A documentary about the West Village staple: Carmine Street Guitars, a little storefront filled with the most gorgeous custom-made guitars, a stop-off place for every legendary guitarist in the world.
My review of Carmine Street Guitars is now up at Rogerebert.com.
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!
I have written at great length about The Replacements on this blog. I will continue to do so. I write about them in my head ALL THE TIME. I never thought of this list as being numerically accurate and this album proves it. Because if there was one album I had to have on that deserted island everyone is hoping to be banished to, it would be this. It is my favorite album of all time, bar none. It may say 38 in front of the post but this is the #1.
I’ve written about the context in which I first heard this album on my sister’s blog.
SIDE ONE
I’ve written about seeing The Replacements in concert.
1. “I Will Dare”
I’ve written about seeing Westerberg solo and almost turning my back on him.
2. “Favorite Thing”
I’ve written about the flip side of that almost treason and how his solo work has become just as important to me.
3. “We’re Comin’ Out”
So what am I going to write today?
I’m not. You are going to write this review. To do this, you are going to travel back in time to a night in your life when everything came together. You are probably a teenager, but closer to 20 than 12. You’ve probably also just realized that you aren’t immortal and that realization has led you to embrace absurdity and intoxication.
4. “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out”
On the night in question you go to a party somewhere with some people you just met. The unfamiliar nature of these people leaves the night with a quality of danger, as if everything could go wrong at any moment. You still live at home and you’ve lied to your parents about where you are so if anything does go wrong you are on your own.
5. “Androgynous”
The party is over crowded and over loud. Feeling untethered doesn’t impede your confidence, it merely spurs over-compensation. You are broader than usual, funnier than usual, drunker than usual, angrier than usual, more entertaining than usual, more dangerous than usual, more everything.
6. “Black Diamond”
Your extremity attracts someone at the party and before you can drop your act and admit that you are young and far from home you are in a dark room doing things you’ve never done before, or at least doing them in different ways. Still in the dark, things start to go a bit haywire and the tenuous connection you have with this stranger starts to seem ominous and oppressive, not youthful and free.
END SIDE ONE
You extricate yourself with a little bit of drama.
SIDE TWO
The party hasn’t noticed but you approach it all differently now. After all, you’ve just been through the death of a romance.
1. “Unsatisfied”
Your absence was not noted by your new acquaintances and this leaves you feeling like a balloon without a string. Why don’t you just float on out of here? You do. The streets are dark and shiny from the rain and your breath is visible. You only know that your childhood home is east of here. You begin to walk.
2. “Seen Your Video”
Cellphones do not exist yet.
3. “Gary’s Got A Boner”
After an hour of wandering, things start to look vaguely familiar, residential/business giving way to business/residential. Your buzz is wearing off and the combination of the cold and the cigarettes is edifying. Fuck that whole scene. You won’t be hanging out with those morons anymore. And what the hell was up with that girl in the bedroom? Lucky you cut that shit off when you did or you might have woken up with more than just a hangover tomorrow.
4. “Sixteen Blue”
Quarter for a cup of coffee. Why do you feel so much older than you are? Aren’t you supposed to be a teenager? Why are you huddling against the cold and feeling the weight of the world? Why couldn’t you Star Trek right back into your bed?
5. “Answering Machine”
You throw a rock at a sign and hit a parked car.
It hurts to run but you don’t feel quite safely far enough away from the scene of the crime. How dumb was that. What is your deal? You just don’t give a fuck about a shit or a shit about a fuck. Fuck a luck a duck.
Should have gotten that other girl’s number. Maybe next time. Almost home. Fuck home…quarter for another cup. Wait for your real friends to wake up and save you from this nightmare. Which was actually fun. So what the fuck do you know?
Let it be.
If it was good enough for The Beatles, it’s good enough for you.
— Brendan O’Malley
Awful news out of Memphis this Easter morning that Omar Higgins, the bassist/lead singer of the Memphis punk rock band Negro Terror, died early this morning. He had had a stroke this month. He was only 37 years old. He was also a war veteran, having done two deployments in Iraq. Here’s the obit in the Commercial Appeal.
Just this past January, there was a nice meaty article about the band, plus an interview with the band members, in The Nashville Scene.
Negro Terror, a documentary about the band, directed by John Rash, was in competition at last year’s Indie Memphis, where I was a juror in the Hometowners category (meaning: made by and about locals). While we chose Brett Hanover’s Rukus as the best Hometowner Feature, Negro Terror won the special “Soul of Southern Film Award,” a well-deserved honor. I snapped this pic of director Rash, and Negro Terror guitarist Rico on awards night.
You can find out more about upcoming screenings (or even request a screening) at the Southern Documentary Project.
Here’s a trailer for this very excellent documentary. It’s no surprise that Memphis is a rich environment for music. But here’s a fresh look, a very NOW look, at guys who are the essence of punk rock, who cross genres and boundaries, opening up a wider space for expression. That’s what Omar Higgins was all about. He was an amazing advocate for the music he loved. (Negro Terror was only one of his bands. This is a catastrophic loss.)
Here’s Negro Terror in action, in the music video for their song “Voice of Memphis,” filmed entirely at the Altown Skate Park in Memphis.
My heart goes out to Higgins’ family, his friends, his band mates, and the Memphis music community.
Woke up yesterday to the absolutely devastating news that investigative journalist Lyra McKee was shot and killed in Derry, during a police standoff with dissident republicans. She was there as a journalist, covering the events. A masked person fired a shot at the police vehicles, and McKee was hit. Her final Tweet was: “Derry tonight. Absolute madness.”
McKee was 29 years old.
Born in Belfast, right off socalled “Murder Mile,” she was of the generation that came of age post Good Friday Agreement (she was killed on the 21st anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement). She had a perceptive take on the challenges and struggles of the “Ceasefire Babies,” those of her generation raised in the aftermath of decades of terror and violence (centuries, really), when all of it was supposedly “over” but … it wasn’t over, not really. McKee wrote:
The Ceasefire Babies was what they called us. Those too young to remember the worst of the terror because we were either in nappies or just out of them when the Provisional IRA ceasefire was called. I was four, Jonny was three. We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils just never seemed to reach us.
This important voice has been silenced. I’m so angry and so sad.
Martin Doyle recently featured her in his Best of Irish: 10 Rising Stars of Irish Writing. She was chosen by Forbes in their first European “30 Under 30 in Media”. McKee worked as a freelance journalist, and had signed a book deal with Faber & Faber. I was very much looking forward to her first book next year, The Lost Boys, described as:
“The Lost Boys will explore the disappearances of a number of children and young men during the Troubles. Many of them were not believed to be victims of the IRA or the UVF. Some were kids who left home for school and never came home and their disappearances were never solved by the police. McKee will investigate what happened to them.”
Her 2016 piece in The Atlantic about the high suicide rate among the Belfast “Ceasefire Babies” is what got my attention. It’s an extraordinary piece of journalism: Suicide Among the Ceasefire Babies
She was also an advocate for LGBTQ youths. The struggles of growing up in Belfast are unique. It’s not like growing up other places. She spoke from and to those in that particular struggle. In 2015, she wrote a letter to her 14-year-old self on her blog, which then went viral. Her letter was made into a beautiful short film.
Her murderer was caught on camera. The hunt for him is on. The statements of condemnation have come from both sides of the conflict – a rare thing. Her murder has rocked the community. My friends, Anthony and Carrie McIntyre, two journalists who live and work in Belfast, knew Lyra McKee, loved her, and are horrified and infuriated at what has happened. (I stayed with them when I was there almost 15 years ago. We went to Bobby Sands’ grave. Anthony was in prison with Sands. We strolled by the Sinn Fein offices, and Carrie pointed out “Gerry’s” car. Anthony and Carrie have been – famously – look it up – harassed, for their dissident positions, and they found hope for the future in Lyra McKee’s example. They are both devastated.) Anthony’s site, The Pensive Quill, has a couple of different tributes to McKee up on it right now, one from human rights lawyer Sarah Kay, and an essay by Carrie, whose rage shimmers off the page.
This is just heartbreaking and infuriating.
I haven’t watched it yet. I just responded to everyone’s comments from last week’s episode and I’m in kind of a depressed mood about what has happened to the show (I’ve been re-watching Season 2 this week). It’s such a stark contrast. I realize I’m late to get the memo. Re-watching “What Is and What Should Never Be” was especially depressing.
At any rate, I’ll show up here after I’ve seen the episode. I just can’t quit you, Supernatural. And I can’t quit all of you too!
Everyone who has continued to gather here to discuss Supernatural – many many thanks. It does help to discuss all of these things.
If you didn’t see Julia Hart’s Miss Stevens (2016) then I suggest you do. I think I mentioned it back then, in particular Lily Rabe’s wonderful lead performance. Fast Color is the Hart’s new film. I reviewed for Rogerebert.com.
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!
Madonna. Cyndi Lauper. Laura Branigan. Cher. Debbie Gibson. Tiffany. Whitney Houston. Janet Jackson. Jody Watley. Suzanne Vega. Gloria Estefan. Sheena Easton.
These are some of the female names I saw while quickly glancing at ‘1987 Music’ on Wikipedia.
In November of that year, a 20-year-old Irish chick with a shaved head released the album she’d recorded while pregnant. I know her following album was the one that sent her into the stratosphere, but when you consider the context in which it was released, this album grows in its importance every year. It is also still ahead of its time sonically.
There were almost no female auteurs/pop stars at this point. They were either packaged dance music stars or singer/songwriter hippie chicks. Sinéad was like the appearance of The Sex Pistols to male rock music. She changed the rules and left so-called “edgy” women in the dust. I mean, Melissa Etheridge? Compared to Sinéad she seems like a boozy karaoke artist.
Just like punk music exposed the myth of hard rock by being infinitely harder, Sinéad showed that whatever was passing for female aggression in those days was merely a come-on dressed up to look like rebellion. Sinéad was not trying to turn you on if you were a man. She’d had it with men in general and she was only 20. This, of course, turned her into a giant sex symbol to both men and women.
The song I’m going to single out is the epic “Troy”.
It showcases the genius O’Connor has in blowing the personal up into some unholy conflagration of myth and history. She describes a passionate youthful love affair in the specific context of modern day Dublin. Long grass, summer rain.
But something has gone wrong and the affair has ended. When she sings, “There is no other Troy/For you to burn” the song stops being simply about these two specific people, or about O’Conner at all. Who can sustain a love affair in the modern age? How can such passion be free to live in the context of a grimy urban shattered landscape of divorce and religious oppression? How is it that the carnal embrace of two young lovers no longer means anything pure or wonderful? How do those young lovers view themselves under the weight of a world that has turned its back so firmly on purity or wonder?
These are the questions that she leaves me with.
Without her there is no Alanis, there is no KT Tunstall, there is no Pink, there is no Lily Allen, maybe not even a Courtney Love. She single-handedly dragged female rock music into the modern age. And she did it with 9 songs in 1987.
1. Jackie
2. Mandinka
3. Jerusalem
4. Just Like U Said It Would B
5. Never Get Old
6. Troy
7. I Want Your (Hands on Me)
8. Drink Before the War
9. Just Call Me Joe
She’s crazy. But it just might be a lunatic we’re looking for.
— Brendan O’Malley
From David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film : Expanded and Updated , the entry on Bibi Andersson:
“She needed such a holiday to prepare for one of the most harrowing female roles the screen has presented: Nurse Alma in Persona (66, Bergman). That this masterpiece owed so much to Bibi Andersson was acknowledgement of her greater emotional experience. She was thirty now, and in that astonishing scene where Liv Ullmann and she look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and Ullmann arranges Andersson’s hair, it is as if Bergman were saying, ‘Look what time has done. Look what a creature this is.’ Alma talks throughout Persona but is never answered, so that her own insecurity and instability grow. Technically the part calls for domination of timing, speech, and movement that exposes the chasms in the soul. And it was in showing that breakdown, in reliving Alma’s experience of the orgy on the beach years before, in deliberately leaving glass on the gravel, and in realizing with awe and panic that she is only another character for the supposedly sick actress, that Andersson herself seemed one of the most tormented women in cinema.”
Indeed. I saw the movie in college when I was studying acting and felt a kind of swoon of despair/anxiety/desire: it’s like you’re shown “the bar” which others have set in the field you’ve chosen for yourself. And you may never be that good, but at least you recognize what there is to strive for. That’s what Bibi in Persona did, in particular her drunken monologue which remains, for me, one of the greatest single pieces of acting I’ve ever seen.
But there is so much more to her career than just Persona. She did 10 movies in total with Ingmar Bergman, and had a rich career elsewhere (although it is through those films with Bergman that she will be remembered: Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona being the most famous, but there’s also The Passion of Anna, The Magician, The Devil’s Eye, Brink of Life … God, this collaboration. (Here’s a piece I wrote about Bergman’s work last year.)
It was my great honor to write and narrate a video-essay last year for The Criterion Collection about Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann’s collaboration – both separately and together – for Bergman: Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, Sisters in the Art
She’s one of the greatest actresses who ever lived. I was so in awe of her as a teenager after Persona that I stayed far far away from that film for some time. I needed courage in my own pursuit of acting, I needed to find my own way and her example was too daunting, too intimidating. (I had a similar thing with Gena Rowlands. The fact that, so many years, later, I would pay tribute to both Rowlands and Andersson at the Criterion Collection, having completely found another path for myself, hacking it out of NOTHING all by myself … is a beautiful and strange dovetail, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.)
Bibi Andersson was flat out on another level, and I recognized it instantly. It may be a level very few actors reach … but at least you know it’s out there, at least you know the bar has been set.
I absolutely loved Madeleine Olnek’s Wild Nights with Emily, starring Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson, Susan Zeigler as the famous (and famously erased) “Sue” of Dickinson’s poems, and Amy Seimetz (whom I just met last fall when we were both jurors at Indie Memphis) as Mabel Todd, Dickinson’s first publisher and editor, and the crafter of the posthumous myth of Emily as a “spinster-recluse”. It’s fantastic. Very very funny but also thought-provoking, with a gut punch of a final scene (and final sound effect). I reviewed Wild Nights with Emily for Rogerebert.com.
This is what I wrote when David Cassidy died. Re-posted now for his birthday.
Maybe you “had to be there” to really get just how huge he was back then. I wasn’t the biggest Patridge Family fan in the world, and I was too young to get hormonally fangirl about David Cassidy like every teenage girl in my neighborhood who went BANANAS for him -but even I – still listening to Broadway musicals on my turntable and playing with Fisher Price “peeps” – knew who he was. He was everywhere. A GIGANTIC star. Who can forget the Annie Leibovitz photo of him on the cover of Rolling Stone?
(Completely unsafe-for-work additional photo from that same shoot below the jump.)
And I always liked his biggest hit.
I met him back when he starred in the musical Blood Brothers on Broadway – along with his brother Shaun, Petula Clark and – most importantly – my amazing aunt Regina O’Malley.
Here’s a compilation video of some of the songs/moments from the show. Look for my aunt in the plaid jumper, listening to Petula Clark (my aunt played Clark’s daughter, and sister to David/Shaun).
I loved the show. He was wonderful in it, his voice was very strong live. My aunt said he was lovely, took his work very seriously, and so wanted to be taken seriously as an actor. He worked very hard. He was nice to everyone, including the slightly-batty stalkers who flocked to the stage door every night. He was doing well at that point in his life. He had had struggles with addiction, which he had been open about in interviews (getting him a ton of shit at the time. The sneering contempt with which this huge Teenage Idol was treated – by “serious” people – is sadly par for the course in our culture – and, as I’ve said before in some of my writing about Elvis – stems a lot from misogyny. “Wait a second, WE didn’t anoint this guy. WE’RE supposed to be the ones who tell people what’s cool. We can’t let millions of screaming GIRLS tell us what’s cool. Who cares what GIRLS think?” Well, hate to break it to you, boys, but teenage girls ALWAYS know what’s cool and they know LONG before you do. When you hear thousands of girls screaming at once, you should follow the sound, not make fun of it. GIRLS anointed Elvis their King long before the mainstream did. Teenage girls – and gay boys – are early adopters.) But anyway, at the time of Blood Brothers, he had cleaned up his act and was doing well. The show was a hit.
What I remember from going to see Blood Brothers was going backstage to meet up with my Aunt. It was her Broadway debut, so we were all very excited. We had been going to see her in plays since we were in grade school. It was a madhouse back there, and I saw David Cassidy, and he saw us, the big crowd of O’Malley kids. He was unbelievably nice to us. Thanked us when we complimented him, but he also turned the conversation around to our Aunt. “She’s so good, isn’t she? You must be proud of her …” He said that kind of thing, which is extremely gracious if you think about it. At first I was awestruck by him, thinking, as I watched Shaun walk by us in the hallway, shaking hands with the two of them, “Wow… THE PARTRIDGE BOYS RIGHT HERE WHAT IS HAPPENING.” David Cassidy’s Sexual Persona was still overwhelming! I mean, it was insane!
But I kept it together and he was so nice to the gaggle of O’Malley cousins coming to see their Aunt on Broadway. He sort of effaced himself knowing we were there for her.
It made an impression.
The man struggled and suffered and I am very sorry to hear that. He made his fans so happy in his heyday. And – as I’ve said time and time again about other similar “teen idols” – fans of such people are loyal. Go to a tour at Graceland and you’ll be getting on the shuttle bus with 80-year-olds who have loved Elvis for 60+ years. You never stop loving someone you loved at a fever pitch when you were 14.
At least you shouldn’t.
Rest in peace, David Cassidy.
