AV2009

Selections
The Nassau Nightly
from
Anthony M. Verdoni Contributing Editor

I. Satire
Universal Health Scare
The High Costs of Hypochondria.................................................................................... 3

Going Public
Testimony on a Healthcare Option that’s Insured to Fail............................................ 5

Never Happened
Deniabilities Implausible and Outlandish........................................................................ 8

The Fonzie Scheme

Turning Tough Times into Happy Days...........................................................................11

Whatever You’d Like

The Forbidden Desires of Enhanced Interrogation.....................................................13

Don’t Ask, Do Tell!

A Homoerotic Conversation Regarding Gays in the Military.....................................15

Tired of Being a Loan?

The Latest Tricks in High-Interest Lending...................................................................18

Letters to the Creditor

The Beggars Have Changed Places, But the Crash Goes On................................ 20
AV2009
Selections
The Nassau Nightly
from

II. Pop Music

Moz Def
Old Tricks, New Single from Morrissey......................................................................... 22

The Young and the Reckless

Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972......................................................................... 24

Jesus of Cruel
Nick Lowe Sings the Awful Truth................................................................................... 27

Everything Old Is New Again

Classic Rock in Contemporary Form........................................................................... 29

Sexy Singles Looking To Score

The 20 Most Attractive Songs of 2009........................................................................ 33

Can U Digit?
Downloading Our Decade in 5 Phenomena and 25 Songs..................................... 38

III. Cinema
Catching the DVD
A Screening of the Season’s Most Infectious Discs.................................................. 47

Hangovers
The Rewards of Excess in Contemporary Cinema................................................... 50

Summer Six-Pack
The Ardent Spirits in this Season’s Cinema................................................................. 56

A Decade in the Dark

The Top 10 Films of the ‘00s...........................................................................................61
 TheNassauNightly

Universal Health Scare

The High Costs of Hypochondria

Who am I and what brings me in today? Are you

kidding me? I’ve already completed your new-patient
paperwork in triplicate and surrendered 25 points of
identification. What do you want me to do now? Tap
out my mother’s maiden name in Morse Code? Should I
call a notary public?
No, I didn’t mean that literally. But you
should really stop treating Dr. Shapiro’s name
with such deference. If his adherence to
appointments is any indication of his medical
prowess, he’s fortunate to be practicing in a
NATO-affiliated country. Frankly, I don’t think

I listed my symptoms in bold print on page 8 of your “Clinical Profile”

questionnaire. And again on the back of your “Today’s Visit” form. So
this guy is fit to doctor a photograph.

Don’t get insulted. I’m the one who should be

what’s with the inefficiency? You guys make the DMV look like Outback insulted. I made this appointment 4 months
Steakhouse. Am I in a doctor’s office or a Kafka novel? ago. I thought I had skin cancer, for Christ’s
sake! Only the keratoses turned out to be
Yes, I’m a first-time patient. No, not first-time ever. Just with Dr. Shapiro. Why stubborn mosquito bites. They’re all gone
did I choose Dr. Shapiro? Well, it wasn’t a choice so much as a compulsion. now. But I kept the appointment on the
Dr. Shapiro is the only dermatologist in my network who was educated odd chance that I might develop another
outside of the Lesser Antilles. I prefer physicians who’ve moved beyond the dermatologic malady. And, as fate would
four humours paradigm. Even if, in cases of genuine emergency, I’m willing have it, I’m now afflicted with plaque psoriasis.
to consent to leech therapy. Not to mention tan lines.

But that shouldn’t be an issue today. Because you’re already bleeding What am I expecting? A consult. A petty
me dry with this co-pay. $50 for 10 minutes with Dr. Shapiro? Eliot Spitzer reassurance. A knowing nod and a white lab
got better rates than that. I could get a higher return investing with Bernie coat. Why? Do you purport to offer a cure?
Madoff. For that kind of cash, I expect my examination to be followed by Ha! That’s a good one! You guys couldn’t cure
a table dance. a Virginia ham. What was medical science’s
last substantive vaccine? Polio? Jonas Salk’s
Why do you need to see my insurance card again? To photocopy it? been gone for 15 years. And even he was too
The Continental Congress made fewer copies of the Declaration of late to save President Roosevelt.
Independence. And they worked faster, too. I understand that you need a
copy for your records. But being without your insurance card in an American You stand behind your treatments? Those
out-patient facility is like being without your documents at a Gaza City ridiculous pills and ointments? Your rosacea
checkpoint. Please don’t disenfranchise me. Or render me to an Egyptian creams are about as cosmetically elegant as
otolaryngologist. I just want to see Dr. Shapiro. Nick Nolte in a Balenciaga gown. Plus they’re
more expensive than Malaysian cocaine.
What’s that? The doctor is 3 hours behind schedule!?! But you’ll let me see And demonstrably less effective. So don’t talk
a PA-C instead? What the hell is a PA-C? Isn’t that a collegiate athletic to me about “treatments”? You couldn’t treat
conference? Aren’t Stanford and UCLA in the PA-C? Is this a doctor’s office your patients to a round of drinks.
or the Pauley Pavilion? I came here to be examined by an ADA-certified
physician, not Coach John Wooden. Let’s stop with the games. Show me And this certainly ain’t no happy hour.
the doctor or show me the door. Your waiting room is a living, breathing

3
 TheNassauNightly

advertisement for Zoloft. I’d be depressed too if I had to visit you’ve come to recognize the urgency of my condition. Yes,
this place with any semblance of regularity. Look at what of course I’m willing to submit myself to a pre-examination
you’ve got for palliatives: O magazine, screening. What’s the protocol? Height, weight,
some clinical literature on dyshidrotic Frankly, I don’t blood type, and prior arrests? No? You want
eczema, and a droning, low-definition think this guy me to do what? Turn my head and cough!?!
television. Why is the volume set so loud? is fit to doctor Right here in the waiting room? Is this a doctor’s
Philippine military coups have marched a photograph. office or a Catherine Breillat film? I haven’t been
through Manila with less bombast than so offended since my urologist told me that my
this Ellen program. And why does she insist on dancing? If genitourinary tract was “unremarkable.”
dermatology has taught us anything, isn’t it that being
Caucasian is inherently hazardous to one’s health, break Go ahead and laugh. Laugh all you want. Just wait until Dr.
beats and harmonic syncopation notwithstanding? Erving hears about this. He’ll have your license revoked faster
than you can say “benzoyl peroxide.”
What’s the problem with my medical insurance? You no
longer accept HealthRight’s Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity I’m out of here! But before I go, can I trouble you for a
Plan? And you refuse to honor my referral? Yes, as a matter couple of Botox samples? I’m not getting any younger. And
of fact, it is a dry cleaning receipt. But it’s clearly signed self-medicating is something of a hobby, especially now that
by the venerable Dr. Julius Erving. You’re not familiar my health insurance is worth about as much as a Weimar
with his work? Might I refer you to the 1983 NBA Finals. Papiermark.
Or any number of slam dunk competitions. If you should
find these directions insufficient, I can only refer you to my If you’ve got the vials, I can cover the syringe portion of the
middle finger. equation. What can I say? Desperate times call for desperate
pleasures. And I’ve long since surrendered to the audacity
No, I didn’t mean it that way at all! Look, there’s an of dope.
unmistakable ring of contact dermatitis just above the
knuckle. Perhaps I should lay off the costume jewelry. I really What? You’re calling security? While you’re at it, could you
need to ask Dr. Shapiro about this. It’s important. call me a cab? I’m running late for my afternoon appointment
with Dr. Phil. He’s a great man. But you don’t want to get me
The doctor will see me in just a minute? Excellent! I’m glad started on his cancellation policy.

(January 15, 2009)

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4

Going Public
Testimony on a Healthcare Option that’s
Insured to Fail
CaseOne
Douglas Wellington, Calabasas, California
It all started with a headache. One which I’d normally treat
with two Excedrin and a tall glass of Ovaltine. Only this time, the
throbbing didn’t fade, despite my treatment’s commercial-
grade acetaminophen and rich chocolaty goodness.
I tried to place a phone call to my doctor. But before I
could get a functional dial tone, a Washington bureaucrat,
obviously drunk on the powers of his unwarranted wire-
tap, blocked my transmission. He told me that the federal
government had formally severed my ties with my primary
care physician, and that my family’s medical records had
been burned in a bonfire of vanities.
I was placed on a 6-month waiting list for an appointment
with a new practitioner, a Dr. Healthcliff Huxtable. A quick
review of his credentials revealed that he was educated
by the indigenous peoples of Equatorial New Guinea
and completed both his residency and fellowship at Fort
Leavenworth Prison.
By the time I was bid entry into his office, my condition had
significantly worsened. With neither an X-ray, MRI, nor even
the slightest overtures of physical examination, Dr. Huxtable
determined that my headache had matriculated into a
malignant brain tumor.
Immediately after this diagnosis, as per the dictates of my
state-run healthcare plan, I was shuttled via quarantined
bus to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. To qualify
for chemotherapy, psychological counseling, and sterile
gauze pads, I had to be scrutinized by Governor
Schwarzenegger himself.
Our encounter was brief but memorable. The Governor
removed my shirt, criticized my sunken pecs, and gave me
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a distracted tap on the top of my head. He then shouted
“It’s not a tumor!” and called me a girlie man. I asked for
a second opinion. To which the Governor replied, “I’ll be
back!”, ostensibly with a clinician.
Unfortunately, Mr. Schwarzenegger never returned. I’ve now
been locked in his examining chamber for close to a year.
My ailment has cost me my wife, my job, my freedom, and
my sanity. I wish I was still with Aetna.
CaseTwo
Phil Marino, Baltimore, Maryland
My name is Phil. I’m the single payer in this new single-
payer system. And I’m very displeased with how things are
working out.
Before the government takeover of healthcare, I paid about
$1,500 per month to insure myself, my wife, and our two
kids. Now I’m obliged to cover a monthly premium of $42.7
billion to insure some 305 million Americans, many of whom
I’ve never met. Needless to say, this has been a big strain on
my finances. I’ve had to take on a second job and cut
back on incidental expenses like food, clothing, and
mortgage payments.
I’m in serious debt here. Yet every time I put in an application
for a bank loan, it’s the same old story: “Sorry, Mr. Marino, but
based on the value of your existing assets, our institution is not
prepared to loan you $12 trillion dollars.”
These guys are complete tight wads. And I really don’t think
my situation is fair. I mean, I want my fellow Americans to
have good, stable medical insurance. I just don’t think I
should have to pay for it.
Is a second or a third payer too much to ask?
5

CaseThree
Rose Dobson, Fort Worth, Texas
The Washington-run healthcare system is operated by a loose
collection of sexual perverts. And I can prove it merely by
describing my recent visit to the office of an Obama-certified
oncologist. In the interests of good taste, I’ll save the more
sordid details for my impending civil suit. But even a general
overview should convince you that I’ve been grievously
wronged and callously disrespected.
All I wanted was a simple cancer screening. Yet at my
first interface with Dr. Johnson’s nursing staff, I was asked
all manner of impertinent personal questions, such as
my blood type, my medical allergies, and my preferred
mailing address.
Then came the kicker. I was told to undress and slip into a
shabby “medical” gown with inadequate rear closure. In
this indecent state of bearing, I was made to sit on a cold
examining table lined with cheap butcher paper.
As I waited for my formal screening, nurses and attendant
personnel occasionally stopped in, flashing malevolent smiles
and insisting that the doctor would be with me shortly. Little
did I know that this wasn’t a reassurance, but an admonition.
Because when Dr. Johnson entered the examining room, she
immediately put me in a compromising position. She told me
that she’d reviewed my chart and was concerned to see a
history of breast cancer in my family. She asked when I last
checked myself for a mammary growth. I was shocked by
the casual licentiousness of the question, but nonetheless
managed to articulate the truth, which is that I don’t dabble
in the art of self-diagnosis.
Dr. Johnson looked worried. She said it was imperative
that she examine my chest for cysts and fibrous tissue. She
asked that I untie the top clasps of my medical gown and
lay back on the examining table, which I did with only a
moment’s protest.
It was then that she touched me. Well, not so much touched
as groped. For a good three minutes, Dr. Johnson poked,
pulled, and prodded each of my bare breasts. The violation
was such that I was rendered speechless and dizzy. All I
remember is Dr. Johnson saying something about a biopsy
or a mammogram. But I really wasn’t able to comprehend
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her instructions, lost as I was in the fallout of my first lesbian
experience.
After this manhandling, I’ll never darken Dr. Johnson’s doorway
again. Nor will I report for any of the petty “mastectomy
surgeries” she’s scheduled on my behalf. From here on in, the
only doctor I’ll listen to is Dr. Sanjay Gupta. At least he knows
how to keep his hands to himself.
CaseFour
Rodney Dangerfield, Babylon, New York
I tell ya, I’m alright now, but last week I was in rough shape.
It’s my wife’s fault, ya know. She’s been keeping me up real
late. She says she needs to talk after sex. So last night she
called me three times from my brother’s house.
That’s the problem with my wife. She never gives me
any respect!
I got so worked up that I had to see a psychiatrist. He told me
I was crazy. I said I wanted a second opinion. So he said, “OK,
you’re ugly, too.”
No respect at all, I tell ya!
And now that I’m on this public option, things are even
worse. After I saw my deductible, I started to get chest
pains. I had to call my doctor. He’s the only doctor in my
network – Dr. Vinnie Boombatz. I said, “Doc, I need to see ya
as soon as possible.” He said, “Come on over. There’s nobody
in the office.” So I went on over. And there was nobody in
the office!
I tell ya, that’s my problem. I never got no respect from
doctors. When I was born, the obstetrician told my mother
he did all he could, but that I survived anyway. As a child, I
went to see a pediatrician. I told him I broke my arm in two
places. He told me to keep out of those places. Years later, I
got a bad stomach ache and had to make an appointment
with a gastroenterologist. I said, “Doc, every time I look in
the mirror, I feel like I’m going to throw up.” He said, “I don’t
know what’s wrong with your stomach, but your eyesight’s
perfect.”
No respect!
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My wife signed me up for this government insurance plan just
last month. It was a big to-do. I had to go see the Surgeon
General. He offered me a cigarette!
But smoking’s not a problem for me anymore. My wife and I
only smoke after sex. I’ve been on the same pack since 1985.
But she’s up to three packs a day!
Which is why I had to go back to Dr. Boombatz. I pulled him
aside and said, “Doc, I think my wife’s got VD.” He patted me
on the back…and gave himself a shot of penicillin!
I tell ya, this public option is a real mess. I had to get a referral
to see a proctologist. When I got to his office, he took a long
look at me and stuck his finger in my mouth.
What a doctor he was!
Then the bill came, and that was no bargain either. I got
charged extra for being a heavy drinker. Apparently my urine
sample came back with an olive in it.
To cap things off, the feds hit me with a hundred-dollar
premium for going past my legal limit of doctor jokes.
I tell ya, the government don’t give me no respect at all!
CaseFive
Dr. Robert Dwyer, Libertyville, Illinois
I’m a doctor. And I take my profession pretty damned
seriously. That’s why I’m so pained by our nation’s sudden
transition to government-run healthcare. The pain is so great,
in fact, that I’ve eaten all my practice’s samples of Vicodin
and Percocet. Thank god I have script-writing power and a
discreet, onsite pharmacist.
But I digress.
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When I became a doctor, I took an oath. In reciting this oath,
I gave my personal assurance that I would always act in the
best interests of my patients and never bring harm upon
anyone in my care. Washington’s public option has made
these two vows irreconcilable. President Obama and his
legion of loyal bureaucrats have changed the very nature
of the patient-provider relationship. Instead of greeting each
patient with clinical curiosity and 15 pages of redundant
questionnaires, I’m now forced to implement a federalized
program of rationed healthcare. I reuse tongue depressors,
check for fewer hernias, and permit the denizens of my
waiting room to read only one outdated news periodical per
visit. As a result of this last stipulation, many of my patients will
never truly realize the danger of sea pirates or learn whether
Georgia was duly conquered by Russia.
This is an obvious tragedy, but ultimately one of a reasonably
low magnitude. Much more disquieting is the federal
mandate that all primary care practices establish a system
of shared intravenous needles. That’s right – virtually every
injection I give is dispatched with an implement of dubious
hygiene and mysterious back-history. Just last month, a long-
time patient came in with a stubborn sinus infection. I drew
some blood and unwittingly gave him the AIDS virus. The
poor guy had trouble blowing his nose. Now he’s got Kaposi’s
Sarcoma. I trust that’s not what the president had in mind
when he pushed for a national medical upgrade.
But now he’s got blood – tainted blood! – on his hands. And
it’ll be years before I can wash that damn’d spot off my
conscience. It just goes to show: A single-payer system is an
oxymoron, because it creates conditions in which everyone
pays. Some pay out of pocket. Others pay with their lives.
As a doctor, my only consolation is a tall vial of Percs and
a chilled bottle of Popov Vodka. These liberal reformers will
never take me alive!
(July 27, 2009)
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 TheNassauNightly

Never Happened
Deniabilities Implausible and Outlandish

Let me begin with a point of clarification: My recent

denial of the Holocaust, while zealously reported
and sedulously criticized, was not a denial in the
conventional understanding of the term. Context
must occasionally be accorded its due reverence. And,
in this particular case, context is king.
political personalities of the 20th Century, the
ostensive Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never
existed. Ergo, neither did the New Deal, Social
Security, or the Glass-Steagall Act. (Thankfully,
but belatedly, I’ve received countless
seconds on my Glass-Steagall denial since
our economy went into its fictive recession.

Y ou see, I don’t just deny the Holocaust. I deny the entire existence
of World War II.
Only in dark times can the truth be exposed.)

I’m nothing if not an equal-opportunity

denier. My refusal to acknowledge FDR is
The Blitzkrieg, the Maginot Line, the Miracle at Dunkirk? All fiction. Operation not a calculated illiberal scheme; it’s merely
Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge? Pure poppycock. the logical extrapolation of my refusal to
acknowledge Calvin Coolidge, Herbert
Each of these phenomena is an historical contrivance on the order of Hoover, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
evolution, heliocentrism, and vermiform appendices. And I refuse to play The period we’ve mistakenly labeled the
apologist for those who would willingly have wool pulled over their eyes by Great Interregnum – that is, the time between
a sordid consortium of secular progressives. World War I (which never happened) and
World War II (ditto) – is positively crawling with
My denial of World War II extends from its formative events to its principal myths and idols. Chief among them is the
figures. Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt never set foot on God’s green notion of the Jazz Age. There was no such
earth. Yalta was a yarn, the Iron Curtain a soft fantasy, and the Gulag a genre; consequently, there could be no such
fairy tale fit for the hack illustrators at Walt Disney Productions – a company age. What were “flappers” aside from bit
which, I hasten to note, takes its name from a personage who was no more players in the F. Scott Fitzgerald bibliography?
flesh and blood than Pinocchio, Snow White, Lady, or the Tramp. And if Fitzgerald was a purveyor of fiction,
could he not also be a product of the very
It just goes to show: The grand deception was extant long before the same force? Old Gatsby. Old Sport. The
purported initiation of hostilities in western Poland. World War II merely character is certainly a forgery, as are his silly
marked the transition from domestic disinformation to international colloquialisms.
conspiracy. Read any professed “history” of the war. The conflict tends to be
characterized as a series of bridgehead sieges and telegram transmittals. I The Sun Also Rises? Not necessarily – especially
could fabricate a better story than that. And I never even went to college when the reputed author subsequently
– largely because the so-called “university” doesn’t exist. disappears without a trace in the harsh
environs of Ketcham, Utah. Hemingway’s
My absence of formal education does not belie an ignorance of the was definitely a faked suicide. Which is
standing world order. As Hamlet might have intoned, had Shakespeare not odd, considering he was only a figment of
been an obvious Elizabethan ruse, “I am too much in the sun.” And such America’s collective imagination. Something
enlightenment provides sight lines typically denied to the conspicuously just doesn’t square up when you consider
delusional arbiters of the American Experience. Our dominant national that A Farewell to Arms clearly pre-empted
narrative is rife with inaccuracies. As I noted above, one of the major the locking, loading, and firing of Papa’s Boss

8

& Co. shotgun. The shot heard ‘round the world was likely
never fired.
Speaking of guns, what are we to make of the Bonus Army
that may or may not have harassed the presumptive President
Hoover, mostly by camping and marching unlawfully in the
general vicinity of Washington, D.C., our latter-day Atlantis?
This phantom army was undoubtedly a lark, much like the
Red Scare that preceded it. I evince no hypocrisy in denying
Sacco, Vanzetti, and the Palmer Raids, as I disavow the
existence of communism itself. Ditto Marx, Engels, Lenin, and
the sealed train to Petrograd. Consult any accredited map
of Eastern Europe. Do you see a city named Petrograd? Of
course you don’t. Because it never existed.
Still have the map handy? Good. Search for the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Can’t find it, can you? Yet we fought a
50-year Cold War against this concoction of a sovereign
nation. What a load of jive! Dean
Acheson and J. Edgar Hoover cooked I don’t just deny the Holocaust.
the books – books that you can file under I deny the entire existence of World War II.
Fiction, right next to Silent Spring and the
journalistic accounts of the Kennedy assassination, which was
plainly staged so that Jack could run off with Marilyn.
This brings us right back to the so-called “Land of the Free”
and “Home of the Brave.” The etymology of these phrases is,
shall we say, questionable at best. We typically attribute their
authorship to Francis Scott Key, he of “The Star-Spangled
Banner” and the concrete bridge connecting Georgetown
with Arlington, Virginia. But what do we really know about
this man? His most celebrated anthem claims to depict
belligerent action during the War of 1812, yet the battle
that Key was theoretically party to, the Battle of Baltimore, is
said to have taken place in 1814. Get your lies straight,
historians! I’ve already disproved the existence of Francis
Scott Key Fitzgerald. Do I have to drop the proverbial deuce
on his namesake?
Issues of identity and intellectual property notwithstanding,
the twin concepts of Freedom and Bravery are integral to
the American spirit. Unfortunately, the grandees of the
reigning parliament have sought to revise our nation’s
social history by contriving a quasi-divine Illinois statesman
named Abraham Lincoln. This figure, despite tall, oft-told
tales regarding log cabins, rail splitting, and emancipation,
never drew a single mortal breath. Like slavery and the Civil
War, Abe is a shameless fantasy. There were no debates
with Stephen Douglas, no speech at Cooper Union, no Bull
Run or Gettysburg, no melancholy or ambiguous sexual
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orientation. John Wilkes Booth never pulled that infamous
trigger. In fact, I hazard to opine that Booth probably lacked
an opposable thumb.
What’s clear, however, is this: Booth was an actor, paid to
play a leading role in a meticulously scripted stage drama.
He cannot be faulted for impersonating an assassin with
striking verisimilitude. But he can be called out as a pawn
in the larger chess match for mind control and the privilege
of belief.
Here’s the rub: History is a study of the present, not the past.
Think back to when you were a kid. Wasn’t Christopher
Columbus a hero? Didn’t your elementary school teacher
force you to construct the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa
Maria out of surplus toothpicks donated by the local Greek
diner? Why aren’t school children doing this anymore?
What happened to Señor Cristobal Colon, star stipendiary
of Ferdinand and Isabella?
He was once an avatar of
Freedom and Bravery. Now
he’s nothing more than a dart
board for grad students at UC Berkeley, even though the
notions of overseas exploration, the round globe, and a New
World are patently ridiculous.
The fallout is practically Orwellian: Oceania is at war with
Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Until,
one day, Oceania and Eastasia are no longer adversaries,
and Christopher Columbus is revealed to be a murderer and
a pederast.
Yet you still believe history to be factual. Well, let me tell you
something. Columbus’ downfall should not be traced to
the emergence of ethnic studies or the subterfuge of the
American-Indian lobby. Instead, the great explorer should
be conceived as the protagonist in a Greek tragedy – a
character who can be felled in one act by virtue of revelation
or the Socratic Method. Revisionists start in with a line of simple
questions. Before you know it, the hero is gouging out his eyes
or drinking a hot vial of hemlock.
This is what happens when history’s puppet masters turn
on one of their own creations. Christopher Columbus, the
man we adored and admired just a generation ago for
“discovering” America, is now depicted as a harbinger of
holocaust. It’s apparent that this recharacterization is not the
fruit of deliberative debate but a diktat from the editors of
the human comedy. The fact that Columbus never existed is
almost immaterial.
9

But not quite totally immaterial. Because in Columbus, I find
my absolution. As a child, you revered the man’s exalted
position as the putative godfather of our continent. You
celebrated his accomplishments and furiously coveted the
October holiday that your school observed in his honor.
Therefore, as a child, you denied a holocaust. And you did it
with a smile on your face.
Now you have the audacity to point your high-and-holy finger
at me. For what, denying a similarly spectral holocaust? If I
am guilty, good sirs, then so are you. Deaths are still deaths,
whether they were wrought by Gentiles or Germans, whether
they come with archaeological testimony or “photographic
evidence,” and whether they took place 500 years ago or in
our grandparents’ lifetime (provided that, unlike me, you buy
into that whole time and space racket).
You’re as complicit in this farcical cover-up as I am, my
friend. So if you want me strung up, you should at least have
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the courage and the decency to join me at the gallows.
Of course, we both know that, like the lunar landing, the
storming of the Bastille, and the election of George W. Bush,
such an honest consummation of crime and punishment
will never happen. So we’ll just have to learn to live with
Western Civilization’s inconvenient truths. Because however
hackneyed and bastardized it may become in the hands
of the mainstream media, my argument simply cannot be
denied. And it’s this fool-proof undeniability that separates
my argument from such spurious hoaxes as global warming,
female suffrage, and the retrospective Nazi indiscretions
which compose the basis for the specious case against me.
Question everything. Answer nothing. And keep a civil
attorney on retainer.
(June 13, 2009)
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10

The Fonzie Scheme
Turning Tough Times into Happy Days
Aayyyy! Arthur Fonzarelli, of Fonzarelli & Teitelbaum
Automotive & Accountancy, at your service. But
please, just call me “The Fonz.” Or, if youse prefer, call
me your new financial adviser. Because I’ve been going
to night school. And I think I can help youse out with your
little, shall we say, “cash-flow situation.”
I know what youse are thinking: What can an ethnic stereotype in a
leather jacket and motorcycle boots possibly tell me about money?
Well, who have youse been listening to up until now? Bankers,
investment consultants, that ridiculous E*Trade baby? How’s that been
working for ya?
I’m here to tell ya that youse don’t need to listen to any of them guys in
monkey suits. What youse need is a strategy. And I got one. It’s a 5-point
plan designed to get us all out of this mess. Or at least to help me make
rent for Mister C.
Hey, economies can’t be fixed in one quick shot, like juke boxes or Ford
Thunderbirds. But if youse take my advice, ya just might be able to put
some lead back in your pencil. And your wallet.
Ya want change youse can believe in? I’ll give it to ya. In the form
of pennies.
Consider this bronze on The Fonz!
Point 1: Jump the Sharks
First thing youse gotta do is stay away from your man-eaters. I’m talking
about your Madoffs, your Stanfords, and your hedge-frauders. Six months
ago, these guys were big shots. Now they’ll have to play it cool from behind
bars. And the chumps who invested with them could be stuck in the poor
house for the rest of their natural lives. Moral of the story: Don’t get involved
in anything that’s not F.D.I.C. insured. It could be a phantom fund. But even
if it’s not, it could lose value faster than my Dodge Dart. I mean, you’d get
better returns running numbers outside Arnold’s Drive-In. Not that I’d ever
recommend that. (On the record.)
TheNassauNightly
Point 2: Richie’s Rich
This ain’t advice. It’s a simple fact. My friend
Richie Cunningham, who youse might know
as Ron Howard, is as flush as the King of Hearts.
He’s gone from Opie to Oscar, child prodigy
to executive producer. His house has its own
time zone, for Pete’s sake. Youse could live off
his residuals until the market rights itself. Or, if
need be, until the revolution comes. All I know
is that I got dibs on that Andy Griffith money.
Think of how many times I saved Richie’s ass
from the toughs on Fillmore varsity. Ever hear
of a retainer fee, Ronnie? But don’t think I’m
greedy. The Happy Days cash has gotta go
to Ralph and Potsie. They’re more broke than
the SEC’s regulatory function.
Point 3: I.R.Aayyyy!s
O.K., sales time. I’ll give youse my little speech.
Ahem.
Lemme tell youse something. These days, the
stock market is harder to score with than Pinky
Tuscadero. That’s why youse need to go off
the Wall Street grid and invest in my very own
proprietary brand of funds. I call them Fonzie’s
I.R.Aayyyy!s. They’re individual retirement
accounts tied directly to the fiscal health of
Mister C.’s hardware store. If business is good,
youse turn a profit. If business is not so good,
I’ll let youse borrow Chachi as your own
personal house servant.
But don’t worry, all my investments are F.D.I.C.
insured. Meaning Fonzie Don’t Invest your
Cash. I just give it to Mister C. and let him buy
ball hammers and Glad trash bags.
Note: This investment should not be confused
with my 401 (k-aayyyy!) program. If youse
11

want in on that, youse’ll have to drop off an application at
Fonzarelli & Teitelbaum. (Leave it with Teitelbaum.)
Point 4: Sit on It, Potsie
...And watch it grow!!! Look, even if youse don’t put your
money in my I.R.Aayyyy!s – and I don’t see why ya wouldn’t
– youse gotta think long-term. Enough with the get-rich-quick
schemes. Investing isn’t a drag race, it’s a Daytona 500.
Haven’t youse seen those T. Rowe Price commercials? The
slow and steady dude always wins. Even I get that metaphor!
So whatcha wanna do is corner the futures market by making
sure that youse still have money in the future. If ya got some
cash stashed away, sit on it. Put it in a low-yield CD. Or under
the seat cushion of your recliner. That way, you can literally
sit on it. And if it’s under your ass, it can’t be coming out of
your pocket.
Hey, I don’t wanna starve the money market. But I don’t want
youse to starve neither.
Point 5: Joanie Loves Trotsky
Worst case scenario: Capitalism falls. If this should happen,
youse’ll need a spinoff. That is, youse’ll need to make money
off nationalization. In theory, that’s really hard. But in practice,
it’s like taking candy from a baby. (Which is something youse
TheNassauNightly
might also have to do if capitalism falls.) Lemme tell youse
something. (Again.) Ahem. This guy Marx had plenty of
theories. But his entire system of governance depended on
an educated proletariat. And most of us don’t even make it
to night school, never mind college!
So when the revolution comes, it won’t be enlightened. It’ll
be bloody – like The Demons versus The Falcons. And wealth
won’t be spread. It’ll be concentrated. Youse can share in this
concentration by declaring a loyalty early in the revolution.
If your side wins, ya might get a government contract. If your
side loses, ya don’t gotta worry about the future.
But hey, I’m not gonna end on a sour note. I’m The Fonz
because I got a Can-Do Attitude. That’s why I came up
with this 5-point plan in the first place. So even if youse don’t
understand where I’m coming from, let’s get together on
where we’re going. Sing it with me: “Goodbye, grey sky/
Hello, blue!”
Youse know the rest.
Just a little positive thinking, and a lot of Chinese capital, and
happy days will be here again.
God bless the U.S.Aayyyy!
(March 4, 2009)
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12

Whatever You’d Like
The Forbidden Desires of Enhanced Interrogation
“...you would like to employ ten techniqlies (sic)
that you believe will dislocate [Abu Zubaydah’s]
expectations regarding the treatment he believes
he will receive...You would like to place Zubaydah
in a cramped confinement box with an insect...In
particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you
intend to place a stinging insect into the box with
him...Finally, you would like to use a technique called
the ‘waterboard.’”
— Text from the “torture memo” authored by Jay S. Bybee,
Assistant Attorney General of the United States, August 1, 2002
Y ou would like to give Abu Zubaydah a shave and a haircut. Your
contention is that these procedures would not only disorient and
emasculate the detainee, but also bring out his soft features and angular
jawline. No expense would be deemed unacceptable in the pursuit of your
desired “Latin Underwear Model” aesthetic. You have orally informed us
that you intend to fly in a dedicated team of Miami’s top stylists to manage
Zubaydah’s daily grooming rituals, as standard military employment of
buzzers and clippers would engender gauche and imprecise cuts.
You would like Zubaydah to prepare a Western omelette for your
consumption. Egg whites only, no yolks. (You have orally informed us that
your doctor classifies cholesterol as an enemy combatant.) The prisoner
would be bound at the feet, but his hands would be given the requisite
measure of freedom to slice and dice the omelette’s customary onions,
bell peppers, and mushrooms. As Zubaydah is a practicing Muslim, he
would be recused from handling the omelette’s ham component. Military
police would prepare the ham under a separate flame, then combine their
cooked meat with the dairy and vegetable portions entrusted to Zubaydah.
Under extreme circumstances, Zubaydah might also be asked to make you
a junior-sized plate of hash browns.
You would like to dress Zubaydah as a French maid. The costume would
entail a vintage petticoat, a frilly white apron, untold quantities of lace,
and a black servant’s dress with liberal tailoring. (You have orally informed
TheNassauNightly
us that you prefer a plunging neck line.) A
feather duster and fishnet stockings might
also be employed, either as props or in sheer
deference to Victorian verisimilitude. Use of
the phrase “Ooh la la!” would be a function
of your discretion.
You would like Zubaydah to pick up your
dry cleaning. You have orally informed us
that, while at Gitmo, you wear your white
uniforms in exclusivity, as such apparel allows
your appendages to breathe and prevents
opposing military personnel from identifying
you as an officer. You eat breakfast 300 yards
from 4000 Cubans who are trained to kill you
on sight. This inexorable threat of hostility
provides de facto justification for sending the
detainee to claim your dry cleaning. It also
implies that your Western omelette is well
earned.
You would like to begin referring to Zubaydah
as “Poochie.” You have orally informed us
that this sobriquet was expressly conceived
to humiliate Zubaydah through the stubborn
degradation of his psyche. “Poochie,” you
contend, bears no connection to a certain
cocker spaniel that you may or may not have
lost to a freak lawn mowing accident in the
spring of 1967. You did not, you contend,
ever possess a carnal love for that dog
– irrespective of whether or not he patrolled
your family’s front yard with his tongue
wagging suggestively and his tail ever-aloft.
You would like to take your large, gym-
sculpted arms and throw them around
Zubaydah’s naked torso. You have orally
informed us that this would not be a flagrant
13

display of homoeroticism, but a scientifically tested rapport-
building technique that you’ve petitioned to add to the
Army Field Manual. You contend that you’ve been using the
technique at Fort Bragg for the better part of two decades
(ie, your entire married life).
You would like to ask Zubaydah to dance with you. Nothing
particularly fast, as you lack special ops training in salsa or
meringue. Your preference is for a waltz or a minuet. You
have orally informed us that your movements are graceful
and on-rhythm, particularly when the music is played in 3/4
time. At the present moment, we cannot ascertain whether
Zubaydah shares your dexterity. (Or your enthusiasm.)
You would like to place Zubaydah in a small box. Then you
would like to climb into that box and share the intimate
space with the prisoner. While inside, you would discuss
Romantic poetry, bubble baths, and long walks on the beach
– in particular, the pleasures associated with each of these
caprices. You have orally informed us that, time permitting,
you might also instigate a dialogue germane to America’s
national security concerns.
You would like to use the term “washboard.” Not as a threat
of violence or maltreatment, but to describe the abs that
Zubaydah has developed in the wake of his hunger strike.
You have orally informed us that you could grate cheese on
his rectus abdominis. Such grating might complement the
Western omelette that you previously requested. Accordingly,
it is our advice that you condition Zubaydah to be proficient
TheNassauNightly
in omelette preparation prior to the initiation of any attempts
at grating.
You would like to engage in role playing. Specifically, an
inversion of roles: You would be manacled in Zubaydah’s
full collection of chains, ropes, and fetters. The prisoner, in
turn, would be offered temporary powers of interrogation.
You have orally informed us that it might be necessary for
Zubaydah to brandish a whip or to perform aggressive and
repeated cavity searches. Handcuffs, you contend, are a
non-negotiable must.
You would like to go to war with Iraq. (Well, perhaps not
you personally, but we get the general idea.) You have
orally informed us that despite constant pressure and the
occasional caress, your detainees have not corroborated a
substantive link between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein. You
propose to expand your interrogative repertory to include the
following measures: squeezing of the biceps, stroking of the
latissimus dorsi, slapping of the gluteus maximus, and fluffing
of something you refer to as “the Magic Johnson.”
Taken in the aggregate, your position is simple: Desperate
times call for desperate measures. You’re prepared to take
the gloves off – along with several more intimate pieces
of apparel.
We hereby defer to your whims. And we respectfully request
a transfer out of the Justice Department.
(April 21, 2009)
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14

Don’t Ask, Do Tell!
A Homoerotic Conversation Regarding
Gays in the Military
I hold in my hand your discharge. That is, your
impending discharge from the U.S. Army. Don’t
come around here looking for double entendres or salty
innuendo. Because I’m all business. And straight as an
arrow providing directions to a Liza Minelli concert or a
discreet men’s restroom.
L et’s be clear: What you do at barracks, on leave, or at the Chelsea
Bath House, located on the corner of West 26th and Greenwich, with the
hot tub astride the lockers heated to a sultry 98 degrees, and with muscle-
bound Antonio reliably manning the front entrance, is certainly not my
concern. My focal point is the integrity of the Army uniform, which, I hasten
to note, you fill out quite nicely.
First, some background information. How schlong have you been in the
Army? I mean, how long have you been in the Army? Forgive the slip of the
tongue. “Schlong” and “long” are virtual homonyms. And their relationship
is further confused by the potential for the latter to describe the former. Or
so I’ve been told. What we have here is a point of semantics. And I’m not
sufficiently inquisitive to examine the psychology of my word choice. But I
am curious enough to insist that we continue our examination.
Speaking of which, you know why you’re here. Certain photos have been
discovered. Photos so explicit and horrific that they make the hair on the
back of my neck stand on end. Allow me to show you Exhibits A through
OMG! Never mind the wear and tear. The obvious heavy handling is a
function of military meticulousness. Imagine how ridiculous it would be
to think that somebody in the Armed Forces, perhaps yours truly, might
have used these photos in a less than professional manner. The very concept
is laughable.
Anyway, that’s a hell of an ass pyramid you assembled there. Far more
symmetrical than that amateur-hour production we put on at Abu Ghraib.
The execution is downright Egyptian, fit for a Pharaoh’s burial – a lucky
Pharaoh’s burial! You, sir, are an artist, an engineer, and an architect in
one.
But, quite evidently, you’re also prone to disgusting, unnatural, and
demoralizing urges. Men’s asses simply should not be stacked in such a
TheNassauNightly
manner, even in the context of an innocent
R&R misadventure in San Francisco’s Castro
District. Which begs the question: Where did
you stay while on leave, Private? The Empress?
How is Gunther? Is he still available for in-room
oil massages?
Back to the photos. And the nightmares of
depravity contained therein. Private, I’m no
interpretative genius, but I’m fairly sure that
the mouth-to-mouth action depicted in this
picture is not some new-fangled form of
CPR. And this one here, with the ropes and
the chains and the leather straitjacket? In
no way can this be construed to constitute
enhanced interrogation. Although, to be fair,
certain body parts appear to be thoroughly
enhanced, either through weight training,
cosmetic surgery, or sudden engorgement
with blood. Incidentally, you’ve got a nice
pair of legs on you. How much can you squat,
soldier?
Strike that question from the record. It was
the product of ill-advised distraction. But now
I’ve regained my focus, perhaps on account
of the sobering contents of this photo right
here. What exactly were you doing to this
gentleman, Private? Did you or did you not
engage in waterboarding without the express
written consent of the CIA? I mean, the guy’s
wearing nothing but a set a water wings.
Absolutely nothing. And he appears to be
foaming at the mouth, as if he were just party
to a particularly intense form of asphyxiation.
What did you shove into this man’s mouth,
Private? A water-saturated rag? Or something
more substantial and less copasetic?
To be fair, I recognize that the boundary
15

line between pain and otherworldly pleasure can blur to
the point of indistinction. So, for the sake of jurisprudence,
it’s probably best for a full battalion of soldiers to reenact
the explicit choreography of bodies captured within these
photographs.
OK, we hereby agree to defer to a later date any disciplinary
action that might be connected to the photos. Until that time,
I’m obliged to keep the shots in my private possession. I don’t
want to turn these proceedings into a protracted analysis of
crime and penishment, but all military adjudickation must be
beholden to rules. In the absence of procedure, we have
chaos, otherwise known as our expedition in Iraq.
Alright, let’s discuss your relationships with your fellow soldiers. you a chance to simply fill in the blank. Is multiple choice
Did you feel like a kid in a candy store during your time at
barracks, what with all the exposed man flesh, the daily
physical rigor, and the emphasis on cleanliness? What were
your sleeping arrangements? I mean, were you a “top” bunk
or a “bottom” bunk? Did you ever have the occasion to switch
hit, if only for
variety or to My focal point is the integrity of the Army uniform,
pacify the which, I hasten to note, you fill out quite nicely.
appetites of a
bulkier enlistee?
Your silence unnerves me, Private. I think you might have
figured out my motives. Yes, it’s true: I’m scheduled to be part
of a covert intelligence operation, one which calls for me to
infiltrate the sordid homosexual insurgency that’s taken root
in the military ever since the Democrats allowed Barney Frank
to attend meetings of the Military Appropriations Committee.
It’s my job to break the seductive, stubble-ridden stranglehold
that the G.I. Janes have on both the Armed Forces and my
unfettered imagination.
Now that we’re queer...I mean, clear...on my orders, we
can concentrate on subjective matters. Soldier, if I were
to agree to employ a more becoming hair cut and some
pec-hugging khaki, how do you think I would do in your
“scene”? Do you think your brothers in arms would respond
to my subtle entreaties? I’m quite the convincing undercover
agent, and I’m willing to go to extreme lengths to serve the
best interests of my country, not to mention my libido. Which
brings us back to the unfortunate “schlong”/”long” duality.
More sophomoric nonsense facilitated by your patently
unprofessional behavior. I’m going to have to insist that you
refrain from making a mockery of our conversation.
TheNassauNightly
You know what else is a mockery? My marriage. I love my
wife, but more like a sister than a spouse. I mean, she’s really
let herself go. I’ve seen smaller asses pulling tourists along the
lesser trails of the Grand Canyon. It’s really, really sad. When
I compare her behind to the stronger, shapelier specimens
composing your blatantly pornographic ass pyramid, I feel
empty inside. But then I take another look at the ass pyramid,
and my existential anguish relents, at least until a clear portrait
of my wife shocks me back to a homoestatic state. Which is
to say fervent heterosexuality.
Where were we? Oh, yes, your likes and dislikes. Here’s a
question for you: What do you think of Rufus Wainwright? If
you’re not prepared to answer at length, I’m happy to offer
at odds with your homodoxy? I didn’t think so. Here’s the
statement: “Rufus Wainwright is ______.” Your options are A)
Talented, B) Delicious, C) Fabulous, and D) All of the above.
Feel free to eyeball my autographed copy of Poses while
you consider your answer. Again, forgive the obvious heavy
handling. It’s a function of
military meticulousness.
We’re almost done, Private.
Just some final formalities from the psychosocial department.
If I were to ask you to turn your head and cough, how would
you feel about that? Bear in mind that, while I possess no
medical degree, I might be persuaded to don a doctor’s
white lab coat or brandish a functioning tongue depressor.
This is what we call speculative role-playing. And it’s all in
good fun. So tell me, soldier – What’s it going to be? If you
drop your drawers, I might be inclined to drop all charges
pursuant to this investigation. If you refuse, you’ll be subject
to court martial. Which may lead not only to dishonorable
discharge, but also to an extended stint in an all-male military
prison.
You lucky bastard.
If you think my probe is excessively intrusive, wait until the folks
at JAG get their firm, work-calloused hands on you. Detainees
are faced with a degenerative cycle of interrogation and
deep-cavity searches. In my capacity as an undercover
agent, I’ve been involved in untold numbers of the latter.
It’s long been part of my training. At least that’s what I told
the judge.
On that note, and as per the dictates of my harsh continuing
education schedule, I’m obliged to conclude this session
16

and depart for an improvised lunch-and-learn. Today’s
function is being held within the candle-lit basement
of the Provincetown Theatre for Experimental Drama.
The Bearded Men’s Glee Club of Cape Cod oversees
the entire affair. It’s very well done. Want to come with?
No? Well, thank you for the give and take, Private. This has been
a very stimulating conversation. I’ll need to hold onto your
discharge until 06:00 tomorrow morning. By that time, I should
have a significant volume of additional discharges dropped
TheNassauNightly
into my in-box. My nights are dedicated almost exclusively to
cruising units, inspecting privates, and examining members
of various Army assemblies. It’s hard work, butt somebody
has to do it. The military is lucky that my love of country is
almost as passionate as my love for my fellow soldier. My
other loves, for better or for worse, are strictly confidential.
Consider yourself debriefed.
(May 20, 2009)
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17

Tired of Being a Loan?
The Latest Tricks in High-Interest Lending
Hey Baby,
Has your current mortgage commitment lost
its spark? Have terms that seemed favorable and
attractive three years ago revealed themselves to be
bloated, selfish, and manipulative? Has the drop in
property values brought an element of flaccidity to your
formerly rock-solid loan package?
I
f you answered “Yes!” to any of these questions, it’s only natural for
your eyes to stray and your wallet to wander. You’re in the mood for
something new. And we’re prepared to give it to you.
That’s right, Big Boy: By virtue of receiving this letter you qualify for
the latest addendum to the Obama Administration’s Making Home
Affordable Program. We call it Me Luv U Loan Time. And we’re anxious
to prove that our word is true.
We hope that your fiscal fidelity is not similarly unwavering. Because our
central objective is to get you to abandon your old ball and chain. Why
are your still party to such a humorless and punitive union? It’s obvious
that you’ve been used, abused, and confused by the loan industry’s
PIMPs – Patently Illegal Mortgage Providers. They courted you with
insincere compliments, then wowed you with rates that were cut so low
you could see their unmentionables. But just when their loving got good,
their rates got higher than a hippie at a Sly & the Family Stone concert.
Seductive entreaties morphed into sinister threats. “How can we service
you, honey?” became “You betta have my money, bitch!”
Me Luv U Loan Time doesn’t pursue this passive-aggressive course of usury.
We’re working men and women who treat our profession as if it were the
world’s oldest and most essential. When you solicit our services, you can’t
help but notice that our customer care representatives, or “call girls,” put
the “fine” back in “refinance” and the “ho” back in “home loans.” They’ll
bend over backwards to facilitate your application. And, if need be, they’ll
strike a similar pose to indulge your desires for something subprime.
But we don’t stop there. Our in-house team ensures that all Loan Time
products are regularly screened for fiscal prudence, moral integrity, and
TheNassauNightly
external genital herpes. Our rates are as
flexible as a Romanian gymnast – and just as
primed for elite-level competition. We allow
you to remit your loan over 30 years, 15 years,
or whatever period is most convenient for
your family. Heck, we even offer hourly rates!
No job? No problem! No income? No
problem! Non-communicable terminal illness?
No problem, either! Just try to find another
lender with Loan Time’s unique dedication to
customer satisfaction.
But, ultimately, the Loan Time program is not
about us. It’s about you. And all you need to
do to complete your pre-approval is submit
to a short physical examination. We want to
take a look at your loan package, examine
its size and duration, and then come up with
a customized plan for busting your monthly
nut. We aim to lower your costs and your
inhibitions. So don’t be afraid of exploring your
options on the open market. If you’re worried
about the quality of our goods, we invite your
to check out our A.S.S. (Asset Security System).
This patented program guarantees tacit FDIC
insurance and discreet transaction fees.
Nobody but you has to know that you’ve
refinanced. Creative accounting techniques
enable us to keep your former lenders in the
dark for indefinite stretches of time. They
won’t know that you’ve left until it’s too late
for them to get you back.
There you have it, Honey: Me Luv U Loan Time
offers low interest rates proprietarily packaged
with an even-lower risk of getting called out on
your fiscal philandering. So let us put our ARMs
around you. Let us reach into your pockets and
pull out a wad of cash that you’ll be surprisingly
18
 TheNassauNightly

happy to discharge. Or, if you prefer the reliability of a hard, ready, willing, and able to re-inject the fantasy into your
fixed rate, let us quote you some numbers that’ll set your eyes American Dream.
rolling toward the back of your head. Our refinancing plans
are so sexy that you’ll be tempted to extend your loan past Come see us anytime, Sugar. We promise to send you home
the mortal boundary of “till death do us part.” Why pay down with a smile on your face and a wrinkle in your shirt – even
the pleasure if that home is a month away
principal You qualify for the latest addendum to the from foreclosure and that shirt
when we can Making Home Affordable Program. We call it “Me Luv is the only thing you have left
get the feeling U Loan Time.” to lose.
to last all night
long? (That is, for the entirety of your mortgage contract.) Sincerely yours (provided we agree on a rate),

That’s a question you’ll have to struggle with. In the meantime, The Me Luv U Loan Time Team
quit struggling with the rules and rigors of your current loan
agreement. Some contracts are simply asking to be broken. (June 2, 2009)
And now more than ever, we at Me Luv U Loan Time are

Back to Contents

19
 TheNassauNightly

Letters to the Creditor

The Beggars Have Changed Places,
But the Crash Goes On
checked my Chicago Manual of Style to
Dear MasterCharge, determine whether “Past Due” should have
been hyphenated. Now, I don’t presume
I read with interest your “Final Request for Payment,” but not with quite so to know every nuance of the composition
much interest as you’re currently applying to my debt. Perhaps I’m being style into which you corset your corporate
a little nitpicky, but with a 37% vig, couldn’t you have afforded to print my communications (if they even adhere to a
delinquency letter on better paper stock? Your request is essentially coming normative standard, and aren’t distributed
apart in my hands. And for good reason! The word choice is poor, the indiscriminately, like your leasing agreements).
grammar is suspect, and the threats regarding lawsuits and/or prison time But I do know that “Past Due” was being
are alternately ham-fisted and melodramatic. The empty bombast (“This used to qualify “Payment,” and, accordingly,
is your last chance to prevent irreparable damage to your credit score.”) should have been classified as an adjective.
and hippie-dippy rapprochement (“You should consider pursuing a debt- In short, methinks I see a blank space in the
consolidation solution with a licensed intermediary.”) read like the diaries of text field that should be rightly reserved for
a bipolar guidance counselor. This is not a serious letter, but a lazy, formulaic a hyphen! This letter serves to correct your
grope for recognition. And all I take from its reading are the grade-school careless typographical error. An invoice for
vagaries of a hack writer in the employ of a distracted patron. Nothing new my editorial services is enclosed. A past-due
here. Please cancel my subscription. notice may be forthcoming.

Dear American Central Bank, Dear Internal Revenue System,

As someone who was encouraged to join the so-called “ownership
society,” I was taken aback by your “Default Notice of 10/18/09.” In this
miserable excuse for a missive, you claim that I haven’t issued “a single
mortgage payment since February of 2007.” This is wildly inaccurate and,
as such, wickedly libelous. Just last week, I applied more than 27 U.S. dollars
to my property’s escrow account. Other remittances, though perhaps not
dispersed with the ridiculous frequency that you recommend, were clearly
defrauded by either Michael Milken or Bernie Madoff. Check your records!
Seriously, check your records! Because I’ve had a hard time staying current
since PSE&G cut off my electricity. This letter is being written by candlelight
and plume, yet it still shines with greater truth and coherence than the
two-bit Default Notice you callously directed to my attention. Might I
remind you, sir, that a business relationship is built upon an edifice of mutual
respect. And you Brooks Brothers-besuited jackasses are neither worthy of
my respect nor my financial support. Expect to hear from my lawyer.
Dear Honda of Baskerville,
After reading your “Past Due Payment Notices” (volumes I - IX), I immediately
retired to my study and took the sentient solicitee’s logical recourse: I
In your “Failure to File” memorandum,
dated 10/29/1987, you accuse the intended
recipient (known hereafter as “me”) of
purposely withholding all income, taxable
or otherwise, from federal scrutiny. Well, let’s
start with “accuse,” a word that I take as a
call to arms (the possession of which, I hasten
to note, is protected under the Second
Amendment). And lest your accusations of
negligence gain traction, let’s fast-forward
to the Eighth Amendment, a provision
which reads, I believe, “No Taxation Without
Representation!” This stone-clad axiom
served as the “It’s not you. It’s me.” of 18th
Century Anglo-American relations. Today, it
serves as something of a personal motto, in
that I refuse to pay any federal taxes until
I’m accorded the right of representation
in the U.S. Legislature. It’s important to note
that I believe in Athenian democracy, which
provides for direct representation rather than

20

government by proxy. So unless you’re prepared to offer
me a lifetime appointment in the Senate, you can take your
repeated attempts at extortion and shove ‘em where the
sun don’t shine (that is, Delaware). I await your decision.
In the meantime, I’d appreciate being removed from your
mailing list.
Dear East Malibu Rehab Clinic,
Your “Friendly Reminder” for payment, which was forwarded
to my current address without solicitation, is both personally
insulting and professionally unbecoming. My reticence to
settle our open balance is not, as your author implied, “an
unfortunate oversight,” but a direct extension of my reckless
extravagance. Since leaving your facility, albeit without the
“requisite” physician clearance, I’ve acquired six Vespa
scooters, four Havanese show dogs, and two Venezuelan
fishing licenses. Well, that and 24 kilos of cocaine. Which
pretty much confirms what I’ve long suspected – that your
treatment center is an absolute joke. With results like these,
I’m lucky to be alive, never mind solvent. Please consider this
letter a formal rebuke of your billing policy, as well as an ink-
and-iron repudiation of the entire concept of rehabilitation.
And please direct all future correspondence regarding my
account to the New Jersey Department of Corrections. I
might be here a while.
TheNassauNightly
Dear Fat Paulie DiSenzo
(aka “Paulie Cupcakes”),
Thank you for the “Pay up or DIE!!!” note that I found stuffed
into my mouth last Wednesday. I happened upon the
letter surreptitiously, after regaining consciousness from the
knockout blow that your associate, Nunzio, administered
to my cranium. Suffice to say that I find the work a tour de
force, with a heavy emphasis on “force.” The handwriting
is so tactful and guileless that it resembles calligraphy. And
the combination of blood, saliva, and tears that coats the
paper really lends a fashionably distressed look to the entire
affair. As to the substance of the note, I’m reading you loud
and clear! Rarely do I come across such unadorned prose;
the simplicity is as inspiring as it is frightening. So rather than
meet your idiomatic menace with Joycean prevarication,
let’s address the first order of business: I’ll have your money
as soon as I sell off a couple of my assets. Which reminds me:
Can I interest you in a Vespa scooter? How about a long
weekend on the estuaries outside Caracas? Please RSVP! My
prices are insane!
(November 1, 2009)
Back to Contents
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21

Moz Def
Old Tricks, New Single from Morrissey
Steven Patrick Morrissey doesn’t write eligible singles
so much as he dispatches fully confirmed bachelors.
Each song is a celibate, a fellow who’s been passed
over with such violence and frequency that he long
ago disavowed the concept of romantic bliss. He’s
fated to brood and offer droll commentary, to prize the
failed courtship rather than the ultimate consummation
of its promise. This is Morrissey’s broken record, a hit
parade that pulls its stubborn theme from the stocks
of the forsaken and unrequited. The titles tell the story:
“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “The Boy With the
Thorn In His Side,” “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody
Loved Me,” “I Am Hated For Loving.”
F or the narrator of a Morrissey song, everyday is like Sunday – prone not to
just the “silent and gray” but to the solipsism and self-pity that accompany
untrammeled leisure. Moz takes Cartesian logic one step further than it
was intended. Instead of “I think, therefore I am,” we get “I think, therefore
I’m lonely.”
During his quarter-century reign as the Prince of Petulancy, Morrisey’s most
reliable message has been the inevitability of loneliness. And his medium,
perhaps contrarily, has been cheeky Britpop. One might take issue with
this ironic treatment
of tragedy – private For the narrator of a Morrissey song, everyday
disappointment revealed is like Sunday – prone not to just the “silent and gray”
with public bombast but to the solipsism and self-pity that accompany
– if the Moz weren’t so untrammeled leisure.
goddamned good at it.
He’s one of the few indispensable singers of the “Alternative” era. From
a vocal perspective, his good-cop croon is every bit as arresting and
idiosyncratic as Glenn Danzig’s bad-cop counterpart; lyrically speaking,
his English austerity distinguishes his verse from the more frenetic and
meandering lines of Michael Stipe. This versatility – the juxtaposition of the around/Around Paris.”
parry and the wound, the offensive and the retreat – is what makes Morrissey
so interesting. On paper, he’s a shoegazer, but, in person, he stares you
dead in the face.
TheNassauNightly
From paper and person, we move to the pop
star’s typical mode of expression: the record.
On his latest single, “I’m Throwing My Arms
Around Paris,” Morrissey drives his Manchester
melancholia through the Chunnel, returning
his gaul to the land of its namesake. The track
begins with the sound of an engine turning
over, an aural effect you’d sooner expect
from the leader of the E Street Band than the
former front man of the Smiths. But whereas
Springsteen is always magnanimous, eager
to offer Mary his passenger seat and a dirty
hood of redemption, Moz eschews the very
notion of invitation. In fact, he eschews the
very notion of Mary. He’s simply not the type
to sing sweetly for his intended or to pine
longingly for the one that got away. Heck,
they all got away! – that’s the essence of
Morrissey’s discography.
It’s also the emotional precondition for
“I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris.” Petty
isolation begets total surrender, which in turn
begets unbearable loneliness. (There’s that
word again.) Having given up on humanity’s
potential to love
him, Moz seeks
solace in an illicit
(and anatomically
unfeasible)
embrace with the
5th Arrondissement. Perhaps his own words
provide the clearest picture: “In the absence
of your love/And in the absence of human
touch/I have decided/I’m throwing my arms
One wonders what the Mormons would make
of this, especially considering the phallic
qualities of the Eiffel Tower. Of course, smart
22

money says that Morrissey isn’t the least bit concerned with
orthodoxy. His primary compositional aim is to mix metaphor
with the complete absence of the abstract. Indeed,
“absence” is the most important noun on the lyric sheet.
Rejection has left the protagonist full of gaping holes – no
love, no touch, no smiling faces or open arms – so he seeks
reconstitution in the inanimate. It’s a straight trade: flesh for
concrete. And it reeks of desperation.
“Paris” is not a declaration of fetish but an admission of
failure. The chorus is presented as a fait accompli. Morrissey
complains
that “Only Morrissey is a living, breathing intimacy issue.
stone and
steel accept my love”; therefore, he’s decided to toss his
affections at the French capital, which, we assume, contains
ample stocks of both. Such is the logical culmination of
Morrissey’s avant garde experiments with misanthropy: If
hell is other people, why not abandon humankind entirely?
Well, not entirely, for Moz still needs a band. And on this track, sartorial splendor lead him to resemble a camera-ready cross
the boys with the instruments find a happy midpoint between
classic Smiths jangle pop and the thicker, fuller, huskier sound
that fueled Morrissey’s You Are the Quarry comeback. “Paris”
is propelled by a simple, arpeggiated guitar riff, one which
is slightly more upbeat than the mandolin pluck on R.E.M.’s
“Losing My Religion” but considerably less caffeinated than
the piano motif employed on Coldplay’s “Clocks.” This
foundational strum is filled out by the quasi-orchestral echoes
and rises that have come to characterize Morrissey’s woe-is-
me balladry. The sound is warm and endearing – so much so,
in fact, that the song itself feels like a hug, albeit one that is (February 18, 2009)
offered begrudgingly.
TheNassauNightly
But what else would you expect from Morrissey? The man
is a living, breathing intimacy issue. He’s always kept his
sexuality ambiguous, making occasional claims of man-
love, then partaking in irregular stints of abstinence. To traffic
in the dispensing of such smoke and mirrors is to unwittingly
enroll yourself in Morrissey’s passive-aggressive game of
“You said, I said.” It’s best to simply assess his music on its own
merits, and “Paris” is certainly worthy of our time, attention,
and applause.
Morrissey’s post-millennial sound – harder, more percussive,
somewhat symphonic – has
helped reinvigorate his popular
appeal. He may be famous for
proclaiming “Meat Is Murder,” but he’d be hard pressed not
to admit that, from a sonic perspective, “beefier is better.”
His fuller sound becomes his fuller body, not to mention his
outsized persona. Moz is nearly 50, and he’s slowly morphed
from an angry young man into an avuncular curmudgeon.
Look at his recent concert videos: His patrician hair and
between Alec Baldwin and Keith Olbermann. Only Morrissey
isn’t an actor or an ideologue. He’s the ever-exalted Pope of
Mope, newly emerged from the confessional and slouching
towards an absolution only he can grant.
This is one of the spoils of loneliness: In the absence
of companionship, you get to be your own judge. And
in the absence of entanglements, you’re free to be your
own man.
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23

The Young and the Reckless
Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972
Contrary to popular conception, the current
calendar year has witnessed the release of a rock
record with a longer incubation period than Chinese
Democracy. In fairness, this “record” is actually
an 8-disc, 116-track retrospective from one of rock
and roll’s most ornery and mercurial talents: Neil
Percival Young.
I t’s only appropriate that Volume 1 of Shakey’s archives should be
characterized by more than two decades of false starts, unsubstantiated
rumors, and a progress chart filled with feverish work and long sabbaticals.
Neil is the most maddening of our multi-platinum singer-songwriters; he’s
hyperaware of the fact that rust never sleeps, so he evolves (or devolves,
depending on whom you ask) at a breakneck pace. “Forever Young” is
therefore fated to remain the title of a Bob Dylan song, never to become
a viable summation of Neil’s discography. Nothing about Young is forever.
And that’s what makes him indispensable.
Comprising Neil’s output from 1963 through 1972, the Archives, Vol. 1 covers
a considerable patch of cultural ground. It’s the Kennedy Assassination
through the Watergate break-in, Meet the Beatles through Transformer,
strident and straightforward Bob Dylan through cryptic and recalcitrant
Bob Dylan – or, in strictly Youngian terms, the Squires through Harvest. This
means we get to meet and greet not only the barely-legal Neil, but also
many iterations of the guitarist as a young man: the tremoring psych-rocker
in Buffalo Springfield, the solo-acoustic folkie of “Sugar Mountain,” the
wildcard who crashed CSNY’s sweet harmonies, and the brains behind the
brawn of Crazy Horse. Such a trip requires a road map, as it takes us from the
coffee houses and dance halls of Winnipeg and Toronto to the Strip joints
and concert houses of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Thankfully, Young’s
dreamy, instinctual songwriting is a reliably strong navigator, especially
when presented in chronological order, as it is on Archives.
The Squires’ material is punchy but lite, conjuring the dense echo of Link
Wray, the breezy clunk of Del Shannon, and the soaring pitch of Roy Orbison.
There’s promise here, but promise that would have to be radicalized in
order to be revealed. By the mid-Sixties, Young would develop the musical
dexterity to move beyond the three-minute soundscapes of his jingle-
jangle influences. He would incorporate Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and
TheNassauNightly
the Byrds into his Beatles-by-way-of-boogie-
woogie bedrock, marrying folk with blues
and country with rock. Post-Squires, he wrote
early versions of pointed, introspective songs
like “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing”
and “Sugar Mountain,” demos of which are
released for the first time on Archives. These
tracks are mystical and informative, leading
the way towards Young’s landmark tenure
with Buffalo Springfield.
The Springfield are among the most
underappreciated bands of the psychedelic
era, perhaps because they’re more funky
than far-out. Their balance of energy and ego
was far from level, but the group’s internal
dynamic exacted the pressure necessary
to squeeze out the occasional diamond.
Stephen Stills struck first, with “For What It’s
Worth,” but Young would strike best, with “Mr.
Soul” and “Broken Arrow.” In the language
of riffs, “Soul” is a brazen “Satisfaction” ripoff,
giving the shake to Keith Richards’ iconic
strum. The transformation is in the vocals,
where Young quivers like man recently
discharged from shock treatment. This is
less psychedelic than psycho, preimagining
David Byrne’s maniacal trill and Jack White’s
tenuous high register. “Broken Arrow” is the
Springfield’s masterpiece, a requiem for
rock and roll innocence that stands as the
consummate North American answer to the
Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” From the opening
lyric, “The lights turned on and the curtain fell
down,” Young makes it clear that business
interests have usurped sheer talent both in the
record store and on the performance stage.
Can one conceive a more damning portrait
of Monkees’-era pop than “They stood at the
stage door and begged for a scream/The
24

agents had paid for the black limousine/That waited outside
in the rain”? Young is penning the preamble to rock’s funeral,
not a fond farewell to the L.A. scene.
Buffalo Springfield would be among Neil’s casualties, as
evidenced by the abrupt shift in the directional integrity of
Archives’ track list. After shuffling through a baker’s dozen
of actual or intended Springfield collaborations – including
mono versions of “Burned” and “Expecting to Fly” – the set
matriculates into solo territory. Or, should we say, solo territory Neil’s “Come back now, come back now, whoah-ohhh”
populated with a motley crew of usual suspects. Producers
J a c k
Nitzsche and Nothing about Young is forever. And that’s what makes
David Briggs him indispensible.
are there,
soon to be joined by the entirety of Crazy Horse. The post-
Springfield, pre-Horse tunes are mostly sketches and stretches.
Young hits his stride with the Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
sessions, tapping the Horse to color and elongate classic
compositions such as “Cinnamon Girl,” “Down By the River,”
and “Cowgirl in the Sand.” It’s during this period that Young
formalizes his sonic signature: simple lines of melody spiked
with vibrato guitar. Each track is a rumble, an earthquake
that charms the Richter Scale if not the pop charts.
Nowhere came with an aftershock – Young’s decision to
reconcile with Stills and add a Y to the soft-rock alphabet
soup of CSN. Fueled by potent dope and titanic portions of
self-regard, CSNY would mix like kerosene and a lit match.
Neil was typically flaky and petulant, but also typically
prolific. Archives shows that Shakey was pulling double (and
sometimes triple) duty, writing simultaneously for CSNY and
his future solo projects. For every “Helpless” and “Ohio,”
there’s a “Southern Man” and an “Only Love Can Break Your
Heart.” Archives contains all of the above, but most telling is
its compendium of live tracks. The CSNY testimony starts with
“Sea of Madness,” live from Woodstock in August of 1969. A
mere five songs later, Young is back with Crazy Horse, playing
the Fillmore East in February of 1970. The takeaway lesson is
pretty obvious: During this period, Young’s loyalties were fluid.
His fealty was to his muse, not to his band mates or his friends
(acknowledging that, at times, these two categories were
mutually exclusive).
What results are two years of creative destruction. And the
climax of Archives 1.0. The retrospective boasts more than
50 songs (live and in studio) documenting the long march
from Woodstock to Harvest. One standout is the brooding,
elegiac “After the Gold Rush,” the title track from an album
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that aspired to combine the grunge of Crazy Horse with the
mellow gold of CSN. Another is a live take of “Winterlong,”
a song that wouldn’t be formally released until 1977, when
it hopped aboard Young’s greatest-hits collection, Decade,
as a stowaway. The track is notable for its mixture of intimacy
and bombast within a conventional pop arrangement.
Confessional lyrics (“I dreamed about you winterlong/You
seemed to be where I belong”) conjoin with guitars in minor
descent, then blossom into a Spectoresque sing-along chorus.
plea is worthy of the Crystals or the Ronnettes. Stammering
guitar work and deft, “Be My
Baby” percussion fashion a tale
of longing that sounds more like
a lamentation than a request
for deliverance. Young has doubts – not about his feelings,
but about the chances of his love connection culminating in
consensual bliss.
Thus begins Neil’s living tribute to cosmic uncertainty. With
After the Gold Rush and Harvest, Young’s songwriting
became decidedly tighter and diverged into two general
camps: Shakey-Breaky Heart love ballads and country-
tinged ruminations on the perils of the human condition.
Occasionally, these spheres would overlap. Young originally
conceived “A Man Needs a Maid” and “Heart of Gold” as a
seamless song suite, the former expressing the opinions of the
man Neil was, the latter articulating the desires of the man he
hoped to become. As captured on Archives – solo, acoustic,
and live as Massey Hall – the erstwhile duo becomes a single
negotiation between entitlement and concession. Young
had botched his marriage to Carrie Snodgress, blown up
more super-groups than Yoko Ono, and graduated from
the underground fringe to the middle of the road. Now he
was fighting to regain his bearings, if only so he could dive
headlong into the nearest ditch.
But that’s a story for Archives, Vol. 2: The Patently Self-
Destructive Years. Because the Young discography reaches
its high-water mark, commercially speaking, with Harvest.
The record’s earnest soul-searching and Topanga Canyon
tranquility were perfect for 1972, the year when the sensitive
singer-songwriter went mainstream, stultifying an audience
that had overdosed on the the twin pillars of the Sixties:
violence and idealism.
It would be spectacularly unfair, however, to treat Neil Young
as an opiate. If one is looking for sedation, he should avert his
eyes (and, more importantly, his ears) from Young’s staggering
25
 TheNassauNightly

oeuvre. Harvest is not necessarily an aberration, just the Dylan – a man who’d rather be called Judas by an audience
fleeting bootprint of a traveler who never spends more than of millions than truly betray his art or his instincts.
a single night at the local inn. Shakey has no rules; therefore,
he can have no exceptions. Archives corroborates this One couplet from Harvest’s “Old Man” says it all: “Does
postulation by chronicling Young’s steadfast pursuit of the it mean that much to me, to mean that much to you?”
new. By early 1972, Young poses this question to his
he had moved from listener, not his lover – and while
acoustic to electric,
Young’s fealty is to his muse, not to his band the query is put rhetorically, its
mates or his friends – acknowledging that, at
then back to acoustic answer can be inferred to lean
times, these two categories are mutually exclusive.
again, burning band toward the negative.
mates and session
men like a Hummer H2 burns gasoline. The flames of this Neil is extreme. He’s challenged his fans in ways that would
towering inferno were Promethean as well as destructive. make even Dylan blush, continually redrafting his artistic
They burned not just bridges, but boundary lines. image with strokes that are as colorful as they are bold.
Archives tracks this improvised metamorphosis, giving glory to
Which is to say that Young’s work corrects Friedrich Nietzsche’s. the great work but offering nary a clue as to what will come
Nietzsche had stated that music could be classified into next. Only through the distance of posterity can we see that
one of two categories: Dionysian (ie, drunk, dirty, and of what always comes next is more of the unexpected.
the flesh; eg, the Rolling Stones) or Apollonian (ie, ethereal,
pure, and of the spirit; eg, the Beatles). Suffice to say that By sewing together each episode of the unexpected, the
Neil, through such compositions as “Broken Arrow,” “Cowgirl Archives achieve something resembling coherence,
in the Sand,” and “Down By the River,” exposes the lie in this narrative, and biography. When the last volume is completed,
classical dichotomy. By opting for the real instead of the we’ll finally find what we’re looking for: The full reel of Neil.
affected, and for the reckless instead of the right, Young Forever Young, at last.
rendered labels obsolete. He’s the prime acolyte of Bob
(June 22, 2009)
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26

Jesus of Cruel
Nick Lowe Sings the Awful Truth
Nick Lowe’s career as a songwriter is predicated
upon taking his audience halfway to paradise. His
harmonies are smooth, his melodies are fluid, and his
arrangements are uncommonly amiable. But before
the major lifts can become party to deliverance, Lowe’s
lyrics slice through the facade of grace and gentility like
a hot knife through butter.
T his juxtaposition of sonic tranquility and poetic puncture define the Lowe
aesthetic. His debut album, 1978’s Jesus of Cool, emerged from its jacket
adorned with the image of a buzzsaw blade. The message implicit in this
none-too-subtle metaphor is simple: Pop music is about to be severed from
its clichés. Insentient disco, decadent arena rock, and mellow-gold singer-
songwriting will be torn limb from limb. The old formula must die so that a
new recipe for redemption can rise.
One could claim that Lowe’s musical recalibration was something of a
redundancy. After all, the mid-to-late 1970s was a period that produced
the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Petty.
But it was also a period in
which Nick Lowe, acting If a particular subgenre can be accorded to Lowe,
as Studio Maverick by it would be Metapop – that is, pop that comments on itself.
default, produced the
Damned, Elvis Costello, and Graham Parker. Nicknamed “The Basher” on
account of his gangbusters approach to studio production – bash out the
track in short order, worry about the details later – Lowe was among the U.K.’s jaded: “I trained her to love me so I could go
select corps of guitar-flashing Light Brigaders. He fomented his insurrection
from the sound booths of Stiff Records, constructing such seminal records as
Damned Damned Damned, My Aim Is True, and This Year’s Model before
Jesus of Cool staked his claim for solo stardom.
Lowe can thus be considered the Zelig of the British punk and new wave
scene. In 1975, he was an under-the-radar pub rocker, playing first with
Brinsley Schwarz, then Dave Edmonds. By 1980, he’d assimilated the Beatles
into the Damned and reconciled the Kinks with the Pretenders. In the
process, he released his own toxic runoff into the sordid reservoir that would
birth Britpop. He literally went from down and out to Top of the Pops.
Here we have Jesus lording over an evolution – yet another buzzsaw image,
TheNassauNightly
and one that might ruffle a few feathers in
the American Middle West. Which is pretty
much Lowe’s M.O. It should be remembered
that, 30 years ago, Jesus of Cool could not
be released as such in the United States of
piety and prejudice. It had to be retitled Pure
Pop For Now People, a moniker that traded
heresy for irony. Thankfully, Lowe’s songwriting
lost nothing in the transition, as evidenced
in today’s rollout of his latest All-Time Lowes
collection, Quiet Please: The New Best of Nick
Lowe. A quick stroll down the track list, from
the classic “So It Goes” to the contemporary
“I Trained Her To Love Me,” provides a
truncated tour of pop’s cruelest songbook.
“So It Goes” begins with an influx of energy, a
percussive build into a melodious Bachman-
Turner overture, all of which is accompanied
by the following feel-good lyrics: “I remember
the night the kid cut off his right arm/In a bid
to save a bit of
power.” “I Trained
Her To Love Me” is a
much less involved
track, one that employs only voice and
upbeat acoustic guitar, but its chorus is just as
ahead and break her heart.” A three-decade
separation is therefore bridged by a timeless
knack for cynicism and savagery.
What Lowe traffics in is legitimate acid rock,
a dulcet sound that burns the caustic into
the cordial. His most reliable penchant is
for sprinkling a little arsenic into pop’s sugar
bowl, for putting the “harm” in “harmonious.”
Consider “Marie Provost,” perhaps the
consummate Nick Lowe orchestration. The
song is about a silent film star who doesn’t
survive cinema’s westward trek from New
27

York to Hollywood. Her epitaph is written on pink slips,
composed with cold precision as she’s undone by the
dictates of taste: “When the talkies came Marie just couldn’t
cope/The public said ‘Marie, take a walk’/All the way back
to New York.” The drama resolves itself with the protagonist’s
overdose by sleeping pills, after which Marie’s dead body
is eaten by her starving domestic companion, “her hungry
little Dachshund.”
No perceptive listener could possibly confuse “Marie Provost”
with “Dancing Queen” or “How Deep Is Your Love.” Whereas
most disco-era pop songs were designed to produce
narcotic smiles or robotic hip shakes, Lowe’s songs produced
casualties. And he
absolutely reveled in Lowe didn’t sound cruel in order to be kind.
going against the He sounded kind in order to be cruel.
grain, especially
when his compositions targeted the record business at large.
If a particular subgenre can be accorded to Lowe, it would
be Metapop – that is, pop that comments on itself. Many of
Lowe’s early singles were tongue-in-cheek swipes at the pop
apparatus’ lack of loyalty, constancy, and quality. “Music
for Money,” “Shake and Pop,” “They Called It Rock,” and “I
Love My Label” are populated by shifty musical mercenaries,
overzealous DJs, and cagey A&R men. The rock universe is
poisoned by a myopic profit motive: Gibsons for gain, Fenders
for fame, and “lots of songs of no more than 2:50 long.”
This sentiment couldn’t be more timely. Yet today Lowe is
chiefly remembered for two standout tracks: “(What’s So
Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” and “Cruel
to Be Kind.” The first is ironic in its earnestness, the second consequently, the airwaves), but he still turns out lots of songs
earnest in its irony. Listening to the Lowe discography, you
never get the sense that the artist feels peace, love, and
understanding are realistic goals. They’re merely carrots
waved in the faces of the hippies and folkies that he parodied soften the sneering contempt in the lyric while the alcohol dulls
on the Jesus of Cool album cover. No wonder he gave the
song to Elvis Costello.
“Cruel to Be Kind” is a more prototypical representation
of the Lowe aesthetic. It’s got broken hearts assuaged by
petty assurances of affection, with the “He said, She said”
interplay scored by an ambient wall of sound. There’s prey
and predator, victim and criminal, cruelty amid kindness.
And that’s the essence of Lowe’s songwriting, only in reverse
order. He didn’t sound cruel in order to be kind; he sounded
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kind in order to be cruel. His carefully layered, power pop
production belied his biting, sardonic lyrics. Unlike the Clash or
Black Flag, bands with an angry feel but a hopeful message,
Lowe combined an ambiance of calm with a narrative of
disorder. Instead of “Rise Above,” we get the Lowe-End
Theory: fall down and stay down, because life is unfair.
There is, of course, no small measure of sarcasm in this
disposition. It’s worth mentioning that Lowe’s first EP, the four-
track recording that preceded Jesus of Cool, was entitled Bowi
expressly because David Bowie had just released an album
named Low. Such good-humored reaction to current affairs
lives on in songs by the likes of Morrissey, the Magnetic Fields,
and Weezer. And many more
artists are indebted to Lowe’s
embrace of contradiction –
that is, setting the “Eleanor
Rigby” lyric to the “Good Day Sunshine” instrumental. When
we hear the awful truth rendered smooth by a sonic palliative
(Marshall Crenshaw’s “Cynical Girl,” Matthew Sweet’s “Sick
of Myself,” Fountains of Wayne’s “Bright Future in Sales,” Pink’s
“So What”), we hear a small piece of Nick Lowe’s influence.
Despite his unrepentant use of sarcasm and irony, Lowe was
fairly straightforward in telling the American public what
he was all about. At bottom, he made, and continues to
make, pure pop for now people – deceptively simple guitar
raves that never go out of style. His pop is unorthodox in
its underlying cynicism, but it’s still crafted for the masses
and remains explicit in its radio friendliness. Lowe claims to
have “escaped from the tyranny of the snare drum” (and,
of no more than 2:50 long. His albums package the concision
of punk with the indulgences of hair metal: There’s a three-
chord maximum and a two-drink minimum. The barre chords
the pain heaped upon the jilted lover, the conned pop star,
or the Marie Provost. The production redeems the storyline,
and the characters take solace in the sing-along melody.
But once the artificial high wears off, the illusory stairway
to heaven reveals itself to be a hellish, Sisyphean incline.
The sounds of hope are merely a trumpet flair presaging a
failed resurrection. Because when the music stops, all that’s
left is cruelty.
(March 17, 2009)
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 TheNassauNightly

Everything Old Is New Again

Classic Rock in Contemporary Form

Rumors of rock’s demise have pushed past the

realm of the greatly exaggerated into the domain melodies. These are the songs that won’t last
of the criminally unfounded. long, either on the charts or in the hindsight
of posterity.

M uch of the confusion regarding the genre’s relative health results

from a problem with its demotic nomenclature. The phrase “Rock is dead,”
Such cynical machinations have pushed the
rock sound to the commercial wilderness and
the music industry to the brink of extinction.
despite being repeated with frightening regularity, is not a statement that But credible rock music, a force more
demands (or deserves) a literal interpretation. Translated from the strident accustomed to grassroots campaigning than
hyperbole of its old-media architects, the expression merely stands in for a AstroTurf auctioneering, is alive and well.
loose collection of extant phenomena – something along the lines of “Rock Quantitatively, rock’s vital signs have never
radio is dead,” “Rock video is absurd,” and “The singles charts are allergic been better; the sheer number of new releases
to conventional instrumentation.” is absolutely confounding. Qualitatively, the
genre has admittedly seen prouder days, but
To which the loyal rock fan flippantly replies, “Who effin’ cares?” its batting average is still pretty respectable.
Variance in quality is the price one pays for
Rock and pop can no longer be conflated. Nor should they be regarded diversity of source. The math is fairly simple: If
as synergistic forces. Video game franchises notwithstanding, the arbiters the Beach Boys inspire 100 bands, 50 will be
of popular culture have stopped bankrolling the 4-piece garage band, the awful, 30 will be fair, 15 will be good, and 5
album-oriented songsmith, and the unrepentant guitar hero. (See “Album will be worthy of genuine distinction. Consult
Sales, Tanking” for clarification.) the Law of Diminishing Returns for an air-tight
proof and a more objective explanation. (Or
No contemporary rock group can claim the commercial ubiquity once just compare the latest Grizzly Bear record to
accorded to the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, or Prince. There are simply Pet Sounds.)
too many stars, too many songs, too many Svengalis – in short, too many
competitors. American tastes have demassified to such an extent that the Today’s rock is a mutant genus of a
media have decided to sell miscegenated
themselves rather than any species. This is
The phrase “Rock is dead,” despite being repeated with
viable cultural product. MTV, an evolution in
frightening regularity, is not a statement that demands
ostensibly a Music Television three acts: First,
(or deserves) a literal interpretation.
outfit, is now in the business of the divergent
supplying a nebulous youth streams of
demographic with chic after-school specials and vainglorious advertising. American music – R&B, country, gospel, folk
The network’s cool quotient is what’s being marketed, not the pop song or – crossbred to create rock and roll; then rock
(heaven forbid!) the rock artist. and roll dropped its boogie-woogie swing in
favor of a hard-guitar swagger, becoming
Musically speaking, the hallmark of the Aughts is that the brand has rock; finally, rock turned inward and
usurped the band. The promotional apparatus perpetuates its power by incestuous, adhering to a paternity program
championing a commodity best described as “FMera”: disposable tunes which stipulated that every new band had
from superfluous singers, featuring interchangeable beats and exhausted to take its cues from either the Beatles or the

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Velvet Underground. The fallout from this process is Modern acoustic narrative and deft pacing, sounds like a long-lost
Rock, a sprawling, amorphous hybrid that’s at once in thrall recording from the Blood On the Tracks sessions. Similar
to the past, the present, and the future. Its sound belongs to atmospherics imbue Furr’s second single, “God & Suicide,” a
the Ramones and the Kings of Leon, to Brian Eno and TV On track with a name that evokes 19th Century Russian literature
the Radio, to Bob Dylan and Connor Oberst…to the Beatles but a spirit that’s firmly rooted in Dylan’s America. Seductive,
and the Velvet Underground. propulsive, and concussive, this track’s got the wild mercury
sound that always seems to elude the
Now more than ever, it also belongs to Today, pop’s promotional reigning “New Dylan.”
the listener who’s cosmopolitan enough apparatus champions a
to eschew minute categorization. The commodity best described “God & Suicide” posits that the
classic and the current can be easily as “FMera”: disposable tunes Trapper identity is equal parts vibe and
distinguished by the astute ear. But an from superfluous singers, verbiage. While the sextet paints sonic
aural impulse for fine discrimination is, like featuring interchangeable pictures that meld the Band’s rustic
the digital disco that pervades our pop beats and exhausted melodies. splendor with Pavement’s crackpot
charts, more mechanical than human. expressionism, lead singer and chief
Plus it misses the point: The classic is always current, if only songwriter Eric Earley folds clever lyrics into rolling melody.
by virtue of its timelessness. And the current will always be “If a three-four chord can ignite a flame/And a girl like you
redolent of the classic; unless, through some sordid concert can forget my name” is among the most striking couplets in
of the gods, a whole new tonal architecture is uncovered, this year’s popular verse – the “If” implies a hypothetical, but
engaged, and embraced en masse. Earley’s punchy vocals make the statement sound like a sure
thing. His words constitute the verbal engine that drives “God
Not bloody likely. & Suicide,” a lyrical life force fueled by cold longings and
hot desires. Such feelings give the track torque, enabling it to
At the moment, Planet Rock is governed by a single rotate between the classic and the current without choosing
operational principle: There’s nothing completely new a side or declaring a loyalty – perhaps because the territories
under the sun. If it’s worth doing, it’s probably been done are one and the same.
before, even – no, especially – if the earlier iteration was
not particularly popular. To paraphrase Thomas Huxley, it’s Tinted Windows, “Can’t Get A Read On You”
customary for novel sounds to begin as heresies and end as Twenty five years ago, the Replacements claimed that
axioms. Welcome to rock’s sonic recycling program. Here children by the millions sang for Alex Chilton, the Big Star
are some new releases that keep the gyre spinning. front man and power-pop innovator. Today, we can be
reasonably certain that one of the children to whom Paul
Blitzen Trapper, “God & Suicide” Westerberg was referring was Taylor Hanson.
In an interview running in the current issue of Rolling Stone
magazine, Bob Dylan confides that he recently paid a visit Mr. Hanson, now 26 years old and more than a decade
to Neil Young’s childhood home in Winnipeg. “I wanted to removed from “Mmmbop,” has joined forces with Adam
walk the steps Schlesinger of Fountains
that Neil walked Thom Yorke dreams of the apocalypse six nights of Wayne, James Iha of
every day,” a week, reserving the other night for truly harrowing Smashing Pumpkins, and Bun
Dylan reports, thoughts. E. Carlos of Cheap Trick to
thus confirming form rock’s most improbable
that his trip was less long than strange. Here we have super-group. Their slicked-back sound and catchier-than-
arguably the most important artist of the Rock Era partaking swine-flu arrangements are obviously orchestrated by
of a journey that was expressly devoted to the atmosphere Schlesinger, but it’s Hanson who holds the lead-vocalist
that helped shape a respected acolyte. conch. His voice, stuck between an adolescent high and a
mature nasality, lends a breakneck pace to “Can’t Get A
After listening to the latest Blitzen Trapper album, Furr, one Read On You.” The song is a power-pop thunderbolt in the
wonders how many times the band has packed up its van tradition of Fountain’s “Denise” or Trick’s “He’s A Whore.”
and made a beeline for Hibbing. The title song, with its fluid, Imagine a Schlesinger-Collingwood composition with less

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irony or a Robin Zander vocal with less carnality – in other this Oasis looks a lot like the McLean Psychiatric Hospital. We
words, a breathless, three-chord sing-along that borrows see rock and roll future – and it’s not a rehab center, but a
from each of the players’ core commercial strengths. sanitarium. Yorke gives us paranoid without the android. And
shock treatment never sounded so good.
The windows may be tinted, but the view is clear: These guys
endeavor to play straight-ahead, hook-laden rock and roll; New York Dolls, “’Cause I Sez So”
part Big Star, part Ramones. Their lyrics exist solely to pass the The New York Dolls are unique in that their sound both pre-
time between “ooh ooh”s empted and post-dated punk. Playing
and “aah aah”s, between The first 10 seconds of the buzzsaw blues in black eyeliner, they gave
guitar bursts and drum fills. New York Dolls’ “Jet Boy” the Ramones their asphalt ethos, the Smiths
But the band needn’t be the pushes Tommy Lee to a level of their insouciant attitude, and Motley Crue
least bit contrite. Because excitement he hasn’t reached since their burnout-in-drag aesthetic. This last
guilty pleasures require no he stopped taping his trysts with Pam connection often goes unremarked, as
apology, especially when Anderson. critical paydirt is better tilled when one
you’re singing for Alex Chilton. inspires important, rather than wildly popular,
bands. But make no mistake: The source material for every
Radiohead, “Killer Cars” debauched, Hair Metal guitar rave from the mid-1980s is the
Radiohead were formally declared The Band of Their first 10 seconds of the Dolls’ “Jet Boy.” The hand claps, the
Generation sometime between OK Computer and Kid A, scratchy Strat lick, the kick drum echo – taken collectively,
but in terms of accessibility and plain listening pleasure, The these sounds push Tommy Lee to a level of excitement
Bends remains their finest hour. Or, to be exact, their finest he hasn’t reached since he stopped taping his trysts with
48 minutes. Pam Anderson.

Now those contiguous 48 have been joined by a stirring, three- Released earlier this week to barely a whimper, “’Cause
minute coda called “Killer Cars.” This track was included as I Sez So” proves that the Dolls have nary a commercial
a B-side on the “High & Dry” EP, but was inexplicably left off instinct. The track opens with a beer-commercial riff that
the subsequent Bends album. Resurrected after a nearly 15- splits the difference between Van Halen’s “Beautiful Girls”
year absence from the retail market, the song sounds like a and Poison’s “Don’t Need Nothing But A Good Time,” then
revelation. It captures the moment when Radiohead moved struts forward to the stutter and bounce of serrated guitars.
beyond the Pixies loud-quiet-loud dynamic and the Smiths This type of cock rock hasn’t moved units since the midpoint
jangle and croon, thus matriculating towards a more antic of the Reagan years – a period which, to be precise, fell a
and experimental sound. It’s Goodbye, Morrissey, Hello, decade and a half after the Dolls invented the Glam vogue.
David Byrne. So it’s not that the Dolls are consciously going vintage in an
age that demands electronic override; it’s that vintage is the
Which is not to say that Thom Yorke needed any help working only setting on a Dolls amp.
himself up into a frenzy. The dark aura of his discography
essentially corroborates suspicions that he dreams of the However, as the wine connoisseur will remind you, not all
apocalypse six nights a week, with the other night being vintages are created equal. “’Cause I Sez So” lacks the punch
reserved for truly harrowing thoughts. “Killer Cars” is born of “Trash” and the mania of “Pills,” but it’s still loud, loose,
from this sense of the mindful and louche
macabre. Its central refrain is enough to
What is Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, “Like A Rolling
“I’m going out for a little drive/ Stone,” if not a 5-minute taunt? While in solitary earn a tip of
And it could be the last time you confinement, Bernie Madoff ought to be made to listen to it on the cap from
see me alive,” a notion that’s constant rotation. the dearly
emoted neither as an idle threat departed
nor a solemn promise. But the song’s true genius is its spitfire Johnny Thunders. The song could soundtrack a surreptitiously
pace and layered Britpop arrangement. Lyric and melody filmed switchblade fight or the “neighborhood in disarray”
coalesce in such a way that you envision the Talking Heads’ panning shot that’s central to all Charles Bronson movies.
psycho killer sharing vocals with the Gallagher brothers. Only “Sez” is more Sunset Strip than Bowery, but its volume – and

31

its violence – is unmistakable Dolls.
Bob Dylan, “I Feel A Change Coming On”
Bob Dylan’s career is not the type that invites summary in a
single glib phrase. But if one should speculate on the mission
statement that’s directed its course, he’d probably have to
opt for conceit over poetics – something along the lines of,
“Anything you can do I can do better.” Dylan tacitly projected
these words at Dave van Ronk and Phil Ochs, at the Beatles
and the Stones, at Billboard and MTV, until, eventually, he ran
out of colleagues and had to settle for disciples.
Dylan is now clearly in a league of his own: Not just an
immovable musical figure, but an unstoppable musical
force. Not just the consummate classic rock songwriter, but
a character meriting mention in the annals of Western
cultural history.
In other words, not just a man, but a myth. Or, if you prefer, not
just a myth, but a man – someone who embraces both the
daily struggle with his art and the nightly ritual of the stage, a
piece of flesh and blood who ensures the integrity of popular
music’s body and soul.
Sure, such descriptives bear more than vague traces of
hagiography, but consider what Bob has done: He brought
unmoored intellect to rock and roll, electric civil disobedience
to folk, and a truthful, unpretty voice to the pop charts. Now
consider what Bob is still doing: At age 68, he’s quietly churning modern complications but finding simple pleasure in the
out album after album
of songs that speak Bob Dylan’s throat is so worn and ravaged that
to the heart of the it could belong to the plaintiff of a class-action lawsuit
American experience, against R.J. Reynolds.
redrafting the Mason-
Dixon Line not as an artificial latitude of division but as an
organic circle that envelopes the whole of our hemisphere.
Dylan is our Tolstoy, our Rimbaud, and our Wagner in one. He
tells us who we are as a nation, a people, and a civilization,
even when we’re too busy or frightened to listen.
Dylan’s narrative authority is not necessarily a cause for pride
or exultation. Look at his songbook: It’s among the most
caustic on record. “It Ain’t Me Babe” is a denial, “Ballad
of a Thin Man” a denunciation, “Positively 4th Street” an
accusation, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” a recusation.
What is Dylan’s masterpiece, “Like A Rolling Stone”, if not a
5-minute taunt? “How does it feel?” isn’t an articulation of
curiosity or a gesture of empathy, it’s a sneering “I told you
so!” – and an appropriate caption for the living portrait of our
times. (While in solitary confinement, Bernie Madoff ought to
be made to listen to “Rolling Stone” on constant rotation.)
TheNassauNightly
Bob’s classic sound and fury are so relevant that one’s ears
tend to do the auricular equivalent of a double-take when
listening to his latest single, “I Feel A Change Coming On.”
The song is certainly not without precedent; it’s reminiscent
of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “If Not For You,” “I Shall Be
Released,” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” and “On A Night
Like This.” Think Nashville Skyline with a smile, The Basement
Tapes bathed in the baptistery of hope and faith, Big Pink
reconstructed as a house of mirth. In fact, think John Mayer’s
“Waiting On the World to Change” rearranged to score a
county-fair carousel ride. (Seriously.)
If your powers of imagination can’t quite make that ascent,
simply scan the song’s lyrics. There’s earnest congeniality
– “We got so much in common/We strive for the same old
ends/And I just can’t wait/Wait for us to become friends” –
and romantic whimsy – “Well, life is for love/And they say that
love is blind/If you wanna live easy/Baby, pack your clothes
with mine.” Each verbal reassurance is backed by equally
calm and cool instrumentation. The track evokes lemonade
on the front porch, maple branches swaying in the summer
breeze, and similarly atavistic visions. The timeless trumps the
timely, and we take solace in the fact that, for better or for
worse, we’re all in this together.
Perhaps Bob is already several years ahead of us, happily
ensconced in an age when people aren’t fighting off
eternal truths. Maybe
the answer, my friends,
really is blowing in the
wind – and maybe
that answer is peace,
partnership, and perspective. Dylan posed this proposition in
1963, and now he’s seeing fit to repeat the thesis. Our boy
has come full circle: He spent his early twenties channeling
a raw, rugged, frontier voice. Now his throat is so worn and
ravaged that it could belong to the plaintiff of a class-action
lawsuit against R.J. Reynolds. The dues have been earned,
but Dylan, ironically, uses “I Feel A Change Coming On” to
tell us that he has no more recriminations left to shout or rivers
left to cross. (At least in this given four-minute interval.) This
is the sound of happiness, the perfect pitch of the classical
ideal displacing the current event. It’s rock rendered beyond
its normative standards of identification by a man who’s
immune to categorization. Call the track Country or Soul, Old
Time or New Wave. Just don’t call it dead.
(May 5, 2009)
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 TheNassauNightly
Sexy Singles Looking To
The 20 Most Attractive Songs of 2009
Score
When confronted with a task of epic scope and
confounding complexity, I generally do one of two
things: I either surrender to the steroidal rush of my adrenal
glands, and let the attendant epinephrines do their dirty
work, or dutifully place sentience over sensation, and
invoke my limited powers of creativity. This morning, as I
sat down to compile my list of the year’s 20 best singles,
I hit the proverbial daily double. First came sheer panic,
with its coinciding hot sweats and hissy fits; then came
cognitive calm, with its cold-blooded calculations and
petty reassurances.
H aving now completed my list, I’m not sure which condition is worse.
When one contrasts the breadth and diversity of 2009’s pop crop with
the scarcity of real estate on any “Best of” compilation, it becomes clear
that a wide-eyed, harried state is the far more rational response to a year- technology, there’s a punk kid or wily veteran
end charge of “rank
and file.” Compressing Compressing thousands of worthy songs into a
thousands of worthy vaunted legion of 20 is not a job for a reasonable
songs into a vaunted man– it’s a job for a maniac.
legion of 20 is not
a job for a reasonable man – it’s a job for a maniac. Just think of
the casualties! We’re talking Antietam to the fifth power, without
the whiskey, rye, or underlying righteousness of cause. One can’t
help but feel the natural compulsion to find a roundabout method
of jump-starting the selection process.
Enter creative engineering. That’s the term I use to describe my penchant
for addressing a problem through indirect means, by way of bridge, tunnel,
or other unsightly marvel of public works. And here’s what I came up
with: Subordinate the guest list to the party theme. That is, turn the Top 20 For this reason, those three artists were
Countdown into a Singles Mixer, with the requisite preamble being written
as an eHarmony or Match.com personal ad. You know the type – not a
laughably outdated “SWF looking for soul mate,” but a full-on Internet
confessional, featuring aesthetic preferences and height requirements.
Something that begins with, “I never know what to write in these things!,”
then quickly transitions into said single’s love of Jordache jeans, Barbary
apes, and unprotected intercourse. (Author’s
note: Certain “dating” sites really ought to be
self-censored.)
This Single’s Profile construction was, quite
clearly, the work of an adman. It was high in
concept but low in labor intensity – a sordid
combination of “clever” and “easy.” Blessed
with a few hours’ perspective, the concept
started to look like a gimmick. Shortly
thereafter, the gimmick began to resemble a
joke. So I chose to abandon it, and meet the
year in music head on.
Pop deserves better than parody and
expedience, even if it often doles out both
commodities with the ungoverned generosity
of the Gates Foundation. Because for every
young crooner who’s doped up on Auto-Tune,
serving at the beck and call of contemporary
who’s managed to
make his peace with
the reigning sound.
Yes, Justin Bieber
sounds like the fourth
member of Alvin and the Chipmunks. But
Julian Casablancas, the Raveonettes, and the
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among many others, have
embraced the postmodern performance
metric – that is, doctored vocals ensconced
in the din of pre-programmed pleasure
machines – without losing their humanity, their
edge, or their musicianship.
among the candidates for my Performer
of the Year award. They never stood a truly
credible chance of winning, mind you,
but at least they were game enough to go
along with the charade of a neck-and-neck
competition. By any realistic accounting, the
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balloting for 2009’s most valuable player was decidedly one-
sided. The winner’s name is Lady Gaga. And she dominated
2009 like Lil Wayne dominated 2008.
Gaga was, in a word, ubiquitous. But not ubiquitous in a
forced or corporately favored way. Her spate of killer singles
interlocked to form a continuum: “Just Dance” slowly gave
way to “Poker Face,” which gracefully bowed to “Love
Games,” which passed the dice to “Paparazzi,” which
handed the baton to “Bad Romance.” That was the year
in pop music writ small: a tightly choreographed parade of
singles, each one looking to score with eligible audiences,
despite truncated playlists and the exigencies of the
evolving market. To land a direct hit, a song had to hussy
up, dabbing itself with more cosmetics than a corner whore.
But although production values were amazingly high – higher
than Snoop Dog at an Allman Brothers concert! – NASA-level
pyrotechnics weren’t enough to ensure a lasting connection
with a critical mass. Pop is still dependent on a force known
as songwriting. And Gaga is our year-end Homecoming
Queen because she’s exhibited a precocious aptitude for
the art of composition.
Lady G is a Digital Age superstar to whom the label “artist”
can be attributed without riotous laughter or immediate
calls for violence. She understands that pop is fashion and
fashion is pop – that “look” and “sound” are conjoined
twins in this era of YouTubes and iPhone apps. Her outfits are
outlandish, her persona is outsized, and her performances
are more Dada than Gaga. This Man Ray-meets-Salvador
Dali aesthetic is sincere in aspiration but misleading in effect.
Our fair Lady wants to give the impression that
she’s a freak diva, something that Picasso might There is no longer a
fish out of the Seine or that Passolini might pick “mainstream” market,
up on a Roman backstreet, but she’s actually the just a series of distinct
perfect median of 21st Century sound and fury. but indiscriminately allied
Her songs are simultaneously sexy and gender demographics.
neutral – resembling the collected works of a
middlesex Twiggy Stardust. For all her tortured talk of disco
sticks and shirts turned inside out, Gaga is not as salacious
as Britney Spears or dirrty-period XTina Aguilera. Her singing
is conspicuously masculine, with nuances of Madonna and
Cher blended into echoes of Freddie Mercury and David
Bowie. Sure, the boys on this list possess mean flashes of
femininity (which, I might add, they’ve never been ashamed
to flaunt), but their girl partners have more than a little
testosterone in their systems. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to
state that bra and panty androgyny is the new feminism, just
as OK-Computer entente is the new pop.
TheNassauNightly
I must admit to being a late-comer to Gaga’s charms. I
thought that “Just Dance” was Amber in big sunglasses, that
“Poker Face” was Taylor Dayne for hipsters – in other words,
my native New Jersey Guido music gone mainstream. Then
I remembered that there is no mainstream, just a series of
distinct but indiscriminately allied demographics. “Paparazzi”
was the song that ensured effective crossover. It appealed to
both straight-edged indie rockers and dangerously-curved
dance teams, marrying the intimacy of personal confession
with the beats-per-minute demands of digital disco. It
also addressed contemporary celebrity without trying to
differentiate between villain and victim, thus managing to
balance topicality and escapism with all the skill of a high-
wire act.
Then “Bad Romance” came out, and it was even better.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As noted above, the Top
20 list will take care of the formal ranking and filing. For now,
it’s enough to conclude that Gaga triumphed by scoring just
the right mix of man and machine. Her songs bore au currant
cosmetic enhancements but still delivered a unique sound
– one that can be described as “uncommonly attractive.”
And in pop, beauty is still the name of the game. (Hell, even
the Dirty Projectors are using R&B harmonies!)
Today’s singles are released to a jaded, overstimulated
listening pool – so the tunes had damn well better be
bombshells if they expect to turn heads. The typical young
American’s relationship with pop is one characterized by
casual flirtation rather than true-blue devotion. If our muse
of the moment loses some of
her shine, we simply move on,
and hook-up with the next hot
little number. The pop charts are
therefore a singles mixer without
referee, chivalry, or chastity. Music
fans from Boston to Berkeley are
holding all-night electric proms with Caligulan commitments
to glory, excess, and self-gratification. The only limit to our
debauchery is the threshold of our appetites. And if modern
history has taught us anything, it’s that Americans are the
world’s best consumers – especially when, as in the case of
the mp3 download, money is no object.
That does it for the State of the Union portion of my year-end
countdown. Before I happen upon any other bright ideas or
wild tangents, let’s double-time it to my personal faves from
the 2009 pop scene. I hope you can curry some small form of
34

respect for the selections I’ve listed below. More importantly,
I hope my descriptions do the songs justice. The color and
quantity of tracks under review were so vast that no forthright
critic could claim to speak for the genre as a whole or its
audiences at large. Sometimes, he can’t even reliably claim
to be up to the task of speaking for himself. The body is
willing, but the mind isn’t always able to translate those wills,
thrills, and impulses into the Queen’s English. What can I say?
I never know what to write in these things! But my year-long
romance with pop music precludes me from taking the easy
way out.
1. Bang! – The Raveonettes
To Denmark, James, and don’t spare the exclamation marks.
The Raveonettes are worthy of the excitement implicit in
their song title – because in 2009, they brought the straight
Dopenhagen. “Bang!” assimilates the ghosts of rock n’ roll
past, present, and future, using a Spectoresque Wall of Sound,
Jesus & Mary Chain reverb, and drum machines that wouldn’t
feel out of place on a Timbaland remix. The most timeless
shot of teenage kicks comes during the chorus, when Sune
and Sharon sing, “Kids wanna bop out in the street/Fa-fa-fun
all summer long!” This is what End of the Century would have
sounded like if Phil Spector had pulled a bigger pistol on Joey
Ramone. It bangs like a screen door in a gale storm and bops
with all the blitzkrieg of the advancing German army. Turn it
up to 11 and watch the Maginot Line fall to pieces.
2. Your Easy Lovin’ Ain’t Pleasin’ Nothin’ –
Mayer Hawthorne
Here we have the modern Motown sound – finger snappin’,
foot tappin’, hip shakin’, and belly achin’. Save the Gs
for “gifted,” a word that can be tossed at Hawthorne’s
songwriting without wink or reservation. “Easy Lovin’” supplies
an upbeat performance of a downtown narrative, with the
singer counting off the petty indignities that come with feeling
true love for an untrue woman. It’s this year’s Raphael Saadiq
joint, escorting a bumping, good-time rhythm through a blind
date with the blues. Hawthorne’s brass has sass, but his story
has soul. The Temptations would be proud.
3. Out of the Blue – Julian Casablancas
Call it The Return of the Native. The leader of our decade’s
most auspicious guitar band eschews his signature jingle-
jangle in favor of a synthetic pulse, thus making the world
safe for hipster disco. In a year replete with emotive shouts
and murmurs, Julian wins the coveted award for Best Use
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of “Wooh-Ooh-Ooh” In a Song’s Chorus. “Out of the Blue”
came as something of a surprise, what with its computerized
keyboards and associated digitalia, but the track is still
peppered with inimitable strokes of genius. It’s time to
call Albert, Jules. Four years is a presidential term, not the
suggested space between Strokes albums.
4. Bad Romance – Lady Gaga
A stiletto to the throat of every other charting pop star. This
song shows no mercy and reveals no provenance. It features
primal chants alongside a postmodern beat, leaving the
listener to wonder whether a cabal of Druids has just bought
into a Jersey Shore summer share. In addition to covering the
whole of Anglo-American anthropology in just 4 minutes and
54 seconds, “Bad Romance” serves the more immediate
need of facilitating drunken posturing, spirited fist pumps,
and ill-fated trysts. The only question that remains is how
the Seaside Park DPW is supposed to get this goddamned
Stonehenge off its boardwalk. Looks like we got ourselves
a Situation!
5. The Fixer – Pearl Jam
Anything you can do I can do Vedder. So says Eddie as he
and the boys kick out yet another all-thrills, no-frills Jam. “Fixer”
opens with a guitar rush unequaled in this year’s discography,
and ends with a “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” exhortation worthy of
late-70s Cheap Trick. Reveling in the role of Mister Fix-It, Pearl
Jam play with an unalloyed joy not seen since the lighter side
of No Code. I’m not sure if the Humpty Dumpty of strident
Classic Rock can be put back together again, but I can’t
fault PJ for trying.
6. Let’s Go Surfing – The Drums
A huge swell from Brooklyn’s would-be Chairmen of the
Boards. The Drums get the max out of their cheeky brand of
New Wave minimalism, adorning “LGS” with little more than
a hypnotic whistle, a gnarly chorus, and a killer “down by the
roller coaster” breakdown. The song is alarmingly infectious
but completely unaffected. As it turns out, all that indie
rockers need to get by are some tasty waves, a cool buzz,
and a vigorous wax-off from Pitchfork.
7. 3 – Britney Spears
Menáge-ment material. This single may be about a threesome,
but there’s no two ways about it: The song’s seductive vocal
cadences are far more alluring than its titillating subject
35

matter. “3” is not a soft-core gimmick. (I’m looking at you,
“If U Seek Amy.”) Instead of half-assed Fs and Us seeking out
their complementary Cs and Ks, we get a slinky, sexy piece
of text chatter. The question is “R U in?” And the answer is
Yes, Yeah, and You betcha! May the third time be the charm.
8. 21st Century Breakdown – Green Day
Apopalypse now! Green Day serve up a sonic triptych that’s
sewn together with more integrity than a multi-platinum
power trio is thought to possess. The Children of Nixon weave
into the Class of ‘13, then walk hand in hand through a dark
age of Heroes and Cons. Sure, it’s a bit indulgent, but the
song captures the magic in teenage angst’s transformation
into young-adult bombast. Rarely has the end of the world
sounded so tuneful.
9. God & Suicide (Live) – Blitzen Trapper
Best opening rock couplet of the year: “If a 3-4 chord can
ignite a flame/And a girl like you can forget my name.” The
set-up (the “if”) comes so fast and fluent that the payoff (the
absent “then”) is almost immaterial. Blitzen’s Eric Earley blends
lyrical command with emotional vulnerability, enabling his
stripped-down performance of “God & Suicide” to ring with
the rolling thunder of Bob Dylan and the Band. Keep these
Sub Pop-ers on your radar. The fire in their belly is as arresting
as the blood on their tracks.
10. House of Flying Daggers –
Raekwon (with the whole Wu crew)
Best opening rap couplet of the year: “I pop off like a mobster
boss/Angel hair with the lobster sauce.” We always knew
that Raekwon was da Chef, but until the above-cited rhyme
was dropped, who would have dreamt that Rae’s kitchen
comrade, Inspectah Deck, was da Capellini Don? More than
15 years after their game-changing debut, Wu Tang continue
to wield lines as sharp as daggers. The only complaint comes
from the Department of Sanitation: Contemporary rap
shouldn’t get this dirty. Who GZA-ed in the soup?
11. Cousins – Vampire Weekend
Vamps like us, baby, we were born to strum! VW rev their
engines for mile after mile of vibrant guitar work and quirky
drum/keyboard accompaniment. “Cousins” is a blood
relative to Elvis Costello’s “No Action,” but it reveals the lie in
that Imposter of a song title, purging the “No” and flashing
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an antic disposition. The Weekend take no time off. “Cousins”
is a dead sprint from start to finish – but it’s alive like nothing
else in the alt-rock universe.
12. People Got a Lotta Nerve – Neko Case
The best Jenny Lewis song not written or performed by
Jenny Lewis. Ms. Case, an occasional member of the New
Pornographers, is up to her old tricks: melding country melody
with indie harmony. The result is a treatise on predator and
prey, with Neko plainly confessing to belong to the former
tribe. (Sample lyric: “I’m a man, man, man, man, man, man
eater.”) Considering the casualties, the authorities had only
one recourse: Murder was the Case that they gave her. Stay
tuned for the 187.
13. 1901 – Phoenix
Less a French Connection than a French Compromise.
“1901” reconciles the differences between the Strokes and
Franz Ferdinand five years after such distinctions were of any
interest to the American listening public. Luckily, the song
stands on its own, stutter-stepping its way from Phoenix’s native
Paree to the SNL performance stage. The chorus’ extended
“hey-ey-ey-ey!” is infused with more effervescence than
commercial-grade French bubbly. It delivers Champagne to
the membrane. And “1901” is a very good year, indeed.
14. Something Is Squeezing My Skull –
Morrissey
Oh, the Audacity of Mope! Who but Morrissey would have
the cajones to rhyme Diazepam with Tamazepam in a
conventional pop song? “Skull” may be a straight-ahead
rocker, but its narrator is chronically crooked. He’s doped
up, run down, and just a missed dose away from committing
acts including, but not limited to, theft and self-hurt. On the
bright side, Moz tells us that there’s no “hope,” “love,” or
“true friends” in modern life. And you wonder why Johnny
Marr quit the Smiths.
15. Lust for Life – Girls
Author’s note: Girls are boys. Four boys from San Francisco,
in fact. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Second
author’s note: “Lust for Life” is not an Iggy Pop cover. It’s two
and half minutes of jangly guitar, lo-fi vocals, and charming
“bop-bop-bada-bop-bop” harmonies. Instead of raw power,
we get custom-baked bliss – the snap, crackle, and pop
36

of young Americans with casual drug habits and dubious
standards of personal hygiene. Somebody call Urban
Outfitters. Their theme song has arrived.
16. Surprise, Surprise – Bruce Springsteen
Nearly a year after its release, Working On a Dream is still
groping for its glory days. Initially, the album sounded rushed.
Now, it resonates with all the vibrato of a clarion call. “Surprise,
Surprise” is the record’s most graceful track, and it packs a
nonpartisan stimulus program full of J.S. Bach organ swells,
Brian Wilson production values, and Billy Joel balladeering.
The good-time vibe hits its acme at the 2:15 mark, when E
Street builds a bridge of hand claps and power chords that
makes the Bay City Rollers look like tone-deaf dilettantes. The
song proves that when hard times come, the only Boss worth
listening to is Bruce Springsteen. No surprise there.
17. Zero – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
On a scale of 1 to 10, “Zero” merits a 9 and change. The
9 is a function of Karen O’s reliably feral pleading over
Nick Zinner’s reliably angular riffs. And the change comes
courtesy of the Yeahs’ headlong embrace of electropop,
a subgenre with which they’ve previously experimented
but never acknowledged in the morning. This cipher of a
track sounds like “She’s Lost Control” on Zoloft, with industrial
clank and heavy percussion giving way to lightning bolts of
sonic abandon. The band achieve a state of Zero Gravity,
where there are no expectations or strings attached, just a
future that’s infinite in all directions. Far out, man. Freedom
rock lives!
18. Paparazzi – Lady Gaga
Lights! Camera! Traction! Here’s where Gaga matriculates
from arriviste to artist. She stabs at the soft underbelly of
modern celebrity with all the flash and finesse of Jacques
Pepin, hiding the song’s implicit violence behind a synth-
driven promise to “follow you until you love me.” The strident
slowly morphs into the sinister, with the Fame Monster assuming
Frankensteinian powers of sense and sensibility. We’re not
sure if the story ends in an emergency room or a psych ward,
but we’re clear on the fact that “Paparazzi” packs the year’s
most seductive chorus. Papas don’t preach – you’re not
being defamed here, just outmaneuvered.
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19. Get On Your Boots – U2
Achtung, baby: This banger proves once and for all that
the Edge is U2’s musical life-force. He supplies instrumental
momentum in the form of polyphonic future, crafting simple,
teched-up riffs that flitter and flurry until the conditions are
right for Bono’s serpentine croon. “Boots” begins with a full-on
booster blast, and launches into the cosmos long before the
singer has a chance to open his mouth. But let’s give Bono
his due. Only a singer with sock-it-to-me soul could deliver this
track’s stop-and-go phrasing with the required torque and
passion. As for the boots in the title: Let’s lace ‘em up, lads.
We’ve got a world to save.
20. Last Dance – The Raveonettes /
11th Dimension – Julian Casablancas
In a more ecumenical poposphere, both of these singles
would have mingled with Britney and Gaga on the Billboard’s
nether regions. Instead, they’re forced to share the scattered
applause that comes with a fringe position on my year-end
countdown. This is patently unfair, as “Last Dance” and “11th
Dimension” were as melodic as anything emanating out of
the speakers at Disney, Interscope, or Jive. But it’s hardly a
shock, as the contemporary taste-making cohort has roots
that extend back no further than Madonna. (And even
Madonna is pushing it.)
Suffice to say that “Dance” is top-shelf Raveonettes – yet
another of the band’s beautiful songs about horrible things
(namely, loss and addiction). With apologies to Gaga,
it chronicles the year’s saddest and baddest romance,
betraying neither a weep nor a flinch. And Brother Jules?
Well, his “Dimension” reaffirmed my faith in the sanctity and
purpose of electronic music. It’s a song that keeps its beat
without losing its pulse.
Which just goes to show: The digitron nation is compatible
with the forgotten troop of live-instrument enthusiasts. But
we need strong songwriters like Casablancas and Sune Rose
Wagner to point the way forward. Pop should belong to the
diesels, not the weasels. And perhaps, in due time, it will. The
contemporary singles scene is nothing if not plugged-in and
tricked-out – so the smartest and most talented of our artists
can win the day simply by seizing the grid. Easier said than
done, of course. But that won’t stop me from continuing to
pray for a power surge.
(December 13, 2009)
Back to Contents
37

Can U Digit?
Downloading Our Decade in 5 Phenomena
and 25 Songs
I cannot credibly purport to speak for posterity, but
I suspect that there’s no harm in trying. So if you’ll
indulge the convenient writerly caprice of time travel,
and join me as I flip the calendar forward, we just might
be able to render a verdict on the decade that was.
w
e won’t concern ourselves with the meta-issues of geopolitics and
planetary health. (Leave that to The Economist, BBC News, and what
remains of the New York Times.) Our subject is decidedly lighter and more
localized – yet, I would argue, also more universally compelling. Because
instead of discussing the factors that make life possible and sustainable,
we’ll be discussing a force that makes life interesting. That force is called
“pop music.” And though it may be trading at a 50-year low, its future is
infinite in all directions.
From a safe distance of I-know-not-how-many years, posterity speaketh
thusly: The first decade of the 21st Century, with its light speeds and dark
urges, its smaller world and larger debts, sounded like a requiem. But a
requiem for whom? Certainly not for the listener, who was blessed with a
full-flush of empowering technologies and caveat vendor attitudes. Nor did
the dirge apply to the artist, who, if he or she had the netroot ingenuity to
publicize a decent single or timely gimmick, could jump from unknown to
first-comer with greater haste than Usain Bolt. The requiem, quite clearly,
was reserved for the record industry, which, while it may not have ceased
to exist, had certainly ceased to matter.
At the turn of the millennium, the major labels were regularly releasing teen-
pop albums that sold at a clip of more than a million per week. This was the
record industry’s Hummer period, when spectacular sales of a questionable
product managed to smokescreen the impending immolation of an entire
business model. The fire started well before boom-time, but its heat was
only felt in earnest after its flames had reached the temple. There probably
wasn’t anything that the industry could have done to prevent an eventual
digital coup. But one cannot help but wonder why the major labels sent
men without chests – the Backstreet Boys, NSync, Nick Lachey – to counter
the barbarians at the gate. Their victimhood is laced with an undeniable
charge of myopia and a semi-plausible accusation of complicity.
No one outside their employ is shedding any tears for Jive, Universal,
or Capitol.
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But then there were the human losses, which
are always tough to write off as the inevitable
wage of sands through the hourglass. This
verse of the requiem can’t help but be
lachrymose and sob-heavy. Just look at the
casualties: Ray Charles, George Harrison,
Johnny Cash, James Brown, Wilson Pickett,
John Entwistle, Joe Strummer, three Ramones,
and Michael Jackson, just to name a few.
Here we lay to rest a golden gallery of rock
and roll heroes – modern music’s progenitors
and popularizers, rebels and royalty, reposing
in the same hallowed ground, somewhere
between the rhythm and the blues. Their
presence will be missed, but their work isn’t
going anywhere – at least not anytime soon.
Pop is good about this sort of thing. It tempers
physical loss with a survival of spirit, which often
manifests in new forms. Our decade was no
stranger to rebirth, what with its garage-rock
revivalism and its disco-done-digital. Much
of the most intoxicating material, however,
came courtesy of previously distilled spirits.
In some ways, the 00s (pronounced “double
zeroes”) were the aggregate of the four
decades that preceded it: Bob Dylan came
back to us, firing on cylinders he hadn’t hit
since his mid-60s motorcycle accident; Bruce
Springsteen found his own little fountain of
youth, updating an inimitably American
story with chapters on conscience and
reconciliation; U2 and Madonna flirted
with their Reagan-era peaks, sounding
simultaneously wizened and super-fit; and
Radiohead continued to be the only band
that mattered, at least to the ever-expanding
troop of rock critics.
Yet our decade did not belong to the artists
or their audiences – it belonged to the
phenomena that shaped the relationship
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between the two. These phenomena were primarily devices now administer the task of consuming all of our free
technological, and they resulted in new heights of interface time. The machines have not only risen; they have won.
and accessibility but historic lows of magic and mystery.
Plato said that when the mode of the music This is borne out by 2009’s T-Pained
changes, the city walls shake. Well, in the 00s, In the 00s, the expressions of bad romances and dirty
the mode of the music did change; but the music magazine of dance floors. But the trend colors a
city walls didn’t just shake, they crumbled. record changed much larger swath of real estate, and is
from Rolling Stone to conspicuously represented in the awards
This is the requiem that the most perceptive Popular Mechanics. ceremony that our End-of-Decade
of posterities will note: the final goodbye to occasion obliges us to hold. Here it is, in
demi-divine pop icons and sphinx-like rock truncated form: My choice for Artist of
stars. We’ve entered an age of avowed skepticism, where the Decade is Steve Jobs. And my pick for Artwork of the
carnal knowledge of our favorite musicians’ proclivities sucks Decade is the iPod.
away the need to worship and replaces it with the mere
desire to cheer or jeer. Ample hysterics are still set into motion It’s sobering to think that our infant millennium’s most far-
by Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus concerts, but the throngs who reaching musical moment took place in an unmarked
act them out aren’t going to rush headlong into oncoming engineering studio in Cupertino, California. But can any other
traffic solely to touch the hem of their lady’s garment. It’s prime player challenge Mr. Jobs and his digital jukebox? Not
easier to go home and leave a freaked-out Facebook a chance.
message, complete with a cell-phone snapped picture that
communicates “I was there!,” emphasis on “I.” Apple underwrote the digital boom, giving the world a sleek,
intuitively designed platform with which to solicit the sounds of
Even groupies have lost their ambition. They’re no longer in the marketplace. The iPod was the dominant force is making
it for the chest-to-chest dalliance with lead-guitar greatness. music ubiquitous as a whole but disposable in particular –
They just want a digital video that can subsequently be that is, streaming all around us, but with so much turnover
trafficked on the Internet, hopefully to the highest bidder, and distraction that the individual track lost its weight and
but, realistically, to the freeloading web community at large. identity. Add to the iPod’s impact the sordid history of Auto-
For shame, groupies – your standards have dropped faster Tune audio processing and GarageBand digital software,
than your underpants. (And since when do you even wear and you’ve got the very archetype of a revolution that eats
underpants?) If Vince Neil were dead, he’d be turning over its children.
in his grave.
Which just goes to show: Greedy consumers didn’t kill the
I’m not sure how we got from ignorant bliss to informed record industry. Their computers did. First through the Internet’s
megalomania, but posterity points to the following five search and plunder capability; then through the iPod/
phenomena. This, in short, is what the decade looked like to iTunes tendency to subordinate the sanctity of copyrighted
the innocent bystander: product to the whims of personal taste. Hey, we bought the
digital player at a considerable cost – it’d therefore be un-
1. OK, Computer American to deny ourselves the freedom of enjoying all of its
spoils. “The pursuit of happiness” implies the protection of our
Let’s start with a semi-profound statement: In the 00s, the own property, not AOL/Time Warner’s. We know this because
music magazine of record changed from Rolling Stone to our founding documents are available 24/7, be it on our
Popular Mechanics. Of course, this statement presupposes smart phones, our laptops, or the ever-widening gyre of our
that there’s still a music press of note, and not just a running expectations. Today’s portable mainframes put the whole of
transcript of editorial testimony from blog-rolls and fan sites. human history in our very palms, locking the computer and
But let’s give it the benefit of the doubt, if only for the sake of the consumer in an airtight embrace. Not many among us
our eyesight, and proceed to a matter that’s less debatable; are willing to abandon our toys and visit a brick-and-mortar
namely, that we spend a lot of time saying “Yes” to our hard record store – for ours in not an epoch of human agency,
drives, softwares, and plugged-in accessories. In an irony but an age of mechanized morals. Such is that dark side of
that would best be outsourced to Thoreau, our labor-saving “Better living through technology.”

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2. The Fame Monster
Here’s another none-too-subtle irony of the Digital Age:
As technology makes us collectively less important, we’re
caught up in daily manias of advancing self-regard.
During the 00s, celebrity was so democratized that obscurity
became something of an insult. Many of us have chosen,
consciously or otherwise, to turn our lives into shameless tributes in pictures?
to overeager exhibitionism. There are a variety of reasons
for why this has happened, and several of them connect,
however tangentially, to music. The narcissist’s best friend is
now the Internet, not the mirror. And the computer, with its
open-source ideology, can say “OK” to just about anything
we propose. We can become Stereogum-savvy Walter Mittys,
forever romanticizing and reinventing ourselves, usually as
some form
of ladies As technology makes us collectively less important,
man or we’re caught up in daily manias of advancing self-regard.
tastemaker
(eg, “I’m cool because I like Animal Collective.”). We can
become revisionist blowhards, administrating our Facebook
and MySpace accounts to transmit wit, wonder, and
unsolicited opinion to people who never hung out with us
in high school (eg, “Obama is a socialist…the government
is giving us all autism…and John Mayer rules!”). Or we can
become outright techno-fascists, getting off on twice-hourly
Tweets and all-day iChat gang bangs (eg, “@goeffurself
WHY ARENT U ONLINE?!?”).
It’s Choose Your Own Illusion. And many of us have chosen
to eschew friends in favor of “followers.” We imagine that the
social media have conspired to make us the talk of the town
– even if we should know damn well that our banal daily lives
aren’t worth talking about.
Cary Grant never had a publicity arm as jacked as my 14-
year-old cousin’s. (Neither did Kurt Cobain.) And this “It Could
Happen to You” (or, “It Should Happen to You”) milieu has
infiltrated the pop scene with all the aggression of an English
soccer fan. Many of our aspiring stars are hooligans – that
is, underskilled and overconfident brutes who pack a sense
of entitlement which is altogether incommensurate with the
merits of their work. The 00s featured more people who were
famous for being famous than the 20th Century in its entirety.
There are the enduring no-talents – Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie,
Kim Kardashian – and the fly-by-night fame whores – the
Real Housewives of East Bumblefuck, countless Trumped
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apprentices, and the majority of American Idol participants.
I would argue that this final constituency – the Bible belters
and street-corner crooners with less wail than Kelly Clarkson
and Adam Lambert – did as much to catalyze our obsession
with fame as the social media. The Idol show presented the
final erasure of the distinction between the performer and
the audience – hell, even my voice, a shoddy instrument at
best, is better endowed than William Hung’s. So why aren’t I
The truth is that we were all in pictures – on MySpace,
Facebook, et al. – but just not in as many pictures as Britney
Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Nick Jonas. Musical celebrity is
now less about presence itself than proportion of presence.
How many Google searches did I garner this week? Is TMZ
photographing me as I shop for my Ed Hardy wristband?
How long has it been since
my last corporately mediated
sex scandal? The ubiquity of
celebrity is such that our stars
make a full-time job out of primping and preening. They’re
personalities rather than musicians, and their colognes and
clothing lines count for far more than their albums.
There’s a fine line between primping and preening and
pimping and prostituting. This decade played witness to
pop stars, real and imagined, who placed pervasiveness
over dignity or privacy. Many of the tactics employed to
maintain our interest appealed only to the basest of our
instincts. Did we really need to see Britney sans hair, faculty,
or undergarment? Was she getting rolled by the game? Or
was she using the game to keep us looking?
Fame being the monster that it is, these questions are extremely
difficult to answer. With everybody from K-Fed to Betty in
Accounting hell-bent on bum rushing the show, our pop stars
seem to feel a compulsion to raise the stakes – to show more
of themselves, be it in print, picture, or video. I’d much prefer
for them to focus on the oft-overlooked audio component.
Musicians are supposed to make music as well as headlines.
Despite the jet-set circuits and paparazzi flashes, we can’t
let them turn their day jobs into afterthoughts. But first we’ll
have to pull ourselves away from the garish tributes we’ve
constructed to our own petty existences – the MySpace
accounts, the Facebook pages, the YouTube channels,
the music blogs. If you hear a noise, that’s me not holding
my breath.
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3. High School Musical
Pop has long been considered no country for old men,
but in this decade even young men were suspect. Let’s be
honest: If you were pushing 30, you were more than likely to
be pushing up daisies. The pop charts were bequeathed to
teenagers and their manipulative consorts, a sort of neo-royal
court of fresh-faced Louis’s and Disney-trained Richelieus.
The Class of ‘99 – your Justins, Britneys, and Christinas, your
Kirkpatricks, Fatones, and Lacheys – either graduated to
icon status or settled for an early retirement, thus clearing
the slate for Mickey Mouse’s latest crop of hit makers. Partly
because of the elder tribe’s penchant for panty-baring and
associated wardrobe malfunctions, the younger generation
came out clean as a whistle: The Jonas Brothers are the sons
of a former Assembly of God pastor, and if Taylor Swift isn’t an
evangelical, she should be. Zac Efron seems to be alarmingly
straight-laced, and Miley Cyrus is nothing if not party to the
quaint Southern tradition of impeccable public morals (with
corresponding private lives guarded by gun-toting daddies
and “peculiar institution” statutes).
All things considered, the Class of ‘09 is a fine-looking
contingent. So it’s a goddamned shame that they all sound
like chipmunks. I’m old enough to remember the forbidden
pleasures of the record player, a contraption that allowed
a 45 rpm disc to be played at 90 rpms, if one so willed. The
resulting stroke of sonic alchemy could turn Earth, Wind & Fire
into Alvin, Simon & Theodore, with much laughter abounding
from the peanut gallery. Pitches were comically heightened,
beats were sent into hyperdrive, and the record itself became
a parody of the pop sensibility.
In today’s High School Musical, we don’t need the record
player to achieve the parody – Auto-Tune and its attendant
in-studio cosmetics inject all the helium required to obfuscate
the gender of the artist and the purpose of the song. Nick
Jonas and Taylor Swift don’t sound demonstrably different.
Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato don’t even sound human. And
Justin Bieber? There are castrati who can hit lower notes than
that peckerwood.
Herein lies the problem of using teen stars: Many of them
are still in the throes of pre-nubility. They possess neither the
testosterone nor the estrogen to convince you that their work
is anything more than child’s play. One of the things that this
decade’s pop lacked was secondary sexual characteristics.
R&B tried to deliver some of the real thing, but, alas, R. Kelly’s
real thing was caught up in more court cases than Bernie
Madoff. D’Angelo went missing sometime around the Monica
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Lewinsky affair, and hasn’t been heard from since. And the
00s’ greatest R&B singer, Beyoncé Knowles, is sexy without
being sexual. Which, while framed as a lament, is actually
a cause for celebration. Beyoncé is clearly the classiest act
in contemporary pop music. She’s got all the best trappings
of Church in her voice and in her mannerisms, and she
managed to get through the decade without a harebrained
musical step or a compromising photo spread. Young B even
married the Best Rapper Alive, in a closed-door ceremony
to boot.
That being said, why is Beyoncé far less interesting than
Britney Spears?
Let’s not endeavor to answer that question. Let’s just agree
that the cast of our current High School Musical ought to
aspire to become destiny’s children in ways that extend
beyond the purview of Reverend Rick Warren or President
Ronald Reagan. This destiny is not manifest in the purpose-
driven life; it’s just plain old common sense: Tis far, far better
to be like Beyoncé than to be like Britney. We have 10 years’
worth of evidence to prove it.
4. The Exile of Mainstream
People are cruel, markets crueler. For whereas most men feel
at least some small tremor of vestigial guilt after abandoning
an erstwhile friend, markets are neither sentient nor sensate
– and, as such, are strangers to the notions of conscience
and compassion. They move on without pause or reflection,
because the very concept of thought is anathema to the
business world’s twin idols of bold action and rapid response.
New product is what makes the world go round; so if your
current partner isn’t up to snuff, the exigencies of the market
oblige you to snuff him out.
I guess this is my roundabout way of saying that 21st Century
economics have created an environment in which pop
stars can be quickly transmogrified into cannon fodder. This
is not just the one-hit wonder phenomenon writ large; it’s a
condition whereby a heavily sponsored, marquee name can
go from hero to zero in the blink of an eye, either through his
own misdeeds (Chris Brown, Kanye West) or the pivoting of
musical tastes (Shaggy, Staind, Limp Bizkit – each of whom
produced one of the 40 best-selling albums of the 00s,
yet now couldn’t headline a Tuesday night at your local
meth clinic).
This phenomenon didn’t develop in a vacuum. In fact, it’s
only a small component of a larger, far more repercussive
41

meta-phenomenon: the death of the mainstream. Artists are
disposable because there’s no reliable metric for measuring
their peak appeal. Marketers have decided to hedge their
bets by saturating the market with rerun pop personalities. This
speeds the technology-driven trend towards demassification,
in which several macro-sensations are replaced by
innumerable micro-sensations. We still have a form of Beatle
mania, only it’s not experienced
by 73 million breathless viewers Music is now caught in
of the “The Ed Sullivan Show.” an oddly contemporary
Enthusiasm is now expressed in conundrum: It takes up a
pockets – a few million here, a greater share of our time but
couple hundred thousand there – less space in our lives.
so it’s possible to be both a fervent
pop music fan and wholly unaware of the number 1 song in
the country.
Perhaps Michael Jackson’s death stung so badly because
we knew that there’d never be another Michael Jackson –
not just in an artistic sense, but in terms of worldwide notoriety. engendered a lack of respect for the pop idiom; and the
In 1985, MJ was the most famous person in the world. And his
celebrity wasn’t just apparent; it was important. For all the
pecker-flexing of the Pope John Paul and “Tear Down this
Wall” advocates, the real secret weapon of the late Cold
War was Thriller. Kids who were raised in the forlorn shadow of
the Soviets saw Michael as a sparkling incarnation of Western
flash and freedom. MJ was the single finest ambassador of
American intrigue and exceptionalism, with every stutter step
and emotive grunt piercing a hole through the unsmiling
barricades of totalitarianism. Stalin may have made for a
fine statue or agitprop subject, but he couldn’t moonwalk
or choke the chicken. That’s why he couldn’t compete with
our Michael. Do you remember the receptions MJ used to
get in Eastern Europe during the dying days of communism?
It was probably pop’s last iteration of the Beatles landing
at JFK (barring some sheer-number spectacle in Beijing or
New Delhi).
The death of the mainstream represents the death of
shared narratives. We’re all listening to different stories told
by different storytellers – so it’s no surprise that when we’re
called upon to act in concert, we split into rival factions. I
consider Arcade Fire, Tim McGraw, and Jay-Z to all fall under
the rubric of pop, but I doubt that the most ardent of each
act’s fans would be able to conduct a musical conversation
with any measure of civility. Artists can’t reasonably expect
to conquer the mass audience anymore; they simply have to
make do with a pastiche of high-value demographics. What’s
more, they can’t take even their most devoted markets for
granted. With so many eyes on the prize, it’s no wonder that
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so few ears are left to focus on the music.
5. Free at Last!
Our decade’s requiem is dependent on a secret that’s more
or less remained tacit to this point in the essay: ie, that nobody
in possession of a high-speed Internet connection actually
pays for music anymore. I don’t necessarily
support file sharing, nor do I practice it with
anything approaching regularity. But I do think
that I have at least a cursory understanding
of the phenomena that made it first possible,
then prominent, then inescapable. The No
Pay for Play reality is, in many ways, the result
of the four forces outlined above: Technology gave us the
means to search and pilfer; the combined devaluation of
celebrity and surge in self-regard gave us the psychological
perquisites to surrender to our material whims; the no-pube
YouTube stars and their chipmunk-voiced machinations
demise of mass-market events and long-tenure mentalities
further eroded the connection between cultural artifact and
cultural consumer.
During the 00s, music got caught in an oddly contemporary
conundrum: It took up a greater share of our time but less
space in our lives. Pop officially moved out of our record
stores and into our televisions, movies, advertisements, and
blogs. It became a cultural by-product rather than a main
event – we valued the iPod, not the tunes; the music app,
not the music itself. This is part of what I mean when I say that
music took up less space in our lives: It became a network
externality for the all-inclusive social media, keeping its profile
but not its primacy. Then there’s the literal aspect: Music
actually took up less physical space in our lives, with mp3s
replacing CDs, cassettes, and albums. It’s now possible to
hold one’s entire record collection on a single multi-gig hard
drive, and to set that collection to play on a random shuffle,
in which Bob Dylan’s genius and Marvin Gaye’s ambition are
forced to coexist with the Divinyls’ raunch and Ugly Kid Joe’s
silly rancor.
Given the indignities of this shuffle, it’s no wonder that music
fans have succumbed to the extra-legal vagaries of the
digital download. Either that, or people just don’t like paying
for things.
Your guess is as good as mine. And so are your opinions on
the state of our millennium’s pop music. But even if you’ve
had your fill of my bitching and moaning, I doubt that you’ll
42

toss more than a thin heckle of protest at my final point: In
the 00s, one of the fundamental questions of the rock and roll
era underwent a text-speak mutation. “Can you dig it?” – the
query that separated the hip from the square – was truncated
into “Can u digit?” – that is, Are you wired enough to be a
true-blue music fan? Or, more specifically, Do you have the
devices, both electronic and intellectual, needed to make
the most of the Digital Revolution? The basic requirements
were an iPod, a Super Phone, Pitchfork e-mail alerts, unlimited
online media streams, and a consumer conscience shot full
of more holes than the entire Dunkin’ Donuts product line. In
short, staying current on pop music became unforeseeably
labor intensive. Our ears and our eyes – if not our brains –
were worked to the point of total exhaustion.
So was our ability to distinguish between the good and
the bad, the important and the superficial. Platforms and
applications didn’t totally displace the accounting for
taste, but they ghettoized tactful connoisseurship and
made discretion a sign of cowardice. This might sound like
Machiavellian logic, but it’s actually its opposite – because
in our decade, the means justified the ends.
Now might be the time to mention that great music lived on,
in markets small, medium, and large. It’s a bit irresponsible of
me to postpone this pronouncement to an 11th-hour place
in my decade-long download. But you needn’t pressure
me to atone, as redemption has long been part of the
game plan.
So let’s cue up a lightweight bout of self-refutation. To counter
the many digs at digital culture that I’ve levied above, I’ll
hazard to unleash a list of 25 songs that have made the mp3
millennium worth living through. Yes, I have an iPod. Yes, I use
it frequently. And yes, each of these songs is on it. One thing
that I’ve been happy to discover but loath to admit is that I
can “dig it” and “digit” at the same time. The two states are
not mutually exclusive – just like grievance and gratefulness
or harmony and melody. Sometimes the conditions even
manage to complement each other – just like rhythm and
blues. Or rock and roll.
This is what the decade sounded like to the one audience I
can confidently claim to speak for: me.
1. Hey Ya! – OutKast
A true bohemian rapsody. “Hey Ya!” is likely to be the best
pop song released in my lifetime – past, present, or future.
It hit a near-miraculous trifecta of commercial win, critical
place, and cultural show – winning the champion’s purse by
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combining semi-conventional construction with wildly weird
acoustics. The track is magnificently miscegenated; it moves
in such mysterious ways that it upholds the cliché of defying
categorization. Consider the song’s gorgeous paradox: It
uses a simple guitar riff to propel a complex melody, a hip-
hop stroke to color a rock n’ roll canvas, and an upfront
pitch to secure the love below. Is it a booty shaker or a head
shaker? A bridge builder or a mic wrecker? Who cares? If you
don’t like this song, you don’t like pop music.
2. Girls In Their Summer Clothes –
Bruce Springsteen
Get your facts learned, mister: The Boss has always worked for
us. And only a craftsman of his caliber could build a track this
redolent of delight, wonder, and truth. “Girls” is an absolute
beauty, an ethereal portrait of vulnerability and pride framed
in loves lost and found. It sounds like a conversation between
a Brian Wilson ballad and a Norman Rockwell painting –
at once sad, earnest, and resolutely American. “She went
away/She cut me like a knife” proceeds without delay to
“Come on, beautiful thing/Maybe you could save my life.”
The song’s closing couplet – “Love’s a fool’s dance/I ain’t
got much sense, but I still got my feet” – is the best distillation
of romantic whimsy to emerge from Digital Age pop. “Girls”
is the Boss’ strongest track since “Glory Days.” It’s also an
unforgettable lesson in hope and humility.
3. 99 Problems – Jay-Z
Bon Hovy. You know you’re crazy for this one, slick. And why
wouldn’t you be? “99 Problems” is a mad dash of mixed
metaphors – a fist of steel in a velvet glove? – yet it never veers
off course. Like all good New York rap, the track is violent in
intensity and vulgar in subject matter. But it’s beat has much
more than a localized charisma. It brings the bounce and
ballast to match Jay’s superhuman flow, meshing sound
and lyric with unmatched virtuosity. In the 00s, Hov proved
beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s the Best Rapper Alive,
peppering his albums with singles that were vital to the integrity
of the blues/rock/hip-hop continuum. “99 Problems” is the
most concussive of Jay’s tracks. It reveals the weaknesses
in Lil Wayne’s space-ni**a stutters and slurs. When a rapper
gets his grown-man on, he knows that it’s more important to
be persuasive than eccentric. Follow the blueprint, kid, not
the fad.
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4. Crazy – Gnarls Barkley
Insane in the right brain. DJ Danger Mouse and MC Cee-Lo
Green came together to issue a Big Bang of cosmic funk.
“Crazy” is creationism at its most urgent and naked – all bass
and percussion, as if to argue that the rhythm section is our
universe’s first mover. Second to none, however, are Cee-Lo’s
killer cadences of oral testimony, which occupy the vague
sphere that sits between rapping and singing. Whatever this
stuff is, it sounds an awful lot like soul – but a barbed and gnarly
soul. If R&B were to stand accused of consorting with punk,
this track would be marked Exhibit A. Songs this ambitious
are rarely this popular. The public should lose control of its
faculties more often. Because sometimes getting out of our
heads and off our meds is just what the doctor ordered.
5. Hard to Explain – The Strokes
For the first 18 months of the millennium, Julian Casablancas
was the coolest man on the Lower East Side of New York.
With tracks like this, it’s not hard to understand why. Title
be damned, this banger is easy like Sunday mourning: a
dry lament for last year’s girl, last month’s rent money, and
last night’s party. It comes across as both exhausted and
effortless, confused and confident – combinations that can
only be achieved by the very young and the very wealthy.
(The Strokes were both.) When it was released, in 2001, “Hard
to Explain” sounded like really high-end video game music
– Frogger crossing the Bowery or Jules gear-shifting into Pole
Position. Now it sounds like the template that Max Martin
used to break Kelly Clarkson – a star-spangled jangle and
bop, lean as Jack Sprat but pregnant with pop possibilities.
Too bad the authors got none of the royalties.
6. Seven Nation Army – The White Stripes
Call it a Salvation Army...because this track single-handedly
saved the territorial integrity of riff-rock. Jack White tooled
around with his munitions, turning his lead-guitar whack into
a bass-guitar echo. The song’s opening chords shout “Fire in
the hole!”; then Meg throws down her sticks to consummate
the explosion. One wonders how 2 people manage to make
so much noise. Is it trickery, talent, or fearlessness? I’d go with
all of the above.
7. Jesus of Suburbia – Green Day
The tale of the tape is compelling: 9 minutes, 5 vignettes,
3 chords, and 1 unifying theme – “It’s the world that’s fucked
up, not me.” Green Day could have forced a callow teenage
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epic down our throats. Instead, they give us the time of our
lives – a mega-track that tackles the booms and busts of Bush
with all the blood and guts of Bosch. “Jesus” is a nightmare
of depravity made good. It was the band’s first 21st Century
Breakdown. It’s likely to remain their best.
8. Crazy in Love – Beyoncé
Horns and halos. The ChiLites’ sample gives the song crazy
momentum, but Young B’s cherubic “Uh-oh”s and Jay-Z’s
cocksure mediations make sure that the track keeps running
at full steam. It’s hard to believe that Beyoncé has been a
solo artist for only six years. Her success seemed written in the
stars, but perhaps it was written in this song. “Crazy in Love”
was her coming out party. And she’s never lost its good vibes
or world-class pedigree.
9. Take Me Out – Franz Ferdinand
Alternative pop’s “Just Dance.” This single helped normalize
relations between garage-guitar advocates and disco-synth
partisans. Call it the Treaty of Glasgow, as these Scots mixed
rock and dance with all the aplomb of a rogue DJ. “Take”
starts with coiled, “Eye of the Tiger” fury, then suddenly
slackens its posture, inviting an audience of millions to boogie
like the bassist in Kool & the Gang. Six years removed from
the accord, we can conclude that the song is fantastic. The
dancing? Not so much.
10. B.O.B. – OutKast
Remember when Bill Clinton bombed Iraq for violating
the UNSCOM agreement? Neither do I. That’s why we’re
lucky that OutKast achieve total recall on “Bombs Over
Baghdad.” No wasted rhymes about Monica Lewinsky here
– just the straight dope. Big Boi and Dre bust out their “Power
Music Electric Revival!,” ushering in a new age of big-stick
diplomacy with a single sentence: “Don’t pull the thang out,
unless you plan to bang!” If Saddam Hussein had heeded this
warning, he might have survived our War on Terror.
11. Vertigo – U2
Alfred Hitchcock’s got nothing on the Edge. With “Vertigo,”
U2’s lead guitarist proved that he could deliver bombast and
bedlam in addition to rattle and hum. The song is a genuine
thriller, alternately attacking and retreating through the wires
of Edge’s wah-wah pedals and distortion boxes. Bono does
his job, too, supplying a suspense that reverberates with New
44

Wave ring. The song is not a spinning nail-biter but a straight-
ahead seduction. It’s hard rocking but goes down as easy as
uno, dos, tres, catorce.
12. Number 1 – Goldfrapp
Goo-goo for Gaga? Then check out Alison Goldfrapp, the
dance-hall diva who blazed many of the trails (both sonic
and sartorial) that our fair Lady now travels with such style
and fanfare. “Number 1” presaged digital disco, projecting
the perfect complement of Britpop’s pasty cheek and
Eurotrash’s lewd camp. The operative word in its title is “numb”
– the synths are warm and hypnotic, the singing relaxed and
melodic. One listen, and you’re comfortably numb – in a way
Roger Waters could never have imagined.
13. Womanizer – Britney Spears
A career-best from Britney. But don’t call it a comeback,
just a graduation. With “Womanizer,” Brit formally raised her
standards. She demanded that her club bangers really bang,
that her sexy songs pack genuine sex appeal, not just soft-
core stunts or gratuitous gropings. This single showed that the
reigning pop queen needn’t be a slave to her music – that
the music could, and should, obey her. Circus was the sound
of Britney back in control. “Womanizer” is the sound of Britney
back on top.
14. Intervention – The Arcade Fire
I’ll be Bach! So said Win Butler when he and his 36-member
ensemble wrapped their barn-storming Funeral tour. Suffice
to say that Win returned with a winner – namely this cryptic,
organ-filled reverie. The song is almost certainly political,
with “the useless seed” in the first verse representing George
Bush II and “Hear the soldier groan, ‘We’ll go at it alone’”
expressing the left’s disavowal of the President’s hawky
unilateralism. Yeah, and if you play your Judas Priest records
backwards, you get to talk with the devil. Let’s stop with the
speculation and treat “Intervention” for what it is: the sound
of Bruce Springsteen conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.
You heard it here first.
15. Hollaback Girl – Gwen Stefani /
Get UR Freak On – Missy Elliott
Neptunes vs. Timbaland, for the heavyweight crown. Pharrell
and Chad pull out all the stops, bringing percussive curlicues
and brassy arabesques to Gwen’s cheerleader callouts.
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Timba pushes away such adornments and simply pulls the fire
alarm, bearing witness to Missy’s red-hot flow. Gwen is light
and sweet, floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. And
Ms. Elliott? She just be puttin’ it down – and nothing’s gonna
stop her from lastin’ all 20 rounds. In the end, we’ve got a
SoCal “Hey Ya!” battling “A Milli”’s godmother. Better call this
one a draw – or, more accurately, a double knockout.
16. Molly’s Chambers – Kings of Leon
Sex on fire. Before the Kings conquered the Gossip Girl set,
they were a feral, ribald, and artless bunch. I won’t tell you
what Molly’s “chambers” are a metaphor for, but I will assert
that such an explanation would garner an NC-17 rating.
(Which is fairly ironic, now that the band’s gone full monty for
the teen-female demographic.) “Molly” is all plunging bass
line and surging libido. It’s got more menace than Skynyrd,
more malice than the Allmans, and more pace than the
Stones. Consider it different Strokes for Southern folks.
17. Wolf Like Me – TV On the Radio
A howl worthy of Allen Ginsberg. Brooklyn’s most auspicious
alternative cohort crossed the MTV Rubicon with this arresting
riot of a track. All that needs to be said about “Wolf” is that
it has the wild mercury sound of Electric Dylan – that buzz
and pulse, that quiver and wail. You can actually hear a
transformation taking place: from man to beast, from slacker
repose to fanged-and-clawed aggression. Which might just
be an indirect way of saying that TVOTR grafted their indie
aesthetic onto a pop sensibility. They lost nothing in the
process. And pop gained a monster of a single.
18. Mississippi – Bob Dylan
Tangled up in blues. Bob Dylan finally has the gravelly,
burned-out voice he’s been seeking since the early 60s.
And on “Mississippi,” he puts it to good use. His lines are
stoic laments and humble apologies, both to himself and his
fellow travelers: “Well, my ship’s been split to splinters, and
it’s sinking fast/I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got
no past;” “Got nothin’ for ya/Had nothin’ before/Don’t even
have anything for myself anymore;” “You can always come
back, but you can’t come back all the way.” The first two
statements are lies – Bob is the past, present, and future of
rock n’ roll, as well as the genre’s greatest songwriter. But the
third statement is right on – a correction of Fitzgerald, and a
realization that paradise, once lost, cannot be revisited.
45

19. Ignition (Remix) – R. Kelly
The transition from Bob Dylan to R. Kelly is somewhat unnatural,
but, then again, so are some of the acts of which Mr. Kelly
stands accused. Perfectly natural, however, is the following
question: Did this song have a pre-mix? If it did, I can’t recall
it. Nor do I need to. Because “Ignition” v. 2.0 had the most
titillating toot-toot and bawdy beep-beep in early 00s R&B.
Party or after-party, stretch Navigator or Lexus coup, the
message remains remarkably consistent: Baby, you can drive
my car – provided you don’t mind that I’ll be videotaping our
backseat tryst.
20. Stronger – Kanye West
Imma let you finish. But I just wanna say that Jay-Z made
some of the greatest rap singles of all time! And he did it
with Kanye’s help, as West manned the production board
on such tracks as “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” “’03 Bonnie & Clyde,”
and “Encore.” In subsequent years, Kanyezzy earned his solo
bona fides by being the consummate in-studio professional,
scoring sampling coups with his happy jacks of Curtis Mayfield
(“Touch the Sky”) and Daft Punk (“Stronger”). Then there are
his personal peccadilloes. “That which don’t kill me will only
make me stronger”? You’d better hope so, Kanye.
21. Time for Heroes – The Libertines
Pete Doherty went on to Babyshambles and rehab. Carl
Barat went on to Dirty Pretty Things and a lower tax bracket.
But when they were together, boy, were they something
special! The Libs were probably the best British punk band of
the 00s, and “Time” is definitely their finest hour. Or, should I
say, their finest 2 minutes and 40 seconds. From start to finish,
the track is a stop-and-go maverick of youth in revolt and an
English class system caught between flux and flex. This is the
closest our decade got to the Clash or the Jam. Now’s not
the time for heroes, but a Libertines reunion.
22. Hold You in My Arms –
Ray LaMontagne
Great songs generally fall into 2 categories: those that get
you moving, and those that move you internally. Brother Ray’s
fervid acoustic ballad clearly belongs to the latter tribe. The
song is a prayer of succor and aspiration, with psalm, qualm,
and verse resolving itself in a love requited. It’s delivered by
a voice that’s as heart-stopping as the Lord’s – no guile or
ostentation, just conviction and, above all, truth. Ray is the
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genuine article, and “Hold You” stands as his most persuasive
credential. This is Caucasian gospel. No further witnesses
necessary.
23. Kiss, Kiss – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Pucker up and settle down. No, this was not one of the
Yeahs’ breakout tracks, but it’s certainly the group at its most
accessible. “Kiss” has the sleekness of Television, the angularity
of Gang of Four, and the concision of the Ramones. It’s one
of the handful of YYY songs that clock in at under 3 minutes,
yet it packs more pleasure than many of their longer, artier
compositions. By mixing the shrill urgency of “Bang” with the
tenuous calm of “Maps,” “Kiss” hits the golden mean of the
Yeahs’ discography. If the Misfits had gone to art school, their
lead single would’ve sounded exactly like this.
24. That Great Love Sound – The
Raveonettes / Somebody Told Me –
The Killers
50s revivalism vs. 80s revivalism, for a chance to be really
big in England. In the left corner, we have a Danish duo with
protective instincts for Buddy Holly and Phil Spector. In the
right corner, we have a 4-man band from Vegas who’ll fight
to the death for Duran Duran and New Order. “Great Love
Sound” wins all rounds dedicated to the sonic leveraging of
harmony and dissonance. But “Somebody Told Me” sweeps
the scorecards of those who prefer killer synths and buzzy
percussion. Call it another draw, with the lovers going for
the Raves and the dancers big-upping the Kill crew. Cut me
anyway, Mick!
25. First of the Gang to Die – Morrissey
An indispensible song from an indispensible singer. Morrissey
drags his muscular brand of Mope Rock to the outskirts of
Los Angeles, where young Hector bears the brunt of being
the titular figure (ie, “the first lad to go under the sod”). This
Hector is certainly no tamer of horses, but Morrissey gives him
an epic thrust by taming the wilder edges of his narrative.
“First” is primarily a love song, a croon that redeems the petty
thieves who carry out the cruel chivalries of turf warfare. If
you’re wondering whether the lead singer of the Smiths can
credibly cover the street beat, your answer is a resounding
“Moz def.”
(December 17, 2009)
Back to Contents
46
 TheNassauNightly

Catching the DVD

A Screening of the Season’s Most Infectious Discs

If T. S. Eliot was right, and April truly is the cruelest

month, then humanity is obliged to take comfort in
the madness of the current calendrical period. In like
a lion and out like a lamb, March is host to the great
thaw – a defrosting both climatic and cinematic.
Winter reaches a winter of its own, begrudgingly giving
way to longer days and less severe strains of seasonal
affective disorder. And film, not to be outdone, slowly
separates itself from the pomp and seriousness of the
awards season. It’s out with the characters and in with
the cartoons, goodbye to adult dialogue and hello to
car chases, so long to the Holocaust and shalom to the
fart jokes. The iterations of this riff are truly innumerable.
deserve a resurrection, if only to be seen and
appreciated by folks who were too busy,
too tired, or too full of mortgages, children,
and car payments to catch them the first
time around. Consider the five DVDs listed
below a petty palliative for the Hollywood-
issued punishment that lies ahead. May they
strengthen our spirits, tickle our fancies, and
have mercy on our reproductive systems.
I’ve Loved You So Long
When we first glimpse Kristin Scott Thomas
in “I’ve Loved You So Long,” she looks sleep
deprived and anxiety ridden. Bags worthy

A quick glance at the April movie-release schedule reveals the

following: “Dragonball,” “The Wolf Man,” “Old Dog,” “Vanilla Gorilla,”
of the Louis Vuitton deluxe treatment stand
sentry under her eyes, and she takes long,
thoughtful drags on her cigarette. This
and a Seth Rogen vehicle (“Observe and Report”) that appears to be portrait of uneasy silence makes a plain
based on Kevin James’ recent meditations on the trials and tribulations of implication: Scott Thomas’ character, Juliette,
mall copping. The big screen has thus been bequeathed to wild animals is a woman who’s seen too much and is now
and second-tier comedians whom the film press will unceasingly refer to condemned to live, however painfully, with
as “schlubs” and “schlemiels.” It’s going to be a cruel, cruel month, one the consequences. We soon learn that Juliette
that spurs righteous contempt among cineastes and motivates sentient has just completed a 15-year prison sentence,
filmgoers to pose the essential question of the forsaken: “What have we that the crime of which she was convicted is
done to deserve this?” patently unforgivable, and that her sole link
to civil society is an empathetic,
Well, it’s not so much what we have done as what What have we done to recently rematerialized sister.
we haven’t done. We haven’t supported quality deserve the insentient Estrangement is the name
film in adequate numbers. So we stand to be spate of Spring cinema? of this game – from family,
punished by the Spring and Summer spate of new Well, it’s not so much from fixed notions of right and
films, a collection so disdainful and pitiless that it what we have done as wrong, from prisons both real
threatens to reintroduce Vin Diesel into the wild what we haven’t done: and imagined. Only Juliette is
(“Fast & Furious,” April 3!). We haven’t supported quality forbidden to remain distant.
film in adequate numbers. She’s compelled to move
But don’t fear – technology is here to save us. If from the frigid milieu of solitary
you have a DVD player and ready access to a Netflix-style service, you confinement to a reasonably amiable stance
can enjoy a spring hibernation from the perils of the multiplex. March may of assimilation. Obviously, the journey is not
signal the death knell for serious in-theater cinema, but it also heralds always streamlined and ready-tracked, nor
the arrival of some of last year’s best efforts to DVD. These are films that is the protagonist particularly endearing

47

or loveable. The film that captures the trip, however, is
perfectly paced and ingeniously arranged, enabling sin and
atonement to pose an affecting point-counterpoint. “I’ve
Loved You So Long” is easily the best French picture released
in America in 2008. It’s an order of magnitude better than its
awards-bejeweled kinsman, “The Class.” And Scott Thomas’
performance is at least the equal of Kate Winslet’s brilliant
turn in “The Reader.”
Rachel Getting Married
The more I hear about the lack of formidable roles for actors of
the female persuasion, the more I’m prone to scratch my head
and mutter a sotto voce “WTF?”. Because hot on the heels of
Winslet and Scott Thomas comes Anne Hathaway, specifically
as Kym Burkman, egotist
and degenerate If you don’t like Penn’s politics, and feel
extraordinaire, in nothing but contempt for his cocksure
“Rachel Getting brand of actor-activism, remember that
Married.” Jonathan Hollywood’s most ascendant political export
Demme shoots the was Ronald Reagan.
film as a guerrilla
documentary with high production values, using an ample
array of close-ups, tracking shots, and earnest testimonials.
Hathaway responds by taking no prisoners. She creates a
lead character that is both vulnerable and despicable, a
recovering drug addict and erstwhile model who scores
release from a rehabilitation clinic to attend (and possibly
destroy) her sister Rachel’s wedding. Kym’s pull is so forceful
that it can only be labeled gravitational – as soon as she enters
the picture, she reorients the drift and focus of the entire affair. Visitor” is a study in socialization, examining what happens
“Rachel Getting Married,” title be damned, is about Kym –
that is, how Kym continuously tests the boundaries of sisterly
compassion and familial peace. Rosemarie DeWitt, playing
the bride, is sufficiently riveting to challenge Hathaway’s
control over the narrative. And Bill Irwin, as the soft, eager-
to-please father, nearly steals the show. But if this film strives
for anything, it’s harmony. The ensemble joust is scored by
the suppression of painful memories and the sublimation
of good intentions. Not to mention music. Lots of music –
some welcome and appropriate, some purposeless and
overindulgent. The result is not pop or adult contemporary,
it’s opera. And Hathaway is a true diva.
The Visitor
“The Visitor,” like “Rachel Getting Married,” starts its scenario
in the suburbs of Connecticut. But before the movie can shift
into second gear, we’re faced with an impromptu change
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of venue. The film’s central character, Professor Walter Vale,
is called to New York City for a stodgy macroeconomics
conference. Upon arrival, he stumbles into his seldom-used
Greenwich Village apartment and finds it illegally subletted
to a young, polyethnic couple. The conceits of this random,
seemingly antagonistic pairing become fairly explicit: Vale
studies the world economy, but he’s ignorant to the true
elasticity of national boundaries until his life is interrupted by
an unexpected flourish of intercontinental color. More tellingly,
the communication and cooperation between characters is
so halting and ad hoc that it’s unclear who’s the host and
who’s the visitor. Richard Jenkins, ostensibly in the driver’s
seat as Professor Vale, is the film’s transformative figure. At
first closed and impersonal (John Cheever suburban), he
becomes curious, inviting, and impassioned (Lou Reed
urban). The catalyst for this change
is Tarek, the Syrian gentleman who
was duped into renting Vale’s
apartment by a crooked, absentee
landlord. Tarek makes his living as a
musician, playing an African drum
with a mixture of Middle Eastern
and Caribbean inflections. The drum brings a welcome new
rhythm to Vale’s life. It allows him to jump from stern professor
to affable student. True, such a character arc runs the risk of
devolving into “How Walter Got His Groove Back,” but Jenkins
keeps things grounded with a command performance. The
key plot wrinkle – let’s just say that the sublet wasn’t the only
thing that was illegal – helps humanize a man who formerly
possessed all the charisma of a cigar store Indian. “The
when those who are dedicated to keeping a steady beat
are forced to improvise. Its criticisms of punitive bureaucracy
(think Kafka without the detachment) are evocative and,
sad to say, reliably topical.
Milk
“Milk” is another polemic, but its issue and its arguments
are far more strident than those employed in “The Visitor.”
Whereas Richard Jenkins received his Oscar nod for playing
the not-so-strong and silent type, Sean Penn won his
Academy Award for reanimating Harvey Milk in all his pith
and bombast. On the big screen, the gay rights activist
turned city councilman is painted as a many-splendored
fellow: business man, opera lover, boyfriend, leader. Like
Martin Luther King before him and Barack Obama after him,
Milk was a community organizer. He treated his San Francisco
constituency as equal parts friends and conscripts. “My name
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is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you!” was both a cajole
and a call to arms – a mixture of the Ramones’ “Hey, ho!
Let’s go!” and Otto von Bismarck’s brass anthem, signifying
a charge across the battlefield. “Milk” triumphs by framing
a true but tragic story in the hopeful footlights of posterity.
When Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978, homosexual
rights were, at best, a dubious prospect. Thirty years later,
gay friendly policies are making the slow advance from the
de facto to the de jure. Sean Penn is able to play Milk with
this latter-day knowledge in tow. He helps demonstrate that
the oft-invoked “homosexual agenda” is not a platform of
sexual revolution but the culmination of the larger human
rights movement. He allows “Milk” to function not just as a
message movie, but as a thoroughly entertaining work of
art. So if you don’t like Penn’s politics, and feel nothing but
contempt for his cocksure brand of actor-activism, consider
this fact: Partisan advocacy has always run both ways. Before
bemoaning the exploits of Penn, Tim Robbins, and Susan
Sarandon, remember Hollywood’s most ascendant political
export: Ronald Reagan.
Elegy
Very few actors in the contemporary cinema are fit to follow
Sean Penn. But Sir Ben Kingsley is certainly one of them. In fact,
it could be argued that Kingsley is Penn’s outright superior,
even if such a debate, pitting as it does Jimmy Markum
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against Don Logan and Jeff Spicoli against Mahatma Gandhi,
would ultimately prove ill-advised and irresolvable. Suffice to
say that, in the context of Spring DVDs, Kingsley and Penn
perform similar functions: They carry their films from the first
frame through the closing credits. Penn was handsomely
rewarded for his efforts in “Milk,” but Kingsley’s turn in “Elegy”
somehow managed to fly under the radar. This is highly
unfortunate, as his portrayal of David Kepesh, an alternately
romantic and lecherous Columbia professor, merits a fairly
strong frequency on the brilliant dial. Paired with the serially
magnetic Penelope Cruz, Kingsley becomes party to a winter-
spring romance – a partnership defined by differences in
physical age, emotional maturity, and intellectual pedigree,
but sustained by something resembling love. Mutual affection
does battle with a metaphysical form of claustrophobia: the
fear of commitment, matrimony, and, most of all, mortality.
Kepesh is a man living against the clock. He’s aware that time
is finite, so he slackens the drag of oblivion by turning to the
fine arts, which bear some small measure of timelessness. This
finely tuned aesthetic propels Kepesh to regard Consuela, the
Cruz character, as his late-period masterpiece. The excesses
of pride and longing that accompany this sentiment help
articulate the picture’s elegy: Ego and adoration don’t make
a union – they make an idol. Kepesh’s struggle to come to
terms with this fact gives the film its direction and energy.
The denouement is poignant, surprising, and, by my
account, beautiful.
(March 26, 2009)
Back to Contents
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Hangovers
The Rewards of Excess in Contemporary Cinema
2009 is still defined by the successes and failures
of 2008. Our day-to-day political reality is shaped
by Barack Obama, the man we elected to office
last November. Our current economic crisis is a direct
extension of last September’s market crash. And our
movie theaters – at least those that purport to offer
quality, adult fare – are still pulling inventory from last
December’s bum rush of bounty.
O ur country, in short, has one hell of a hangover. Excesses of greed
and consumption, of hope and dreams, have made our wallets emptier
and our brows more furrowed. Credit has given way to incredulity. And
confusion is the hallmark of the age. This confusion tends to articulate itself
in the form of semi-rhetorical inquiry: What happened last year? Where did
all my money go? And what in God’s name am I going to do now?
Amid these headaches and gastrointestinal disturbances, we can endeavor
to answer that last question: We’re going to go to the movies.
Motion picture ticket sales are up 17% from the first quarter of 2008, a period
now remembered with tearful longing and good-old-days romance. Back
then, Lehman and Bear were still solvent, Citibank wasn’t selling its shares
at the dollar store, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua was nothing but a blip on
a major studio’s release schedule. The protracted bull run excused and
underwrote irrational habits of consumption, indulgences which are only
now coming home to roost. To propose a facile but fiscally credible analogy,
Hollywood is this year’s Exxon. That is, movies are turning record profits even
as the global economy flirts with a disaster of historic proportions.
People are flocking to theaters for three simple reasons: 1) A night at the
movies is a relatively cheap date, 2) Cinema provides convincing escapist
fantasy, and 3) The Jonas Brothers are now appearing in 3-D!
Each of these reasons is compelling enough to motivate a run on the
local multiplex. But truth be told, the most sublime cinematic pleasures
of this thoroughly onerous year star neither Nick nor Kevin nor Joe Jonas.
They’re not indigenous to the multiplex or propped up by the blockbuster’s
commercial-industrial incubation system. Technically, they’re not even
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new releases. They’re the hangover films:
Movies that were accorded a limited holiday
release, so as to qualify for Oscar contention,
and then slowly matriculated from New York
and Los Angeles into what Sarah Palin might
refer to as “the real America.”
This steady drip from hot-spot to not-spot is a
condition of excess. There are many problems
with contemporary cinema, but no sentient
critic can claim that we’re in the midst of a
quantitative failure. Like many American
businesses, the entertainment industry has
too much inventory. But unlike business at
large, the film community’s problem is not
supply or demand – it’s characterization. Film
and audience are both out there. Whether or
not they actually meet is largely the work of
advertisers.
Faced with a surplus of product, film
distributors are charged with deciding
which independent features are worthy of
a major marketing push. The vetting process
is refreshingly transparent: The Deciders
determine which films have the most
malleable identity – that is, which films have a
story that can be sold to a ridiculous number
of people. Then they write a check. It doesn’t
take Weinstein-caliber powers of perception
to note that Slumdog Millionaire has thrived
because its rags-to-raja narrative fell in line
with the national zeitgeist. Far better films
(The Wrestler, Milk, Vicky Cristina Barcelona,
Rachel Getting Married, and all those listed
below) could have used a similar PR goose.
But such a pinch in the ass probably wouldn’t
have resulted in inspiring box-office returns.
And last time I checked, motion pictures were
not a non-profit industry.
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Thankfully, true cinephiles are rarely in thrall to advertising or rewards him with the more tactile pleasures of a love affair.
economics. We’re secure enough to call ‘em as we see ‘em
– even if those of us who live outside a major As the film flashes forward, however, the
metropolitan center are forced to see ‘em Hollywood is absence of clothes is shadowed by the
much later than we’d like. this year’s Exxon: presence of a uniform. Hanna, it turns
Movies are turning out, was a camp guard at Auschwitz. In
The beauty of the cinema’s holiday hangover record profits even as this capacity, she was party to a policy of
is that it allows excess to be redeemed the global economy extermination. And Michael, long estranged
as opportunity. A slackening of newer flirts with a disaster of from Hanna and now studying the law,
releases enables the more resilient grapes to historic proportions. stumbles upon her trial for crimes against
remain on the vine for a few extra months. humanity. It’s at this point that the film ceases
This increased exposure, particularly during a winter of to be titillating and starts to become a genuine document
grand-scale discontent, makes the delayed harvest all the of intrigue.
more sweet.
The Reader steadfastly refuses to be another spineless addition
Here’s a five-pack of the hearty and hungover. They were to the canon of Holocaust pictures. It exhumes complexities
released last year to considerable critical applause but didn’t that genteel society would rather keep dormant: the notion
gain any adequate measure of traction until the first quarter that Auschwitz victimized its petty staff as well as its innocent
of 2009. Now that they’re here, let’s appreciate them. And inmates, that the death of a single person, even a brute, can
now that Hollywood has already handed out its hardware, be an honestly transcendent tragedy. The Reader argues
let’s loose some laurels of our own. that such a tragedy can be acknowledged and mourned
without rendering the deaths of 6 million to the realm of the
The Reader **** empty statistic.
Back Pages
Director Stephen Daldry shows that, on occasion, evil is banal
In this troubled job market, it’s heartening to see that some because it is confused. Sometimes the prime actors aren’t
no-show jobs still exist on the peripheries of cinema. There is, literate in the consequences of the very procedures they’re
for instance, Wardrobe Coordinator Responsible for the First hired to implement. (Think Abu Ghraib.) For every Eichmann
Hour of The Reader. I have neither fashion sense nor a flair there are dozens of scared, hungry, and weak-willed
for haberdashery, but I could fill this position at a moment’s underlings. This does not by any means excuse the travesty
notice. In fact, I could do it without leaving the craft services of the Holocaust, which remains the single most pernicious
table. Because neither of the principal characters wear any extermination program of the Modern Era, but it helps
clothes for a considerable portion of the film. explain how the Final Solution got beyond the drawing table.
Germans without the
capacity to handle power
These characters are Kate The hangover films were accorded a limited
were given marching
Winslet, as Hanna Schmitz, holiday release, so as to qualify for Oscar
and David Kross, as Michael contention, then slowly matriculated from New orders, a living wage,
Berg. They are brought York and Los Angeles into what Sarah Palin might and someone to pick on.
together by a random act refer to as “the real America.” The rest is written in the
of kindness, then carnally bloody journals of history.
conjoined by the forces of fate and desire. Hanna is a middle-
aged ticket puncher on a West Berlin street car, Michael a We’re fortunate to be around to read the testimony. And to
callow youth with marked tendencies toward motion sickness. see The Reader. Winslet took home the Best Actress Oscar
After Hanna nurses Michael through a sudden and violent for her portrayal of Hanna – an honor well deserved if a tad
vomiting spell, the couple founds a relationship built upon the predictable. Many claim that she received the award for 1)
principle of education. Her instruction is in the sentimental, his stripping bare and 2) playing the lead in a Holocaust film.
in the intellectual. Their meetings progress as follows: Michael That’s not only untrue but misleading. This is neither a soft-core
arrives at Hanna’s apartment; they both undress; Michael picture nor an against-all-odds story of heroic survival. It’s a
reads from a great work of literature; and then Hanna piercing polemic that celebrates the flesh while lamenting

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its propensity for poor decision The moral of the

making. The early wardrobe The Reader exhumes complexities that picture is that
dysfunctions are part and parcel genteel society would rather keep dormant, the American
of the film’s naked appeals. They including the notion that Auschwitz victimized Dream cannot be
help commemorate – no, help its petty staff as well as its innocent victims. recreated. It can
consecrate – the journey that only be conceived
Michael makes as he’s mastering the law. He visits Auschwitz and then deferred, until suddenly it explodes. Director Sam
and walks through a long corridor in which the shoes of Mendes has walked this road before, and to great acclaim.
exterminated inmates are stockpiled to pitiful heights. This His American Beauty took aim at suburban listlessness, with
proves that the Wardrobe Coordinator wasn’t a no-show Kevin Spacey being the avatar of the disenchanted. This
after all. She was simply saving her clothes for when they time, Mendes has two characters spiraling out of control in
mattered most. the most calm of settings. Frank and April need to believe
that they’re iconoclasts, that they’re worthy of their suburban
Revolutionary Road ***1/2 street’s namesake. So when “We’ll always have Paris” segues
Dead Ends into “We’ll never have Paris,” both husband and wife become
casualties of the aborted trip. With the carrot removed, the
Revolutionary Road is a lesser film than The Reader, but the principals return to the stick. It’s a slow burn: First, they resent
two titles are connected by a single leading lady (Winslet). each other. Then they cheat on each other. Finally, they
In the latter, Kate asserted her dominance by virtue of age loathe each other.
and worldly experience. In the former, she assumes top billing
by being more demanding and decisive than her onscreen The Greek chorus in this tragedy is the village idiot, a disturbed
spouse, Leonardo DiCaprio. This is not to belittle DiCaprio’s intellectual named John Givings. He initially champions the
performance, which is the strongest in the picture; it’s simply Wheelers’ longing for change, then pillories them when
to recognize the power dynamic that exists within the they fail to deliver on their promise. John is meant to be the
Wheeler family. savage genius, the truth teller with talons. Only the Wheelers
don’t need a third shooter of acidic accusations. They do
Frank (Leo) and April (Kate) Wheeler begin their relationship fine on their own. And they prove, beyond any reasonable
as young and irreverent city dwellers, hipsters riding high on doubt, that even the most noble of revolutions can end up
insouciance and aesthetic potential. In short order, however, eating its children.
the pressures of matrimony and parenthood push them to the
suburbs, where their ability to fight off the perils of conformity is Che, Part 1 ****1/2
taxed at pre-Reagan levels. The Wheelers trade in the pursuit Guerrillas in the Midst
of personal purpose for a life of solvency, fraternity, and
frequent martinis. An erstwhile writer and actress transmogrify Ernesto “Che” Guevara was something of an authority on
into breadwinner and homemaker, respectively – a shifting revolutionary roads. He proved remarkably adept at fomenting
of roles that manages to depict maturation as ritualistic opposition to corporate monopoly by exhibiting monopolistic
sacrifice. tendencies of his own
The moral of Revolutionary Road is that – that is, by vertically
Revolutionary Road is a film about the American Dream cannot be recreated. integrating strategy
this sacrifice. More pointedly, it’s a It can only be conceived and then deferred, until and spirit into a quasi-
film about the form of sacrifice that suddenly it explodes. mathematical formula
best characterizes the Wheelers’ for worldwide rebellion.
relationship: abortion. By wedding, they unwittingly aborted
no small reservoir of dreams. Home ownership and child Such a modest goal, prone as it is to romance and lyrical
rearing fail to act as adequate palliatives for such a loss, so splendor, can do quite a job on your GPS. Che’s Camino
April tries to reclaim the vibrancy of youth by relocating her anti-Real extended from Argentina to Cuba, from the Congo
family to Paris. That’s the idea, at least – and Frank, dissatisfied to Bolivia, from Senator McCarthy’s nightmares to Bill Ayers’
at his job and ashamed of his trivial infidelities, is more than campus fantasies. It was a revolutionary road that started
happy to take the ride. with theory, twisted into practice, and then looped back to

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complete the circle. In other words, it covered a lot of ground – of firepower, bravado, and progressive rhetoric. The movie
far too much ground for a single film. conscribes the viewer in much the same way – with equal
parts charm and brutality. We know
Steven Soderbergh is The Class is so close-cropped and in your that Che will meet his maker in the
way ahead of us on this face that it plays not like an examination sequel to this urgent first installment,
point. He recognized that of urban scholastics, but like a study in but we’re pleased by the prospect
Che is the preeminent beauty marks. of having our viewership enlisted
countercultural icon of for several more hours of white-
the post-colonial period, and he gives him an epic treatment knuckle adventure and uncompromising ideology.
that befits a figure of his world-historical importance. What
results is five hours of film, evenly split into two episodes: Che, Hopefully we can learn from Che’s failures. Because now
Part One (The Argentine) and Che, Part Two (Guerrilla). that a distorted form of capitalism is convulsing epileptically
on the killing floors of the New York Stock Exchange, “Viva
The first installment is arguably the best film released in the last la Revolution!” is starting to sound like a pretty good
calendar year. It focuses on Che’s contributions to the 26th of catchphrase. Let’s just pray that our call for change results in
July Movement, the insurgent operation led by Fidel Castro the picking up of paychecks rather than the taking up of arms.
and dedicated to the ouster of Fulgencio Batista’s corrupt
Cuban government. Soderbergh sustains the narrative The Class (Entre Les Murs) **1/2
intensity by refusing to languish in the humidity of the Sierra We Don’t Need No Education
Maestra jungle. He cuts from the brush and the battlefield,
circa 1958, to the UN General Council, circa 1964. These The Class was the best-reviewed picture of 2008. Critical
before and after pictures reveal a subtle turn of character. praise for this French feature was so effusive and untiring
Che formerly has the look of a Latin Cassius – angry, lean, that I feared the English language might not have an
and hungry. After his Cuban victories, however, he begins to adequate supply of superlatives to describe it, thus forcing
resemble Caesar – proud, ornery, and mindful of his power, commentators to lapse into another of the leading romance
both as a statesman and a soldier. languages. Naturally, I put a sensible amount of stock in these
critical encomia, and grew excited for the movie’s American
Benicio Del Toro does for Che what Sean Penn did for Harvey premiere. Then I actually saw the film, and emerged from the
Milk. He humanizes both the martyr lionized by the far left theater strikingly unmoved.
and the scoundrel vilified by the right, exposing Che’s flaws in
addition to his virtues. It’s not easy to supply the sweat, blood, Part of my disappointment is explained by the art-film
and sinew for a figure who’s known primarily as a righteous journalist’s penchant for hyperbole. (This proud corps of
face on a t-shirt. Del Toro had to do justice to Che’s crippling scribes apparently takes its cues from the British rock press,
asthma, his failure to close ranks at the onset of the Cuban which reliably anoints a new musical Messiah every two to
military campaign, and his fetish for firing squads. A man three months.) Based on lead reviews, I was expecting The
who lives by the miscegenation of the book and the bullet Class to be a blackboard jungle worthy of Che Guevara’s
will never be able to divorce violence from governance. machete and combat boots. This was purported to be an
Del Toro makes this point clear by portraying Guevara as a issue film, one that unblinkingly documented the struggles
cold-tempered, professional revolutionary rather than a Boy for academic respectability within a Parisian public school
Scout-cum-liberator or doctor-cum-humanitarian. hamstrung by the post-colonial blues. Well, I admit that the
critics were right about the picture’s flair for documentary:
There are innumerable grades of heroism and wickedness, the film is close-cropped and in your face, shot like an O’Reilly
and they often coexist contemporaneously, if not peacefully, Factor foray into man-on-the-street ambush journalism. As
in the same person. In the first part of his epic, Soderbergh is such, it plays not like an examination of urban scholastics,
smart enough to paint Che with an even hand, declaring but like a study in beauty marks. We peep the characters
him a fearless idealist with an itchy trigger finger. (Gandhi or so closely and unbecomingly that their dermatologic
Martin Luther King he was not.) The episode climaxes with maladies take precedence over their crises of spirit and
the rebels’ siege of Santa Clara, Batista’s last frontier outside comprehension.
his capital city of Havana. Che takes the town with a mixture

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Perhaps I’m quibbling over a matter of aesthetics. Or perhaps convened incident review board, a team of rivals which
The Class simply presents nothing novel or instructive to a recalls the Estates General that bridged the gap between
viewer who attended a truly troubled inner-city elementary the ancien regime and Robespierre. Groping for control
school. (My credentials, and fair play, they become
which are essential to the Gomorra shows that the gangster’s unwitting agents of chaos.
integrity of the previous approach to the street is a lot like
statement, are as follows: Michelangelo’s approach to marble: The The Class insulates itself in
From 1981 through 1985, I job is finished only when, in the maestro’s words, administrative action, but its
attended P.S. 33 in Jersey City, the superfluities have been purged. principal trade lies in words,
New Jersey, a school which words, words. Monsieur Marin is
produced such miserable returns that the state government a teacher of French, so his task is to explain the meaning of
assumed control over its curriculum and administration.) In various words and phrases to non-native speakers, to explain
any low-income, immigrant-laden community, the default the functions of tense and conjugation to a generation
institutions of learning will have to surmount countless that seems indifferent to the formalities of linguistics. This is
obstacles to instruction. The Class makes this point subtly but a serious business. But it’s undertaken every day, in many
repeatedly by emphasizing the dangers of diversity: African different time zones, to startlingly similar effect. The notion
students retreat into their native tongue; Muslim students that students can be teachers and teachers students is not
remain taciturn as the teacher attempts to spur conversation; particular to the characters in The Class. If you want to see
a Caribbean student employs unreadable body language this lesson taught well, watch Full Nelson, a film that focuses
so as to confound the school authorities he neither reveres on the extracurricular activities that complicate the interplay
nor trust. of instruction and learning.

What we have here is a failure to communicate: Teacher
doesn’t understand student, and student doesn’t understand
teacher. Sometimes, a teacher doesn’t understand a fellow
teacher and a student doesn’t understand a fellow student.
This problem is called “life” – and its hazards are not specific
to the Parisian public school system.
The Class is not a bad film. The acting is intense and the scenario
is strong. Francois Begaudeau, the man who plays the central
character, Monsieur Marin, was an actual public school
teacher in urban France; he adapted the film’s screenplay
from his memoirs. Most of his screen time takes place in the
classroom, and his alternately stern and good-humored
repartee with his students bears the mark of authenticity.
The problem is that authenticity doesn’t necessarily coincide
with importance. For the immigrant student, what happens
at school is often secondary to what happens at home: Are
the parents working? Are they abusive? Are they legal? Are
they even present?
Director Laurent Cantet chooses to answer these questions
indirectly, through parent-teacher conferences and faculty
room gossip. The movie is keen for petty administrative
meetings and staff-on-staff argumentation. Figures of minor
authority debate issues of major consequence, such as when
to punish, when to commend, and when to simply cut the
cord and expel. These judgments are rendered by a regularly
The Class won the Palme D’Or at last year’s Cannes Film
Festival. One wonders whether the “Palme D’Or” honorific
has officially been changed to “Palme Douleur.” Because
The Class is a painful film to watch. It might have been a great
picture if it told a complete story, however dark, rather than
dabbled in chic impressionism and Godard-level lecturing. The
film’s sin is to traffic in profundities it doesn’t fully understand
and, therefore, can’t articulate. Its incomplete truths coalesce
into sophistry, a reasoning that’s sound in appearance but
ultimately lies to the very people it’s designed to convince. If
that’s education writ large, there’s no shame in dropping out.
Gomorra ****1/2
Neighbor Hoods
Like The Class, Gomorra dedicates a good deal of its
resources to underprivileged children. But where the French
film has its kids carry books, the Italian film has its kids carry
guns. The minor mafiosi that populate Gomorra have already
divested themselves of the hope of social mobility through
education. Their heroes are Scarface and Capone, and
their dreams are confined to the claustrophobic corridors
that channel ill will and good intentions through the housing
developments of lower Naples.
In Gomorra, Naples is presented as a modern-day iteration of
Fellini’s Satyricon. Along a single city block, one youth delivers

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groceries while another delivers narcotics; one woman
supports herself through virtuous enterprise while another
takes widow’s pay from the mob; one man tailors bootleg
haute couture while another measures the dimensions of a
doleful business deal. The Camorra, Naples’ titanic organized
crime syndicate, casts its shadow over every illusory act of free
will. Gangsterism is governance and governance gansterism:
The rules are set by the men with the most firepower. If you’re
unwilling or unable to accept their version of justice, you can
live elsewhere. Or you can die.
Perhaps this is reductivist. Or maybe it’s the kind of truth that
lends purpose and vitality to cinema verite.
Matteo Garrone, the film’s director and co-screenwriter,
accounts for the Camorra’s strident ubiquity by slicing his
narrative into six interwoven vignettes. Each story underscores
the futility of resistance: Whether you’re a crook or a straight
arrow, a novice or a veteran, your fate is married to the
mob. This notion of shared destiny enables the six snippets of
biography to cohere around a single theme, one that defines
the Camorra’s reason for being: waste management.
A fan of The Sopranos will be no stranger to this theme, but
he’d be foolish to conflate Tony, a friendly neighborhood
gangster, with the more sinister and systemic elements of the
Camorra. In Naples, the scale of the waste management
operation extends far beyond the docks and the dumps.
Waste and disposal, like crime and punishment, are the
fuel of day-to-day existence. If something or somebody is
undesirable, that thing or body must be voided. The gangster’s
approach to the street, therefore, is a lot like Michelangelo’s
approach to marble: The job is finished only when, in the
maestro’s words, the superfluities have been purged. The art
is in the direction of corrective energies – in other words, the
management of the waste.
Gomorra starts chillingly, with a series of sudden, no-nonsense
wackings at a tanning salon. It transitions from this initial pistol
work to an equally sordid, but ostensibly legal, suit-and-tie
affair, reaffirming Don Corleone’s conviction that you can
steal more with a briefcase than a gun. This juxtaposition is
intentional: The Camorra is empowered by the bullet, then
invests its political capital in legitimate enterprise. By creating
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a de facto gangster state, the mob literally becomes too big,
too interconnected, to fail. Everyone’s either a foot soldier or
a partisan in the gang wars, so to invoke independent law
or principle is to cite chromosomal material foreign to the
Neapolitan DNA.
Garrone is not a pusher of fantasy, but he does distill his
plot from a novel. Roberto Saviano’s explosive treatise on
organized crime, which gives the film its name, was greeted
in certain sections of Naples in much the same manner
as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was greeted in
Iran. The author now keeps a permanent police escort, at
state expense and insistence, to ward off the Camorra’s
aggressions. His contributions to the film’s screenplay were
made from an undisclosed location, so as to minimize the
potential for a drive-by assassination. Apparently revenge
isn’t always served cold, especially when one breaks the first
rule of cosa nostra: not to talk about cosa nostra.
In a sense, Gomorra is Italy’s answer to Boyz in the Hood. The
various Camorra factions resemble the Bloods and Crips in
that they think globally but act locally. The West Coast gangs
deal in a global drug and arms trade, but concentrate their
tactical efforts in neighborhoods like Watts, Crenshaw, and
Compton. The Camorra also operate in worldwide markets –
Saviano noted that they’ve funneled their blood money into
such projects as the construction of the Twin Towers memorial
plaza in New York – but ultimately make their payroll in the
back alleys of Naples. The street is both a proving ground
and a recruitment center. The main currency is loyalty.
Garrone’s most affecting vignette ruminates on this matter
of loyalty. Two headstrong teens, possessed of fleet feet
and delusions of grandeur, decide to challenge their
neighborhood’s operating crew. At first, the monopoly shows
restraint, treating the incursion as the work of bambini. But
when the tipping point is reached, and the besotted kids
refuse to commit their loyalties to entrenched powers, the
Camorra quickly drinks their milkshake. The film’s final scene
makes use of bodies, bullets, and a bulldozer; the first provides
the waste, the second and third the management. Killing is
always business, never personal. And those that consider
themselves indisposable are the first to go underground.
(February 12, 2009)
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Summer Six-Pack
The Ardent Spirits in this Season’s Cinema
Film is generally classified as a cultural artifact,
but it might be better conceived as an intoxicant.
Think about it: The moving picture, packaged as it
is with digital projection and Dolby Surround Sound,
is endowed by its creator with an inherent knack for
enchanting the eye, alluring the ear, and exciting
the viscera. Cinema just might be humankind’s
most physical art form. By stirring the senses, it plants
the potential to boggle the mind, leaving those with
tendencies toward overindulgence in a condition of
nausea, headache, or besotted stupor. The effects are
a function of how hard the stuff hits you.
T
his is not to say that the average filmgoer reports to the multiplex with
the clear intention of getting plastered. He might belly up to a Loews or an
AMC, review the movie timetable, and choose a film that won’t challenge
his threshold for sensory arousal. Consider this the O’Doul’s Option – a pick
that divorces the flick from its agent of efficacy. It’s best explained to the
layman by means of an example: If the filmgoer’s pool of serious contenders
is limited to movies starring Vin
Diesel, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Every Coming Attraction for a summer
Sandra Bullock, respectively, film should bear a Surgeon General’s Warning
choosing the latter will ensure instead of an MPAA rating.
a safe and sober evening. You
know just what to expect from a Bullock film: a saucy attitude, an unlikely
romance, and a plot resolution that’s activated by the opening chords of
Joe Cocker’s “Feeling Alright.” The act of viewership is entirely passive.
But what if you’re tired of sobriety? What if you’re in need of some high-
viscosity stimulation? Well, then you simply wait for the Memorial Day
fireworks, and pursue a course of action that’s derived from Sex Pistols fury
rather than O’Doul’s restraint. Say it with me: “Never Mind the Bullocks, Here
Come the Summer Films!”
Summer cinema belongs to the boys, especially the boys who like to binge
drink. Consumption is entirely volitional, but every Coming Attraction for
a summer film should come equipped with a Surgeon General’s Warning
instead of an MPAA rating. Because like alcohol, cinema is served in endless
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permutations and trafficked in varying proofs.
Its capacity to intoxicate is not a standard
metric, but a measure of man, movie, and
mood. If you want a bender, Michael Bay
or Vin Diesel can give you one, complete
with Hiroshima-caliber explosions and flights
of quasi-heroic fancy that make Superman
look like George Costanza. But if you want a
cool buzz of cognition to complement your
endless summer of tasty waves, you’d better
keep Mr. Bay at bay. If you prefer to savor your
distilled spirits rather than pound them down
insentiently, you’ll have to drop summer’s
skunked brew in favor of elixirs more intense
and absorbing. They’re out there, my friends,
even in the stultifying heat of the dog days.
And if you catch them with an open mind
and a hungry heart, they just might set you
reeling towards ecstasy.
Here’s my Summer Six-Pack: A half-dozen
films that brought strong proof without a
harrowing hangover. Crack a couple of them
open before Hollywood goes Oscar wild
and displaces the last of
the summer hooch. It’s
T-minus 50 days to closing
time.
Funny People
One doesn’t often place “dick joke” and
“maturity” in the same sentence, but the two
terms strike a relatively peaceful coexistence
in Judd Apatow’s triumphant new film, “Funny
People.” The movie is an inspired marvel
of adult-oriented comedy. It addresses
heavyweight themes – sickness and health,
sin and atonement, estrangement and
reconciliation – without getting stuck in sand
traps of pity or languor. Those who thought
little of the film – they are vocal and they are
legion! – fail to appreciate the nuance with
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which Apatow sows the poignant into the puerile. He may
accord masturbation a primacy that seems at odds with
its underlying social value; but, in the right hands (if you’ll
forgive the pun), even the ever-present jerk can stand-in
for something serious. What is masturbation if not a rite of
desire deferred, of physiological self-sufficiency masking an
inner core of loneliness? Each stroke is an act of idolatry,
a genuflection before a false but convenient god. It’s the
pursuit of pleasure trumping the dignity of principle.
Which is a pretty fair description of the life of George Simmons, David, the Allen proxy in this caustically comical feature.
the central character in “Funny People,” played brilliantly by
Adam Sandler. George is a terminally ill stand-up comedian
turned movie star, one whose body of work grows increasingly
safe and sophomoric as his Q Rating climbs toward Everest-
worthy altitudes. He’s rich but unfulfilled, recognized but not
respected, desired but not loved. He’s also a bit of a jerkoff.
Years of star treatment and fat paychecks have rendered
him too selfish and myopic to pursue his twin muses: the
live audience and
an old flame named In Woody Allen’s abyss-ridden milieu, the
Laura. Faced with a party pooper is also, paradoxically, the life of
dire diagnosis, George the party.
vows to return to both.
This is where Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) comes in. George meets
Ira on the stand-up circuit, and soon hires him as a junior joke tells us straight off, in a monologue that breaks the fourth
writer and personal assistant. Ira thus becomes Sancho Panza
to George’s Don Quixote, forever deferring to the great man’s
whims and appetites. The bond that forms seems wrought in
iron, but its covalence is tested as George’s condition shifts
and Laura’s interests become reanimated. “Funny People”
climaxes in an arm wrestle between ego and conscience.
Instead of degenerating into a sordid teenage raunchfest
or a trivial romantic comedy, the film establishes itself as
an earnest meditation on friendship and accountability. If
“The 40-Year-Old Virgin” was a grope for carnal affection
and “Knocked Up” a portrait of emotional resolve, “Funny
People” is a plea for greeting the perils of adulthood with
good humor and great intentions. By aiming high, it surpasses
the achievements of Apatow’s earlier films. This picture
deserves a better fate than the 3-and-out treatment it got
at the box office. If you can’t find it at a theater near you,
reserve an audience with the DVD.
Whatever Works
A Woody Allen film is a reliable valet of déjà vu. Provided
you arrive at the theater with any semblance of punctuality,
you’ll experience something you know you’ve experienced
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before, even if the feeling eludes immediate place or
comprehension. Let me save you a visit to Shirley Maclaine:
The catalyst to cloudy recall is the opening credits. They’re
practically identical from picture to picture and from decade
to decade. A pitch-black screen gives way to pearly white
Windsor-EF Elongated font, then the ménage is completed by
syncing a jaunty, anachronistic jazz tune into the soundtrack.
That’s what works for Woody.
And whatever works for Woody is good enough for Larry
The premise of the film is a nod to the higher dons of
misanthropy. David’s character, Boris Yellnikoff, is a retired
physics professor who uses the license implicit in the first four
letters of his surname to extol the virtues of amoral living. His
take on life is that it’s sufficiently nasty, short, and brutish to
justify a “whatever works” approach to remaining among
the vertical and breathing. Yellnikoff’s Second Operating
Principle for Mankind is “To each his own” precisely because
his first is “Every man for himself.”
Boris knows a great deal about
loneliness and disappointment.
He’s the veteran of a bitter divorce,
two failed suicides, and a (supposed) blackball campaign
orchestrated by the Nobel Prize Committee in Physics. He
wall between player and viewer, that he is neither a “likable
guy” nor party to “the feel-good movie of the year.” These
assertions are both affirmed and challenged for the next 90
minutes. Boris proves to be plenty likable to Melodie (Evan
Rachel Wood), a down-and-out Southern girl who turns up in
the cardboard recycling recess adjacent to Boris’ Manhattan
apartment. She charmingly accosts Boris for food, shelter,
and something resembling friendship – and the old hump
begrudgingly obliges, thus setting into motion a union that
transforms man, woman, and several of said woman’s blood
relations.
There’s a madcap, “Benny Hill” feel to portions of “Whatever
Works,” but Allen’s writing spares no expense in the pursuit
of a thoughtful belly laugh. Boris is no avatar of piety, but
rather than getting lecherous with his beautiful, barely-legal
roommate, he gets avuncular. He schools her in his ideologies,
baptizes her in his neuroses, and makes her the trigger point
for countless one liners. When Melodie dresses herself in sheer,
skin-tight attire for an evening out with a local dog walker,
Boris asks, “Where are you going on your date? The abortion
clinic?” Equally acerbic is his rejoinder to Melodie’s mother,
Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), a Mississippi belle who comes
57

to town in search of two things: her daughter and good
times. After she reprimands Boris for his tired routines and
serial negativity, she solicits an itinerary for a light-hearted
mother-daughter romp through New York City. Boris duly
recommends a visit to the Holocaust Museum.
Of course, such doomsday wisecracking is par for the course
in an Allen film. In Woody’s abyss-ridden milieu, the party
pooper is also, paradoxically, the life of the party. This dual
identity is earned by sharp wit and the dull ache of falling
self-regard. Oddly enough, the two forces typically conjoin to
blaze a trail toward another Allen trademark: the quick and
quirky happy ending. I won’t tell you how “Whatever Works”
resolves itself. But I will state, with reasonable confidence,
that the fallout is almost as fun as an afternoon at the
Holocaust Museum.
The Hurt Locker
Following the great success of “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen
wrote and directed a contemplative, Bergman-esque
feature called “Interiors.” This title, if not the film’s ponderous,
neorealist vibe, fits “The Hurt Locker” perfectly, as the movie
is essentially a study of the inner workings of Staff Sergeant
William James (Jeremy Renner). One of the virtues (and
conveniences) of cinema is that the psychological spurs and
hang-ups of a single soldier can be made to represent the
madness of war writ small. In the process, the notion of an
“Army of One” can help distill the complexities of battle into
a manageable documentary of purpose and motivation.
With “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow pushes for just such a
documentary. She uses hand-held 16mm cameras and highly
elevated shooting ratios, thus imparting to the war in Iraq
the newsy, up-close-and-personal feel that fell beyond the
bounds or the abilities of traditional media. To call this film a
motion picture, however, would be somewhat disingenuous,
because its shaping forces are stillness and space. SSgt.
James is the tech leader of a Bravo Company bomb squad.
His job is to dismantle the various forms of I.E.D. that shadowy
insurgents plant along the streets of Baghdad. Much of his
screen time is spent in a protective suit, alone save for the
comrades in his earpiece and the suspect device in his sights.
Every bomb is a Rubik’s Cube with legitimate widow-making
potential. And SSgt. James, in his cocksure, incautious manner,
treats enemy explosives with boxing gloves rather than kids
gloves. In doing so, he takes the disquieting randomness and
impersonality out of mechanized conflict, turning modern
warfare into hand-to-hand combat.
SSgt. James is equal parts brave and reckless. His team
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members resent his balls-out, improvised approach to what
are ostensibly rule-laden missions. The interpersonal drama
in “The Hurt Locker” is therefore a function of the tech
leader’s blast radius; that is, why should James’ fellow soldiers
put themselves in harm’s way when they know that every
operation will be a one-man show? This question is fueled
by both anger and envy. And its answer goes back to the
sad truths of the Light Brigade’s fateful Charge: Ours is not to
reason why.
This statement could comprise James’ motto – or his epitaph.
By the end of the film, it’s clear that he’s damaged goods,
someone who’s better served by doing than thinking. His life
is one of unbearable tension, and it’s only in the eerie stillness
of dismantlement that he finds equipoise. SSgt. James is like
Randy “The Ram” Robinson in “The Wrestler.” He knows his
job might kill him, but he’s incapable of taking up another
trade. Kudos belong to Bigelow and Renner for finding an
affirmation of life in so troubling a story. Their rewards will
come in February, when the Academy announces its Oscar
nominees.
Inglourious Basterds
If Quentin Tarantino had directed “The Hurt Locker,” he
probably would have eschewed the delicacy of the title –
which implies psychological pain under wraps – and gone for
something a bit more visceral, like “Death Chest.” Tarantino’s
characters are rarely afforded the luxury of extended self-
examination or cognition independent of context. Their
minds are always aflutter and their bodies are perpetually in
motion, with brain and guts typically serving the same end:
racking up an ever-exalted body count, all while moving
heaven and earth to keep one’s own person off the list
of casualties.
Such is the preamble for righteous self-defense and bloody
bullying alike, and “Inglorious Basterds” aspires to split the
difference between justice and abuse by celebrating their
penchant for overlap. Early in the film, a polyglot, hyper-
suave Nazi Gestapo (Christoph Waltz) orders the massacre
of a family of displaced Jews, whom he discovers under the
floorboards of a French farmhouse. His firing squad misses
one of the condemned, and this survivor, Shoshana Dreyfus,
spends the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour picture auditioning
for an “angel of revenge” role.
Suffice to say that the girl is not alone in her desire for
retribution, for Tarantino has assembled a dedicated corps
of intrepid Nazi hunters called “the Basterds.” They’re largely
Jewish-American in composition, but they’re led by a
58

Gentile, a cordial Tennessee mountaineer named Lieutenant
Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). Raine’s friendliness is tempered by his
frequent requests for Nazi scalps – a vestige, he claims, of
his recessive but lingering American-Indian blood – as well
as his tendency to carve swastikas into the foreheads of
the German storm troopers whom he chooses to spare. The
Lieutenant justifies this latter tactic by invoking a fairly logical Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with passions that press deeper than
argument: When World War II is over, and the uniforms are
removed, the names are changed, and the harsh truths are
camouflaged, how are we to distinguish
brutal Nazi from upright civilian? By his The Holocaust was not a fair
math, an indelible scar stretching from fight but a calculated program
hairline to brow will do just the trick. of extermination. To rescript it
as a two-front battle is an insult
The question for Tarantino is whether to history.
Raine’s algorithm is faulty. Does savagery
in the service of liberal democracy undermine the integrity
of the Allied cause? I venture to guess that Tarantino would
answer in the negative. That’s why he frames his epic’s
culmination as a fiery Gotterdammerung for the ringleaders
of the Thousand Year Reich. What he concocts is a cruel
comingling of the film’s constituent vignettes, one in which
the Shoshana Dreyfus Affair unwittingly joins forces with the
Basterds’ covert plot for a Final Solution on the Western Front.
The fate of the Free World is thus decided by competing
hatreds and the sanctification of malice.
In the final accounting, “Inglourious Basterds” is more
ridiculous than unsettling. There are moments when the story’s
holes are covered by fine acting, particularly by Waltz and
Pitt, who shine through as twin predators in a film that’s loath
to address the concept of prey. This absence of innocence
is a glaring omission. The Holocaust was not a fair fight but
a calculated program of extermination. To rescript it as a
two-front battle – to extend the taint of torture to both sides
– is an insult to history. Somebody should tell Tarantino that
paths of glory needn’t be lit by the demonic glow of burning
bodies. He’s too talented a director to succumb to the lesser
arts of “Here we are now, entertain us!” film-making. Rather
than rely on pure shock value, he would be well-served to
revisit his proven capacity to awe. Tarantino can do it with
dialogue or image, but he does it best when the two act in
concert, mixing noir and vérité, burning human fortitude and
frailty right through the screen.
Cold Souls
“Cold Souls” is certainly more bizarre than “Inglourious
Basterds,” but perhaps less outlandish. Its chief concern
is the integrity of Paul Giamatti’s chickpea-sized soul – not
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in terms of its metaphysical tender or Catholic currency,
but as a commodity that can be extracted, stored, and, in
particularly troubling cases, stolen. Giamatti plays himself, a
frumpish, manic actor with pretensions of the stage. These
pretensions manifest sans “pre”fix, as a crippling anxiety
that results from Giamatti’s struggle to adorn his portrayal of
the marrow. He can neither sleep nor eat nor exhale. He’s
beholden to a unique spiritual malaise, and his options seem
limited to acceptance of the
unacceptable or escape
from his very self.
Enter The Soul Storage
Company, a curious outfit that
Giamatti discovers by means
of a New Yorker profile. The organization purports to purvey
nothing short of inner peace. They specialize in removing
the soul and, along with it, the clenched-fist, ground-tooth
unease that accompanies the life overexamined. Giamatti
is quickly sold on an invasive procedure by the venerable
Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn, in fine form). Flintstein is Soul
Storage’s reigning emeritus and the medical community’s
leading authority on soul extraction. There is, of course, a
hidden downside to the good doctor’s brave new world;
namely, that it’s populated by Russian soul traffickers. And as
fate would have it, these thieving Muscovites come looking
for the soul of an American actor just as the Giamatti extract
is being placed on ice.
With “Cold Souls,” first-time director Sophie Barthes dives
head-first into the theatre of the absurd. Absurdity, however,
is not the same thing as nonsense. There’s a coherence to
Barthes’ narrative that belies the more surreal aspects of
her subject. Giamatti is not incredulous when he learns of
Soul Storage, nor is he in utter disbelief when he finds that
his soul has been stolen. He’s merely worried and angry, just
as you might be if you received a hefty, but not altogether
unexpected, parking ticket. In this film, the metaphysical
becomes just another banality of existence. One day,
you misplace your car keys. The next day, you misplace
your soul.
Which is not to say that “Cold Souls” is dry or dispassionate.
To the contrary, the picture is charming, smart, and funny.
It’s difficult to hold back a guffaw when you learn that the
Russians have reallocated Giamatti’s essence under false
appearances. Instead of advertising their black-market
beauty as the property of Mr. “Sideways,” they tell their
customer, a fame-drunk Russian actress, that her new soul
59

once belonged to Al Pacino. It may be small, but its owner’s
bravura screen performances prove that the tiny bugger
is positively dripping with power. (Say hello to my little
friend, indeed!)
Noting that Giamatti masters his Vanya duties without
possession of his own soul does little to spoil the film’s unfolding
drama. If anything, the Vanya tie-in is informative. Chekhov
stated that when he wrote the play he began it in forte and
finished it in pianissimo – meaning that he started with a bang
and ended with a whimper. Barthes does her best to match
the maestro’s pacing, presenting the soul extraction and theft
with all deliberate speed, then dedicating the remainder of
the film to an intercontinental soul search. Giamatti is driven
by life, misery, and the pursuit of the incorporeal. And the
viewer leaves the theater thinking that spirit and body aren’t
opposites, but soul mates.
It Might Get Loud
Here’s a title that seems less an admonition for our ears than
a belated prologue to the summer film season. Because at
this advanced date, with the dog-day flicks finally behind us,
those who suffered through “Transformers,” “G.I. Joe,” and
“Star Trek” can summarily confirm not only that it got loud,
but that it also got ugly. Untold quantities of smoke, shrapnel,
and CGI tomfoolery turned the major-studio’s summer slate
into an aesthetic no-man’s-land, a barren bone yard where
animation and machinery came to do battle, leaving among
its casualties the live take and the sanctity of the human
eardrum.
Thankfully, “It Might Get Loud” is a film without special effects
– unless you count those employed by the Edge, U2’s lead
guitarist and a pioneer in the discipline of tech-channeled
riff design. His tactics are placed alongside those of two
other electric guitar innovators, Jimmy Page, formerly of the
Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, and Jack White, currently of the
White Stripes, the Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather. What
results is a Canterbury Tales for three generations of ax men.
Page’s verse carries him from the stutter of Lonnie Donegan
skiffle to the squall of British Invasion blues; the Edge’s is born
in DIY punk and matures in the margins of post-Berlin Wall
pop; White’s derives direction from the kings of the Mississippi
Delta, then hitchhikes through the royalty of noise rock
and low-fi alternative. In the aggregate, we have discord,
harmony, and bombast – a vibrant soundtrack for the Rock
Age, which, as any major dude can tell you, started in the
summer of ‘65 with the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and ended with
the ascent of American Idol’s Chris Daughtry.
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“It Might Get Loud” is directed by David Guggenheim, who
made considerable noise with his previous documentary,
“An Inconvenient Truth.” “Loud” is a more subdued affair,
subordinating didactics to personality and collaboration.
The film’s conceit is to organize a summit meeting between
the three guitarists. Jimmy, Edge, and Jack come together to
share stories, regrets, and their myriad tricks of the trade. Each
makes the case for his own musical texture, Page’s being
virile and virtuosic, Edge’s lean and ringing, White’s stripped-
down and swampy. Screen time is apportioned more or less
equally, so the men are permitted to offer their testimony with
fairly even balance and conviction. But instead of adopting
the dictates of divide and conquer, the three lead guitars
reach for common ground. Guggenheim thus constructs a
sonic relay race that revels in baton passing and ends in a
hands-clasped victory lap. Musicians at this level are secure
enough to know that pissing contests are best left to the likes
of Kanye West.
That being said, insofar as there is a show to steal, Jack White
steals it. His commentary is the most droll and humorous, his
persona the most conflicted and beguiling. When asked
what he thinks will happen when the plugged-in trinity
finally gets together, he says, “ Probably a fist fight.” The joke
is compounded by White’s shaman-meets-peckerwood
approach to wardrobe. It’s never clear whether he’s dressed
for a rock concert or a cowboy’s funeral, perhaps because
Jack is the type of guy who’d find his dedicated pocket of
comfort at either affair. The documentary captures White
alternately performing for a few dozen pensioners at a British
old-age home and tens of thousands of besotted youths at an
American music festival. Such versatility is tough to match.
Page and Edge, however, have White squarely beaten on
the prime indicator of popular impact: record sales. Both men
have moved millions upon millions of albums, an honor that’s
likely to elude Jack in our era of digital singles and illegal
downloads. By way of compensation, White can only furrow
his brow and crank up his amplifier. The louder he plays, the
harder he’ll be to drown out.
If such a method can work for Michael Bay and Vin Diesel,
it can damn well work for someone as inimically talented
as Jack White. After all, volume is an impartial arbitrator of
merit and hackery, of sweet music and sour noise. And if this
film season has taught us anything, it’s that the bold and the
brilliant should not rest until they’ve harnessed the powers of
projection.
(September 14, 2009)
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A Decade in the Dark
The Top 10 Films of the ‘00s
With the lights out, it’s less dangerous? I don’t think
so, Kurt. That statement is way too soft on terror, way
too accommodating of dark-side urges – in short,
way too 90s. Each word is a callow souvenir from a
more innocent time, an artifact of an age that permitted
grown men and women to actually aspire towards the
conquering of their irrational fears. We’re talking ancient
history here – a place we’ll not soon revisit, and a
condition to which we’re loath to return.
I f the first decade of the 21st Century has taught us anything, it’s that we
should be continuously terrified to a point just short of self-injury. This rule
applies not only from dusk till dawn, but also from sun-up to sun-down. At no
time during the day should we know our nuts from our noggins. And at no
time during the night should we sleep with less than one eye open.
This sense of imminent peril pervades our descent into the darkness of the
post-9/11 movie theater. Beyond the well-lit snack bars and pedestrian
corridors, who knows what horrors might
come? Taken collectively, Nora Ephron, If the first decade of the 21st Century
Hugh Grant, and Sarah Jessica Parker has taught us anything, it’s that we should
could induce screams in even the most be continuously terrified to a point just short of
trauma-averse band of Stoics. And such self-injury.
unfortunate name dropping is just a
prologue to a sustained program of flick-driven frighteners. My conscience
compels me to warn you that I’m about to type the words “Gigli,” “Orlando
Bloom,” and “Revenge of the Sith.” I hope you’ve managed to retain your
lunch. (And your sanity.)
Then there are the far less obvious cinematic dangers – the ones that
generally fly over the head and under the radar of popular tastes. These
are the real monsters, the true threats to national security. They come
equipped with claws of a razor-sharp variety – pointed barbs that wantonly
pierce the sanctity of your flesh, leaving scar clusters that extend beyond
the pale of cosmetic surgery. Yet the damage that these films inflict cannot
be limited to the realm of the laceration, as their cuts are more likely to take Babylon. I’m sure Jerry Bruckheimer is in the
up residence in the mind than in the body. Their objective is to never end –
to be replayed ad infinitum in the screening room of your psyche, with the
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digital projector forever cued by reflex rather
than volition.
Movies that pack such wizardry are rare, and
thankfully so! Because when they come to
a theater near you, not even the minister’s
daughter is safe. Make no mistake: Films of
the ilk and caliber which I describe hold no
compunction about having their way with you
in the dark. Amidst the permissive milieu and
shadowy ethics of a pitch-black auditorium,
they first deliver a wallop to your senses, then
plant their seed in your memory. When the
lights go up, you’re not sure whether to call
the authorities or smoke a cigarette.
Which is probably just an impolite way of
saying that these pictures are not for the
more demanding acolytes of the “Here we
are now, entertain us!” set. The best films of
our decade, of any decade, require an
active and fearless viewer – someone with
a strong stomach
and a stronger
constitution. That
is, someone who’s
not afraid of the
dark.
Each of the 10 films listed below have
challenged my capacity for self-control, be
it in terms of laughter and tears, shouts and
murmurs, or fights and frights. They comprise
the cream of my decade in the dark, feats of
the boudoir sadly included. Some of them are
so good that they’re genuinely dangerous –
particularly to the barons of the blockbuster,
the rulers of the “rom-com,” and the other
firmly entrenched interests of Hollywood
process of filing some sort of petition. So my
advice to you is refreshingly simple: See these
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movies before they’re classified as enemies of the state.
The clock is already ticking. You won’t be safe until you’ve
peeped the entire decalogue.
1. Head-On (2004)
Turks and Dirks. Islamic moral tenets and German behavioral
strictures collide in this marvel of a motion picture, with the
wages of assimilation being paid by alternate bouts of
abandon and sobriety. Head-On is a story of love, sickness,
and estrangement that extends across two continents, two
decades, and two dead-end lives. This tendency toward
double-trouble is altogether appropriate, as the film represents
the acme of cinema’s second Punk moment – that is, the
flash and dash of New Wave reborn in the gut-wrenching
narratives of contemporary Third World vérité. Director Fatih
Akin crafts a vulgar epic, a quest for a separate peace on a
contiguous landmass, complete with detours and return trips.
His film offers an insider’s account of an outsider’s lament,
providing neither an excuse for the crime nor a complaint
for the punishment. Such brutal honesty has a lasting impact
on the viewer – an impact that’s not only head-on but
concussive.
2. The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Divorce and its discontents, as told from the perspective
of the children. Rarely is an “art” film so beguiling, so funny,
or so watchable. At a lean 81 minutes, Squid is concise but
comprehensive, capturing the full drama of the Berkman
clan’s nose dive without chastising the viewer for chuckling
at the frantic loss of altitude. Noah Baumbach sets his semi-
autobiographical still-life in mid-80s Brooklyn, depicting a
father’s genius in fade, a mother’s talents in bloom, and
the sons’ loyalties divided. Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse
Eisenberg, and Owen Kline constitute the best-acted nuclear
family in recent memory. Each Berkman pulsates with the
strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions that are central
to the notion of rounded character. These people aren’t
always easy to like or to root for, but the flaw in their design
is precisely what makes them so compelling. Squid takes the
neurotic humor of a Woody Allen picture and mashes it up
with the sleek, atmospheric despair of an Ang Lee feature.
The sum of this equation is an intelligent, idiosyncratic, and
memorable original.
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3. There Will Be Blood (2007)
Both a gospel and an admonition. Blood is the chronicle of
Daniel Plainview, a turn-of-the-20th-Century oil evangelist
with a penchant for finding the spouting geyser and closing
the shady deal. The film reads like Country/Western Faulkner,
with a family destroyed, a fortune denuded, and a future
compromised, amidst much sound and fury. Plainview can
handle the sound – just listen to Daniel Day-Lewis’ Academy
Award-winning bellow – but his specialty is undoubtedly the
fury. This anger is projected at competitors and collaborators
alike, audiences that become ever more difficult to distinguish
between as the picture moves forward. The ire’s true target,
however, is the god that Daniel refuses to believe in. His gospel
is one populated by sinners and false prophets, misanthropes
and manipulators. The implicit rejection of conventional
divinity is made manifest in the film’s final act, when Daniel
shouts “I am the Third Revelation!” as he bludgeons a foe
who is part foil, part fraternal reflection. Plainview has a god
complex – but his sinister plots and violent outbursts are clearly
the work of the devil. Blood is a distinctly American exorcism.
It will look even better in 10 years.
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Wes Anderson’s French connection. In response to the
critical and commercial success of his late-90s breakout
feature, Rushmore, Anderson decided to heed the advice
that’s embedded in the film’s title – he rushed more, creating
a strikingly ambitious picture of quickened pace and quirkier
textures. Tenenbaums is reminiscent of Truffaut’s jumpy yet
sure-handed Day for Night, Malle’s charming yet edgy Murmur
of the Heart, and Tony Richardson’s absurd yet delightful
Hotel New Hampshire. It sustains multiple subplots and
countless flourishes of witty dialogue, but most of the action
that matters transpires in the vicinity of Royal Tenenbaum.
Royal is a failed paterfamilias who’s in the throes of a late-
life resolution to redeem himself to the wife and children he
never deserved in the first place. Gene Hackman, playing the
indefatigable Father Tenenbaum, turns in the best comedic
performance of the decade. He talks some major jive in
the service of his own selfish whims, but he also puts in the
legwork necessary to prove that he cares for his maladjusted
sons and daughter, all of whom were once child prodigies
but are now slumped expressions of ennui, depression, and/
or paranoia. Royal’s heady rises and falls make the film worth
watching. Anderson’s magnificent screenplay makes it a
modern classic.
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5. The Lives of Others (2006)
Listen in or opt out? That’s the dilemma faced by Hauptmann
Gerd Wiesler, a true-believing Stasi agent who’s duped into
serving the aims of a high-ranking East German bureaucrat
rather than the priorities of the DDR state. Wiesler leads
Operation Lazlo, a surveillance program expressly designed to
uncover the phantom sedition of Georg Dreyman, a popular,
clean-living playwright. Despite being an investigative savant
and ace interrogator, the “Hauptmann” is not the “head
man” at all – he reports to several layers of party hacks, the
most important of whom wants to see Dreyman felled so that
he can take possession of the playwright’s fetching girlfriend.
Wiesler’s tragedy is a trust misplaced. He makes an allegiance
to his government that’s altogether incommensurate with his
government’s allegiance to him. So when the Hauptmann
starts to act independently, his fall from grace becomes a
mere formality. Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
tells a thrilling tale of secrets and lies, blurring the line
between friend and foe and commander and casualty.
The film’s hushed addendum, which takes place after the
duplicities have been exposed, is a worthy tribute to a good
man undone by a wicked hierarchy. It argues that we have
a place in other peoples’ lives – but not one that undermines
our sense of common decency.
6. Oldboy (2003)
More like boldboy. This intrepid South Korean feature is a short-
fused wonder of cruel intentions and bombastic revelations.
It positively levels you – first with the horrors of captivity, then
with a glimmer of madness, and finally through the contorted
faces of a man who knows too much. That man is Dae-su,
an unassuming white-collar professional who’s mysteriously
kidnapped off a Seoul street corner in the fall of 1988. He’s
subsequently held for 15 years in a bricked-up hotel room,
never meeting his captor nor receiving any clues as to why
he’s being detained. The situation is initially Kafkaesque – all
matter-of-fact suffering, with no explanation of its logic or
its cause. But when Dae-su is finally released (with the same
haste and secrecy as he was taken) the enigma slowly starts
to unravel, piece by piece and cipher by cipher. Oldboy was
the only movie of this decade that impelled me to call out
in the theater, pregnant with sudden realizations. This Eureka!
moment came much to the chagrin of my fellow movie-
goers, but much to the credit of director Chan-wook Park.
His picture is a degenerate masterwork on public humiliation
and private revenge. It might be the best Asian film since
Kurosawa’s Dreams.
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7. The Departed (2006)
Criminal minded. The Departed is the thinking-man’s iteration
of two popular cinematic tropes: the police drama and the
organized crime thriller. Its genius is to conflate both genres into
a fluent strain of modern-day cops and robbers, one in which
the characters and the categories are blended together
with such skill that we’re never quite sure who’s on the take
and who’s on the make. South Boston is less the film’s setting
than its reason for being. Only on such an island of working-
class stasis, Irish purity, and strictly parochial charismas could
Frank Costello run his ballsy, vertically integrated drug racket.
His kingdom is closed to all but the localest of contenders,
be they ratty street punks or crooked policemen. The film’s
pivotal neighborhood-kid roles are flawlessly played by Matt
Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio. Damon’s Conor Sullivan
is Iago in a blue uniform, all treachery and self-interest;
DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan is an undercover Hamlet, all veiled
motive and white-hot internal conflict. Super-auteur Martin
Scorsese presents their story as an intricate shadow play on
infiltration and identity. He uses his patented triple-V formation
– violence, vulgarity, and vengeance – to fearlessly resolve a
confoundingly complex narrative. His Oscar for Best Director
was both long overdue and well deserved.
8. Volver (2006)
Be kind, rewind. Pedro Almodóvar has never been one to
shrink from the past. Many of his films begin with a yester-
year trauma that eventually metastasizes into the hinge point
of a larger, more antic plot. Volver is slightly different in its
design: the picture starts with a young mother’s real-time
travails, then moves forward by skimming the back pages of
her family history. Almodóvar flashes his director’s license to
cheat time, fleeing a harried crime scene to return us to a
prologue that packs a body count. His film is a heartfelt and
humorous paean to mothers and daughters, and the men
they “outlive.” It traffics in equal parts sin and redemption,
with candor and closetedness burning at opposite ends of
the same candle. Volver is splendidly lyrical and shockingly
beautiful. (So is Penelope Cruz, the female lead – which, in an
Almodóvar film, can be shortened to just plain “lead.”) Pedro
is an Old Master on the palette wheel. He uses red the way
Vermeer and van Gogh used yellow – to endow a scene with
ambience, to adorn the lone maiden or lonely landscape,
to cinch a corseted intensity. This red colors Cruz with the
imprints of love and lust, blood and roses, bull charges and
stop lights. Her character’s picaresque is a happy accident
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of bumbling peripatetics and stirring self-discovery. Call her
Donna Quixote, and don’t spare the reverence.
9. Gran Torino (2008)
Gran theft auto, with a twist. Here’s a film that gear shifts
from tart parody to moving parable by consequence of a
single scene: Walt Kowalski, then a gruff, antisocial widower,
pulls his pistol on Thao Vang Lor, then a frightened Hmong
teen who’s been peer-pressured into lifting Walt’s 1972 Gran
Torino. This muted showdown proves to be the springboard
for an unlikely teacher-student partnership. Thao slowly
becomes a Kowalski protégé, all tool belt and calloused
hands. Walt, in turn, gradually learns to abandon some of his
enmities and prejudices – sources of negative energy that
his Hmong neighbors expose as misconceptions. Embodied
by the ageless Clint Eastwood, Kowalski is clearly the prime
mover in this conspicuously topical drama. He’s a Korean
War vet and retired autoworker who’ll never leave his blue-
collar Detroit suburb, regardless of demographic change
or its insidious gang culture. Estranged from his own spoiled,
self-concerned family, Walt revels in the roles of stalwart and
protector that Thao and his relatives afford him. So when his
Eastern allies come under attack, Walt sets out on a mission
that’s written like White America’s last will and testament.
Walt will not deny himself the chance to bequeath a better
world to posterity, regardless of the private costs or personal
sacrifices. Gran Torino is our generation’s High Noon. It’s less
a movie than a prayer.
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10. A History of Violence (2005)
Charmed and dangerous. Director David Cronenberg made
his name in the shock-and-awe cinema of the 1980s, with
such pictures as Scanners and The Fly. In this decade, he’s
moved from sci-fi freak fests to cerebral human-interest stories.
A History of Violence is his sharpest, most seductive film yet. It
maps the metamorphosis of an small-town diner owner into
a big-city hit man. This transition is not a novel about-face but
a sordid relapse. The plot reveals that the current Tom Stall,
upright coffee-jockey, is the former Joey Cusack, downtown
throat-slitter. But the tell that Cronenberg conceives is neither
tawdry nor formulaic. His film’s violence comes in tightly
choreographed spurts, so as not to claim primacy over the
more compelling personal history. Viggo Mortensen, playing
the dual-identity protagonist, strikes an expert balance of
demurral and rampage. His performance is a case study in
circumstantial schizophrenia; he never intended to introduce
Joey to his wife and kids, yet certain threats and exigencies
require him to. Cronenberg demonstrates that the sins of the
father can not only catch up with him, but that they can be
forgiven – even when survival and absolution come against
all odds.
Another 10 that just as easily could have made the list: City
of God (2002, Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund), Blood
Diamond (2006, Edward Zwick), The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005,
Judd Apatow), Code Unknown (2000, Michael Haneke),
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008, Woody Allen), Gomorrah
(2008, Matteo Garrone), Che (2008, Steven Soderbergh),
Munich (2005, Steven Spielberg), Irreversible (2002, Gaspar
Noe), Y Tu Mamá También (2001, Alfonso Cuarón).
(December 21, 2009)
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