Tuesday Weld, Elvis Presley’s sometimes girl, was also his costar in the wonderful Wild in the Country (1961), where they play two individuals who, at first, circle warily around each other, like cats who either want to fuck or fight, or maybe both (why choose?). His first words to her in the film are a soft gentlemanly, “Excuse me”, but he says it to her because she has purposefully and kind of rudely stood in the doorway, blocking his passage. She does so to make him deal with her. It takes willpower for him to slip past her, and his body language as he moves by her, trying not to touch her is one of his most erotic moments as an actor (yes, even more so than the “That ain’t tactics, baby, it’s just the beast in me” moment in Jailhouse Rock. It’s more so because it’s subtle, and the moment requires self-control and repression, which is inherently hot when you’re talking about two sexual powerhouses such as Tuesday Weld and Elvis Presley.)
What he does in the moment I’m talking about is simple as can be, natural and un-pushed, but eloquent and deep. From that moment, you know those two are going to go at it. Presley and Weld’s characters in Wild in the Country are bad news together when they finally hook up, but it is awesome cinema when Elvis is allowed to be wild, dirty, troubled, and careless, with a gal by his side who is even more so, a woman who has had a baby out of wedlock, eats with her mouth open, lets her dress strap fall down on her shoulder, and laughs with her head thrown back. They’re electric together.
Tuesday Weld said, in re: Presley:
He walked into a room and everything stopped. Elvis was just so physically beautiful that even if he didn’t have any talent . . . just his face, just his presence. And he was funny, charming, and complicated, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve. You didn’t see that he was complicated. You saw great needs.
As electric as she is in Wild in the Country (and it’s unbelievable to think how young she is, to give such an assured performance), I love her especially in Pretty Poison with Anthony Perkins. It recently got a run at Film Forum and it was awesome to see it on the big screen. Her beauty is undeniable, and it works almost like an assault in the film. She is irresistible. But as the film goes on, you start to see/feel other more creepy sides. With the last frame, you are left with more questions. Her presence enlarges the second the film ends. It’s a character you walk around thinking about.
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
18. Foo Fighters – The Colour And The Shape
This album is a marker for me, a placeholder, a doorjamb. It came out in the spring of 1997 which was a very full time for me, as Cashel would be born on Halloween several months later. If you tested my DNA you would find microcosmic snippets of these songs in there.
I know many people who are big fans of this band and most of them dislike this album. Most of them had flipped over the first Foo Fighters record which I have never gotten into. In fact, I don’t own any other Foo Fighters music. I’ve heard the songs and like them, I enjoy Dave Grohl immensely and root for them, but I never needed anything but The Colour And The Shape.
There are a few albums like this in my collection. I knew they were in the pantheon the first time I heard them, I listened to them obsessively until I could sing every note (and by every note I mean every vocal, every guitar solo, every bass line, every drum roll, EVERYTHING), and I consistently revisit them once the initial obsession has passed.
From what I can tell, Grohl was going through a breakup and much of the album delves into this difficult territory. It’s hard not to layer Cobain over everything, which gives it a whole different level of depth and tragedy, something that doesn’t detract at all. It’s like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. The movie isn’t about Mickey Rourke fucking up his movie career, but those echoes certainly add to the impact the story has.
So it is with this album. For me, a guy who was in a trying relationship of his own, it hit me like a ton of bricks. From the gentle opening notes of “Doll” which segue violently into “Monkey Wrench”, it is clear that we are in for a tough ride.
Actors all have little tricks for getting at difficult emotion. Or good actors do. Years later doing my cousin’s play Searching For Certainty in Los Angeles, I would use The Colour And The Shape to channel myself into the state I needed to be in. My character has been pining away for 9 years over the girl that got away in college. He takes a road trip to New York and has a dinner with her in which he finally comes clean. They kiss. The pent-up emotion lets loose and he begins to cry at this dream which has finally come true.
This is what this album sounds like to me. A triumph, a moment so hard-earned that your celebration has a wide swath of regret braided into it. You wish you could merely jump for joy but you paid such a price in getting there that your capacity for that kind of unfettered positivity has diminished. You receive your trophy, it is in your image, but it needs crutches to stay on its pedestal.
To my taste, the sound on this album perfectly represents that kind of contradiction. The guitars are crisper than crisp but still pack major punch. The drums are powerful and full of abandon but never stray over into bombast. Grohl’s singing is emotionally spot on, to the point that he disappears and the song becomes its own performance. This album is alive to me, it has a personality and a point of view. It hurts.
To this day if I need to cry for any reason, all I have to do is try and sing along to “February Stars”.
I simply can’t get through that song without having the primal response I had when I first heard it, when I felt as if I’d never be happy again, but at least I was admitting I had to try.
I said you’d find snippets of this album in my DNA which is true. The strange thing is, it hit me so hard it felt like it had been there my whole life. As if I’d been born with this album. Just like Dave Grohl. And I would like to give him a prize for it, one that didn’t have to use crutches to hold itself up.
For my next column at Film Comment, I wrote about actresses who come from a comedy/improv background, and the special gifts they bring to bear in dramatic material. Featuring a couple of interviews I did with circus people, and also a quote from …. Window-Boy. Yes. There’s his name. Out there in the world. lol. Not like it’s ever been a big secret. But he said this thing to me years ago I never forgot. So I’m usin’ it.
I’ve been wanting to write this one for a long time!
This documentary is sweet and surprisingly sad, but not sad in the expected way. Tender. And that’s unexpected, considering the topic (a kid who wants to be a social media star).
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
19. Let’s Hope It’s Beck or Jeff Buckley – Grace
The year is 1997. It is May and New York is blossoming. Maria is pregnant with what will turn out to be Cashel. We work together at The Hub, a channel on AOL. I am writing a column a week as Legs Urbano, investigating urban legends for the Urban Legends website.
It seems an impossibly naive time in the city. The internet boom is in such full force that money is being thrown at anyone with an idea. People still smoke in bars. Clinton is flirting with the whole world. In fact, one of the legends that had started to surface on my site was that Clinton had had an affair with an intern. Unlike the albino alligator in the sewer, this one was true.
Even that brewing scandal seems quaint now that we’ve had 9/11, Abu Ghraib, Cheney hunting old friends, fake yellowcake, and the collapse of the economy. We all gathered every morning at the offices in midtown and played ping pong until we had good ideas. We were making it up as we went along.
Several years earlier, when Maria still lived in Providence and we were doing the long-distance dating thing, Jeff Buckley was playing an in-store appearance at a record store in Providence. I took the bus up and we went and sat on the floor as he sang a short set of material from Grace.
In person he was somewhat of a disappointment. He was not as handsome as he seemed in the shots on the album and this made that seem like a bit of a pose. He was sort of a runt, stringy hair, a bit of a dirtbag.
But when he sang, all of a sudden the James Dean beauty that infused the photos on Grace appeared. He became larger, larger than he’d seemed, larger than life. Then the song would end and he would shrink back down to the little scrawny dude who just didn’t know what to do with all these people watching him. He seemed like a monk who all of a sudden has to pray in front of an audience.
To anyone who wasn’t around when the album came out, you might not be able to fully grasp the feeling he brought out in people. He influenced so many singers that his style seems inevitable, like something that was there all along. But, no. If you go back to 1994 there was a grunt and groan aesthetic born from grunge that was passing for emotional depth. Jeff Buckley shot an arrow through the heart of that bullshit.
I can’t help but compare the sound of Grace to the vision I have of New York prior to 9/11. There is a simplicity and ease that can never be duplicated.
Working for an internet startup in those days meant that I was something of a town crier to my friends who weren’t connected to the internet. So when word started coming in that a “young white male rock musician” had passed away, I was one of the few who knew about it. There was a short period of time when those were the only details we had. Young white male rock musician. It was rumored to be Buckley but no one knew for sure.
One of my coworkers, no doubt busy creating a slide-show that would seem prehistoric today, spoke out into the common space.
“Let’s hope it’s Beck.”
I’ve always been startled by the blackness of that comment, which never fails to make me laugh. And it seemed like after we found out who it really was, everything started to come apart at the seams.
Less than 4 years later, my marriage would be over, The Hub would be long gone, Bush was President, and the city was in flames. Thank God you could still stand in a bar and have a smoke.
I really loved Blinded by the Light, based on Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir Greetings From Bury Park, about growing up the son of Pakistani immigrants in England, and his life-changing discovery of Bruce Springsteen. Directed by Gurinder Chadha, who also directed monster-hit Bend It Like Beckham, Blinded by the Light is a poignant story about a kid trying to navigate the shoals of the first-generation immigrant experience – but it’s also a great story about the positive aspects of fandom. I loved it! My review of Blinded by the Light is up at Rogerebert.com.
We will always miss someone who sings like their “soul is at stake,” to quote Gillian Welch’s haunting song. Almost no one lives every moment – onstage or off – like their “soul is at stake.”
As Dave Marsh wrote in his Elvis book:
There is no explanation. And if one listens closely to songs like “Hurt” and “I Can Help” and “If I Can Dream” – if one listens clear back to “Mystery Train” and “Blue Moon” – that’s what is truly heard: A voice, high and thrilled in the early days, lower and perplexed in the final months, seeking answers where there are none, clarity where there is none, cause where is only effect.
Somewhere, out of all this, Elvis began to seem like a man who had reached some conclusions. And so he was made into a god and a king. He was neither – he was something more American and, I think, something more heroic. Elvis Presley was an explorer of vast new landscapes of dream and illusion. He was a man who refused to be told that the best of his dreams would not come true, who refused to be defined by anyone else’s conceptions.
This is the goal of democracy, the journey on which every prospective American hero sets out. That Elvis made so much of the journey on his own is reason enough to remember him with the honor and love we reserve for the bravest among us. Such men are the only maps we can trust.
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
20. Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros – Rock Art & The X-Ray Style
As far as I’m concerned, this entire Top 50 List could consist entirely of albums by The Beatles, The Clash, The Rolling Stones, and The Replacements. So in order to shake it up and distinguish it from other similar lists, I’ve forced myself to include questionable entries, i.e. albums that I wrote, my sister and cousinswrote, and Chinese Democracy.
So no, this album by Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros is not better than London Calling. London Calling has its place in the pantheon as one of the greatest albums of all time in any genre. So why should I write about Joe Strummer in place of that? Because.
I came to Los Angeles several times before moving here. Two days after Cashel was born I was flown out on a callback for a beer commercial. That was my first time in LA. The second time I came I booked myself into an Extended Stay hotel for a couple of weeks and tried to scare up some meetings. The third time I came…well, that’s what this review is really about.
Earlier that year, my cousin Mike had been visiting New York. As usual, debauchery and comedy ensued. This might have been the beginning of the Law and Order skit that we’ve been amusing ourselves with, whereby a regular civilian when faced with homicide detectives, continues vigorously polishing silverware or stacking cantaloupes instead of sitting the hell down and answering the questions.
And Mike played me Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros. I remember we were riding in a cab somewhere, it was already quite late, and Mike said in that insistent tone I’ve come to expect great things from, “Dude, you’ve gotta listen to this album.”
The Clash had been the true template for the band I’d been in in high school. As much as I love The Replacements, The Clash are the true height of rock and roll. Some famous quote called them “The Only Band That Matters” or something to that effect. And I think in many ways that was true. For my friends and I, their breakup was as crushing as The Beatles had been to the Baby Boomers.
And then Joe Strummer disappeared. Mick Jones pushed the boundaries of popular music with his rock/rap outfit Big Audio Dynamite, music that is still influencing the scene today. If you check out their stuff you’ll not be able to believe it was recorded in the ’80’s.
But Joe Strummer? He was our Springsteen. Imagine that for the next TEN YEARS Bruce Springsteen was silent. Well, that’s what Joe Strummer did. That’s how punk rock that fucker was.
He’d put out the excellent Earthquake Weather in 1989, he’d done some work with The Pogues, but it all felt like after-thoughts, like he’d decided to have some fun.
But when Rock Art & The X-Ray Style snaked out of those headphones into my ears in early 2000 in a cab shooting up 6th avenue, I knew this was no after-thought.
Cut to LA. I’m again visiting, knocking on mostly closed doors. This time, due to financial considerations, I’m staying at Cashel’s uncle’s, my former brother-in-law’s house. But I’m spending most of my time with Mike and Lisa in Venice. Mike excitedly tells me that Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros are playing The Troubador, the famed West Hollywood club. Mike immediately snaps up tickets.
I shoot up the 10 in my teeny Ford Aveo rent-a-car. In some strange fit of fiscal irresponsibility I’ve paid for every bit of insurance one can buy, even though my credit card supposedly covers me anyway. I am jazzed about the prospect of seeing one of the few heroes I have.
I exit the 10 onto Crenshaw. At the top of the ramp I skirt right through the tail end of a yellow light. It’s about 2 a.m. so traffic is slight. About 50 yards up Crenshaw is the ramp from the 10 going in the other direction. As I take my left onto Crenshaw that light turns green. I continue through it, thinking about Joe Strummer.
As I cross under the light, I see out of my peripheral vision a car barreling up the ramp. I realize they are not stopping at the light. They’ve come off the highway and must be going close to 50 mph. I brace for impact.
All is quiet. I spin, lights trace, wheel turns. I whip the wheel to keep myself from flying into the oncoming traffic of the other lane. I do either a 360 or a 720, I’m still not sure which, and I come to a stop in the lane I was in but facing in the opposite direction. Imagine a car parked in a lane facing the wrong way. My brain was boggled.
The car that hit me was a giant American model. They’d taken a left onto Crenshaw, plowed through me and now pulled over on the overpass.
Here’s where things get kooky.
In my head I can see the driver get out of the car and take a few steps in my direction. They are maybe 20 yards away. Perhaps there were two people in the car but I guess I’ll never know. Because he/she got back in their damaged car and took off.
I sat stunned in my crumpled Aveo. An SUV was stopped at the light in the lane going the other direction. We were separated by the divider. The woman leaned out of her car and said, “You should get out of the car…you’re gonna get hit again.”
I thought that seemed like a sensible idea so I put the hazards on and stepped out of the car. I walked around it onto the median strip. I felt soft and over-inflated. I sat down on the ground and called 911. Then I called Mike. He said he was leaving immediately from Venice and would be there in 20 minutes.
I could now see the damage to the passenger side of the car. It was considerable. The car had struck my car right over the back wheel well, which had saved my life. If it had hit me a second sooner it would have caught my car right in the middle and pushed me into oncoming traffic where I’d have been hit head on. As it was the whole left side was punctured and indented from the impact.
More kookiness ensued.
As I sat there, a car came chugging up from the ramp where my hit-and-run attacker had come from. This car was on fire.
A small white car, perhaps a Toyota Celica or something along those lines. It rolled to a stop directly across the street from me and the driver got out. He was a small Mexican man wearing a baseball cap. He ran across the street to a house yelling, “Agua! Agua!” Another man, perhaps his father, came running out with a bucket of water and proceeded to douse the engine. I knew this was a bad idea but I was still too shocked to try to communicate with them. The hissing from the water hitting the hot engine block sounded heinous.
The fire truck came and put the car out. It took a few attempts to explain to the firemen that these two cars were completely unrelated to one another. They asked if I was hurt and I didn’t think that I was. Although my head was ringing and my ears were stuffed with cotton.
Mike came. He waited for me until the cops came which was quite some time. Apparently, if you’re ever in a car accident in LA and need assistance, you have to say that you thought the other person had a gun. Then the cops will rush right over to you. But if there isn’t a gun involved they have better things to do.
Needless to say, it was pretty cut-and-dried since it was a hit-and-run. The extra insurance paid for the car which was totaled. I went back with Mike to his apartment and gingerly went to sleep, but not before I terrified Melody by leaving her a voice message which said something like:
“Hey babe. Got into a car accident. I’m at Mike’s and I’m just gonna go to sleep.”
She freaked out! Pictured me like the folks in the movie who just want to lie down after head trauma. But no, it wasn’t that severe. However, I was rattled to a very intense degree. I was sore all over, very emotional, spacey, irrational…you name it.
We didn’t go see Joe Strummer.
I don’t care about the car. I don’t care about the occasional aches and pains I still get. I don’t care about the shudder when I cross that intersection again, which I do at least 10 times a week.
No. I care that those fuckers drove up the Crenshaw ramp and killed my last chance to see Joe Strummer in person. He’d be dead in a year. They didn’t kill me, though. You hear that, whoever the fuck you are? You didn’t get me.
My new column for Film Comment is about Dennis Hopper’s wild and nihilistic Out of the Blue, starring Linda Manz, in a definite high watermark for performances by teenagers. She’s an icon, and WAS an icon to me when I was a kid, due to her appearance in a TV movie called Orphan Train (which I wrote up as a novelization, old-timers will remember). I didn’t see Days of Heaven until I was an adult, nor did I see Out of the Blue until I was an adult (and Out of the Blue is very hard to find. It’s almost never screened. Once you see it, you will understand why. This movie is tough, scary, and brutal).
Additionally: I chose to write about this movie not just because it’s great (although that too) but because next week is Elvis Week and … while there are many movies haunted by Elvis (Mystery Train, True Romance, Bubba Ho-Tep, to name a few – Out of the Blue is the most Elvis-haunted movie of them all.
