HBO is, for some unknown reason, not really promoting The Tale, which generated so much buzz at Sundance even people who weren’t there – like me – could feel it. At any rate, it really should be seen, promotion or no. I reviewed The Tale for Ebert.
Started by Andy Warhol, I discovered Interview magazine in high school, when it was still in its out-sized form, looming over the other traditionally sized magazines in the rack. The covers were always striking. Even if it was someone famous – and it was always someone famous – they would be presented in a way that made you look twice. There was nothing generic about the images. The covers were often flat-out avant-garde.
The interviews inside were pure transcripts, no editorializing, which was part of the magazine’s style. It made you feel like you were in the room. I got a subscription, which I maintained for years. It was my only magazine subscription. It was also the only magazine I read literally cover to cover. Even stuff I thought I wasn’t interested in (there was a restaurant review section), I read. Interview introduced me to many things which would become favorites. An interview with Tori Amos, before Little Earthquakes came out, turned me onto her. There are many more examples. I still have some of those magazine covers in my mind. Drew Barrymore, nude, lying in the green grass. On the cover!
Eventually I lost track of Interview, and eventually, the decision was made to reduce its size, so that it looked like every other magazine on the rack. Something was lost. For a long time, I lugged around all of my old issues of the magazine, gigantic size, floppy. They seemed too precious, too unique, to just toss out. Each one was a work of art in its way. But eventually, I made the tough decision to get rid of them. It just wasn’t practical to be packing up boxes of old gigantic magazines every time I moved.
Now, with the news that Interview is closing up shop, I regret that decision.
Turns out, I did keep one issue. It was an entire issue shot by Bruce Weber, with Mark Wahlberg (then known as Marky Mark) on the cover. The “Uncensored” curving over his nipple says it all about the magazine’s erotic and playful style.
As a high school teenager, Interview opened doors of curiosity in my mind. It introduced me to artists I had never heard of. It opened doors in a downtown New York scene which I could only imagine, and dream of. It made the world seem like it was CLAMORING with creative people just doing their own thing, eccentric, bizarre, unclassifiable, precious.
Born in 1910, Margaret Wise Brown always wanted to be a writer, but her journey towards the almost unprecedented success she eventually achieved, was not direct (how could it be? If you set out to create a children’s classic along the level of Goodnight Moon, you couldn’t do it). Brown went into education, and was disheartened by the books for kids that she saw out there in the publishing world, in school libraries. She had other ideas, radical for the time: Maybe there didn’t need to be a Sunday School lesson in a children’s book (“Be good,” “obey your parents”, “don’t tell a lie”, and etc.) Maybe a child learning to read would thrill to a story made up only of observations of what the child looked around and saw in his or her own life. After getting her degree in education, Brown worked as a teacher, and eventually became connected to Harper & Brothers, as an editor of children’s books. From there, she started to write her own.
She was an interesting and bohemian woman. She wrote other children’s books, some better than others. Runaway Bunny is also beloved. Goodnight Moon, though, is the show-stopper. (Fans of the book, if you haven’t already, read All of my issues with the Good Night Moon bedroom. Tears of laughter streamed down my face the first time I read it.)
Goodnight light
And the red balloon
Goodnight bears
Goodnight chairs
Goodnight kittens
And goodnight mittens
Goodnight clocks
And goodnight socks
Goodnight little house
And goodnight mouse
It’s a list of objects with no commentary. It’s very straightforward and almost banal. But they stop being “just” objects, but instead symbolic of the love present in the whole scene. “Bears” “chairs” “kittens” are not banal at all to a child who loves them. The book is a child’s prayer (“And God bless mummy and daddy, and God bless the bears, and God bless my mittens …”) The list is compulsive and spontaneous, the child’s eyes scanning the room, mentioning each object as it comes into view. This is the child’s whole world.
I am not overstating things when I say that the final three lines give me goosebumps every time I read them (and as an aunt of many small nieces and nephews, I read this book out loud constantly).
Goodnight stars
Goodnight air
Goodnight noises everywhere
Margaret Wise Brown died unexpectedly from an embolism. She was just 42 years old.
Goodnight Moon is one of the most successful children’s books of all time.
This film doesn’t have distribution yet, but I wanted to share the official trailer which just launched. I saw You & Me some months back, and it’s a beautiful, touching, and funny story. Directed by Alexander Baack, who co-wrote the script with his wife Hillary Baack (who stars in the film), You & Me tells the story of a deaf woman and a blind man who fall in love, and all of the complications and family complexities and friend-input included in all love stories. Sally Struthers appears as Tony’s mother – it’s so good to see her again! What makes this film unique is that both lead actors (Hillary Baack and Paul Guyet) are disabled (a first, for this type of story, where you normally have able-bodied actors playing disabled characters). The two leads are charming and funny. My talented brother Brendan O’Malley plays Tony’s best friend. I’m so proud of him! Fingers crossed the film gets distribution. I think audiences will love it. Well, audiences already do. It won the audience award at Cinequest Film Festival.
It’s been a while. I’ve been driving a lot these days. Music is an escape. A gentle escape, though. Something alongside reality, something that helps me access emotions that aren’t really available to me normally. iPod Classic with the click-wheel still holding strong.
“Hello, Trouble (Come On In)” – Ernest Tubb. See, this is the beauty of Shuffle. It starts you off with Ernest freakin’ Tubb.
“Love Is All Around” – Joan Jett, paying tribute to one of her main inspirations, Mary Tyler Moore.
“Green Green Rocky Road” – Emmylou Harris, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Loudon Wainwright. From the wonderful album The McGarrigle Hour.
“Rhyme or Reason” – Eminem. He morphs into Yoda at one point. I love the sample, too.
“The Ol’ College Try” – L.E.O. Okay, so this is from an album called Alpacas Orgling, and it’s the brainchild of two of my favorite current singer-songwriters – Bleu and Mike Viola. The two of them are hugely influenced by ELO, and so this is their “band”. I love the album. Not a bad song on it. These guys are amazing.
“Tell It Like It T-i-Is” – The B-52s. This song is so anchored into a specific time and place for me that when it comes up, I am transported in time. I had just moved to Chicago. I lived in one room in a glorified roach-motel on the shores of Lake Michigan. I was staggering out of a terrible relationship. I was all kinds of fucked up. I took long runs along the lake shore. I was going 5 miles a day, sometimes more. I have never been in such great shape. I wasn’t doing it to get in good shape. I was doing it because I was in a heightened state of awareness and anxiety, everything new, everything scary. I remember I was in a Cracklin’ Oat Bran phase – this was my cereal of choice at the time. ?? See. This is how memory is stored, in the senses and that’s what I think of when I hear this song. I had made a “workout mix” cassette tape, which I played as I took my daily runs, even in the pouring rain. The music kept me going, helped me work off some of the panic I felt at getting out of that relationship, at being single for the first time, at starting my Madcap Floozy Progression through Chicago.
“Somethin Else” – Eddie Cochran. He was so sexy.
“To the Sea” – Jack Johnson. A bit twee for me. A bit??
“Hound Dog” – Elvis. From one of the shows he did at Madison Square Garden. He introduces it with, “This is a song I did on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1912.” And then he proceeds to just mess around with it, slowing it down, with James Burton killing it around his vocals. I mean, it’s all a goof. He’s so relaxed.
“You Hold the Key” – Lloyd Conger. I don’t know where I picked this up. Maybe it was on a soundtrack or something. Charlie Rich is clearly the inspiration, but it just points up that nobody can really be Charlie Rich except Charlie Rich.
“What” – Brendan Benson. I love this guy. He came onto my radar because of some commercial for an iPod a million years ago. The song called to me. It was a felicitous discovery. He’s a wonderful singer, wonderful songwriter, and prolific too. So far he hasn’t written a boring song. I love him.
“Beale St. Blues” – Eartha Kitt. ACES.
“Down and Out” – Charlie Rich. Speaking of Charlie Rich … He’s got as strong a sexual presence as Elvis, or Brigitte Bardot, or any other Erotic Muse you can think of. He makes me weak in the knees.
“Do Somethin'” – Britney Spears. Maybe go home and take a nap, Brit? Either way, I love you!
“Cry Me a River” – Michael Buble. The arrangement is hysterical. It starts out like it’s a sequence in an action movie taking place in the 1920s, or like it’s been composed for a military parade in a totalitarian dictatorship.
“Little Red Corvette” – Prince. Every so often I suddenly am reminded he is dead and I think, “Wait … no … can it be true?” It still hasn’t sunk in for some reason.
“Alabama Wild Man” – Jerry Reed. He cracks me up. Also you can pick his guitar playing out of a lineup.
“Next To Me” – Emeli Sande. Sooo groovy.
“Wedding Bells” – Jerry Lee Lewis. One of them self-pitying country songs. Punctuated by his floozy-juke-joint piano. I love the combo. I also love the huge female chorus behind him.
“Bruise Violet” – Babes in Toyland. Ferocious. I’m so glad the soundtrack to my 20s featured so much female anger. Just seemed like a valid part of life. It was given voice. Sexuality was obviously present. Everyone sings about sex. It’s what everybody is doing. But there was room for all this other stuff. There still is now. But … it doesn’t really sound like this.
“Like Home” – Eminem (featuring Alicia Keys). This is beautiful. Painful. Outraged. I cried the first time I heard it.
“Lay Your Shine On Me” – The Box Tops. So funky.
“Bluegrass With Guts” – Jerry Reed. He’s just dazzling.
“Forget You” – Gwyneth Paltrow (the Glee cover of Cee Lo Green’s awesome “Fuck You”). Paltrow does a hell of a job. Something else comes out in her when she sings. (See Country Strong.) She’s LOOSE, happy, free. Also, she can legit sing.
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” – Gladys Knight. Classic.
“Little White Church” – Little Big Town. “Take me down to the little white church.” Maybe you can just drive yourself there. Stop demanding rides.
“Trying to Get To You” – Elvis, from the “sit-down” sessions in the 1968 comeback special. One of his greatest live performances. One of ANYBODY’S greatest live performances. It gives me goosebumps, no matter how many times I’ve seen it. His neck and chest glistening with sweat, throwing his head back, oh my God, it’s overwhelming. He is overwhelming.
“Stairway to Heaven” – Heart, at the Kennedy Center Honors for Led Zeppelin. Yes, I converted the video to mp3. The performance is so powerful it’s not just a tribute – it takes the song to some OTHER LEVEL. A level that seems to shock Robert Plant and Jimmy Page themselves in the audience. Blows me away. If you haven’t seen it:
“What a Wonderful World” – Joey Ramone. What a coincidence. It was his birthday yesterday! I just posted this on Twitter. I was in love with this raucous cover long before Supernatural used it so memorably. But that scene … so smart. To choose that song? It’s such a smart use of the perfect song to create the mood. Also that it’s the RAMONES, which loops into the whole music world of the Winchesters. It’s not a traditional rendition of the song. It’s a ROCK rendition of the song. The scene shows a dude mowing a lawn. That’s it. How can you make it seem like a MIRACLE of exploding joy? They did. With the help of Joey Ramone.
“Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” – Waylon Jennings. Do not mess with Waylon. He’s HAD IT.
“Superstitious” – Stevie Wonder. He is a natural antidepressant.
“Me and Bobby McGee” – Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s the definition of a “natural” – although he’s clearly what you might call “touched.” Sam Phillips sure thought so. The word “talent” doesn’t even cover it.
“When Baby Gets the Blues” – Jerry Lee Lewis. I’m so happy his career didn’t end with his scandalous marriage. He “came back” and went on and on and on and ON … taking over Nashville, with album after album … there’s so MUCH of him out there. Very grateful.
“Practically Out Of My Mind” – my old pal (and Elvis discussion buddy) Pat McCurdy. There’s something about him that sometimes makes me cry. He also makes me laugh uproariously. We go way back. History. Weird history. His music – and he – means a lot to me.
“Honey Don’t” – Ben Folds Five, with a raucous version of Carl Perkins’ classic. I wrote about it here.
“Burslem Normals” – superstar Robbie Williams.
“I’m On My Way” – The Proclaimers. Member them? This is the only album of theirs I have. My friend Kate sent it to me randomly, a million years ago, without even a note enclosed. So I went for months wondering who my secret pen-pal was. I was like, “Thanks a lot, whoever you are, I love the album!”
“Nothin'” – Robert Plant and Allison Krause. God, I love the album they did together. Their voices blend so beautifully. I read that one of the reasons he was drawn to doing an album of duets was that – as a lead singer – he rarely sang the harmony line. Long long career, always sang lead vocals. So it was so fun for him to explore a different aspect of music, that of the harmony line.
“Shitloads of Money” – Liz Phair. From Whitechocolatespaceegg. Liz Phair is in the news now, with the box set anniversary box set of Exile in Guyville and I read some review that said, “Almost no one likes Whitechocolatespaceegg” and I think – as I always do when a critic makes a statement like that – “I liked it. Stop assuming shit. Speak for yourself.” Now granted, I’m a fan for life. I think even her “sellout” album is FANTASTIC. I love her blunt sense of truth here: “It’s nice to be liked, but it’s better by far to get paid.”
“Everything” – Michael Buble. This song makes me feel really lonely.
“So Glad You’re Mine” – Elvis Presley. Sexy jangly fun. Love the tinkly piano.
“I’m Hurtin'” – Roy Orbison. So dramatic! And he’s got the voice for it. Histrionics. Exciting. “You walked awayyyyyyyy (bum bum bum) The pain begaaaan (bum bum bum bum) I Knew I’d NEVEEERRRR (bum bum bum bum) know love again …”
“A Hazy Shade of Winter” – Simon & Garfunkel. I grew up listening to them. My parents’ albums. I will always have a place in my heart for them. But after reading Ellen Willis … she didn’t change my mind but I have to acknowledge she has a point. That woman could WRITE.
“Prince of Darkness” – Indigo Girls. This album was so huge. Kind of amazing they are still around. I’m happy about it.
“Fancy” – Reba McEntire. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen my friend Mitchell lip synch this, towel wrapped around his head, with 100% commitment. I love it best when he gets PISSED (as Fancy). His face is like, “Go ahead. Judge me. You privileged piece of shit. I DID WHAT I HAD TO DO.”
“We’re Coming In Loaded” – Elvis. From the Girls Girls Girls soundtrack. Now I will not pretend this is in any way peak Elvis. In many ways, it is a complete travesty. But the man sells it, what can I say. And there’s honor in that.
“I Got Stung” – Elvis. Now THIS is peak Elvis. It’s thrilling.
“Twistin’ the Night Away” – Sam Cooke. Great songwriter. One of the best things about him is the details he puts into the lyrics. He SETS THE SCENE.
“My Monkey Made a Man Out Of Me” – Mike Viola. Mentioned above. Fantastic songwriter. He’s solo now, but I “came to him” when he was with his band the Candy Butchers. (My sister Siobhan opened for him. Very exciting.)
“Unchained Melody” – Charlie Rich. He’s perfect. What can I say.
“This Is Living” – Elvis. From the Kid Galahad soundtrack. See above comment about “We’re Coming In Loaded.” You listen to this, and think about the Beatles, and then you think, “What on EARTH is happening.”
“Hello Mary Lou” – Ricky Nelson. Pure joy.
“Batman Theme” – the great Link Wray. If you haven’t seen the new documentary, Rumble, I urge you to drop what you’re doing NOW and seek it out.
“Baby” – Little Richard. SWING IT. “Baby, don’t you need a man like me?” Not sure about that, Little Richard, but thanks for asking!
“Eleanor Rigby” – Aretha Franklin. A complete re-imagining of the song. It’s unbelievable. I often think of what it must have been like for John Lennon and Paul McCartney to hear covers like this. Gives me goosebumps.
“What’s Left Of Me” – Waylon Jennings. “Even dogs think that I’m a tree.” This is a sad sad story, Waylon.
“Don’t Be Cruel” – Elvis. A monster hit. 1956. If you listen to it, there’s a tapping sound throughout. That’s Elvis tapping on the top of a guitar case. It gives it such an immediate sound (but all of his tracks have that, since they’re all “live” performances. What happened in the room is what we get on the record. Very little post-tinkering.)
“I Got a Woman” – The Everly Brothers. I find their version thrilling! “OH YEAH SHE IS MY BABY DON’T YOU UNDERSTAAAAAAND” – it’s primal. Great big sound.
“Apache” – Link Wray. The sound goes right through you.
“Hold It Against Me” – Britney Spears. All of her songs are like, “I am the wildest woman you’ve ever seen. Sorry you can’t handle it.” I have such fondness for her. Will always root for her.
“The Coventry Carol” – The Mediaeval Babes. I got into them years ago. There’s something about them – their backgrounds in avant-garde music/art/burlesque/film – they’re all just so HIP. But then they have this really traditional approach to these old medieval songs. I love it. They were just nominated for Emmy’s – so these women have staying power.
“All I Wanna Do” – Sheryl Crow. This song was so omnipresent when it first came out it actually got super annoying. “I never want to hear this damn thing again.” And the video was also annoying. This was when you actually knew what the video was because you actually watched MTV.
“You Are My Sunshine” – Leftover Cuties. I am such a huge fan.
“Norwegian Wood” – Waylon Jennings. I love his voice so much. He gets very full-throated here, it’s filled with emotion.
“It’s Raining Men” – The Weather Girls. I will always think of Michael – and his withering SCORN – when I got excited, hearing this song coming out of the “disco club,” as we stood in the alley outside, trying to hear what kind of music they were playing. Michael was (is) a disco snob. We had so much fun.
“Whitechocolatespaceegg” – Liz Phair. See, I love this. What’s not to love?
“Chain Gang” – Sam Cooke. A pretty major recording, important in his discography. Once again: he paints a picture, he sets the scene. And those rhythmic grunts just MAKE it.
“Give Me One Reason” – Tracy Chapman. Never been a big fan of hers, but I can’t live without this song. Great recording, great piece of work. Timeless. Best thing she ever did.
“I Love Rock ‘n Roll” – Britney Spears. I remember people were outraged when she covered this. Relax. On one level, yes, it’s ridiculous. But also … it’s kind of a jam. Side note: I am glad I came of age in the era of Babes in Toyland/The Breeders/Liz Phair – and, earlier – Joan Jett herself – as opposed to Britney. I love Britney but I came to her as a wise old lady who can enjoy her without being influenced by what she represents.
“Get Up” – Bleu. One of his best. He writes pop anthems. Effortlessly.
“Fuck Her Gently” – Tenacious D. The song gets funnier the longer it goes on. If this isn’t your “kind” of humor, then there’s no way I can convince you of how DEEPLY funny I find it. “I’m gonna ball you discreetly.” It’s the CONCEPT that’s funny.
“Sylvia” – Elvis. This song gets no love. I mean, okay, I get it. But come on. He sings the HELL out of it. I love Big Melodramatic Power-Ballad Elvis. He just THROWS his voice up, “I’m WAIIIITING for a word of love …” Like I said, this is not a half-assed job. I find it kinda thrilling.
“Gone, Gone, Gone” – The Everly Brothers. They were just so perfect.
“Non-Existent Patricia” – L7. Talk about your female role models in my wild-child early 20s. AND they have a new album coming out. You can’t imagine what the last couple of years have felt like: with Sleater-Kinney, The Breeders, Liz Phair AND a new L7 album … all with new albums (or, in Phair’s case, an anniversary box set). I’m in heaven. L7 is hard, tough, really really heavy, heavy metal heavy. My kind of music.
“Mother’s Little Helper” – The Rolling Stones. “… gets her through her busy day …” This is some bleak shit.
“If the Lord Wasn’t Walking By My Side” (take 6) – Elvis. One of my favorite Elvis gospel tracks. Halfway through him, you hear him start to clap with the beat, and it’s so joyful it makes me want to cry.
“Road to Ruin Woman” – Brett Detar. I am pretty sure this one came on my radar from the great soundtrack to the TV series Justified. Maybe not. Wherever I found this, I’m happy I did. It’s fantastic.
“I Need Your Love Tonight” – Elvis. From the frenzied sessions in the spring of 1958, put together to get as much of Elvis recorded as possible, to be released during his 2-year stint in Germany. These sessions are WILD, with an extremely unique sound in Elvis discography. Elvis is on fire. Incidentally, the Colonel was not wild about this series of songs because the band was too prominent. (The man was a genius at promotion, but his taste was just awful.)
“I Love You Because” – Jerry Lee Lewis. A big country hit in the 1940s. Elvis recorded it, one of the first things he recorded at Sun. Jerry Lee Lewis does “his thing” with it: it swings, it keens, there’s a swoopy fiddle in the background, and then there’s his piano. The man is jaded. He’s always got the whiff of the juke joint honky-tonk around him and it’s why I love him. This guy is not a softie. He gives women hell. He’s not endearing. It’s refreshing.
“I Miss You” – Leftover Cuties. I love her voice so much. I love what they’re doing, their taste, their style, their sensibility. It’s a throwback, but it’s not precious. It’s honest.
“Bottom Dollar” – Jerry Lee Lewis. See above. I realize I am probably unduly influenced by Nick Tosches’ biography of JLL, which has to be read to be believed. I get a lot of joy from Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s barely recorded one boring song. Even the cliched songs have his characteristic swoop and panache and narcissism, all the things that make him HIM.
“C’mon Everybody” – Eddie Cochran. Along with his voice, and general sexuality, it’s the grinding shaking beat underneath the song, the drums, the tambourine, the bass line, that give it is drive.
“Money (That’s What I Want)” – Little Richard. What would we do without him? I tremble at the thought.
“Glass Onion” – The Beatles. When I was a kid, I was so blown away by the “meta” aspect of this song. Referencing their old songs. 9 year old me: “Can they DO that??”
“Wonderful” – Brian Wilson. Is that a harpsichord? He is such a genius.
“Don’t Bring Me Down” – ELO. Huge ELO fan. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve heard this. I get excited.
“Take Me With U” – Prince. From Purple Rain. That opening … I love how it finds its way, it starts one way, exploring it, before “settling down” into the intro of the song. I have memories of high school dances with everyone on the dance floor singing the chorus at top volume. Nerds. But happy.
“Don’t Wake Me Up” – Pat McCurdy. From his album Fainting with Happiness. I’m thanked in the liner notes for that one, and I’m still not sure why. We hadn’t seen one another in years at that point. But it’s one of his best albums, so sure, I’ll take it.
“Every Ghetto Every City” – Lauryn Hill. This album, man. Perfect.
“Your Obedient Servant” – Leslie Odom Jr. and Lin-Manuel Miranda, in Hamilton. The increasingly hostile correspondence between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, moving towards the inevitability of a duel. Although these letters are filled with anger, they always end so politely. “I remain, your obedient servant …” My mother and I just talked about our experience seeing Hamilton this past weekend.
“Lookin’ Better Every Beer” – Stray Cats. The 80s were such a weird time. One narrative is that Nirvana et al. came along and blasted open the boring mainstream. Okay. There was that feeling. But the 80s were WEIRD. You had Prince and Cyndi Lauper and Devo and The Go-Gos and Huey Lewis and Madonna and Michael Jackson doing their thing … some legit geniuses on that list. Then there was the 50s comeback, which was really formative for me since I was already in love with 1950s movies. So you have a rockabilly craze, embodied by The Stray Cats … who you might THINK would fade out after the phase faded out. But turns out, they CREATED the phase, because they were visionaries of a sort, and actual artists, who moved on to other things. Ahead of the curve. Always. Big-band swing comeback in the 90s? Who’s at the center of it? Brian Setzer, who suddenly now has a big band orchestra. I adore him. I’ll follow him anywhere.
“Little Pink Umbrella” – Pat McCurdy. Another one from Fainting with Happiness. I love this, it has what I consider to be his “fingerprint”, a mix of whimsy and melancholy, humor and longing, gives you a heartpang. He has such an interesting career. If you live in the Chicago-Minneapolis-Wisconsin area, seek him out. “Last night I saw you as you rose up from the sea. You were breathing fire and destroying Tokyo. Last night I saw you and I’m glad you didn’t see me cuz you turned my heart to ashes long ago.”
“C.O.U.N.T.R.Y.” – LoCash Cowboys. Now listen. These guys jam. Meant to be played loud. Fun, in a lot of ways. But they’re so defensive. Their entire thing is “We’re better than them snobs up east” which is just … My God, get over it. You lost the war. #sorrynotsorry Every single one of their songs has that “chip on the shoulder” thing I find so boring in so much of country music. However, I also like the beat? #sorrynotsorry or #sorrykindofsorry “Got a hound dog named Minnie Pearl.” Good for you. Why are you so ANGRY about it?
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” – Everclear. They’ve helped me through some really rough times. I don’t know why. It wasn’t the lyrics, not really. But maybe because there’s a sound in their stuff of “having overcome hard times” and coming out the other side into expressiveness – whether it be joy or anger or sex – maybe it was that that helped me in 2009. Or, didn’t “help me” … things got so bad in 2009 that anything that gave me pleasure was abolished from my world. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t watch movies. I couldn’t listen to music. But I could listen to them. Who knows why.
“What’d I Miss” – Daveed Diggs (and others), from Hamilton. Thomas Jefferson, in head to toe purple velvet, dancing around, singing “What’d I Miss?” Sooo hilarious. The laughter just EXPLODED throughout the theatre, and never stopped for the entirety of the number. Diggs, who also played Lafayette (a perfect casting decision, since Jefferson was such a Francophile), is so talented.
“Frozen Heart” – from Frozen. I got into Frozen because I realized if I didn’t I wouldn’t have anything to talk about with my niece Pearl.
“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” – Jerry Lee Lewis covering ol’ Hank Williams. Listen to that piano opening.
“Lorenza, Giada, Alessandra” – L7. In my top 5 L7 songs.
“Working in the Coal Mine” – Devo. Talk about the 80s. This being played at a high school dance? I’m sorry. But it’s super hip.
“Harper Valley PTA” – Jeannie C. Riley. A feminist anthem, really.
“Little Bitty Pretty One” – Huey Lewis & The News. He was my first concert. He’s recently had some bad news. I understand there’s no cure for his ailment. It makes me sad.
“When Baby Gets the Blues” – Jerry Lee Lewis. A lot of The Killer in this shuffle. I’m happy about it.
“Hi-Heel Sneakers” – Elvis, at his most sexually aggressive. Rowr.
“Broken, Beat & Scarred” – Metallica. My brother once said that Metallica is “metal for math nerds” and you can really hear that here.
“Search Me Lord” – Little Richard. His gospel stuff is to die for. He seems to be perched on a cloud here.
“Phoenix from the Flames” – Robbie Williams. One of his best. One of those songs I clung to during one of my many Bad Times. Something about the song, its music, its progression, the way it hits me … it obliterates thought. And obliterating thought is what’s comforting to a woman with a brain like mine.
Also I have a tattoo of a phoenix on my back. I drew it myself. I drew it while I was “in the flames”, hoping I would come through it. A couple weeks ago, a hashtag exploded across the Internets: #Oldheadshot It was so fun seeing actors – famous and not – sharing their early headshots. Here’s one of mine. It was taken when tattoos on women were still a novelty. I took off my shirt at the photographer’s studio and the photographer and makeup artist both saw the tattoo and pounced. “Oh please can we take a picture featuring the tattoo?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I don’t particularly like my shoulders or my arms. They assured me it would be okay. I was happy with how it turned out. Incidentally, I was “in the flames” here, too. The day before had been a bad bad day, so bad I almost canceled the headshot appointment because my eyes were swollen. I have spent most of my life in varying degrees of total despair. Thank you for this second chance … family, doctors, whatever … so I can actually live without that kind of nameless wordless anguish all the time.
“Hold Me Tight” – Evan Rachel Wood, from Across the Universe. I love her version. This movie gets no love. I like its inventiveness.
“Role Model” – Eminem. At his brattiest most slim-shadiest.
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” – The Beach Boys. Yes. It would be nice.
“Sex” – Lenny Kravitz. Yes, sir.
“Jesus Done Just What He Said” – Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. I love Sam Cooke’s gospel stuff with the Soul Stirrers. This is particularly good. The build. The build is all in the voices. Each time they come back to the verse … it goes higher … higher … more intense … until the song almost explodes.
“Mambo Italiano” – Dean Martin. He sings it with a wink. He knows it’s a goof. One of my favorite things about Dean Martin is that you can hear him smiling when he sings.
“The Holy Spirit Is the Air We Breathe” – The Monks of Glenstal Abbey. I would love to visit this abbey, or go to one of their concerts. When they come up on Shuffle, sometimes I want to skip it because it requires me to slow down, take a moment, take it all in. They are meditative. Calming. Thoughtful. This one is spoken word, no music. But I find it restful.
“The Crow” – Steve Martin. BANJO! From his New Songs for the Five-String Banjo album, which I adore.
“Buddy Holly” – Weezer. Adorable.
“Boeser Zwilling” – Moka Efti Orchestra (from the great German television series Babylon Berlin – the music is FANTASTIC throughout). I inhaled Babylon Berlin last month. Only 16 episodes, alas. I am hopeful they will go on to do more. One of the best things I’ve seen all year.
“Frozen Man” – James Taylor. I love James Taylor. But ever since I read Lester Bangs’ “James Taylor Marked for Death” … I can’t get it out of my head. I will never be able to purely respond to JT again. Thanks a lot, Lester!
“Who Will the Next Fool Be” – Charlie Rich. From his start at Sun Records. He’s so OPEN. Blasted open. He’s so damn masculine, but his openness is stereotypically feminine – and his fluidity in this respect, and his lack of neurosis about his openness and being this vulnerable, is part of what made him such a great and important star.
As W.B. Yeats wrote of Jonathan Swift: “Imitate him if you dare.”
Tom Wolfe was one of the most imitated of American writers, with his combination of reportage, gossip and sudden flashes of insight about the sea-change in American culture post WWII (the rise of the teenager, pop art, the lower-classes as Tastemakers as opposed to the other way around, the various rise of sub-cultures including car culture, gambling culture, New York art culture, etc.) He helped create a new wave of writers, all of whom tried to locate the source of the upheaval they sensed around them.
Sometimes Wolfe is so hip you can’t tell what is sincere and what he is lampooning. (Which is part of his point.) I mean, the man dressed in a white suit and a white hat. Was he putting us on? Was he for real? What is he up to??
Sometimes he could be hard to take. Other times he was laugh-out-loud funny. Sometimes he was hard to take and laugh-out-loud funny simultaneously. He was an obsessive, circling around and around and around his themes and observations. At the time, what he was doing was akin to what William Hazlitt did in the 18th century, when he wrote about boxers and circuses and theatre, and it was seen as a scandal that an important intellectual would waste his time detailing the enjoyments of the lumpen proletariat. Boxing, for God’s sake? That is what Tom Wolfe did in his first major piece “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a massive 50,000 word essay on a custom car show he attended in the early 1960s. He saw that something was happening, something seismic, a “something” no one was paying attention to. He saw that these so-called mechanics who created souped-up tailfinned cars were artists, as creative, as radical as Mondrian and Paul Klee and etc. and etc. And yet the New York art world would never, in a trillion years, consider a tail-finned tangerine-colored car a work of art. Tom Wolfe said, in 50,000 words, not so fast.
He wrote about stock-car racing, the rise of NASCAR and the Indy 500 – again, a sub-culture nobody “in the know” in journalism would take seriously enough to investigate, although it entertained millions of people. (It reminds me of Don Draper in Mad Men, encountering the car-culture guys out in California, who all seem to be “real men,” unlike his slick city-slicker helpless self.) Of course Wolfe then moved on to detail Ken Kesey’s merry brand of acid trippers, the Space Program, and the cataclysmic clash of race and class in New York City. His books were always events. There’s a white-hot conservative streak in Tom Wolfe’s outlook, but it’s a streak is sparked with humor, irony, appreciation. He’s not a scold. He is one of those rare observers who can sense “what is going on” AS it is ‘going on’.
I picked up with the Tom Wolfe train in the Bonfire of the Vanities era – a book I didn’t really care for, but you HAD to read it, because you HAD to, and then went back and read The Right Stuff (which I loved, and still love). He thrilled me. He was always on my radar. But I had never gone back and read all of the essays which launched him. It’s just one of the many “gaps” in my education. Every year I try to fill at least 1 or 2 of those gaps. This year, totally coincidentally, I decided would be the “Tom Wolfe” year. And so I read the first collection of his essays: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. These essays were all written in about a one-year period, starting with the aforementioned Custom Car Show title essay. It’s an astonishing output. The man was on FIRE, and he writes with total trust in the validity of his own perceptions. Whether or not you agree with his perceptions is not the point. As a writer, you need to have this kind of confidence. What I see, what I perceive, the connections I make … I stand by them. I have thought them through. I have considered all the angles. Here is what I see. Here is what I think is going on. If you need a role model for that kind of writerly confidence, Tom Wolfe is about as good as it gets.
Here are some excerpts.
From “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!”
Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Willbraham, Massachusetts, but signs. One can look at Las Vegas from a mile away on Route 91 and see no buildings, no trees, only signs. But such signs! They tower. They revolve, they oscillate, they soar in shapes before which the existing vocabulary of art history is helpless. I can only attempt to supply names – Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral, McDonalds Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptical, Miami Beach Kidney. Las Vegas’ sign makers work far out beyond the frontiers of conventional studio art that they have no names themselves for the forms they create.
From “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!”
Captain Gubser is telling me about life and eccentric times in Las Vegas, but I am distracted. The captain’s office has windows out onto the corridor. Coming down the corridor is a covey of girls, skipping and screaming, giggling along, their heads exploding in platinum-and-neon-yellow bouffants or beehives or raspberry-silk scarves, their eyes appliqued in black like mail-order decals, their breasts aimed up under their jerseys at the angle of anti-aircraft automatic weapons, and, as they swing around the corner toward the elevator, their glutei maximi are bobbing up and down with their pumps in the inevitable buttocks decolletage pressed out against black, beige and incarnadine stretch pants. This is part of the latest shipment of show girls to Las Vegas, seventy in all, for the “Lido de Paris” revue at the Stardust, to be entitled Bravo!, replacing the old show, entitled Voila. The girls are in the county courthouse getting their working papers, and fifteen days from now these little glutei maximi and ack-ack breasts with stars pasted on the tips will be swinging out over the slack jaws and cocked-up noses of patrons sitting at stageside at the Stardust.
From “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!”
Thousands of Europeans from the lower orders now have the money to go to the Riviera, but they remain under the century-old status pall of the aristocracy. At Monte Carlo there are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau Richness, Cultural Aridity – concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Seigel hired Abbott and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.
From “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!”
As Riddle speaks, one gets a wonderful picture of sex riding the crest of the future. Whole tableaux of bare-bottomed Cosmonaughties will be hurtling around the Casino de Paris Room of the Dunes Hotel at fantastic speed in elliptical orbits, a flash of the sequined giblets here, a blur of the black-rimmed decal eyes there, a wink of the crotch here and there, until, with one vast Project Climax for our times, Sean Kenny, who used to work with this fellow Frank Lloyd Wright, presses the red button and the whole yahooing harem, shrieking ooh-la-la amid the din, exits in a mushroom cloud.
From “Clean Fun at Riverhead” (about demolition derbies)
Such, in brief, is the early history of what is culturally the most important sport ever originated in the United States, a sport that ranks with the gladiatorial games of Rome as a piece of national symbolism. Lawrence Mendelsohn had a vision of an automobile sport that would be all crashes. Not two cars, not three cars, not four cars, but 100 cars would be out in an arena doing nothing but smashing each other into shrapnel.
From “Clean Fun at Riverhead”
Sports writers, of course, have managed to ignore demolition derbies even more successfully than they have ignored stock-car racing and drag racing. All in all, the new automobile sports have shown that the sports pages, which on the surface appear to hum with life and earthiness, are at bottom pillars of gentility. This drag racing and demolition derbies and things, well, there are too many kids in it with sideburns, tight Levi’s and winkle-picker boots.
From “Clean Fun at Riverhead”
For years now sociologists have been calling upon one another to undertake a serious study of America’s “car culture.” No small part of it is the way the automobile has, for one very large segment of the population, become the focus of the same sort of quasi-religious dedication as art is currently for another large segment of a higher social order. Tommy Fox is unemployed, Don Fox runs a junk yard, Spider Ligon is a maintenance man for Brookhaven National Laboratory, but to categorize them as such is getting no closer to the truth than to have categorized William Faulkner in 1926 as a clerk at Lord & Taylor, although he was. Tommy Fox, Don Fox and Spider Ligon are acolytes of the car culture, an often esoteric world of arts and sciences that came into its own after World War II and now has believers of two generations.
From “The Peppermint Lounge Revisited” (an early “thinkpiece” on what is now known as the Bridge-and-Tunnel crowd)
The first time people in Manhattan noticed the Jersey Teenagers was when they would come bobbing out of the Port Authority and move into Times Square. No one ever really figured out what they were up to. They were generally written off as Times Square punks. Besides the bouffant babies in their stretch pants, furry sweaters and Dick Tracy eyes, there would be the boys in Presley, Big Bopper, Tony Curtis and Chicago boxcar hairdos. They would be steadying their hairdos in the reflections in the plate glass of clothing stores on 42nd Street that featured Nehru coats, Stingy-Brim hats, tab-collar shirts and winkle-picker elf boots. No one ever seemed to notice how maniacally serious they were about their hairdos, their flesh-tight pants, puffy sweaters, about the way they walked, idled, ogled or acted cool; in short, how serious they were about anything that had to do with form and each other.
From “The First Tycoon of Teen” (a fascinating essay about Phil Spector, boy genius)
Spector, while still in his teens, seemed to comprehend the prole vitality of rock and roll that has made it the kind of darling holy beast of intellectuals in the United States, England and Europe. Intellectuals, generally, no longer take jazz seriously. Monk, Mingus, Ferguson – it has all been left to little executive trainees with their first apartment and a mahogany African mask from the free-port shop in Haiti – let me tell you! – and a hi-fi. But rock and roll! Poor old arteriosclerotic lawyers with pocky layers of fat over their ribs are out there right now twisting with obscene clumsiness to rock and roll. Their wives wear stretch pants in the seafood shoppe. A style of life! There have been teen-agers who have made a million dollars before, but invariably they are entertainers, they are steered by older people, such as the good Colonel Tom Parker steers Elvis Presley. But Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen. Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the most glorious expression of its style of life – in latter-day Rome, the Emperor Commodus; in Renaissance Italy, Benvenuto Cellini; in late Austustan England, the Earl of Chesterfield; in the sal volatile Victorian age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in late-fancy neo-Greek Federal America, Thomas Jefferson; and in Teen America Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen. In point of fact, he had turned twenty-one when he made his first clear million. But it was as a teen-ager, working within the teen-age milieu, starting at the age of seventeen, that Phil Spector developed into a great American business man, the greatest of the independent rock and roll record producers. Spector’s mother, Bertha, took him from the Bronx to California when he was nine. California! Teen Heaven! By the time he was sixteen he was playing jazz guitar with some group. Then he got interested in rock and roll, which he does not call rock and roll but “pop blues.” That is because – well, that is a complicated subject. Anyway, Phil Spector likes this music. He genuinely likes it. He is not a short-armed fatty hustling nutball fads.
“Anyway.” Classic Wolfe.
From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” (about a custom car show)
But after a while, I was glad I had seen the cars in this natural setting, which was, after all, a kind of Plato’s Republic for teenagers. Because if you watched anything at this far very long, you kept noticing the same thing. These kids are absolutely maniacal about form. They are practically religious about it. For example, the dancers: none of them ever smiled. They stared at each other’s legs and feet, concentrating. The dances had no grace about them at all, they were more in the nature of a hoedown, but everybody was concentrating to do them exactly right. And the bouffant kids all had form, wild form, but form with rigid standards, one gathers. Even the boys. Their dress was prosaic – Levi’s, Slim Jims, sport shirts, T shirts, polo shirts – but the form was consistent: a stove-pipe silhouette. And they all had the same hairstyle: some wore it long, some short, but none of them had a part; all that hair was brushed back straight from the hairline. I went by one of the guitar booths, and there was a little kid in there, about thirteen, playing the hell out of an electric guitar. The kid was named Cranston something or other. He looked like he ought to be named Kermit or Herschel; all his genes were kind of horribly Okie. Cranston was playing away and a big crowd was watching. But Cranston was slouched back with his spine bent like a sapling up against a table, looking gloriously bored. At thirteen, this kid was being fanatically cool. They all were. They were all wonderful slaves to form. They have created their own style of life, and they are much more authoritarian about enforcing it than are adults.
From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”
Things have been going on in the development of the kids’ formal attitude towards cars since 1945, things of great sophistication that adults have not been even remotely aware of, mainly because the kids are so inarticulate about it, especially the ones most hipped on the subject. They are not from the levels of society that produce children who write sensitive analytical prose at age seventeen, or if they do, they soon fall into the hands of English instructors who put them onto Hemingway or a lot of goddamn-and-hungry-breast writers. If they ever write about a highway again, it’s a rain-slicked highway and the sound of the automobiles passing over it is like the sound of tearing silk, not that one household in ten thousand has heard the sound of tearing silk since 1945.
From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”
Picasso, I should add, means nothing to Barris, although he knows who he is. It’s just that to Barris and the customizers there is no one great universe of form and design called Art. Yet that’s the universe he’s in. He’s not building cars, he’s creating forms.
From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”
If Barris and the customizers hadn’t been buried in the alien and suspect underworld of California youth, I don’t think they would seem at all unusual by now. But they’ve had access to almost nothing but the hot-rod press. They’re like Easter Islanders. Suddenly you come upon the astonishing objects, and then you have to figure out how they got there and why they’re there.
From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”
Somewhere back in the thirties, designers, automobile designers among them, came up with the idea of the Streamline. It sounded “functional,” and on an airplane it is functional, but on a car it’s not, unless you’re making a Bonneville speed run. Actually, it’s baroque. The Streamline is baroque abstract or baroque modern or whatever you want to call it. Well, about the time the Streamline got going – in the thirties, you may recall, we had curved buildings, like the showpieces later, at the World’s Fair – in came the Bauhaus movement, which was blown-up Mondrian, really. Before you knew it, everything was Mondrian – the Kleenex box: Mondrian; the format of the cover of Life magazine: Mondrian; those bled-to-the-edge photograph layouts in Paris-Match: Mondrian. Even automobiles: Mondrian. They call Detroit automobiles streamlined, but they’re not. If you don’t believe it, look down from an airplane at all the cars parked on a shopping-center apron, and except that all the colors are pastel instead of primary, what have got? A Mondrian painting. The Mondrian principle, those straight edges, is very tight, very Apollonian. The Streamline principle, which really has no function, is very free Dionysian. For reasons I don’t have to labor over, the kids preferred the Dionysian.
From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”
The customizers do not dream of working as stylists for the Detroit companies, although they deal with them more and more. It would be like Rene Magritte or somebody going on the payroll of Continental Can to do great ideas of Western man. This is an old story in art, of course, genius vs. the organization. But the customizers don’t think of corporate bureaucracy quite the way your conventional artist does, whether he be William Gropper or Larry Rivers, namely as a lot of small-minded Babbitts, venal enemies of culture, etc. They just think of the big companies as part of that vast mass of adult America, sclerotic from years of just being too old, whose rules and ideas weigh down upon Youth like a vast, bloated sac.
From “The Marvelous Mouth” (detailing a night he spent in the company of then-named Cassius Clay)
But the crowd at the Metropole hit several wrong notes. One was hit by a white man about fifty-five, obviously a Southerner from the way he talked, who came up to Clay from behind – people were gaggled around from all sides – and stuck the blank side of a Pennsylvania Railroad receipt, the kind you get when you buy your ticket on the train, in his face and said in a voice you could mulch the hollyhocks with:
“Here you are, boy, put your name right there.”
It was more or less the same voice Mississippians use on a hot day when the colored messenger boy has come into the living room and is standing around nervously. “Go ahead, boy, sit down. Sit in that seat right there.”
Cassius took the Pennsylvania Railroad receipt without looking up at the man, and held it for about ten seconds, just staring at it.
Then he said in a slightly accusing voice, “Where’s your pen?”
“I don’t have a pen, boy. Some of these people around here got a pen. Just put your name right there.”
Cassius still didn’t look up. He just said, “Man, there’s one thing you gotta learn. You don’t ever come around and ask a man for an autograph if you ain’t got no pen.”
My first thought when I heard Tom Wolfe died was a dismayed … “Oh no. Who will pick up his torch? Who do we have now? Who can see like this? There are many many many too many people telling us what they see now. And not one of them is as fun to read as Tom Wolfe.”
Her Lois Lane meant so much to me as a kid. A role model. Aspirational. But HUMAN. My friend Dan Callahan wrote an emotional tribute to the late actress over on Ebert. I didn’t realize how much I needed a piece like this until I read it. It’s an act of mourning and an act of celebration for an actress who meant a lot to so many people, but maybe especially if you were a child in the 70s/80s.
. These essays were all written in about a one-year period, starting with the aforementioned Custom Car Show title essay. It’s an astonishing output. The man was on FIRE, and he writes with total trust in the validity of his own perceptions. Whether or not you agree with his perceptions is not the point. As a writer, you need to have this kind of confidence. What I see, what I perceive, the connections I make … I stand by them. I have thought them through. I have considered all the angles. Here is what I see. Here is what I think is going on. If you need a role model for that kind of writerly confidence, Tom Wolfe is about as good as it gets. 
