"Sometimes Love Has To Let Go"

New Sade, people.  It's typically gorgeous and limpid, even without the metaphor of being washed clean, which is central to the song.  Sade is someone I like, even though I would say I have trouble listening to her sometime.  I think it's a combination of pacing, vocal style, and lyrics.  I tend to feel a bit like I'm sinking under the song, and the lyrics come along just often enough to pull me back enough into the narrative and images.  That said, periodically I find myself with "Lovers Rock" on repeat for days at a time.  I think it reminds me of being by myself on the beach I've been going to my entire life:

Rich Kids

Although I do greatly like Josh Brolin and Frank Langella, I have some trouble believing that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is going to be a good movie.  Even if it's an Evil Traders movie, it feels a year or so off: the fact of joblessness, and of a permanent dislocation of career plans for a large swath of young people have swamped the causes and original villains.  I do, however, love seeing Michael Douglas relaxed and aged into a rogue's role.  I mean, this is kind of delightful:



But like, for example, The Good Guy, this wretched-looking romantic comedy, the question of whether bankers and traders can be good people feels weirdly irrelevant today.  I mean, really, who cares?

Show Me Your Teeth

Well, looks like Sam Worthington might get to be Dracula, in addition to Perseus, a Hero to the Native Peoples of Pandora, and a robot who thinks he's a dude.  Aside from the fact that this seems like a terrible casting choice (come on, is this the face of Vlad the Impaler, people:

Sam Worthington by yotambientengosuperpoderes.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy the excellently-named yotambientengosuperpoderes.


I didn't think so.) every time studios make one of these awful-looking vampire movies, they take a step away from doing a serious and gorgeous adaptation of The Historian, the best, and most grown-up, vampire novel to come out and become available for adaptation in years.  There's theoretically a Historian movie in production (Sony owns the film rights), but with no public cast information available, I feel the need to treat it with as much credulity as the recurring rumors, mostly died down now, that someone is doing a movie version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  It's really too bad.  The Historian places vampirism in an entirely different context than the wan abstinence and immortal youth narratives so predominant today, but it's still a pretty sexy book.  The difference is that the sexual tension is between adults rather than teenagers, and those adults are serious academics.  A movie treatment of the novel could tap both the vampire craze and folks like me who like nerdy professorial movies (see Possession), and movies about relationships between actual adults.  Which is probably why it'll never get made.

Throwbacks

So, you know how I completely love Solange's "Sandcastle Disco"?  V.V. Brown's "Crying Blood" is like that, but so much more so:



I adore everything about this girl: the pouf of bangs, the old-school houndstooth-print dress with the saddle shoes, the fact that she moves like a rock star rather than like a pop singer, the fierce happiness of this heartbreak song.  "I'm crying blood / I'm crying tears from my eyes like I can't deny / And I am falling like a comet from a broken sky" is both sad and incredibly tough.  It's nice to be reminded of how much you can jam into a two-and-a-half-minute song.

Modern Families



SR 522 SR 522 - UW Bothell_Cascadia Community College 002 by WSDOT.
<div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/3931979643/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0


I've been thinking about the 2009-2010 television season quite a bit lately, trying to account for what seems to be a strong spike in extremely high quality television.  I haven't entirely made up my mind yet, but I do think I'm ready to assign the title for best new comedy of the year.  And while I'm enjoying the hell out of Glee, and am consistently impressed by the ensemble cast and slyness of Modern Family (I cannot tell you how excited I was that Breaking Away was the movie playing in the background during the January 20 episode.  The opening sequence of Breaking Away with the truck driver is such a great comedic sequence.), I really do think the best comedy to debut in 2009 is, and continues to be, Community.  



First, the cast is working extremely well, top-to-bottom.  And I don't think that should be taken for granted.  Joel McHale was the guy who hosted The Soup before this, and while that's not small beer, it's also not a predictor that a guy is going to be able to nail the lead role in a half-hour comedy.  Other than McHale, the most-known actors in the ensemble are Chevy Chase, whose hallmark has not been, shall we say, consistency, and Alison Brie, who does her thing on Mad Men.  Yvette Nicole Brown's longest-running TV gigs before Community were a 15-episode gig on Drake &amp; Josh and six episodes on the quickly-canceled The Big House, and Danny Pudi had short arcs on ER, Gilmore Girls and Greek, but nothing else significant to his credit.  Donald Glover and Gillian Jacobs have never been series regulars anywhere.  It's hugely to Dan Harmon and the producers' credit that they put together this group of core series regulars.  And it's amazing that they're working as well together as they are.  


The guest stars are great, too.  Jim Rash is delightfully creepy as Dean Pelton.  Ken Jeong's been brilliant as SeƱor Ben Chang.  It's a shame that John Oliver and John Michael Higgins, so funny as respectively an incompetently manipulative psychology professor and a spontaneous accounting professor and debate coach, have faded into the background, because one of Community's definite strengths is that it's provided a really full portrait of the people who go to and teach at the college.  The show is just extremely deep and textured, and that's one of the things I think pushes it ahead of Modern Family a bit--there's an extent to which the families in the show operate in isolation from the rest of their community (although the January 20 episode was a nice break from that).


Beyond the casting, as Joey pointed out in comments, Community is the best portrayal of an intergenerational and multiracial group on television today.  Glee's actually made jokes out of its marginalization of its token extra Asian and black characters, something that's a sly nod to viewers' perceptions of the show, but isn't an actual fix to the problem.  I do really, really like Modern Family (it was an extremely difficult decision for me between it and Community), but I have genuine problems with the show's treatment of Gloria, and increasingly with its portrayal of gay characters on the show.  Are we seriously still at a point where it's hilarious to have Chazz Palminteri paw some guy's coat and have it be theoretically hilarious code for him being a closeted gay man?  I think the actors playing Cameron and Mitchell are doing a fine job, but the show needs more moments like the one we find out Cameron played serious college football, and fewer of them acting like caricatures.  


When Community takes on racial tropes and types, it does so much more intelligently.  In last week's episode, for example, Shirley asked Britta, in one of my favorite lines of the series so far, "Can I just ask, as a divorced black housewife, what part of being a single white slacker makes you people so jaded?"  "You people?!" Britta responded in mock-outrage, prompting a bonding session.  Or there are circular conversations like this one:





The exchange works because it's not a "Black people are racist too! See! See!" type of joke.  Instead, it plays on the kinds of shifting positions that often take place in true conversations about race and racial tropes, as the people involved with them search for nonexistent solid ground.  And the jokes go in multiple directions.  One of the things I like about Community is that it's not just black people and white people: you've got the Middle Eastern kid, and the Asian Spanish professor.  You've got the black football player who praises Jafar as an exemplar of Arabian-badassery in movies, even as his friend of Arab descent declares that he invented rap music.  


And the show has its genuine clueless racist in Pierce.  He's not virulent--no one on the show is--but no one's making excuses for him either, and he's the only person victimized by his racism--he makes himself ridiculous.  When Jeff, asked by Britta who he's sleeping with, replies "Last name: Beeswax.  First name: Noneaya," to which Pierce responds "Oh, my third wife was biracial," it's clear that he's an idiot: his foolishness about race, and lying about his age, and being a goddamn magician are all part of the same ridiculous cocktail.  It's not that Pierce's character downplays the impact of racism in Society At Large, but he's useful evidence of the fact that the other characters, black, white, and brown alike are genuinely evolved.


I'm almost annoyed with myself for spending so much time on the show's racial makeup and humor, because while I enjoy it and think this kind of portrayal is The Future, I think the most important reason Community is so good is that the writing is just rock-solid.  Take Jeff's complaint in the last episode,
"Can't I be the friend in the group whose trademark is his well-defined boundaries like Privacy Smurf, Discreet Bear, or Confidentiality Spice?"  It's perfect juxtaposition humor: Smurfs, bears, and Spice Girls aren't separately that funny (Okay, the Spice Girls will forever be hilarious), but together, and slightly transformed, they're a riot.  It's like Owen Wilson's declaration in Wedding Crashers that "I'd like to be pimps from Oakland or cowboys from Arizona but it's not Halloween. Grow up Peter Pan! Count Chocula!"  It's the list that matters.


The show's consistent use of pop culture humor in everything from Troy and Abed's credits riffs (like the crossword puzzle last week), to Troy's cry for help to Jeff in "Introduction to Statistics" that "Pierce took something and he is trippin' balls. He is touching people and dancing weird. It's like Grumpy Old Men but not hilarious."  Which is a great line, since Grumpy Old Men is not actually that hilarious.  And since a lot of what people in college, at least in my experience, do is talk about the stuff that they like.  And what people like is often pretty strange.  That Pierce latched on to Beastmaster of all things as a mark of coolness, or that Styx makes Troy cry is both hilarious and also completely in-character for both of them.  When jokes build our perceptions of the people we see on screen every week, that's a well-constructed script.


Community isn't perfect.  The Jack Black guest appearance was a huge mistake, and I say that as someone with an extremely high tolerance for Jack Black.  The folks at AV Club are right that Jeff's progression into a nice guy is happening a little too fast, though I imagine we'll see setbacks in that progress.  I'm curious to see how many more facets of community college the show can find to frame episodes around: there are only so many classes these people can take in a given semester!  But the cast is big enough that there's a lot of space for the writers to develop plotlines, and find jokes and juxtapositions.  And so far, they're consistently rocking it.  Community feels real enough to be compelling, and is strange enough to keep you constantly alert, and funny enough to reward you for doing so.  It's a real shame that it didn't get the awards-show boost that Glee, already doing well particularly because of its tie-in products, is getting so far.  But if I were Tina Fey and the folks at 30 Rock (which, by the way, I think has righted itself considerably in the last couple of episodes), I'd be taking notes.  If they could do with Toofer, Frank, and Cerie what Community is doing with its assets, the show might head for a second golden age.

R.I.P. J.D. Salinger

I really can't think of a better way to eulogize J.D. Salinger than to post Maurice Sagoff's poetic summary of Salinger's most famous novel:

School was crummy,
Classmates mean,
Holden Caulfield,
Aged sixteen,
Dropped out to the New York scene.

There he wandered,
Sorrow's son,
Overgrown,
But underdone,
Scorned by girls...it wasn't fun.

Broke, disheartened,
Home he slid,
Sister Phoebe,
(Perky kid),
Bouyed him up, she really did.

Only for the
Moment, though:
Down the skids
Alas, he'll go
Landing in a shrink chateau.

Ah, what torment
Must be his
Who Goddamns
But feels Gee Whiz!
Youth is rough--it really is.

As a side note, Sagoff's Shrinklits is brilliant, and much more useful than Cliff's Notes. 

What Viewers Want

I think the point of this Times article, that a market for late-night talk and joke show driven by a host, just doesn't exist among people in my age group.  I've never particularly understood the appeal of the format anyway--it always seemed like something that existed because there wasn't enough programming to fill the available time slots.  Now that Hulu exists, I can find something I like even when there isn't one of those delightfully interminable House re-runs that one of the sources in the story alludes to.  And now that Nielsen's going to start counting online viewing, it seems like a lot more late-night content will be much more financially viable than such shows would have been when they had to pull in consistent audiences at unusual hours.

Wordplay

I have a particular fondness for pop songs that incorporate nursery rhymes, so I was pretty excited by the "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick" line in V.V. Brown's "Shark in the Water":



Of course, the queen of this particular genre is Pink, who has made repeated use of the device.  There's the "ice cream, ice cream, we all want ice cream" riff from "Cuz I Can," (which is, incidentally, one of the great all-time female declarations of bravado, up there with the introduction to Robyn):



Then there's the hilarious and slightly disturbing re-appropriation of the whole "where it stops, nobody knows" line in "Bad Influence":



I don't know if this is uniquely something female singers seem to do, or if that's just who I've noticed do it.  But I like the link back to a place in our lizard brains, not just to familiar songs like the ones Gwen Stefani's worked into some of her solo material, but to the earliest rhymes we remembered in wildly different context.

Having This As The State of the Union Would Also Not Make Me Unhappy...

Although woe betide anyone who cuts off the St. Crispin's Day speech:

State of the Union

I'm covering it tonight for the day job, so blogging on Thursday will probably be pretty slow since I won't have time to write posts.  But can I register a brief note of regret that no State of the Union will ever be this badass? (Minus the dorky-sounding "I'm going to get the guns" line, of course.)

Right to Write

On behalf of nerds everywhere, I feel kind of outraged about this court ruling permitting prisons to ban Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia and books:

Prison officials said they banned the game at the recommendation of the prison’s specialist on gangs, who said it could lead to gang behavior and fantasies about escape.
Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,” prison officials said in court. That could make it more difficult to rehabilitate prisoners and could endanger public safety, they said.
The court, which is based in Chicago, acknowledged that there was no evidence of marauding gangs spurred to their acts of destruction by swinging imaginary mauls, but it ruled nonetheless that the prison’s decision was “rationally related” to legitimate goals of prison administration.
I know most of the commentary on this case has focused on the fact that a) it's dopey to assume that gaming causes pathological behavior, b) it's particularly dopey to assume D&D-playing leads to the formation of prison gangs.  But I actually think the free speech issues are disturbing.  Perhaps it's just me, but I tend to think that unless a prisoner is writing threats or coordinating crimes through his writing, he should be allowed to keep doing it, and to keep his writing after completing it if he wants.

Writing is distraction, it's therapy, it's a way to develop skills that, who knows, might actually serve someone upon their release from prison.  I can see some circumstances under which it might make sense to monitor that writing, or to direct it into a formal program like InsideOUT Writers.  And under some circumstances, it might make sense to act on somebody's writing.  Seung-Hui Cho may have been a lot better off if something had really taken place after his fellow Virginia Tech students and professors found his writing disturbing.  But preventing him from writing wouldn't have stopped him from killing somebody.  And taking away a murderer's D&D manual isn't going to prevent the killing that landed him in jail in the first place.  But it may have denied him something that was rehabilitative.

What Do Artists Owe Us, And Themselves?

Amy Winehouse 4 by DJ Durutti.

blackink12's post over at PostBourgie about D'Angelo's dissolution and creative decline really struck me yesterday.  This, in particular stood out to me:
“I feel like there’s a book with a bookmark in it,” says (former manager Dominique) Trenier. “Two albums? That can’t be it for this guy. He’s got so much music in him.”
But does he really?
I alluded to this in my mixtape last Friday, but it's been very difficult for me to watch Courtney Love and Amy Winehouse fall apart.  Both Celebrity Skin and Back to Black came out at times when it felt like I needed precisely that record, the blast of independence and disdain, the decision to manage grief by dressing it up and embracing it.  I trust both of these manifestly unreliable women because at one point, they gave me something I needed, before I could even articulate that I needed it.  While I don't particularly feel like it's Me Against the World, or the Machine, or Whatever, and I definitely don't feel like holidng an elaborate funeral for my own heart (though, what style), I remain wary of the possibility that I may need a bulwark against those sentiments again. 

And so I want Amy Winehouse and Courtney Love to be there for me, to anticipate that next moment of great musical need.  What a fool I am.  blackink12 is wise when he says "D’Angelo has already exceeded my wildest expectations, and I didn’t realize it until it was over.  I have everything I ever needed. And I hope D’Angelo can say the same."  Amy and Courtney will get better, or not, independent of their talent and my desire for its expression.  And while, as Courtney put it, "I want to be the girl with the most cake," I'll try to be content with what I have.

Apropos of Nothing...

It's just amazing to me how pretty Britney Spears was when she was really young.  I don't know that she's truly beautiful, she was never remote and stunning enough for that.  And a huge amount of attention focused on her body and her clothing, but she just had an incredibly lovely, youthful face.  The change from something like "Lucky"



To how tired she looks in "Everytime" (which I think is an underrated sad love pop song) is kind of stunning:



Really, her music video career is kind of an astonishing commentary on the paparazzi, almost a seminal document explaining their evolution.  In "Lucky," you've got the photographers with old-fashioned cameras who are part of the stylized Hollywood scene, but they're non-threatening.  In "Everytime," they're literally crushing her.  Her boyfriend tries to fight them off by throwing tabloids back at them, and becomes yet another shot.  The video's got quite a bit that's ugly in it, from the Jack Daniels bottle on the floor, to the disarray of their hotel room, littered with dirty glasses and clothes: even her panties are ragged.

By "Piece of Me," she's playing games with them, dressing up decoys, luring them into bathrooms, but in a resigned sort of way:



But even that can't keep them from taking pictures up her skirt.  And in a weird way, "If You Seek Amy,"she's achieved a fascinating fusion of the images in both "Lucky" and "Everytime."  Inside the house, the remains of what looks like an orgy are waking up (and Britney's sporting a corset and shoes I would kill for the opportunity to purchase):



For once, though, that dissolution isn't prey to the paparazzi.  By the time she faces the photographers, it's in perfect preppy housewife gear, with a catalogue-issue husband and son flanking her, and an apple pie in hand.  In "Piece of Me," she lamented, or perhaps declared, "I've been Miss American Dream since I was seventeen," and in this video, she's giving the paparazzi, and observers at large, an impervious image of what they expected to be her.  And there's an extent to which she's assimilated the obsession with her: "Love me / Hate me / Say what you want about me / But all of the boys and all of the girls / Are begging to if you seek Amy."  Their persecution of her is only the manifestation of their forever-unfulfilled desire.


Dear Martin Scorsese,

Feel free to make your kids' movie.  But please stay away from my hometown.  When you go to Boston, you do things like remake astonishing movies that don't make remaking, and enable Leonardo DiCaprio's terrible, terrible attempts at a Boston accent and augment it with ghosts.

Love,
Alyssa

Canonizing Jersey Shore--And An Announcement

Jersey Shore Toll Bridge by gargola87.

So, I probably could have found a picture of the actual beach at the Jersey Shore to illustrate this plug for y'all go to read my meditations over at The Atlantic on how Jersey Shore fits into the long literary and artistic tradition of the beach as a site of humiliation and bad decisions.  As the piece begins:
When he gave his youngest daughter permission to go to Brighton, England, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bennet declared that Lydia would never be happy "until she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances."  But he could have just as easily been talking about the members of Jersey Shore, the MTV reality show about a summer share house that, with its first season just ended, seems on the verge of becoming a mass cultural phenomenon.
Check it out.  But I (corny, I know), chose the bridge for another reason.  In the next month or so, I'll be starting a column for a new section of The Atlantic's website, writing pieces much like this one.  It may mean I have to cut down on the frequency with which I post here a little bit, but the blog is definitely not going away.  You all are too valuable an audience for me to test my ideas on and to talk things over with for me to let y'all go.  I don't say it often enough, but thank you for reading, for talking back, for emailing.  You make me a better writer and thinker.

Serpico Takes a Writing Class

I thought this tidbit in Corey Killgannon's profile of Frank Serpico was pretty great:

After several frustrating attempts at collaboration with co-writers — “They just don’t get it,” he said — Mr. Serpico enrolled in a weekly workshop through an arts group in Troy, N.Y., where his classmates also do not always understand his stories. “How could they?” he said. “We have women in the class writing about their kids — they don’t know what a bag man is.”
Frank Serpico writes out the story of his life daily in longhand, at the cabin, then types the pages on a computer at the public library, using the two-finger method he honed filing arrest reports on station house typewriters, gathering the pages in a manila folder. The memoir begins on the night of the Williamsburg drug bust, his bleeding body cradled by an elderly tenant who called for assistance when his fellow officers did not, the narrator floating above and recounting the life path that led him there.
Writing groups, and writing classes, are funny things.  Some of my best classes in college were on writing, but I can see how that might not be a precisely universal experience.  Mark Salzman's beginning of True Notebooks is all about how awful his experiences teaching adult-education writing classes were (one of his students called another student's mother a bitch after the student read a story about how her mother slapped her father after discovering his adultery), though he ends up loving teaching in prison.  I can only imagine what it must be like for Serpico to get critiqued by the housewives--and for them to get feedback from him.  Do you think he tries to get them to write about corruption in nursery school admissions processes?  Or gets them to blow the whistle on their co-op boards or something?

Is It Good for the Children?

A.O. Scott's point about the ratings system and its absurdities is extremely well-taken.  His piece in the Times this weekend concluded:
In 2154, when “Avatar” takes place, it is possible that tobacco use will no longer exist. But if movies are still around, there will still be arguments about what they should be showing, and to whom. Such arguments are built into the medium and our complicated bond with it. We want movies to acknowledge what is real, but also to improve on reality, to give us a vision of a perfect world in which everything is permissible — a world that’s sexy, dangerous, scary and smoky and safe for children too.
I basically don't think the ratings system should exist.  The guidelines have become so absurdly arbitrary that newspapers routinely run capsule reviews oriented at parents that interpret those ratings.  One of those reviews played a critical role in my being allowed to see Romeo + Juliet in 1996.  Parents who care about what their children see are doing additional research anyway.  Parents who don't will take their kids to pretty much anything: it bothered me to see the toddlers somebody took to see The Lovely Bones at a screening I attended, but they weren't even borderline, their escort just could not have cared less what the movie was rated.  If they're not being used or still useful as a guide to content, they're just an exhibit hall for hypocrisy and inconsistency, and should be retired.





In The Tank

I love Entertainment Weekly, which I think is probably not something pop culture critics say very often.  It's not a Very Serious Journal, though it employes a number of very good critics, particularly for movies.  It's solidly poppy magazine, funny and irreverent.  Michael Ausiello is one of the entertainment journalists I most admire: he's both very good at reporting on television, and has built a great, multi-platform relationship with his fans, and his an extremely unique voice.  One of the reasons I subscribe to the magazine is a desire to contribute to his salary.

But I am mystified by the extent to which the magazine is in the tank for Twilight.  One of the reasons EW's stayed viable is by staying hard on top of emerging trends.  But the oversaturation for Twilight is kind of astonishing.  The publication of a graphic novel version of the novels is news.  But it's not a six-page spread.

Lovely Laura Linney

Mary Ann Singleton by Hello ChateauHo.

This hagiographic profile of Laura Linney really doesn't say much that devotees of her work don't already know: she is phenomenal and we love her.  But one point I wish Patricia Cohen, the author, had made is that Linney is often very good at elevating the trash she's in.  Take Love, Actually, which pushes many of my most sentimental buttons, but which I am perfectly capable of admitting is doofy and even sometimes deeply problematic.  But there is absolutely nothing corny about watching Linney's character, who cares for her seriously mentally ill brother, sabotage her chance at a relationship with a coworker she has been in love with for years.  It's not about her doing something stupid, or goofy.  It's not a portrayal of a beautiful woman having a totally implausible problem.  It's that her character is literally unable to choose something for herself, no matter how much she wants it, over her caretaker role.  Her character, even as part of a massive ensemble, is enough of a human being for the scene to be entirely believable.  It's shattering, and I don't know who else could portray it the way Linney does.

On a Lighter, Happier Note

Weird Al is directing a movie.  I don't think I need to say anything more about this than: awesome.

Truth

nOvaSlimmer has some wise words about the state of hip-hop:
Arrogance in Hip-Hop isn’t new but it’s only worthwhile when it’s accompanied by humor, intelligence, vocabulary and talent....

Most of them don’t have an actual story to tell. They wanna be rich and famous, period. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I happen to have at least a sliver of respect for someone that goes “I just wanna make you dance and have fun” as opposed to someone that makes the same style of music and suddenly becomes Confucius when discussing it. They have it backwards. Story should proceed music all the time, not the other way around.
On the point about progression, I’m also at odds with how they interpret it. Progress to them has nothing to do with artist evolution; it simply means deferring to the white mainstream by having GaGa on your record and gaining more exposure, which potentially means more sales. Again, there’s nothing wrong with branching out and appealing to a wider audience and experimenting with Pop sounds, but don’t call it progress. Don’t say you’re doing something different when everyone else is doing the same thing.
 I don't have a ton to add to this.  I would disagree, at least a bit with the sentiments in the last paragraph.  Infiltrating popular music may not be progress for hip-hop, it may even be a devolution.  But in a larger context, I tend to think it's progress for popular music, in terms of how it influences the role of verses, production, etc.  To paraphrase Tony Kusher, the world only spins forward.  Rappers will be citizens.

More From Mamet

Commenter David points out this New York Times piece from Mamet on why he wrote race that I missed.  I think it's revealing, particularly this graf:
I have never spent much time thinking about the themes of my plays, as, I have noticed, when an audience begins to talk about the play’s theme, it means the plot was no good. But my current play does have a theme, and that theme is race and the lies we tell each other on the subject.
I pointed out in my original post that individual lines worked much better than the play's structure, and that the show might have been much better as a play about lawyers.  Maybe Race would have been a better play if Mamet hadn't suddenly decided to focus on theme, particularly one where his thoughts seem poorly-developed.

This Is Not a Political Blog

But Adam Serwer's post at TAPPED about Race and conservative white guilt, both adds some context to Mamet's thought process, and is a very interesting explication.  I'm grateful to him for taking this conversation further.

Snarl

In the annals of Lady Gaga's ridiculous lyrics, it takes a lot for a line to stand out.  But the command to "take a bite of my bad girl meat" is up there.  That said, I like the visceral nature of "Teeth" a lot.



The line "show me your teeth" gets at something I think most songs about sex tend to avoid, whether consciously or unawares.  Most folks, when they sing about sex, talk about emotions, control, performance.  I love Big Boi, and "I'll Call Before I Come" is a wonderful song, and "I'm a gentleman, I'm a satisfy your soul / And then I'm a get mine" is a great, and important sentiment, but it's also kind of besides the everloving point.  And just because folks aren't being gentlemanly, or for that matter ladylike, that doesn't mean they're any more in tune with the truth of sex.  I do love the bravado and filthiness of Lil' Kim's "Magic Stick," but it works essentially because it's self-consciously silly.  "Hungry Like the Wolf" is marred by both awkward syntax, and the fact that it's telling rather than showing, a cardinal sin in poetry and prose of all forms.  "Teeth" is about losing your damn mind during sex.  And I kind of think that's as it should be.

White Guilt

Race by moriza.

I went to New York this weekend, among other reasons, to see David Mamet's latest play, Race, with a bunch of the folks from PostBourgie, and, as it turns out, Racialicious's Latoya Peterson, who it was such a pleasure to meet.  It was good the company was delightful, because the play certainly was not.

I'm not sure why Mamet decided to write Race.  It's an exceedingly awkward work, about a law firm composed of a white partner, a black partner, and a young black female associate, who take the case of a wealthy white man accused of raping a young black woman.  Some of the play, particularly the brief sections that focus on the dynamics of a firm, have a fine snap to them.  There is a wonderful, and obscene line about a preacher who will want to testify in the case.

But none of the racial dynamics work whatsoever.  First, it's patently implausible that a black and a white lawyer who have worked together for years would never have taken a case that challenged their racial dynamic before.  It also seems basically implausible that they would have developed a totally color-blind relationship.  Second, a lot of the dialogue around race is awfully stilted.  People declare that white people have nothing to tell black people about race, which is just sort of silly.  A white lawyer, when accused of making an affirmative action hire declares that he hired his associate because she has "talent, and that's exceedingly fucking rare."  Mamet's argument seems to be that white people bend over backwards for black people, both out of guilt and fear of being called racist, but that they expect those black people to betray them, and still intend to be wounded when they and their generosity is betrayed.  And that all black people hate all white people.  And that all white people perpetually want to confess and be shriven of their sins towards black people.  It's an ugly and astonishingly unsubtle framework for a racial conversaion, especially one where white ethnicity is dancing around the edges, but is never really addressed.  The play's ideas just felt enormously stale to me, and yet the predominantly white audience ate it up, just as the Times review said they would, as if they felt like they'd been confronted with hard truths.  As if attending the play was an act of contrition.

It didn't help that Kerry Washington's character was both poorly written and exceedingly shrilly performed.  James Spader was frequently quite good, I thought.  Some of the staging was very interesting: the law office where the events take place is split-level, and Spader's character is the only one who stays on the lowest level the entire time: the rest of the cast ascends and descends throughout the show.  But I don't particularly understand why Mamet didn't just write a play about lawyers, which it seems like he had a knack for.  Did he need a race play in his body of work?  Did he feel guilty about something?

There Are No Words

For how brilliant this is:



Seriously, this may be the hip-hop verse closest to my own experience EVER: "I went to museums and the planetarium / I was the toughest motherfucker at the aquarium / Walking down Queens Boulevard, scared of the traffic-a / Only 8-year-old sneaking into "Out of Africa" / Hung out with my Aunt Joyce, she was like my art coach / We would go see foreign movies starring Juliette Binoche / We saw "My Left Foot" starring Daniel Day-Lewis / To me, my Aunt Joyce was such an influential Jewess."

I'm not playing.  My own influential Jewess, my grandmother, passed away many years ago.  But she read me great books, and took me to my first symphony, a performance of "The Planets," conducted by a man in a space suit.  No joke.  She deserves much of the credit for my interest in culture, much more, certainly, than I give her here.

Created In The Image

IMG_0555 "Lady GaGa" by SpreePiX - Berlin.

So, the New York Post has a piece on the creation of Lady Gaga as a personality and a marketing ploy that implies that the artifice, and the fact that she doesn't talk about it much, is some how "darker" than speculation about her sexual orientation or gender identity.  This strikes me as incredibly stupid.  First, who expects their pop stars to actually be genuine? This is an industry where Britney Spears got breast implants before she finished puberty, for god's sake.  Where Pink recorded a listenable but laughable urban album before winning the right to do pop-rock.  Everything's fake.  Nobody sells 35 million downloads on the power of spontaneity and genuineness.

And I'd much rather someone create a persona of a creative, abstracted, empowered freak and get rich off it than be forced into an intense sexualization of themselves before they're ready for it.  I mean, Lady Gaga may be mercenary in setting up a charity for homeless queer youth (and let's hope, please G-d, that it doesn't have Yele's financial problems), maybe it's all a part of her image, but I don't care.  I'll take this kind of fake over all the others out there.

Big City

Update: I'm aware the videos aren't showing up in the post.  SO sorry.  Working on a network that blocks YouTube for bandwidth reasons, but I'll plug the code back in when I can.

I'm headed up to New York this morning, so blogging might be a little bit light.  But as an apology, here's a mini YouTube mixtape:

1.  "New York Groove," Ace Frehley (cover): Sure, Sinatra's great. But I don't actually love "New York, New York."  Maybe that's just because I'm a crazed Red Sox fan, and I have to represent, but the whole "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere" line always felt a little...obvious to me.  "New York Groove" nails how New York vibes, without having to spell it out.



2. "Celebrity Skin," Hole: I was talking to PostBourgie's Shani yesterday about how much we worry about Amy Winehouse.  But to a certain extent, Amy's just a stand-in for my concerns about Courtney Love.  It's almost shocking how good she looks in this video, from that initally falling shot to the intense green of her eyes when they snap open after the chandelier smashes to the floor.  But I digress.  I know this song, and the album in general, are about Hollywood, but I think the sentiments here apply equally well to New York.



3.  "American Boy," Estelle: As much as I get annoyed by the dominance of New York and LA in our popular culture, the cross-country and trans-Atlantic buoyancy of this track is wonderful, and got Estelle at least some of the attention she so richly deserves over here.  Besides, "Can we get away this weekend? Take me to Broadway? / Let's go shopping, maybe then we'll go to a cafe / Let's go on the subway, take me to your hood / I've never been to Brooklyn and I'd like to see what's good" is basically my agenda for the weekend.  Although I have been to Brooklyn.



4.  "Above the Clouds," Amber: Oh, Lord.  I'm about to reveal myself as one of those women.  But I really do associate this song with New York because of how it's used at the end of the third season finale of Sex and the City.  Before you all vote to exile me, here's why I like that scene.  All the women are single or in wierd states of emotional ambiguity.  Samantha's throwing a barbeque for the trans prostitutes in her neighborhood, and everyone's hanging out.  It's one of the last moments before the show became an icon and a commodity, and I like that everyone's happiness feels really earned.  Plus, it's just a great song.  The Jonathan Peters radio edit is best, but it's hard to find, so live with this.



5.  "Miami 2017," Billy Joel: I've always thought the idea that New York is An Idea That Will Endure Beyond All Things is a little absurd, even after September 11.  There are too many New Yorks, and they evolve too rapidly, for there to be a coherent Unified Theory of New York.  But I think "Miami 2017" is a song that embraces that concept even as it recognizes its absurdity.  Mythos is good, as long as it's self-aware.



6.  "Open All Night," Bruce Springsteen & The Sessions Band: A lot of the people who glamorize New York are the ones who come to it from elsewhere, and a lot of the fun of glamorizing it is talking about it on the trip there and back again.  There is just an absurd amount of joy and energy in this song, which you can hear better if you buy the Live in Dublin album, which really you ought to have done at some point anyway.  This sounds like the best trip to New York and back again, ever.  Also, anyone who argues with "Hey, ho, rock 'n' roll / Deliver me from nowhere" as a lyric should be institutionalized.

A Thought

How is it that Public Enemies isn't winning, much less nominated, for any of the big end-of-the-year honors?  It's a somber film, certainly, but gorgeous, and quite well acted.  Marion Cotillard can't handle her accent, but that doesn't prevent her from being alternately fragile, defiant, and movingly brutalized.  Johnny Depp is predictably marvelous; the tension in his face is perfect for the role.  There's genuine chemistry between them.  His "I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars...and you" is a condensed and predatory version of Crash Davis's classic declaration in Bull Durham (NSFW unless you've got headphones in).  Christian Bale's humorlessness works as Melvin Purvis; he's an arrogant, incompetent bastard with a strain of decency.  Stephen Lang makes up for his absurd overacting in Avatar with an excellent, understated performance as a very different kind of man who carries a gun.  And the movie just looks beautiful: a digital shot of fog rising off the ground in the night as two men flee the gunfight at Little Bohemia is the best-looking thing I've seen on screen all year, Pandora and the afterlife be damned.  Despite my initial skepticism, it really was one of the best movies, top to bottom, I saw all year.  The way it's being overlooked is a grievous error.

Boycotting Roman Polanski

Is a lot easier when he makes movies that look this patently goofy:





Maybe it's just me, but I'm having a harder and harder time taking Pierce Brosnan remotely seriously, something that makes me a little sad since it makes it harder to enjoy the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (Also, IMdB tells me there's a sequel to this in the works for 2012.  I have no idea what the plot would be, but I sure hope Rene Russo ends up with Dennis Leary.  I have a thing for tough cops who make speeches.).  I do vaguely wish this movie looked better, since the premise, about a ghost writer for a politician who begins to suspect his subject may have committed a murder, is juicy, and probably the thing that would make a fine BBC serial.  I know a lot of folks think Kim Cattrall is kind of ridiculous, but I love her, and would like to see her have a career beyond Sex and the City, which she deserves not to get typecast by.  And Tony Gilroy has instilled me with an incredibly intense love of Tom Wilkinson. In fact, I think Tony Gilroy should have made this movie.  It'd be guaranteed to be absurdly well-written.  And I could watch it with a clear conscience.

Taking to the Air

So, I know The Red Baron's been out in Germany since 2008:



But isn't its American release a great opportunity for some Snoopy jokes?

I'll also just be interested to see if a movie about aerial combat in World War I can be made to be genuinely horrifying instead of just a chance for nifty special effects.  Any German readers out there seen this?  I do think piloting a biplane in combat would be something only folks with specific personalities would be able to do, especially given the role of chemical warfare in the first World War, and so this could be an interesting character study of risktakers coming to terms with the impact of their actions.  Not that I expect that the movie will actually go in that direction.  And now that I'm thinking about World War I,  I'm kind of surprised no one's made a major movie about the Christmas Truce.

Love, And Other Hazards of Interstellar Diplomacy

Earth from the moon iPhone wallpaper by The Pug Father.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy The Pug Father.

So, a couple of months back, commenter agauntpanda was nice enough to buy me Cordelia's Honor, the omnibus edition of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, about a talented spaceship captain named Cordelia Naismith who ends up married to a high-ranking military officer of her planet's rival world, and is caught in that new world's Imperial succession struggle as a result.  The two novels in the volume are good, propulsive fun.  Cordelia herself is both badass and romantic: think Princess Leia with a reasonably high tolerance for ordering people's head's chopped off, and without the wiffling around about whether to hook up with Han.  I tore through the book fairly quickly and found myself reading it even though I'm incredibly busy right now.  And it also helped me clarify a couple of things that I like most in my science fiction that I want to discuss a bit here.

First, I tend to resonate most to science fiction where a clear connection to Earth remains.  There are exceptions, of course, most notably Star Wars and the Foundation novels, which I'm about to revisit.  But a universe has to be exceptionally well-conceptualized for me to connect to it as well as I do to speculative fiction about Earth's future.  I think one of the reasons I love books like Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead as well as Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is that they're intimately connected to concerns about Earth that I understand.  The Bugger wars are terrifying, as are the moral conditions of Ender's victory in Earth's service.  The overpopulation of Earth that sparks the mission to Mars in Robinson's books, and the class divides that begin to tear the planet apart aren't actually that speculative. Even something like the early sequences of this summer's Star Trek reboot that show Kirk on Earth isn't explicitly about a social message, but offer the tantalizing image of a familiar place, in this case Iowa farm fields, transformed into something strange and wonderful, like a spaceport.  Earth's a distant fragment in Cordelia's Honor, and I found that I missed it.  Because there are two societies that Bujold is trying to develop in a story that's extremely plot- and character-driven, I found it hard to get immersed in either.  Unlike Star Wars, which takes us from the crime-ridden Cantina in Mos Eisley to the heart of the Imperial high command, we don't get to see both Beta and Barrayar top-to-bottom, and I wanted more of them.

Second, I like science fiction best when it shows how technological advances have shifted the shape and practices of society.  One of the best things in Ender's Game is the novel's description of how information dissemination on the internet makes the fragile political entities of Earth vulnerable to manipulation.  The differing ways a cure for aging affects Mars and Earth forms one of the central conflicts of the Mars trilogy.  The technology that is most important in Cordelia's Honor is an artificial womb, and while it's implied that being freed from nine months of pregnancy frees women on Cordelia's planet to take up a wider range of roles in society, the chauvinism on her husband's planet clearly runs far beyond pregnancy.  I'd have been interested in a discussion of the moral implications of the weapons their respective planets use in combat.  Cordelia's countrymen invent, and deploy, a weapon that turns an enemy's attack against itself, while her husband's soldiers use personal combat devices that fry a victim's nervous system.  They're vicious in different ways, and on different scales, but after some early discussion, any further discussion of those implications, and what they say about the society where the weapons originate, are largely shelved.

But despite these preferences, Cordelia's Honor is a lot of fun, and frequently quite sweet despite the occasional attempted rape, beheading, and coup.  I like romances between equals, and science fiction increasingly feels to me like one of the few places that's genuinely possible--there reliance on female insecurity in most romantic comedies is disturbing to me as a symbol of inequality.  If the future gives us love stories, that's one form of progress I'll embrace wholeheartedly.

More Rappers and Fine Art

In Timbaland's latest with Katy Perry:



To be fair, it's art theft--and jewel theft--and not Damien Hirst shout-outs, but it stuck out to me.  And the song is processed cheese, but totally justifiable and enjoyable, especially if one is living on a solid diet of Bob Dylan, at least for a day.

The Wages of Heartbreak

So, a little bit ago, a couple of my friends were having a debate on Twitter about whether or not it would be an honor to be the woman who inspired Blood on the Tracks.  Obviously, the person to ask that question would be Sara Dylan, who probably doesn't want to talk about it very much.  But the question was a good opportunity to revisit the album, which is one I tend to binge on and then leave alone for a while.  I tend to find "Simple Twist of Fate," despite the fact that it's one of the most obviously fictionalized narratives on the album, almost too unbearably sad to listen to:



Bad timing between two people who are trying hard to love each other is one of the sadder things I know.  And I have a hard time feeling like it would be an honor seeing yourself in "Idiot Wind," which is one of those I'm-having-a-bad-moment-and-need-to-be-vicious songs:



But I could see being honored by "You're a Big Girl Now," which is both one of the most emotionally honest and articulate songs on the album, at least to me:



The song has a rare clarity, I think, it's absolutely full of the pain that it's about, there is no remove here, but there's an impressive depth of perception. "Love is simple / To quote a phrase / I'm learning it these days" is a wonderfully humble lyric.  "I'm going out of my mind / With a pain that stops and starts / Like a corkscrew to my heart / Ever since we've been apart" captures the fever-like sensation of heartbreak perfectly, even if it is a little melodramatic.

And while I can't really imagine being the inspiration for "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," I have to mention it because the song is the source of my obsession with lyrical inflection.  If you listen to the whole thing, it'll become clear that Dylan has very pronounced patterns in each verse:




Until, that is, he hits the line "Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair."  It's a great line in and of itself, and a strong advancement of the narrative.  But, unless I'm crazy, it's also the only real exception to Dylan's pronunciation patterns, and it's a lovely one.

But then, none of you need me to tell you that Blood on the Tracks is a great album.  I'm still not sure I'd want to go through the emotional experiences that produced it (I feel like Bob Dylan would be exceptionally difficult to end a relationship with), but I'm glad someone did, for our collective benefit.

A Somewhat Belated New Year's Thought

Was J-Lo's New Year's bodysuit a failure both as a fashion statement and as a tempt to provoke because no one will ever, ever top Cher?

Strike!

Cello by schoeband.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of schoeband.


This New York Times piece about the strike at the Cleveland Orchestra is excellent, and raises a couple of important issues.  First, there's the one that's made explicit in the story:
In Cleveland, the fight revolves around several thousand dollars a year in salary for each player. But implicit is a debate over the worth of exquisitely trained musical artists in our society and how much we are now willing to pay for them.
That's of course one of the issues at stake in stories about funding for the arts across a wide variety of disciplines, from the broad decline of the news business, to the closing of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis.  But there are other questions here, too.  If salaries rapidly decline in music and art, as they have in journalism, symphonies, galleries, etc., risk losing out on a huge amount of talent.  For example, journalism has become such a costly career to pursue, full of unpaid internships, low starting salaries, and fellowships that require the people who take them to have independent sources of income.  Those financial entry barriers are not inconsequential, and they limit the kind of people who can decide they want to pursue a career in journalism.  Given the costs of training and equipment to go into classical music, if salaries fall, the entry barriers are even steeper.


But I think one thing that stood out substantially to me about this story was the fact that the Orchestra musicians feel comfortable potentially striking at all.  Given the high social capital culture jobs have, and the terrible state of the economy, I'm impressed that the musicians aren't worried about getting fired or disciplined, or losing public approval for striking.  I guess when the profession's in peril, someone's got to take a stand.

I Am A Bad Celebrity Gossip

Because somehow I missed that Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls is engaged to Neil Gaiman (which makes SO MUCH SPOOKY SENSE) until she took off a lot of her clothes on the red carpet and the Fug Girls pointed it out (NSFW, duh.).  I'm not a Dresden Dolls devotee or anything (though Amanda did go to my high school, and they have been generous enough to play benefits for our incredible drama department), but "The Jeep Song" is up there on my list of favorite breakup songs of all time, is is in many ways the silly encapsulation of how I felt about much of ninth through twelfth grade:




All of this nostalgia aside, though, I actually didn't think Dana Goodyear's profile of Neil Gaiman in this week's New Yorker was very good. Maybe it's just that Gaiman isn't someone I wanted to know more about, and I didn't know that until I read the piece, but I felt like it was a fairly surface look at a 
complicated artist, unlike Goodyear's brilliant deep dive on James Cameron. I love Sandman so much 
it's difficult for me to talk about, the emotions just run too deep. It's impossible that the person who 
created it could be as moving as the work itself.

Golden

I highly, highly recommend Lynda Obst's piece for The Atlantic about how the Golden Globes represent the future of our entertainment:

Increasingly, the TV and movie industries are blurring together. Their executives are commutative: the head of Disney Channel just took over Walt Disney studios, where many studio heads have been grown; Grey Gardens, which won best TV movie, stars movie veterans Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore; Laura Linney is starring in a new cable TV series – a venue where women movie stars over 40 now go to thrive; moviepeople are making TV; and TV stars, like Blake Lively of CW’s Gossip Girl, are making movies. Lively, in fact, is the movie business’s newest “it” girl, and a client of CAA party host Josh Lieberman. In some weird way, the Globes anticipated this mish-mash.
On a meta level—as its first ever host, the Globes chose a foreign import who starred in a British TV series that was remade here (becoming a TV hit with a movie star who became a TV star), who then started making American movies before he ever made a British one… (Got all that?) Very hybrid.
 And if you look at the bottom of the piece, her bio indicates Obst is going to be writing and blogging for The Atlantic's new culture channel.  This is great news.  She's funny, and smart. 

I Wanted to Like the Movie Version of the Lovely Bones

But I'm sure it's fairly abundantly clear from the title of this post that I didn't.  It may be nostalgia from enjoying the book much more than I expected, and as a result, feeling more protective of the property than I intended.  But I think Peter Jackson's movie adaptation has a couple of significant flaws.

First, while the movie strips down the book quite a bit, both in terms of plot and characterization, it still manages to feel slow.  As my friend and regular movie-going buddy Alex Remington pointed out, after the murder is committed, a large part of the movie happens in slow-motion and repeated takes.  Some of the images we see over and over again are lovely, but they're limpid, the movie takes a lot of time.  It's too bad, because the opening section of the movie has tremendous momentum, particularly in two scenes, one where the main character races across her back yard to take clandestine pictures of a neighbor girl, another in which she commandeers her parents' cherry-red Mustang to driver her brother, who has swallowed a twig and has an obstructed airway, to the hospital.  There's a later scene in which her sister runs away from a man who wants to kill her that has tremendous energy as well.  Jackson hasn't lost his ability to shoot great horror or exhilirating action, he just chooses not to for most of the movie, and it's frustrating.

Second, a lot of the effects manage to look precious, rather than awe-inspiring.  Again, I don't doubt Jackson's ability to awe, but at least the way I interpreted Alice Sebold's vision of heaven was a little more...rigorous than the candy-coated paradise Jackson occasionally conjures up for Susie to spend her afterlife in. And Jackson shifts some of the events in the novel around in a way that I think actually drains the dramatic tension from them.  I won't say more in the name of spoilers, but Sebold manages to have a larger scope than Jackson does, and also tell a story more economically than he does at least in this outing.

That's not to say there aren't some things in the movie that are worth watching.  Susan Sarandon's turn as the boozy grandmother who holds Susie's family together after her death is marvelous.  Full of life and a little usefully placed bile, she careens into the haunted house where Susie's family is marooned, drinking, overfilling the washing machine and dancing in the bubbles, lighting things in frying pans on fire, and believing Buckley, Susie's younger brother, when he insists she's still present in some way.  There's a gorgeous shot of her shaking back her hair and lighting a cigarette through hospital glass that made me extremely happy.  Saoirse Ronan is lovely, if saddled with some narration that's tough to swallow, much less say.  And Rose McIver, who plays Susie's younger sister Lindsey, is marvelous, alternately distracted, grieving, furious, terrified, and passionate.  I hope she gets more work out of this, because she richly deserves it.

In the end, I wonder if The Lovely Bones ever could have been a great movie.  It's one that people feel extremely passionate about; Jackson apparently bought the film rights to the novel with his own money rather than getting financing for it, he felt so strongly about.  I know I had an extremely specific vision of many elements of the book in my head, and wept over it as I haven't cried over a book in a long time.  The movie made me cry too (but then, I'm an enormous sap), but I wasn't captivated by it in the same way I loved the novel.  A book about a personal vision of heaven may not bet translatable for the masses.