Spike Lee’s new documentary about Michael Jackson (his second documentary about Michael Jackson) premieres on Showtime tomorrow night. It’s very moving. It’s about the work, and ONLY the work. It also made me bust out Off the Wall for the umpteenth time and listen to it start to finish.
I reviewed Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to “Off the Wall” for Rogerebert.com.
NEXT BOOK on the essays shelf:
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
I should say up front that I have no dog in this race. I am not in academia. I was not a humanities student or an English student. I was an acting student. I was protected from the wild changes in Humanities programs (starting in the 70s, I guess, before my time, but continuing on to now). My Humanities class in 11th grade – which incorporated art history and literature trends – we did Egyptian art, we did Gothic melodrama, we did Beowulf, we did the Harlem Renaissance, we did the Romantics, we did a little Impressionist painting – was one of the best classes I took in high school. It’s the foundation. I grew up with parents who loved books, and who were not academics or theoreticians. My family is a family of artists who love art for art’s sake, and don’t get bogged down in theory. I read academic jargon and I think, “Something has gone very very wrong.”
The way I look at it is: Art represents a chaotic impulse deep in the human soul, something that has to do with beauty and sex and death. We don’t have words for these things, or words don’t suffice. Hence, Art. Religious art counts, secular art counts, movies count, performance art pieces count. Personal preference is irrelevant at that level of the discussion, the What Is Art discussion. You may not LIKE Jackson Pollock (for example), but what he was DOING was part of the ongoing attempt to express things that has been going on since a caveman first painted a bison on a cave-wall. And so I think some of the academic jargon sounds like a timid man trying to wrestle with a giant anaconda. Let’s contain all of these chaotic forces by explaining them (in the most incomprehensible prose ever invented. Its PURPOSE is to be incomprehensible. I do not get it. This happens in film criticism, too. There are the theorists, and if you read one paragraph of their stuff, you feel your own enjoyment of the art form draining out of you as though your neck has been sliced open. WHO are those essays FOR? Is there embarrassment that you spent so much time analyzing what is, essentially, pop culture, no matter which way you slice it? And so you have to JUSTIFY your interest in going to movies by drowning it in prose like that?)
I saw something alarming on Twitter from a guy who makes his living writing film criticism. He said that discussing “aesthetics” was evidence of “privilege.” What a dreadful attitude. That attitude is why so many film reviews read like glorified book reports / sociological commentary. Of COURSE aesthetics matter. And if you came up in a time when “aesthetics” are derided, then your ability to SEE will be impacted. Literally. How does one look at the Sistine Chapel without understanding the importance of aesthetics? What does it look like if you treat aesthetics with suspicion and class-hatred? (It’s all quite middle-class Marxist.) You can have glorious aesthetics put in the service of something dreadful (Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will the purest example), you can have a terrible-LOOKING amateurish movie in the service of a good cause. (That second category is why a lot of movies get a pass. I persist in thinking – and this is my show business background – that things have to WORK. Whatever that means. That doesn’t have to look a certain way. Bela Tarr’s work is not ingratiating or show-bizz-y, to say the least, but it WORKS, as story, as visuals, as themes. I don’t CARE if it’s a movie about a popular cause: if the movie sucks, it DOESN’T work. “Aesthetics” doesn’t mean “prettying” things up – it means the VISUALS, HOW things are put together. To work in the arts in any way, and to treat aesthetics with such derision, is, again, an example of “something is very very wrong here.” Incidentally, it was the suspicion of aesthetics that made critics dismiss By the Sea wrongly.
I guess I do have a dog in this race. But not really the same dog as Paglia’s. “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” is basically a manifesto, attacking American academia, the Humanities, in particular. It’s both macro and micro. It’s 100 pages long. She diagnoses the problem (French theory, which came into our universities through the backdoor in the 1970s), and then proposes solutions. She is still proposing solutions. I haven’t been in a university setting in decades. My grad school was an acting school. All of this is totally unfamiliar to me, although my friends who teach at universities have told me stories about all of this. According to Paglia, the French theorists plus the Humanities departments fracturing into specialization (women’s studies, LGBT studies, and etc.), was when the decay began. And so now a student can conceivably graduate from college or high school without ever having read Shakespeare. And still be considered educated.
Camille Paglia went to Yale, Harold Bloom was her mentor and icon, but her adult life has not been sent in a university setting. She has been teaching at the same arts school in Philadelphia for 30 years. She’s an outsider. Maybe there is some resentment that she has been side-lined, but she’s not really writing from the stance of “Hey, guys, let me in!!” She’s more like an avenging angel. She thinks academics have fucked it all up. Tenure fucks things up. People become safe and rigid, protecting their tiny little ground of theoretical expertise, and they pass that rigidity onto their students.
Her targets in this gigantic essay are the French theorists – Derrida, Foucault, Lacan. She’s extremely mean about the French (shocker). I have not read their work, so I can’t weigh in, but Jessie just gave me a crash-course in Lacanian theory – as it relates to the function of language and Story – in one of the Supernatural posts, and it was very intriguing. Book recommendations, please? I don’t dismiss something just because Camille tells me to. I also don’t dismiss something if I haven’t read it yet.
Camille’s essay appeared in Arion in the spring of 1991. It is gigantic. A small book, really. It features her pet issues, which she goes after with a battering ram. Issues that will be familiar to anyone who read her gigantic tome Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
She attacks the ivy-draped halls of American universities with a flame-thrower. Burn it all down! She does not play nice with things she holds in contempt. Like the following excerpt, about Foucault.
Haven’t read any of the people she discusses, so posting this is not an implicit endorsement. Because I have no idea what she is talking about, it sometimes comes across to me as “BLAH BLAH BLAH I AM SO MAD GRRRRR BLAH BLAH BLAH.”
In my own small corner of the world, I guess I can understand. The French film critics of the New Wave were so influential to American writers. The auteur theory and all that. Now because I came up as an actress, and a movie-lover, I had no idea about any of those guys outside of the movies they eventually made. Which I loved. Godard and Truffaut and Chabrol and all the rest. Artists don’t care about your theories, critics: it’s very important to remember that. The conversation you are having is not meant to be a two-way street. I have my own thoughts on auteur theory (I think it’s so limiting, and it’s so clear that it’s embraced by people who are not artists – and who LOVE “systems.” GOD, look out for people who love systems!!) Auteur theory is an organizing principle. It definitely has its uses. AND, in its first blossoming, helped resurrent/re-enliven the reputations of the guys who did “our” genre pictures, stuff we considered B-movie trash. Howard Hawks and all the rest. The French LOVED Howard Hawks (way more than he was loved here, especially at the time of the French New Wave) – and they were practically single-handedly responsible for putting the gleam on his reputation that exists to this day. As well it should. He’s my #1 favorite director. The French often love most the stuff we are embarrassed about. They loved our gangster movies. They loved our crime thrillers. They loved our whodunit-detective stories. They weren’t in love with our big prestige “message” pictures. They loved our “trash.” And they were RIGHT. (I always pay attention to what the French decide to love and celebrate. Because they have a pretty good track record, in that regard.)
But we’re a couple generations away from that initial auteur theory, and so it’s morphed into something that can be kind of ridiculous. AND, because the THEORY is the most important thing – directors who don’t fit into the theory (the more workmanlike guys who did a lot of different things well) are ignored. Not even studied. (I covered this a little bit in my Criterion essay about Gilda.)
Back to Camille. Here she is, being extremely generous towards Foucault.
Excerpt from Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Foucault is falsely used by naive American academics as a scholarly source of information, as if he were Fernand Braudel. But you cannot trust a single fact in Foucault. His books should be called Foucault’s Diaries. They have no relationship to historical reality. They are simply devious improvisations in the style of Gide’s The Counterfeiters. They attract game playing minds with unresolved malice toward society, people who gave lip service to rebellion but who lack the guts to actually rebel and pay the price. Derrida is smack for the spirit, but Foucault is the academic cocaine, the yuppie drug of choice of the Seventies and Eighties. In the Sixties, LSD gave vision, while marijuana gave community. But coke, pricey and jealously hoarded, is the power drug, giving a rush of omnipotent self-assurance. Work done under its influence is manic, febrile, choppy, disconnected. Coke was responsible for the plot incoherence of fifteen years of TV sit-coms and glitzy “high-concept” Hollywood films. Foucault is the high-concept pusher and deal-maker of the cocaine dealers. His big squishy pink-marshmallow word is “power,” which neither he nor his followers fully understand. It caroms around picking up lint and dog hair but is no substitute for political analysis. Foucault’s ignorance of prehistory and ancient history, based in the development and articulation of cultures and legal codes, makes his discussion of power otiose. He never asks how power is gained or lost, justly administered or abused. He does not show how efficient procedures get overformalized, entrenched, calcified, then shattered and reformed. He has no familiarity with theories of social or biological hierarchies, such as the “pecking order” universally observed in farmyards and schoolyards. Because, in the faddish French way, he ridiculously denies personality exists, he cannot assess the impact of strong personalities on events nor can he, like Weber, catalog types of authority or prestige. He is inept in comparing different governmental structures. Because he cannot deal with flux or dynamic change, he is hopeless with protracted power struggles. An astute political analyst would have begun his reflections with the long conflict between Pharaoh and priesthood in Egypt or between Emperor and army in late Rome, patterns still observable in our century’s ongoing power struggles between college administrations and faculties or between Hollywood corporations, banks, and studios on the one hand and directors, actors, and screenwriters on the other.
Foucault, like Lacan and Derrida, is forty years out of date. He does not see and cannot deal with the radical transformation of culture by new technology and mass media following World War Two. He overlooks the economic role of entrepreneurship, and he is blind to the dominance of personality in our pagan Age of Hollywood. Liberal academics are stuck in a time warp. Invoking the Foucault buzz words “surveillance” and “the police,” they try to re-create the Fifties world of J. Edgar Hoover and Dragnet, the last, lost moment of liberalism’s political authenticity, before it was destroyed by my generation’s excesses. It is mildly nauseating to see this snide use of “the police” as a literary cliche coming from spoiled, wifty, middle-class academics who would be the first to shriek for the police if a burglar or rapist came through the window. And as for surveillance, Foucault-style language analysis seems lame and monotonous compared to the treatment of the same theme by Sade, Blake, Poe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Brecht, or even Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. The cultural mode of the post-Sixties era is not surveillance but voyeurism, ours. Eye-energy, thanks to omnipresent television, is going in the opposite direction. Institutions are the modern reality principle. Current academic liberalism cannot understand the fragility of institutions, or the ease with which order, due process, and civil liberties can be destroyed by assertions of anarchic selfhood. As a battle-scarred Sixties veteran, I learned this the hard way. Humanists like to childishly sneer and snort about the system, but they are quick to hide behind it, to pose from its forum at conferences, and to use it as a lifelong gravy train.
The academic popularity of Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida was produced by the poor educational preparation of American humanists, who appear to have slept through college. In the basic biology class of my first college semester in 1964, we studied the Pre-Socratics, with their competing and contradictory theories of the origins and constituency of matter. Heraclitus, in particular, to whom I had already been introduced by Walter Pater, contains everything that is in Derrida and more. We later studied the Western development of scientific classification schemes and the checkered history of evolutionary and genetic theories from Lamarck through Mendel and Darwin. In basic geology the next year, we learned how to think in huge time-frames and how to analyze multiple layering and inversions in mixed physical evidence. At no time in my education or reading was science ver presented as an absolutist, dogmatic methodology, the way it is constantly maligned these days by French-befuddled humanists. We saw, following Aristotle and his seventeenth-century admirers, that science is a system of provisional hypotheses, open to constant revision and disproof. In classical art and history, we were impressed with modern archaeology’s tender solicitude for the tiniest chips and fragments of vanished cultures, with the excruciatingly slow and heroically self-abnegating excavation, measurement,numbering, photography, extraction, cleaning, cataloging, restoration, and preservation of artifacts. (It was exasperation and impatience with dull potsherds that ended my childhood dream of becoming an archeologist.) In introductory social science, we learned that the nineteenth-century rise of anthropology as a discipline hastened a new cultural relativism that shifted Europe from centrality; we were shown how anthropology is a limited interpretation by aliens who inevitably alter the small societies they enter and observe. As for Saussure, from the moment we began Latin class in junior high school, we were told, in simple, common-sense terms, that language is an arbitrary, self-enclosed system that varies from culture to culture, a point obvious to everyone studying languages for the last 200 years. Even the hot-dog vendor on the street would never mistake the word elephant for a real elephant. The French school, tickling its own buttocks, is in a state of dementia about the actual facts of modern thought. It has nothing whatever new or important to say.
I was going to put our lovely troll’s name for us (“annoying cunts”) in the headline, but I don’t want to scare people away. I should use Helena’s hashtag: #proudtobeanannoyingcunt.
Maybe we should create a warding spell for the rare future troll.
Anyway, I’m busy tonight, the flame is coming over to do handiwork around my house. Because I need a tall man to reach where I can’t reach, dammit. These lightbulbs won’t change themselves.
Will watch tomorrow – and to all of you who participated in the epic “Folsom Prison Blues” discussion: seriously, thank you. That thread was amazing, and it’s been, what, 36 hours, and I’m still laughing every time I think about lindah’s poem.
ALL of you rock.
Thank you for showing up here, for being so wicked smart that I’m in awe of you, for helping me dig deep into this show I love so much, think deeper about my ideas, throw ideas/concepts around. To not only talk about “Folsom Prison Blues” but also why human babies developed big eyes in the first place. Because….. that makes sense …. somehow.
Anyway, here’s an open thread for tonight’s episode.
Have at it!
“30 for 30” Chasing Tyson (2015; d. Steve Cantor)
I love the 30 for 30 series on ESPN but had never seen this one, the story of Evander Holyfield’s pursuit of Mike Tyson. I’ve got a Tyson thing. I loved James Toback’s movie. The only time I went to the David Letterman Show at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, Evander Holyfield was the guest. It was right after the curious incident of the ear-chomping. “Chasing Tyson” is really a portrait of Evander Holyfield, whose clear talent as a boxer, was always being measured against Tyson, so that the popular belief was that he wasn’t REALLY a champion, even when he won things fair and square. Tyson, as always, is a compelling figure for the camera.
The Sorrow and the Pity (1972; d. Marcel Ophüls)
I had never seen this 4-hour long documentary about the French resistance (or so-called resistance) during WWII. The interviews are so compelling you forget the length. When you listen to the people describe why they did what they did during the Vichy years, the complexity increases. Nothing is clear or black-and-white. People want to make themselves look good, too. So there is some unreliable narration going on. Incredibly riveting film.
While We’re Young (2014; d. Noah Baumbach)
I enjoyed it … somewhat, but something was off. Maybe it felt self-congratulatory. Or maybe it was defeatist, too. A middle-aged man settling into his own mediocrity. And maybe that’s the story. But something was “off.” Very good acting across the board.
Supernatural, Season 10, Episode 12, “About a Boy” (2015; d. Serge Ladouceur)
A fave.
Supernatural, Season 8, Episode 11, “LARP and the Real Girl” (2013; d. Jeannot Szwarc)
Another fave.
Supernatural, Season 8, Episode 20, “Pac-Man Fever” (2013; d. Robert Singer)
A mini-masterpiece. I weep every time. And every time I watch, I feel I need to learn the lesson, which is woven into the story so elegantly (thank you, Robbie Thompson). What would happen if I just …. stopped playing the game? When she says, “See? You can’t stop either.” she could be talking to me.
The Conformist (1970; d. Bernardo Bertolucci)
I love this movie. I first saw it at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago and it really should be seen on the big screen, true of all of Bertolucci’s films.
The Face of Another (1967; d. Hiroshi Teshigahara)
My God, what a brilliant and disturbing film. Reminiscent of Joan Crawford in A Woman’s Face, where her appearance is transformed by plastic surgery … and also Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart in a similar position … but also monster-movies, where through the wonders of “science” monsters are created … The Face of Another features a frighteningly brilliant performance from Tatsuya Nakadai as the man with a disfigured fave who is given a lifelike mask by what amounts to a mad scientist (the mad scientist’s lab is genius in conception). The mask starts changing who the man is. He can’t control it. Nakadai’s performance is so revelatory because even though he, the actor, is not wearing a mask (we are meant to understand that his actual face IS the mask, that the character looked very different from this) – we BELIEVE that that is a mask. We BELIEVE that that face doesn’t quite “fit” him. This is all because of his acting. He’s the one who had to be in charge of that. No tricks. Unforgettable performance and film.
The Vow (2012; d. Michael Sucsy)
Everyone needs to have a little Channing Tatum in their lives on a semi-regular basis, and I am just counting the days until Hail, Caesar comes out.
A Very Murray Christmas (2015; d. Sofia Coppola)
The whole thing feels like a miracle to me. An homage to “Christmas specials” of days gone by, where a star – like Cher – or Dean Martin – sang songs, had guest stars, there were cheesy sets and little-Santa-elf Rockette dancers and it was all pleasing and silly and innocent. We don’t really go for “pleasing and silly and innocent” anymore. It’s our loss. Because it’s Bill Murray’s Christmas special, there’s that strain of sour melancholy in it … but I loved the conception (everyone trapped in a hotel during a blizzard), and when finally the actual Christmas special starts (near the end), and George Clooney and Miley Cyrus are swept onto the sound-stage in a little fake sleigh … I thought my heart would burst from the pleasure.
Like Someone in Love (2013; d. Abbas Kiarostami)
I had missed this one from Iranian art-house master Abbas Kiarostami. I had loved Certified Copy so much and had been looking forward to Like Someone in Love, especially when “word on the street” was that it was filmed in Tokyo with Japanese actors. The film features the classic staples of Kiarostami’s style (lots of people driving in cars, with reflections sweeping across the windows), and lots of “set-piece” scenes, where two people have a conversation before moving on. I was incredibly moved by the film, and I am so thankful to my friend Steve Boone for his Rogerebert.com review of it. Now THAT is film criticism. If I were in charge of the world, that piece would be anthologized.
Night and the City (1950; d. Jules Dassin)
It’s a nest of vipers. Everyone on the make. A classic femme fatale wouldn’t have a chance in this environment, because everyone is rotten to the core. Great atmosphere, great setting, great performances. Richard Widmark in high manic desperate mode.
Supernatural, Season 11, Episode 8, “Just My Imagination” (2015; d. Richard Speight Jr.)
Loved it. When air-guitar-guy hears the news of his dead girlfriend, and cries out, “SHE WAS MY GIRL” … it makes me love actors so much that I don’t know what to do with myself. He GOES for it. That was REAL. (And because it was so real, that’s why it’s funny.)
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 1, “Ladies Night” (2015; d. S.J. Clarkson)
I decided, what the hell, let me check this out. I got sucked in instantly. I LOVE her. I love Carrie Moss. (I also love Carrie Moss’ girlfriend whom Supernatural fans will recognize as the “chastity counselor” Dean banged in Season 9.) I love its interest in how trauma operates, what it can look like (and it ain’t pretty.) I can see why it’s being criticized for its racial issues (especially in the character of the drug-addict-next-door), and maybe it can course-correct. But so far, I love it.
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 2, “Crush Syndrome” (2015; d. S.J. Clarkson)
I also love how so much of it appears to be shot on location in New York. It gives it a gritty grubby vibe (it’s not Times Square New York, it’s East Village New York).
Criss Cross (1949; d. Robert Siodmak)
Burt Lancaster, Yvonne deCarlo and Dan Duryea. What more do you want out of life.
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 3, “It’s Called Whiskey” (2015; d. David Petrarca)
Jessica and Luke hook up. They bang ferociously, and she knocks her head on the headboard. He stops, and says he’s sorry. She scoffs, “I won’t break” and he says, “Yes. You will.” And goes gentler after that, moving her down a little bit so her head won’t bump against the headboard anymore. I haven’t stopped thinking about that moment. Because I say to people all the time variations of, “I won’t break.” But then I do. Or, if I don’t, then it is still POSSIBLE that I will break. I am not an unbreakable person: no one is. So maybe I need to stop saying that. This is why I say the show is so so smart about trauma. It makes you say stupid un-true shit to protect yourself.
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 4, “99 Friends” (2015; d. David Petrarca)
I also LOVE Rachael Taylor. Plus, the look/feel/mood of the show.
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 5, “The Sandwich Saved Me” (2015; d. Stephen Surjik)
And help me, now I am deeply DEEPLY in love with Wil Traval.
The Big Short (2015; d. Adam McKay)
I went to a SAG Foundation screening. I hadn’t seen it on the big screen. There was a QA afterwards with two of the actors, Adepero Oduye and John Magaro. Because it was a SAG event, the focus was on the acting (the audition process, the filming process), and the two were both so charming and smart. One question was what job gave them their SAG card. Oduye told a funny story about playing every black-woman-stereotype on a Law & Order SVU – “You know, she was a crackhead, unwed mother, in prison … and I LOVED playing it and I will always LOVE that role because I got into SAG with it.” They were both wonderful.
Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976; d. Paul Mazursky)
I had forgotten how much I love this movie.
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 6, “You’re a Winner!” (2015; d. Stephen Surjik)
I’m in it for the long haul now.
Supernatural, Season 2, Episode 19, “Folsom Prison Blues” (2007; d. Mike Rohl)
A re-watch for what became an epic re-cap with an even more epic comments section (237 comments and counting.)
Sense and Sensibility (1995; d. Ang Lee)
Popped it in the day I heard about Alan Rickman’s death. I had spent the day writing the tribute for Rogerebert.com, and couldn’t let it go.
Pitch Perfect (2012; d. Jason Moore)
I adore this movie.
Room (2015; d. Lenny Abrahamson)
Watched with Jen and her Mum. They had never seen it before. Jen’s mother is a social worker, so we had an amazing discussion afterwards.
Supernatural, Season 2, Episode 20, “What Is and What Should Never Be” (2007; d. Eric Kripke)
In preparation for the next re-cap, which I’m just not sure when it will happen. But one of my favorite episodes in the entire history of the series.
Rams (2015; d. Grímur Hákonarson)
Incredible film. Discussed it here.
Used Cars (1980; d. Robert Zemeckis).
A brutal ruthless comedy that has the courage of its sleazy convictions. I reviewed here.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 1, “Sympathy for the Devil” (2009; d. Robert Singer)
I’m not sure what prompted the grand binge-watch festival that was January. I’m sure it was some mixture of malaise, bad weather, and procrastination. I’m starting up at the NY Times again, part-time, but that won’t start till February. Maybe I’m just living it up while I can.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 2, “Good God Y’All” (2009; d. Philip Sgriccia)
See above.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 3, “Free to Be You and Me” (2009; d. J. Miller Tobin)
Wow, a lot has changed.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 4, “The End” (2009; d. Steve Boyum)
One of my favorite episodes in the series.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 5, “Fallen Idols” (2009; d. James L. Conway)
“Four score and seven years ago ….. I wore a funny hat.” And all of those legends about Jimmy Dean’s car: all true. There is something weird about the history of that car.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 6, “I Believe the Children Are Our Future” (2009; d. Charles Beeson)
That little child kills me.
Naz & Maalik (2015; d. Jay Dockendorf)
A movie about two gay Muslim Brooklyn kids. Reviewed for Rogerebert.com.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 7, “The Curious Case of Dean Winchester” (2009; d. Robert Singer)
“Listen, Sam, when you get to be our age …” Lol.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 8, “Changing Channels” (2009; d. Charles Beeson)
Classic, not only in Supernatural-world, but in all of television history.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 9, “The Real Ghostbusters” (2009; d. James L. Conway)
I know some fans appear to feel that “Becky” is “making fun” of them. Well, if the shoe fits … But, in general, the episode is a celebration of the fans who thrill to this story and these characters. And I miss Chuck.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 10, “Abandon All Hope” (2009; d. Philip Sgriccia)
Devastating. The way the “reapers” are shown standing silent through the street is just one example of how inventive the show used to be with portraying angels/demons. It’s so simply done, and so creepy. More of that, please, less Boy-Band-Rejects wearing suits and presenting Power Point lectures.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 11, “Sam Interrupted” (2009; d. James L. Conway)
No matter how hard I try, I find this episode personally upsetting. There are so many moments I love but I think the one that is most jarring is Sam fighting off the orderlies and then you see that no one is there. It’s terrifying.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 12, “Swap Meat” (2009; d. Robert Singer)
Poor Sam in that hoodie. And being allergic to gluten.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 13, “The Song Remains the Same” (2010; d. Steve Boyum)
I had forgotten how inventive Season 5 was. Maybe the most inventive in terms of its overall Arc. The vessels, Michael and Lucifer circling, saying Yes, what that will lead to, and etc. Very intricate, very well-conceived.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 14, “My Bloody Valentine” (2010; d. Mike Rohl)
I love when Dean looks at Cas, as Cupid is hugging Sam, and asks, “Are we fighting? Is this a fight?”
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 15, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (2010; d. John F. Showalter)
Welcome, Kim Rhodes! I love it when Bobby is given real backstory-episodes. The more you learn about him, the more tragic it is, and the more heroic he seems.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 17, “99 Problems” (2010; d. Charles Beeson)
Very creepy episode about humanity’s Jacobin/Robespierre-ian tendencies.
The 5th Wave (2016; d. J. Blakeson)
A not good film based on a very good book. My review.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 18, “Point of No Return” (2010; d. Charles Beeson)
“Your brother Adam. He’s in the cage. In Hell. With Lucifer.” Thanks for the reminder, adorable stage manager.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 19, “Hammer of the Gods” (2010; d. Rick Bota)
Yes, the ancient deities are a campy bore. But there are a lot of funny individual moments in this episode. I enjoy it.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 20, “The Devil You Know” (2010; d. Robert Singer)
The “entrance” of Death is the best thing the show has ever done. Period.
Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 21, “Swan Song” (2010; d. Steve Boyum)
The framing of the whole thing with the history of the Impala is so emotional.
Supernatural, Season 6 (except for “Clap Your Hands” and “French Mistake,” which I watch all the time.) The Arc is just as good as I remembered, although wiping Lisa and Ben’s memories still seems like it puts them at such risk. Like: they’re still in danger but now … they won’t know why. And how will they conceive of the fact that they lost a year of their lives? It’s dreadfully sad, the way it’s played, and Dean is a WRECK. He’s a wreck whenever he has to deal with them, he feels so guilty and protective and trapped and lost … It’s a new side of Dean. The worry he feels there doesn’t look like the worry he feels for Sam. It’s a different context, and it sort of drives home the point that normal relationships, and normal intimacy, is impossible with the hunter life.
Supernatural, Season 7 (except for “The Mentalists” – which, again, is a favorite and I watch all the time). Season 7 was not my favorite on first viewing. I didn’t find the Leviathan scary (maybe because the whole season is about what the Leviathans are PLANNING to do to human beings. They never actually start the Final Solution. Maybe there would have been more stress if we had actually seen human beings driven into feeding pens en masse, etc.) But the season not only held up better, as a whole, than I remembered, I saw a lot of new things, fresh things. It also doesn’t look as “bad” as I remembered. The main problem, as I see it, is in JAs and JPs skin-tones. Suddenly they are pink and fleshy, or (worse) orange. When they should be pale, or brown, freckled and flush. They had forgotten how to light these guys, and so they put on the makeup so they could light them both the same way. That’s the main issue. Plus, Season 7 brings us both Charlie and Garth. And Kevin, too.
Supernatural, Season 8 (except for “Man’s Best Friends with Benefits,” because I just can’t.)
Season 8 is also quite wonderful and unique. Not that I didn’t remember that, but I hadn’t watched the whole thing in succession since my first time through. I have my favorite episodes, but it’s good to put it all together and see how it hangs together. In a way, it feels like Season 8 is just one long preamble for Season 9, which focused mainly on the brothers’ relationship. The “trials” and Dean’s protection of Sam, and etc. etc. was the spark that lit the match that then exploded in Season 9. Also, Season 8 gives JA a chance to say, with dead seriousness, “What’s up, Doc?” And I almost explode with gratification that that exists now.
Supernatural Season 9 (First three episodes, so far.)
I love so much the malaise and dread and interior-twistiness of season 9. They’re in their 30s now, and Season 9 feels like a very “adult” season. If Sam, in the first season, still seemed like a kid trying to come out from under the shadow of his big brother … now he’s a grown man, and he’s HAD IT. Such a destabilizing season.
Tumbledown (2014; d. Sean Mewshaw)
It opens this Friday. I’ll be reviewing for Rogerebert.com.
NEXT BOOK on the essays shelf:
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
When Elizabeth Taylor died it felt like the end of an era. Something vital had left the landscape. One of our Movie Goddesses, and unlike so-called “serious” actresses, Movie Goddesses are repositories of dreams and fantasies and projections … so that when THEY go, it’s disorienting. And Elizabeth Taylor, my God, she was THE movie goddess. Her heyday may have been in the 1950s and 60s, but when I grew up – the 1980s – she was still omnipresent, not just in her random TV appearances or guest spots, but in her tireless work and advocacy for AIDS research, which may be her most important legacy (and that’s how she referred to it too: “This is my life’s work.”) Elizabeth Taylor was not a nostalgia act. She was in the NOW. The only “nostalgia” about her was that her beauty was so extraordinary that she seemed timeless, or like she should be flying about on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her beauty was ferociously in your face, and it changed over time.
As a child, she gleamed like a star in the sky. Her violet eyes emanated bolts of light. As a young woman, she was so beautiful your bones ached just looking at her. I love 1960s Liz, jet-setting around with two-time hubby Richard Burton, looking plump and luscious in her go-go boots and minis and huge fur hats. As a middle-aged woman, the earthy side of her (always there) exploded out into one of her most defining and entertaining characteristics. Like any Erotic Muse, she is timeless. She herself is not androgynous, she’s all Woman, but her appeal is vast, from straight men to straight women to gay men to gay women to everyone in between. She’s an Icon of Identity. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. The world has changed too much. Sex-Bomb Movie Goddesses are out of style (more’s the pity).
Photo by Roddy McDowell. They were child actors on the MGM lot together. They went to school on the MGM lot. Their classmate was Dean Stockwell. Just so you know.
When she died, there was an outpouring of grief at all we had lost. It was supremely touching. Because, of course, outside of her Movie Goddess-ness and her tabloid life, she was a hell of an actress. As a child she had a gift. She could project her inner life. Grown-up actors WORK to be able to do what she could naturally.
Critic Dana Stevens and I had a discussion about National Velvet (and, strangely, I published it just days before she died. It was uncanny timing.) “So Many Currents In Such a Little Puddle”: Dana Stevens and I Chat About National Velvet
Here’s the piece I wrote when she died:
From Velvet to Helena: A Life of Launching Herself Into the Imaginary
I’m not sure if you’ve seen Paul Newman’s TCM tribute to his friend/colleague Elizabeth Taylor, but it’s so so gorgeous. He gets it.
My favorite phrase in that tribute is when he calls her a “functioning voluptuary,” which I think nails down her huge essence beautifully.
Not surprisingly, Elizabeth Taylor is Camille Paglia’s favorite actress. Paglia’s gigantic survey-course book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
In this 1992 article for Penthouse, Paglia examines Taylor’s mystique and Personae, and puts Meryl Streep on the chopping-block by way of comparison. It’s one of those things where I agree – and then disagree – does it have to be either/or, Camille? Aren’t you comparing apples and oranges? But she certainly makes her points about the problems she has with Streep – AND, on a larger plane, she’s going after what the culture values, what the culture says “Here. This is good.” Paglia resists the Streep-cult, and tells us why. She goes into all of this in her typical autobiographical way. Elizabeth Taylor connects her to the Dionysian impulse. A woman made to be looked at, to be savored, eaten up, celebrated, an Icon. Paglia sees Meryl Streep’s hard-working-ness to be an example of the Protestant work-ethic that Paglia feels is so damaging and prudish and anti-Art. So, you know, take it for what it’s worth. Paglia’s not the only one to criticize Streep in this way. Pauline Kael had similar issues. But this is why I value Paglia: she is not afraid of going after sacred cows, and it’s not indiscriminate swiping: it’s all very personal for her. And also: you can WRESTLE with her. She states her case so clearly that you are thrown back on yourself to try to put your reactions into words. This is what good rhetoric is SUPPOSED to do. If you dismissed her words on Taylor because you disagreed with her sentiments on Streep … then you are missing out on that cultural dialogue.
Later in the article, Paglia goes into Taylor’s various roles (and she makes some wonderful observations), but here’s an excerpt from the opening of the article. (I love how Paglia states that she had “599” pictures of Taylor. Not “598.” Not “600.” “599.” And I believe her that that’s the exact number.)
Excerpt from Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Hollywood, America’s greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind. It has only one living queen: Elizabeth Taylor.
My devotion to Elizabeth Taylor began in the late Fifties, when I was in junior high school and when Taylor was in her heyday as a tabloid diva. I was suffering sustained oppression in the Age of Perky Blondes: day after day, I reeled from the assaults of Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, Sandra Dee. All that parochial pleasantness! So chirpy, peppy, and pink so well-scrubbed, making the world safe for democracy.
In 1958, Elizabeth Taylor, raven-haired vixen and temptress, took Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds and became a pariah of the American press. I cheered. What joy to see Liz rattle Debbie’s braids and bring a scowl to that smooth, girlish forehead! As an Italian, I saw that a battle of cultures was under way: antiseptic American blondness was being swamped by a rising tide of sensuality, a new force that would sweep my Sixties generation into open rebellion.
Three years later, adulteress Taylor was forgiven by the American public when she caught near-fatal pneumonia in London. She was photographed being rushed unconscious on a stretcher into a hospital for an emergency tracheotomy. This brush with death seems, in some strange mythic way, to have divinized her. A worldwide surge of popular sympathy helped her win the Oscar in 1961 for Butterfield 8. There was a brilliant series of glossy color pictures of her in Look magazine that year in which her melting beauty was frankly set off by the concealed pale white scar on her throat.
Suffocating in the tranquil, bourgeois Fifties, I escaped by studying ancient Egypt and Greece – and worshipping Elizabeth Taylor. At one point, I had collected 599 pictures of her. I sensed that she was a universal archetype of woman. At the very moment that I was rebelling against the coercive role of femininity and modeling myself on my other heroine, the intrepid, masculine Amelia Earhart, I also recognized that Taylor’s mystery and glamour were coming from nature, not culture.
Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance. She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist label, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman’s ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men’s relations with women.
There is an absurd assumption in the air that Meryl Streep is the greatest American actress. Meryl Streep is a good, intelligent actress who has never given a great performance in her life. Her reputation is wildly out of sync with her actual achievement. Cerebral Streep was the ideal high-WASP actress for the fast-track yuppie era, bright, slick, self-conscious.
Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon.
Sorority Sisters (Tri-Deltas), University of Texas, 1944.
There’s too much that I love about this photo (every last stinking detail) that it’s useless to even discuss it. All I will say is: these girls seem FUN.
NEXT BOOK on the essays shelf:
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
I’ve got strong feelings about Camille Paglia. I suppose everyone does, pro or con. I’ve been seeking out this woman’s columns since my post-college years, her cultural stuff, music columns, book reviews, and then – also – her cultural broadsides. She has been banging on the same damn drum for almost 30 years now: but hell, if people aren’t listening, keep on banging. The problem with a lot of social commentary now (or at least the audience for social commentary) is that it eagerly dismisses those who don’t line up with their precious 21st century line of thinking. (Which then makes it almost impossible for these people to read books that pre-date the year 2000 without being outraged. I will not concede ground to people who want to limit their minds, and – worse – want to narrow what is deemed “acceptable” for everyone else. Meaning Jane Austen is written off as an example of internalized-patriarchy or whatever. Of course Ovid doesn’t HAVE to have trigger warnings, and that’s just an extreme example, but the mere REQUEST sets a dangerous precedent. If you are triggered by Ovid, see a doctor. I say that with no disrespect. We all have to take care of ourselves. I’ve got Triggers too, baby, and I talk about them and try to navigate around them as best I can. I don’t ask that everyone else tiptoe around my own personal issues – which are of no importance to anyone other than myself – and that’s as it should be. If you cut yourself off from the wellspring of artistic tradition that pre-dates your existence on the planet … well, just admit that you want to resurrect the “Know Nothing” political party of the 1800s and call it a day.
I think the problem I have is the inevitable reaction of dismissing someone totally if you disagree with some of their positions, or even one of their positions. “Christopher Hitchens wrote that horrible article about how women aren’t funny. Therefore, I don’t need to hear one other thing that that man has to say.” Everyone has their limits: if someone is a white supremacist or a homophobe, then I will ignore everything else that person says. However, there are exceptions, and that mainly has to do with time period. If you’re a white supremacist or a homophobe now, I will not listen to you. You are a Dinosaur and you are worthless. But some of my favorite writers from the past were misogynists to a practically hallucinatory degree. If you want to know how some men feel about you, ladies, Strindberg would be a good place to start. It’s excellent enemy-territory commentary. Or should I dismiss Shakespeare because his plays are littered with insulting comments about women’s emotionality and weak physicality? Shakespeare also wrote some of the greatest women characters of all time. And every actress I know wants to take a crack at “Miss Julie.”
Some of my favorite writers were jingoistic propagandists for the British Empire, including vicious hatred of the Irish. Some great writers in the 30s were willing to ignore the warning signs coming out of Stalin’s Russia. Or Hitler’s Germany. Some people don’t like John Wayne or Charlton Heston’s ACTING because of politics. They can’t and won’t separate. We all have to work out these disconnects for ourselves. You do you, I’ll do me. Where we will run into problems is if you want to tell ME what my limits should be. This is not how it goes. This is a free society and I believe in freedom of thought. Ezra Pound was a wack-job, and an anti-Semite, but he also did more to help struggling/obscure artists find their light than almost anyone else in the 20th century. Some people find this both/and attitude craven and disgusting. I just can’t help that. I also don’t care.
A lot of these social commentators have no interest in Art. They want Art to be social instruction. In many cases, bizarrely, right and left join hands in calls for censorship (the pornography wars in the 80s a perfect example, where right-wing Christians joined hands with radical feminists to condemn pornography. It was through the looking-glass. As a matter of fact, any time the hard-right and the hard-left join hands like that … my advice would be, do your best to claw your way to the middle, and stand your ground. Even if you don’t know why you’re doing it. By all means, choose a side, but when those sides align … something stinks to high hell in Denmark, and you’d best wash your hands of all of them.)
Camille Paglia comes at things from her cherished status as Total Outsider. Maybe she relates more to gay men and drag queens, because they revere pop culture and art like no other demographic. She’s working-class. To many women of color, her commentary is a welcome corrective to the “they just don’t get it” feminism of white girls who leave out minorities from their discussions, who don’t even realize their privileged status. Paglia sticks up for those who have no time for the “issues” that white mainstream feminism hold dear … and also sticks up for artists and sex workers and sexual outlaws and outsiders, her tribe, who also find no place in that establishment.
Paglia has her “pet” topics, her revered public figures, people she comes back to again and again. She’s like Lester Bangs, who wrote about four pieces on The Rolling Stones in one year, and in each one he veered wildly from scorn to adoration, so much so that it feels like an ongoing nervous breakdown. Paglia LOVES Madonna, loves the Italian-ness, the Catholic-ness, the sexual provocateur-ness, the thumbing her nose at the prudes thing, the destruction (or partial destruction) of a rigid binary sexuality, plus the beats and grooves and the working-class-ness, and all that. But she is also willing to call Madonna on her bullshit, and willing to say, “Stop it, Madonna. Don’t go that route. PLEASE I BEG YOU.”
In “Madonna II: Venus of the Radio Waves”, a 1991 article that appeared in London’s Independent Sunday Review, Paglia discusses Madonna’s music videos, how they changed everything, injected something new into the culture, but that something “new” was also connected to the past, a past that Paglia also reveres. (The past of 1930s movie goddesses, and the past of secret drag clubs, and the past of Dionysian iconography.)
I was in high school when Madonna exploded onto the scene, vaporizing Cyndi Lauper in what felt like a matter of months. I loved Cyndi. I didn’t want Madonna to take over. I WAS a virgin, and I felt like “Like a Virgin” was making fun of me. (Irony is not often a characteristic common to pudgy 15-year-old girls.) I felt threatened by the sexuality because I wasn’t playing around with my persona like that. (Give it 2 years, Sheila. You’ll get it then.) I basically dressed like Madonna in the “Vogue” performance in her Blond Ambition tour for the entire time I was living in Chicago. It mixed perfectly with the kinder-whore thing I loved from the grunge world. Those “costumes” were perfectly representative of what I felt like inside … sometimes the Mask reveals rather than conceals. Camille Paglia gets that. That’s what Sexual Personae is all about.
We NEED our contrarians. We need them desperately! Not to agree with 100%, but to push against conformity of thought, to provoke conversation (even outrage), to examine sacred cows rather than blindly worship them.
In the excerpt below, she discusses two Madonna videos, to “Open Your Heart” and “Justify My Love.” Here they are, for reference purposes.
Excerpt from Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
In 1985 the cultural resistance to Madonna became overt. Despite the fact that her “Into the Groove,” the mesmerizing theme song of Desperately Seeking Susan, had saturated our lives for nearly a year, the Grammy Awards outrageously ignored her. The feminist and moralist sniping began in earnest. Madonna “degraded” womanhood; she was vulgar, sacrilegious, stupid, shallow, opportunistic. A nasty mass quarrel broke out in one of my classes between the dancers, who adored Madonna, and the actresses, who scorned her.
I knew the quality of what I was seeing: “Open Your Heart,” with its risqué peep-show format, remains for me not only Madonna’s greatest video but one of the three or four best videos ever made. In the black bustier she made famous (transforming the American lingerie industry overnight), Madonna, bathed in blue-white light, plays Marlene Dietrich straddling a chair. Her eyes are cold, distant, all-seeing. She is ringed, as if in a sea-green aquarium, by windows of lewd or longing voyeurs: sad sacks, brooding misfits, rowdy studs, dreamy gay twins, a melancholy lesbian.
“Open Your Heart” is a brilliant mimed psychodrama of the interconnection between art and pornography, love and lust. Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy. Madonna, role model to millions of girls worldwide, has cured the ills of feminism by reasserting women’s command of the sexual realm.
Responding to the spiritual tensions within Italian Catholicism, Madonna discovered the buried paganism within the church. The torture of Christ and the martyrdom of the saints, represented in lurid polychrome images, dramatize the passions of the body, repressed in art-fearing puritan Protestantism of the kind that still lingers inAmerica. Playing with the outlaw personae of prostitute and dominatrix, Madonna has made a major history to the history of women. She has rejoined and healed the split halves of women: Mary, the Blessed Virgin and holy mother, and Mary Magdalene, the harlot.
The old-guard establishment feminists who still loathe Madonna have a sexual ideology problem. I am radically pro-pornography and pro-prostitution. Hence I perceive Madonna’s strutting sexual exhibitionism not as cheapness or triviality but as the full, florid expression of the whore’s ancient rule over men. Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name. In my university office in Philadelphia hangs a pagan shrine: a life-size full-color cardboard display of Joanne Whaley-Kilmer and Bridget Fonda naughtily smiling in scanty, skintight gowns as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies in the film Scandal. I tell visitors it is “my political science exhibit.” For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to woman’s cosmic power.
In a number of videos, Madonna has played with bisexual innuendos, reaching their culmination in the solemn woman-to-woman kiss of “Justify My Love,” a deliciously decadent sarabande of transvestite and sadomasochistic personae that was banned by MTV. Madonna is again pioneering here, this time in restoring lesbian eroticism to the continuum of heterosexual response, from which it was unfortunately removed twenty years ago by lesbian feminist separatists of the most boring, humorless, strident kind. “Justify My Love” springs from the sophisticated European art films of the Fifties and Sixties that shaped my sexual imagination in college. It shows bisexuality and all experimentation as a liberation from false, narrow categories.
On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Baseball: A Literary Anthology
Stephen King is a famous sports fan, of course, devoted to his regional teams. His books are filled with references to the Red Sox, the Bruins, the Celtics, the Patriots … the Quadruplicate-Franchise that make up our culture ’round these here parts. He throws out the first pitch at Fenway. He sits in the stands at Fenway, dressed in Red Sox garb, reading a book, glancing up at the field. He is obsessive, but his obsession doesn’t need to be watched over, the flame burns all on its own. I suppose that’s true of sports fans everywhere, in every region, but there’s something about New England sports, maybe because we’re all so crowded together geographically, we can’t get away from one another, and when we gather up at places like Fenway it’s like a family reunion. You participate, but you also withstand it. It’s frenzied, and yet also “over it.” I’m sure other New England sports fans know what I’m talking about.
King and novelist Stewart O’Nan were partners-in-crime during the insanely suspenseful (so suspenseful I was afraid some of my elderly uncles would have heart attacks) 2004 Red Sox season. They emailed back and forth every day, sharing theories, reactions. Of course, those email exchanges were eventually published in a book, the hugely entertaining Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
While sports sometimes come center stage in King’s novels, more often than not it plays as background noise, hearing the game on the radio, reading the sports page, Little League games as background for horror in Maine, etc. It’s fun to read Faithful because you know King has been wanting to get that in detail for a long long time. Off comes the leash. And suddenly ALL he talks about is sports, and it’s refreshing to hear him.
One of my favorite peripheral “sports” sections in a work by Stephen King is the tangential description in Under the Dome of a high school basketball star, a girl named Hanna Compton. It doesn’t have anything to do with the plot of the book itself. It is there to enrich our understanding of one particular character and his memories of Hanna Compton. It’s one of my favorite passages in all of King’s work (and I’ve read most of it), because he understands it so well. In it is the entire world of small-town life, where the high school sports teams provide entertainment, where everyone goes to the games, even people who don’t have kids in school there. Because what else are you gonna do in a small town? (I grew up in such a small town. Maybe that’s why it rings so true. The IMPORTANCE of local sports teams, even if the players are all only 15 years old.) I also love the passage because I can feel Stephen King almost swept away by his own invention, by his own memories of high school sports (as a kid and as a parent). It’s so much a tangent, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but King really develops it. He’s onto something. Here’s the Hanna Compton excerpt.
Moving on: I had never read Stephen King’s lengthy essay called “Head Down” that appeared in The New Yorker in 1990. I read it for the first time when I got this anthology. And there, you can feel the genesis of that Hanna Compton excerpt, something that’s there in a lot of his work, but here he goes autobiographical with it. “Head Down” tells the story of Stephen King following the 1989 season of his son’s Little League team, Bangor West. (King often wears Bangor West sweatshirts.)
In “Head Down,” King follows that season as though he’s a sports-writer working the beat, as though these are Major Leaguers, and not 12-year-olds. The team was scrappy, not considered contenders, but they ended up getting all the way to the State Championships. After that they moved on to the Regional Championships. (My brother was on one of “those” soccer teams when he was 12 years old, and the excitement took over our household for two months straight. Could this team of pipsqueaks … go all the way to the top?? And I’ll tell you what: as described in the excerpt below, my brother and his old teammates who went through that together, share a special bond to this day. Three of them ended up being at my sister’s wedding, including my brother, and they did a drunken toast to that old soccer team they were on when they were kids.) King traveled with the team, wrote about what baseball was like when played by 12-year-olders (some of the funnest sections of the piece: all the errors, stuff that would never happen in the Major Leagues, are just a part of the game. King has to get used to it.) There’s one little guy who’s a pitcher, who seems to have a strategy in his mind and an arm to match. Rare in Little League. King studies him like a hawk. He takes it all so seriously that you forget these players are middle-schoolers, and at one point the coach (who takes on huge status in the essay) says to King, “You gotta remember. They’re 12.”
The coach is a guy named Dave Mansfield (who was nominated amateur coach of the year by the Baseball Federation). He keeps the guys focused, he yells encouragement and correction, and he’s not afraid to get Herb-Brooks-in-the-locker-room-before-the-Olympics by the time they get to the Regionals. He wants these boys to know they did their best and they have to DECIDE to do their best.
The whole thing is extremely touching. Great baseball writing, but great as well in that Stephen King way, of having an ear for how people really talk, a feel for atmosphere, and a great sense of how different communities set themselves up. The world of Little League is of the ultimate importance to everyone who participates in it. It’s great for the kids, the adults are invested, the parents/friends/siblings come to watch the games … it’s a full-spectrum community experience. King captures that.
I played Little League. And this was before they created separate Leagues for girls. I was the only girl on my Little League team. I was 10, 11 years old. And I’m still not sure where I had the guts for that. But I loved baseball, I wanted to play. Okay, no Girls League? I’m joining the Boys. My own team-mates treated me equally, they were my friends from school, but the teams opposite us treated me like shit, cat-calling and not taking me seriously. They made huge shows of swaggering practically into the infield every time I was at bat. Little did they know, I was a slugger. I couldn’t field for shit, that’s for sure, but I could HIT. I never struck out. I always got at least to first base. Hand-eye, baby, hand-eye. My batting average was one of the best on the team. And through the summer, that’s what you’d do. You’d play baseball. Your parents would come watch. You’d horse around afterwards. You’d have baseball practice. You’d work hard on your swing. You’d practice fielding grounders. You were 11 years old. I’m very glad I had that experience.
Most of the essay (over 50 pages long) features long conversations about baseball and how the rules have to be bent a little bit at the Little League level in order for a game to happen at all. And what it’s like to have pitchers dissolve in tears on the mound, etc. It also describes the suspenseful buildup of a baseball season, where a team suddenly finds itself champions, far beyond the level they expected, district, State, Region (maybe? fingers crossed?).
But the excerpt below goes macro.
Stephen King watches the boys practice on a new field, and asks Dave the coach what he thinks the boys will take with them from their Little League experience.
Sentimental? You betcha. Baseball is one of the most openly sentimental of sports. So sentimental it can get downright soggy. But that’s the gig. That’s also why there’s a need for a gigantic Anthology like this one.
Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology
“Look at them,” Dave says, still smiling. Something in that smile suggests he may be reading my mind. “Take a good look.”
I do. There are perhaps half a dozen of them on the bench, still laughing and telling junior high school war stories. One of them breaks out of the discussion long enough to ask Matt Kinney to throw the curve, and Matt does – one with a particularly nasty break. The boys on the bench all laugh and cheer.
“Look at those two guys,” Dave said, pointing. “One of them comes from a good home. The other one, not so good.” He tosses some sunflower seeds into his mouth and then indicates another boy. “Or that one. He was born in one of the worst sections of Boston. Do you think he’d know a kid like Matt Kinney or Kevin Rochefort, if it wasn’t for Little League? They won’t be in the same classes at junior high, wouldn’t talk to each other in the halls, wouldn’t have the slightest idea the other one was alive.”
Matt throws another curve, this one so nasty J.J. can’t handle it. It rolls all the way to the backstop, and as J.J. gets up and trots after it the boys on the bench cheer again.
“But this changes all that,” Dave says. “These boys have played together and won their district together. Some come from families that are well-to-do, and there’s a couple from families as poor as used dishwater, but when they put on the uniform and cross the chalk they leave all that on the other side. Your school grades can’t help you between the chalk, or what your parents do, or what they don’t do. Between the chalk, what happens is the kids’ business. They tend it, too, as well as they can. All the rest -” Dave makes a shooing gesture with one hand. “All left behind. And they know it, too. Just look at them if you don’t believe me, because the proof is right there.”
I look across the field and see my own kid and one of the boys Dave has mentioned sitting side by side, heads together, talking something over seriously. They look at each other in amazement, then break out laughing.
“They played together,” Dave repeats. “They practiced together, day after day, and that’s probably even more important than the games. Now they’re going into the State Tournament. They’ve even got a chance to win it. I don’t think they will, but that doesn’t matter. They’re going to be there, and that’s enough. Even if Lewiston knocks them out in the first round, that’s enough. Because it’s something they did together between those chalk lines. They’re going to remember that. They’re going to remember how that felt.”
“Between the chalk,” I say, and all at once I get it – the penny drops. Dave Mansfield believes this old chestnut. Not only that, but he can afford to believe it. Such cliches may be hollow in the big leagues, where some player or other tests positive for drugs every week or two and the free agent is God, but this is not the big leagues. This is where Anita Byrant sings the national anthem over battered PA speakers that have been wired to the chain-link behind the dugouts. This is where, instead of paying admission to watch the game, you put something in the hat when it comes around. If you want to, of course. None of these kids are going to spend the off-season playing fantasy baseball in Florida with overweight businessmen, or signing expensive baseball cards at memorabilia shows, or touring the chicken circuit at two thousand bucks a night. When it’s all free, Dave’s smile suggests, they have to give the cliches back and let you own them again, fair and square. You are once more allowed to believe in Red Barber, John Tunis, and the Kid from Tomkinsville. Dave Mansfield believes what he is saying about how the boys are equal between the chalk, and he has a right to believe, because he and Neil and Saint have patiently led these kids to a point where they believe it. They do believe it; I can see it on their faces as they sit in the dugout on the far side of the diamond. It could be why Dave Mansfield and all the other Dave Mansfields across the country keep on doing this, year after year. It’s a free pass. Not back into childhood – it doesn’t work that way – but back into the dream.
Dave falls silent for a moment, bouncing a few sunflower seeds up and down in the palm of his hand.
“It’s not about winning or losing,” he says finally. “That comes later. It’s about how they’ll pass each other in the corridor this year, or even down the road in high school, and look at each other, and remember. In a way, they’re going to be on the team that won the district in 1989 for a long time.” Dave glances across into the shadowy first-base dugout, where Fred Moore is now laughing about something with Mike Arnold. Owen King glances from one to the other, grinning. “It’s about knowing who your teammates are. The people you had to depend on, whether you wanted to or not.”
He watches the boys as they laugh and joke four days before their tournament is scheduled to begin, then raises his voice and tells Matt to throw four or five more and knock off.
As I explained here, my friend Larry, when he’s bored, lifts my photos off of Facebook (or stock photos of Elvis, either one), and photo-shops Elvis into my pictures, or vice versa. I never know when I’m going to get a new one. You can see the results in that post above. They are ABSURD.
Larry has been busy.
Here are three more.
Being silly makes the world go round. Besides the Elvis connection and how funny it is, I’m impressed with how Larry finds just the right photos to seemingly “go” together.
My favorite, though, is the one in the previous post, where 11-year-old Sheila perches on the grille of Elvis’ car as he greets fans at the end of the driveway. Sheila, get off Elvis’ property.
Our blizzard is melting, although mountains of hard ice still mark the land. But it’s so mild today that the melting snow outside sounds like it’s raining. The wind roared all Saturday, the snow pouring down in heavy horizontal waves. It was cozy, yet I feared I might lose power (many in my area did), so I had lots bottled water, and candles and all the rest. Listen, I went through Hurricane Sandy (plus the 20 other hurricanes I’ve endured in my life) so I’m a hardened veteran of this crap. Played music and puttered about. Haven’t done one of these Shuffle things in a while and people seem to enjoy them.
Here goes.
“My Way” – Sex Pistols. As Lester Bangs noted: It came from “nowhere” and because of that it reaches a sort of Zen of absurdity and perfection.
“Paranoid Android” – Radiohead. Radiohead is so intimately connected with a very specific “season” in my life when I was hanging out with this crazy crowd of photographers and soldiers and financial traders and poets … They were all friends with each other. And I fell so in love with one of them that it ruined my life for a while. It was like an enchantment, like a spell had fallen over me. To be fair, it happened to him too. Here’s the essay I wrote about the night we met. From when I used to write with regularity about the Men who Swirled Around me in a Tango of Passion. So I had to let that guy go (even though it never really started) and I found it really hard, because I so rarely like ANYONE that when I DO like something, it’s akin to a brick wall falling on my head. So Radiohead is actually – still – too wrapped up in that time and brings it all back.
“Magic Carpet Ride” – Bedlam. From the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack, of course. Quentin Tarantino has a way of co-opting songs to such a degree that you can never hear them again without thinking of the movie.
“The Tourist” – Radiohead. Are you fucking kidding me.
“Beatnik Beach” – The Go-Go’s. Listen to Gina on drums. For me, it’s all about those drums.
“Why Don’t You Do Right” – Sinéad O’Connor. The woman who threw away her own career. But I don’t care. Ripping up the picture of the Pope was the most Punk-Rock thing imaginable and good for her. I’ll follow her anywhere, even through her dirge-like religious double-album (oh, Sinéad, no) and her reggae phase (thank God that’s over). “Why Don’t You Do Right” is big-band sound, sexy as hell, and she’s phenomenal, a great version of the classic song.
“Beauty School Dropout” – the Glee cast cover. It’s dippy and very entertaining. They don’t re-imagine it, but it’s still a lot of fun.
“Money Changes Everything” – The Brains. Written by Tom Gray. It’s punk-rock. Of course now it’s known as the Cyndi Lauper anthem of greed. In the QA with Greil Marcus I attended, he talked at length about the song, and the “battle of the bands” between Lauper and Grey that has lasted 30 years now.
“Bliss” – Tori Amos. I saw her at the Park West in Chicago right before Little Earthquakes was released. In other words, right before the Wave of Tori hit. In a matter of months, she wouldn’t be playing small venues like Park West and she’d sell out huge venues in minutes. She is an unforgettable performer – and at the Park West she didn’t even have a band with her. It was just Tori and her grand piano, whom she referred to as “she” and “her”.
“The Waiter” – Bleu. Oh, Bleu, how I love thee. He’s a rock star like Freddie Mercury, he has that scale, only nobody (except his fans) know who he is. He plays tiny clubs with 100 seats. I went and saw a benefit concert he gave at Rockwood Music Hall (all benefits going to Hurricane Sandy victims), and he was amazing. Such a wonderful songwriter.
“Why Wasn’t I More Grateful?” – the great Maria McKee. Boy, can this woman sing. I’ve been following for years, and we’ve become friends in the last 5 years or so (she and her husband came to the workshop reading of my script in Los Angeles), life is funny like that. She’s a beautiful artist. You should see the movies she’s made with her husband Jim Akin, too. They’re gorgeous: The Ocean of Helena Lee and After the Triumph of Your Birth.
“Let’s Be Friends” – Elvis Presley. A snooze-fest from his final film Change of Habit. There are only a couple of songs in Change of Habit (where Elvis appears opposite Mary Tyler Moore) – and it’s a fine film, actually. The first time we see Elvis, he’s sitting in an apartment with a bunch of hot groovy women, having a sing-along of “Rubber Neckin’.” But other than that, the songs are bad.
“Heart of the House” – Alanis Morissette. I love/scorn her. I’ll buy whatever she does. Because there are always gems alongside the wordy-weird-syllable-break songs. This is a beautiful ballad, with some dumb lyrics (“my Tinkerbell tendencies.”) Like I said: love/scorn.
“Strange Brew” – Cream. Perfect for dry-humping with someone on the couch.
“One Step at a Time” – Brenda Lee. Fabulous. SWING IT, BRENDA. Brenda Lee set records that were not broken until Madonna came along. She was as big as it gets.
“One Love” – the Glee cast cover. It’s pretty fabulous. Two men doing a duet. One of my favorite things, the blend of male voices. It’s so rare nowadays and I miss it, happy when two men decide to do a duet.
“Ave Mary A” – Pink. She’s so awesome. What a voice. She sounds like herself. A rock ‘n’ roll star. Not too many show-offy trills. She doesn’t need them. She has her passion and her desire to express herself.
“She’s In Love With the Boy” – Trisha Yearwood. Sentimental clap-trap. Chickens pecking the ground, etc. But it has a certain charm.
“I Am What I Am” – Jerry Lee Lewis, live in 1986. The crowd is WILD, because you know why? It’s Jerry Lee fucking Lewis. “I was just born country … but I was raised on rock ‘n’ roll ….” It’s thrilling. It’s a joke, it’s defensive, it’s aggressive: “One fact for sure: I’ll never change.” Please don’t, wild man.
“Burnin’ Love” – Elvis Presley. The sexually explosive song was a staple in his 1970s concerts, calling to mind the sexually explosive young man from 20 years before. The audience went nuts. This is a live track from a 1975 concert in Dallas which should put to rest forever (although I know it won’t), the idea that the 1970s were a long slow steady decline for Elvis. Bullshit. I’m not saying he wasn’t sick, and that he didn’t give some lackluster performances, but to say it was all worthless is just not true.
“The Weight of a Man” – Russell Crowe. I’m sure everyone knows he has a band (or had?), and I have one of their albums. Some of his songs sound like Irish traditional music (or Irish-Lite), and folk music. It’s pretty cheesy and “vulnerable” but there’s something pleasing about it too.
“Advertisement in the Voice” – Good Rats. If you grew up in Long Island in the 70s/80s, you knew The Good Rats. I did not grow up in Long Island in the 70s/80s. But after seeing the film Roadie (and LOVING IT), I fell in love with the band (because this song plays a huge part in one scene). I loved Roadie so much that I wangled my way into a conversation with the producer at a Tribeca screening, and he put me in touch with Ron Eldard, the star of Roadie, and an under-sung Leading Man if ever there was one. I thought he gave one of the best performances of the year in Roadie. I had loved him ever since I saw him in that small part in Sleepers, when I thought, “WHO. is THAT.” Then, of course, he was tremendously touching in his semi-regular role in E.R. Interviewing Ron Eldard is a pretty funny story. It was one of my first interviews. I had no idea what I was doing AND I revere Ron Eldard, and wanted to make sure I didn’t fangirl all over him. The producer set up the interview, clearing it with Eldard, and then he gave me Eldard’s phone number to set it up. I texted Ron Eldard, introducing myself, and asked if we could set up a time. 4 days passed. I didn’t understand, and was in somewhat of a panic because 1. Roadie was opening that week. I wanted the interview to go live on the site before the opening. and 2. I was headed out on a road trip to Memphis that week, and really wanted to get it done before I left. But … he didn’t respond! I tentatively texted the producer again, asking him as nicely as I could to double-check with Eldard … The producer was extremely ambitious for the film, and loved that I wanted to cover it – nobody else was – so he clearly texted Eldard immediately and Eldard texted me back in less than 5 minutes, totally chagrined and horrified. “I AM SO SORRY. I DIDN’T GET YOUR TEXT, OR I MISSED IT, I AM SO SORRY.” I interviewed him via phone later that day. He immediately launched into another apology, and I assured him it was okay, I knew he was busy, and he moaned (literally, moaned), “You must have thought I was such a DICK.” We then had a great conversation about the film, and he loved talking about it, he was so proud of it. At the end of the conversation, I said I hoped the interview would go up in a couple of days, and because I couldn’t seem to help myself, I added, “I’m headed to Memphis tomorrow, so that’s why I had a sense of urgency about it.” He said, “What’s up in Memphis?” I said, “I’m going there for Elvis’ birthday celebration,” and he erupted, “Oh my God, that is going to be so much FUN!” “I know, right?” “You have to take so many pictures.” “Oh, I will.” And then he launched into a monologue about how much he loved Elvis, how much he had always wanted to go to Graceland (he said to me, “What I love is that Graceland is not this huge mansion. It’s a sweet homey HOUSE, and that’s perfect, right?”), and in fact he loved Elvis so much that he wrote a one-man show where he played the biggest nerdiest most compulsive Elvis fan ever. Ron Eldard told me the entire show from beginning to end, all as I was laughing and asking questions and thinking to myself, “I am so fucking glad I mentioned my Graceland trip. This is golden.” When I played back the tape to transcribe it (I didn’t transcribe that part since it was outside the proper interview), we sounded like two babbling laughing lunatics. But he was funny and enthusiastic and we ended the conversation with him saying, “This has been so fun. Thanks for your support of Roadie, and you are going to have such a blast in Memphis. I’m jealous.” So that was my interview with Ron Eldard. The result of said interview is here. As you can see, we talked a little bit about the Good Rats, and what that band means to Long Island people (and Ron Eldard grew up in Long Island, so he knew all about it.) If the stars had aligned in a different way, The Good Rats could have gone national (LISTEN to the lead singer’s voice), but it didn’t work out that way. Instead, they remained a local band, packing in their club-dates with 100s of people, who loved them without stop for 30+ years. Not a bad record.
“Be My Baby” – The Ronettes. Classic on so many levels. That gigantic background sound, the “wall of sound”, and those voices, pushed out in front. Unmistakeable sound.
“Waitin’ In School” – Ricky Nelson. Rock ‘n’ roll filtered through a white middle-class filter, Nelson’s extremely successful “thing.” The country-boys like Cash and Perkins and Lewis and Presley came from the dirt. Nelson didn’t. He, like Eddie Cochran, wrote songs about sock hops (as opposed to Elvis’ secret “good rockin'” bash behind the barn), and school busses and cute little girls bopping around. James Burton, Elvis’ guitar in the 70s, played with Nelson, got his start with Nelson. One of the greatest guitar players ever, and he made that sound on a Fendercaster. I feel so happy/grateful that Charlie and I went to see James Burton play a couple years ago.
“She’s Not There” – the Glee cast covering the great Zombies song. I know, it’s ridiculous. I have the Zombies original too, of course! It’s a psychedelic funky ANTHEM.
“Rolling in the Deep” – the Glee cast cover. I can’t help it. I love Glee, yes for O’Malley Tribal Reasons, but that’s as good a reason as any.
“It Feels so Right” – Elvis Presley. One of his sexiest performances ever. It’s ludicrous, almost embarrassing. The song, recorded in the early 60s, ended up being in his ridiculously fun movie Tickle Me, where Elvis’ performance is outRAGEOUSLY sexual. Women literally melt, and fall apart. And what is he doing? Nothing, really, but standing there and being himself. I wrote a whole post about that performance.
“Baby Let’s Play House” – Elvis Presley. One of his first national hits. With Scotty Moore’s brilliant guitar lick and its controversial pre-marital-sex-demand lyrics. Keith Richards writes about trying to re-create Scotty Moore’s lick in “Baby Let’s Play House” and being unable to do it. It remains a mystery – even to a great player like Richards.
“B.O.S.T.O.N.” – Bleu. One of my favorites of all of his songs. And not just because my whole family comes from Boston. It expresses a kind of connection to one locale that I think everyone could relate to. It doesn’t matter how far you move, and it doesn’t matter where you were born: there are places where you feel connected, places you call home. I’ve lived in the New York area for 20 years, but I feel more connected to Chicago than any other place on earth. Here’s the song. Enjoy. You’ll see what I meant above: Bleu is a Rock Star and barely anyone knows who he is.
“UR” – Alanis Morrisette. Okay, this is the Alanis that drives me crazy. And yet, ugh, I love it too. I can’t bear the confusion!
“Bad Connection” – Everclear, from their really fun album of covers (where they cover the theme song to Land of the Lost to great success). Lots of fun stuff, including this cover of the Yaz song that was a college favorite for my group of friends.
“Dreams” – Fleetwood Mac. Rumours is a perfect album. Not too many albums are.
“I Love U” – Eminem. I love his “love” songs. They’re so fucked up. Understatement. And they’re all about Kim. He’s been making music for 20 years. Longer. She’s his lone female figure. There’s nobody else. Wouldn’t surprise me if they were still hanging out on the down-low, doing their messed-up thing that obviously was addictive to them both. They’ve already been married twice. Their daughter is a high school graduate now. They’re in their 40s now. I’d lay money on late-night hook-ups, and the press isn’t on his ass so much, so they could fly under the radar. This is pure speculation (and please don’t waste any more time writing about this, Sheila!), but the sheer amount of songs he has written about her rivals Yeats’ poems for Maud Gonne, which also spans about 20, 30 years of time.
“Back to My Music” – The Good Rats. What are the odds. Out of 11,000+songs … I only own about 5 Good Rats songs. Two in one cluster? Yet another great rock anthem, as good and catchy as any 70s rock of the Superstars of the day.
“Twenty Flight Rock” – Eddie Cochran. I love him so much. He didn’t go down on the plane with Buddy Holly et al, but he died in a car crash the following year. It must have felt, to the fans, like a Cruel God was picking off favorites one by one. Cochran was as gorgeous as Elvis. And I don’t say that about too many people. He also wrote songs, similar to Nelson’s (although with a raw-er voice), about kids sneaking around, making out in movie theatre balconies, etc. Just wrote a post that co-stars Eddie Cochran. This particular song describes a guy dating a girl on the 20th floor and the elevator’s broken but he has to get up there!
“Colonel Fraser” – Jerry O’Sullivan. A crazy genius on the uilleann pipes. And as always, whenever a new Shuffle starts, I know it’s just a matter before the Irish show up.
“Geek Stink Breath” – Green Day. As my brother said once, as much as he liked Green Day when they first came out, it always felt like Punk-Rock-Lite to Bren (who had cut his teeth on The Replacements and The Clash and all the rest). And he also said, when American Idiot came out (which he LOVED, and which my nephew Cashel memorized, every last word), “If anyone had told me 20 years ago, that Green Day had THIS in them, and would come out with an album that captured a complex zeitgeist, I wouldn’t have believed you.” And he was a FAN of Green Day. But I agree. Listen to “Geek Stink Breath,” early-ish Green Day. It has a heavy-grind to it, that heavy sound they can get … but it feels a bit stock. Grunge-punk stock.
“Will Ye Go, Lassie” – The Irish Tenors. As much as I like Irish traditional music sung by people who know how to sing, I can’t get my dad’s scorn out of my mind. An Irish nationalist, an Irish literature scholar … he always got annoyed when he sensed the Irish were “jumping on some bandwagon” or other. He felt the same way about the Irish famine memorials. God, he was funny. No sacred cows for him.
“Let the Good Times Roll” – the ferocious and gorgeous and unforgettable Link Wray.
“Emotion” – Brenda Lee. Power pipes. Love her belt. She could make it rough, she could make it longing and feminine. But a belting alto, not a soprano. Makes a difference in sound/feel.
“Here in the Deadlights” – Brendan Benson. Along with Bleu, one of my favorite songwriters right now. I first discovered him because of that iPod commercial years ago. It was “catchy.” I bought the song. But then I discovered more. I discovered so much gold. Best: he’s prolific. He comes out with an album a year, practically. He’s incapable of writing a boring song. He’s writing great pop songs, and, like Bleu, he doesn’t have “name recognition.” Doesn’t matter. He’s amazing.
“Bad” – U2. Edge’s guitar-sound. Would U2 be the same without it? No.
“1816, the Year Without a Summer” – the crazy band Rasputina. Dark intense girls. I think they’re still around, but I lost track of them. I love their songs. Unclassifiable. Huge.
“Express Yourself” – the Glee cast version of Madonna’s empowerment anthem. Nope. It sounds thin, a re-tread. Sometimes it happens. The GUTS are left out.
“Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” – Amanda Seyfried, from the Mamma Mia! movie, which I loved. The movie was obviously meant to be a stupid romp, where ABBA is the real star, with fun and energy-charged covers of the songs everyone knows. Criticizing it would be like criticizing a cupcake. Silliness is a virtue sometimes.
“Shame” – The Eurythmics. From Savage, my favorite album of theirs. Creepy. Bizarre. These songs are in my DNA. We listened to it so much in college that it’s incredible I’m not sick of it.
“Victoria Radio Ad 1956” – Elvis Presley, Southern accent still thick and chewy (soon he would lose it, mostly). This is a radio ad for RCA Victor, special new-fangled record players being sold, with free Elvis songs included. “Hurry while this great offer lasts, friends. See you in the movies when Love Me Tender comes to town.” Yes, sir.
“Last Days of Disco” – Robbie Williams. A superstar. Another prolific genius, like Brendan Benson, although he plays stadiums and outdoor concerts that break records set by The Stones, etc. I love him so much. What an improbable career: how many people “go solo” after being in a silly Boy Band? Ricky Martin. Justin Timberlake. Robbie Williams is like that.
“Apologize” – Timbaland (featuring OneRepublic). From that phenomenal Timbaland album Shock Value. Not a bad song on it. Great and diverse collaborations, incredible songs.
“Rags to Riches” – Elvis Presley. Sing OUT, Louise. From Elvis’ great country album from the early 70s, basically thrown together, but one of my favorites. Here, he’s in Tom Jones crooner mode, and it fits. He sounds amazing.
“Kiss Your Man Goodbye” – The Everly Brothers. God, they hit the spot. Always. So influential it can’t even be measured.
“Angels From the Realms of Glory” – from Annie Lennox’s fantastic Christmas album.
“Paddy On the Railway” – The Dubliners. The music of my childhood, although we were more a Clancy Brothers family.
“Baby Let’s Play House” – Elvis Presley, a live recording from a Louisiana Hayride show. He’s a star now, but fulfilling his contract (the Colonel eventually bought the contract out for $10,000). But those shows were INSANE. I’m almost afraid for the Hank Williams movie, because I love that whole era (and Hank) so much, and he also caused riots at his Louisiana Hayride performances … and I just hope they get it right. If I had a Time Machine, attending a Louisiana Hayride show would be high on my list. That, and being allowed to sit in on the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. When Alexander Hamilton made this insane 6-hour-long speech. With no notes.
“My TV and You” – VAST. I have no idea who these guys are, but this song came on when I was zipping along down Wilshire Boulevard, heading home after the first rehearsal for my script-reading workshop production. It was a high water-mark for me. And this song came on the radio. And I blasted it and zipped along those curves, feeling light as air. So I came home and bought it, and I will always think of that momentous day when I hear the song.
“Keeper of the Key” – Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley messing around in Sun Studio in what eventually was known as the Million Dollar Quartet impromptu session. Not really a Quartet though, Johnny Cash only showed up for a promotional photo. Here, Elvis accompanies Carl on guitar, whose voice aches with country-western sincerity. People talking in the background. Jerry Lee Lewis, maybe. Sam Phillips definitely. It’s also fun to hear Elvis sing harmony, which he never got to do in his real career, being a Lead Solo Singer always.
“Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” – Hugh Jackman in the celebrated revival of Oklahoma! Such a simple song, but made for a big beautiful voice. It’s lovely.
“I Got Stung” (take 11) – Elvis Presley, in the insanely productive spring-1958 session at RCA in Nashville. Elvis was headed to Germany with the Army in the fall. There was pressure to get a lot of music down, to be released during his 2 years away when he would stop recording. Elvis recorded it while on a weekend break. The songs from those session have an unmistakeable sound: loud, joyous, innocent, free, with a LOUD jangly band, boogie-woogie piano, the Jordannaires … The Colonel, whose musical taste left a lot to be desired, didn’t like the sound. Too much band, not enough Elvis. But Elvis (and his fans) loved it. Still do.
“No More Tears” – Barbra Streisand, Donna Summers. Classic. Weird, just wrote a post on Facebook about my relationship with a sociopath and how it came back into my life in an indirect way the other night with a random email … and I wrote about the break-up with the sociopath on FB and how I skipped the grief part and went into white-hot rage because he treated me so poorly I knew I didn’t deserve it. Babs and Donna in my ears: “No more tears.” He can rot in hell for all I care. So that’s what this Lady Anthem makes me think of.
“I Want You to Want Me” – Cheap Trick. Yeah, let’s lighten the mood!!
“Blueberry Hill” – Elvis Presley. Vestiges of Southern accent, this was still relatively early. “The moon stood stee-il…” Diphthongs, in other words. Later in the 70s, he turned this into a bloozy-floozy burlesque number, one of those songs he could not/refused to take seriously which is why it’s so hilarious and right. (Imagine a man in his 30s singing this adolescent song sincerely. He’d be ridiculous). So he messed it up, made fun of the lyrics (“the moon ‘tood ’till…”), laughed at himself, and did a bump and grind act that is awesome.
“The Barnyards of Delgaty” – The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. Ah, childhood. Ah, the old vinyl albums. My siblings and I loved these guys. Yes, it was Irish indoctrination from our parents, but I’m grateful for it. The flame and I are going to a spring-concert at an Irish Literary House in New York this Friday. It’s a place I love, have been to concerts and poetry readings there before, hanging out with my people, but it’s been years. I’ll write about it if I feel like it.
“My Way” – Elvis Presley. Very very melancholy and strangely prophetic. He performed it live from the early 70s. It’s really a song for an older man, right? Facing the final curtain? So it’s creepy to hear a man in his 30s sing it. With fame like that, you get more experience than other people, very strange experiences, that weather you. And, of course, even creepier, he actually was near the end. But whatever: it’s emotional, and he means every word, as he always did. (This is not a live recording. I’m not sure when he recorded it in the studio – or maybe in the Jungle Room, I don’t know, I should know.)
“I Ain’t Living Long Like This” – Waylon Jennings. #1. Isn’t that title hilarious and honest? #2. I love him so much I don’t even know if I can talk about it. So hot, so macho, so honest, a true Nashville outlaw, a guy who tore down the edifice, making way for himself, for Willie Nelson, for rough-er guys, bad boys, “outlaws.” Nashville, unfortunately, did not pick up the torch, and country music retreated into its strictly nostalgic and conservative form for awhile with cross-over hits watering down the style even more. Eric Church gives me hope, with his darkness and rage and humor, too, plus his big “taking on Nashville” epic song. I am sure there are more, but he’s the one that comes to mind. It’s not a redemption tale Church is selling, so beloved in American culture: he’s still in the thick of it, he sings from the thick of it. So does good old Waylon.
“The Battle of Evermore” – Led Zeppelin. As Jack Black said when he introduced them at the Kennedy Center Honors: “They wrote songs about LOVE. They wrote songs about VIKINGS.”
“Locked Out of Heaven” – the Glee cast. I’m just not sure what is happening here.
“Up the Ladder to the Roof” – The Nylons. Introduced to me by my friend Brett. This was our favorite. Brett died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2011. So the Nylons remind me of him, and bring a pang.
“Weekend” – Eddie Cochran. Planning a party on the weekend! White-bread, right, but Cochran always gives the situations a rough sexual spin. He’s not entirely safe. He’s definitely gonna give “second base” a shot. Which is why he’s rock ‘n’ roll.
“I’m Learning About Love” – Brenda Lee. Again: SWING IT, BRENDA.
“The Acid Queen” – The Who. Tommy, of course.
“There’s Always Something There to Remind Me” – Lou Johnson. Great sound, the slow jazz-y start, then the horns, and the electric guitar plunk-ing, and the back-up girls joining in.
“Kiss Me” – Yipes! Of course you’ve never heard of them. It was Pat McCurdy’s first band, before he went solo. And of course you probably haven’t heard of Pat McCurdy either – unless you live in the Chicago/Wisconsin/Minnesota area, where he probably plays 300 shows a year in regular gigs. I was a huge fan when I was in Chicago, and then we became friends … Uhm, yeah.
I performed with him at Milwaukee Summer Fest for 3,000 wasted people, the funnest experience of my life to date, and he wrote a duet for us that’s on one of his albums. Have a listen if you’re in the mood. There are a million Pat and Sheila stories. Obvi. Eventually, we basically could communicate via ESP. Full complex conversations. There was also a teleporting incident. And neither of us were New Age-y people and neither of us did drugs. I don’t know, it was like we were forged from the same DNA strand. It was partly the Irish-ness, I think. All was understood on that elemental level.
“In Pursuit” – Pat McCurdy. Okay, Pat, get off my Shuffle. Now.
“Operator” – Manhattan Transfer. Wow. I forgot about them. Another college-era favorite.
“Swine” – Lady Gaga. This is on my workout mix.
“Without Love (There Is Love)” – Elvis Presley. This song resulted from the unbelievably productive sessions from 1968, at American Studios in Memphis – these sessions were as productive as the original Sun sessions. A double-album came out. And the songs recorded on those days (“Kentucky Rain”, “Long Black Limousine,” “In the Ghetto” and, oh yeah, “Suspicious Minds,” maybe you’ve heard of it) were all hits, and still get radio play. Iconic Elvis songs. He worked under a new producer, Chips Moman, who pushed Elvis, who made Elvis work harder, break through the “same ol same ol” thing he had been doing through the 60s (except for his gospel stuff where he still “brought it.”) These songs have as distinctive a sound as the Sun stuff, the RCA 1958 stuff. It re-vitalized Elvis for the new decade. A lot of people seem to consider Elvis’ ballads second to the rock ‘n’ roll stuff. (I know it’s not really a widespread opinion, but it is “out there” in the commentary sometimes.) But that’s silly. He was more than just one thing. He had a big huge voice and he loved showing it off. The reason why this performance of “Without Love” works in such a piercing and emotional way is that he brings himself, and his fluid flexible voice, to the table so seemingly easily – he’s TRANSPARENT. There’s not even a conscious “style” here (like, say, “Power of my Love” where he digs down into the sex stuff). He doesn’t need to “style” it up. It’s just HIM. And he goes at it with openness. He’s BLASTED open. Listen to where it starts and then where it goes to! His voice can do exactly what he needs it to do. I love this performance so much.
“Don’t Stop” – the Glee cast cover of the Fleetwood Mac song. Here, they “hit” it (they sometimes miss it). They re-arrange it a bit, infuse it with Glee-ness, the highschool-choir things. It’s a lot of fun.
“Calling Sarah” – Jellyfish. We were all so into them in my Chicago years. Short-lived band, but influential. You can hear them everywhere. Harmonies, power-pop, catchy. They were playing at the party where I did hard drugs for the first and only time.
“Warning” – Green Day. From International Superhits, when I first got into them, having no idea, like my brother, that these guys would have an American Idiot in them.
“Rag Mama Rag” – The Band. There’s just something about these guys, isn’t there … It’s like they converged every different strain of American culture into their own style, owning it, looking backwards but also forwards. Rough BOY music. Love them so much.
“Xanadu” – Olivia Newton-John. Yessssssssssss
“Land of the Lost Theme Song” – Everclear. Speak of the devil. Here it is. If you don’t enjoy this … we probably have nothing in common.
“Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” – from Les Miserables. Stop whining. I’m kidding.
“That Kind of Love” – the wonderful Cliff Eberhardt. A guy you’re probably familiar with if you keep up with contemporary folk music. Which I don’t really, but a million years ago when I was living in Philadelphia, my boyfriend and I went to go see Christine Lavin (we were really into her), and some dude named Cliff Eberhardt was opening for her. We were like, “Whatever …” but from the second he walked onstage, we were captivated. I barely remember Lavin (love her, but Eberhardt stole our hearts). I’ve seen him live as much as I can. He plays the Bottom Line here from time to time. He’s a hell of a songwriter.
“Shake That Tambourine” (take 10, 16) – poor Elvis Presley, recording a song for the movie Harum Scarum. He started laughing so hard during Take 10 that they had to stop. He ROARS, he HOWLS, he GUFFAWS, he SNORTS, he WEEPS. The song is so stupid, and he’s giving it his best shot, but his sense of humor was so developed that he COULD NOT DO IT. It’s always amazing to me when I hear the finished version and he gets through it. I think they ended up having to punch-together two takes (something that almost never happened with Elvis. He was a professional. He got through things in one take). But this song was his undoing. He could not stop laughing. Good for him.
“Random Acts of Kindness” – Robbie Williams. Man knows how to write an anthem.
“Rich Woman” – Robert Plant & Alison Krauss. Love this album so much. It was one of THE albums of that year. Who would have thought of that pairing? I’m so glad it happened. Gorgeous blend of voices. Robert Plant said that one of the appeals of the project was that he would get to sing the harmony line, something he rarely did as lead singer. I love artists.
“Money Honey” – Little Richard. As outrageous as you would imagine.
“I Just Can’t Help Believing'” – Elvis Presley. One of the staples of his Vegas shows, with the Sweet Inspirations (including Whitney Houston’s mother) providing beautiful backup.
“Hey Louis Prima” – Brian Setzer, with his rockabilly/big-band sound. I love him so much.
“Cousin Jane” – The Troggs. These guys, man. I love Lester Bangs’ ode to them.
“Drug Ballad” – Eminem. From The Marshall Mathers LP. Groovy. “Hey, yo. This is my love song.” Got it, Marshall.
“Itsy Bitsy Spider” – Carly Simon. What the hell. No, seriously, I’m asking. What the hell. It’s kind of cute, though. (Used in the soundtrack of Heartburn.)
“Perfume” – Britney Spears. FINALLY. I’ve been wondering where the glorious Brit-Brit was hiding herself. I love it all. To quote Britney herself, “Gimme More.”
“Just Leave Everything to Me” – Barbra Streisand as Dolly in Hello, Dolly! She sings the hell out of this song. Not a surprise. She was (is) a phenom.
“Are You Ready For the Country” – Waylon Jennings. YES WAYLON I AM BRING IT.
“Bits and Pieces” – Joan Jett & The Blackhearts. I couldn’t love her more if I tried. I’m so glad I “came up” in the world with chicks like her in the Top 40. With Debbie Harry. And Chrissy Hynde. And Cyndi Lauper. Before Madonna (love her, but the effect she had was catastrophic on these alternative voices) took over the airwaves and re-formed what women stars were supposed to be doing and presenting. I love those rough tough girls.
“The History of Wrong Guys” – Annaleigh Ashford from Cyndi Lauper’s (speak of the devil!) Broadway musical Kinky Boots. I haven’t seen it but I am devoted to the soundtrack. So excellent. I’d love to hear Cyndi record some of them, including and especially this one.
“Bang! Bang!” – Liz Phair, from the album that appeared to baffle everyone, Funstyle. I love it. Seems to be inspired by … Bollywood musicals? Go Liz. The singer who put my Gen-X 20s experiences into words better than anyone else ever did. It was as though she had stolen my diaries. “Fuck and run”, yeah, oops. I’ll follow her anywhere. She didn’t “sell out,” you yahoos. She grew and changed, she’s in her 40s now, she’s a mother. If she kept singing “Fuck and Run” she’d just be a Nostalgia Act.
“Let It Rain” – Ok Go. I was into them before they “hit.” They put out these little weird LPs with, like, 3 songs on them. I love them, and I’m happy they’ve found this wider audience. They deserve it.
“Besame Mucho” – The Beatles. The Beatles aren’t really represented on this Shuffle so far and the first time they show up, it’s with THIS? Really?
“The Colors of My Life” – Jim Dale and Glenn Close, from the Broadway musical Barnum. I love how revealing an iPod Shuffle can be. You can’t maintain your mystique. You can’t protect yourself. And why would you want to? That’s the fun of Shuffle. You can’t control it. I saw Barnum on Broadway in high school, with Glenn Close still in the role, and Tony Orlando (yes, THAT Tony Orlando) in the lead role. He tightrope-walked across the stage, people, while singing. I will always always admire Tony Orlando for that feat. He’s not a circus performer like Jim Dale. He had to WORK that shit. He did a wonderful job.
“Heaven” – The Eurythmics. Another one from Savage. This droning repetitive song was often blasted at college parties and we’d all zone out dancing on the “dance floor” (i.e. someone’s ratty living room).
“Keep Holding On” – Avril Lavigne. Don’t tell me what to do, Avril.
“(Every Time They Play) Our Song” – the great Wanda Jackson. So glad I went to see her play at Maxwell’s. Pioneer. Rock ‘n’ roll. One-time girlfriend of Elvis. A rockabilly girl pioneer. “Hey, they aren’t writing songs for a girl. Hell, I guess I’ll have to do that for myself.” That’s how change is made. You can’t wait for the Establishment to do it for you or to say, “Hey, come on in, we welcome you.” That’s not how you get into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
“Train in the Distance” – Paul Simon. Beautiful. Paul Simon’s favorite Elvis song is “Mystery Train.” I think I hear that influence in the opening section.
“Peace in the Valley” – Elvis’ heartfelt hymn, with Jordannaire backup. He recorded this in 1957 after performing it on the Ed Sullivan Show in his last appearance. Imagine that: the country was in an uproar about Elvis’ sexuality. His records were being smashed by Deejays. He was being crucified in the press, from the pulpits. He did perform some of his hits on the Ed Sullivan Show (filmed from the waist up, famously), but what his final number? A sweet and heartfelt religious song. Can you imagine? It would be as if Eminem, in the midst of the furor surrounding The Marshall Mathers LP appeared on David Letterman singing “That Old Rugged Cross,” totally straight, and filled with the love of God. Can you imagine how that would have gone over? The confusion? Is he … making fun of us? Is he … trolling us? But no … look at how much he means it … and so boundaries started dissolving, disappearing. That’s what happened when Elvis sang a hymn on the Ed Sullivan Show. It wasn’t manipulative on his part. Or maybe it was. But it came from a sincere place. He loved this song. Religious music was his favorite kind of music. But when he sang it on the Ed Sullivan Show, and Ed Sullivan came out afterwards, shook Elvis’ hand and announced to the audience (and America), “This is a decent young man” – the entire public conversation changed. Everyone embraced him. Grandmas and teeny-boppers. Crazy.
“Maximum Overdrive” – The Troggs. Strange: a kind of 80s synthesizer sound added, but the voice is still gritty groggy punk-rock, sneering and snarling.
“About a Girl” – Nirvana. Great fucking song.
“Gas Panic!” – Oasis. I wish I liked them more.
“Master of Puppets” – Metallica. This is from S&M, their great album recording of the concert they gave with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Hearing their songs backed by 80 violins, and horns … it’s unbelievable. In the liner notes, a violinist is quoted as saying that in all his years of playing the famous classical symphonies, he never had to change his shirt at intermission until he played that show.
“All Through the Night” – Cyndi Lauper. High school. Tormented longing high school feelings. Being in love, but nobody wanted that from me. Nowhere for the feelings to go. That’s what this song is to me. I found it comforting. I could release those feelings into the song.
“Freedom to Stay” – Waylon Jennings. So authentic. I think that’s one of the things that really gets me about him. Once he threw off the shackles of the past, the Nashville expectations, and became himself … it’s like he never made a false move again. Because he allowed himself to be himself.
“Stairway to Heaven” – Dolly’s famous haunting version. Happy (belated) birthday to one of my favorite artists of all time.
“I Wore Elvis’ Ring” – Wanda Jackson’s kiss-and-tell song about her time dating Elvis. She always credits him with having a career at all, since he encouraged her to drop the strict country-hillbilly stuff and move into the new sound that had no name yet. “He’s why I’m in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame,” she told us when we saw her play. (We saw her during Elvis Week, so it was all just a little bit too poignant to bear. I cried.)
“Another Bridge to Burn” – Waylon Jennings. This is one sorry-ass tale, Waylon.
“Good Night Irene” – Little Richard. I love it too much I don’t know what to do.
“Ou es-tu Julian?” Scala & Kolocny Brothers. This is a Belgian all-girl choir, who cover things like Marilyn Manson’s “Beautiful People” and Radiohead’s “Creep”. I love them. Check out the Youtube clips of their concerts. They have a grandiose conductor who is a show in and of himself.
“No One Knows” – Queens of the Stone Age. This is some of the heaviest shit imaginable, they practically make Metallica sound light-hearted. I mean, not really, but still: HEAVY. RELENTLESS. I was so into them for about 5 seconds.
“Human Touch” – Bruce Springsteen. It’s always good to see Bruce.
“Sittin’ in Church” – the aforementioned Pat McCurdy. A great songwriter, but you’d have to attend one of his shows to really get what the Pat thing is about. It’s like a cult meeting. Here’s the opening line of this dumb song: “I’m sittin’ in church thinking about your body …”
“Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby” – Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss & Gillian Welch. A trio to die for. I love each one individually, and they are heaven together.
“In the Lost and Found” – Elliott Smith. I think of him and I think Ouch, man, just ouch. Even in a song like this, with a sweet melody, the despair is palpable.
“Jewels & Drugs” – Lady Gaga, with a little help from T.I., Too $hort & Twista. I don’t know what’s going on here at all but I like it.
“Money (That’s What I Want)” – The Beatles. Now that’s more like it. Greil Marcus went into the song and its history in depth in that QA I attended.
“San Francisco Mabel Joy” – Waylon Jennings. Any time Waylon elbows his way in as much as he has in this particular Shuffle, I’m happy. But I’m wondering where the Rolling Stones are hiding?
“Rocket Reducer No. 62” – the awesome MC5. “JOIN US IN SONG, BROTHERS AND SISTERS.” Will do, you wild motherfuckers.
“Bad Romance” – Lady Gaga. When she first started “hitting” and taking over our air-waves. It still works. I’ve heard it 5,000 times by sheer osmosis, but I still love it. Another on the workout mix.
“Broken Boy Soldiers” – The Raconteurs. You know, it has a great sound. It’s all bombast, all boy-bombast, but I like boy-bombast.
“Back In Black” – AC/DC. Talk about boy-bombast. Crank it up to 11!
“Late In the Evening” – Paul Simon. I love Paul Simon but going from AC/DC to Paul Simon does not work at all.
“Angel of the Morning” – the great Nina Simone. What an interpreter. She takes songs written by other people, and makes them so her own that she obliterates the original.
“Reilly’s Daughters” – The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. From their Carnegie Hall album. My siblings and I memorized every word. We didn’t even know what we were TALKING about. It didn’t matter. This music was OURS.
“The Sound of Your Cry” – Elvis Presley. A gorgeous ballad, totally melodramatic, and probably hard-core 1950s-only fans were upset by this kind of thing. But my God, it’s glorious. He had that VOICE, why shouldn’t he show it off? He WAS melodramatic.
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – The Rolling Stones. Finally! Shuffle ain’t shuffle without at least one Stones appearance.
“My Apocalypse” – Metallica. Off the Death Magnetic album. It makes me re-think my comment about Queens of the Stone Age. This is heavy as hell, made even heavier by how fast it is. Nobody’s faster than them.
“Sleepless Nights” – The Everly Brothers. While I love their sweet ballads (those heavenly harmonies), I like it best when they rock. And when they’re slightly pissed.
“Wives and Lovers” – Jack Jones. If you want to get a sense of the psychotic atmosphere of the 1960s aimed at women, and how widespread it was to the point that it’s Official Propaganda, listen to this shit. Fuck YOU, Jack Jones.
“The Reminder” – my gorgeously talented sister Siobhan O’Malley, off her album Alibi Bye.
“Jailhouse Rock” – Queen, paying tribute to The King at Wembley Stadium. It’s ferocious.
“Duke” – Stevie Wonder. This reminds me of the summer Mitchell and I became fast friends, and we would cruise around in my car, going to Dairy Queen, head to the movies, and then go have breakfast at Bickford’s at 11 p.m. We blasted “Duke” constantly, singing along at the tops of our voices, as we drove around in that gorgeous summer loop.
“You Rascal You” – Cab Calloway. I love these guys.
“If I Could” – Seal. This whole album reminds me of one of my college boyfriends. We had this tempestuous 1950s-type relationship. What was our first date? We went to go see Fatal Attraction, screaming and clutching at each other in sheer terror. Then we went to the beach and made out. Then I drove him home, blasting this Seal album. Listen, music leads to Memory Lanes. Sue me.
“Circus” – The Candybutchers. This is Mike Viola’s band, and how I first got into him (he is mostly solo now, although he sometimes collaborates with the aforementioned Bleu). He’s an awesome songwriter. They came out with a couple of albums. Check them out. I got into them because of my cousins and siblings who were obsessed. Siobhan (my sister, see above) opened for Mike Viola once. Imagine: opening for one of your idols, the person who inspired you most. It was such a cool evening.
“My Fault” – Eminem. From the Slim Shady LP. Yes, Marshall, it IS your fault that you gave that girl all those mushrooms. At least you acknowledge it. But the thing about this song is: He jokes and snarks about this girl OD-ing (he’s being a brat, trying to shock people because that’s his thing), and he plays the girl too … and paints this whole picture of this crazy party where the girl flips out. As the song fades out, shit gets real, and he starts sobbing and shaking the girl, “I’m sorry! WAKE UP. OH MY GOD. SOMEONE HELP. I’M SORRY.” It’s real. A classic hat-trick from Eminem. Or maybe not hat-trick. He pulls the rug out from underneath the people who are laughing as though it’s a joke.
“Black to Comm” – MC5’s 8-minute anthem, recorded live. The sound sucks, the voices are buried, with some fuzz on them, distortion, the guitar blaring on one side … and it’s all part of the sound. It’s an experience more than it is a song.
“Daddy Sang Bass” – Johnny Cash. Real country-gospel. So wonderful and authentic. Cash couldn’t be anything but authentic, perhaps his greatest gift, even more so than his song-writing, although it’s probably a tie.
“I Love You Porgy” – Nina Simone, live. It’s unbearably gorgeous. I have a hard time with Nina Simone sometimes. I can’t listen to her casually. She forces me to “go there”. I am not allowed to skip off the surface of her songs, and just “enjoy” them passively. She won’t allow it. She was a great artist.
“Womanizer” – Britney Spears. A favorite Britney tune. I have no idea what’s happening. It’s all about the beat. Another workout-mix song.
“Mary” – The Death Riders. Cheery!
“Last Hit” – Eminem & High and Mighty Trilogy. Fun and clever: I love the internal rhymes, always half the fun with these guys: the sounds they find in familiar words.
“Your Cash Ain’t Nothin’ But Trash” – Huey Lewis & the News, from their great tribute album, “Four Chords and Several Years Ago”. Paying tribute to the r&b songs from the 1950s/60s that inspired them. Huey Lewis was my first concert ever. Years later, out came Four Chords and … well, I was an “extra” in their music video for the album. It was SUCH a fun day. You can’t see me in the video, but I know just where we were. Here’s a link.
“Jesus Children of America” – Stevie Wonder. Good Lord, Innervisions is a great album. Every track a classic.
“Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” – Kenny Rogers. This song is hot hot hot. Of course now OWNED by that dream-sequence in Big Lebowski, but it’s nuts even outside of that hallucinatory memory.
“Let Me Go Lover” – Dean Martin. A perfect singer. My fave of all of those guys. Yes, Frank is awesome. But Dino has my heart in a way Frank does not. One of the things I love so much about Dean Martin is you can hear him smiling as he sings. It’s so comforting. Or, soothing is a better word.
“Daniel and the Sacred Harp” – The Band. I find them spooky. In a good way. There’s something hard-bitten about them, rough lives, a sense of mortality, and yet … the nostalgia running through it all, a love of the old medicine shows and carnival shows and playing little honky-tonks … the off-the-beaten-track rhythms of so much of American life … which maybe they could perceive with more clarity due to the Canadian-ness of some of them? These guys are not white-washed or packaged in any way whatsoever. I mean, just watch them talk about groupies and sex on the road in The Last Waltz to understand just how much tail these guys got collectively. They’re almost shame-faced about it, giggling like naughty kids. But there’s a sweet heartbreaking quality to that sound … Greil Marcus wrote a chapter on The Band in Mystery Train and I highly recommend it.
“Country Clown” – Louie Doctor Ross. One of the Sun Studio recording artists. You can pick the Sun sound out of a lineup. The slap-back. The sense of it being a moment captured in time, nothing “fixed” in the editing process. This is raw and stripped down: his voice. A harmonica. A guitar. No drums.
“It’s Not Easy” – The Rolling Stones. Off of Aftermath. Epic. The echo on their voices make them sound impossibly far away, Rock Star Gods. But with the grinding accompaniment underneath, those simple chords, blues chords. It’s rough and dirty and self-aware all at the same time … one of their “things” as a band.
“Shady Narcotics” – Eminem. With his posse, Obie Trice and D12 and all the other Usual Suspects. Macho Assertion.
“U.S. Male” (take 1) – Elvis recording a Jerry Reed song, with Jerry Reed playing accompaniment. It’s a goof, a parody of the male chauvinist, asserting his “property”. Elvis knew how funny it was, and poured it on. He makes the guy sound macho as hell, and yet also clues us in that the guy is not the brightest bulb. In one take, as the song fades out, you can hear Elvis improvise: “I’m a U.S. Male. I’m an AMERICAN U.S. Male. That’s M-A-L-E, son.” hahaha Yes, if you’re a U.S. male, then that automatically means you’re American, and we know it’s not spelled “M A I L”, so why are you being aggressive about it … Oh. Cause you’re a little bit dumb. That was all Elvis. And boy, Jerry Reed is a maestro.
“I Saw Her Standing There” – The Beatles. Out of their whole catalog, this one is probably my favorite. Definitely Top 5. I’ve listened to it, on average, at LEAST once a week ever since I first heard it – when I was probably 5 years old, I probably heard it in the womb, too … and I am never sick of it. I never skip it. Ever. That’s crazy, when you really think about it.
