On Both Their Houses

Madonna at the Superbowl

2012-02-06T20:41:00.008+13:00

Pretty good show. Prince is still the best by the proverbial country mile (I've elsewhere recommended that the NFL should just make Prince their steady), followed by U2 who were great at the country-still-in-shock-after-9/11 Superbowl in 2002, but M's the best of everyone else.

One other general thought: the show put M. back into perspective. On the one hand, yes, M. faces a problem: she's spawned generations of fast-hybridizing, dance-pop/mediaste imitators, and those hordes do threaten to make further output from her redundant, or to force her into the past. (Bowie faced a particularly galling version of this problem in the early 1980s, when he was confronted with hundreds of fast-moving young acts, assiduously mining out every open seam from every part of his catalogue and image-history. Imitation is sincerest flattery but it can kill the imitated host!) On the other hand, M. really is central to the sort of spectacle that pop has largely become. The Superbowl show demonstrated this by being both a version of the sort of performance that M. has done since the mid '80s, and also strikingly similar to much of what passes for state of the art pop music performance.

Update: I'm pretty sure that Madonna's big entrance/first look was supposed to recreate Liz Taylor's entry into Rome in Cleopatra (1963), but it actually felt more like Julianne Moore's dream sequence Maud Lebowski:

Holy Mother of all that is Funky and Cool

2012-01-30T16:00:00.008+13:00

Rogers, Edwards, Thompson immediately pre-Chic in 1976. Doing Earth Wind and Fire. Wow. Some of the best music ever made starts here.

Nile Rodgers has the story behind the video on his wonderful blog here. (Note that Nile's acronym DHM means 'drunk hot mess'.)

Update: I heartily recommend the Six Million Steps soul/disco site and JJ's Smoking Sessions mixtapes/podcasts in particular to all Chic fans. Every mix that I've checked out has been spectacular. In most cases, obscurities and interview snippets rub shoulders with old favorites in way that's completely intoxicating. Your mileage may vary, but probably it won't. This stuff's gold.

Hitchcock's Family Plot in Dazed and Confused

2012-01-29T15:03:00.003+13:00

Nice.

Henry Fonda: an appreciation

2012-01-27T20:54:00.031+13:00

Having just watched the excellent though somewhat diagrammatic Tin Star (1957) for the first time, and in light of being pretty bowled over by Jezebel (1937) last year, I'm starting to think that I might have under-rated Henry Fonda's career. I've definitely been one of those people who's big-upped Cary Grant for stretching his career at the top from the '30s to the '60s, but Fonda did the same thing.

Like Grant he has a bunch of golden age classics (The Lady Eve, Grapes of Wrath, Drums Along the Mohawk, Young Mr Lincoln, Jezebel, My Darling Clementine, The Ox-bow Incident) and he also has a bunch of late '50s/'60s triumphs and show-stoppers thanks to veteran directors (The Longest Day, Advise and Consent, The Wrong Man, Tin Star, War and Peace) and young turks such as Lumet and Leone alike (Once Upon a Time in the West, Fail-safe, 12 Angry Men, The Best Man). Fonda has other achievements of course including hits like Mister Roberts and the late career show-case On Golden Pond, but it's the two large clusters of excellent films that are Fonda's claim to greatness. I count 7 near-masterpieces in the Golden Age cluster and 5 in the Late-'50s/'60s cluster. That's a career to stack up against anyone's.

For whatever reason, Fonda isn't as iconic as Grant or Bogart or Wayne or Astaire, but he's got as many great films to his credit as those guys, and he had as astonishingly long a career at the absolute top as Grant and Wayne did. Quite a guy in other words, and I for one will be careful to include him henceforth on the shortest of short lists of true Hollywood superstars that begins with names like Davis, Grant, Wayne...

The Madness of Speaker Newt: Best TNR Cover of the '90s

2012-01-26T11:46:00.006+13:00

Chris Christie is right (at least about what once was).

All That Jazz image

2012-01-23T19:35:00.001+13:00

Clicks in Ball of Fire (1941)

2012-01-23T17:14:00.006+13:00

It's a cute conceit: Katherine "Sugarpuss" O'Shea (Stanwyck) clicks her way through Hawks's Ball of Fire (1941), loses her click-mojo slightly near the end, but evidently has passed much of it on to her Professor-cherubs (who need it). BoF is a slight film in many ways, but it grows on you, and Stanwyck's on fire throughout. Of course, in 1941 Stanwyck was brilliant all over, doing The Lady Eve for Sturges and Meet John Doe for Capra. Two bona fide classics and a delightful romp: pretty good year.

The Expressos' Want

2012-01-20T17:33:00.005+13:00

The Expresso's Want (a.k.a. What She Wants), not previously available on youtube, is my favorite album track from the splendid Pillows and Ties (1981). It broadly apes the great Doc Pomus song (Marie's the Name Of) His Latest Flame which was a hit for Elvis in 1961. The Smiths' Rusholme Ruffians strip-mined the same tune 3 years later to excellent effect on Meat is Murder, but the Expressos got there first!

My visuals are from the Drum Boogie sequence in Hawks's Ball of Fire (1941). Although I regard BOF as second-tier Hawks and second-tier screwball more generally, Barbara Stanwyck is incandescent in it, and the Drum Boogie number lights that fuse. The unadulterated Drum Boogie number is widely available on youtube, e.g., here, so I hope that purists won't object to me adapting it to give the unjustly overlooked Expressos a boost. And if you like new wave girl pop, you owe it to yourself to see some screwballs of the '30s and '40s. There's a still under-explored connection between the feisty movie gal generation of Stanwyck, Colbert, Lombard, Arthur, etc. and the music generation of Pattie Smith, Siouxsie, Pauline Murray, Chrissie Hynde, and Debbie Harry (to which The Expressos' Roz Rayner certainly belongs).

Want's lyrics near as I can make out (corrections/improvements welcome) are as follows:

Want
Want
Want
[That's what] Is there someone to meet here
[What you want] Every thing I see here
[Want] Somebody tell me
What you gonna do for a guy that's true?
[Want] A pretty conversation
[What you want] Electric lubrication
[Want] A whole lotta love from you
Is there someone here I can call on tonight?
Take me by the hand, I'll lead you to unite
Our feelings grow so tired I want to get out
And when I get the chance I can show you what I want
[You know you want] A little bit of loving
[What you want] A little bit of something
[Want] A whole lotta love from you
Got my tickets in the hand and I'm walking out the door
If you stop me now, I'll never walk away no more
If these sophisticated people for a while
And when I get the chance I can show you what I want
[You knows you want] Uh oh, come on
[What you want] Gimme gimme gimme gimme
[Want] Gimme gimme gimme gimme Owwww
(Solo)
If these sophisticated people for a while
And when I get the chance I can show you what I want
[You knows you want] Oh
[What you want] Oh, come on
[want] Gimme gimme gimme gimme
[Want] Give it to me
[Want] Gimme gimme gimme gimme
[Want] Gimme gimme gimme gimme
[Want] Ohhh
[What you want] Gimme gimme gimme gimme
[What you want]

Jane Siberry's Symmetry (The Way Things Have To Be)

2012-01-18T13:19:00.026+13:00

Jane Siberry's brilliant, gorgeous, but relatively obscure, geek-girl anthem, Symmetry (The Way Things Have to Be) from her 1984 album No Borders Here hasn't been represented anywhere on youtube. My video plugs that gap. Our visuals are from the title number of Dames (1934), created and arranged by Busby Berkeley.

Dames is a 'must see' film in my view (see this blog post for terrific promotional images from the film including the ultra-classy ad. image at right), but it has recently drawn attention mainly because Michel Gondry and Matthew Barney have spent the last 15 years strip-mining it! Edgar Wright, however, has repeatedly advocated for Dames itself by screening it at various festivals. At any rate, I think the combination of Siberry and Busby Berkeley works well - two genius level items together for the first time, what could go wrong! - and hope that the relatively distinct audiences for these materials might productively cross-pollinate.

While many people nowadays associate symmetry in film with Wes Anderson or Kubrick, Busby Berkeley got there first and deepest, especially in the numbers for a remarkable string of somewhat risque, pre-Code, pictures he directed for Warner Bros in the early 1930s. Note that Dames probably isn't the best starting point if you're new to Busby B., for that I recommend the very topical (Depression-themed) Gold-diggers of 1933, e.g., here, here and here.

Berkeley influenced Escher and the wider development of Topology, and since he occasionally had his chorines dance and rearrange themselves on what look for all the world like giant folded proteins and viruses, Berkeley's influence on the sciences probably hasn't fully played out even now.

Mind-bogglingly, given that it's now a favorite, I only heard Siberry's track for the first time just over a week ago thanks to the wonderful Now you're at Songblague! blog. (Forget politics, a week is a long time in music appreciation!) Since one of my discoveries of last year was (the original mix of) Moev's Cracked Mirror - which I only heard about from a College remix 'tape' after liking their contribution to Drive (2011)'s soundtrack - I'm beginning to think I've got a thing for '80s C(anadian)-pop, as the kids might say.

Finally, a couple of other (recently-new-to-me) Siberry exceptionally-goodies from the '80s. From The Speckless Sky (1985), Taxi Ride:

and from The Walking (1987), the official video (with somewhat unfortunate poor audio quality) for The Walking (And Constantly):

Clara Bow would like Metronomy (if she time-travelled forwards from 1927)

2012-01-15T17:28:00.008+13:00

Yes she would. Must set some of It or Dangerous Curves to some of English Riviera.

Listening again to Metronomy's English Riviera

2012-01-14T14:41:00.010+13:00

Metronomy's English Riviera was one of the most acclaimed albums of the last year (2011). I agreed with that consensus, but I'm further starting to think that it's a real classic (the sort of thing that'll be on 'end of decade' lists in 2020). So, let's listen through again, as if for the first time...

ER's first real track is the exquisite scene-setter, We Broke Free:

Airily Air-y, every note and timbre in its right place, ultra-precvise drums and percussion, a very 'dry' mix overall, nice. That's the sound of the record.
Onto the first single on the record (the actual fourth single released):

Roxanne Clifford (who? she's in a band called Veronica Falls and was in The Sexy Kids, but I don't know either of those) is drafted to do essential female vox. It's as livening for ER as Kim Deal is for The Pixies or Morgan Kibby is for M83. Great simple shaker percussion and handclaps matches a great, simple lyric about being surprised by love. The astringent ghost of Young Marble Giants' first record hangs heavily over this track, which is a good thing in my view. I wish I'd written this song. (Note that in my experience, at least when you're past 30 say,, and perhaps especially if you've been in a band or at least tried to write songs yourself at some point, it's always a good sign when an album has you asking yourself questions like 'Why didn't I write this?', 'This great song has always been "out there" to be discovered, why didn't someone else figure it out?' Not to mention if it provokes flat out envy and admiration: 'I wish I'd written this/I'd be so proud to have written this'!).
Now to ER's (actual and on the record) second single:

With its slightly spooky seaside fun fair feel, The Look has its Sea and Cake and eats it, topping off with a Winwood-y keyboard-trumpet fanfare/solo at the 3 min mark. Unbelievably tasty stuff.
Time for the lead-off single (third on the record):

Cooler and cooler. Twitchy bass and synth tones, feels a little Franz-ish overall but James Mount's restrained vocal unwinding into a repeated 'The Hours come...' refrain at the end of the track is the opposite of histrionic and is singular pure Metronomy delight. Probably the killer blow: listening from the beginning of the record, as with Let Down on OK Computer this is the track that inspires love. The album has you bad now.

Trouble's title reminds us of Coldplay's first album and sure enough the track does sound a little like that, albeit with enough touches to prevent anything too ernest or saccharine from breaking out. It's like all of the good song-writing and arranging ideas from Parachutes (since largely abandoned by Coldplay) bundled into one song, only without any of the irritating bits.
The third single (fourth on the actual album):

A fun imaginary travelogue, but The Bay's retro-disco beat is only OK in my view. This is the first track on ER that doesn't conspicuously over-achieve.

Loving Arm is more conspicuous coolness. Nice keyboards.

Corinne is the most rocking song on the record (so far and overall). Female vox return for the first time since Everything Goes My Way, although this time it's drummer Anna Prior chiming in. Great stuff.

More dry coolness. Not going to be everyone's cup of tea (but neither is Air or Stereolab or Jon Brion-period Aimee Mann, all of which are points of reference here), but I like it a lot. Drums rock out at the end, mad PA organ comes more front and center than its been before. Whirlygigs and bumper-cars, and pier-end funfairs - six minutes of English fading entropy perhaps. That fades into the final track:

A bit darker, what is going on here? Is the Metronomy show at the end of time now, careering off the rails, with sex pushing through the cool gentility ('She wants it all the time')? Mount plays his cards close to his chest at the end here. No, this record will stay in its comfort zone.

In sum, ER is an intensely contained record, rather like a Graham Greene or Iris Murdoch novel. It's obviously a 9/10 or 10/10 album - not a duff track on it and you want to listen to the whole thing again immediately to give its elements more chance to sink in. The absence of incredible highs and lows is inherently a little disturbing and makes its potential classic status difficult to judge. If I had to guess tho' I'd say that ER is going to be seminal. Like, say, the Cure's Disintegration or MBV's Loveless, ER is an exercise in purity and fastidiouness. It finds a note and a space and holds it. That sort of restraint and control risks boring people, but the purity will beguile if you can get on its wavelength, and over time, I'd say that more and more people will. I could be wrong, but with ER, Metronomy have announced themselves as a classic band, prepared to play the legacy/waiting game for an audience to grow behind them. Good for them and for us.

Hiroshima's (and J-pop's? and J-or-K-pop's?) Finest: Perfume

2012-01-11T11:49:00.015+13:00

I'm new to J-pop and K-pop... but the trio from Hiroshima, Perfume, stand out. They've got some of En Vogue's glamor but with lots of sweet hooks in 'Nee' (only an appreviated vid. is embeddable; the full vid. is viewable here):

And there's some Bacharach (perhaps via Pizzicato 5) in 'Voice''s changes if you listen closely:

I'm not quite sure how they pull off having such skinny legs etc. without looking unhealthy (being v. young helps a lot obviously!), but they do. I'm also not completely sure about the lasting value of tightly-formatted, producer-driven pop (Perfume's big producer is Yasutaka Nakata) when one doesn't understand the language (as I don't here). Consider how much even musically great stuff like The Supremes and The Shangri-las (to stick with girl-centric dance-pop) suffers if you lose almost all lyrical content. Videos can help make up those losses, but not completely I suspect. That said, very melodic stuff from the Supremes through to Perfume seems to be more inherently intelligible (independent of language) than funk and hip-hop (which emphasize rhythm and lyrical and attitudinal richness over melody and chord changes). With Public Enemy or En Vogue or Missy Elliott, say, you really need to speak the language (and sharing a lot of very culturally specific background is also very desirable). Key K-popsters, 2NE1, have a harder row to hoe world-wide I think than Perfume or Kyary (Pon Pon Pon) precisely because they've got more hip-hop in them (but, chiming with freakytrigger's Frank Kogan, Spin Magazine doesn't see any problem for them).

Update: Perfume's Polyrhythm is a delicious, Daft Punk-ish confection (I think it substantially improves on the DP track, One More Time, that it apes), and this live video shows the potential for subtitling to work very well for music vids.:

Polyrhythm is used in this scene from Pixar's Cars 2:

which has caused some hand-wringing by some of Perfume's early fans. Perfume themselves didn't see the problem, and were downright adorable at the film's LA premiere to boot:

Perfume are so very corporate, but it works for them.

London Belongs to Mia

2012-01-08T19:26:00.004+13:00

[Unfortunately, youtube/Warner Bros appears to be blocking this vid. almost everywhere except in the UK. You'll have to click and see whether it works for you. My apologies if it doesn't. (Shakes fist in general direction of LA.)]

Andrea Arnold's instant-classic second feature, Fish Tank (2009), is the story of 15-year old Mia (Katie Jarvis) who lives in a housing estate near Tilbury on the edge of Greater London. 'London Belongs To Me' is a bizarrely-not-on-youtube-anywhere, track from Saint Etienne's classic debut album, Foxbase Alpha (1991). My video brings these two personal favorites together, I hope productively (and not just punningly). Fish Tank of course has its own musical agenda (Mia dances mainly to hip-hop) and Saint Etienne are more middle class/college/central London than Mia (and SE's title comes from a central-London-set 1945 novel, which was apparently well-filmed in 1948). Still, I think the pairing works. Maybe it's Arnold and Saint Etienne who are simpatico, and, of course my short vid. favors the severely beautiful (and Mia alone) above the more cumulative, tense and desperate (and Mia in conflict with others) aspects of Arnold's vision, thereby skewing matters towards SE's wry, near beatific take on London life. At any rate, all Saint Etienne Fans need to see Fish Tank, and Mia/Katie Jarvis fans (who are probably into Katy B nowadays) should explore SE generally and Foxbase Alpha in particular. And Katie Jarvis needs to act again! Cast her somebody.

Best Songs of the '90s: Prince's When The Lights Go Down

2012-01-06T19:02:00.004+13:00

Prince in retiring muso mode channels Curtis Mayfield, shows off some jazz chops, and just rolls. Perfect in every way. An anonymizing, submerging antidote to the attention-seeking but also ADD-ed, personal-branding degradation that is the core of most popular and dance music.

What 'alternative' means now (in music)

2012-01-04T02:06:00.011+13:00

I just watched (OK, intermittently fast-forwarded though) '50 Top Alternative Anthems' on MTV Classic (down under). That list, which was topped by Creep, Seven Nation Army, and Love Will Tear Us Apart, also included Gnarls Barkley's Crazy, Outkast's Hey Ya, Oasis's Wonderwall, and The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. But all of the latter were among the broadest of mainstream hits of their respective years. Each sold massively to everyone from hipsters to Grannies, all over the world, just as they were intended. One possibility is, then, that the always somewhat suspicious 'alternative' label has become completely meaningless and unhelpful.

But here's another possibility suggested by listening to the NPR: Planet Money (streamable/downloadable) podcast on Rihanna and contemporary (paradigmatically summer) hit-making. Music that's written, performed, and produced overwhelmingly by the artist/group his/her/itself (or jointly with a single Producer/Engineer team - say roughly along the lines of a George Martin or a Brian Eno or a Nigel Godrich) counts as 'alternative'. It's (broadly) individually expressive compared to the corporate/industrial/Darwinian/networked/distributed (it's not clear which if any of these descriptors is the right one!) model that Rihanna et al. use. The latter is proudly as close as possible to being purely expressive of/written by/a function of the market and the zeitgeist. The purpose of an outsize visual personality/front end (Rihanna, Xtina, Ke$ha, Katy Perry, Kylie, etc...) in this model is to hide/distract from/make bearable the genericness/impersonality of the product. It says something about how popular music has evolved that formerly mainstream, ambitious outfits like Outkast and Gnarls and Oasis are starting to look like crazy DIY romantic freaks. It's the same evolution that's happened in movies: former epitomes of mainstream mass-entertainment direction such as Cameron and Spielberg start to look like wild-eyed romantic individualist auteurs next to the truly cynical, corporate ministrations of Sherlock Holmes Bastardized 2, Pirates 4-Eva, Marvel Comic Extrusion/Reboot/Carbuncle 2, etc.. Hence, Dana Stevens's quip about the contemporary movie situation: "Big, A-list movies that lack 3-D and a toy tie-in are the new scruffy indies".

Maxine Sullivan's If I Had A Ribbon Bow (1940)

2012-01-01T13:12:00.008+13:00

Most of the vids I put up on youtube are genuine videos, but just occasionally, when I notice that one of my very favorite songs or recordings isn't anywhere to be found on youtube, I prefer to whack up the track with just a single image to accompany it. That's the case here. This is the first known recording of the semi-traditional (Huey Prince and Louis Singer are listed as writers) 'If I had a Ribbon Bow'. According to Wikipedia, Maxine Sullivan recorded this in 1936, but it's collected on a Classics 1938-1941 CD, and iTunes/eMusic et al. identify the recording as from August 1, 1940. (My own copy of the track is on a strange, early '90s, 2-disc Sony compilation A Tribute to Black Entertainers.)

Sullivan was from Homestead (just outside Pittsburgh) PA, but hit the (semi-)big time in NYC, singing initially mostly at the Onyx Club w/ her (soon-to-be) husband John Kirby's band, but soon getting a radio show on CBS and performing and appearing in films with Louis Armstrong. Sullivan seems to have taken a decade or more off after her initial success to raise a family but came back in the late '50s, appearing in the famous A Great Day in Harlem photo with everyone.

Sullivan's early recordings had a very pure, cool, unaffected tone that partially anticipated songbook breakthroughs by Ella and others in the late '40s. And Sullivan was strikingly beautiful. In sum, although she's currently well-known only to early jazz-buffs, Sullivan's ripe for rediscovery by a wider audience.

Homestead itself is in the process of recovering its memory of Sullivan. Famous principally for steel, strikes, massacres and the great Negro League Baseball team The Homestead Greys w/ the legendary Josh Gibson ('The Black Babe Ruth? Hell no. Ruth was the white Josh Gibson!' is Homestead and Pittsburgh holy writ), Homestead can surely use Sullivan as an important female grace note to its predominantly ultra-macho history.

At any rate, I'd be amazed if this track doesn't eventually draw some advertizing interest. Can't you just hear it floating around some perfume or other luxe product? Fairport Convention's folky version not so much. Hippies.

My Paprika, My Life

2011-12-30T14:42:00.012+13:00

Paprika (2006) is the brilliant final film by anime director Satashi Kon, who died tragically of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at age 46. Bike was Andrew Brough's short-lived, post-Straitjacket Fits group. Its cover of Abba's 'My Love, My Life' was the standout track on the (patchy) 1995, Flying Nun Abba tribute, Abbasalutely. Paprika, Bike's cover, and Abba's original song (a somewhat unheralded album track from Arrival, but see here) all deserve to be more widely known than they are. I intend this vid. to contribute to building the audience for each of them, in part by demonstrating some surprising commonalities.

Arrival was basically Abba's Rubber Soul/Revolver, which Bike literalizes.
Abba's 30-something concerns about hall-of-mirrors effects in long-term, adult relationships are the principal realistic, domestic counterparts of Paprika's Philip K. Dick-style, divided-self, dream-within-dream-scapes.

I've seen it on your face
Tells me more than any worn-out old phrase
So now we'll go separate ways
Never again we two
Never again, nothing I can do

[Chorus] Like an image passing by, my love, my life
In the mirror of your eyes, my love, my life
I can see it all so clearly
(See it all so clearly)
Answer me sincerely
(Answer me sincerely)
Was it a dream, a lie?
Like reflections of your mind, my love, my life
Are the words you try to find, my love, my life
But I know I don't possess you
So go away, God bless you
You are still my love and my life
Still my one and only

I've watched you look away
Tell me is it really so hard to say?
Oh, this has been my longest day
Sitting here close to you
Knowing that maybe tonight we're through.
[Chorus]

My fave 18 tracks of 2011

2011-12-23T11:52:00.016+13:00

Like most people, much of the music that's really grabbed me in 2011 was released long ago, and is just mostly new-to-me. So, old albums by Amy Winehouse, Brothers Johnson, Carla Bley and Paul Haines, Chet Baker, Clifford Brown, Clothilde, Evelyn King, Expressos, Fleetwood Mac, Fox, Harold Grosskopf, Holly and the Italians, Husker Du, Kanye West, King Crimson, Lalo Schifrin, Lou Reed, Moev, The National, The Shangri-Las, Sonic Youth, and 5th Dimension are a lot of what's really moved me this year.

I tend to encounter current releases more at the level of singles and through vids (on tv or on youtube). Here are my 1-18 fave new tracks (Q. Why 18? A1. Fits on a cd. A2. After 18 I found myself repeating artists, which made for a less interesting list.) Some of these records have been played to death at this point, so a high placing here doesn't necessarily capture how I feel about a given song now, rather it registers how the track impacted on me initially. That is, I rate a song highly for list purposes just if it (and/or its vid.) rocked me back on my heels and dominated my mental space for some period. Rihanna's and Lana Del Rey's songs and vids, in particular, just did blow me away for several weeks each, hence they're my songs of the year:

We Found Love	Rihanna ft. Calvin Harris
Video Games	Lana Del Rey
Somebody That I Used To Know	Gotye ft. Kimbra
Queen Of Hearts	Fucked Up
Blackout	Anna Calvi
Holocene	Bon Iver
Rolling In The Deep	Adele
Motivation [Lil B]	Clams Casino
Everything Goes My Way	Metronomy
Keep You	Class Actress
Countdown	Beyonce
Winter Beats	I Break Horses
Novacane	Frank Ocean
Crystalline	Björk
Dirt	Wu Lyf
A Real Hero	College ft. Electric Youth
Need You Now	Cut Copy
Gucci Gucci	Kreayshawn

You know you have an Alison Brie problem

2011-12-19T15:23:00.016+13:00

When you find yourself getting inexplicably angry whenever Community spends much time with anyone other than her character Annie:

I'm starting to think that this response might interfere with Mad Men Season 5 when it screens. Like everyone else, I've loved the Trudy and Pete Campbell 'surprisingly strong marriage' sub-plot on MM, but my now evidently borderline prurient interest in Trudy (Alison Brie) may throw off the equipoise of my interest in the show. I'll be slightly, unconsciously angry at Don and Sally etc...for drawing attention away from Trudy, which is crazy!

At any rate, I hope Brie does some movies soon, and that, in particular, someone writes a great screwball comedy for her. She's incredibly funny and smart as well as being smoking hot in a pretty-gal-next-door way. That's the combination that Lombard/Colbert/Stanwyck/Dunne/Hopkins/Arthur had in Hollywood's golden age. Make it so again Hollywood!

Gaga's Problem Identified

2011-12-19T12:29:00.012+13:00

One of the most illuminating pieces about Gaga from her Fame/Fame Monster, 2010 prime was Overkiller Queen by David Schmader. Schmader's best point comes late in the article:

Much is made of Gaga's extensive plundering of Madonna, but not enough is made of the speed and intensity with which this plundering has occurred. It took Madonna six years to get from dance-floor diva to international hit-maker to high-art pop icon; it took Gaga four singles, all culled from her debut album. Much like Bo Diddley sped up the blues to make rock 'n' roll, Stefani Germanotta sped up the pop machine that made Madonna to make Lady Gaga.

In the light of all of the singles from Born This Way, this now seems even more right to me than it did in 2010 only with a darker twist. Yes, Gaga leapt directly from Holiday to Like a Prayer/Vogue/Justify My Love/Deeper and Deeper (take your pick), i.e., to the Madonna of Cultural Studies departments. But that's a problem: while there are obvious high-points from that more conceptual, overexposing 1989-1992 Madonna (esp. the tracks I just mentioned), that's a period in which Madonna's music feels secondary to exhibitionism, cultural provocation and domination for its own sake. During that period Madonna burned through a lot of the good will she'd accumulated from her first three, pretty immaculate albums, and she just plain wore out her welcome with a lot of people. Madonna the self-conscious media artist/student of her own image had its moments, but taken as a whole it was too much, too calculating, and ultimately just tiring and boring (in the special way that only the over-wrought and over-stimulating risks - 'Oh, you again. Always with the wanting of attention. Go away!').

It's mildly heretical to say it, but that middle period Madonna, while superficially triumphant was actually a bit toxic. Madonna had to go away for while after it and come back with a more self-contained, more musical focus. Bedtime Stories, Ray of Light, and Music were the result of that pulling back from excess, and they jointly constitute the second great career peak for M. after her initial not-putting-a-foot-wrong/breakthrough period that continued up through the True Blue album. (I count Confessions on a Dancefloor and its tour as M's much lonelier third career peak - five years later we're still waiting to see whether that's all she wrote for M. at pop's top-table - she'll have lasted longer than anyone else if it is.)

Again, heretical though it is to say it, the 'Madonna Studies' period of M. that Gaga has indeed fast-forwarded to, while impressive in certain ways was also obnoxious and unconvincing, and with the perspective of distance was a kind of creative low for M. (notwithstanding its special resonances with certain sub-cultures).

Gaga is currently only superficially triumphant: all of the Born This Way singles have been tiring and boring, hectoring, un-musical attention events. They may deepen Gaga's connections with certain core fans and true believers, but for a wider public it's a disastrous turn. Madonna had all the cultural political capital gained from her first three albums to spend down, whereas Gaga's obnoxious and exhausting phase has to be 'funded' out of only the handful of broadly appealing singles up to Bad Romance. That's a problem. Schmader (and others) called the phenomenon right back in 2010 but they didn't see the problem that posed for Gaga and for the public alike.

When the Sunrise Hits

2011-12-07T11:05:00.010+13:00

Murnau's Sunrise (1927) is one of the greatest silent films (e.g., Welles, Wilder, Minnelli, and Gondry have all stolen shots from the sequences I collect in this video). Slowdive's 'When the Sun Hits' is one of the greatest 'shoegaze' tracks. In this vid. I combine them, and, in effect, streamline Sunrise away from its controversial (abortive) murder plot (and the somewhat problematic acting choices encouraged). This is meant as a kind of proof of concept that Sunrise could have worked in a less abstract/philosophical mode. That is, in principle, Murnau could have kept almost all of his film's ultra-spectacular visuals, while using a more modern/looser Stewart/Stanwyck acting style (traces of which are there in the performances in any case), thereby becoming a kind of hypercharged, expessionistic Lubitsch.

Of course, Murnau and Sunrise in particular are great just the way they are: flamboyant, mad, and almost impossible to take completely straight. Let me explain.

The violence in Sunrise's (abortive) murder plot destabilizes the narrative, pitching it into Night of the Hunter/Vertigo/Blue Velvet territory. The Man originally responds to The City Gal's drowning suggestion by attempting to throttle her, and later he reacts to The Obtrusive Man who hits on/harasses The Wife by just-barely-faux knifing him in the face (David Lynch recycles the latter scene as Dorothy Vallens's just-barely knifing Jeffrey in the face). These sorts of scenes (up to and including the Man's second near-strangling of the City Gal at the end of the film) mark The Man as seriously unstable/sociopathic, which in turn makes the wife's forgiveness etc. of him unbelievable and dangerous. If we interpret the whole film as 'what actually happened' then one must fear for the Wife and the Baby's safety long term. The principal way around this problem is to embark on a grand overall re-reading of the film: everything from the Man going to bed thinking about killing his Wife (which is visually signposted by the superimposed waters of the lake) until the final 'Finis' sunrise is the Man's dream-state. That's some elephant to swallow, and I don't think that Murnau compels us to accept such an interpretation. Rather I think that Murnau opens this as one possible interpretation of Sunrise, just as Hitchcock protects the readings that Vertigo's several discontinuities open (most famously the 'Incident at Owl Creek' interpretation of everything after Vertigo's apparently-impossible-to-be-saved-from opening scene). Our projected, streamlined, more-Lubitschy Sunrise would trade away this sort of haunting, crazy richness for greater naturalism and linear intelligibility.

Moev's Cracked Mirror

2011-11-09T11:09:00.005+13:00

Just heard this for the first time on a College mix-tape... Wow. Very much in a Chris and Cosey vein, I almost can't believe I've never heard of this early '80s band before (apparently they're from BC, Canada - I suppose that that was a little out of the way at the time).

Holly and The Italians (in praise of)

2011-10-26T22:01:00.010+13:00

The only track from Holly and the Italians that I remember from my youth is 1980's Miles Away:

Looking back, this should have been some sort of hit: it's a perfect power-pop song, and Holly Beth Vincent's voice has star-quality (w/ Florence Welch esp. in Dog Days perhaps being the closest comparison case), and she's flat out cool in the (gold-standard) Chrissie Hynde/PJ Harvey-ish/Karen O-ish way in the vid.. Mark Sidgwick and Steve Dalton (a.k.a. Steve Young) monster the bass and drums respectively on this one like they're McKagan and Adler respectively. (Were the latter guys listening?)

Other tracks seem specifically influential on others:

Youth Coup sounds like both Liz Phair's Exile (esp. 6'1") and PJ Harvey's Stories (esp. Good Fortune) to me.

Rock against Romance sounds a lot like G'n'R's Sweet Child o' Mine (only without Slash's great signature riff and Axel's special yowl over the top).

HATI evidently cut it live too: here are stonking versions of Youth Coup and Rock against Romance on OGWT (live in the tv studio w/o an audience). Holly's skinny sleek and is on her guitar (just rocking basically), injured leg notwithstanding:

Or consider Poster Boy:

I think it substantially anticipates both G'n'R's Rocket Queen and Green Day's When I Come Around.

And consider Means to a Den:

Surely that anticipates much of C86 pop (and Juliana Hatfield and...).

HATI also did quite a nice line in more traditional girl-pop, including esp. a cover of the Chiffons' Just for Tonight (for which the great Ellie Greenwich did some backing vox) as well as the single that got them a record deal in the first place, Tell That Girl to Shut Up.

In sum, HATI was a very good band with a magnetic singer and front-woman that never quite got its due, except indirectly/sincerely, by being diffusely influential and possibly being extensively strip-mined by others.

Exquisite Music from Azerbaijan

2011-10-26T01:43:00.006+13:00

I'd never heard of Aziza Mustafa Zadeh until yesterday, but according to wikipedia she's sold 15 million records to somebody. If this exquisite, intriguing jazz/ambient/classical piece from 2004 is anything to go by, that success is richly deserved. In any case, Zadeh's a composer and performer to watch.

Class Actress album needs more work (2 songs)

2011-10-18T12:46:00.017+13:00

The new single Weekend feels to me like a demo rather than a final version. It's at least a few bpm too slow in my view, some of the synth timbres need more development and to be mixed more dynamically, and the song's various bridges and transitions feel untidy and not at all inevitable. There's a great, catchy track struggling to get out here, but it needs work (one suspects that Robyn and her producers, who have that Berry Gordy quality control model down pat, would never have let this version pass).

Bienvenue seems to be one of the best (so far) non-single tracks on the album. But it could probably have done to be the album-opener: it's title means 'Welcome!' after all, and since it's pointless denying Bienvenue's 'Age of Consent' vibe, why not embrace that track's positioning? In my view too, Bienvenue needs a little AoC guitar (or I'm in Love with a German Film Star guitar or... something) in the mix somewhere.

In sum, both these songs have potential, but neither fulfils it as recorded which irritates whereas good pop (from Borderline to Hang With Me in the relevant tradition) exhilirates. Having heard most of the rest of Rapprocher, nothing seems up to the level of Keep You or to the title track of last year's Journal of Ardency e.p.. The album's overall feel is muted, languid, not trying hard enough (I've had the same problem with a lot of Ladytron), which is a bummer for indie dance-pop. Too bad.

P.S., I've lately been disappointed by Bjork's Biophilia (Vespertine refigured as a narrowly intellectual gesture - although I've come around a bit on Crystalline) and by M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming (a double length Saturday = Youth with half the charm). What I've heard from Feist's Metals does nothing for me, and the much-hyped Dum Dum Girls seem to me to be wildly under-done (and I love '60s girl-groups). That's left Anna Calvi as my current album and discovery of the year. Calvi just rules. Even her (free/downloadable) classical mixtape is terrific. Beyond that, old Sonic Youth stuff (esp. Bad Moon Rising and Daydream Nation) and the last three National albums have rocked my world lately.

Israel Dagg eludes Quade Cooper

2011-10-17T16:06:00.005+13:00

Obviously the All Blacks' jazz-dance training is paying dividends. And who's naming the players in this Rugby World Cup? Herman Melville?

John Williams's NBC theme

2011-10-05T11:04:00.003+13:00

Best youtube comment about it:

It sounds like ET on a horse being chased by Darth Vader... [DannyFox06 2 months ago]

Indeed, but that would, of course, completely rule! Anyhow, like Elmer Bernstein's National Geographic theme, I take this to be a very good porting out of populist movie classical idioms to the even more populist TV-transition form. Inspiring for generations of kids I'm sure.

Top Music Slams

2011-10-03T15:55:00.003+13:00

The National are Nickelback with a Joy Division record.
Muse are Depeche Mode covering Queen.
.
.
.
[Just the examples that I can remember right now. Will try to add to and update the list periodically.]

Futurama's Hitchcock Memorial

2011-10-01T09:12:00.002+13:00

Great Songs of the '90s: Temple of the Dog's Hunger Strike

2011-09-25T15:06:00.003+13:00

It's hard to explain what this song and its vid. meant at the time to kids all over, but let me try. It meant that even the side-projects, back-story-fill-ins of the Seattle/NW scene completely killed. And this song, apart from a couple of heavy chords, is just a soulful rocker that Aerosmith or Bruce Springsteen could have done. Hunger Strike therefore meant that the whole axis of rock, not just its alternative-metal-punk subcultures, had shifted to.... Discovery Park on the far side of Magnolia in Seattle. Beautiful man.

Great Songs of the '90s: Dre's The Day the Niggaz Took Over

2011-09-25T01:41:00.006+12:00

The angriest, most potent, most downright frightening track on Dre's monumental The Chronic (1992).
One thing that feels quite distinctive about the early-mid '90s period: there were lots of different music scenes, all of which were worth exploring, and the key works in each new area were genuinely astounding. The effect was that if you only bought one grunge album in 1994 it was probably Superunknown, and that was a great choice! If you only bought one rap album in 1992-1994 it was probably The Chronic, and that was a great choice! If you bought one ambient/IDM album it was probably Aphex Twin... And so on. The good and the popular and well-known were highly in-synch, so if you explored in any direction the rewards were immediate. Relatively self-contained near-masterpieces that taught you how to speak a new musical language were obvious everywhere....

Great Songs of the '90s: Blur's To The End

2011-09-22T10:37:00.001+12:00

Sigh.

Great Songs of the '90s: Lucas's Lucas with the Lid Off

2011-09-12T20:56:00.007+12:00

The song's great but, of course, it's inseparable from its video, which definitively announced (as in 'Who the hell made that thing I just saw?') the arrival of Michel Gondry. Gondry had already made a bit of a splash with his vid. for Bjork's Human Behavior, but this new vid was at another level (the gap between these two vids roughly corresponds to the gap between Gondry's first two feature films, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine). Above all, this song and vid. is a reminder of just how explosive and exciting music overall was for a while in the early-mid '90s. Huge movements were underway like grunge and industrial and gangster rap and trip-hop and ambient and IDM and grind-core metal and jungle and different flavors of electronica and brit-pop - all of which were pretty great and worth checking out - but there were also fantastic pop outsiders and one-off things around. I don't actually remember hearing Lucas with the lid off on the radio (but it was a moderate-sized hit so someone must have played it), but MTV would play its ker-razy video occasionally, especially late at night (they ended up nom'ing it for one of their vid. awards). In that context, it was a little like stumbling into the best dream you'd ever had.

Great Songs of the '90s: Tricky's Overcome

2011-09-11T02:37:00.006+12:00

Closely related to Massive Attack's Karmacoma, Tricky's lesser-known track is better. Needless to say, it's not often that someone gets the better of MA!

'You're a couple, especially when your bodies double.
To placate, and then you wait for the next Kuwait. Karmacoma.'

Best couplet of the '90s? Probably.

Great Songs of the '90s: Elliott Smith's Everything Reminds Me of Her

2011-09-11T01:59:00.006+12:00

Arguably the most brutal, tragic, mental health-related early death in pop music between Cobain and Winehouse, Smith's guitar on this track is supernally beautiful, and the song itself is so great it should be a standard by now. Sigh.

Great Songs of the '90s: Nirvana's All Apologies

2011-09-10T23:41:00.002+12:00

Like most people, I prefer the unplugged version to the one on In Utero. Truth be told tho', any number of Nirvana's unplugged tracks could be on my list.

Great Songs of the '90s: Ace of Base's The Sign

2011-09-10T23:26:00.006+12:00

Swedish pop genius and Abba's visual template in particular re-emerged at the height of grunge. It was truly refreshing and connected subterraneanly with the Abba reawakening birthed by Priscilla Queen of the Desert and, esp., Muriel's Wedding in 1994. Unfortunately, the band (three of them including the two gals were siblings) had some of Abba's ultimate instability. Rather like Agnetha before her, Linn ('the blonde one') had evident misgivings about being the visual focus of the group and maybe about pop-music generally. By 1998 she was half out of the band and never again a focus, and soon after that she seems to have become a full recluse.

Oh well, we'll always have All that She Wants and The Sign! The vid. for the latter is a bit of a wonder - Linn kills it and is apparently happy to do so (however fleeting that feeling was for her), and the vid. itself is boundlessly energetic with insert shots of Ankhs and other symbols seemingly influenced by dream sequences from Ken Russell's Altered States! This felt a little odd at the time but the slightly mystifying/unsettling feeling it evoked in viewers helped 'weigh down' the poppy froth of the music in my experience (again the template is Abba, whose videos used Bergman/Persona shots in the same sort of way).

Realistic Relativistic Spacecraft and Impact Events

2011-09-08T21:47:00.010+12:00

As everyone knows by now, impacts from space have occasionally devastated much of life on earth, most recently and famously in the K-T boundary impact event, 65 million years ago, that appears to have killed off most dinosaurs. Typically, impactors from space that come from within the solar system arrive at 20-50 km/s. And the specific impactor that shmushed the dinosaurs' world was probably a hard/dense rock (not ice), say 3000 kg/m^3, 10-14 km in diameter. That's remarkable: something doesn't need to be 'the size of Texas' (a la Michael Bay's Armageddon (1998)) or to be travelling at anything like relativistic speeds (say > .1C = 30,000 km/s) is required to obliterate much of life on Earth.

But what if an impactor is out at one of these extremes? Well, supposing that 'something the size of TX' means a 10^4 (a 100x100) scaling up of mass from the actual K-T event impactor then K-T-level impact energy results from only 1/100 the v, i.e., only .2-.5 km/s = 200-500 m/s, the speed of current fighter planes.

And what about a space-ship moving at relativistic velocities, i.e., the sort of thing that travel to the stars 'without warp drive' will require? Won't it look like a very dangerous projectiles to any other life-forms who spot it, as it were, in-coming?

Suppose as a kind of base-line that the sort of space-ship that could conceivably sustain technological life for 20+ years would be at least the size/mass of the largest current aircraft carriers, which are about 100,000 long tons = ~ 10 million kg. For simplicity, ignoring relativistic effects, how fast does does an aircraft-carrier-scale ship have to be going to have the kinetic energy of the K-T impactor?

Current estimates of the K-T impactor energy are 400-420 x 10^21 J. Solving for v we get that the aircraft carrier would have to be traveling at ~ 90,000 km/s ~ .3C to do K-T-type damage. If we take relativistic effects on kinetic energy into account, the sufficient-for-a-K-T-disaster v computes out to ~ .29C.

On the one hand, then, why build a Death Star when you can devastate a planet just by ramming something the size of the Starship Enterprise or Space Battleship Yamato into it (at anything like their normal speeds)? On the other hand, the sorts of moderately large spaceships humans might use to get to the stars over a generation (e.g., accelerating continuously at 1 g for the first half of the trip then decelerating at the same rate for the second half) are going to look like menaces to intelligences at the other end. If the decceleration goes wrong, e.g., fuel runs out early or some such thing, then those ships will 'come in hot', at a non-trivial fraction of C, and will threaten to destroy civilizations and possibly life more generally at their destination. Look out.

Great Songs of the '90s: Underworld's Dirty Epic

2011-09-08T18:05:00.003+12:00

The best mind-bending long-form dance track of the '90s in my view.

Great Songs of the '90s: Magnetic Fields' Strange Powers

2011-09-05T16:27:00.003+12:00

Madonna's W.E.

2011-09-02T13:05:00.008+12:00

All the early word suggested that W.E. had the godawful (almost inevitably unsatisfying) Julie and Julia, unbalanced nobody&somebody ('Wally and Wallis'), dual-time-period structure, and that it further might borrow a trick or two from Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Uh-oh! Probably only someone as instinctive and masterful as Almodovar could get a nobody&somebody structure to fly, and Marie Antoinette would have been a disaster but for Sofia C.'s exquisite, hipster taste - so really isn't copiable or a template for anyone else.

And given that Edward VIII was an appalling, unlikeable guy in reality (whether Simpson was too is disputed), a female-centric, outsider/American like Madonna will be tempted, as art of being highly sympathetic to Simpson, to be evasive about Edward VIII. That is, if you don't soften the realities of Edward somehow, Simpson may start to look like a complete idiot, and at worst like a complete reprobate herself. So Madonna's likely going to be doubly tempted: to elide both Simpson's own significant sympathies with and ties to the Nazis, and the basic fact that she married a guy who honestly dreamed during WW2 of a Nazi victory and of his own future as Hitler's lieutenant-ruler over the remains of the British Empire is going to pall for most people. The latter point lends itself to a story of grim irony: Wallis Simpson saves the UK and the world by inadvertently helping to bring low the horrifying Edward VIII. But that's not a very romantic tale and, in any case, it's complex and can't be squeezed into half a film, so doesn't sound at all like what Madonna's offering.

First reviews of W.E. from the Venice Film Festival including this bollocking from the Guardian suggest that all of the structural and stylistic and thematic chickens that seemed to loom over this film have in fact come home to roost, e.g., apparently the modern-time-period parallel female figure in the film, Wally (played by Abby Cornish) says of Simpson and Edward VIII that they were 'naive not Nazis'. Well, we await the context of that quote - perhaps Wally is being an airhead when she makes that remark. But, preliminarily, 'Double uh-oh! What a trap Madonna's fallen into!' Apparently, however, the film has some nice cinematography, design, and (maybe) music.

I'm a big Madonna fan overall, but this project sounded bad from the beginning, has a pointless/stupid title (see discussion below), and now appears to be tepid at best in actuality. I will wait for a few more reviews before making a final decision about whether to see W.E. at a cinema, but things aren't looking good.

W.E.'s title makes me think of Zamyatin's We (hence our image above). And, seriously, wouldn't M. have enjoyed making a film of that more? Her music video work with, say, Fincher on Express Yourself and Romanek on Bedtime Story, etc. should have given her some clues about how to stage that sort of intelligent, dystopian sci-fi. And We's character, I-330 is an erotic subversive who says things like "There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite." One wants to say, "C'mon M., that's you! Film that." W.E., by way of contrast, sounds more like a film representation of M.'s faux-British accent. Triple uh-oh insofar as that's so.

Charlotte Kemp Muhl

2011-09-01T19:25:00.009+12:00

I first came across her a few days ago at Stereogum in this image from their Serge Gainsbourg tribute concert coverage:

As in 'Who's that sitting behind Beck?'

It turns out that she's Charlotte K M, girlfriend and sometime musical partner of Sean Lennon, and also a top model in her own right. This tumblr page has the basic evidence that she's one of those truly spooky beauties who never takes a bad picture and who can look like almost anything while always looking exactly like herself. When the camera loves you in that very specific, strong way (you're Audrey Hep. or Milla Jov. say), Hollywood and fame more generally usually comes knocking (and ordinary mortals feel like killing themselves!). It'll be interesting to see whether that happens in this case. At any rate, here are a couple of nice images of CKM in casual musician mode:

Reading around, CKM has done a few silly interviews (leading some people to claim she's vapid and a calculating dater/climber, etc.), but otherwise she seems to have impressed people with her smarts and general sensibility. We'll see.

Great Songs of the '90s: Saint Etienne's Avenue

2011-08-31T21:43:00.004+12:00

The official vid. was for the shorter single mix:

The 7m30s album version, however, is essential:

Sideshow Bob has a point?

2011-08-31T21:26:00.002+12:00

New Glasser mix!

2011-08-24T01:50:00.004+12:00

Treasury of We (Delorean remix) is streamable and downloadable from stereogum here. I like it a lot: tasty Chime-period, Orbital house grooves on top of the usual Glasser tricks. In general, with Glasser (esp. as remixed - I loved the Lindstrom remix of Mirrorage too), Class Actress, Ronika, and the like cranking out cool, melodic dance-pop tunes the dub-step/off-speed hip-hop that has been the principal recent alternative to Dr Luke/Stargate/Martin/Guetta eurotrash (original) dance mainstream at last has some serious competition. Yay.

Favourite Albums?

2011-08-19T00:42:00.013+12:00

The Guardian is running a series of articles where their music columnists (one by one) choose their favorite albums, e.g., here. The authors select albums that mean or have meant the most to them, which may or may not correspond to the albums they think are best in some relatively rigorous, defensible, quasi-objective sense.

Most of the writers so far have chosen albums that they first encountered during their teenage or college years, and for the most part they've further chosen albums that were further actually released then. That's as one might have predicted: you were maximally open to new things, and you were there when this great thing happened. I have my own bunch of faves in that vein, e.g., Off the Wall, The Lexicon of Love, A Walk across the Rooftops, Meat is Murder, Tallulah, Weezer (Blue Album), OK Computer, Second Toughest in the Infants, Vespertine, etc..

But, like many people presumably, I have a bunch of faves that don't fit this model. For example, Hunky Dory, the Superfly Soundtrack and Freewheelin' are three real comfort albums for me despite the fact that I don't have an 'I was there/This was mine' connection with any of them. And some of my most precious, oft-returned-to albums are true compilations of older materials: the Beatles Red and Blue double collections, e.g.,

the Bacharach box set 'The Look of Love':

and the Verve Records collection of heartbreak standards, 'When Love Goes Wrong', which I flat out adore:

Here's the latter's unbeatable track-listing (with my 7 absolute favourite tracks bolded):

1. Good Morning Heartache Billie Holiday
2. Born To Be Blue Chet Baker
3. It Never Entered My Mind Johnny Hartman
4. Everybody's Somebody's Fool Lionel Hampton
5. A Woman Alone With The Blues Peggy Lee
6. A Woman's Intuition Beverly Kenney
7. Everything Happens To Me Frank D'Rone
8. I Fall In Love Too Easily Shirley Horn
9. Here's That Rainy Day Helen Merrill
10. I'm Through With Love Arthur Prysock
11. I'm A Fool To Want You Dinah Washington
12. What Will I Tell My Heart? Billy Eckstine
13. But Not For Me Sarah Vaughan
14. Reaching For The Moon Ella Fitzgerald
15. Gloomy Sunday Mel Tormé

I picked up this compilation reduced to $4.99 (or something equally farcical) and it's probably the single best purchase I've ever made. I suspect that some people would regard this as a multiply unfair or inauthentic choice for 'My Favourite Album'. But these are some of the best recordings by some of the best performers of some of the best songs ever written. It's just a fact as far as I'm concerned that no one artist or group can compete with what amounts to the whole of (wretched!) human experience distilled (the disc is so awesome that fantastic tracks from Holiday and Fitzgerald aren't in the top tier of stuff on it!).

If I'm honest about my preferences now and don't overweight nostalgia for, as it were (thanks Morrissey!), 'lay in awe on the bedroom floor', teenage and extended teenage enthusiasms then When Love Goes Wrong has to be my choice. The Bacharach box and the Beatles' double collections probably contend with Hunky Dory and Off the Wall and Tallulah for second.

Women in Rock/Pop 1980 vs 2011

2011-08-16T22:26:00.024+12:00

In 2011 women, and particularly solo women dominate both the pop charts (Gaga, Perry, Rhianna, Beyonce, Adele, Winehouse, Pink, Kesha, etc.) and the, as it were, indie charts (Florence, Janelle Monae, Robyn, Lykke Li, Calvi, PJ, Newsom, Bat for Lashes, Feist, Glasser, Class Actress, etc.). Not to mention acts like Dirty Projectors and Sleigh Bells that have strong female components.

I suspect that, for better or worse, this level of female dominance is a recent phenomenon. That said, I think one can make a case for 1980 as a banner year for women in rock/pop, one that's at least the equal of current times in terms of quantity of female excellence if not in terms of, say, overall quantity or overall market share. So let's make that case by listing important female-centered acts, singles and albums from 1980 in the order, near as I can judge, of their importance and excellence. Note that I've included items that charted very extensively in 1980 even if they were first released in 1979, and I've honored the best by selecting two vids. just for each of the 'top five' items on my list.

1. The Pretenders (First self-titled album, Brass in Pocket, Stop your sobbing, Tattooed Love Boys, Up the Neck)

Chrissie Hynde arrives and explodes. This flawless album, with monster song after monster song, one of the greatest debuts was deservedly everywhere the whole year. Tragic deaths would scar the band soon after this, and the first album's incredibly tight guitars and rhythm section wouldn't repeat. Hynde would be good again after this but never quite this good.

2. Marianne Faithfull (Broken English, Ballad of Lucy Jordan, Broken English, Working Class Hero)

A '60s 'it'-girl returns a woman and makes an angry masterpiece and testament album. With brilliant synth-work from Steve Winwood (who'd obviously paid close attention to Eno's work for Nico in the mid. '70s).

3. Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees (Kaleidoscope, Happy House, Christine, Red Light)

Siouxsie the prototype, highly haughty, super-creative, indie 'it'-girl with the great haircuts arrives. With John McGeoch in her band she was now unstoppable, as 1981's Juju would further establish.

4. B-52s (First self-titled album, Rock Lobster, Planet Claire, 52 Girls)

Huge down under for the whole year, the B-52s debut contained three of the best party dance-tracks of all time.

5. Blondie (Eat to the Beat, Atomic, Dreaming, The Hardest Part, Call Me)

Blondie's strengths - clever concepts, Debbie Harry's voice and image, Clem Burke's ace drumming (fusing disco beats with rock power) - were perfectly displayed across this series of singles.

6. Abba (Super Trouper, Super Trouper, The Winner Takes It All, One of Us, On and On and On, Gimme Gimme Gimme (A man after midnight))

Abba were fraying at the seams personally by 1980, were just past their hit-making prime, and were in any case subject to incredible back-lash. But even firing on only 80% of their cylinders, Abba's output was still better than most acts ever achieve.

7. Kate Bush (Never for Ever, Babooshka, Army Dreamers)

Kate Bush continued to show that she was smarter and weirder than anyone else in music since Bowie. Even if you didn't like her latest exactly, she was someone to be reckoned with.

8. Diana Ross (Diana, Upside Down, I'm Coming Out)

Diana Ross had the two classiest dance tracks of the year courtesy largely of Chic, with whom Ross fought. Ross brought in her own engineer to remix, change tempos etc.. I'd always assumed that Chic's original mixes would be better, but having heard them recently, I must say that I prefer Ross's speeded up, slightly poppier mixes. Ross appears to have been very shrewd.

9. Young Marble Giants (Colossal Youth)

The retiring, intellectual, cool person's record of 1980. Alison Statton's vocals are tightly rationed throughout the record, but are an indie blueprint whenever they appear.

10. Olivia Newton-John (Magic, Xanadu, Suddenly)

One of the worst movies ever made had three good, cheesy, pop hits for Ms Newton-John.

11. Pat Benatar (Heartbreaker, We live for love, Hit me with your best shot)

Benatar arrived in 1980 with a series of great singles, spread over two so-so albums. Her albums would improve after this but her singles were never this good again. The gods are cruel!

12. Grace Jones (Warm Leatherette)

Grace wouldn't really arrive until 1981's Pull up to the Bumper single, but the Warm Leatherette album and its title track (a The Normal cover) announced the arrival of someone to watch.

13. Pointer Sisters (He's so shy)

The Pointer Sisters continued their run of great singles with what felt like a continuation of Prince's I wanna be your lover and the Brothers Johnson's I'll be good to you. Don't stop!

14. Holly Vincent (Miles Away)

Holly and The Italians (w/ Holly Vincent's stonking voice, guitar, and general coolness) released a pretty great album in 1981 (which they never really followed up), but this 1980 single was an especial stunner.

15. Lipps Inc. (Funkytown)

An alternately irritating/awesome hit song.

16. Toyah Wilcox (Ieya)

Some sort of masterpiece that Toyah was never able to follow up.

17. Flying Lizards (Money)

Just a fun as hell cover and video.

In sum, there were a heck of a lot of women in both mainstream and, as it were, indie charts in 1980. The best stuff was all-time-great, and much of the rest was either solidly entertaining or interesting in a where-will-this-person-go-next? way or both.

South Park Psycho

2011-08-12T20:48:00.005+12:00

South Park's recent Season 15 ep. 6: City Sushi ended with an homage to Psycho's final scene. Instead of a double dissolve from Norman to mother/skull to car-being-pulled-from-swamp we got Chinese restaurant guy to crazy white psychiatrist guy to City Wok restaurant. Click the above image for details!

The Shangri-Las II

2011-08-08T05:38:00.001+12:00

A simple vid I made for a remix of one of their 'Shadow' Morton penned/produced classics from the Stonewall (1996) soundtrack. The mix is nothing special really, but the Shangs. haven't been remixed much, so it struck me as worthwhile getting up on youtube.

The Shangri-Las

2011-08-07T16:25:00.015+12:00

Like a lot of people, I've been re-listening to Amy Winehouse over the past week or so, and really appreciating her pop sensibility. That's led me to explore some of Winehouse's pop/girl-group influences a little more thoroughly than before, esp. the Shangri-Las. The Shangs' best records are simply incredible: great songs including a bunch written by Brill Building, presiding geniuses Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, fabulously atmospheric conceptual productions, and great vocal/dramatic performances by Mary Weiss. A heck of lot of stuff that we all love from the last 40 years of music from the Velvets and Lou Reed to the Who to Gainsbourg to Abba to the Ramones to Blondie to Kate Bush to Propaganda to (I'd argue) MBV to Winehouse to Bat for Lashes is deeply indebted to the Shangs' colloquial melodramatics. And just look at them in early 1965:

And listen to where they got to by 1966:

and where they began in 1964:

They had 'it' from the beginning, and never lost 'it'. Just, wow. The Shangs haven't so far been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Greenwich and Barry are in, as are The Ronettes and Darlene Love). That should change. Lesley Gore and the Crystals deserve to be inducted too, but the Shangs are a bigger omission in my view. The conceptualness and cinematicness that the Shangs introduced to pop means that the history of pop and rock simply doesn't decode properly without them. Their omission may be part of what Frida from Abba had in mind when (at Abba's own induction) she pointedly, smartly drew attention to how few female artists had made it in to the Hall:

p.s. If you need convincing that Ellie Greenwich's genius extended beyond her monumental '60s tunes, consider the following:

EG: Yep. And years later, I was working with Cyndi Lauper on her single "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". And during the rehearsals, they got kind of... stuck on the breakdown part of the song. So I thought for a minute, and then it came to me: "Girls. They want. Wanna Have Fun. Girls. They wanna have. Just wanna, they just wanna. Girls. Girls just wanna have fu-un." And so that's what we went with.

That, of course, is the bit of the song that pushed it over the top into joyousness/greatness, making it an instant classic/standard.

M83's Skin of the Night

2011-08-01T04:22:00.011+12:00

I'm late to the party on this 2008 track and its album... but I like it a lot. Neu!, Simple Minds, Kate Bush, Tears for Fears, Talk Talk, Modern Eon, MBV, maybe a little Massive Attack are the obvious, general, background influences on the album, aside from the direct model of Air (M83 are French). And the 'Thou shalt not fall' chant from The Lost Boys s/track may have helped shape this track in particular. (I've sometimes heard 'of the night' and 'the night' designated/mocked as none-more-'80s phrases: think Benatar, Winwood etc.. I'm open to that idea, but want to see some data!)
p.s. Excellent live at (fab!) KCRW version here:

Nouvelle Vague's version of Psych. Furs' Heaven

2011-08-01T02:46:00.003+12:00

A disputed image

2011-07-24T19:27:00.000+12:00

Anna Calvi again

2011-07-24T13:42:00.008+12:00

There are quite a few talented, dramatic, haughty girls (where I use 'girl' just to signal newness, and in a relatively non-age-specific way, cf. 'riot girl', 'roaring girls/boys') around in popular music right now, and I applaud the trend, but, for me, among recent entries, Anna Calvi has jumped out ahead of the pack:

One problem, I've yet to hear an album version of one of her songs that is as good as, say, the best three or four live performances of that song available on youtube. Calvi's performance skills and presence are so strong that it's evidently going to be hard to match that and capture that on record. Strong performers from Joanna Newsom to Janelle Monae to Gaga have all had to find some way to do this consistently, albeit in each of those cases too there are songs where the live versions are markedly superior, so maybe this isn't a problem that can ever be completely solved. At any rate, in my view Calvi's still got some work to do on the recording side, perhaps she has yet to find the perfect studio collaborator (Eno's watching over her, so presumably that's a problems that'll be solved). Apart from that, though, she's fabulous, appears to have everything figured out and to have almost no limits.

p.s. In my view, anyone who prefers Gaga's Edge of Glory nonsense over Calvi's Desire for an '80s-big-rock fix needs his or her head examined:

Sylvian and Sakamoto's Bamboo Music (1982)

2011-07-20T01:47:00.003+12:00

And the B-side, Bamboo Houses (which was arguably even better):

Extraordinarily talented and serious and beautiful, Sylvian was too good for pop music (it felt at the time like pop music for aliens, for a higher form of life than humans were currently capable of). Amazing.

The Antlers' I don't want love

2011-07-18T23:02:00.003+12:00

Don't know anything abut these guys, but this is a purdy half-song. Where's the rest of it?

Keep Watching

2011-07-18T11:53:00.005+12:00

I have put a vid. up on youtube here of a 4 bar Class Actress loop (from the end of the fab. new single Keep You) over a minute from near the end of Snyder's Watchmen film.

Fox's S-S-Single Bed

2011-07-15T00:31:00.005+12:00

A #1 hit in Australia and #4 hit in the UK in 1976, this record (with just a little reinstrumentation and fattening of the bass) could be in the charts in 2011 (e.g., it would then sound a lot like one of Gaga's best songs, Summerboy). Cartoonish, vaguely inhuman vocal tone? Check. Nursery rhyme lyric? Check. Danceable but somehow deracinated? Check. All of that's pretty appalling on one level, but on another level it's an inspired formula that obviously works for lots of people. SB seems to foreshadow much of modern dance-pop in something like the way I Feel Love and TEE and Pop Muzik do.

Update July 19, 2011: I've been listening to Fox's eponymous debut album from 1975. It's fantastic, and like S-S-Single Bed seems way ahead of its time. Very impressive stuff. I can hear why it didn't quite blow up at the time: there's no Lady Marmalade or Dancing Queen or I Feel Love or Holiday or Bad Romance, no one song that really leaps out in that unignorable, star-making way. But there's a consistent vibe here that's fresh and appealing, one that with hindsight lots of subsequent people have reinvented bits of. Fave tracks include Pretty Boy, Red Letter Day, and the Abba-ish Imagine me Imagine you, but, seriously, almost every song (I can do without the Love Letters cover) is great.

Jobriath's Inside

2011-07-14T02:29:00.004+12:00

Finally, this largely unheard masterwork, should-be-a-standard is up on youtube. For how long one wonders (I tried uploading it several times and was rejected)? Enjoy it while it lasts.

Hitchcock in Marienbad

2011-07-12T01:45:00.002+12:00

At ~10 minutes in to Resnais's film, it's a cardboard cut-out.

In flagranti

2011-07-10T23:31:00.005+12:00

Brain magazine is a source of some of the best dance + soundtrack mixes around today. Everything I've sampled from them has become a staple. Its In flagranti mix [NSFW graphics!], for example, is utterly outstanding. Highly recommended. Brain magazine is a French site, so it's also a good chance to practise reading a little colloquial, subject-specific French.

Bette Davis, resmitten with

2011-07-08T22:42:00.011+12:00

What a gal! I'd not seen any of Davis's TV interviews from the '70s and early '80s until recently. Before that I knew her just from her ding-dong classics (esp. All about Eve, Now Voyager, Dark Victory, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and The Letter), and from her later near-disastrous, post-stroke, Oscar shows appearances (as presenter but also as Testimonial awardee IIRC). Youtube, however, enables me and others to fill in that sort of gap: it's a treasure-trove of interviews that awesomely display Davis's smarts and 'stand and deliver' personal style. Having spent a few hours clicking around through these items, I'm blown away again, resmitten. Over the next month I'll try to rewatch some of my existing Davis faves and check out at least the obvious biggies that I've missed before (esp. Jezebel, Of Human Bondage, and her Elizabeth I movie, if I can get hold of them). Go here for Meryl Streep's lovely tribute to Davis if you need further inspiration to do the same. Streep describes herself and her high school girlfriends regularly watching Davis's classics on after-school tv in the 1960s, and as taking lessons from Davis on 'how to scare the hell out of men'. Haw haw!

Update July 13, 2011: Just saw The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Pretty good w/ a powerhouse lead performance from Davis (who's unafraid to play ugly and unappealing and super-high-maintenance - Davis's frantically fidgeting Elizabeth I feels like a prototype for Olivier's later Richard III). Unfortunately, despite some interesting, almost 3-D effect focal length tricks from director Curtiz, the script and production is very stagey and somewhat hard to believe. E.g., the few outdoor scenes are filled with incredibly bright, steady CA sunshine that's ridiculous for England - the soundstage, interior light is much better although it's still unrealistically bright for the renaissance/medieval world; and Flynn's Essex is given some absurd lines that make him a proto-Locke or Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, the casting of Errol Flynn (w/ a Korngold score) and Olivia de Havilland as an insolent lady-in-waiting (who should surely have lost her head!) invites comparison with Robin Hood and GWTW, respectively, but PLEE isn't nearly as much fun or as spectacular as those. At any rate, next up: Jezebel.
Update August 1, 2011: After some delays, Jezebel! More excellent work from Davis in a well-made film with an unfortunately too predictable script. The 'noble'/self-sacrificing ending is an odd beast because it's evidently also a deeply self-interested ending on Davis's Julee's part. At any rate, it's impossible to be moved by what happens because of the conflicted stances the action embodies. The ending then comes to symbolize the complexity of our feelings about all of the main characters. Nobody comes out especially well, so I guess that makes J a rather good drama, but it's no Dark Victory or Now Voyager. J's setting and content invites comparison with GWTW - but, alas, that just makes me appreciate GWTW's scale, spectacle, casting, and score even more. Fonda's a bit of wet-blanket compared to Gable, as is the good-girl foil to Davis (Margaret Lindsay's Amy) compared to De Havilland's Melanie. Deep down too, I wonder whether Julee's character even quite makes sense. She's supposed to be a free spirit/spitfire. But she's also supposed to mope around the house, to receive no callers etc. for a year after things blow up with Press. That doesn't seem like a plausible combination to me. Also, we're supposed to believe that Julee's red dress scandalizes society, and that that then has consequences with Press. But the movie focuses completely on the fallout with Press, so that it's as if it forgets that Julee is now regarded as a scarlet/wild/trollop-y woman and should be paying social prices independently of Press for her non-conformism. Maybe my two complaints are connected and may be jointly answers as follows: maybe we're supposed to infer that Julee holes up for a year after Press leaves in part because New Orleans society now largely shuns her. But if that's so then I think it needed to be clarified, e.g., there's a scene missing, perhaps of people crossing the street to avoid Julee that we need.

The best rock formation in The Searchers

2011-07-06T01:53:00.006+12:00

Very cool, no? (Click for bigger, more gloriously VistaVisiony version.) It reminds me a little of a Jawa Sandcrawler from Star Wars:
Obviously SW alludes directly to The Searchers in the 'Luke finds his home destroyed and Aunt and Uncle killed' scene, but Lucas's debts to Ford are diffuse and v. extensive, from the cinematography to the treatment of 'natives speaking their own languages'.

Class Actress's Keep You

2011-06-29T01:34:00.011+12:00

Possible song of the year? I think so:

[Hat-tip to stereogum.]
But is there enough going on timbrally, say by the 'middle eight', to maintain broad interest? I love the basic backing track and the vocal and the way the whole thing just beds in, but a sense of something else crashing through that technotic surface - some other vocal melodies? some guitar? - might have been worth exploring. Compare with Steve Stevens's entry into this:

Bonus thought: Maybe Class Actress, Zola Jesus, Romika, and Little Boots should join forces, form an '80s super-group: Acoustic Psychiatry (what Kraftwerk described themelves as doing/being) or possibly The Acoustic Psychiatrists.
Update July 1: Still loving this, but one problem: the mp3 that's been released is so fricking *loud*. When you look at the signal, it's completely bricked (no beat structure in the signal *at all* - incredible!) and it's clipping everywhere. I've ended up loading the file into Garageband and remastering it down by 2.7 dB just so it doesn't give me headaches if I listen to it repeatedly (as I'm currently wont to do). For God's sake people, loudness and zero dynamic range stink. Way to kill your own music.

iMovie and iDvd '11 are pieces of crap

2011-06-22T22:11:00.008+12:00

Just to begin with:

Chaptering within movies is crippled
Positioning and resizing of images in 'drop zones' and menus is crippled
No frame-grabbing of images from videos
It's almost impossible to add transitions without increasing project duration (often apparently by random amounts - this has to be seen to be believed)

All of these very basic functionalities were available even in iMovie '04 on my previous iBook, so Apple has gone out of its way to make recent versions of its programs almost unusable (unless you don't mind creating movies and dvds that look absolutely terrible).

Also, more generally, both programs have work flows that are dumbed down to an incredible degree. Using them is like being trapped in software Idiocracy. What an appalling company Apple has become: rich, abusive towards its users, contemptuous of norms of incremental and logical design.

Nasty Surprises in the Old Testament

2011-06-19T18:08:00.047+12:00

1. Rivers of Babylon
The pop song (in all its forms - one of the best episodes of Mad Men, Season 1 had a great one) cycles around the following lyrics:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down;
ye-eah we wept, when we remembered Zion.
When the wicked
Carried us away in captivity
Require from us a song -
Now how shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

rather less frequently adding:

Let the words of our mouths and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in Thy sight here tonight

As wikipedia observes, while the last couplet comes from Psalm 19, the song mainly rehearses Psalm 137, which recounts the yearnings of the Jewish people for Jerusalem and their freedom while they are in exile, enslaved in Babylon (i.e., after the catastrophe of the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the first temple etc. in 587-586 BCE).

The song has a stately, mournful, undramatic, unaggressive feel (disco versions are metronomic), and it achieves this largely because it cuts off just before Psalm 137 gets interesting, i.e., by causally checking the enemies list back in Israel ('When we get free, we're comin' for you Edomites!'), and by climaxing with brutal, close-to-hand horror. Here's the full Psalm 137:

1 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
2 There on the poplars we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy;they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.
6 May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.
7 Remember, LORD, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. “Tear it down,” they cried,“tear it down to its foundations!”
8 Daughter [of] Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us.
9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

Because the Psalms are relatively free-floating songs/hymns, it's not entirely clear what situation is envisaged here. Are the enslaved Jews just metaphorically by the rivers of Babylon (i.e., in the same sense that anyone who's in LA is 'by the Pacific'), or is this a completely literal scene: Jewish women (presumably) literally on the banks of, e.g., the Euphrates doing their Babylonian masters' laundry, occasionally encouraged by (possibly genuinely curious, not especially sadistic, but the Psalm does go out of its way to call them 'tormentors') overseers/guards to sing songs of their homeland while they work? I suspect that it's the latter. The hanging of harps in the poplars places us outside and possibly at riverside, and the horror image of the final line seems to build on the traditional laundry method that involves slapping the laundry against flat rocks at waters' edge. If this interpretation is on the right track then the horror image is actually two-fold:

The enslaved women who are doing your laundry by beating it against rocks, are thinking of beating your infants' brains out as they do so
The women who are doing your laundry will (eventually and probably sooner rather than later) be providing your child-care.

The infanticide threat therefore is doubly concrete, and no mere fantasy. That said, the intensity of resistance that the fantasy itself expresses is frightening, and should be chastening for slave-holders. Slave rebellion of the household help - check. General Biblical idea that infants are fair game in a rough neighborhood - check.

2. David and Goliath
You may remember, as it were, from Sunday School, the story of unafraid, unarmored shepherd-boy David killing the highly armored, 9 ft tall Philistine warrior, Goliath of Gath with just a sling and a rock (effectively just because he's got God on his side, hence David's lack of fear, confidence, etc.). 1 Samuel 17 continues:

50 So David triumphed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone; without a sword in his hand he struck down the Philistine and killed him.
51 David ran and stood over him. He took hold of the Philistine’s sword and drew it from the sheath. After he killed him, he cut off his head with the sword. When the Philistines saw that their hero was dead, they turned and ran.
52 Then the men of Israel and Judah surged forward with a shout and pursued the Philistines to the entrance of Gath and to the gates of Ekron. Their dead were strewn along the Shaaraim road to Gath and Ekron.
53 When the Israelites returned from chasing the Philistines, they plundered their camp.
54 David took the Philistine’s head and brought it to Jerusalem; he put the Philistine’s weapons in his own tent.
55 As [King] Saul watched David going out to meet the Philistine [Note the cool mini-rewind, flashback structure here!], he said to Abner, commander of the army, “Abner, whose son is that young man?” Abner replied, “As surely as you live, Your Majesty, I don’t know.”
56 The king said, “Find out whose son this young man is.”
57 As soon as David returned from killing the Philistine, Abner took him and brought him before Saul, with David still holding the Philistine’s head.
58 “Whose son are you, young man?” Saul asked him. David said, “I am the son of your servant Jesse of Bethlehem.”

Sunday School never mentioned or elaborated on the beheading part, but it's clearly of the utmost significance to the author of 1 Samuel, hence the repetition. The next chapter flashes back again to the entrance of David into Jerusalem to further flesh out the scene:

6 When the men were returning home after David had killed the Philistine, the women came out from all the towns of Israel to meet King Saul with singing and dancing, with joyful songs and with timbrels and lyres.
7 As they danced, they sang: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.”

So this is the image to have: David is instantly transformed from an unknown shepherd boy to national hero, where this change is capped by his entering the city in triumph before a crowd of thousands with the head of Goliath in his hand (it's irresistible to imagine him holding it aloft). Sunday Bloody Sunday school! At any rate, most of 1 Samuel 18 is concerned with Saul's paranoia about (and attempts to kill) David:

22 Then Saul ordered his attendants: “Speak to David privately and say, ‘Look, the king likes you, and his attendants all love you; now become his son-in-law.’”
23 They repeated these words to David. But David said, “Do you think it is a small matter to become the king’s son-in-law? I’m only a poor man and little known.”
24 When Saul’s servants told him what David had said,
25 Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.
26 When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed,
27 David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.

The gruesome laying waste to Philistines is treated as a sideshow, almost as a gag 'Saul, the Putz, thought he'd set David a task that would get him killed, but no!' And note how David actually kills twice as many Philistines as Saul asked for as the bride price (which was what Saul thought would be enough for David to get himself well and truly killed - Saul's got the Terminator on his hands). Charming. And how utterly miserable that the Philistines have been remembered only incidentally as a kind of joke ('You Philistine!').

3. Joshua and Jericho
One of the most beloved of traditional Sunday School stories is the Battle of Jericho: the Jews parade the Ark of the Covenant around the walls of the city of Jericho once per day for six days, and on the seventh day they do 7 laps of the city with it. Then priests blow their horns, and, at Joshua's command, the people all shout at once, and....the city's wall collapses, the Jews take over the city, the end.

But not so fast! Not only is all the shouting and horn-blowing just pageantry (it's the Ark as a Raiders-style, divine WMD that's doing the work surely!), but also the Sunday School version cuts off just as things start to get interesting in Joshua 6 and Joshua more generally. After the wall comes down:

21 [The Jews] devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys...
24 Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the LORD’s house....
26 At that time Joshua pronounced this solemn oath: “Cursed before the LORD is the one who undertakes to rebuild this city, Jericho: “At the cost of his firstborn son he will lay its foundations; at the cost of his youngest he will set up its gates.”
27 So the LORD was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land.

It's worth mentioning that by the Jews' own account in Joshua the people of Jericho had never done anything to or against the Jews (it's actually a little surprising to me that there's no attempt made to gin up some Gulf of Tonkin-like incident or 'those people disrespected the Lord'-type pseudo-charge against the people of Jericho). Rather the text is very clear: Jericho and its people are just IN THE WAY, i.e., they just happen to be living in a region that God has now supposedly granted uniquely to the Jews. QED. Kill, kill, kill, but retain valuable dry goods (but see below).

Most of the rest of Joshua continues and completes the programme begun at Jericho (although it had been promised explicitly by Moses in Deuteronomy 9 ('Hear, Israel: You are now about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you, with large cities that have walls up to the sky... the LORD your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He will destroy them; he will subdue them before you. And you will drive them out and annihilate them quickly, as the LORD has promised you'): the extermination of every existing settlement or group of people west of the Jordan River (at least) so that Israel will be able to be founded on a blank page. After Jericho comes Ai in Joshua 8 (after some 'not following the Lord's instructions' shenanigans in Joshua 7):

24 When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it.
25 Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai.
26 For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed all who lived in Ai.
27 But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the LORD had instructed Joshua.
28 So Joshua burned Ai and made it a permanent heap of ruins, a desolate place to this day.
29 He impaled the body of the king of Ai on a pole and left it there until evening. At sunset, Joshua ordered them to take the body from the pole and throw it down at the entrance of the city gate. And they raised a large pile of rocks over it, which remains to this day.

And so on. Note that the livestock are spared and carried off this time. Can anyone seriously believe that God changed his instructions from Jericho to Ai? Surely not. The only reality here is that Israel's methods are evolving (note the king's corpse impaled bit), being perfected. It's crazy/overkill/a luxury for a conquering army on the march to waste its enemies' livestock. God isn't changing his mind, the Jews are just becoming better, smarter terrorizers and ethnic cleansers. 'As God wished/commanded us' has just been rubber-stamped over every new malicious step.

Wikipedia's articles on the Book of Joshua and on the concept of herem (which apparently implies an exterminationist agenda) contain good, well-referenced summaries of scholars' hand-wringing about some of the most brazen and abhorrent propagandizing in favor of ethnic cleansing and genocide one could ever hope to see.

4. The Grapes of Wrath
Most of us know the phrase 'The Grapes of Wrath' from Steinbeck's novel and also from The Battle Hymn of the Republic (the 'Glory glory hallelujah, his truth is marching on' one) from the US's Civil War. But the Biblical roots of the phrase are obscure for most people. Although the phrase turns up in Revelations, it first appears in one of the most cinematic and horrifying passages in the Bible: the beginning of Isaiah 63. At this point in Isaiah there's about to be a new birth of freedom for the Jews as they've been released from slavery in Babylon and are now trudging back to their homeland or what's left of it. In Chapter 61, the narrator tells us that now at last all will be well.

4 [The Jews] will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.
⁵ Strangers will shepherd your flocks; foreigners will work your fields and vineyards.
⁶ And you will be called priests of the LORD, you will be named ministers of our God. You will feed on the wealth of nations, and in their riches you will boast.
⁷ Instead of your shame you will receive a double portion, and instead of disgrace you will rejoice in your inheritance. And so you will inherit a double portion in your land, and everlasting joy will be yours.⁸ “For I, the LORD, love justice; I hate robbery and wrongdoing. In my faithfulness I will reward my people and make an everlasting covenant with them.
⁹ Their descendants will be known among the nations and their offspring among the peoples. All who see them will acknowledge that they are a people the LORD has blessed.

This is all sounding very ominous, like we're about to have a replay of the Joshua only with God himself very much on the scene this time. Isaiah 62 builds suspense:

⁸ The LORD has sworn by his right hand and by his mighty arm: “Never again will I give your grain as food for your enemies, and never again will foreigners drink the new wine for which you have toiled;
⁹ but those who harvest it will eat it and praise the LORD, and those who gather the grapes will drink it in the courts of my sanctuary.”

We await the Ark's appearance? But, no, God himself is on the case. Cue the Morricone: it's the man with no name, actually God as John Doe from Se7en, emerging from the haze.

¹ Who is this coming from Edom, from Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson? Who is this, robed in splendor, striding forward in the greatness of his strength? “It is I, proclaiming victory, mighty to save.”
² Why are your garments red, like those of one treading the winepress?
³ “I have trodden the winepress alone; from the nations no one was with me. I trampled them in my anger and trod them down in my wrath; their blood spattered my garments, and I stained all my clothing. ⁴ It was for me the day of vengeance; the year for me to redeem had come. ⁵ I looked, but there was no one to help, I was appalled that no one gave support; so my own arm achieved salvation for me, and my own wrath sustained me. ⁶ I trampled the nations in my anger; in my wrath I made them drunk and poured their blood on the ground.”

The narrator speaks quasi-fantastically for the whole of Israel conceived as 'on the road', trudging back to Zion from their 50 year Babylonian nightmare. Who is the blood-splattered stranger on the road from Bozrah, the mountain fortress of Edom, the narrator/Israel asks?

It's the Jews' God, and he has slaughtered all of the Edomites in their most impregnable fortress. This appears to be grudge-settling of an especially expansive, 'best when it's cold' form: remember Psalm 137 (Section 1 above) in which the Edomites cheered when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem etc.. After 40-50 years of enslavement, it's now payback time for the Jews. God's ticked that he had to do all the work himself this time around (a good Joshua is hard to find I suppose), still, it is accomplished. God's almost literally bathing in the blood of the Jews' enemies. God appears to be hoping that this action will be a one-off, that the Jews themselves will take things from here, i.e., now that they have this fresh example of what sort of barbarism's required to make the vision of Israel as 'land of milk and honey for the Jews' real. God will still be decisive for the Jews, but he'll mainly act in relatively abstract or invisible ways, e.g., invisibly ensuring the Jews win all their battle, etc.. The grapes of wrath, then, are enemies of the Jews being squished like grapes by a wrathful deity championing his favorite people again and again. The Battle Hymn of the Republic's first verse (all that anyone ever remembers) is:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

Yankee soldiers marching against the South invoke the monstrous image of a John Doe God. Yee Haw.

A quick word about the rest of Isaiah 63: in effect the narrator is then led to reflect on what this reboot for the Jews means: won't they just screw everything up all over again? Isn't it inevitable that God will eventually tire of the Jews' lack of righteousness, of their general wickedness and disobedience? Won't God ultimately let the Jews' enemies overrun them as punishment for their inevitable frailty? What's the point if so? The narrator asks a plaintive question which David Plotz calls the toughest question in the Bible:

17 Why, LORD, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you?

The Narrator then seems to morph this question into a kind of plea that God should be more of a hands-on ruler of the Jews, at least if there's to be much hope. Fat chance of that! But interpretation here is very difficult. Isaiah is an incredibly complex, multi-authorial work, full of prophecy but also grappling with the historical realities of the reverse diaspora/new Exodus. Isaiah's fantastical levels of violence and truly psychopathic God are deeply disturbing, even if they're intended as fantasies, just as the infanticide plea in Rivers of Babylon in Psalms is even if it's interpreted just as a fantasy signaling the implacability of Jewish resistance.

Conclusion
In some ways, nothing can prepare one for the horror and terror of the Old Testament, and it's probably appropriate that kids should be spared much of it (of course the Richard Dawkinses of the world think that exposing kids to any religious texts at all is child abuse!). But it's often great literature - extremely cinematic with the spareness of a well-written screenplay - and it's spookily pseudo-historical too (in a way that speaks to the shape of many current events in the Middle East), so it's gripping stuff. At a deep level too the OT grapples with the problem of how to pass on wisdom to future generations who'll be living in very different times (and who'll tend to largely have forgotten all the precedents for the next shocking crisis). The unexpurgated version of the OT is therefore an amazing resource for adults, allowing them, among other things, to reflect upon the simplicitudes of childhood, and the shortness of effective cultural memory.

Comsat Angels: three songs

2011-06-15T19:36:00.003+12:00

Their biggest hit:

Their best song:

A personal favorite (and a demo version may be even better - wow!):

These guys were pretty good... Not so great that anyone who didn't grow up with them should necessarily track them down, but definitely worth dipping an ear into for a few tracks if you feel like exploring a little below the level of the very best stuff (e.g., Cure, Echo, Bauhaus, New Order, Siouxsie) from the post-punk/almost-new pop era.

The Be Good Tanyas: Praising them, spreading the word

2011-06-12T13:30:00.007+12:00

A lot of the best music of the '00s was Roots/Bluegrass/Americana-ish. Some of it sold well at the time (Rabbit Fur Coat, Van Lear Rose, or even Hem's Rabbitsongs) but, amazingly/depressingly those records have been almost forgotten by now (none of those albums were on the end of decade lists in 2010, indicating that their broad critical embraces had always been shallow, fashionable rather than sincere, etc.).

But of course, much terrific music from the genre never got the attention it deserved even at the time, e.g., Freakwater (although a lot of their best stuff was originally released in the '90s) and, here, The Be Good Tanyas. Both groups are amazing song-writers and good players - in short, they rule, and will always be two of my favorite groups from the '00s. They're not music for every mood (but that's true of almost every music that's non-generic/specific enough to be really good), but almost everyone's in the mood for them some of the time (at least weekly in my case). I'd urge anyone to get hold of a copy of The Be Good Tanya's Chinatown album (whence come both the tracks here).

Blancmange's Sad Day and I Can't Explain

2011-06-11T01:19:00.003+12:00

A nice instrumental, and a good manic groover. Just a matter of time before Gaga rips them off I suppose (or maybe Ladytron will get there first and then Gaga can rip them off).

Breakfast at the Bates Motel

2011-06-10T12:55:00.022+12:00

In passing (in fn. 31!) in a recent post I mentioned that the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, notwithstanding its very different genre, bears traces of Psycho, the surprise critical and commercial mega-hit that was still in cinemas as BAT started shooting in October 1960. In this post I present visual evidence that that footnote only described. Click on any image to see it full size.

1. Martin Balsam's Berman/Arbogast
As Arbogast, Balsam enters as a looming head (and he dies that way too). As Berman, Balsam enters as a growing head talking to a stuffed bird (recalling Norman's taxidermy). When the camera swings around Berman looks like an almost-grinning, Norman/Mother.

Balsam's Berman later turns up with a blonde in a shower (although the connection to Psycho is more cognitive than visual in that case). Inside jokes to tease and flatter hipster audience members who remember Balsam as Arbogast? I think so.

2. Eyes
Paul wakes alone the morning after really spending the night with Holly, and we begin in extreme close-up....

3. Statuary
Still half-asleep, the first things Paul sees are the masks that he and Holly stole the previous day, posed (by Holly) in the arms of a strange statue. The statue could have come from Mother's bedroom in Psycho. Truly, Paul's patron/sugar-mama has wretched taste!

4. Overheads
When Paul brings Holly home drunk, the camera on them in the foyer is suddenly overhead for the first time.

5. Stairs
When Paul carries drunkie Holly up the stairs, the camera follows behind them, then reverses back along the first floor balustrade.

BAT was an A-list film, designed to be a big hit, but it was also intended specifically as a hip/cool/sophisticated entertainment. It therefore makes sense that director Edwards, DP Planer, and other technicians involved with the film would want to show that they were up-to-date/hip to the new cinematic language that Psycho represented. And that's what we see when we look for it.

A final question: Would we have got bare-chested George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn in relatively little (bare-legged, and in just a robe or shirt) in bed together, esp. so early in the film, without Marion and Sam (in underwear and bare-chested respectively) at the beginning of Psycho? This is a serious question - one really can at this point in US film history, pinpoint the exact days when standards loosened/taboos were broken.

I don't love Explosions in the Sky

2011-06-07T19:56:00.009+12:00

Mike Spies's preposterous-on-its-face Slate article, Facebook Music: Why we all Love Explosions in the Sky doesn't pass a basic sniff test. Not only are EITS transparently inferior to things like Sigur Ros or Boards of Canada or Radiohead/Jonny Greenwood's solo stuff, they also don't even make the grade on the stuff they're most known for: Friday Night Lights.

EITS provided most of the music for the original FNL (2004) film, e.g.:

EITS's stuff is just OK in my view - pleasant-ish but definitely generic and forgettable. The TV producers evidently agreed, because when they needed theme music for a FNL weekly show they smartly brought in someone with rather more talent to imitate EITS and improve on their basic formula (i.e., to make something genuinely memorable):

Mission accomplished. This weekly FNL theme is by the great (and wonderfuly named) W.G. Snuffy Walden, who was previously responsible for classic opening credits themes for thirty something and Roseanne (as well as other stuff such as The West Wing's theme that I don't rate as highly). Walden's theme is literally EITS done with real musical flare. That one can love. EITS's tepid noodlings? Not so much.

Cinemafantastique #34 Back Cover (The Birds)

2011-06-06T15:39:00.004+12:00

A tidied up version of 'Thomson's Fudging HG'

2011-06-05T03:22:00.015+12:00

David Thomson's Fudging Holly Golightly

2011-06-01T19:00:00.107+12:00

[Notes, June 14, 2011: I've continued to tinker with this essay. While the 'tidied up' version on issuu.com (see here) is always up-to-date, this blogger version may not be. Click on any image to see that image full size.]

David Thomson begins his review (for The New Republic) of Sam Wasson's Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman (hereafter, '5AM') by insulting it ('This book is such a swift, sweet, smart stroll....that it takes a little while for one to realize how slick, undemanding, adorable, and unintelligent it really is.'), and things go downhill from there. After strafing Wasson throughout, Thomson concludes that 5AM is a 'travesty of a book' that no one should take seriously. In his second paragraph, however, Thomson announces that he has bigger fish to fry than Wasson and 5AM. What he really wants to do is share with us his latest, as it happens, broadly debunking or 'cutting down to size', views about (Wasson's subject broadly conceived) Audrey Hepburn and the character of Holly Golightly. Thompson leadingly announces that he wants to 'question the chilly yet unlived-in gamine glamour of Audrey Hepburn', (for once, as it were) to not give 'the brittle Audreyness of Audrey' or 'that priss Audrey' (as he imagines many a modern woman thinking) a pass, and

[T]hat it is past time that we re-examine Audrey Hepburn—to say nothing of that will-of-the wisp, that huckleberry friend, Holly Golightly, a creature who has survived because no one any longer bothers to read Truman Capote’s original description of her.^[1]

In this note, I work through Thomson's article, summarizing it, and quoting passages that I think are especially suspect or unfair, registering any objections to or queries for that material as I go. In broadest terms, I agree with many of Thomson's criticisms of 5AM (at least in substantial outline), but I find his attempted debunking of Audrey Hepburn, Holly Golightly, and the film Breakfast at Tiffany's (hereafter mostly, 'AH', 'HG', and 'BAT-f' as opposed to 'BAT-n' for Capote's novella ^[2]) a mixture of point-missing, uncharitable, and simply inaccurate.

First, however, let's lay out some ground rules (which may be interpreted as concessions according to taste) for discussing BAT-f and BAT-n.

Ground Rule/Concession 1: BAT-f ≠ BAT-n, and that's OK
BAT-f, which largely follows its screenplay due to George Axelrod, albeit with significant embellishments from director Blake Edwards (esp. the party scene (5AM, 129-135) and the ending (5AM, 136-7, 186)), diverges extensively and systematically from BAT-n. BAT-f is:

Less risqué. No implied presence of queer, fluid, or infantilized sexualities, no banter about homosexuality, sexually-transmitted diseases, or drug use, no pregnancies and miscarriages, no bad language, and so on.^[3]
More conventional. A wholly faithful adaptation of BAT-n would have been a comic character and milieu study with melodramatic overtones (e.g., runaway horses, convenient miscarriages) rather than the straight comic romance that BAT-f beats towards (with, e.g., a symbolic wedding ring, a happy-ish ending where a suitor who's grown in stature throughout speaks the truth to and apparently rescues a heroine who's spun out of control, who 'doesn't know who she is any more', and who's dissolved in both real and pathetic fallacy tears).

At the intersection of BAT-f's lesser risqué-ness and greater conventionality lies, of course:

Greater ambiguity over whether HG is a high-end prostitute. In BAT-n, Holly strategically dates and has sex with older, rich men for financial favors, but she argues that that's compatible with her being a non-prostitute:
- 'I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did' (19), and
- 'I've only had eleven lovers -- not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn't count. Eleven. Does that make me a whore? Look at Mag Wildwood. Or Honey Tucker. Or Rose Ellen Ward. They've had the old clap-yo'-hands so many times it amounts to applause. Of course I haven't anything against whores. Except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts. I mean, you can't bang the guy and cash his checks and at least not try to believe you love him. I never have. Even Benny Shacklett and all those rodents. I sort of hypnotized myself into thinking their sheer rattiness had a certain allure.' (82)^[4]
That is, BAT-n maintains a zone of ambiguity around the proper interpretation of HG's activities. BAT-f, however, expands that original zone of ambiguity to include the activities themselves, by never ruling out the possibility that Holly's strategic dating and soaking of rich men for their money may be mostly or even entirely chaste. Indeed, BAT-f even allows those who want to, to believe that Paul and Holly don't have sex after their day spent together doing 'new things' including shop-lifting (5AM, 85 discusses how the censor's script approval was conditional on the presence of this specific ambiguity.) That may seem preposterous, but it is the film's proposition. And, of course, AH wouldn't have done the film without BAT-f's producers Jurow and Shepherd assuring her that an interpretation of HG as a relatively pure kook/dreamer of dreams/lop-sided, cockeyed romantic would always remain tenable. ^[5] Hence:
- AH's remark in a NY Times article (quoted at 5AM, 121) covering the day of the shoot at Tiffany's in Midtown:
  'It's true that we've left the sex ambiguous in the script... Too many people think of Holly as a tramp, when actually she’s just putting on an act for shock effect, because she’s very young.^[6] Besides, I know Truman Capote very well, and much of what is good and delicate about his writing is his elusiveness.'^[7]
- Paramount's all-court-press 'Kook' publicity campaign for BAT-f (5AM, 144-6)
- AH in interviews at Premieres saying that Holly is '[w]hat they call in America these days a 'Kook' (laughs), which is a dizzy, gay, type of girl. [Int: Anything like you?] I'm not quite that way, no (laughs).'

In any case, however, claims about BAT-f's impact or enduring appeal or about how good it is are largely distinct from claims about its faithfulness to or success as an adaptation of BAT-n. Would a significantly more faithful adaptation of BAT-n have been able to be made in 1960? Would it have been any good? Would it have had any real impact or enduring appeal over and above what BAT-n would have had in any case? Fun questions to puzzle over, as it were, 'at the pub', but all answers are inherently highly speculative.

Ground Rule/Concession 2: AH is a good fit for HG. No, really.
Many people, from Capote to AH's best biographer, Barry Paris, have thought that, at bottom, AH was a poor fit for BAT-n's HG (or her BAT-f offshoot), e.g.,

'In the novella, Holly says she's "only had eleven lovers -- not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen." One could believe that of Monroe, but never of Hepburn.... Audrey from backwater Texas? Not likely.' (Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 173, Berkeley Publishing Group, 1996)

But not so fast! That thought's premature for at least three separate reasons.

BAT-n's Manhattan HG could hardly be more AH-like (and less MM-like) as a physical type (esp. when that's broadly construed to include semi-abstract physical features such as 'vivacity', 'youthfulness', 'precocity', 'stylishness', 'chic-ness', and the like).
1. The reader first encounters HG in photographs of 'an odd wood sculpture, an elongated carving of a head, a girl's, her hair sleek and short as a young man's....here was the spit-image of Holly Golightly'. (6, my italics).
2. Next the barman, Joe Bell dismisses the thought that HG might be back in the city: 'If she was in this city I'd have seen her... I see pieces of her all the time, a flat little bottom, any skinny girl that walks fast and straight' (9, my italics).
3. Finally, we experience the narrator seeing HG for the first time: 'I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy's hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.' (12, my italics)
4. After some further glancing encounters, the narrator continues: 'Of course we'd never met. Though actually, on the stairs, in the street, we often came face-to-face; but she seemed not quite to see me. She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so. One might have thought her a photographer's model, perhaps a young actress, except that it was obvious, judging from her hours, she hadn't time to be either. (15, my italics) ^[8]
5. [Item a5] In general, although HG is relatively uneducated, she's learning and catching up fast, is a good reader once motivated, and is in any case, quick and well-spoken (and always was according to both Doc and Berman). Consider the balance of her retort (very AH-sounding as it happens, cf. fn. 16 below) to the narrator/'Fred' after he's condescended to her about knowing Wuthering Heights principally as a film: '"Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege."' (62) Or consider even the whimsical alliterations in her notes, e.g. 'Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best.' (110) Talked to any 19 year olds recently? ^[9]
Perhaps HG's chic thinness could have been allowed to lapse for the film, just as her boy's hair was (although BAT-f effectively gets some of that for free from our star-memory of AH in Roman Holiday), but HG's precociousness and her youthfulness possibly excusing all behaviors almost certainly couldn't.^[10]
Holly's back-story in BAT-n is supposed to be, prima facie, highly improbable given the Manhattan HG we are acquainted with. After Doc recounts the first half of Holly's backstory to him, the narrator/'Fred' finesses the problem with 'It was too implausible not to be fact'. (68) Any actress who actively suggested simply as a matter of her physical type that HG is a hayseed would be miscast. (Note too that Capote was good friends with HG-like, 1940s top model, Dorian Leigh, who was from San Antonio TX, and whose improbable combination of pixie-/waif-ish-ness and hauteur made her an overnight sensation at age 27 (although her agents thought she was 19!).)
The details of Holly's past in BAT-n (at 66-70) are sufficiently ghastly and gothic that the point is vividly made that Holly is extremely anomalous given her general, regional background. We understand that she's a freak or sport of nature developed under conditions of extreme hardship.^[11] She's a surprising beauty and creature more generally, that's the point (cf. Natassia Kinski in the TX boondocks). Doc tells us that:
1. He first encountered Lulamae and her brother Fred as starving, malnutrited orphans ('Well, you never saw a more pitiful something. Ribs sticking out everywhere, legs so puny they can't hardly stand, teeth wobbling so bad they can't chew mush.').
2. Lulamae and Fred were stealing milk and turkey eggs from him (to stay alive), and were:
3. Runaways from ominous makeshift situations ('[They'd] been living with some mean, no-count people a hundred miles east of Tulip. She had good cause to run off from that house.').^[12]
4. [Item c4] Lulamae flourished extraordinarily and immediately once taken in ('She plumped out to be a real pretty woman. Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio.'). Then:
5. Doc proposed marriage quickly to his (already at 14!) much more quick-witted gal, and Lulamae agreed with a kind of precocious naiveté ('Course we'll be married. I've never been married before.').^[13]
6. Lulamae was materially well-looked after ("We all doted on her. She didn't have to lift a finger, 'cept to eat a piece of pie."), but:
7. Material satisfactions and being a pretty bird in a cage were not nearly enough for her, and things almost immediately went Sam Shepherd. ("'Cept to comb her hair and send away for all the magazines. We must've had a hunnerd dollars' worth of magazines come into that house. Ask me, that's what done it. Looking at show-off pictures. Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.")
BAT-f keeps 2-6, but only hints at 1 (just HG's dream murmurings: 'Where are you, Fred? It's cold. There--There's snow in the wind.') and omits 7.
Now for the amazing coincidence that AH as a child suffered serious hardship during the Nazi's occupation of Holland in WW2, including grave malnutrition near the end.^[14] AH was therefore more HG-like than almost any other castable actress in terms of the range of conditions she'd actually lived through.
But is this such a coincidence? On the one hand, surely, yes. Jurow and Shepherd said they wanted AH for her duality: classy/chic, etc. but also sweet, sensitive, almost down-home. They never said that they thought she was right for the part because they'd remembered the horror details of her background.^[15] On the other hand, no, not at all. Why is AH so affecting? She inspires love as all great beauties do, but she also triggers empathetic feelings generally, and feelings of protectiveness specifically (and Tierney, Simmons, Taylor, Leigh, etc. do not). It is reasonable (though not rationally compulsory) to speculate that AH's early, bone-deep exposure to the cares of the world helped forge her very rare combination of affective powers.^[16] Thus the 'brittle Audreyness of Audrey' that Thomson derides may in fact stem from the place where AH's biography brushes wings with HG's. And that's to say that, however indirectly or inadvertently, AH may have been cast as HG for the best possible reason.

In sum, then, modulo BAT-f's broadening of BAT-n's zone of ambiguity about sex (see Ground Rule 1), AH seems to me to be well cast as HG.^[17]

Ground Rule/Concession 3: BAT-f isn't a masterpiece, and that's OK
Nobody thinks BAT-f is a masterpiece. Rather, almost everyone agrees that it's a delightful, even beloved film with a great, possibly uniquely-affecting star, terrific technical elements, and much else besides. Most people will and probably should see BAT-f at some point (they'd be crazy to miss it), but it doesn't aim especially high, it's got plenty of flaws, and nobody's film education is fatally incomplete without it.

And that's OK. BAT-f's obvious peer films include To Catch a Thief, Funny Face, and Charade.^[18] These too are polished, mainstream entertainments of a very high order that are nonetheless a notch below their directors' and legendary stars' very best work. We like these films in spite of their not being, e.g., The Philadelphia Story, Singin' in the Rain, Roman Holiday, Rear Window, North by Northwest, My Fair Lady, Two for the Road.^[19]

Consider how BAT-f's league of films is treated on the various AFI 100 years.... lists:

BAT-f is #61 on the top love stories/passions list (cf., Roman Holiday is #4, Annie Hall is #11, My Fair Lady is #12, To Catch a Thief is #46, The Apartment is #62)
Audrey Hepburn is #3 female star/legend (behind Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis)
Moon River is the #4 Song (behind Over the Rainbow, As Time Goes By, and Singin' in the Rain)
BAT-f is not on the comedies/laughs list (cf. Annie Hall is #4, The Apartment is #20)
BAT-f is not on either of the overall top 100 film lists (Annie Hall is #31/#35, The Apartment is #93/#80, My Fair Lady is #91). Neither is To Catch a Thief, Funny Face or Charade (the last two aren't on any AFI list, although their stars burn brightly)

And as for their IMDb scores (as of May 2011):

BAT-f scores 7.8 (not close to the 8.1/8.2 cutoffs for most IMDb 'top' lists, i.e., the near- 'masterpiece' level we may suppose)
Charade scores an 8, To Catch a Thief 7.5, and Funny Face a shocking 7.0 (the average IMDb-score is 6.8!)
The Sound of Music scores 7.9, Mary Poppins 7.7, Marnie 7.2, The Birds 7.9

In sum, AFI and IMDb agree with each other, and with our own remarks. As far as broadly comparable, light fare goes, BAT-f is in the pack of very good, critically second tier films. Claims about BAT-f's exceptional significance or influence are therefore distinct from claims about its exceptional quality.

Closely Reading Thomson
Thomson begins by minding the gap between BAT-n and BAT-f (all Thomson quotes are in red text):

[BAT-n] is the story told by a gay guy in New York about meeting Holly (real name Lula Mae) Golightly. Lula Mae is a wreck from the country whose smart talk and gaping schtick does not obscure her grim life as a prostitute or the lies she is living. Even Wikipedia admits there is “a foreboding edge” in the novella that has been cleaned up in the movie. Clean is spiffy, but it is not reliable.

But this both underestimates BAT-n's ambiguities and misdescribes its content. Yes, there are hints that both the narrator and barkeep Joe Bell are gay. But each wrestles with both physical attraction to and obsession with Holly. And, as we discussed at length in our Ground Rule 1, while BAT-n's HG certainly strategically dates rich men, that that amounts to prostitution isn't a sure thing.

Moreover, Holly is supposed to have been in California for two years before coming to NYC, and while she may have some self-destructive tendencies (e.g., to not settle down/move on too quickly, to be simultaneously materialistic and spend-thrift, to have both a nose for mischief and a talent for being completely incurious), she's not necessarily much worse on these fronts than average, slightly dissolute, contemporary college kids (whom she's of age with). She wasn't a wreck when she first came to the big city, and she isn't one at the beginning of BAT-n either. Whatever grimness and forboding floats around in BAT-n has to be weighed against not only Holly's general joie de vivre but also her strangely open yet hopeful end: HG as a wild thing still on the prowl, in Africa perhaps, apparently leaving legendary traces of herself across several continents. Conversely, the basic sweetness of BAT-f has to be weighed against the loss-of-identity jeopardy in which it places Holly; that, by the end of BAT-f, HG doesn't know who she is any more. That Paul is willing to step in to try to rescue her and 'solve' that problem for her (now that, thanks partially to her, he's on the rise) gives feminists palpitations for sure, but it doesn't and shouldn't entirely convince or reassure anyone. The pleasure all of us can and do take from BAT-f's happy-ish ending, sealed with a kiss-and-cat sandwich, is real, but it's necessarily fleeting and possibly slightly guilty.^[20] For this reason, at least in my experience, there's always a surprising amount to discuss post-movie on any date that includes BAT-f.^[21]

And what is the force of Thomson's 'not reliable' here? Presumably just that the additional ambiguities BAT-f builds into Holly, not to mention AH's and Paramount marketing's 'kook' resolution of those ambiguities, are simply incredible. But most of the young women who responded to HG in BAT-f, and who took her as a totem of and partial role model for a desirable single life in the city, projected real freedom and careers for themselves, not gold-digging and dependency, let alone fully-blown courtesanship. Protecting the possibility of purely kooky/dizzy/gay HG not only expanded BAT-f's audience, it also, crucially, made it easy for members of that audience to take just what they needed from HG, and to paste their own projections for themselves onto that character. Moreover, since neither having to be rescued (BAT-f) nor having to flee the city to parts legendary (BAT-n) was the preferred option for real world HG-wannabes, even the most half-hearted proto-feminist could conclude 'avoid fundamental dependence on men' as a guiding principle, particularly if a chance to take Manhattan should ever come her way. Why isn't that reliable enough for Thomson?

After swiftly praising Wasson for providing many details about how BAT-f's turn to the less risqué and more conventional was effected as a series of compromises (with censors, with AH's personal wishes, with commercial realities in 1960 more generally, and so on), Thomson lets us know that he thinks that at least some of those compromises were both more shameful and more avoidable than Wasson and his sources let on.

The screenwriter George Axelrod pondered long and hard on how this material could “work” as a movie. Then he got it, and Wasson treats this yielding as a triumph. The guy, Paul, could be straight, but a gigolo. There could be a love story between him and Holly (because love stories are life preservers when the plane goes down), but they could be so busy having sex with other people that they never quite made it together. They were chums. Do you see? I know, this was fanciful even in 1961, but suppose we cast George Peppard as the guy, and Audrey Hepburn as Holly. Peppard is so dull he hardly gets noticed, and Audrey is so adorable we don’t have to think about her. That could work, couldn’t it? With good clothes, and a song? No, there isn’t a song in the book. There usually aren’t.

We get it: Thomson thinks poorly of BAT-f's comic romance tack. Still, I fail to see the value of this sort of highly insinuating, serial cheap-shotting. Once BAT-f's producers decided to refract BAT-n into a more conventional romance (and hire writers accordingly), then articulating a non-cloying version of the romantic end-/goal-state and finding believable obstacles-to-romance^[22] just are part of the very-hard-to-play-well game. It was therefore natural for Axelrod to try shading HG's trait in BAT-n of somewhat abstract, possibly perverse (because it seems so self-destructive), probably unending restlessness into something like a gender-stereotype-reversed instance of a classical obstacle-to-romance trait: 'struggles with commitment'. And while Axelrod may have originally made Paul a 'kept man'/toy boy/gigolo to heterosexualize the character and as a buttressing/back-up obstacle-to-romance, the thematic potential of that addition is very significant.

First, and most obviously, symmetrizing some of the basic terms and conditions of Holly's and Paul's lives, and introducing the character of Paul's predatory, glamorous female patron/benefactor/client helpfully muddies the moral waters. That is, HG's own ambiguously disreputable activities don't stand out when they are set against a backdrop of general disreputableness. Second, and most importantly, the deep thematic point is that precisely because both members of the favored couple are independently using sex or its promise as currency, they establish their relationship with each other as a respite from and counterpoint to all of that predatory, economically-mediated stuff. Provocatively/paradoxically their non-sexual/non-romantic relationship is sealed by Holly spending part of a night in Paul's arms in his bed
To be clear, and despite what Edwards and Axelrod may occasionally, incautiously have said, Holly's and Paul's symmetrical jobs/life-styles aren't obstacles to them getting together romantically in the trivial, mechanical sense that those jobs/lifestyles leave them too busy, tired, etc. to find each other. Rather, they are obstacles-to-romance in a constitutive sense: the couple that we know by genre convention will and should be lovers have constituted each other as non-romantic friends. The romantic and sexual realm for both of them is a realm of money and power and dependency. Friends (even very risqué friends), however, can be free together. When Paul starts to desymmetrize by selling his first new story, however, everything changes...

None of this is mere character busy-work (contrary to Thomson's multiple, often incorrect insinuations - 'life preservers', 'so busy'). Rather 'the ideal lovers who've constituted each other just as friends because each has independently confounded love and romance with money and power and control' is a bona fide, novel engine for a romantic comedy. It's entirely comparable to the great screwball plot-engine of over-marriage or Austen's plot-engine of the over-confident but lucky match-maker who's most clueless about herself. Axelrod was really onto something, and he knew it.

A final comment about this disastrous paragraph from Thomson's review. Thomson says 'there isn't a song in the book', oleaginously amplifying the point by adding, 'There usually aren’t.' But there is a song early on in BAT-n. It's not 'Moon River' exactly, but it's vividly outlined and it's staged more or less exactly as in the film's signature scene:

'Also, she had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy's adolescent voice... there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pineywoods or prairie. One went: Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.' (16-17; at 65, Doc enters BAT-n whistling this song. See discussion below.).

Since 5AM, 96 discusses in detail how this section from the book made it into Axelrod's script and how that script element then struck Mancini, Thomson should not have botched this point. At any rate, I'll reserve further discussion of BAT-f's adaptation of BAT-n's song ideas and the re-positioning of the song in the film for when we consider Thomson's frontal assault on 'Moon River' below.

Axelrod was a deft, clever, talented man. But he was also a Hollywood engineer who wanted his picture to “go.” The dawning of the modern woman did not cross his busy mind.

But Wasson's loose 'dawn of the modern woman' thesis about BAT-f and the film's HG is principally a thesis about the reception and influence and enduring appeal of the film not about its genesis (or its quality or its faithfulness as an adaptation or....). Thus, Wasson quotes critic Judith Crist saying 'Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a progressive step in the depiction of women in the movies, perhaps unintended by Axelrod and Edwards' (5AM, 138; my italics), and he spends much of 5AM clucking over the ironies of BAT-f's progressive reception, given the film-makers' actual motives, e.g., AH's general fearfulness, and her personal, relative conservatism about motherhood and marriage. Paramount played up the later greatly in publicity for BAT-f. See, e.g., 5AM's extraordinarily well-chosen epigraph. 'Quel beast of a calculating, overtly moralizing film company!' one wants to say, channeling one's own inner HG, but it was no act as far as AH was concerned ('I'm not quite that way, no.').

And Wasson settles the minimal logical point that some women received BAT-f and AH's HG very positively by giving a starring role in his narrative to Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a co-founder of Ms magazine. Pogrebin testifies at length to being influenced:

'In those years [i.e., after the film came out] I really considered myself an altar [sic.] ego of Holly Golightly' (5AM, 153) and
'Holly was my formative prefeminist role model' (5AM, 161)^[23]

Wasson may indeed exaggerate the significance of BAT-f and of AH's HG for modern women (see our fn. 1 for some initial misgivings), but snarky remarks that mischaracterize the underlying claims don't help make that case.

But with Blake Edwards directing (a late replacement for the edgier John Frankenheimer—and why? Because Audrey and her husband, Mel Ferrer, had not heard of Frankenheimer), with Edith Head and Henry Mancini, the picture went.

Thomson gets his account of Frankenheimer's dumping from Frankenheimer himself in one-liner mode.^[24]. Wasson, however, paints AH and co. rather more sympathetically (5AM, 90-92). AH wanted the security of an A-list director, both as a general point of principle and in the specific light of her insecurities about not being a trained actress. AH's camp duly provided BAT-f's producers with its list of satisfactory alternatives, most of whom AH had worked with before, including Wyler, Wilder, Cukor, and Zinnemann. Edwards got the job when no one on that list was available, and because he'd just worked well with a massive star, Cary Grant, on the hit service comedy, Operation Petticoat, which had been a massive hit.^[25] Prima facie, that's a perfectly reasonable chain of commercial, star-centric reasoning: 'Nothing against Frankenheimer, but we want someone from this A-list, and if that can't happen then at least someone who's worked closely and well with a peer big star.' AH also put a particular premium in this instance on 'safety-first' in this case because her previous two films (Green Mansions and The Unforgiven) had been commercial and critical failures (and as a result they've been little seen ever since). Most career-savvy, well-managed top stars would have done the same.

Needless to say, or so one would have thought, since the (intermittently excellent) Frankenheimer never exhibited any subsequent interest in, let alone special affinity for romantic comedy, with hindsight, he probably wasn't the best person to direct Axelrod's BAT-f script (or anything like it that met the producers' specifications). Safety first, commercial, star-centric reasoning worked for once. Those are the obvious, moderate conclusions to draw about Frankenheimer's losing the BAT-f job. That Thomson doesn't grant them is, at best, odd and uncharitable.

Next Thomson unfavorably compares BAT-n's translation to the screen with the adaptation of James Jones’s 'unfilmable' From Here to Eternity (FHTE-n) into a criticial and commercial smash in 1953.

They fudged? Yes and no. They omitted language and words. They tamed attitudes. But they did not alter things. They did not introduce lies. I don’t think there was ever any doubt that the characters played by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr were having sex. And although “prostitution” was not stated in the Montgomery Clift-Donna Reed relationship, there are moments when she (yes, Donna Reed played the whore) gives that woman a nasty, fearful undertone that is still arresting—when the truth is there for anyone to see and hear. The film is a Reader’s Digest abridgement of the novel, but you know what James Jones meant and you do not want to be in the Army. The witless dawning in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by contrast, is that you are ready to be an East Side prostitute if you can look, and dress, and sing like Audrey.

We have a series of responses. First, it wouldn't be shocking to learn that FHTE-f is a better adaptation of its source than BAT-f is of its. FHTE-f won 8 Oscars including all of the top craft awards (picture, direction, screenplay, editing, cinematography, etc.), whereas BAT-f only won the two music Oscars (score, song). It should be better, and in any case we agree (Ground Rule 3) that BAT-f is more of a delight than a masterpiece.

Second, the films and their underlying books are so very different that it's hard to see what the real points of comparison are. FHTE is an ultra-serious drama. Facing up to gritty realities and moral murk is its core line of work, hence it's not too hard to believe that its evasions/fudging can be kept relatively minor or technical. Think also of Bloch's novel Psycho, in this regard: Norman is fat and middle-aged, and mother beheads her victims. The latter point was never going to make it past the censors in 1960, but Marion and Arbogast getting repeatedly stabbed is quite horrifying enough, so that fudge only counts as a minor change. And making Norman young and attractive, while a commercial no-brainer (and ripe with thematic possibilities), is also, from a certain perspective, only a minor change. As Thomson might add: looking at the finished product, you still do not want to visit the Bates Motel.

But that's gritty, un-elusive drama. It's plausible that comedy is going to be a tougher nut to crack. Timing and conventions and expectations matter immensely in comedy, and in romantic comedies we further have to able to identify intimately with the leads.^[26] If standards and expectations in society change over time (or if a film's much broader audience has very different standards and expectations) a comedic adaptation has to change, which risks everything. What was once comedic starts to read as awkward or pitiless, comically persistent characters may start to seem like frightening stalkers, and so on. To get the overall comedy-and-charm souflée to rise again may now require further changes, and we're off to the races...

Third, as we discussed in Ground Rule 1, claims about the value of a film are largely distinct from claims about its faithfulness or success as an adaptation. Thomson may be right that a significantly more faithful adaptation of BAT-n could have been made in 1960 (perhaps by Cassavetes, say). But we don't know that. And, above all, it's perfectly reasonable for Wasson and others to focus on the very good film that was made rather than hare off after (how many?) multiply hypothetical alternates of unknowable significance.

Fourth, Thomson's concluding (and conclusory), invidious comparison:

The witless dawning in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by contrast, is that you are ready to be an East Side prostitute if you can look, and dress, and sing like Audrey.

is especially galling. As we saw in Ground Rule 1, BAT-n maintains a zone of ambiguity around the proper interpretation of HG's strategic dating of older, rich men for financial favors, which BAT-f only expands. Thomson is not entitled to rewrite both the film and the novella to his own unambiguous specifications. The film's HG is definitely still a shady character. To put Holly's $50 tips for the powder room, and $100 per week from Sally Tomato in perspective: on Mad Men, Season 1 set in NYC in 1960, secretaries earn $35 per week and junior exec. Pete Campbell earns $75 per week ('Is she or isn't she?' her agent asks). Of course, there's a lot of shadiness going around, what with Paul and his patron/sugar-mama. ('$1000. Take her away somewhere for a week.' That's 6 months wages for a secretary!) And 'kook', 'café society celebrity', 'playgirl', and 'gold-digger' cover a multitude of sins. And the line from the screenplay that AH herself clung onto - someone who finds it 'useful being top banana in the shock department' - can't just be wished away.^[27]

A fairer charge than Thomson's, would be that what dawns in BAT-f is that if you can look, and dress, and sing like Audrey, then being a single girl living by herself, making her own rules, having a high, proto-Sex-and-the-City time in Manhattan might be on the cards. Feminists and others had to edit the film's HG a lot to extract that of course. Wasson's star witness, Pogrebim says:

'She was a woman you wanted to be. Of course, she didn’t have a profession and I was career oriented, so that was a little troublesome'. (5AM, 153)

But of course that's only the beginning. While aspects of HG both in the book and in the film do make her a prototype for That Girl, Mary Richards, Annie Hall, Carrie Bradshaw, and so on, one also has to reckon with her child-like-ness and general messed-up-ness (forgivable in someone so young, but still....).^[28], These latter traits aren't strictly admirable (no matter how much fun they make HG as a character^[29]), lead Holly to become ever more explicitly and dangerously dependent on men, and in BAT-f in particular they cause Holly to lose her identity throughout the film, ultimately putting her in the position of (near metaphysically) needing to be rescued. As we've already emphasized, BAT-f's final, gooey resolution is a guilty pleasure, especially for feminists.

Thomson now usefully tears apart Wasson's thesis that “There was always sex in Hollywood, but before Breakfast at Tiffany’s, only the bad girls were having it.” (13) Thomson cites Fran Kubelik in The Apartment, a range of Hitchcock hotties, and a number of the mighty gals from the golden screwball era as counterexamples. And although they're not strict counterexamples to Wasson's thesis because they're non-Hollywood, early French new wave films regularly featured non-bad, sexually confident single girls, from Jean Seberg's Patricia in Breathless to Chabrol's bubbly though troubled group of Parisiennes in Les Bonnes Femmes (only Clotilde Joano's Jacqueline, the group's dreamy, highly romantic 'good girl' dies!).^[30] In sum, Wasson's major thesis doesn't seem to answer to anything important in the actual history of movies. Maybe focusing more narrowly on BAT-f's audience-reception at the specific post-Psycho^[31], post-Breathless moment it arrived, AH-superpowered would have helped.

A more general cultural perspective would probably have helped even more. Two examples:

Wasson asks for trouble by bandying about phrases like 'dawn of the modern woman' while showing little interest in the political movements of the period, and drawing no systematic pictures for the reader of what the status quo prospects for most U S women were in (presumably immediately pre-dawn) 1960, and what they were in, say, 1975 by way of contrast. 'Blink and you'll miss 'em' anecdotes from star witness Progrebim about, e.g., searching for a job in 1960 out of the 'Help Wanted: Females' column (5AM, 150) aren't really sufficient. Even summaries of something as popular as Gail Collins's When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present (2009), Section I would have been helped 5AM's credibility a lot on this front.
By focusing almost exclusively on BAT-f and its personnel components,^[32] Wasson disconnects BAT-f from other popular culture developments. For example, BAT-f along with The Apartment is a foundational text for the slightly older-pitched, sophisticated pop music, associated most prominently with Bacharach and David, that existed alongside the surging youth culture of the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, etc.. There’s a touch of AH's Holly in the way Petula Clark hits the 'just listen to the muuu-sic of the traffic in the city' line in her (Bacharach/David-aping) 1965 hit 'Downtown'. And lyrics such as 'Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty/How can you lose? The lights are much brighter there/You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares' and 'Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossanova/You'll be dancing with 'em, too, before the night is over' plug into the most up-beat aspects BAT-f's vision of single life in the city more generally. But 5AM isn't interested in making these sorts of connections.

To be fair, it's not clear that opening out 5AM in any of these ways would allow it to keep its self-consciously little-black-dress-like, slender volume (~50K words, mass-market) profile.

Back to Thomson, who now turns to Hepburn herself:

Audrey Hepburn is an unquestioned star of the ’50s and early ’60s. She was beautiful, she had lakes for eyes and a boy’s body, as well as a highly developed instinct for fashion..... Audrey had a pristine charm, an armored innocence, in an age that (on screen at least) was very nervous about sex.

So far, so reasonable.

For this reason, I think, and because her place in our dreamscape was as the brilliant child, Audrey invariably played with men much older than she was—Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer, and so on, all the way to Rex Harrison. There is only one worthwhile picture in which Audrey was matched with a man of her own age, the Stanley Donen-Frederic Raphael film Two for the Road, where she is married to Albert Finney (who was seven years her junior).

It's hard to say what's more aggravating about this passage: that Thomson begins by saying AH's male leads were invariably much older (which is of course wildly false), only then to immediately take it back, or that when Thomson does acknowledge AH's films with roughly-same-age male leads, he baldy asserts that only one is any good. Two for the Road is indeed a near-masterpiece, but just helping oneself to the corollary that BAT-f, The Children's Hour, How to Steal a Million, Wait Until Dark, and Robin and Marian aren't so much as worthwhile, is quite a cheek.^[33] That AH had angelic and child-like qualities ('brilliant child') that optimized her for ingenue/student/daughter/supplicant roles is a legitimate, descriptive point. It even gets at some of what makes AH's HG troubling for feminists if she's taken whole (which she usually wasn't as we've seen). But everything else that Thomson says here is pure assertion and, in my view, little more than deliberately infuriating overkill.

Audrey talks like an actress alone on a sound-stage. It’s not just her curiously unattached accent—born in Belgium, raised in Britain, at work in America, but permanently in an elocution class, plaintive, touching on self-pity or self-congratulation, never really talking to people. She could do lines, she could talk to the cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and she oozed a cozy sympathy. But, oddly, she was warmest when singing, even if she was not trained in that work. And so she makes Holly an isolated, precious creature, someone talking to herself.

Well, no accounting for taste and all that, but I find AH's version of Hollywood, mid-Atlantic English, as well as the slight formality and deliberateness of her basic speech patterns and line readings pretty enchanting (and I suspect that I'm not alone in this). Perhaps then we can just agree to disagree with Thomson on this general point. But there's also a strong, relatively objective case (effectively an instance of our Ground Rule 2) that AH's voice works well for HG in particular.

Recall that Berman (in both BAT-n and BAT-f) gave HG French lessons for a year to rid her of her hick accent ('Figured once she could imitate French, she could imitate English'). And that shows; HG as written does sound a little like she's 'permanently in elocution class'. Her sentences are very composed even when she curses (as though she's speaking an easy foreign language). And HG is, as we've observed, surprisingly well-spoken (Ground Rule 2, Item a5) and also urbane-sounding (although perhaps with the odd note of trying-too-hard), certainly much more so than Mag Wildwood, who's quite the unreconstructed Arkansas yokel (in both her expression and her ideas) by comparison.^[34]

Moreover, insofar as the 'AH's HG is always just talking to herself' charge strikes home at all (and let's suppose for the sake of the argument that there's something in AH's screen presence that this complaint speaks to), to that extent I'd contend that the charge mainly just gets at two closely-related facts about BAT-n that BAT-f reproduces, albeit in weakened forms.

First, in BAT-n, HG is hyper-opinionated and a great speechifier. She was this way even before she came to the big city ('better than the radio'; Ground Rule 2, Item c4), and now the density and multi-culture of city life has amplified this aspect of her character. HG's been exposed her to an incredible amount for someone so young, and now talk up a streak, blue and otherwise, about almost anything. Consider, for example, this doozy where HG deduces and embraces the bottom of the 'marriage-should-reduce-to-love (any love)' slippery slope that has gender-neutral marriage on its upper slopes:

'If I were free to choose from everybody alive, just snap my fingers and say come here you, I wouldn't pick José. Nehru, he's nearer the mark. Wendell Wilkie. I'd settle for Garbo any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or -- listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with [1920s champion race-horse] Man o' War, I'd respect your feeling. No, I'm serious. Love should be allowed. I'm all for it.' (82-3)

BAT-f retains this speechifying, 'Holly tells us how the world should be run' side of BAT-n, but weakens it. There isn't time in a film to air all of HG's street-smart wisdom, and the Breen Office/Production Code Administration would never have approved a script with all of her best stuff in it.

Second, BAT-n's basic structure is that a relatively self-effacing, passive narrator watches and listens to HG. She talks and acts, and we and the narrator react to that. BAT-f's weakens this 'It's all about Holly' basic structure by its fundamental swerve into romance and its beefing up of the narrator into 'Paul Varjak' with his own travails and explicit character arc. These changes symmetrize, though not completely. BAT-f's still mostly about (watching, listening, reacting to) Holly, and it only has one star.

As far as I see, then, AH does a very good job of playing the precocious, empathetic-but-still-very-self-absorbed, center-of-everyone's-attention Holly that lingers, albeit somewhat softened from the book. If that's principally a case of AH being very shrewdly cast so that her weaknesses are actually good for the charcter, and otherwise of AH just working within her limits, and so on, then, well, so be it. And if AH had to work closely with her director to pull off what she did in BAT-f, then so what? If Edwards was happy to nurse AH along, why's that any of our concern?

What else could Thomson be trying to get at with his completely general claim that there's a solipsistic tendency in AH's speech and presence on screen charge? The following suggests an answer:

In His Girl Friday, you know Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are caught in a spiral of marriage, break-up, and re-marriage because of the furious intimacy with which they talk to each other.
Conversation, or natural, fluent battle. It needed writers, of course, and directors as alert to talk as Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. But it took players, too, and voices. And this brings me to Audrey Hepburn.

Let's grant, and not just for the sake of the argument, that AH is no match for, say, Colbert or Stanwyck as verbal swordswoman (a fortiori that she's not a dramatic powerhouse like Davis or Streep). AH indeed might not have been able to handle the lead in, say, a Sturges or a McCarey film. But I don't see AH's peers, Kelly, Taylor, Novak, Marie Saint, Simmons, etc. climbing those Everests either (and Davis didn't think she had a successor until Streep showed up). Thomson disagrees. According to him, whereas AH talks like she's alone on a sound-stage:

Kelly insisted on talking to her men. She challenges them. And she had her own voice—snooty, sexy, knowing.

But I'm not convinced that Thomson's carving at any joints here. Kelly is more of a sex-bomb than AH, but she's no verbal swash-buckler either. Consider Cary Grant (just as Thomson invites us to). He has incendiary chemistry with Kelly in To Catch a Thief and again with AH in Charade. And modulo Kelly's and AH's rather different sorts of sex appeal, it appears to be the same sort of chemistry, one that's anchored finally by the near-supernatural stylishness and poise/ease of the leads, and by the stellar direction and technical values. From the leads out, as it were, these films flat out look amazing. They have clever scripts too, but they aren't 'furiously intimate', and there's no genre-wide, underlying investigation of the metaphysics of marriage juicing everything up, raising the stakes of even the silliest situations.^[35]

Grant's 1937-1942 pairings with, e.g., Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, etc., however, feel qualitatively different. We're out of a world of leading ladies' languid looks and into a world of fast-talking, funny-as-hell gals, and pitched battles between the sexes every time. The banter back and forth both means more and there's much more of it.

The superstar actresses of the '50s were more self-consciously iconic and feminized than the golden age actresses (they in fact harken more back to the '20s and pre-Code generation of Brooks, Bow, Garbo, Gaynor, Keeler, and West). AH, like Kelly, is part of that, and any attempt to stigmatize AH uniquely by introducing that golden age perspective fails (except insofar as there's an unargued, and in my view patently ridiculous tack-on such as 'AH doesn't have her own voice').

What else could Thomson's complaint about AH's general performance quality amount to? Perhaps finally just this: as is well-known, AH was quite self-deprecating about her acting. She fretted both publicly and privately about her lack of training, and about not having the sorts of formidable technical chops that a Davis or a Stanwyck or a Geraldine Page or a Streep brings to bear. AH always felt she needed a lot of help from her directors to do good work, and chose her parts accordingly, i.e., normally quite conservatively, and with an eye to the movement qualities required (where her dance training might serve her well^[36]).

But even if AH measured herself right, the idea that her self-identified limits as an actress amount to a damaging solipsism on screen is simply incredible. If AH were as troublingly solipsistic an actress as Thomson suggests then super-pro directors such as Wyler, Wilder, and Donen would not have worked with her repeatedly. Nor would Hitchcock have been as desperately disappointed not to get her as he in fact was). Nor would Cary Grant famously have said after wrapping Charade that all he wanted for Christmas was another movie with Audrey Hepburn (Paris 1996, 191-2). Presumably Grant thought he had better things to do than talk to himself on screen. And so on.

In sum, I do not see how Thomson's overarching complaint about AH performance quality and presence on screen, which he finds so regrettably in evidence in BAT-f, can be made good. It appears to be merely an expression of Thomson's own current taste, to which he is very welcome.

What Audrey does in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is not uninteresting, but it is far from the modern woman, even the one introduced to American audiences in the persons of Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, the other Hepburn (though she could talk herself into a self-centered corner, too), Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Jean Arthur, as well as Barbara Stanwyck. Instead Audrey rather resembles her physical antithesis Marilyn Monroe (who wanted to play Holly) in that they have very distinctive voices, but not voices that are good for talking to people.

This passage runs together two separable points almost unforgivably. On the one hand there's the point we've conceded multiple times: BAT-f's HG is child-like, careerless, and increasingly, explicitly dependent on men in general and Paul/'Fred' in particular for her identity and future. One does have to forget about a lot of that to arrive at even, say, a Helen Gurley Brown-style, wily, modern single woman, let alone a fully feminist ideal end state. The golden age actresses Thomson salutes were indeed ahead at this game in their best roles. On the other hand, there's the complaint about AH's voice and presence on screen - that she doesn't really talk to other actors - which, as we've seen, is just Thomson's pure, highly implausible assertion.

Audrey was bankable, no doubt about that. That was how she could get Frankenheimer off the picture, and how she and Mel Ferrer could bar Tony Curtis or Steve McQueen from playing Paul. This raises the sacrilegious question of who else might have played Capote’s Lula Mae [sic.], if the world had been brave enough. Well, Shirley MacLaine could have done it then. So could Piper Laurie, Geraldine Page, or even Natalie Wood—I mention them because they were the other nominees in the year Audrey was nominated for an Oscar for her Holly. (None of them won—that was Sophia Loren in Two Women.) Or Anne Bancroft, or Lee Remick, or even Elizabeth Taylor (who had been a fine slut in the inept Butterfield 8, but was seldom afraid or self-protective). There’s the nub of it: Audrey got the film made, but she ensured its dishonesty and its fabricated air.

If the claim is that Shirley MacLaine or whomever would have done significantly better with those producers and that script then I don't see it. Anyone else would still have had to figure out how to square the aspect of HG that's a prototype modern woman with everything else about her that makes her vulnerable and dependent. Presumably Frankenheimer would have changed a few things, and a few other key personnel changes might also have helped (e.g., probably only Edwards gets you either the ultra-broad, slapsticky party scene, or Mickey Rooney as Yunioshi). But comedy is tricky, and even lots of small changes could easily have led to an unfunny or even grim mess. And in any case, AH's unique charm covers a multitude of sins, and the hit from losing it would have been considerable.

If the claim is that, with another star attached, the producers would have allowed the script to be completely rethought, especially in a non-romance direction, then, well, maybe. But that development's unlikely given how producer-driven, studio, non-(writer/director) films are actually made. And, really, who knows what film we'd be talking about after such extensive re-engineering?

Thomson now trains his fire on 'Moon River' (of all things!):

She sang the song, and I doubt the film would have much currency now but for “Moon River,” out of Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer.

If by 'the song' Thomson means every trace of the main melody and its timbres in the score then I agree (at least provisionally). Taking Moon River out of BAT-f in that sense is as drastic a change as taking every trace of Herrmann's main, announced-in-the-credits themes out of Taxi Driver, Vertigo, or Psycho, or Williams's main themes out of Star Wars or Jaws. In each case, it's almost unthinkable to do that. If, however, by 'the song' Thomson just means Audrey's performance on the fire-escape, then I disagree: losing that 83 seconds of singing wouldn't have tipped an otherwise massively appealing film into obscurity. Do your own edit of the film to check this: cut directly from the first notes that Paul/Fred hears at his typewriter to AH's troubled expression and downcast eyes immediately after her '...and me' trails off. ('Hi. Hi. What ya doin'? Writing. Good.) The film still works, notwithstanding that the edit removes something of real value.

Everyone knows that song—it is, alas, a classic. I say alas because, for all its melodious charm, the song is a dog, a sell-out, a fraud. It is like a great deal of Mancini’s music, so easy to hum but so short on character. Compare “Moon River” with “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca or “The Man that Got Away” from A Star is Born.

These are truly extraordinary claims. We should all write such dogs and frauds! And, prima facie, Moon River (MR) functions very similarly to As Time Goes By (ATGB) (on which more below), its lyrical precision, due to Johnny Mercer, is if anything superior to ATGB's, they're both in the top 5 of the AFI's '100 years... 100 tunes' list, and so on. That one could be incomparably better than than the other, whether considered in abstraction from the film or in context, seems impossible (certainly once we control for Casablanca's consensus, higher overall quality, with which I agree). (I'll set aside Thomson's second example and his discussion of it because I don't know either the song or the film well in that case.)

“As Time Goes By” is not just a song about the past and memory. It’s a moment placed in the rising drama of Casablanca with magnificent accuracy. It’s not an aside; it’s a vital step in the story......Whereas Holly is discovered on the fire escape singing, without one iota of justification or placing. Wasson is very good on how the song nearly got dropped, though he does not appreciate the justice of that challenge—the song is irrelevant to the story. And it was a harbinger of worse to come, like the inane “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” that signals how far Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid cared about nothing except sliding our money out of our pockets. (my italics)

While it's tempting just to crack wise in response ('Critical malpractice? Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?'; 'Well, it's good enough for Almodovar in Bad Education.'), happily we can do a lot better than that.

BAT-f unfolds up to Holly singing MR as follows:

Paul meets Holly (she gets dressed to visit Sing Sing as they chat)
Paul's 'decorator'/2E arrives and he takes her up to his room
[That night] Holly avoids a drunk suitor by climbing up the fire-escape to Paul's window. She wakes Paul, they chat, and she crawls into bed with him to sleep, where she has troubled dreams and she wakes, is snappish, and goes back to her own apartment.
The next day Paul receives an apology note and gift (a typewriter ribbon) from Holly. The note invites Paul to a party in her apartment that evening.
The wild party. We meet Holly's agent Berman (learning from him about her time in CA), and see exactly how ruthlessly Holly pursues rich men. She leaves her own party with one mark, Rusty Trawler, while Paul helps another possible mark, José, escape a police raid on the party.
[1 week later?] Paul accompanies Holy to Sing Sing to see Sally Tomato, who effectively suggests that Paul should write about Holly's life: 'a book would break the heart.'
[That afternoon?] Paul has just begun to get traction on a story. It's about a lovely but frightened girl who lives alone with a nameless cat. He hears singing and guitar-playing from out on the fire escape....

Even though the audience doesn't know it yet, the moment when Holly sings MR to us is her peak. It's the moment when Holly's world seems the broadest to us, and when all the balls she juggles are still in the air. Immediately after this, however, Doc arrives and the first balls start to hit the floor. From here on, Holly's world shrinks, often getting most painfully pared back through double-dealing and fraud, death, or disagreement.

The audience has shared Paul's perspective from the beginning, and we and Paul have done almost nothing but learn about Holly. She may be just a beautiful nut, and live in a completely chaotic world, and we don't yet fully understand her, but she's genuinely fascinating, even amazing. The audience is therefore right there with Paul when he starts writing about her. Of course, we knew that things couldn't go on in a giddy blur forever. We would have guessed that something would eventually come unstuck around Holly. 3 told us that HG was troubled, and 6 (which is completely Axelrod's invention; in BAT-n no one ever accompanies Holly to Sing Sing) warned us that the book of Holly's life is heartbreaking for those who can read it.

AH does some amazing facial acting at the end of MR: her troubled expression and downcast eyes immediately after '...and me', remind us one last time before the first crisis hits, that something is up, or will be. Not even something as wistful and nostalgic and beautiful as MR can forestall what's inevitable.

It's worth mentioning how Axelrod arrived at the placement of the proto-MR song he put in the screenplay. BAT-n's 'singing on the fire-escape scene' happens very early on, before the narrator has even been properly met HG (16-17). Doc later enters as a mysterious figure whistling that same song:

That evening, on my way to supper, I saw the man again. He was standing across the street, leaning against a tree and staring up at Holly's windows. Sinister speculations rushed through my head. Was he a detective? Or some underworld agent connected with her Sing Sing friend, Sally Tomato?...Presently, without turning my head, I knew that he was following me. Because I could hear him whistling. Not any ordinary tune, but the plaintive, prairie melody Holly sometimes played on her guitar: Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky. (65)

Axelrod avoids Capote's somewhat cornball/plot-mechanic-y use of the song as a 'tell', and instead (i) uses the position of the original 'tell' episode to settle where an expanded fire-escape scene should go, and (ii) used the song on the fire-escape as its own tell (it emotionally prefigures Doc's entrance into the film).

In sum, Thomson is spectacularly wrong in every particular. Holly's singing is not an aside, its exact placement in the story is as well justified as any scene in film history, andHolly's singing MR is irrelevant to the story only in the sense that it is that moment of tranquil equipoise before Holly starts to arc downwards (just as - ringing feminist alarm bells! - it's the moment when Paul starts to write again, beginning his arc up to full self-respect; see Margaret Fox, We Belong to Nobody: Representations of the Feminine in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, [pdf], 12). You can eliminate that stationary moment without losing much in strictly narrative terms. But films are more than just their plots, they're also emotional events, and AH singing MR is the emotional heart of BAT-f (just as Keaton singing Seems like Old Times in Annie Hall, or Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson singing My Rifle, My Pony and Me in Rio Bravo, or, to emphasize that this isn't a 'musical' point as such, Frances McDormand meeting up with an old classmate is in Fargo, are of their respective films). Everybody without an axe to grind knows this. The producers of BAT-f consciously decided to make the story of HG principally the story of a scared, starving girl from Tulip TX, and the woman who'd survived on tulip bulbs under the Nazis said yes to them on that understanding. BAT-f isn't a masterpiece (Ground Rule 3), but its best ideas are good and stunningly well-realized. The intimate (sweat-shirt and jeans, hair in a towel^[37]) star, set-piece scene that Axelrod figured out how to stitch together from Capote, that Mancini and Mercer gave wings to, that Planer so lovingly shot, and that AH gave her all to is self-evidently one of those. Thomson, however, writes as though if he'd been given input on BAT-f's final cut, he would have sided with Paramount head, Marty Rackin who thought 'the fucking song' had to go (5AM, 143-4). Good grief.

Thomson now starts to wind up to his conclusion:

And yet, "Moon River," and Mancini's score, were the only Oscar winners for Breakfast at Tiffany's. Agreed, the exquisite John McGiver deserves a small silver spoon for his salesman at Tiffany's. But Mickey Rooney got not so much as a sniff for his hideous rendering of a Japanese character upstairs. Wasson makes it clear that George Axelrod was horrified by Rooney's caricature. It was director Blake Edwards who liked it. Afterwards, no one was happy. Rooney's performance remains a startling revelation of American attitudes in the "hip" Kennedy era, and a disgrace. But the film's treatment of the whore character, and of women in general, is only a little less vulgar and deluded.

No argument about Yunioshi of course, but given that Olivier was a black-face Othello in 1965, and Peter Sellars was in Indian brown-face in 1968, 'Kennedy era' is a cheap shot. And since full Minstrel Shows ran in prime time on the BBC in Thomson's native country until 1978, BAT-f is hardly the last or worst word in racial caricature. I do not pretend to know what Thomson finds so specially vulgar and deluded about BAT-f's (or even BAT-n's) treatment of women. Ambiguities and nods to conventional romance and forms of happiness aren't vulgar or deluded per se, notwithstanding all of Thomson's huffing and puffing to the contrary. Many exemplary mainstream entertainments idealize away matters that dwelling upon would make for very different films. For example, North by Northwest (NbNW) jests about its MacGuffin, notwithstanding that only the nature of that MacGuffin could explain Eve Kendall's willingness to do such degrading and dangerous undercover work. Better then to never pay more than lip service to her work, and even to try to distract the audience by raising the titillating possibility that Vandamm is gay. For another example, The Truman Show avoids the question of whether Truman has sex with his actress-wife Meryl (the answer would seem to have to be 'yes', but Laura Linney's brittle Meryl, and what that 'yes' would make her, makes that answer almost unthinkable). And while many reviews raised eyebrows at this lacuna/evasion at the heart of The Truman Show, Thomson's hyperbolically positive review for Esquire did not.^[38] Where were Thomson's imprecations against vulgarity and delusion then?

So much for the "new woman." Breakfast at Tiffany's concludes with hollow complacency, and no sense of Holly's real experience. It is the movie itself that fudges her, along with everything else. If you want to see a credible whore in American pictures, you have to wait for Jane Fonda in Klute. Wasson doesn't mention it, but any consideration of the dawning of a new woman in 1961 should include Jeanne Moreau in La Notte or Jules and Jim. We might even recollect the performances of Kinuyo Tanaka and Setsuko Hara in films such as Ugetsu Monogatari, Sansho the Bailiff, The Tokyo Story and Late Autumn-Japanese films, with an emotional gravity that Mickey Rooney and Blake Edwards must have missed. The real new women know that the dawning, and the experience, are so much more demanding than the mannequin joie de vivre of Holly Golightly or the stupor in which some people have taken this travesty of a book seriously.

But these comparisons are mostly pointless. Thomson gets to call BAT-f out for not being Klute only by conclusorily insisting ('whore' again) on something that BAT-n and BAT-f left, respectively, partly and fully ambiguous. But calling BAT-f (or NbNW) out for not being Klute, like calling BAT-n out for not being Shelby's Last Exit to Brooklyn is little more than a laborious way of affirming that, for some reason, only dark, gritty dramas currently have any value for you. (Maybe you're depressed? a po-faced snob? a depressed, po-faced snob?)

And while I like La Notte, Sancho the Bailiff, and Tokyo Story as much as the next film buff, there aren't a lot of laughs in those films, and I dare say that their reception and influence, while extensive over time, didn't move too many needles of broad popular culture in the early 1960s. As we've seen, Thomson's right that 5AM suffers from a too-narrow cultural perspective, but there's so little basis for comparison of BAT-f with these particular films that one starts to wonder whom exactly Thomson is talking to. These certainly aren't the obvious first ways to broaden out 5AM.

Thomson wants to dismiss BAT-f (and, a fortiori, 5AM) and probably BAT-n. But almost any item can be dismissed from some later or wider perspective. For example, in the light of Gomorrah or even Goodfellas, the Godfather films can easily start to look facile and glamorizing (We rarely see the Corleones kill or even interact at all negatively with non-gangsters. How credible is that? 'It's mannequin joie de mourir I tell you!'). And I've already suggested that NbNW wouldn't survive the kind of scrutiny for credibility that Thomson urges against BAT-f (let alone a full dose of John le Carré^[39]). Happily, however, most of us find it very natural to cultivate flexibility in the perspectives that we can occupy and see value from. Most of us aren't so drowning in cinematic pleasure and excellence that we'd ever allow ourselves to be forced into false choices between BAT-f and Tokyo Story, or between AH and Jane Fonda, or...

^[1] That last relative clause (i.e., everything after 'a creature who...') is bizarre. Capote's novella and its naughty lead character were successes on publication in 1958, in part because Capote was already semi-famous. Hence Capote was able to sell the film rights to BAT-n for $65,000 (= ~$500K in 2010), whereas, for example, Robert Bloch sold the film rights to his 1959 novel Psycho for only $9500 (= ~$70K in 2010). Supposing that Hollywood had never directly incarnated BAT-n and HG (let alone if Hollywood just didn't develop the particular, allegedly prettified and prissified direct adaptations of them that it in fact did), I don't see why they wouldn't still be finding new readers in the 21st Century in something like the way that near contemporary (and famously unadapted) works and characters due to J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield, and Franny and Zooey and the Glass family) do. I don't see that Thomson has any answer to this question. (An aside: presumably Berman's 'Is she or ain't she a phony?' refrain in BAT-n owes something to Holden Caulfield in Catcher. Similarly, BAT-n's oil rub-down/'narrator tempted to swat HG's bare butt' scene appears to owe something to a famous scene from Cukor's Adam's Rib (1950) with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.) Moreover, Thomson's position here is hard to square with his review as a whole. It would be a weird kind of projected ingratitude to complain about any violence a Hollywood adaptation may have done to Capote's creation if one really believed that otherwise that creation would be mostly (or even entirely) forgotten. Of course, insofar as our Salinger comparison is on the right track, to that extent it cuts against 5AM too. Salinger's unadapted books and short stories have influenced US popular culture enormously (from Woody Allen to Seinfeld to Brett Easton Ellis to This American Life to Wes Anderson to Zooey Deschanel's name!), although it probably helps to be part of the NPR-listening/NY Times-reading demographic to appreciate that influence. Similarly, then, it's easy to imagine a world in which an unadapted Breakfast is (at least in certain circles) widely understood as the ur-text behind everything from That Girl to Sex and the City. That is, whatever needed to be shaken up by the 1960's sexual revolution in film and in life still gets shaken up, and Capote's work is an important part of that, even if Audrey Hepburn never exists. At least for the sake of the argument, 5AM invests a lot in the idea that that's not so, which is implausible.

^[2] Capote, T. 1958. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a short novel and three stories, First Vintage International Edition, 1993. All bare page references are to this edition.

^[3] One important exception: BAT-f's burlesque/striptease bar scene with its 'Do you think she's talented?' dialogue is completely Axelrod's invention.

^[4] BAT-n Holly seems partly to resile from that position, however, when she lays the predicate for chasing rich men in Brazil (i.e., now that the fancy salons of NYC will be closed to her after the Sally Tomato fiasco) as follows:

'And if you lived off my particular talents, Cookie, you'd understand the kind of bankruptcy I'm describing. Uh, uh, I don't just fancy a fadeout that finds me belly-bumping around Roseland with a pack of West Side hillbillies.' (103).

^[5] 5AM, 89, see also Martin Jurow, Letter: Audrey Hepburn; Holly Golightly: Lopsided Romantic. NY Times, March 14, 1993.

^[6] It's astute of AH to draw attention to HG's youth in BAT-n ('[S]he was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.' (12)). This provides interpretative wiggle-room, she's right, because it's almost impossible to believe that, at that age Holly can be quite as self-possessed as she postures as being, or even quite as opinionated let alone experienced overall as she makes out. That some of what she does and says must involve a degree of posing and exaggeration is a reasonable (though not rationally compulsory) surmise. A partly incompatible, alternative wiggle for the purposes of the film - one that corresponds to my own first impressions of BAT-f - is simply to read the film's HG as being in her late 20s (or at any rate, much closer to AH's own age at the time).

^[7] Eugene Archer, Playgirl on the Town. New York Times, October 9, 1960. The line in the script that Hepburn evidently hangs her interpretation on is Holly's early, partially defining remark, 'It's useful being top banana in the shock department'. The novel's counterpart line occurs much later, where it has much less defining power (62, in a multiply risqué situation). Moreover, the line itself is subtlely different there: 'Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.' That suggests shock as accurate accounting rather more than it does shock as act or strategy (notwithstanding that in this particular instance HG is describing the effects of strategically lying to her rival Mag Wildwood that she's a lesbian to allay suspicions that HG has slept with Mag's boyfriend José).

^[8] According to Peter Krämer, 'The Many Faces of Holly Golightly: Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Hollywood, ' Film Studies 5, Winter 2004, 58-65:

'Lest anyone thought that due to her age and image, Hepburn would not be able to portray the character convincingly, one of Paramount’s press books quoted Capote’s first [p.12] description of Holly Golightly, matching each sentence with an appropriate picture of Hepburn.' (64)

^[9] Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies' remark:

'Audrey Hepburn is not ideal casting. She never seemed vapid or vacant enough.'

is therefore ill-considered. HG in BAT-n is reckless, esp. about strategically never asking too many questions, but she isn't especially vapid or vacant, certainly not for her age.

^[10] Capote's famous preference for Marilyn Monroe as HG was therefore absurd. Monroe was 3 years older than AH, had never been especially colt-ish or any kind of gamine, and by 1960 she was a drug- and drink-addled wreck. Thankfully BAT-f's producers Jurow and Shepherd paid more attention to Capote's book than to his nepotism (5AM, 86).

^[11] The same conditions appear to have pushed her brother Fred to other extremes: great height and 'he didn't care about anything in this world except horses and peanut butter. But he wasn't dotty, just sweet and vague and terribly slow; he'd been in the eighth grade three years when I ran away.' (20) BAT-f omits the repeated grades detail.

^[12] In the context of Holly's later semi-confession of sexual activity before age 13 ('that just doesn't count'), the ominous remark (with its focus on Lulamae) raises (at least to modern eyes) the possibility that Holly was at least threatened with sexual assault and that that was a principal cause of her and Fred's flight into near starvation.

^[13] Neither BAT-n not BAT-f allows us to decide the extent to which Holly agrees to marry Doc on purely strategic grounds, i.e., to keep a roof over her and Fred's head. Notwithstanding Buddy Ebsen's touching performance, BAT-f tilts in the latter direction when it adds Doc tugging explicitly on the 'room over Fred's head' string: 'I don't want to seem like I'm pressurin' you none, but now I gotta. If you don't come back with me, I'm gonna have to write young Fred and tell 'em, unless he wants to look out for hisself, he'd better sign up for another hitch.' This touch of steelly menace to the film's Doc increases jeopardy, and helps lay the predicate for the more identity-frayed, needing-to-be-rescued HG of the film's end.

^[14] 'I had jaundice during that last six months. My mother and aunt and I ate very little. We ate a few turnips, we made flour from tulip bulbs which is actually very fine flour. In the winter there was nothing; in the spring we picked anything we could in the countryside...' (quoted in Paris 1996, 31). See also Alan Riding, 25 Years Later, Honor for Audrey Hepburn, NY Times., April 22, 1991

^[15] AH discussed her wartime experience, including starvation, in interviews and articles in 1953 and 1954, i.e., as part of the initial wave of publicity associated with her Roman Holiday breakthough. That part of her background drew less attention once AH was an established star, but interested parties never forgot it, e.g., in 1956 George Stevens (unsuccessfully) pursued AH for the lead in The Diary of Anne Frank.

^[16] AH herself thought the wellsprings of her appeal were innate:

"I myself was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it," she went on. "That's what I'd like to think maybe has been the appeal. People have recognized something in me they have themselves -- the need to receive affection and the need to give it. Does that sound soppy?" (Riding 1991)

^[17] That so many people say the opposite strikes me as an instance of the general phenomenon that spurious observations often quickly become part of the received wisdom about very popular items (e.g., 'Psycho's great apart from that awful, psychologist wrap-up scene', 'Avatar, while spectacular, has a completely unoriginal story', etc.). Sometimes these sorts of observations get at important choice points in a film's production, i.e., they draw attention to the downsides of tradeoffs that the director and/or writer were well aware of but ultimately chose to accept. The spuriousness in that case is a form of 'wants a free lunch'-type reasoning.
But many such observations express principally the needs of self-styled elites to feel superior to the material in question and to that material's natural audience: 'We maintain reservations about something that mainstream audiences have completely swooned for.' The spuriousness in that case shades into the tiresomeness of primate chest-beating.

^[18] Other obvious comparison cases include Barefoot in the Park and What a Way to Go! But both these films seem to me to be a notch (or more) below BAT-f in quality, notwithstanding their strictly comparable star-power, and that both Fonda and MacLaine were alternate HGs.

^[19] We may further like them in part because they're non-top-tier. Love for masterpieces signals principally recognition and appreciation of excellence, whereas love of non-top-tier stuff signals relatively specific, personal taste and historical connection (e.g., maybe someone born before/after a certain time would let a non-top-tier film's exasperating features bug them, you however....).

^[20] Critic Judith Crist registers a version of this point at 5AM, 138-9.

^[21] Two of AH's best post-BAT-f films, My Fair Lady and Two for the Road, similarly feature 'happy couple' endings that are undercut by the presence of either shockingly unresolved or only temporarily resolved tensions. My sense is that up-beat (paradigmatically coupled-up) endings albeit with some question-marks (so that things don't seem falsely tidy and stupidly happy) get less respect (from critics and discerning viewers more generally) than do down-beat (paradigmatically non-coupled-up) endings albeit with some dimensions of personal triumph present (so that things aren't left unrelievedly bleak, e.g., Nights of Cabiria or AH's own Roman Holiday and The Children's Hour).

^[22] I.e., situational features that are (i) at least somewhat realistic (so use twins, shipwrecks on desert islands, memory loss, etc. sparingly. Quiet down the back Shakespeare! You too Sturges.), (ii) intractable enough to keep the favored couple apart for most of the production, but still (iii) plausibly able-to-be-overcome by the end.

^[23] Had Wasson not wanted to develop his own source, he could have just read the NY Times, which has repeatedly run stories or columns about BAT-f's impact on the lives of particular (often quite well-known) women, e.g, Diane von Furstenberg and Judy Collins here, and Yvonne Durant here.

^[24] See, e.g., Cinema: Two-Thirds of Greatness, Time, Dec. 13, 1968.

^[25] Operation Petticoat grossed almost twice as much in 1959 as the very successful North by Northwest did.

^[26] I understand that this is caricature-level stuff, but charm-filled comedy is incredibly tricky. Consider that BAT-f got some grief on release for its shoplifting scene (5AM, 150). The point is that you can have any number of shop-lifting scenes in dark dramas without comment, whereas anything like that raises issues for a romantic comedy because of depth of identification with protagonists that the genre ideally involves. Shop-lifting in BAT-f still feels slightly risqué in 2011 because you and I are right in there with Holly and Paul, wishing we were them (sexy, sexy shop-lifting gets you laid! yes!). Cringe about that sort of fantasy identification later if you must, but it's a core feature of romances, and it's one reason why the genre of romantic comedy, notwithstanding its superficial placidity, attracts attention from moralists, non-feminist and feminist alike.

^[27] The novel's counterpart line - 'Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.' (61) - is subtlely different. It suggests accurate accounting and well-deserved reputation rather than any kind of act or publicity strategy.

^[28] What's Susan Vance's (Kate Hepburn's) excuse in Bringing up Baby?

^[29] Especially at a 'low' level. For a single example, in BAT-f, HG chooses to let her severely drunk frenemy Mag Wildwood fall forward and probably seriously injure herself, jokily yelling 'Timber' to ensure that nobody inadvertently, partially breaks her fall. At the counterpart party in BAT-n, HG settles for injuring Mag's social prospects, telling everyone that Mag struggles with a venereal disease ('You'd think it would show more. But heaven knows, she looks healthy. So, well, clean.' (12)).

^[30] The example of Continental sophistication that's most relevant to BAT-f, however, didn't arrive until early 1962: Corinne Marchand's Cleo in Varda's first masterpiece, Cleo from 5 to 7. Cleo has cats, a wonderful, hilariously self-dramatizing song ('Sans Toi') to camera, and her own little black dress and dark glasses combo, which she assembles in front of us, albeit almost as a magic trick, and self-consciously as a stripping back of her persona. It's definitely sad that Varda's philosophical, photographic eye, which finds surprises in almost every frame, never quite crossed over to mainstream success. In my perfect world, instead of wasting her time in Paris in summer 1962 on a rotten script and a sozzled William Holden, AH goes indie and works with Varda on a Cleo-ish project...

^[31] BAT-f plays extensively with Psycho, principally, I believe, just as a way of asserting its own up-to-date-ness and hip-ness to the sharp, new cinematic lingua franca. Most obviously, Martin Balsam's Berman is a lighthearted Arbogast. He opens the party looking very Norman/Mother-ish through the bars of a birdcage, and coolly mocking the cage's stuffed inhabitant. Berman closes the party scene in the shower with a blonde (and being comically cool about being interrupted there by 'jewel thieves'). Inside jokes to tease and flatter hipster audience members who'll remember Balsam as Arbogast? I think so.
Less obviously, some of BAT-f's flashier shots steal/echo a number of Psycho's signature set-ups: (i) Paul wakes alone the morning after really spending the night with Holly (see Ground Rule 1) and we begin in extreme close-up on an eye, exactly matching the framing of Marion Crane's dying eye (and Paul's eye sees masks held by a strange statue that could have come from Mother's bedroom!). (ii) When Paul brings Holly home drunk, the camera is overhead in the foyer for the first time (reminding us of Hitchcock's sudden stairwell landing overheads for Arbogast's death, and when Norman carries Mother downstairs). (iii) When Paul carries the drunk Holly up the stairs, the camera follows behind them then reverses back along the first floor balustrade (reminding us of Psycho's sensational stairwell traversals).[Update: go here for some of the visual evidence.]

^[32] Which is not to say that 5AM is either exhaustive or wholly reliable even within its personnel-centered wheelhouse. Consider that:

5AM says nothing about the casting of Martin Balsam as Berman.
Wasson says that the film AH did immediately after BAT-f, The Children's Hour (which was released only two months after BAT-f), brought her 'some of the worst notices of her career' (5AM, 158). But this is hard to believe. The film plays relatively well today, and AH impresses in it. Moreover, the two 1961 reviews that are widely available are complimentary. The NY Times, which didn't like the film, singled AH out for praise, and Variety, which did like the film, said:'
Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, in the leading roles, beautifully complement each other. Hepburn's soft sensitivity, marvelous projection and emotional understatement result in a memorable portrayal. MacLaine's enactment is almost equally rich in depth and substance.'
Some of 5AM's best sections are about BAT-f's screen-writer, George Axelrod: his pre-history in Marilyn Monroe comedies, his drive to do something a little more sophisticated, his triumph wrestling BAT-n into a more conventional and censor-proof shape, and so on. But when Wasson observes that AH's return to comedy after BAT-f, Paris when it Sizzles (w/ William Holden) was somewhere between a dud and a debacle (5AM, 158), he doesn't see fit to mention that Axelrod wrote that script too.

^[33] It's also odd that Thomson lumps (13 years older) Peck in his most swoon-worthy prime in Roman Holiday together with AH's other, not only much-older-than-her but also just plain old '50s male leads (e.g., neither Cooper nor Bogart lived to see the release of BAT-f).

^[34] The telling exception: rural dialect emerges occasionally with Holly after Doc shows up and when he's clearly on her mind, e.g., ' Mention that [her marriage to Doc] to a living soul, darling. I'll hang you by your toes and dress you for a hog.' (86-7)

^[35] For example, Sturges's original, PCA-rejected/censored title for The Palm Beach Story was 'Is marriage necessary?' See S. Cavell's The Pursuits of Happiness (Harvard University Press 1981) for the classic, albeit idiosyncratic demonstration of the philosophical awareness and riches of Hollywood's marriage-preoccupied comedies in the '30s and '40s.

^[36] This need not mean dancing proper, rather take seriously the key modern dance and post-Gene Kelly idea that even the most pedestrian movement can have musical, dance-like performance qualities. BAT-f has no dance scenes, but it has plenty of pedestrian movement fondly observed. By this I mean not just the obvious walking around scenes (including, especially, the famous Fifth Avenue opening) and up and down stairs and fire-escapes scenes, but also sequences such as Holly drunk, and Holly first waking up. Consider the latter: HG wakes, meets Paul, explains the 'mean reds', gets dressed for Sing Sing as they chat, and so on. AH is in nearly constant motion throughout (including close-quarters, broadly facial actorly business such as checking earrings, teeth-cleaning, piling-up hair, whistling, and the like), and she flows gracefully through the scene. We see and register every expressive bit of her movement precisely because, as a dancer, AH's movement is always smoothed out and coherent (for this reason, too, Shirley MacLaine seems to me to be easily the best of the alternate BAT-f HGs). The scene in fact plays like an eight minute expansion/dilution/further pedestrianization of Gene Kelly', 90 second/one shot, 'Jerry Mulligan wakes up' sequence that's the first interior in An American in Paris.

^[37] Richard Corliss sees a pattern:

'Indeed, in her transformation movies - Sabrina and Funny Face and My Fair Lady - she always looked more gorgeous in Phase One (mousy) than Phase Two (elegant), more ravishing with her hair down than up, with her dress casual than couture.'

^[38] While Thomson officially only hyperbolized as follows:

'The Truman Show... is one of the most startlingly original American movies in years, enough to give one faith in the salutary and inspiring nearness of the new millennium' (Thomson 1998, 46),

Esquire's editors notoriously swung for the fences with the cover blurb: 'The movie of the decade (and it stars Jim Carrey).' See http://s11.bdbphotos.com/images/orig/e/m/emy49dn3lk1yndly.jpg.

^[39] Mason's Vandamm feels like an early, jokey take on the 'Cambridge Five'/'Philby, Burgess and MacLean' treasonous, bookish sorts that first made headlines in the 1950s, and that le Carré made his own in the 1960s and 1970s.

Braids' Liver and Tan and Native Speaker

2011-05-29T03:06:00.004+12:00

Two great tracks from a very good young band, Braids, from the incredibly fertile Canadian indie-pop scene. Braids have a fairly cerebral, noodly, droney musical base, but they're also sex-obsessed which heats things up nicely. MBV were like this too, and so was early Kate Bush. These are good things to be reminding people of!

Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts

2011-05-21T16:01:00.003+12:00

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to a kind youtube commenter for directing me towards this Auden cracker.

Ólafur Arnalds's Untitled #6

2011-05-20T01:45:00.005+12:00

From the mesmerizing Eulogy for Evolution disc of a year or two ago. Possibly could use some Tarkovskian visuals, still v. bee-yoo-tiful as is.

Another pedestrian Gaga song

2011-05-11T19:00:00.015+12:00

Hard to believe that this turgid rehash of some of Cher's and Bon Jovi's less inspired moments (via, perhaps, some of Pink's and Kelly Clarkson's lesser moments) will excite anyone not already besotted with Gaga (poor Clarence Clemons gets a dreadfully reigned in/limp sax solo and re-entry that's quite dominated by thwacking drums and synth whooshes so that there's no feel to the episode at all). Enter Shikari's aping of (in their case, van Halen-style) big '80s/'90s MOR rock from a few years back feels truly joyous by comparison:
In general, best to avoid Gaga in favor of Robyn or newies Glasser and Ronika for one's interesting-young-(dance)-diva needs for the foreseeable future. (Unfortunately, Gaga doesn't seem inclined to allow that to happen - she's frickin' everywhere, from Oprah yesterday to Farmville today to Cannes tomorrow...)

Update May 16, 2011: Another Gaga song, 'Hair' dropped... v. similar to Edge of Glory, but even less interesting. I continue to think that Gaga needs to take a break - try to write some songs with real feel and musicality, learn how to arrange stuff (Transitions between sections of songs! Is that too much to ask for? Jesus, it's getting embarrassing. Go and take some lessons from Bat for Lashes or Newsom or Elton or Mark Mothersbaugh or Andy Partridge or....) , explore different lyrical approaches, learn to rely less on the same chundering chorus over and over, and so on.

Update May 23, 2011: Slate's review of the BTW album raises a point that crystallizes something for me:

'Gaga is a rocker at heart. She has little feel for, or interest in, black music; there's almost no hip-hop on her records. Her songs are powered by blunt foursquare house beats—a European sound that, thanks to Gaga, has become the default pulse of American pop.'

While I hold no special brief for hip-hop, I've increasingly been alienated by the lack of feel in Gaga's rhythm section: her records mostly plod, they aren't geared to move to (the Gwen Stefani-Sweet Escape/NoDoubt-Just a girl hybrid Summerboy from Gaga's first album is a pleasant exception). The bass drum hammers you, the bass is never sinuous or slinky (I'm not asking for James Jamerson or Bernard Edwards or Louis Johnson here, although that would indeed be pleasant. Jam and Lewis or Steve Bray-style keys would be fine!). And that's a huge problem: there's nothing especially dance-able or dance-worthy in Gaga's music, and yet dance music is allegedly what she's selling. Note that all of this really does set Gaga apart from Madonna, a dancer, who grew up with Soul Train, who was drenched in Sylvester and Chic, who sought out Reggie Lucas, and Rogers and Edwards, and so on.

Sheena Easton's For Your Eyes Only

2011-05-07T22:03:00.012+12:00

The passions that collide in me
The wild abandoned side of me
Only for you
For your eyes only

What a beautifully written song. E.g., lyrically, notice the reverse from me to you between the couplets, and the order reverse/palindrome within the second couplet. And consider the ambiguities within 'abandoned'. Nice job there by Michael Leeson (a screenwiter who wrote episodes of Taxi, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Partridge Family, etc., as well as good movies such as The War of the Roses and atrocious movies such as IQ).

Put that not-Ira-Gershwin-but-pretty-jolly-good level of lyrical craft together with a true, powerhouse performance from Easton and inventive music and arrangements by Bill Conti and you get a track that's a complete knockout. Moral: Leave Bond to soundtrack and big band industry pros, and keep the rockers away (unless perhaps they're freakishly talented magpies like McCartney).

Ronika's Forget Yourself

2011-05-04T23:21:00.007+12:00

Evidently channeling early Madonna (reminds me of fan fave 'Think of me' from M's first album) and some other post-disco/pre-house stuff (some Tom Tom Club vocals and Evelyn King 'Love come down' overall feel), this song is lots of fun, isn't compressed to hell, and has a nifty vid too. Also, Ronika appears to be 'hot', but isn't pushing that side of things hard at all (by current pop standards); a good sign. Word is that her follow-up song, Wi Yoo, is even better. Yay.

Update: The Guardian did a 'one to watch' profile of Ronika back in February (which I missed at the time). They were right!

My arrangement of Herrmann's North by Northwest theme

2011-05-04T17:59:00.003+12:00

Herrmann's theme for Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) is one of the most exciting pieces of music ever written. My vaguely techno arrangement of that piece perhaps helps one hear all of the radical dissonances that Herrmann uses, but which he (as both composer and conductor) made sound so natural and great. What an education for the ear people like Herrmann and Stalling and Morricone and Elmer Bernstein provided to the masses in the mid-20th Century! Nothing like it happens nowadays, that's for sure.

And how about a 'modern' trailer for NbNW?

A Great Day: F*** Yeah

2011-05-03T14:47:00.011+12:00

I believe in 'Ding dong, the witch is dead!' moments.

Congrats to all the obvious people: the special forces troops involved, the intelligence folks, to Obama, Clinton, Panetta, and so on.

Our thoughts and thanks should at this time also go out to all the nameless people who'll be pulling long hours right now rather than celebrating. OBL's death will have shaken many trees, signals will be flashing, networks will be lighting up. Lots of brave, smart people will have to be watching and listening, working towards the next great day rather than enjoying this one. Thank you.

Update May 4, 2011: There's been a lot of hand-wringing from certain quarters about OBL's death. Much of that relies on the idea that the only satisfactory end-game should have been a criminal trial of some kind. But, rightly or wrongly, the US and OBL alike conceived of their struggle as a war. The goal of war is to defeat/destroy the opposition/enemy. The enemy can surrender at any time, and POW and legal provisions then kick in immediately. But until that happens, the primary goal is to make the other guy die for his country or cause. That doesn't mean that 'anything goes' or that war crimes can't be committed etc.. But it does mean that identifying and killing your enemies - killing them so efficiently in fact that they start to surrender to you preemptively rather than keep up the fight - is the business you are in when you are fighting a war. Not ascertaining guilt but eliminating threats is the name of the game. Apparently, Obama seriously considered both drones-strikes and massive, B-52-delivered bombardment (20+ 2000-pound bombs) as alternatives to sending in special forces to get OBL. Those are the kinds of options that are characteristic of war, and only in the latter case is surrender-at-the-last-minute an option. Of course, 'long wars' conducted by irregular troops hiding among civilian populations pose many problems that make military action complicated and fraught in various respects. But, ha ha, it's probably much harder for irregulars living among civilians to last-minute-surrender than it is for regular military. OBL's style of war may in this way have come back to bite him.

And, yes, it's perfectly decent and reasonable to celebrate a victory in a struggle/war: someone who would eliminate you in a second if they could and who would not, did not ever surrender is gone. Ding dong. [It's probably better, however, to refrain from saying that successful military operations, even triumphs, do or reflect justice. You may hope that your win would be endorsed by some hypothetical, impartial adjudictor - God say - as an appropriate outcome, but you don't know that it would be. More importantly, you certainly aren't currently engaged in anything like impartial administration of sanctions etc..]

Update May 6, 2011: And, yes, there are many senses in which Bin Laden 'won' and got what he wanted. The most important thing for Bin Laden was to get US forces out of the Muslim Holy Land (Saudi Arabia), and he got that pretty smartly by late 2003. Go here for the basic Wiki treatment of the point, but, briefly: the US couldn't leave Saudi if Saddam was still in power in Iraq. Allowing the US to get out of Saudi, thereby stopping ticking off the likes of Bin Laden (and more generally putting some distance between itself and the problematic Saudi regime and getting more plausibly onside with both actual and possible modernizing/liberal democratizing forces in the Middle East) was therefore a major motivation for the US to invade Iraq. Insofar as Bin Laden had a more general goal of weakening the great Satan/far enemy, well, the multi-trillion dollar war on terror has been a huge hit hasn't it? and the damage done to the US's standing in the world (and history more generally) by its descent into legalized torture is enormous (trillions off Brand 'USA' I'd guess, if one tried to do a rough analysis of that sort). All of that's compatible with fast-growing economic inequality at home and financial crises being still more damaging (contracting HIV or hep C or becoming schizophrenic or getting Lou Gehrig's or... is still a horror even if cancer is your worst problem). But those are all sunk costs at this point, and can neither justify nor discredit taking actions against OBL in the present. And OBL's various 'wins' may evanesce. The US's standard of living and reputation will presumably eventually repair themselves. And, essentially the US calculated that 'giving OBL what he said he wanted over Saudi' (at least if Iraq didn't turn out to be a complete disaster) would over time unleash genuine modernizing forces in Saudi and elsewhere rather more than it would spur OBL's favored creeping Talibanization and theocracy. It's still too early to tell yet ('nothing ever ends'), whether the US calculation (prayer?) was correct (has been answered). Let's hope it was (has been).

Making people put their money where their mouths are on taxation

2011-04-26T14:32:00.010+12:00

One of the most irritating right-wing/supply-side canards is 'tax cuts pay for themselves', i.e., the idea that reducing (ordinary, non-extreme, non-confiscatory) income-tax rates increases revenues.

I propose the following technique to make people ask themselves whether they really believe this: pick some sector of government spending valued by the proponents, say, defense or highway construction or police or farm subsidies or.., and designate some appropriate slice of revenues - e.g., x% of everything paid (differentially) at the highest rates and y% of everything paid (differentially) at the second-highest marginal rates - as its dedicated funds. Any changes in those rates then directly affect the budget for that sector.

Let's assume that we put in a 3-4 year moving average 'smoothing factor', lagged if needs be (say if it's claimed that behaviors won't change overnight in response to small incentive changes). I'm a reasonable fellow! Eventually, however, money must be put where the mouth was: if you really believe that tax cuts pay for themselves then you should have no hesitation whatsoever cutting the marginal income tax rates that fund, e.g., the military, as a way of boosting military budgets in the medium-to-long-term.

Marion Cotillard's iTunes playlist

2011-04-24T11:22:00.010+12:00

is pretty excellent (except for the bit at the end about about all U2 songs being masterpieces).

Cotillard's Nina Simone selection had a cute/sinister claymation vid. back in the California Raisins era of MTV:

My Baby Just Cares for Me is one of at least two great songs that name-checks Elizabeth Taylor. The other that I'm aware of is Dylan's I Shall be Free from Freewheelin', which rousingly ends: 'I catch dinosaurs/I make love to Elizabeth Taylor . . ./Catch hell from Richard Burton!' Anyone got any others?

That NbNW 50th Anniversary Edn Cover Image

2011-04-24T00:18:00.013+12:00

Many people have observed that the image of Cary Grant (above) on the cover of latest dvd and blu-ray editions of North by Northwest is from a Plaza Hotel scene and not from the apparent plains/crop-duster scene (that Grant's jacket is never buttoned out on the plains is a dead give-away!). But I've never seen the exact source image anywhere (for example, it doesn't turn up in any obvious google image search). Filling that gap, here it is (albeit in non-optimal quality):

I found the image in the cd booklet from the 1995 release of North by Northwest's original, Herrmann-conducted soundtrack. I suspect, however, that it's a publicity still rather than a frame-grab from the film, so it may well be available elsewhere and in better quality, e.g., in dvd extras of publicity materials. (I've misplaced my NbNW dvd so can't check this currently!)

Update April 26, 2011: On an even lighter note...

Second-tier Madonna: Angel

2011-04-23T11:44:00.015+12:00

Second-tier items and people's preferences with respect to them are very revealing: everyone likes the very best stuff in a given genre, or from a given artist etc. simply because it's excellent and because excellence often involves precisely transcending a genre's or an artists's limitations and specificities. Second-tier (and n>1-tier) stuff, by way of contrast, tends to be much more reflective of genre or artist norms. If you love that stuff then you love the sort of thing that genre is or that artist does, not just the occasional, super-achievements that are as if someone was taking dictation from God. You're a Jazz fan if you check out the jazz clubs in any city you visit, not if you just listen to Coltrane. You're not an Abba fan if you love Dancing Queen, you almost certainly are if you love its B-side, That's Me. And so on.

In the case of Madonna's singles, M. herself draws a fairly bright line between her first- and second-tier material: True Blue gets omitted from greatest hits/best ofs, etc., as does Angel (which M. apparently hasn't performed live since the Like A Virgin tour). Other second-tier M. singles (from her first 'imperial period' as it were) include Spotlight and Causing a Commotion.

While some of the affection that fans tend to feel for these tracks stems simply from the fact that they haven’t been overplayed the way beloved signature songs undoubtedly have, these tracks are also just good, unpretentious, uncluttered, dance-pop records - they're almost garage dance-pop. Unlike Borderline, Holiday, Like Virgin, Material Girl, Crazy for You, Live to Tell, etc., they’re not massively better than their non-M. competition at the time. They almost certainly wouldn't have made M. a mega-star, maybe no kind of star. But they're a lot of fun, and the simple/more human-scale M. that they project has a special place in fans' hearts. Or so it seems to me!

The third single from Madonna's Like a Virgin album, Angel didn't get a proper video, but the 'promo-only' vid. that Warners UK spliced together from previous outings is enormously fun:
What an intoxicating visual presence M. was in her first bloom of stardom, and what a debt M. owes to Mary Lambert, the director of the vids. for Borderline, Like A Virgin, and Material Girl. M. is very sexy in all of her early videos, including Lambert's three, but Lambert also (i) always gets M. to act, and (ii) connects M. with wider traditions of cinema representation of women (both Hollywood and indie/European art-house). The upshot is that Lambert's videos for M. are sexy, but they're also analytic and layering. Seeing them pulled apart from their original soundtracks and cut against other effective but comparatively one-dimensional video sequences is incredibly telling: Lambert's images lift everything around them. Madonna Studies starts here.

Soundtracked by arguably the paradigmatic, second-tier M. tune, Lambert's achievement is especially impressive: the 'promo-only' video for a second-tier single distils something like the essence of M's early style and appeal.

For a nice, unpretentious review of Lambert's video for Borderline, go here.
For some vid. of Lambert talking about a recent documentary of hers, go here.

Gaga does not write/perform Abba-worthy songs

2011-04-17T11:27:00.016+12:00

To be fair, Gaga never said she did that I'm aware of (although, now, when her recorded output is becoming increasingly plodding and redundant and unpleasant, Gaga has exhibited a willingness to assert that her latest records are best-of-decade items), but many of Gaga's fans have made versions of the claim. Why it wouldn't have been enough to say that in 2009 Gaga got onto the sort of (largely producer-driven) hot streak of 3 or 4 excellent singles that Janet Jackson got onto with Control and then again with Rhythm Nation (and, beyond music, had one of those, culture-convulsing 'year of [insert artist name here]' years in 2009, the way only 20 or 30 pop music figures have ever done) is never explained.

Consider the following from The Stranger's David Schmader:

Lady Gaga's music is deeply conventional, but ingeniously so, marrying hooky verses to hooky bridges to hooky choruses (which are often split into two increasingly hooky parts), with one-off bonus hooks thrown in here and there for kicks, all of it produced with a consistency that's positively ABBA-esque. Just as Stephin Merritt (himself a die-hard ABBA fan) has made a career out of studious distillations of the Great American Songbook, Gaga's doing the same with dance pop, identifying the genre's most effective intoxicants and boiling them down into unprecedentedly effective pop crack.

Schmader never quite comes out and says that Gaga is as good as Abba or his beloved Stephin Merritt, but the overall impression is that, yes, Schmader thinks that that's her level.

Well, no. Not close. (I'm not sure that even Schmader thinks Gaga's so ingenious these days.) Just as Oasis had a few good songs but were never close to being as good as The Beatles and were made to look especially ridiculous by their own and others comparisons to this effect, so it's just obvious that Gaga 'is' Janet Jackson if she's lucky (although BTW isn't shaping up to be close to the equal of Rhythm Nation). That's still an amazing achievement for someone so young and relatively unformed, but if Abba-quality is going to be in the cards for Gaga, she's going to have to take some time off and really think about writing and about finding the right collaborators. Gaga's (evident to me at least!) manifest destiny - putting her piano and performance skills to work playing Jobraith covers and playing Judee Sill in a Sill bio-pic (or maybe playing both in some funky new miniseries for HBO) - remains undiscovered.

Caribou's She's the One

2011-04-17T00:52:00.003+12:00

A new favorite. Can't believe I only just heard it!

The 5th Dimension's The Magic Garden

2011-04-08T22:02:00.017+12:00

A seriously amazing record from December 1967, The Magic Garden is a concept piece about love and a specific love affair in something like the way Demy's films from the period tend to be.

Every song is excellent, but my two current fave tracks are:

and:

I mean, good God, they kill. The album is definitely some kind of masterpiece. I almost can't believe I never heard of any of it until this Onion AV-Club article.

Ok, one more (this time w/ uncool dancing):
Just, wow.

Update April 11, 2011: All but one song on TMG is written by the legendary Jimmy Webb. The exception is a very soulful, funky cover of Ticket to Ride. This song (from Help!, e.g., here) is one of Lennon's best. It's the ancestor of all of the mildly perverse, bitchy ‘I’m not happy but I’m not sad either’ alt-pop-music (with, ha ha, triumphant pulsing music underneath) that so many of us have loved ever since. TtR claims the whole spectrum of vexation and boredom and general pissiness for pop music, and makes it danceable and almost metallic. A couple of days a week I’d say it was the best, most subversive pop hit since Heartbreak Hotel.

Anyhow, 5th Dimension's TtR cover is exemplary. In my view, too, Lennon's ode to nasty ambivalence (with its booty-shaking underpinning pushed to 11!) fits beautifully within TMG's overall song cycle (about a tumultuous relationship), albeit as a spectacular jolt of earthy energy. Some fans have wanted TtR pushed to the TMG's margins, and apparently some editions of the album, which has even had its name changed a couple of times, have accommodated that desire. I think it works great as a side-ender/mid-point:

An odd feature of 5th Dimension's TtR cover, however, is that they change Lennon's middle eight couplet from:

She oughta think twice/She oughta do right by me.

to:

She oughta think white/She oughta do right by me.

The punchier, full rhyme of white/right sings better than twice/right, but it's still a surprising change, after all, if full rhyme singability was the principal concern, why not go with repetition, right/right? 'White' was evidently, quite specifically chosen, but with what purpose?

On the one hand, the Fifth Dimension were unfairly/absurdly criticized at the time for being 'too white', just as many Motown acts were (see this article for some of the details; it's evident that the nasty criticism is a class thing more than a race thing, but it's still painful). On the other hand, their TtR cover (on which the players were members of the racially mixed Wrecking Crew) is the 'blackest' thing on TMG by far (insofar as we can make sense of such ideas). Presumably the rhyme substitution is making some real point or specific inside joke. But what exactly? Does anyone have the political nous about the 1967 West Coast scene to really decode this matter?

Source Code's Saul Bass-ish poster

2011-04-07T09:11:00.008+12:00

Apparently it was made specially for the film's SxSW premiere. Love it.

Overall, it sounds as though Source Code hits several Hitch-related nerves.

Glasser's Mirrorage

2011-04-05T20:10:00.006+12:00

I've had a stereogum-supplied remix of this track on my ipod since last year, but have only got around to listening to it in the last week or two. Tracking down the original mix and its vid. now, it's a song of the year candidate for me in 2011. Yum.

True Grit (2010)

2011-03-30T00:19:00.004+13:00

Loved it. The Coens, yet again, show that they know what they're doing in a way that almost nobody else does. Still haven't seen The King's Speech, but my ranking of the other, principal Oscar nominees is as follows:
TG > TS3, WB >> TSN, I, BS

Black Swan

2011-03-28T13:20:00.037+13:00

Have now seen Black Swan, and it's utterly ludicrous. Maybe if you know nothing at all about dance, and you haven't any experience with movies about madness and obsession, e.g., The Piano Teacher and The Tenant (or even the Ellen Burstyn segments of Aronofsky's own Requiem), then BS might be impressive, but otherwise....

BS shares one of The Social Network's key problems: except for a striking opening sequence (which, in the light of recent controversy, Aronofsky has clarified is all Portman - well done Ms P.!), BS never really shows us what a top dancer or dance company does that's so very cool (Altman's overlooked The Company is vastly superior in this regard - somewhere out there Neve Campbell is firing darts at an image of Natalie Portman!). Indeed, the dancing is poorly photographed and tepid from what we see of it (although some painful-looking, en pointe close-ups are spectacular). We're told repeatedly that Nina wants to be 'perfect', but we have so little sense of her enjoying dancing or of her relishing gaining fluency and 'getting' new things in her performance, that that perfection feels completely abstract and contentless (not to mention literally risible at the end of the film). Compare with The Red Shoes (you knew this was coming): there we have a powerful sense of how Vicki Page's (Moira Shearer) madness flows not just from her svengali's cruelty but from the intoxicating, addictive powers of dancing and the stage themselves. And whereas the final fall in TRS is the kind of heart-stunning moment that no one ever forgets (and just is dance and death together), the final fall in BS is almost motionless, is clobbered by the plonking last line, and provokes distracting, practical impossibility thoughts: 'Huh? So she really had stabbed herself through? But then how was she able to dance Act 4?'

The scene of Nina clubbing with Lily could have helped flesh out Nina's relation to dance and this ideology of perfection she spouts. It could have been used to show us something about Nina's relation to her own body that maybe the rigidity of the rehearsal studio and her home life has stifled. Ideally we might see something on that dance floor that would make us think something like: 'Oh, so that's why that girl became/is a ballerina. Perfection would be if she can bring something of this out-of-control/out-of-ones-head/Dionysian dancing back to the studio...'. Unfortunately Aronofsky and his DP Libatique butcher the scene into a strobing nightmare so that we don't know who or hardly even what we're seeing.^[1] Opportunity squandered. [Update Sept 2011: someone has pulled out all the clubbing scene's subliminal imagery from the blu-ray of the film here. Wow, but it's hard to see the point if we can't see this stuff in real time (rather we just know that something funny is going on). And I stand by my view that Aronofsky and co. would have done better to make the clubbing scene explanatory of the perfection stuff (which needed explanation!) rather than use it to restate the insanity stuff (which didn't need to be restated, not even subliminally, given that we were repeatedly bashed right between the eyes with 'Nina's nuts'!]

Relatedly, the film's Balanchine-figure (a wasted Vincent Cassell) never does or says anything to show us what his talent consists in and why he might be a genius worth following unto death. We're told he's going to 'strip back' or rethink Swan Lake from the ground up, but everything we see after that looks pretty standard, and we certainly don't see any of the dancers protesting at or recoiling from any radical innovations, rather the basic vibe is 'Business as usual'.^[2] Indeed, as least as far as I noticed, the film never lets the audience in on the fact that fusing white swan/black swans = Odette/Odile roles is optional - that originally they were separate (a return to that could be our quasi-Balanchine's innovation: building on that, a separate Odile could hover/flicker onstage much of the time apart from the main choreography!). An opportunity is thereby missed to use the director/choreographer's refusal to even consider splitting the roles, certainly if there's any evidence that a new lead dancer might be experiencing a breakdown, as evidence of his mania/demonicness. But perhaps the film doesn't mention this possibility because it would suggest a deflating resolution of the crisis in the film: if there's going to a big problem with fusion, split the roles, and let Lily dance Odile.

Needless to say, too, nobody gets to be prima ballerina at a Lincoln Center ballet company who's as tentative and generally freaked out as Nina is. At that level, if you make it, you've been on a soloist track from an early age. That track selects at every point for bravura/swagger as well as for basic talent/training/movement quality. The biggest (rising/risen) star in ballet right now is Natalia Osipova. Here she is still in school at age 17, soloing her heart out and blowing people away. This is just before she joins the corps of the Bolshoi, where she was immediately given some solo parts. It was 4 years of ever-increasing attention in that role that led to her being promoted to leading soloist in 2008, then finally becoming principal dancer for the Bolshoi in 2010. We're supposed to believe of Nina in BS that she jumps directly from being a relatively unheralded corps member/occasional soloist to being the face of the company in the leadiest lead role ever: fused Odette/Odile. Not gonna happen.

A final note: 'ludicrous' may be a little harsh on my part. Substantively, I agree with almost everything that David Edelstein says in his review of BS, especially this:

[Unlike Altman] Aronofsky isn’t remotely interested in celebrating the Dance. Black Swan is full of scary-looking emaciated women, their dark hair severely pulled back, twisting and cracking their limbs and toes—puppets of a tyrannical male deity. Even before Nina begins to unravel, the dances are shot by a camera that seems to be shuddering in horror.

But Edelstein still ends up sounding softer overall than I do here. His tone is, I suppose, more likely the correct or appropriate one.^[3] So, some concessions: while I'm deeply dissatisfied with BS, a lot of people put a lot of work and love into it. It's not the sort of dreadful, slapped-together Hollywood nonsense that there's always a surfeit of at local cinemas. And it's impressive and even fabulous that a small, artsy film allegedly about dance is on track to make $300 million world-wide. See, I can make people happy: I'm the Magical Man from Happy-Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!

^[1] The scene doesn't work as a deafening club alienation scene a la Lynn Ramsay's Morvern Callar either. This was the scene/point at which I gave up on BS, when I realized that it was never going to come close to the standards set by its obvious influences.

^[2] Compare BS's slender pickings on this front with what we see and learn, almost in passing, in All That Jazz about crazy choreographers, fading stars, and the like.

^[3] Metacritic scores Edelstein's review as 100/100. That's bizarre!

Warpaint's Stars

2011-03-25T14:38:00.008+13:00

Just got around to hearing it. Pretty excellent, but I have a serious weakness for haughty, artsy, Siouxsie/Cocteau stuff. Your own mileage may vary, but check it out if you haven't already:

It'll be interesting to see whether these guys blow up. They're playing big festivals this year; if they can bring it live, and if they have a ton of good songs including something with a bit more crossover/pop potential, we'll all know it by the end of 2011.

It feels to me like a bit of demand for a slightly darker and rawer pop-music, something a little less euro-disco-ish has built up of late. Florence Welch has benefited from this in my view, but it seems to me that there are other slots open for somebody to step into. Rock and Mood out a bit more: The Pierces, Zola Jesus, Warpaint, Glasser....for you, opportunity knocks.

The Social Network

2011-03-15T04:01:00.065+13:00

I like David Fincher a lot, but I finally got around to seeing his The Social Network, and... I was underwhelmed, even bored by it. I can imagine someone liking TSN more than me, but I fail to see how anyone could think that the film's a complete triumph. I therefore simply don't believe (or believe that anyone else really believes) that TSN's losing the big Oscars this year resembles situations like Raging Bull losing to Ordinary People, Goodfellas losing to Dances with Wolves, or Pulp Fiction being Gump-ed.^[1]

One caveat: I did spoil a lot of TSN's best lines for myself by reading reviews and paying close attention to ads, etc.. Still, TSN struck me as silly and superficial enough that I doubt that virgin ears for 4 or 5 key lines would have made that much difference. Indeed, I'm sufficiently unimpressed with TSN that it in fact hardly feels worth the effort it would take to figure out what's really wrong with it. Nonetheless, this note is a quick first stab in that direction.

TSN is at bottom a surprisingly by-the-numbers biopic (including beginning with an allegedly psychologically probative flashback that gets called back to repeatedly but most annoyingly with a pat quasi-moral at the end), albeit it's somewhat unusually focused on just a year or two of relatively young lives. For that to work at all, we need the cluster of young people the film focuses on to be incredibly interesting or attractive (recent films that do this sort of thing relatively well, albeit often with considerably less biopic-y baggage, include Almost Famous, Wonder Boys, Boogie Nights, and Good Will Hunting; a more classical example is The Paper Chase). But the characters of TSN aren't especially interesting people - as the film itself seems to realize - there's lots of unattractive whining in TSN (!) and there's precious little in the way of interesting creativity or insight on display (as opposed to shark-like pursuit of main chances).^[2] But then why are we watching the film?

The answer seems to be that the film relies upon on us being titillated by Harvard, fast-money-making, maybe hype about social media, and the like. But if you're immune to all that (as I am) then the film falls surprisingly flat, and fails to address even the most prominent lacunae in its own story-telling. E.g., we're led to believe that one of Zuckerberg's key insights (not to mention his own lizard-brain-level motivation) is that the (vaguely Groucho Marxian) exclusivity of clubs matters: that the most desirable of social networks are those that are hard to get into, that might on another day of the week not have you as a member. But while Facebook began with that sort of exclusiveness in mind (you had to go to an Ivy or Ivy-wannabe to be on it, etc.), it very quickly became entirely open and in fact all about scale and inclusiveness and network effects and 'building the user-base without worrying about how to make money off it' - all ideas that are pure .com/Web 1.0, etc.. The movie shows this change happening, but doesn't really draw attention to it or explain its significance, presumably because doing so would (i) undermine the film's narrative about what drives Zuck. (and what his key special insight was), and (ii) constitute an unhelpful-to-the-film narrative of Facebook as conceptually indistinguishable from what other people were doing at the same the time. If the difference with Facebook was just execution/timeliness etc., which is to say a completely standard, business success story, then again there's nothing movie-worthily interesting here.^[3]

There's also a kind of meta-moral to be drawn from my last two paragaphs: the showing and telling in TSN is everywhere out of whack. At the level of character we're told stuff that we need to just see, and at the level of ideas (about company development, etc.), where we need to be told stuff so that what we're shown can then be meaningful, the allegedly great script is silent.

After seeing TSN's superb trailer ('...and the Oscar for Best film at failing to live up to its own trailer goes to....' presented by Spike Jonze) I anticipated that rather than a simple (and, as I've explained, somewhat misguided) bio-pic, that TSN would be in addition an ambitious, generally skeptical look at (or x-ray of) 'how we live now', esp. at the new forms of sociality that Web 2.0 tech has enabled and the older forms it is destroying. But there's almost nothing of that in the film, hence TSN feels minor compared to what it could have been (and to what its promotional materials suggested it would be). Too bad.^[4]

Moreover, neither the script nor the score for which TSN won Oscars struck me as especially remarkable. Both felt like stuff I'd heard before and better from their respective authors. Indeed, Reznor's score builds so directly on his previous work, including large chunks of The Slip and of Ghosts I-IV that I don't quite see how it retained eligibility as original material, given how strict AMPAS has been about that in recent years. Deep down, too, it's a bummer that, say, Paul Thomas Anderson and Clint Mansell don't have writing and music Oscars respectively while Sorkin and Reznor do (not that I've got anything against the latter two guys, I'm a fan of both, but seriously....).

Nice acting tho', esp. from Andrew Garfield, who appears to me to be the real deal after seeing him play two very different characters in TSN and in Red Riding 1974.

I've still yet to see True Grit, Black Swan, or King's Speech, but of the Best Picture nominees that I have seen I'd definitely take Toy Story 3 and Winter's Bone over TSN. Finally, too, TSN isn't nearly as compelling to me as Zodiac was (in 2007, unfortunately for Fincher one of the greatest years in movie history).

^[1] I take no position about King's Speech, my point is just that the analogies break down because TSN is no RB/G/PF. Indeed, in my view, TSN is more Gump than Pulp Fiction when you get down right down to it. Let's hope that this and Benj. Button don't represent a trend in this regard for Mr Fincher.

^[2] In one scene Zuck. hails his own and his team's intellectual and creative capacities compared to those of his accusers. But too much tell not enough show! By that point I certainly hadn't seen anything that looked so amazingly creative or intellectually explosive. I mean, one could imagine a film about the amazing rise and reign of Pixar and the interaction of Lasseter, Doctor, Bird, et al., frickin' geniuses all I'm prepared to believe, but then show that genius and what they got and can do that their competitors didn't and can't, OK? Or if you want to make a movie about loopy Grigory Perelman and his proof of the Poincare Conjecture then you're well advised to give us a sense of how his mind works (so that he could solve problems that no one else could solve), and you're probably going to have to devise ways of cannily representing holes in space to do that. If you don't do that then you'll just be asking us to take the 'genius' stuff on trust, which will pall. And, for especially positive instances, think of what a great job fashion documentaries from Unzipped through to The September Issue do of just showing the audience that Mizrahi, Wintour, et al. really are extraordinarily gifted, as well as being superhumanly hard-workers.

^[3] Compare too with cases in which something in science became a pure horse-race, so that the only questions to be resolved were (i) who gets the prizes and (ii) who was prepared to bend the rules to make sure that they do: think Venter vs. the NIH over sequencing the human genome, or Watson, Crick, and Wilkins stealing Rosalind Franklin's x-rays to pip Pauling on DNA. The spectacle of street-fighter, animal cunning being decisive even in this most esoteric, rarefied, intellectual, supposedly bloodless environment is inherently amusing and dramatic. Still, in my view, if you want to make a successful movie about any of these cases, you do well to either explore the underlying content and its importance in detail, or have some specific gripping personal angle in mind so that it's not just the horse-race we're focusing on (or both). We discussed content a lot in fn. 2. For examples of 'gripping personal angles', consider Franklin, sexism, her tragic early death and non-Nobel in the DNA case; and consider the overkill, Randian/Teddy Roosevelt-ish swagger of Venter in the genome case. For me, then, TSN neither went deep enough into content nor developed characters that were vivid enough, that had enough at stake really, to make for a strong film.

^[4] See this piece by Tom Ewing, talking en passant about Google and Facebook as providing competing objective and subjective prisms/vortices, for more interesting thought about Facebook and its place in the modern informational ecosystem than anything TSN manages. Vaguely relatedly, note how odd it is that Google is never mentioned in TSN. Indeed, the film kinda, sorta insinuates that Facebook/Zuck. is the successor to Microsoft/Gates, and that nothing and no one of note happened between them in computer software, which is laughable. That said, there's evidently a case to be made that Facebook is the new Microsoft in that, like MS, it makes software that's genuinely irritating, indifferent-to-poor in many ways, but that network effects nonetheless force everyone (quite resentfully) to deal with as the borderline dysfunctional standard.

Hang with Me vs (UK) Skins Season 2 Theme

2011-03-08T19:56:00.011+13:00

I like Robyn's Hang with Me (both the song and its vid.) a lot. I liked the opening credits of (UK) Skins Season 2 (both music and images) a lot too. Well, duh! They're quite similar. Compare:

with