MOVIES ON MY MIND: 300

UPDATE:This ended up being a draft for a more polished piece I published on The A.V. Club blog. You can read it here. It's much better than this version.]

Another Tuesday means another Tuesday-night screening, this time for 300, an adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel about the 300 Spartans who held off an army of Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. I went with my friend and colleague Nathan Rabin and I'm honestly not sure how to respond to the film. On the way back we couldn't decide if what we'd just seen was thrillingly repulsive of repulsively thrilling.

One thing's for sure, it's a fairly faithful adaptation of Miller's book. Like Sin City it tries its best to mimic the look of Miller's art, shooting on soundstages, filling in the backgrounds with CGI effects, and opting for stylization over realism. There are a few notable additions: On their way to Thermopylae the Spartans, led by Gerard Butler's Leonidas, stumble upon a village that's been destroyed by the Persian army, leaving only one small child to tell the tale. Before dying. And there's a lot of business with Leonidas' wife, who's left behind to try to persuade the Spartan council that maybe standing up to the Persians wouldn't be such a bad idea. Both bits feel a lot like padding even if they play into the most disturbing aspect of the Zack Snyder-directed film: Somehow in the translation from page to screen it's become a screaming endorsement of fascism.

That's not a word I want to throw around lightly and I know I'm not quite literally dead-on, since Sparta wasn't a fascist state. But the film doesn't dwell on the finer points of Spartan statecraft. What it offers is vision of society in which value comes only from one's devotion to the preservation of the state. The Sparatans worked toward one purpose, strengthening their city state through raw might. They practiced a brutal version kind of eugenics, discarding any babies found to be flawed. Miller's book portrays all of this with an unabashed admiration for its barbaric integrity. But admiring aspects of ancient principles isn't the same as endorsing them and that's something that gets lost on the way to the screen.

I'm not suggesting that the filmmakers are looking for a Spartan revival, but in moving from one medium to another, 300 has gained a layer of glamour with some disturbing implications. The fight scenes are brutal but, as our own Tasha Robinson points out in her review, so completely divorced from realism that they become oddly bloodless no matter how much blood fills the screen. Snyder shoots the battle scenes with a dynamic intensity, slowing it down to dwell on the good bits. It's thrilling. And it's only thrilling. There's no sense of danger. Death comes with no feeling of loss. Part of what bugged me so much about Troy a few years back was that, even while telling the original war story, it shirked its responsibilities as a war movie, boiling down a devastating, decade-long conflict to what looked like a bloody spring break. Here it's like a weekend with the boys gone slightly awry.

Nathan said he couldn't remember a movie so unabashedly pro-war. I can't remember one so unabashedly pro-nationalism. The Spartans here constantly define themselves by what they are not. When an envoy from Xerxes mentions Athens, Leonidas dismisses them as "boy lovers." (There's an inconvenient truth about that distinction.) When Xerxes meets Leonidas, the film plays up his ambiguous sexuality and not-so-ambiguous body language. And it's not just behavior that's un-Spartan. The Persian army consists of Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Africans. If the film never quite treats the other races as repulsive, it doesn't hesitate to emphasize their exoticism and danger, elements that clearly have no place in an ordered, Spartan society.

Any resemblance to our own is not entirely coincidental. Miller's book was released in 1998, years before our current conflict in the gulf. But a film's a product of its time and it would be hard not to draw parallels even if the screenplay didn't throw in touches to make the connection even clearer. There's a lot of bellowing about "freedom" (nevermind all that compulsory military service), a feckless, corrupt anti-war legislative body to deal with and the film ends with Sparta leading all of Greece in a battle against mystic force from the East. A shameless recruiter would spend this weekend trolling the multiplexes.

300 plays like Starship Troopers without the irony and it closes on a note of triumph that shuts out the great irony of history. The repulsion of the Persion army paved the way for a golden age, one that allowed for Sophocles, Plato, Euripides, Heordotus... you name it. And it lasted about 80 years until a fairly pointless civil war between Sparta and Athens ended it. But that would have to be the subject of a very different sort of movie. Don't expect a sequel.

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: PICKING THE HITS

Anyone who's spent any time in used record stores—and I'm speaking here as someone who's logged plenty of hours in them—knows that a few things are always true:

1) They all smell the same
2) They're always poorly lit
3) There's always plenty of Herb Alpert and Chet Atkins albums laying around for cheap.

I once decorated a small niche of an especially crappy apartment with copies of Alpert's Whipped Cream And Other Delights, but I'd never spent much time with Atkins until recently. Atkins ran RCA's Nashville division for years, pioneering the crossover "Nashville sound" that would help define country music in the '60s. Atkins also cut a lot of albums on his own, usually two or three a year. He'd typically lay down rhythm tracks at RCA's famed Studio B, a facility he'd put on the map, and record the leads at his home studio.

Atkins recorded many instrumental versions of contemporary hits, but even the renditions that border on easy-listening kitsch are usually redeemed by his distinctive playing. I picked up Solid Gold '69 in part because I simply couldn't imagine Atkins' versions of "Son Of A Preacher Man" or "Aquarius" and in part because I never pass up any rendition of "Hey Jude." But the standout tracks are the sensitive readings of "Both Sides Now" and "Blackbird" I've posted below.

One more thing: For some reason Donovan does the liner notes. There aren't any Donovan songs on it and if he appears on it somewhere, it eluded me. But the note is worth reproducing verbatim:

chet paul's tunes sensitive love for love young brownskin harp ear good for nice sounds but of fuzz great face beautiful guitar fondling country smooth like strings and cream joni's tune lovely classical box rewind once upon a time irish music went west and fiddles and jest country music came from the marriage of men's cultures under new suns and now c & w is very popular in ireland... and chet is very popular in america and i thank him for playing "our" new tune so beautifully. -- Donovan

Well said.

ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES: MIAMI VALLEY STYLE
"Maybe even a sandwich platter"

This is primarily going to be of interest to my fellow Daytonians. It's a tour of the Dayton Swim Club, a North Dixie Dr. institution that I've driven past many times without realizing that, well, it wasn't a swim club. Let's take a tour!

I think I'd love this clip anyway. The host is just so dang jovial as he shows off all the low-budget benefits of joining the Swim Club. Soda machines! A video game! A mechanical horse with a vibrator glued onto it! Amazing.

MOVIES ON MY MIND

RECENT FILMS I HAVE SEEN: Zodiac, Summer Rental, and a secret surprise movie even I didn't expect to see

Putting aside the Neil LaBute remake of The Wicker Man, David Fincher's Zodiac, which I caught last Tuesday, was one of the most disturbing films I've seen in a while, and not necessarily for the reasons you might suspect. In recreating the investigation into the late-'60s/early-'70s Zodiac murders, Fincher doesn't spare any of the grisly details—there's a murder by a lake that's all the more disturbing for its unflinching matter-of-factness—but what he gets really right is the psychic toll of obsession and the cancerous effect of an unanswered wrong. In a blind taste test I couldn't have told you that this was from the same director as Seven, Fight Club, and Panic Room. They're all films I admire, but the the nihilism of the first two has been transformed here into a muted dread. It settles like a haze on a San Francisco that's left the Summer Of Love far behind and the technical flash, so much in evidence in Panic never calls attention to itself here. It's technically brilliant, but in a chilly, Kubrickian kind of way. Even when blood gets spilled it looks cold.

Here's how our own Scott Tobias put it (and put it well):

Zodiac follows the events in strict chronology, without imposing an artificial structure. This daring conceit risks shapelessness, but makes the passage of time more devastating, as datelines separated by days or weeks extend to full years while the case lies fallow.

.

Devastating's exactly right. Watch as Robert Downey Jr.'s character devolves from funny drunk to a pathetic, almost inhuman lump of a man. Maybe he would have gotten there without the Zodiac killer. Maybe not. The film never veers from this strategy. Labels like "Six months later..." pop up between scenes as the leads grow cold. It's comic until it becomes tragic.

There are moments here that need discussing that can't quite be talked about without spoilig the plot. But I need to talk about one, so I'll vague it up as best I can. After a long stretch of scenes that's little more than characters discussing leads and finding out that everybody knows something about the case but nobody knows everything—there are lots of passages like this—one of the characters follows a lead into a moment straight out of The Silence Of The Lambs. He's in the wrong place at the wrong time and it's clearly going to cost him. Except it doesn't. It's a dead end followed by trusting someone else's wrong instincts, something we don't find out until many scenes later, maybe years for him (I can't remember). But the film doesn't make a big deal acknowledging this. The character's moment of mortal fear becomes irrelevant to him since it turned out not to contribute to solving the murders. It's exhausting to share that kind of paranoia and monomania for two and a half hours and Fincher makes it clear it's just a sample of what it would be to live it and there's no small reward in that.

*******

I don't have a lot to say about the 1985 comedy Summer Rental, which I watched, kind of, while doing some file sorting at the end of the day last week. (Ah, the joys of working at home.) It was one of those films I alway wanted to see as a kid and never got around to seeing. And now I've seen it. With Summer School another film on my Netflix queue, it comes from a brief period in the mid-'80s when Carl Reiner was synonymous with summer comedies. It also came from that period when John Candy was in seemingly everything. Here the gags are cheap and belabored and the plots straight from the snobs v. slobs playbook. Watching it was purely an exercise in reflexive nostalgia and the most rewarding part came from being reminded of what old cereal boxes used to look like. I used to think there was some value to watching just about any movie I hadn't seen before. As I get older I'm not so sure. (Which doesn't mean I'm not going to watch Summer School too.)

*****

So the big secret movie: When we saw Zodiac there was a marketing type there offering us passes to one of two movies. The first was The Brave One, a Neil Jordan film starring Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard. All that sounds promising. The second was a mystery movie. The marketing woman said that all she could tell us was that it would be rated PG and that it came from, "this genre of film," at which point she waved her hand across a sheet of paper listing everything from Cars to Pirates Of The Caribbean. Hmmm.... Something sure to be interesting or a mystery movie? The choice was clear: We went with the mystery movie.

There was much fuss and bother in getting to the screening and a lot of line-waiting as well. By the time we got inside we'd convinced ourselves we would be seeing Fred Claus since the passes, upon closer inspection, further specified it was a "holiday" movie and we knew it was in post-production in Chicago since the media was all over star Vince Vaughn for complaining about our city's post-production services. We were wrong. Long story short (and maybe these magic words will send my traffic through the roof): I've seen Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix.

How was it? I'm not even sure I should say. Ethically, I'm not even sure I should have been there since I don't think critics are even supposed to go to test screenings. But I'm not reviewing it professionally so screw it. I liked it, anyway, so I'm not poisoning any wells.

When the film series started, I didn't have much invested in it and, frankly, the films didn't really reward investment. I had only read the first book, which I liked just fine, but the first two films were kind of a bore. I remembered little beyond Kenneth Branagh's sly turn in the second one and Rupert Grint's ability to look either mortified or terrified (but never both at the same time and never any other emotion .)

The third film, Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban changed that in a big way. The story deepened considerably (just as it did in the books), the stars grew into their roles, and director Alfonso Cuaron got beneath the special effects to find the human element. At the same time, I caught up with the series (thanks in no small part to Stevie's enthusiasm; she screamed like an eight-year-old when they announced what we were seeing) and the quality of the films started to matter to me.

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire fell short of its predecessor but it wasn't bad, either. It just got a little too caught up in the big setpieces and lost sight of the characters. That's not a problem here. The massive plot's been streamlined considerably, but it's been streamlined smartly. There are a few scenes that will mean a lot more to readers of the book but having read the book isn't essential. But director David Yates (who's previously worked mostly in British television) strikes a pretty great balance between the kind of drama that comes from big scary monsters and the kind that comes from realizing how easy it is to feel absolutely isolated from eveyone around you. The first shot's a killer and the only effect is a piece of abandoned playground equipment. Yates is sticking around for the next entry, too, and that's not bad news at all.

Everybody's good in it, too, but I have to single out Imelda Staunton's turn as Dolores Umbridge, a teacher with the most memorable talent for passive aggression since Uriah Heep. Some of J.K. Rowling's political subtext might have been lost if Staunton hadn't played her as Thatcher with fixation on cute kitten collector plates. She might be slightly less fist-tighteningly hateful than she was in the book, but only slightly.

I can't really say I enjoyed the test-screening process. It's a vile practice that's crept evolved from a marketing tool into an intrinsic part of the creative process. That's wrong. And, furthermore, this wasn't quite ready to screen. Many of the effects weren't done, and they got less complete as the film went along. I'd like to see it again with a climax that doensn't involve Ralph Fiennes with CGI-assist dots on his face battling Michael Gambon on a soundstage. But it was interesting to be on the other side of it, tiny pencils at all. We were asked for our favorite and least favorite scenes, asked to rate various elements on a scale of one to five, and questioned about our favorite characters. If we'd all hated one scene, would it be gone? If we'd ganged up on Daniel Radcliffe, could he have lost his job? Who knows? I'm sure they'll ignore my comments anyway. I'm out of the demo. Who cares what I think?

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: THE GREAT TWIN CITIES FUNK POP BAND THAT WASN'T

(First: Sorry so long between posts. The next couple of days should be better. In the meantime, here's some more from my continuing efforts to transfer some vinyl music to MP3s.)

When Sinead O'Connor had a hit with "Nothing Compares 2 U," articles about her always touched on a few points:
1) She's bald
2) She's odd
3) U2 helped her get her start
4) She's Irish
5) Prince wrote it

But Prince didn't write it for O'Connor. He wrote it for The Family, might've-been-huge-but-wasn't Paisley Park act consisting of three refugees from the recently disbanded Time (St. Paul Peterson, Jellybean Johnson, and percussionist/hype man Jerome Benton), saxophonist/vocalist Eric Leeds, and Susannah Melvoin, twin sister of The Revolution's Wendy Melvoin.

They released one album in 1985, but even by the time I got curious about hearing the original version of "Nothing Compares 2 U" and was already buying up every Prince b-side I could get my hands on, it was hard to find. Was it some lost treasure of Minneapolis funk? I finally had my question answered recently when I found a vinyl copy for $5.99. Answer: No.

But it's not bad either, as these two tracks suggest. "Screams Of Passion" was the single and while I'm not going to say that this version of "Nothing" surpasses O'Connor's or the version Prince threw on his greatest hits collection. But it's worth hearing anyway.

P.S. The new embedded file-sharing system comes via a free site called Divshare, which I recommend.

HAPPY PRESIDENT'S DAY

In honor of today's holiday, here's the legendary Joe Garden:

JERRY LEE LEWIS: LIVE AT THE FRENCH LICK RESORT AND CASINO, FRENCH LICK, INDIANA

I've regretted going to my share of concerts over the years, and sometimes not even because they're bad. There's a Tortoise show that stands out as something that would be a truly memorable experience if the band was playing in your living room as you drifted off to enjoy a nice nap. But I've never once regretted turning out for one of the old guys. One of my favorite concert memories ever is seeing Johnny Cash at the Glastonbury Festival in 1994. This was around the same time the first American Recordings album came out. He was that year's token old-timer and I don't think he expected the reception he got. It's not like he ever stopped touring, but I don't think he'd ever played to a sea of black-clad, pierced English youth who could sing along to every song. And I mean every song. Not just "Ring Of Fire" but "Ghost Riders In The Sky," too.

On Saturday night Stevie and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis, like Cash another member of the Million Dollar Quartet. The last one, actually. He even named his last album Last Man Standing and put a picture of himself with Cash, Elvis, and Carl Perkins inside. I've been on a big Jerry Lee kick ever since writing the (apparently still in the editing process) article on Memphis music movies and picking up the aforementioned Last Man Standing. (A side note: It's actually quite good, unlike most of the oldsters-duet-with-younger-stars albums. Of particular note: A duet with Keith Richards called "That Kind Of Fool" on which they lament they were never the kind of fools who could just have one drink and go home to their wives.)

I'll spare you the harrowing ordeal of getting there via Google Maps directions that took us through the back roads of a national forest where no house is apparently complete unless there's half an automobile or a broken stove on the lawn and mention only in passing that southern Indiana is (otherwise) really pretty to get to the show. Once again: No regrets. Lewis' long-serving band warmed up the show with a handful of oldies which the drunken louts behind us dimissed is "bullshit" that quickly got downgraded to "third rate bullshit." It wasn't, but it wasn't star time either. That came when Lewis ambled out, explained that his plane had been rerouted and that he hadn't had time to change then launched into "Roll Over Beethoven." His voice was problematic on some songs, in fine form on others but the playng remained, as always, an inimitable force of nature. And, despite the environment--which offered excellent acoustics but little else in the way of atmosphere--it felt like a Jerry Lee Lewis show. The drunken louts wandered up to the front of the stage to do some dancing, prompting security to escort them to one side, but not before one of them engaged in some spirited finger-pointing in Lewis' direction and Lewis returned the favor. Later Lewis complained about how it wasn't a rock and roll show if people could tell you how to dance and when to dance. This was shortly before a fight broke out (also involving one of the louts.) For a good 90 seconds or so it was more Memphis roadhouse than sterile casino.

One particular highlight was Charlie Rich's "Don't Put No Headstone On My Grave," which Lewis played as a country lament that turned into rockabilly then back again. These are the official words:
"Don't put no headstone on my grave,
All my life I've been a slave,
Want the whole wide world to know,
That I'm the man that loved you so"
For some reason I heard "loved you so" as "loved his soul." I could be wrong. But I do know he finished the song by slamming the cover of the piano keys against the piano and then looking out at the audience in defiance of something. It might have been death or maybe just the woman he took to task for putting her fingers in her ears with the words, "And people say I'm crazy."

As I was hoping, he also did his rendition of "Over The Rainbow," which just kills me. And he closed, of course, "With Great Balls Of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shaking Going On." For the final passages of "Shaking" he rose, kicked over the piano bench, and played standing up. There was great effort involved in every part of that action and to close the show he simply wandered off and let the band play the final notes. But the spirit behind the gesture was unmistakable. One more rock and roll show down and The Killer was off to join the night, even if now it was at a slower pace.

Below's the setlist. Both it and the photo above come via the thorough European fansite The Jerry Lee Lewis Start Page.

1) Roll Over Beethoven
2) Over The Rainbow
3) Sweet Little Sixteen
4) Memphis, Tennessee
5) Before The Night Is Over
6) She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye
7) Why You Been Gone So Long
8) Don't Put No Headstone On My Grave
9) I Dont Want To Be Lonely Tonight
10) You Win Again
11) Hadacol Boogie
12) Great Balls Of Fire
13) Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: DANCE, GREEDO, DANCE

I've had this album, Patrick Gleeson's Star Wars laying around for years without really recognizing what it was all about. I picked it up mainly because it looked like a hilariously kitsch Star Wars cash-in and featured this impossible to pass up subtitle: "Selections From The Film Performed On The World's Most Advanced Synthesizer." This, of course, must be heard. It is, pretty much as I suspected, an awesome relic, setting John Williams' score to a disco beat and throwing in every flourish that the world's most advanced synthesizer circa 1977 has to offer. (For the record, that's, per Gleeson's liner notes, "an E-mu (pronounced ee-mew) systems synthesizer. It is polyphonic--that is it plays 16 notes simultaneously when instructed to do so--and it is computer driven. The computer, which stores up to 8000 notes in from one to nine memory banks, is based on the Z-80 central processing unite, a popular chip among 'homebrew' computer folks.")

What I didn't realize was the Gleeson was the electronic music guru who put a heavy stamp on Herbie Hancock's early-'70s albums like the awesome Sextant. He's still active, too. There's a short article about him on endlessgroove.com and he's got a MySpace page.

So now I feel a bit bad about being disrespectful to this album for all these years since the man behind it is a legitimate talent whose work I've enjoyed immensely elsewhere. But that doesn't really make the album itself any better. Gleeson provides some detailed liner notes about wanthing to take "another approach" to Williams' score "one that did involve synthesizers and which was more surreeal than the scoring of the original." He also talks about embedding "semi-hidden references back to the film." For instance: "On the main theme track, which is Luke's theme, if you listen carefully to the bassline you'll hear that it is divided into two sections, one of them a hip funk line which is very 1977, and the other one a kind of remembrance of the way basslines were in the late '50s. This is because to me Luke is both a contemporary hero, and also a kind of throwback to the science fiction hero of the fifties--he hardly even kisses the girl."

Well, the reasons for that would come out later. Meanwhile, all I hear is disco John Williams.

Listen: Patrick Gleeson, "Star Wars Theme (Luke's Theme)"

Listen: Patrick Gleeson, "Cantina Music"

ANALOG TO DIGITAL: WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Okay, I know I'm way, way behind everyone else with this, but I'm still thrilled I've learned how to do this. And by this I mean convert records into MP3s. I got my turntable back from my pal Bryce and had it figured out pretty quickly. And I will share with you the first fruits of my labor: A Moog version of the theme from Alfie as performed by someone named Christopher Scott. It's from the 1969 album Switched-On Bacharach. More to come, I'm sure.

Listen: Christopher Scott, "Alfie"

THEY'RE TRYING TO WASH US AWAY

So, this is why my week has been a little hectic: Exploding pipes. Namely, one exploding pipe at our office that flooded us out. Kyle came back from the bathroom saying it had "exploded" and that water was headed our way. I thought he had to be joking or exaggerating. He wasn't. This is what it looked like (all photos courtesy of Kyle Ryan):

My first thought was, "Oh, this sucks. I should just go work at home." It didn't really occur to me until I saw firemen on the stairs evacuating the building that I had to go home. Here's my on the stairs (please note the water cascading down):

And here's what the hardest hit part of our office looks like:

As of now, we're all housebound, which is okay by me. I'm pretty productive when working at home. But who knows when we can go back? Apparently there's no guarantee against bacterial infections and other troubling possibilities. (It was sewer water after all.) I'm planning on stopping by tomorrow to pick up some mail and some recording equipment. This week has taken a strange turn, to be sure.

A PICTURE INSTEAD OF WORDS

Hey. Sorry me no post for a while. Here's a picture of some Battlestar Galactica Mini-mates to make up for it. Note the Starbuck figure comes with a cigar.

HEY MAN, I'M ON A PODCAST
The inimitable Jesse Thorn, creator of the beloved podcast/public radio show The Sound Of Young America was kind enough to feature me on the latest episdoe of his other podcast, Jordan, Jesse GO!. I dole out TV advice and am outed as a fan of Dr. Who. You can get it on iTunes or here.


Updated: Jesse sent in a better link. It's in the comments.

NEW A.V. CLUB FEATURE / THE BEES

On Thursday we unveiled Videocracy, a new A.V. Club feature charting the most popular video clips on the web. I'm happy with it. But I'm not sure why this hasn't made the charts yet:





...especially since we've been quoting around the house endlessly since finding it. "The bees! The bees! MY EYES!"

OPERA NIGHT: TURANDOT

Stevie and I took a trip to the Lyric Opera on Friday to see Turandot. It was part of my Christmas gift to her but, of course, kind of a present for myself as well. I wish we got there more often. I'm a fully committed fan of the opera whenever I'm there even if I rarely listen to it outside of an actual performance. Maybe it's a situational fandom--I think I can name most of the Ring Cycle but I don't remember what order they fall in--but I'm as happy at the Lyric as I am at the Music Box (our revival theater) or the Vic (our favorite concert venue). In another century it might have been more central to my cultural life. As is, I'm glad for every chance I get to experience it. We had season tickets one year in the second or third-worst seats in the house. It was a nice education but since then we've been paying for good tickets once or twice a year instead of terrible seats all year round.

Friday we saw Turandot, Puccini's final opera. He left it unfinished shortly before smoking himself to death. Conductin it for the first time, his friend Arturo Toscanini famously stopped the production at the last note Puccini wrote. This was my first time seeing it and I can't say I loved it the way I love Tosca or Madama Butterfuly. The ending obviously suffers--I can't help but think that Turandot herself would have more than one big moment--but beyond that I found myself not liking the lead characters in the least. It's a fairy tale piece inspired by a story from the 1001 Nights and it doesn't allow for the psychological complexity I like so much in his other works. There's one great Puccini heroine, but she's off in the margins. Still, the music is, of course, beyond inspired, so why quibble?

It might also have been the production we saw, which sported wonderful, almost Disney-like sets by David Hockney but variable performances. I liked the singer who played Turandot and loved the singer who played Liu and while I appreciated the voice of the South African tenor who played Cafalo, his acting was comically awful. The crowd felt it, too. I hadn't seen such a lukewarm response since we saw Regina a not-so-smooth adaptation of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes by Marc Blitzstein (a.k.a. that guy from Cradle Will Rock. I don't have the critical terminology to explain why it fell short, but you can feel opera when it gets to that place. This mostly didn't.

MY DAY: JANUARY 23, 2007


Because when there's nothing else to write about, there's always today.


• Went to the gym and finally gave the new Arcade Fire album a good lisen. Oh. Yes.
• Went to work and figured out some assignments between calls. Also reviewed the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album and learned that I actually didn't have crummy MP3 files. It really sounds like that.
• Talked to a publicist who informed us that the publicist of a famous actor had turned us down for an interview with no explanation. It was a real WTF moment. If I had to pick an actor that I knew everyone on staff considered one of their favorite actors it would be this guy. Again, WTF?
• Pulled the trigger on some iTunes tracks that had been piling up in my shopping cart, mostly Nas songs from those in-between-years recommended by Nathan and some Neptunes-produced songs I don't have already.
• I'm now watching the State Of The Union address. Is Obama sleeping? And if he is, will that kill his presidential run?

MY ADVENTURES IN MYSPACE: DAY OF THE CAM-WHORES

I have a MySpace page, just like everyone else. I usually check it every couple of days. Today I checked it twice. This morning I had no new messages or friend requests. This afternoon I had 12. Now I have 17. Why? One word.... Or is it two?: Cam-whores.

You've probably met them as well, especially if you set your profile to "male" and "straight." They set up profiles with provocative pictures that fig-leaf links for X-rated web cam services, or even other, non-X-rated sites. Take Grace:

She's just your average 20-year-old California girl who wants to be my friend. And if I want to see more pictures of her, there's a link for that too... A link to a laser-hair-removal service.

Ordinarily I ignore them but the deluge today is extraordinary. And then there's this. I'd like you to meet two of my new friends. First there's Gisele:

Then there's Mandoline:

Now, I suppose there's a chance that they're twins. The certainly make the same spelling errors. One links to another site (the ubiquitously advertised dating site true.com) with the come on "Want to see my in my birthday suite?" The other asks "Tell me if you like my birthday suite." Sadly, she'll never learn the answer. (Neither will Ashlyn, eMiLy, Miranda, Mandy, Shania, Larissa, Serenity, Ellen, Rianna Gloria, Ally, Kenna, Jasmin, or Leila.)

MY DAY: JANUARY 17, 2007

Because when there's nothing else to write about, there's always today.

• Some unavoidable delays around the house meant I got to catch the beginning of Regis And Kelly. Regis was blown away by Tony Danza's turn in The Producers. Kelly thought the American Idol judges were way too hard on the poor kid who sang and juggled.
• Wrote a review of The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Damon Albarn's new quasi-supegroup with Paul Simonon of The Clash, Tony Allen from Fela Kuti's band, and Simon Tong of The Verve. Yawn.
• Wrote my contributions to a piece I'm co-writing with Noel that's, in part, about great bands destined never to make the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. I'm now listening to Hüsker Dü. These are related.
• Came home to see how the tortilla soup I made in the slow cooker turned out. Spicy.
• Made the unfortunate discovery that doing an image search for Tony Danza with "safe search" turned off yields some unfortunate results. Try it!

WHY SHOULDN'T THIS MAN BE PRESIDENT?

I mean, Obama puts this:

on his official website. (I ganked it from The Beat, however.)

I've got a pretty big politician crush on Obama already, and this just makes it more pronounced. Of course, if 24 taught me anything the other night it's that even nice presidents have to make impossible decisions. So maybe he's better off not running.

TESTING AUDIO HOSTING

Can I host audio files? I'm trying to find out. If it works, here's Booker T. And The MGs playing "Mrs. Robinson." It's from The Complete Stax/Volt Singles (1968-1971), available via eMusic or at a store near you. You should buy it! (I'm covering my ass here.)

Booker T. And The MGs, "Mrs. Robinson"

MY DAY: JANUARY 15, 2006
Because when there's nothing else to write about, there's always today.

• Realized I hadn't posted anything here for a while and decided I should.
• Realized that I was so wiped out by finishing my big freelance piece (yay) that I'm officially out of things to say.
• So here's a post anyway. Whatever.
• Went to the gym very early despite not getting enough sleep.
• Stevie had the day off so I rode the bus into work today. On the bus I was wearing my cold-weather hat, one of those ridiculous-looking but very warm hunting caps with the flaps and the (fake) fur lining. I had the flaps down over my earphones. I was carrying my shoulder bag and a plastic bag with my lunch in it, which required some juggling. Once in my seat, I took out a notebook to work on a review longhand that I needed to finish today when I noticed that the draft from the door was blowing my hair. So I moved across the aisle, a process that involved securing my iPod and notebook and moving both bags then settling in and repositioning all of my stuff and getting comfortable with my notebook again so I could start scrawling away in my indecipherable handwriting. It was at this point I realized that, to all appearances, the line separating me from a crazy homeless person had never been thinner.
• Wrote. Edited. Went home. Made homemade French fries. Am currently watching the Golden Globes with Stevie. Jamie Foxx loves himself.

"SOME OF YOU ARE GONNA END UP PUKING": (OR I WANT TO BE A "SLASHER MOVIE CRITIC")

Here's an amazing clip in which TV's Morton Downey Jr. puts horror movies on trial. Anyone heard of John Anastasio outside of this clip?

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: GREAT BALLS OF FIRE! (1989)
DIRECTOR: JIM MCBRIDE

Nick Tosches wrote an amazing biography--of a sort--of Jerry Lee Lewis called Helfire that cast Lewis' life in terms of a Faulknerian drama between good and evil and imagined in the strictest Pentecostal terms. If Jim McBride ever read it before making Great Balls Of Fire! he must have decided to take everything in the opposite direction. Balls' greatest debt belongs to Frank Tashlin, the animator-turned-director who best known for working with that other Jerry Lewis. Tashlin made cartoonish, candy-colored satires in the 1950s and his influence is all over this movie. There's a great scene that falls where most biopics would inset a montage of swirling newspapers and screaming fans to symbolize their subject's ascent to fame. Instead, Lewis, as played by Dennis Quaid, rides through town, cheered along the way by everyone from high school students, to courthouse protestors to cops. Everyone loves Jerry Lee! Later, the sequence is reversed, and all those one-time fans shun him. It's silly, but much of the movie treads the line between knowing camp and, well, just plain camp. In the end it doesn't work out, but it's a valiant effort that's better than most reviews would suggest.

McBride has tried to make a movie with all the cartoonish energy and outsized sexuality of a Jerry Lee Lewis song and sometime he gets there, largely thanks to a daring performance from Dennis Quaid, drawing his inspiration from Huckleberry Hound when he's not channeling Lewis. Here the Ferriday Fireball is played an unreflective bumpkin driven by the power of his music and torn between serving god (as per the wishes of cousin Jimmy Swaggart, played by Alec Baldwin) and playing rock and roll. But really he's not torn enough. Anyone who's ever heard the amazing conversation between Lewis and Sam Phillips before recording "Great Balls Of Fire"--in which Lewis frets over playing "the devil's music," Phillips replies that music can save souls and Lewis replies, "How can the devil save souls?... I have the devil in me. If I didn't I'd be a Christian"--knows Lewis was tormented by the things that gave him joy. But here the dark side's not dark enough and while Balls gets a lot of the energy that made Lewis a star, it can't go much deeper. It ends with Lewis storming out of church, choosing independence over conformity. That was one of the choices he had to make, but far from the only one. McBride made Balls with Lewis' cooperation. (He recorded his songs for Quaid to lip synch.) The portrait of an innocent undone by stuffy '50s morality must have made it an easy sell.

Still, there's plenty to like here. Quaid's romance of his 13-year-old cousin (a giggly Winona Ryder who, in another Tashlin-esque sequence furnishes their new home by going to a store and literally throwing money around) is played for creepy, funny laughs. ("You're all woman to Jerry Lee!") The production design is theme park-perfect and there's a great sequence in which Sam Phillips listens to Lewis' recording of "Crazy Arms," likes it, presses it, runs it down to Dewey Phillips at WHBQ, and has the malt girls swooning before the night is through. The city was open that way then and the world was ready to listen.

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: HUSTLE AND FLOW (2005)
DIRECTOR: CRAIG BREWER
I'm going to be writing about some movies with Memphis music in them for a freelance piece I'm preparing so these entries may read as a little notebook-y. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined.

When I first conceived this piece on Memphis music movies a completely forgot about Hustle And Flow. I was thinking of old school Memphis blues, country, soul, and rock and roll and forgetting that new music is still getting made there. I blame the autumnal tone of 40 Shades Of Blue and the nostalgia of the unsatisfying doc Only The Strong Survive (which I'll also be writing about. They spend their time driving past the ruins of the old music shrines and never acknowledge that there might be music bubbling up from those ruins? Is there a style of music made famous in Memphis that didn't work its way up from the economic bottom?

That's certainly the vision present by H&F, which impressed me more this time around than last. I loved the Terrence Howard performance but found the underdog-against-the-odds story a little pat. Still do, but it worked for me this time. Maybe it's because this time it played more like a superior b-movie than a failed arthouse movie. But I digress...

H&F works well as a companion piece to 40 Shades. Where Rip Torn plays a man whose found the limits of what music can provide him--spiritually if not financially--Howard plays a guy who's just finding out where music can take him. And where it can take him as a lot more to do with his soul than his wallet. From an early scene in which Howard cries listening to a spiritual in church to a finale that leaves him not on top but somewhere a few notches up from where he was before, it's much more about finding oneself as an artist and a human being than as a commercial success. In fact, commercial success, as embodied by Ludacris' character Skinny Black--a Memphis born rapper who's found great success--is treated with no small amount of suspicion. Early on, Howard looks at the cover of a Skinny Black CD as if he's not sure what about him bugs him. By the time they meet, he's figured it out. He gets Black's attention with weed and holds it with the words "What the fuck happened to you?" He explains that Memphis misses him and delivers an impassioned monologue about how, when the present civilization crumbled arcehologists would sort through the rubble of New York and Paris but, "If a nigga wanted to know about me, wanted to know about Memphis, all they gotta do is find your first underground tape.”

A city can be defined by music but it can also be explained by it. James Joyce wrote that he hoped Dublin, if destroyed, could be reconstructed brick by brick from his descriptions in Ulysses. But I don't think that's why he wrote the book and I don't think that's why Howard loves that tape so much. Sometimes art justifies who we are by explaining to the world how we lived and why we did the things we did, even when those things pained us, which is something that D.J. Qualls touches on in another monologue:

The thing is, and I believe this man, rap is coming back home to the south. This is where it all began: Heavy percussion, repetitive hooks, sexually suggestive lyics… It’s all blues, brother. “Back Door Man” to “Back Dat Ass Up,” it’s all about pain and pussy and making’ music man. With simple tools. By any means necessary. You’ve got to get what you’ve got to say out. Because you’ve got to. Every man, you know what I’m sayin’?... Has the right, the goddamn right, to contribute a verse.

He's tying Howard's "It's Hard Out There For Pimp" lament to the same tradition as Furry Lewis. The song just keeps changing shape and anyone who feels that Memphis' contributions belong in the past just isn't looking hard enough.

R.I.P. Oscar (1994-2007)

Stevie and I had to put our cat Oscar to sleep today after a short, but clearly devastating illness. He lost a lot of weight over a short stretch of time, dropping from 10 pounds in Spetember to 6.5 in late-December, most the weight loss ocurring over the last few weeks. Our vet diagnosed him with kidney failure last week and prescribed a course of medicine and special food hoping it would give us a few extra years. But at the end of the week he'd only gained a fraction of the weight back, was frequently ill, and clearly not enjoying a high quality of life. The decision was hard, but not as hard as what would certainly have come next. The vet suspected that, given the medicine's ineffectiveness, he probably had a tumor in his digestive tract.

I adopted Oscar in 1996 after losing another cat to illness. He spent the first few days holed up in my closet, growling ferociously whenever I'd get near. I dropped off his food and water and kept my distance. Eventually he came around. I have an early, pleasant memory of curling up next to him in my bedroom in Madison listening to a U2 concert at the stadium nearby. He was always good for a curl. Apart from food and napping on top of random objects (in boxes, on computers, atop discarded hats) it's pretty much what he lived for.

It was from that same window that Oscar tumbled one night, sustaining neurological damage that left him unable to move three limbs for a week. He recovered thanks to the work of my great Madison vet and was walking by the end of the week. Only his trademark ragged ear remained to remind everyone of the traumatic experience.

Oscar was always sweet with me but could be a bit of an S.O.B. to others, particularly Stevie in the our dating years. He also made it hard to eat. When I lived with Nathan, he once reported losing an entire rotisserie chicken to him. Apparently Oscar walked around the apartment with it like it was a fresh kill. He terrorized houseguests. He smacked the dog in the face. He had his turf and knew to defend it.

But he was a sweetheart if he gave you the chance to get to know him. He even accepted Stevie after a while, spending most nights snuggled up next to her in bed. (True, he'd bite her if he wanted to jump out, but still...)I lived in five different locations with me but I think he liked this last one the best. It gave him lots of room to roam and plenty of closets to hide in. Mostly, however, he was happiest hanging out with us. He was good at that. We miss him.

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: FORTY SHADES OF BLUE (2005)

I'm going to be writing about some movies with Memphis music in them for a freelance piece I'm preparing so these entries may read as a little notebook-y. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined.

Writer/director Ira Sachs' 40 Shades Of Blue was one of the films that first got me interested in doing this piece. A washed out mood piece starring Rip Torn as an aging Memphis music producer (who looks a bit like Sam Phillips but whose career seems closer to a Chips Moman or a Dan Penn. Torn's haunting performance really grabbed me, as did a portrait of a place that had drifted away from its moment of greatness. Accepting an award early in the film, Torn says, "“Music is the only valid thing to come out of this whole mess we call an industry. It’s just a moment in time that happened in Memphis that was just pure magic, when the music of the blacks and the whites came together.” But it's a time that's past, both for the city and for Torn. He now lives in a luxurious, lakeside house with a beautiful girlfriend (Dina Korzun) and their young child but the only moments in the film in which he appears even the least bit happy come when he boozes it up with some old music buddies. "Dark End Of The Street" brings him to tears, but he's disconnected from the rest of his life.

The film's as much about Korzun—whose performance is as dead-eyed as it is deep—a Russian emigre whose relationship with Torn is, to all appearances, just a more refined version of a sex-for-survival strategy she's used her entire life. That's too harsh though. She's the most sympathetic character in the film.

Getting back to the music, Torn goes on about growing up with attention divided between white string bands ,the sounds of jukeboxes in black clubs and it's clear he played a large part of bringing them together. But what has he done lately? We see him in the studio, acting with a focus he never has elsewhere, but the focus turns into rage in a flash. This is the intense, method-y Torn of Cracking Up, not the guy from the Men In Black movies. We see him later, contributing a lovely piano line to an ungodly piece of Europop. They drive through Memphis, past old studios and hangout spots now fallen into ruins. They drive to clubs that thump to dance music with no connection to anything like soul. The crowd's all white. He throws a party for himself with music he keeps interrupting for speeches and drunken proposals. By the end, when he begins drunkenly talking about how all he cared about was the the music, his guests pay no attention to him. The good times went away and the togetherness they created goes with them. Maybe it was all an illusion after all.

The music wasn't enough. At film's end there's a nearly wordless driving sequence in which Torn and Korzun both seem to have found a kind of sadness no song could prepare them for.

MY DAY: JANUARY 4, 2006
Because when there's nothing else to write about, there's always today.
• Between a minor head cold and the nasty weather it's been hard to get out of bed lately and today was no exception.
• Stopped at Whole Foods for a muffin on the way in to work. The usual homeless guy who calls me "big guy" was not there.
• Heard a rumor from Stevie, who heard it from someone else, who heard it from a "reliable source" that Dick Cheney would soon be stepping down to be replaced by Condoleeza Rice. I'm putting this here just so I can brag about it later if it comes true.
• Listened to the new Shins album. It did not, as Zach Braff promised, change my life. Yet. But I've listened to it more than once now so we'll see.
• Finished up the bulk of my posting for Slate. I'm sorry to see it end. I just hope I held my own.
• Ate dinner alone at Big Bowl and read Rob Sheffield's book Love Is A Mixtape. I was alone because I had to go to a night screening of Smokin' Aces. Not so smokin'.

THE BIG BOX OF PAPERBACKS PROJECT, BOOK 5:
THE SEEDLING STARS, BY JAMES BLISH (1957)

On June 10, 2006, I purchased a box of 75+ vintage paperbacks, mostly sci-fi and adventure books, from a Half-Price Books And Records in Lincolnwood, IL. I am reading all of them. This is book 5.)

This going to be a short entry since i read this before the bloglapse of the past few months and my memory is a bit hazy. Before reading The Seeedling Stars I only knew James Blish's name from the covers of all those Star Trek paperbacks I'd see at the Englewood Public Library growing up, the ones with names like Star Trek 4 and Star Trek 7 and so on. They adapted episodes into prose stories and apparently provided Blish with a nice income in his waning years. He was writing number eleven when he died in 1975. His wife finished it for him.

Blish won a Hugo in 1959 for A Case Of Conscience and found a following with his four Cities In Flight novels. I know little about either but I think I might be hitting some of them further down the line in this project. He also apparently coined the phrase gas giant, unintentionally amusing schoolkids for decades to come.

But back to the book at hand: The Seedling Stars is less a novel than a series of short stories, some of them quite long, that build off one another. All concern "pantropy"—presumably another Blish coinage—the practice of adapting the human body to live in alien environments. One story deals with tree-dwelling descendents who feat the ground, another with humans reduced to cellular size who live, and war, with single-celled organisms underwater. Conceptually it's all quite strong. Narratively, it's all a bit too protracted. The ideas in the stories are more interesting than the stories themselves. Which, I guess, is one of the main complaints people who don't read science fiction make about science fiction in general. I guess sometimes it's true.

SLATE'S MOVIE CLUB, DAY 1: THE NERVEWRACKENING BEGINS
Just a reminder to anyone who cares: I'm currently participating in slate.com's 9th annual movie club discussion, writing for an audience that's considerably bigger than that of The A.V. CLub (although that continues to grow) and that's about—and this is a rough estimate—about a billion times bigger than the readership of this blog. You can read it beginning here.

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: U2: RATTLE AND HUM (1988)
DIRECTOR: PHIL JOANOU

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)
DIRECTOR: ROB REINER

I'm going to be writing about some movies with Memphis music in them for a freelance piece I'm preparing so these entries may read as a little notebook-y. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined.

Rattle And Hum is the name of both a 1988 album by U2 and the accompanying tour film directed by the band's frequent video director Phil Joanou. Both document U2's attempt to connect to American roots music and both, however accidentally, document the failure of that attempt. By 1988, U2 had transformed themselves from critics' darlings and college rock staples into arena-filling, world-conquerors, filling a biggest-band-in-the-world void left when Springsteen decided that the E. Street machine had had its day. The band would soon radically, and successfully, rework its sound, joining its sweeping anthems to early '90s dancefloor sounds to create a self-consciously clamorous pop sound. This, however, is a reinvention that, while producing some great music, doesn't quite take.

Why? It's pretty evident in the scenes of the band recording in the then recently reopened Sun Studios with songwriter/producer "Cowboy" Jack Clement, best known for discovering Jerry Lee Lewis. Sure, Clement's there and so are the Memphis Horns. But there's no willingness to bend to tradition in the performance. Whether by accident or design, the way Joanou shoots the scene couldn't be more appropriate: There's Bono in the foreground singing into a classic microphone (maybe microphone, the one that stands so casually on the floor of Sun but which captured all those classic performances). There's a picture of Elvis in the background, singing into another mic. It's all just stage-dressing. Bono's the show.

Later, after some shots of The Edge staring soulfully at the Mississippi, we join the boys on a trip to Graceland. It's a rare opportunity for drummer Larry Mullen Jr. to speak and what he says suggests that he might not be the quiet one by choice:

I was a little bit disturbed by going to Graceland to be honest because, unlike some of the other guys I love the Elvis movies… It was great to see a film star who was a musician. In every single one of his movies. He wasn’t acting as a car salesman. He was acting a car salesman who loved to play guitar. And I really related to that. Because I worked in sales for a couple of years.

Mullen gets to sit on one of The King's guitars after some smooth talk from Bono ("“What Harley-Davidson means to this man you wouldn’t undersand.”) Then the U2 show lumbers off to find another town and another tradition.

The trip echoes an earlier pilgrimage from Spinal Tap. A "thorougly depressing" outing to Elvis' grave that Christopher Guest's Nigel Tufnel at least believes "puts perspective on things." "Too much," Michael McKean's David St. Hubbins decides. "Too much fucking perspective."

CNN.COM'S REGULAR HEADLINE WRITER APPARENTLY OFF FOR THE DAY


...also beers, steers, and queers.

MEMPHIS MUSIC MOVIES: MYSTERY TRAIN
DIRECTOR: JIM JARMUSCH (1989)

I'm going to be writing about some movies with Memphis music in them for a freelance piece I'm preparing so these entries may read as a little notebook-y. Feel free to skip if you're so inclined.

Mystery Train is Jim Jarmusch's fourth feature film and, according to the critical consensus, one of his least successful. It's a favorite of mine, however, if only for the time at which I saw it and the fact that it contains too many Keith-pleasing elements—the South, rock and roll, the time-capsule presentation of a particular place at a particular time—not to be a favorite. Mystery Train was the first film I rented from Four Star Video Heaven—where I would later work—in Madison, Wisconsin after moving there to go to attend grad school in 1995. It was a time when I was falling hard for Jarmusch and, beneath that, an entire way to approaching film that I'd never experienced before. I first saw Jarmusch as part of a double feature on campus at Lancaster University in 1994 where the film society screened Stranger Than Paradise and Night On Earth (along with the Tom Waits/Iggy Pop segment of what would become Coffee And Cigarettes). I'd never seen a movie like Stranger before. The takes were long. The camera stationary. The dialogue circular. The story eventually went somewhere, but it didn't get there fast. The settings were an unglamorous corner of New York, the snowiest winter in Cleveland, and a mostly hotel-bound trip to Florida, all shot in the same grainy black and white. It was as much about how people behaved while attending to the mundane details of their lives and negotiating the minefields of friends and family relations as any grand dramatic incident. Wherever you go, the most important things tend to take place in small rooms filled with familiar faces. To me it was revolutionary. Now I know it was part of a different, minimal tradition. Heck, Jarmusch even namechecks Ozu in the dialogue.

It was another year before I'd see Jarmusch again. The video stores in Springfield, Ohio didn't stock his films, for some reason. It was a happy reunion and, revisiting Mystery Train I found it held up well, even if it's never better than its opening segment starring Masatoshi Nagase (Jun) and Youki Kudoh (Mitsuko) as Japanese rockabillies making a Memphis pilgrimage. They arrive, and leave, by train, to the tune of the title song. On their arrival its played by Elvis. On their departure by its originators, Little Junior's Blue Flames, who recorded in 1953, two years before Elvis. It was written by Junior Parker, the Blue Flames'. Upon arrival, they argue over where to go first, Sun Records or Graceland. She wants Graceland first. He wants Sun. She loves Elvis. He's partial to Carl Perkins, but this seems to be as much an issue of contrarionism as taste. He keeps a cigarette tucked behind his ear, just behind a careful pompadour. He wears a neat, green jacket.

It's a Japanese approximation of a tough, American rock and roll cat, but Jarmusch doesn't really play it for laughs. Like those two versions of "Mystery Train," it's all a matter of interpretation. Junior Parker wrote "Mystery Train." Elvis, or somebody, added to the lyric. But where does it really come from? You can chase that Mystery Train back further. Furry Lewis—a Beale Street fixture as both a performer and a street sweeper—cut a song called "Good Looking Blues" in 1927 that sings of a train "sixteen coaches long." Did he dream it up, or does the phrase go back further? Does it predate the trains themselves?

Sun or Graceland? Significantly, these seem to be the only points of interest for the tourists. Memphis has gotten flattened out between Tennessee and Yokohama but the real Memphis has other plans for them. That's none other than Memphis music godfather Rufus Thomas—he of Sun and Stax and WDIA and "Walking The Dog" and its countless sequels—who greets them at the train station (a spot as nearly deserted as the Amtrak train that brings them into town. Sun Records comes first by accident. They're ushered into the famous studio then assualted with a tour guide's spiel that segues from "race music" to endless chatter about Elvis at a rapid clip. Elvis cannot be escaped. Here is a room that's played host to the recording of "Rocket 88," the early work of B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, virtually every blues and gospel artist in Memphis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and on and on. But he's bigger than it all. They'll later meet him as a statue and, in her scrapbook, see his image juxtaposed against the statue of a Middle Eastern King, Buddha, the Statue Of Liberty, and Madonna. Jun: "Elvis was even more influential than I thought." It's an understatement.

Elvis is everywhere but he's also elusive and unobtainable. Standing in his t-shirt, watching a train pass by, Jun's image falls apart. He's a skinny kid with a scowl chasing a sound of freedom first heard on a Walkman many miles away. In the love scene that follows, he proves himself no tiger. He's 18 and stiill growing into an image that may not work out for him in the end.

Elvis is just as elusive for Nicoletta Braschi in the film's second segment. An Italian woman returning to Rome with her husband's body, she becomes an accidental tourist in Memphis. She's also a dupe—sort of—for every hustler to pass her way. She's a knowing dupe, however, one who goes along with their schemes just because it's easier, and more polite, not to call bullshit. First she's talked into buying an armful of magazines. Later, in a diner, she's subjected by Tom Noonan to a long story about picking up the ghost of Elvis who told him to give her a comb... But there is a small delivery fee. Lonely, she agrees to share her room with Elizabeth Bracco, who's just left her husband and can't afford the $22 room in the rundown hotel presided over by manager Screamin' Jay Hawkins and bellboy Cinqué "brother of Spike" Lee. (It's the same place Jun and Mitsuko stay.) But then she has an authentic encounter with the ghost of Elvis himself. Has he come lookng for his comb after all? It's never quite clear. Before fading away he simply says, politely, "I musta got the wrong address or somethin’. I gotta go.” There's no escaping Elvis. But what Elvis means remains up for debte. (In a quirk of history, the actor who looks so eerily like the young Elvis is Stephen Jones, the husband of Paula Jones who was only a few years away from her own alleged hotel encounter with our most Elvis-ish president.)

"I can't get rid of that fucking guy," laments Joe Strummer playing a hard-luck character referred to by his almost exclusively black friends as "Elvis." (Funniest exchange in the whole movie: Strummer: "Don't call me Elvis! If you can't use my proper name, why don't you try "Carl Perkins, Jr." or something? I mean, I don't call them "Sam & Dave", do I?" Black guy: "Hey man, my name is Dave.") Soon he'll be on the run in all the most neglected parts of Memphis, the places where tourists in town for Sun and Graceland would never go, bad neighborhoods with openly racist liquor store clerks, the crumbling remains of a years-from-being-revived-Stax, the spots underneath the rail lines where nobody goes, beneath the place the trains run, keeping their secrets from those who they delivers and those they whisk away.

(Follow up: Greil Marcus' Mystery Train, Robert Gordon's It Came From Memphis, Peter Guralnick's Last Train To Memphis, look into Furry Lewis)

WHO SAYS BLOG IS DEAD?

Okay, it's a new year and a new birthday. (I'm a spry 34 now.) So it seems like as good a time as any to revive this thing. Also, I've got a few freelance projects I'm working on, so I'll be taking some notes here as it progresses (hopefully quickly since it's due in a couple of week.)

What's been happening here during the hiatus you ask? It's been busy, and not always in a good way. Stevie's grandfather died after a long illness. It was sad and entirely expected. His mind was clouded by illness in his final years, but his love for Stevie shone through until the very end. He was a brick mason, WWII submariner, and a tremendous fan of the Jackie Gleason Orchestra. I'm happy to have known him.

Otherwise we've been busy with work and vacation. Ireland was a long, good time. We ended up mostly driving around and looking at stuff by day then drinking in the pubs at night. I couldn't have asked for a better time. Work's been keeping both of us plenty busy. I think I'm finally getting the hang of publishing daily on the web and I've finally been writing more, so that's good. The past few weeks have been especially busy. We basically put together four issues at a time, which left me headachy at the end of every day. It revived my faith in Excel and the virtues of planning well-ahead, but the subsequent days off have been nice.

Not that I won't be busy: Starting January 2 (I believe), I'll be taking part in Slate's annual movie club, a year-end round-up of the past year in film. I'll be hashing it out with Slate's Dana Stevens, Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe, and Carina Chocano of The L.A. Times. How I ended up in such esteemed company I'll never know. I'm just going to try my best not to embarrass myself.

One other thing going on: Our cat Oscar--that's him in my thumbnail photo--has taken ill. He's lost a substantial amount of weight in a short of amount of time. The vet's diagnosis is kidney failure. Her prognosis is that with medicine and special food he might be able to hang around for a while, which would be nice. He's turned into a an old man of a cat pretty rapidly, however, so I don't know. At my birthday party the other night it occurred to me that I've had a longer relationship with Oscar than with anyone else at the table except one person. (Heya Anne!) I'll certainly miss him when he's not around anymore.

Okay, there's a big meaty post for anyone still reading. More to come.

APOLOGIES AND TEMPORARY DEPARTURES

Yeah, I know. It's been a long time. I've got an excuse, namely the long transition to daily content over at The A.V. Club. But, no, I haven't given this blog up. Things have just started to get back to normal with my schedule. But I'm also going away. For 10 days. To Ireland, a country that I love. Maybe I'll check in here. No promises. But when I get back, I plan to resume this project so we can all glory in the mundane details of my life, the movies I see, the books I read, and the animals with which I live. (Not Stevie. She's lovely.)

So, bye! See you in a bit.