One of the fun things about having a column (my new column Present Tense at Film Comment) is writing down a list of all of the random things I’ve always wanted to write, but never got around to here, for whatever reason. Here’s a piece which has, honestly, been banging around in my head for years.
I wrote about the powerful relationship between Ripley and Corporal Hicks in Aliens. (The first essay launched was about Frank O’Hara’s poetry about the movies. Swinging from O’Hara to Aliens is a good example of what I’m about. I wanted to establish that right away!)
I love the title to the Ripley/Hicks essay suggested by editor Michael Koresky:
Ranked one of the greatest female stars of all time, Doris Day has died at the age of 97. I “got into it” (in a very mild way) with a guy on Twitter who said she was symbolic of “1950s conservative ideology” but this is a mistake, it’s incorrect, it’s not right, and all you have to do is watch her movies to understand that the image passed down to us of the perpetual virgin is wrong. Doris Day was NOT Sandra Dee. It’s a category error. It does her – and the women who were trying to live/date/navigate in the 1950s and 60s – pre-birth-control-pill – a great disservice.
I was going to write something about this but I woke up to this FANTASTIC piece by A.O. Scott in The New York Times which says it all, sums up what I was trying to say on Twitter. I love this piece so much: Doris Day: A Hip Sex Goddess Disguised as the Girl Next Door. If your image of Doris Day is a 1950s goody-goody, then I highly recommend you go back and watch her films. You are in for a huge treat. Received assumptions is not a good way to respond to culture. You’ve gotta actually watch the films.
Because there is always a connection to Elvis, have a listen to her absolutely dreamy cover of one of his greatest hits.
She was like Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra in that she wasn’t “just” a singer. She was one of the instruments in the orchestra, she was a conductor. Her singing – the tone, the beautiful elongation of her phrasing, where she chose to breathe, all of it – was an act of pure musicianship.
I haven’t written a lot about Doris Day, but the main piece I wrote – which I’m very proud of – was this Film Comment essay on the great Love Me or Leave Me, where Day is cast opposite James Cagney (he lobbied hard for her to get that role: he wanted only her), and the two of them are out of this world together. It is a deeply disturbing film about a violent domestic relationship, and she gives her greatest performance in it.
My friend Mitchell has always been voluminous in his praise for Doris Day, so one day I turned the voice recorder on and asked him to pontificate. It’s a great tribute to Day, and what she did, and who she was, and just how damn talented she was.
My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. He did series on books he loved, and albums he loved. I thought it would be fun to put up some of the stuff here. So we’ll start with his list of 50 Best Albums. I’ll put up one every Monday.
Brendan’s list of 50 Best Albums is part music-critique and part memoir and part cultural snapshot.
I have always loved these essays, because I love to hear my brother talk. I am happy to share them with you!
50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley
35. The Refreshments – Fizzy Fuzzy Big And Buzzy
I first heard this album on the 7th floor of an office building directly south of Central Park. I was working for The Hub, which was a “channel” on AOL back when you still paid by the hour to get online. The Hub was a joint venture between AOL and New Line Cinema and the fact that their business model included throwing money at me should give you an indication of just how far that internet bubble had expanded.
My journey to The Hub had been a strange one and it all started in my ex-wife’s brain.
She had been temping for a conglomerate of the magazine industry. Her job was to take their content and shoe-horn it into an AOL format. During this process she had to deal with many AOL execs and she eventually heard about something called AOL’s Greenhouse Project. Their mission was to find, acquire, develop and promote original AOL content.
Maria thought that the rabid world of romance novels, novelists and their fans would be a great community to bring into the online world. She used her knowledge of AOL platforms to design a sample cross-section of the interactive site dedicated to bodice rippers and forbidden petticoat exploration.
AOL Greenhouse was intrigued. They ran it all the way up the corporate ladder and it looked like they were going to buy it. At the last second they declined but they liked Maria’s ideas so much that they asked her if she wanted to join the team of one of the ideas they HAD picked.
This site was dedicated to the collecting and retelling and debunking of urban legends. It was to be called…Urban Legends. They hooked Maria up with the creator. They rented office space in the Village and set about building the site.
At the time I was temping and auditioning like crazy. When they asked me if I wanted to pose for pictures as the fictional host of the site I said sure, why not. I dressed a little like Indiana Jones and they took a bunch of photos. The actual host of the site then had to back out and they asked if I wouldn’t mind re-writing some of the legends up from existing source material, which was pretty dry and scholarly.
This became a part-time job. I was working during the day and cranking out internet size re-creations of those myths we all know. Well, as the deadline approached it became clear that they weren’t going to have enough material. I came on full-time as the primary writer of the legends and also embodying the character I’d only been in pictures up to that point.
Legs Urbano. Get it? Urban Legends. Legs Urbano.
For the next two years I was on deadline. The show was quite a success right out of the gate. I wrote an article a week examining the legends from an investigative journalist/private eye perspective. People responded, pouring local legends in from all over the country.
Our show lived on The Hub, the channel on AOL’s front page that was aimed at the MTV crowd, 18-35 white males. We were enough of a success that The Hub wanted to buy us out, have us join their company and not just live on their website.
Our boss was one of the most colossally insecure and narcissistic people I’ve ever met. In our little (by this time my sister Sheila was also working with us) 4-person outfit she could stand back and let us do all the work while taking credit for it. On a team of larger proportions she’d be exposed. In our discussions with the President of The Hub, I made sure to let him know that I was a working actor and that I would be pursuing acting work while working at The Hub. She saw this as a terrible betrayal. On our last day in the Greenwich office, all her fears boiled to a head and she attacked me. I didn’t answer the phones, I didn’t check with her about topics I’d been working on, etc. I quit.
As I gathered up my stuff, I realized that I didn’t want to quit. So I walked back into her office and told her I wasn’t quitting. I told her that her complaints were unfounded and that her complaints were all secondary to the contributions I’d made to the ACTUAL CONTENT OF THE SITE. My writing had struck such a chord in the ether that we were being picked up by the big fish. I didn’t say this but I knew it threatened her. I’d rendered her unnecessary.
The Hub itself was very different. 20-30 people in a cliche internet boom loft-like space. Pool table. Beanbag chairs. Loud music. Unconventional dress.
One of the perks was that we got sent free music by the cartload. Everyone wanted to get their music mentioned on this new thing called “the internet”. Amazing how far we’ve come.
Today’s album is something I’d never have heard without going to work at The Hub.
To me, Fizzy Fuzzy Big And Buzzy is about that time in life when you are no longer a kid but you aren’t adult yet. Very Douglas Coupland. Too much intoxication, too much meaningless sex, too much sun, too many road trips, too few destinations. When Jimmy Buffett sings about it, you long for it. When The Refreshments do, you feel like you need to dry out, straighten up, set some goals, turn things around.
I became absolutely obsessed with this album. This doesn’t happen to me often. I am in the middle of it right now with Chinese Democracy and that is how I know when an album will be with me forever. I can sing the guitar solos on Fizzy Fuzzy Big And Buzzy.
Which brings me to the primary reason that this album is on here. The guitar playing is DELICIOUS. The tone of the leads is just a hair heightened from the rhythm, leaving them linked and potent. The singer has what I consider to be the best straight rock voice from the ’90’s, more Vedder than Cobain but with none of the self-conscious bad acting that mars much of Pearl Jam’s work.
These guys go to Mexico. They pay for hookers and regret it. They fish. They beg their girlfriends to just kill them already and get it the fuck over with. They start fights when they are called “faggots”. In other words, they drink and face the consequences.
A few songs in you start to feel the sun brow-beating your hangover, trying to convince you just to have a beer to cut the edge. And while you’re at it, why don’t you just call that chick and straighten things out with her? She’ll see your point of view. Sure, she threw your photo album into the pool but she was pretty fucked up too.
The scariest part is that you are enjoying your descent. So you can’t see any reason to stop it.
And that is why it resonated with me so much. I was not where I was supposed to be. I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing. I was not with who I was supposed to be with. Times like that, drunk seems like the best idea there is.
There’s so much that’s good here! Had some serious issues with aspects of it, but there’s a lot that is very good. Will be interested to hear from others their reactions, in particular Tolkien fans.
Tilda Swinton holding the May-June issue of Film Comment, with my cover story on Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir”, starring Tilda Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, and Tilda herself.
Honor Swinton Byrne – whose face graces the cover – and Tilda Swinton, holding the magazine open to the article I wrote.
Life is a weird thing sometimes and I am appreciative of it.
My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. He did series on books he loved, and albums he loved. I thought it would be fun to put up some of the stuff here. So we’ll start with his list of 50 Best Albums. I’ll put up one every Monday.
Brendan’s list of 50 Best Albums is part music-critique and part memoir and part cultural snapshot.
I have always loved these essays, because I love to hear my brother talk. I am happy to share them with you!
50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley
36. Eminem – The Eminem Show
By the time this album came out I was already a full blown Eminem fan. But in order to truly describe the arc of my appreciation, it is important to return to a time when I was most definitely not a member of the Eminem Appreciation Society.
When Cousin Tim moved to Brooklyn in 2000, he brought a home-recording career that was almost the exact inverse of mine. Same amount of output but entirely different genre. He was a hip-hop fanatic and had been since the early 1980’s. He’d been recording rap almost as long.
At this time I would have classified myself as an appreciator but not an aficionado of the genre. I had a few Public Enemy albums but their politics made them acceptable to a dyed-in-the-wool punk rocker like myself. When Eminem hit the scene I might has well have been a member of the Moral Majority.
All I knew was that he used the word “faggot” with extreme regularity. I took umbrage and set about writing a song that was in essence a come-on. I wanted to shame Eminem by calling him on his homophobia. Of course, this was before I ever actually LISTENED to him. I only listened to what people SAID about him.
My Eminem flirt song never got off the ground mostly because Timothy insisted that I listen to him. After about 20 minutes I realized that he was more punk rock than anything I’d been listening to for years. The beats, the musical tracks, the WORDS. It is no surprise that Seamus Heaney is quoted on the dust cover of the new Eminem autobiography. Forget Kurt Cobain. Forget Paul Westerberg. (And if you know me you know how HUGE that is).
The voice of this generation, the one that stretches from the late ’70’s to 4 minutes from now, the True Poet Laureate of America is a dirtbag from Detroit who just happened to be born with two M’s in front of his two names.
And The Eminem Show is his Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
He ranges from the broad scope of modern society and hypocrisy (“White America”) …
to the deepest darkest details of his own harrowing life (“Cleaning Out My Closet”).
If you are converted already and I’m preaching to you, then I am glad to be in your company. If you’ve discounted him because of the genre he performs in or his penchant for violent hyperbole, you need to take a closer look.
After all, you don’t want to be the Dylan fan booing at the Newport Jazz Festival because he plugged his guitar into an amplifier. Or do you?
It’s so good. I was hoping it would be since my feelings about Zac Efron are well-known. And I love Joe Berlinger’s stuff. He’s a documentary guy so this is a change-up. It’s so good.
I went pretty long in my review on it. I had stuff to say. Here’s my review.
I reviewed the fun and informative documentary about Dr. Ruth Westheimer, a juggernaut in the 1980s, but still going strong at age 90. I learned a lot about her life from this documentary, stuff I never knew. My review is now up at Rogerebert.com.
