Guests
by Howard Hampton, January 19, 2007 11:34 AM
My frame of mind is considerably improved since my last sleep-deprived post, which Groucho could've summarized: "Whatever it is, I'm against it." But today I resolve to be less of a negative space cadet, to not vent or take gratuitous swipes, and generally endeavor to avoid sounding like I'm auditioning for Factotum: the Musical. Boat drinks all around. Pan's Labyrinth deserves such a toast: it is a nearly perfect film and has more than earned its extravagant reviews. Its only real weakness is a certain sentimental orderliness, a fairy tale classicism that softens the irrational edges of beauty and terror a bit ? but then even Cocteau had his minor weak spots, and they haven't exactly dimmed the timeless allure of Beauty and the Beast or Orpheus. That's the league Guillermo Del Toro's playing in here, but young Ivana Baquero has the startling presence ? such a mixture of immediacy and remoteness ? to makes the whole heavily latticed fantasy/reality conceit work. Her powers of imaginative concentration are astonishing; if people are watching this film fifty years from now, and I believe they will be, this performance will remain the skeleton key that unlocks the fable: Baquero has already taken her place with the immortals. I can't help but think of another exploration of the inner life of children, Rebecca Miller's 1995 Angela. A strange buried treasure of American indie cinema, it is as patchy and uneven as you might expect from a metaphysically ambitious debut, with not fully assimilated elements of David Lynch, Flannery O'Conner, and even Andrei Tarkovsky floating around inside it. Yet it is film that genuinely deserves to be called haunting ? it sticks with you long after the typical flavor-of-the-month sensation has receded from the mind, disturbing in a modest, oblique way that doesn't smack of scare quotes or shock value. Miller tapped into a primal vein, feeling her way into the rawness in a very poised, focused fashion; Miranda Stuart Rhyne made Angela both a heartbreakingly plausible kid and an embryonic mystic who has conjured her own private little religion out of scraps of knowledge and delusion. The shoestring budget and unrealized aspects don't diminish Angela's poetic validity, any more than the occasionally forced notes or strained associations derail Olivier Assayas's Cold Water or Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. The cumulative effect is what counts, and the movie's near-primitive inquisitiveness works in its favor ? it cuts through to an emotional core a schematic, impressively formalized technique might insulate itself from. Miller gets the unmediated, bottomless feel of an ancient folk ballad using semi-modernist means. In the tone she finds, there's continuity with that of Sandy Denny's plaintively stoic voice on some of her Fairport Convention recordings. I'm thinking of the way Denny sang "Some people are very kind" in "I'll Keep it With Mine," with a melancholy and awareness as commonplace as it was supernatural. Or how she delivered "A sailor's life/It 'tis a merry life," as though she were singing on board one of the clipper ships Lou Reed longingly mentioned in "Heroin." It's a heady feeling that passes through you like a ghost and makes the hair on your neck stand up in awe. For me, the most poignant of all such moments comes when Maureen Tucker steps forward to sing "Afterhours" at the end of the Velvet Underground's third album. It is the brazen simplicity, the offhandedness of her delivery, that makes the song's suicidal nihilism so sweet, so touch, so right: "If you close the door/The night could last
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Guests
by Howard Hampton, January 18, 2007 1:31 PM
You can be going along minding your own business, doing your level best to keep real life at bay, but real life has this way of reasserting itself and knocking the crap out of your best-laid coping mechanisms. The past several months, dealing with a serious illness in my immediate family, with so much to handle and juggle and attend to, the cultural politics of the moment feel even more remote and insignificant. Between the buzz-laden bandwagons, the critic-polls, the award shows, the terribly earnest ? or meta-ironic, assuming there's even much difference today ? presentation of these slabs of self-anointed significance "for your consideration," it's enough to make you feel like you're trapped in a giant headache-inducing echo chamber. Or a frantic, deafening game of Trivial Pursuit. The more accolades and statuettes My Chemical Romance or Babel amass, the less interest in them I'm able to muster. Godspeed them to their myriad rewards, but while someone's got to listen to or watch this stuff, why should I want to join the annual Running of the Lemmings? I've got more pressing things to worry about and don't have enough time or patience or disposable income/attention to waste on keeping up with the latest trend-setting instant masterpiece that nine and a half chances out of ten will end up as footnote roadkill by the time the next voracious season of dispensations from on high rolls around. I'll just have to catch 'em further on down the road, maybe in the five buck remainder bin at Wal-Mart or Circle K. Not that I've entirely renounced the contemporary: I did manage to make myself watch a few moderately representative, semi-highly touted "little" films ? Little Children, Little Miss Sunshine. The former is steeped in the kind of pseudo-literacy and symbolic figurines prized by well-intended High School English teachers everywhere, but below all the chamber-movie trappings and carefully clipped performances, it is really a classed-up, sedated version of Desperate Housewives. Likewise Little Miss Sunshine plays like a very extended pilot for the next Arrested Development, the sort of not-as-hip-as-it-imagines-itself sitcom front loaded with the kind of daring gambits and critiques that pack all the trenchant punch of Lucille Ball and Gale Gordon dressing up as hippie peaceniks on a rerun of The Lucy Show. It is however still nice to see Alan Arkin working ? I'd like to see someone team him with Jerry Stiller; maybe Paul Mazursky could come out of retirement or limbo and make a real social comedy with that bilious pair. But instead of wasting a couple hours with the Littles, any halfway sentient being would be infinitely better off catching up on missed episodes of Deadwood: a divertissement, perhaps, but what a concept, McCabe and Mrs. Miller with a soundtrack by Lenny Bruce instead of Leonard Cohen. I find that word-drunk blood and mire soothing somehow. Even though The Death of Mr. Lazarescu sounds like it could actually live up to its heavyweight reputation, I don't think I'm going to be watching it anytime in the near future: I've spent far too much time in ERs and hospital rooms lately, and have soaked up all the free-floating dead-end despair I can process for the time being, though I look forward to watching it at some less fraught date. Sooner than later, I
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Guests
by Howard Hampton, January 17, 2007 11:12 AM
For many years, I've kept a picture of the singer Lora Logic up on my wall. A full-page portrait sliced from a 1980 issue of Rolling Stone, this is the furthest thing from your standard glamour shot. It's a washed-out color photo of a plain girl in a heavy coat holding her tenor saxophone. She's standing in a stark British kitchen ? the kind that surely inspired the term "kitchen sink realism." There's a smart, levelheaded reserve in the way she looks back at the camera, but something inscrutable, mysterious, too. That look says: You don't know me. She could be anyone ? a sensible librarian getting ready to make tea, or a troublemaking schoolgirl who escaped from St. Trinians with nothing but the clothes on her back and an old saxophone liberated from the music room. That look says: Listen up, best pay attention, you'll only hear these instructions once. When I originally picked up the handful of records by Essential Logic, her definitive post-punk group, I fell hard for the corkscrew voice, free-associating language, and sinuous, multi-tiered music. It was everything a young devotee of punk, loopy pop, early Ornette Coleman, and Donald Barthelme could hope for: the experimental and experiential blended in perfect off-the-wall harmony. A mere quarter century or so later (the time flying when you're having fun), I wrote about her (and some of her spiritual sisters) in an essay for The Believer, on occasion of the release of the Essential Logic collection Fanfare in the Garden. (Containing most of Lora's best work with the band and solo, it is an undiscovered country of sheer ebullient bliss. Go! Buy it! Now!) For my book, I retitled the piece "Fairy Tales from Strangers," in honor of the Raincoats, her swell label mates at Rough Trade. They recorded the indelible "Fairy Tale in the Supermarket," and were aptly evoked by their fan Kurt Cobain: "When I listen to the Raincoats I feel as if I'm a stowaway in an attic...." In the brief window of opportunity after 1970s punk opened up a new anything-goes space, it felt like a revolution in sex roles was taking place in that attic, and rock equality was at hand. Lora Logic was the most unique and strangely self-possessed voice; Poly Styrene, her band mate in punk avatars X-Ray Spex (before giving Logic the boot) was the most striking, unreconstructed punk voice, with a timbre that could cut through a chainsaw. Chrissie Hynde was the most toughly seductive and "Precious." Deborah Iyall of Romeo Void was the most intimate and touchingly cynical; Exene Cervenka of X was the most exhilarating, the woman most likely to make "We're Desperate" sound like an mouth-watering come-on. Lesley Woods of the Au Pairs sounded like Marianne Faithfull fronting the Gang of Four; Faithfull herself came back with Broken English and sounded like Marlene Dietrich in the rubble of a bombed-out disco. We had Penelope Houston of the Avengers, Fay Fife of the Rezillos (brilliantly ridiculous: "I Can't Stand My Baby"), the beehive/lobster gals in the B-52s, almost commercial prospects like Lene Lovich and Rachel Sweet, the student prole models in the Delta 5, Myrna Marcarian of the Human Switchboard, and that's not even mentioning Patti Smith or Deborah Harry or Tina Weymouth playing bass for Talking Heads. In that moment, the line between realism and abstraction disappeared; suddenly, people were singing about everything, and everything ? sex, politics, the daily grind, the search for a different life or a different sound ? was connected, illuminated. Pop music, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof, caught up with reality and began to outstrip it. Those were, as the song says, different times. While there's a sense in which Lora Logic paved the way for Laurie Anderson as much as Sleater-Kinney, or at least prepared my ears for them, finally her work stands utterly apart: an emblem of an alternate future. I lifted my book's title from "Born in Flames," the 45 (b/w "The Sword of God") she recorded while moonlighting as the singer for Mayo Thompson's reconstituted Red Crayola (Gina Birch of the Raincoats was the bass player). I trust the meaning ? or the mystery ? is self-evident; so too my enduring philosophic love of Logic.
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Guests
by Howard Hampton, January 16, 2007 12:14 PM
The compact "suitcase nuke" that detonated right on schedule last night at the end of 24's fourth hour would make a swell gift product to hawk on QVC or the Home Shopping Network. Think of it as the Garden Weasel for the budding terror hobbyist on your Easter list: "The Amazing New Ronco Pocket Apocalypse." Clean, fast-acting, and there's no undue psychic fallout to tidy up afterwards. A couple stunned minutes of all-purpose grieving for humanity and before you can say, "Jack, there are four more suitcases," we've moved on to scenes from next week's suspenseful episode and are back to the business of perpetual crisis as usual. Since pop apocalyptics are a main topic of my book Born in Flames, I take a certain proprietary relish in the show's single-minded drumbeat of impending doom ? it only goes to illustrate (with schematics, flow charts, satellite photographs, the works) how pervasive that strain of end-of-the-worldliness has become. With 24, we're at the point where the Doomsday Scenario is treated as another harried day at the office, a launching pad for a Sisyphean Dragnet. The problem with Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer is that despite regular attempts to "humanize" him (implanting faux vulnerabilities and such), he remains a total National Security Eagle Scout (with merit badges in torture and being tortured). Unlike such varied horsemen (and -women) of the Apoc-archetypal as Col Kurtz, Buffy, and Travis Bickle, he isn't implicated in the chaos breaking out around him, and neither are we. Jack's a specialist in Chaos Management; ruthlessly multi-tasked compartmentalization is his corporate forte. The logic of 24 dictates that Jack will have to shoot a dear friend and colleague in order to protect "the greater good." The momentary breakdown that followed provided a discrete, sealed-off interlude of despair, interrupted by that obliging mushroom cloud. A small city is vaporized, but on the positive side, it snaps Jack out of his hand-ringing depression. Dr. Strangelove would approve (and prescribe) ? the bomb as hydrogen-powered Prozac. Still, while the latest cross-pollinated Islamist threat (with Western co-conspirators to doubtless be named and indicted later ? what about American fundamentalists, some nutty, corrupt Apocalypse Lobby?) is well underway, I fret about future seasons. Where will the fresh, young, exciting terrorists of tomorrow come from? Maybe Africa, maybe Asia, sure, fine, but there may be a limit to how many ripped-from-the-headline-crawl-of-CNN villains you can have before eye-glazing entropy finally sets in. I'm thinking maybe Jack and the crew need to eventually look "outside the box" for more challenging evildoers to tackle. Why not go up against a Fight Club-type cell of cultural terrorists? Suicide bombers going boom at the Golden Globes, the whole American Idol troupe held hostage, with a semi-finalist beheaded every two hours until the shadowy group's demands are met. Or make Borat the next nemesis ? that malaprop-comic exterior naturally concealing a terrorist in sheep-molester's clothing, smuggling a super contagious form of bird flu into the country ("Jack, there are four more chickens!"). The big plot twist: we learn in the thirteenth hour that Borat is mere puppet whose strings are pulled by real mastermind… Andy Kaufman, who like Jack of course faked his own death. That could explain a lot. Two footnotes: a shout-out to the makers of the original suitcase nuke in the fantastic 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, a Samsonite masterpiece of paranoid nihilism. That kind of durable, portable destruction just never goes out of style. Meanwhile, I predict the first of the wave of Borat-inspired reality docu-comedies will be Richard Linklater's full-length rotoscope feature adaptation of The Tonight Show's "Battle of the Jaywalk All-Stars." Unless Harmony Korine's long-delayed version of "Stupid Pet Tricks" beats him to the donkey-punch
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Guests
by Howard Hampton, January 15, 2007 12:50 PM
For an opening fanfare, allow me pull out a very worn but surprisingly crisp vinyl copy of Aladdin Sane, if only on the fuzztone grounds that Bowie was once dubbed the Peter O'Toole of rock. (Surely the coolest compliment Davy ever got.) On that sporadic Lawrence-of-Suburbia platter, he did a pretty decent job of translating the great Peter's highly charismatic personal idiom into the prevailing Rock/Paper/Scissors guitar lingo of Stones, Velvets, and Stooges. (Look in the darkened rear view mirror and you can just make out Morrissey lip-synching every ardently baroque syllable.) "Oh honey," our hard-charging leader swoons at the very thought of himself, " watch that man!" Of late I've been keeping tabs on O'Toole himself as he shuffles along the talk show circuit like some ancient extraterrestrial raconteur, reminding us even at such a late date that no film actor has ever been more fun to watch. (That many of his finest exploits seem to have taken place off screen and off the reservation, in barrooms and bedrooms and police stations, has done nothing at all to diminish his stature.) It seems Letterman and Stewart (that would be Jon, not Martha) remember him primarily for Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps not so very much else beyond his beautifully well-oiled mystique. (I'm thinking costumed period pieces like The Lion in Winter haven't found much favor beyond charter members of the AARP.) But O'Toole's greatest gift ultimately wasn't for stirring, superficially complicated heroic figures; his true forte was instead the wily, wildly romantic-satiric madman. (There was just enough of that in his Lawrence to keep him from being insufferable.) As the lyrically alcoholic Errol Flynn-type in My Favorite Year, the film director playing sardonic God in The Stunt Man, and the longhaired aristocrat who thinks he's Jesus Christ in The Ruling Class (a perfectly understandable mistake under the circumstances), O'Toole hit notes of lovely, nuanced dementia no one else has touched. Even in his soul-aching, big-blue-eyed 1960s matinee idol prime, he was always this wondrous anachronism, a man whose tousled Byronic air gradually revealed an almost infinite capacity for bravura theatrical mischief. He made a perfect screen Lawrence because he combined modern attributes ? a proper dash of sexual ambiguity, angst, self-loathing and doubt ? with rapt movie-star glamour: your basic shimmering action-hero Hamlet, an existential Valentino. (What could be more existential than a Valentino stranded in a desert without women?) A persona he soon enough parleyed into a bunch of mainly bad but well-paying movies and a reputation for disturbing the peace far more in life than on film. But Christ a-mighty ("You called?"), The Ruling Class was merely the grandest piece of anarchist vaudeville since the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. O'Toole held the whole sprawling, dottily savage two and a half hour Buñuel-meets-P.G.-Wodehouse farce together with his transcendent timing and delivery ? pound for pound, this is the most engaging single performance I've ever laid eyes on. And that in roundabout nutshell (one exactly large enough to hold the 14th Earl of Gurney and his effects) is what I love about pop culture: a potential for a distilled audacity that High Art Statements so often sublimate in intellectual anal retentiveness. Like so many figures from the 20th Century, O'Toole's Gurney liked to lounge on his own personal cross. Only he kept his right in the main hall, bigger than life and twice as unnatural. A distressed visitor wonders what that thing is supposed to be. "Watusi walking stick," crows O'Toole, turning the words over in his mouth. "Big people, the Watusi." Spoken like a giant in a world of
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