque pucker is a little different. But ultimately, Lady Gaga's artistic presentation seems firmly in an established cultural and commercial tradition. Her video for "Love Game" may involve more sequins, light-up staffs, and Campari than the average New York subway, but it seems like a rememberance of New York's imagined sentimental grittiness than any authentic or raw expression of sexuality. Hooking up with a cop to get out of trouble is not a new idea. The visuals in "Poker Face" are more original, more compellingly strange, and Gaga's voice takes on a lovely, sad inflection in the chorus. But the constant intrusions of shots of Beats by Dr. Dre headphones is a distraction, and the lyrics are simply wretched. Anyone who uses the phrase "love glue-gunnin'" should have to serve time in some sort of artistic penal institution. Invocations of Russian roulette don't really make a girl edgy anymore. In fact, Gaga's entire schtick often feels like another step forward in someone's life-long attemts to be a Very Bad Girl. The beats in her songs are undeniably catchy, even if there's nothing audibly striking about them. But ultimately, Lady Gaga is nothing more, and, this does count for something, nothing less than a very attractive skinny blonde woman who wears some questionable clothes and builds some neat props while recording danceable, generic songs.

Physically, Robyn and Gaga are similar. But Robyn's cut her hair shorter to emphasize a face that can be alternately vulpine and sweet, and frequently wears clothes that disguise, distort, or deemphasize her body. She's undeniably serious about her music, and walked away from a major-label contract to record her 2005 album, Robyn. But unlike Lady Gaga, Robyn appears to have an actual sense of humor. The skit that opens that album, "Curriculum Vitae," announces Robyn's qualifications as the following:

World record holder with a high score of two gazillion in Tetris
Two-time recipient of the Nobel prize for super foxiest female ever
and war time consigliere to the Cosa Nostra
She split the storm, invented the x-ray, the cure for AIDS, and the surprise blindfold greeting
She performed and choreographed the fights for Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon
The Game of Death and still does stunt doubles for Jackie Chan on the weekends
...

She's listed in section 202 of the United Nations Security Act of 1979
As being too hot to wear tight sweaters on international airspace
In this world of tension, pressure and pain
She is known by men and women of all origins and faiths
for her wisdom, compassion, and relentless
determination in the quest to get paid.


Some of her best songs have a specificity that seems a little off. In "Bum Like You," Robyn promises to put up money for her lover's bail, bake him pie, and knight him mittens. The weird details catch your attention and make you pay attention to a lovely, small song about loving someone who is a mess: "you don't even look good / God it ain't right /but you're starry-eyed and out of sight," Robyn sighs. "Be Mine," describes an intense moment of romantic humiliation, when Robyn catches her lover tying another girl's shoes--and the girl is wearing a scarf Robyn gave her man in happier times. The music is too upbeat for the pain it contains, but it contains the stacatto beats of a heart that's not functioning properly and lovely arcs of sound that sound like something close to hysteria. The fragility of her voice is on tremendous disply in "With Every Heartbeat," a song that's less grounded in details but uses abstract visuals to nice effect in the video to suggest the disorienting impact of heartbreak:



But Robyn dosn't deserve attention just because she's good. She's also delightfully, intriguingly strange. Her cover of the Teddybears rap-inspired semi-nonsense song "Cobrastyle" has an air of light menace to it. She waltzed in remixed Snoop Dogg's "Sensual Seduction" turning it into "Sexual Eruption." And because she can, Robyn sang backup hooks on Britney Spear's "Piece of Me," the best rebuttal to paparazzi culture recorded in recent years (Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" ain't bad, but even Alexander Skarsgard isn't enough to make the 8-minute video worth watching). Her latest collaboration, with Royksopp, "The Girl and the Robot" is all the proof you really need of Robyn's superiority to Lady Gaga, though:



It's incredibly weird, and entirely familiar: Robyn lounges at home, calls someone who doesn't pick up the phone, takes a home pregnancy test. All this, and her lover is a brightly colored workaholic robot. Lady Gaga may be doing an effective job of flipping off the past while paying homage to it. Robyn's actively pulling the accumulated freight of past emotion into the future with her, unafraid of its strangeness.

Art School

The New York Times is reporting that the latest administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Arts, the first in 11 years, shows that eighth-grade students have no greater knowledge of the arts than they did in 1997, and that fewer of them are going to art exhibitions of any kind through trips arranged by their schools.  I'm not entirely confident defining the canon that ought to constitute arts education.  But I do feel comfortable saying that a 6-point decline, from a miserly 22 percent to a downright pathetic 16, in the number of children getting to art exhibits as part of their classroom experience, is a very bad thing.

Math, science, English, and history classes all have obvious practical value.  Everyone will need to do basic budgeting, understand a medical decision, write a resume and a cover letter, or understand how the electoral system at some point, unless they are somehow radically divorced from the ordinary rhythms of American existence.  But the value of arts education only becomes clear when schools provide a context for it.  Knowing what a half-note is has no value unless you understand its value in a musical piece.  Being able to identify a Renaissance painting does you no real tangible good if you only ever see the Venus of Urbino, and her successor, Manet's Olympia, in a textbook.  Knowing how to blend watercolors only does you good if someone gives you a palette and paper.

I remember one of my freshman year English professors weeping as he told our class that Milton dictated Paradise Lost while blind.  It was an awkward moment, and would have been even more so if I hadn't read Paradise Lost several times before, and been required to memorize sections of it for previous classes, learned those cadences myself.  Instead of simple embarrassment at my professor's loss of control, I felt tears pricking my own eyes.  The information--and my professor's continuing awe at Milton's skill--were meaningful to me because I understood the text he cared about so much.

Exposure to the arts is not automatic.  With the price of museum admissions rising, even though there are many deals available, a trip to an arts exhibition is a pricey choice for families.  The same is true of theater and classical music.  Arts education isn't something that children have to have to get jobs, or to function on an effective, but basic, level.  But we like the idea of giving them the tools to access things that could enrich their lives, that could make them cultured, sophisticated, genteel.  But it's silly to ask children to memorize notation, or to drill the name of artists, or to learn about elements of theatrical presentation if we're never going to take them to a concert, or a museum, or a play.  If a child has a passion for literature, any teacher with access to a photocopier or a library card can help them pursue it.  If a child loves math, they can get far with a good textbook and a relatively inexpensive calculator.  It's possible to do relatively sophisticated scientific exploration in a classroom--or outside of it.  But the highest expressions of the arts are something that we need to reach beyond the walls of our schools to teach.

Reading Persepolis in D.C.

Amidst all the news out of Iran this weekend, I reopened Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, her memoir of growing up in, and eventually leaving, Tehran during the Islamic Revolution.  The graphic novel is visually striking and emotionally powerful, but most relevant to this moment, it's also an excellent personal history of political protest in Iran.  Sometimes the protests are against the Shah, when the police burn down a movie theater full of liberals and lock the patrons inside.  Sometimes they're conflicts between women wearing veils and those who see the veil as a symbol of oppression.  Sometimes the demonstrations end in physical violence, sometimes just in fear and shame, or conflicts between parents and children.  But as Western observers, especially those of us who live in countries where spontaneous street protests are fairly rare, and almost never involve any serious violence, it's worth considering the history of Iran's political culture as we try to interpret the reaction to the recent elections.  Satrapi may be a novelist, rather than a historian, but she evokes the emotions of ordinary Iranians, and the context young protesters grew up with, as well as any political analyst.

John Dillinger

I want to like Public Enemies, Michael Mann's John Dillinger-Melvin Purvis-J.Edgar Hoover biopic, truly I do.  Everything about the movie looks like high-quality filmmaking.  

Johnny Depp has a more bitter, angular face than the famous bank robber, but the attitude in the eyes is about right.  Christian Bale looks exactly like a guy who would spend a lot of time at the office shining his shoes and employ a manservant named President.  And Billy Crudup can take on the toad-like appearance of J. Edgar Hoover (of course, he can also convey a character who is naked, blue, and significantly animated.  The man has skills.)  I have no particular faith in Marion Cotillard's accent, but whatever.  The point of Billie Frechette in this story was never particularly Billie Frechette.  It seems to me like playing Baby Face Nelson, a straight-up psychotic, would be more interesting for Channing Tatum than playing Pretty Boy Floyd, but then I am not his agent (though I am, of course, open to a chance of careers. Miss Rosenberg's Finishing School for Misguided Starlets perhaps?), and it's not like they're sticking to history when it comes to Pretty Boy Floyd anyway.  The suits are snappy, the guns cumbersome, the tones sepia.

There is a clear market for a movie about an anti-hero who takes on the banks, and the trailer makes sure to feature a moment in the Dillinger legend when he refused to take a bank customer's money (never mind the fact that the bank's money and the customer's money are, um, the same in days before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation).  Public Enemies seems like a much less naked grab for the dollars of angry moviegoers than Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, which is based on the premise that it is a poor idea to deny a gypsy an extension on her home loan.  

And yet, I'm unconvinced.  One of the best parts of Bryan Burrough's book is the exploration of the relationship between Purvis and Hoover, how Purvis's incompetence and Hoover's intransigence soured that relationship, and how Hoover's decision to exile Purvis from the Bureau essentially ruined Purvis's life.  And I think there's next to no chance the movie will explore that relationship.  It's too bad.  Hoover is an astonishingly good character--Don Delillo's portrait of him in Underworld has the makings of a movie in and of itself--and yet there's never been a great biopic about him, or even any significant attempt to make one.  John Dillinger was an iconic character, but not a complex one.  Hoover was both.