Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Jun 25, 2001 |
1) Baz Luhrmann, director, Luhrmann and Craig Pierce, writers, "Moulin Rouge" (20th Century Fox)
Part "Showgirls," part Dennis Potter's "Lipstick on Your Collar," this delirious musical has the courage of its own ridiculousness. It never goes soft, never backs away from its commitment to the constantly trumpeted "bohemian revolution," presented as a new religion of art, love and to thine own self be true, in practice a proof that you can get away with anything so long as you never admit there's anything the least bit odd about what you're doing. After half an hour, the appearance of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in a 1900 Paris chorus line or "The hills are alive with the sound of music" as avant-garde poetry is so liberating, so obliterative of a century's worth of cultural piety, that you start rewriting the movie to fit your own heart. I couldn't understand why doomed lovers Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman were duetting on David Bowie's "Heroes" when they could have been singing "That's My Desire" -- a scandal in 1947, when it was first recorded ("To spend one night with you" is the opening line), then turned into a dream by countless East Coast vocal groups in the 1950s, most indelibly by Dion and the Belmonts.
2) Bobbettes, "The Best of the Bobbettes" (Crash)
In 1957 five young girls from P.S. 109 in New York wrote a song about their cool principal: "Mr. Lee" was a top 10 hit. Still, the edge in the swift, gleeful piece of street doo-wop -- jailbait lusting after a grown-up authority figure -- made sense of the 1960 follow-up: "I Shot Mr. Lee." The girls didn't say why; they didn't have to. By this time the Bobbettes were barely into their midteens.
Heard today, "I Shot Mr. Lee" ("Ah, shot him in the head, boom boom") is totally wild. It's funny; it's almost believable. The surprise is that a group as one-hit marginal as the Bobbettes can so easily sustain a collection of more than 30 tracks: the slow, gorgeous "The Dream," which bridges the gap between the Chantels' "Maybe" and Rosie and the Originals' "Angel Baby"; the witty "Rock & Ree-Ah-Zole (The Teenage Talk)"; the "Party Lights"-like tragedy of "Mama Papa," where the singer turns on the TV only to see her boyfriend dancing on "American Bandstand" -- with someone else.
3) Rennie Sparks, "Evil" (Black Hole Press)
Despite the accurate jacket description of Sparks as "lyricist for the gothic country duo the Handsome Family," her short stories are unspectacularly prosaic accounts of angry, isolated, confused young women and the trouble they get into. They live on the rotting edges of a big city; everyone seems to know someone who's been murdered. The notion of any of Sparks' characters growing up is where the tension comes from: that is, you can't imagine it. One who's on her way is the narrator of "4-Piece Dinette Set $799.99": "I'm a good worker at least no worse than the rest, except for Post-its. I like to steal them. Everyday I grab a pad or two off someone's desk as I head out to my car. Driving back to the city, I toss Post-its out my car window and watch them through the rearview mirror, skidding and rolling in the dirt. I don't know why I do it. I guess I don't really want to know why."
4) Ben Harper, blurb for "Avalon Blues: A Tribute to the Music of Mississippi John Hurt" (Vanguard)
"If it wasn't for Mississippi John Hurt, I would not be making music at all," he says. It's always a good idea to put the blame on someone who isn't around to defend himself.
5) Kelly Vance, review of Herschell Gordon Lewis' 1968 "She-Devils on Wheels" (East Bay Express, June 15)
"It has everything you look for in a drive-in movie: cheap production values, rotten acting, stupid writing, inept direction -- the works. Think 'Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!' In fact, take practically any biker flick you have ever seen and turn it up a notch on the Dumb-O-Meter. This film defines the word 'nadir.' And yet, somehow, abstract concepts appear much more clearly when glimpsed from the rock-bottom of human experience."
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