My best wishes to you for a joyful 2010. I’m going to take a short break for the holidays; posting will resume in the new year.

posted 25 December 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

In case you hadn’t heard, a grassroots movement put Rage Against the Machine on top of the British charts this week (over Joe McElderry from Simon Cowell’s X Factor talent show). This tickles me on numerous levels–but it’s hard for most Americans to understand how attentive Brits are to the question of who’s got the #1 single at Christmas. I thought it might be a good time to direct you to a letter I wrote on the subject of the British pop charts and year-end singles–back in 1998, when Facebook was just a twinkle in your father’s eye.

posted 23 December 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments

Director James Cameron is the third subject in my irregular series of “Icon” interviews for Maxim–my Q&A with him is in the new issue, cover-dated January 2010, with Olivia Munn on the cover. Or you can read it online here. It’s worth a click; Cameron’s a very sharp guy and this is my favorite of the “Icon” interviews so far.

An exchange that got cut:

Q. Do you dream about your movies?
A. That happened for the first time on Aliens–you know you’ve been working on the movie for too long when you start to do that. You’re swamped in a sea of minutiae every day, so the dream’s always about a detail you forgot in reel six. I always say making a movie is like “The Old Man and the Sea.” You catch the biggest fish of your life, but you’ve got to get it back to shore before the little fish nibble it away to nothing.

I saw a half-hour of Avatar footage at 7:45 am before interviewing Cameron at 8:30 am; I thought it was eye-popping, but it also gave me a mild case of motion sickness, which makes me suspicious of reports that 3-D is going to be the new business model for Hollywood.

posted 21 December 2009 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

Merry Christmas to all and best wishes of the season–I’m thankful for the whole Rule Forty-Two community of readers and commenters, and wish you all the best for 2010.

But that’s not why I posted this screen-capture from the Rudolph TV special. My question, which I ask myself every time I see the show, is this: What the hell is going on in the background here? I mean, it looks like a weather map to help plan Santa’s itinerary, fine, but then why are there these huge letters all over the place, and the grid, and the ladder? Is this a parody of something that would have made sense to viewers in 1964? I really want to know–please contribute your best thoughts in the comments section, and if you’ve got a relative of appropriate age within shouting range, ask them!

I’m going to ignore the absence of Europe on the right side of the map, just the way I ignore how the misfit airplane that can’t fly somehow jets off Santa’s sleigh during the closing credits.

posted 18 December 2009 in Photos. 1 comment

We come back from the commercial break to Kevin Seal, thrusting his pelvis to the rhythm of Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll.” “Oh, boy,” he says, “the top 100 videos of 1988. In case you’re just getting out of prison–1988.” Seal, apparently, is eager to be done with his work day. The camera’s somewhat closer on Seal than in previous shots, and we can see that behind him in the studio is a dollhouse-size city–and a big Godzilla toy heading towards it, ready to wreak havoc.

Seal introduces Heart’s “There’s the Girl.” “This is another one where Nancy took over the vocals, which is kind of a step,” Seal says. “‘These Dreams’ was the first time that Nancy stepped out in front of the mike to take the lead.” (I don’t think people actually step in front of the microphone, as it won’t pick up your voice very well, but let’s move on.) “Ann stepped back a little bit.” Seal pretends to be Ann, pushing Nancy forward: “Go ahead, go on. That’s right. Oh, they love you. Go ahead, go ahead.” He thrusts an arm in the air. “It went to number one!” He grits his teeth, channeling Ann’s presumed rage. “And she did it again!” He starts laughing. “But this one, Ann got her nose back in joint, because this one went nowhere.”

Before we start, a quick stat sheet for the Wilson sisters: Ann is the dark-haired one with weight issues, 38 years old in 1988, usually the lead singer. Nancy is the blonde one who married Cameron Crowe two years prior, 34 years old in 1988, usually the guitarist.

The video opens on a soundstage dressed up to look like an Egyptian desert. There’s two statues of pharaohs, each about fifteen feet high, a whole bunch of sand, a sky with dramatic streaks, and an oasis that looks like a wading pool filled with purple water. Ann appears between the pharaohs, pursing her lips. Then Nancy walks through the wading pool. She’s wearing a white top, a black dress, and black leggings. It’s possible we’re supposed to think she’s walking on top of the water, but it’s pretty apparent the pool is about three inches deep. Billowing white artificial smoke rolls across the pool, following her.

Nancy drops the white jersey top and turns to the camera: she’s styled like it’s 2 am on prom night. The black dress has metallic scales and has been seductively lowered on one shoulder. As she sings (“now you’re feeling kind of rough”), we get cutaway shots of the three male members of Heart: a big-haired guitarist with an instrument that looks like a sci-fi probe, doing a Pete Townshend windmill; a drummer in spandex, playing the largest kit this side of Neal Peart, and a bassist with a large exhaust tube hooked up to the back of his jacket and up the neck of his instrument, so as better to spread the smoke-machine love. No, really.

“I know how long you’ve been searching for the perfect touch,” Nancy sings. Her voice is fine, but this song is just dreadful, a generic pop-rock grind with no discernable melody. (Nancy cowrote it with Holly Knight, best known for Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield.”) We cut to Nancy with a guitar, spinning around and bringing her left knee up to her waist for a quick kick. In guitarist mode, she’s wearing a short black jacket and a lot of necklaces, and looks different enough from her prom-dress singer getup that it feels like we’re cutting between two separate band members. Periodically, we cut over to Ann for some token handclapping.

Nancy, standing between the two sphinxes and playing guitar, does the left knee bend again. While some guitarists can play the instrument behind the head, she can play it for very brief increments of time while standing on one foot. This is less impressive than one might hope for.

We get some close-ups of Ann singing backing vocals. She looks unhappy: contrary to Kevin Seal’s narrative of Ann pushing Nancy forward, I suspect the actual story was that Capitol Records said “Is there any way we can have the hot girl singing?” The video is trying to minimize Ann’s presence and her weight; one of the semiotic rules of MTV for women is that the larger you are, the less visible you are. This contradictory maxim would reach new absurd heights two years later, when Wilson Phillips kept rolling out hits and the videos did everything possible to conceal Carnie Wilson’s presence. Ann knows exactly what’s going on and isn’t pretending to be cheerful.

Nancy struts down a mist-shrouded catwalk, playing guitar, with dozens of hands reaching up through the grating. The drummer spins a stick. The bassist clenches his fists. Nancy spins. This is a master class in clichéd rock poses.

Somebody turns up the smoke machine as high as it will go, either because the director wants some more visual elements or because they’ve got an hour left on the smoke-machine rental and figured they might as well get as much use out of it as possible. Nancy fights her way through clouds. Ann and Nancy stand together in front of a billowing wall of smoke. Ann stands alone in front of a dozen misty jets with frizzed-out hair, looking sullen.

For the line “feel your heart beating faster,” Nancy moves her right fist in a way that is presumably meant to evoke a drum beating but comes much closer to the universal symbol for handjob.

Nancy does some jumping and some scissors kicks. Ann stoically stands surrounded by seven midgets wearing black Boba Fett helmets and yellow jumpsuits, all with their arms crossed. This doesn’t seem to relate to anything else in the video–maybe there was a whole plotline that got excised?–and we quickly cut away.

We rotate through the shots we’ve already seen, which don’t look any better the third time around. Boy, I really hope Cameron Crowe had nothing to do with this video. Nancy tickles the chin of a pharaoh statue, and does another mini leg-kick. Not long after, she does a high kick, again with the left leg, in slow motion, over her head. Why doesn’t she ever kick with her right leg? Was there some tragic accident at Budokan? Is the smoke machine covering up a grotesque, misshapen right leg?

Lots of pointing into the camera as the song fades out; we finish with a shot of Nancy putting her head on Ann’s shoulder. Ann looks disgruntled but affectionate.

“There’s the Girl” peaked at #12 on the Billboard charts. You can watch it here.

posted 17 December 2009 in 1988. 7 comments

HBO’s Rome only lasted two seasons–around now, with the schedule relatively bare, I bet the network regrets they canceled it. But before the second season started, I got the show’s historical consultant, Jonathan Stamp, on the phone so we could discuss the show’s more prurient aspects and how they gibed with reality. It proved to be a very entertaining history lesson.

PUBIC HAIR
“No contemporary actually says ‘Roman women have Brazilian waxes,’ but it’s pretty much a given for several literary sources that the women depilated their pudenda. The clearest is the poet Ovid, who talks in ‘The Art of Love’ about the importance of keeping yourself beautiful as a woman and the various ways in which you can keep your whole body smooth: one of the ways that he relates is the passing of very hot walnut shells over the body. We also know that Caesar tweezered his legs.”

ORAL SEX
“We all know the term fellatio, which comes from the Latin word fellare, which means ‘to suck.’ Now, the Romans also had the word irrumare: that’s the active part of the relationship in the blowjob, and it basically meant ‘to stick your cock in somebody else’s mouth.’ And the noun from it was irrumatio. It’s interesting that they had a term for it; if you think about it, we don’t. It was important for them to differentiate the two parts of that sexual activity. If you were a Marc Anthony, when you were a young boy making your way in the world, you would be performing fellatio. Once you’d established yourself, you’d be performing irrumatio: they now had to blow you.”

DRUGS
“The taking and abuse of narcotics in Rome is a difficult subject to get a handle on, but once in a while, you find a reference. Herodotus says there’s people called Scythians, who lived around the Caspian Sea: they chafed hemp seeds on a hot surface, probably a stone held in tweezers. We know there was ample opium grown in Egypt and opium was imbibed and eaten. Since all roads led to Rome, we assume that anything that was a habit out east would have become a habit within the city itself, because the city was the most cosmopolitan place on earth, along with Alexandria.”

ADDICTION
“The Romans talk vaguely about addiction, and always in terms of the male experience: any form of addiction that unmanned you–in the sense that it was your master, rather than you being master of it–was regarded as a bad thing, whether it was alcohol or drugs or sex. The idea that you were master of yourself and you could control yourself was very important. Being too keen on shagging was not a good thing for a Roman male, and both Marc Anthony and Caesar got pilloried for it.”

Originally published (in a shorter version) as “Sex, Drugs and Rome” in Rolling Stone 1018 (January 25, 2007).

posted 15 December 2009 in Archives. no comments yet

From the Andy Warhol Diaries, an account of an evening spent with Julia Scorsese (who was then married to Martin Scorsese–they split later the same year). By the time it opened on Broadway, Shine It On had been renamed The Act. Barbara Feldon was best known for playing Agent 99 on Get Smart.

Sunday, July 10, 1977

Julia was driving me crazy, sometimes when I’d catch her eye she looked just like Valerie Solanas, and then she also acts like Viva…When we got to Serendipity, Barbara Feldon was there. Julia started doing what I hate more than anything, patting my head all the time. She drove me crazy. And she kept trying to fix me up with her girlfriend who was tall and kind of pretty, and it was them saying “You’re so wonderful wonderful wonderful” to me for hours, and I didn’t know what to do. Since I told her they didn’t have liquor, she brought champagne. I don’t understand these girls, they talk and say things and I don’t know what they’re doing….

She said that Marty has coke problems and he got blood poisoning and now he takes medicine to clean himself out. He’s cutting three movies now. She said she wrote a lot of Taxi Driver. I started saying people act like it’s the directors and the producers and the writers who make a movie when it’s actually the stars, and she took offense saying her husband had created Bobby De Niro and Harvey Keitel and some other people. But I said they were new faces and people always want to see new faces. Marty is now in Chicago doing a musical called Shine It On with Liza.

She said that she gave Robert Altman the idea to film A Wedding in Chicago, to take it out of L.A. and give it a different atmosphere. The producers gave her three days off, she said, so I took that to mean she must have been driving them crazy. Julia was getting a little too drunk. She dumped her pocketbook on the table and all the credit cards spilled out. She went to the bathroom and I put them back in (dinner $70).

posted 10 December 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet

1. “Meeting Across the River”
2. “Nebraska”
3. “Seeds”
4. “Cautious Man”
5. “Wild Billy’s Circus Story”

More than I expected, but I’m sure there’s others I didn’t think of. Some of them would work better as talking blues than others.

“Seeds” seems the most anomalous, by virtue of being an uptempo rocker.

posted 7 December 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

I didn’t start the flipwalk project until almost three years had passed after the attacks of 9/11. The random walks around lower Manhattan lasted just about exactly a year, but it’s taken me over four years to finish writing them up. I’m sure there’s some equation that expresses the finely calibrated mix of having a full schedule and achieving emotional distance, but for the moment, let’s just acknowledge they were both factors in the delay.

The walks usually feel immediate to me, even with the passage of time. But as you’ll see in the full version of walk #45 (the image above is just a teaser), sometimes not.

posted 4 December 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

We head to a commercial break with a fifteen-second MTV bumper: lots of revved-up stock footage from the early twentieth century, superimposed over what appears to be flickering pages from textbooks. There’s a director with a megaphone, an old gramophone, men in hats operating film cameras, an orchestra conductor. A portly black man with a polka-dot bow tie opens his mouth to sing into a microphone: out comes a tiny biplane.

The paying spots kick off with the fourth airing of the Coca-Cola Classic spot where the parents get surprised by an anniversary party at their own home. Weirdest detail on this viewing: the clip of two cars pulling up to the house, from opposite directions, at moderate speed, about to collide. The ad cuts away just before they crash and burst into flame.

For the eighth time, it’s the minute-long ad for The January Man. As a special treat this time around, let’s focus on the words: A serial killer has New York City by the throat. Eleven murders in eleven months. They need a tough cop. Ssshh. Listen. What? The wine–it’s breathing. Does anybody know this guy? Find it, superimpose it on the map, find it. How do we face the terrifying spectacle of Nick Starkey? What he may do, what he may not do? Whoop-de-doo and la-di-da. I don’t work for you, you work for me. No matter what the mayor says! Did you miss me? Did he agree without a fuss? No. I let him cook dinner for my wife tonight. What do you think? I hate it. I understand you had dinner with Nick. I think he’s much more interested right now in your daughter. What are you talking about? Just look at your cigar and think of your daughter. So we’re going to go to bed, and then tomorrow you’re going to catch the killer and save the girl. The January Man. I hate this job. Rated R. Starts Friday, January 13. Check local newspapers. Reading through that, I’m surprised by how much of the dialogue is interrogative–apparently the ad’s editor decided that the best way to create drama was to include as many questions as possible.

A repeat of the ad for the MTV-presented Bon Jovi “New Jersey” tour–“debuting January 26th in Dallas,” says Voiceover Guy while the screen shows maps of New Jersey. The band appears in an MTV studio that looks like somebody’s basement den, with beige brick walls.

Again (fifth time), an ad for the WWF’s Royal Rumble. It includes footage of a free-for-all at a Wrestlemania. “No Partners / 30 Opponents” reads the on-screen graphic. We see eight shirtless dudes flailing around in a ring–and a crowd that’s so excited, some of them are literally jumping up and down.

The UA-Columbia staff waves to the camera while “Let It Snow” plays. Boy, eyeglass frames got really large in the 80s.

We conclude with another short-and-clever animated station ID: it could be Henry Selick again, or somebody working in a similar style. A door opens at the back of an empty room, and a large bald man approaches the camera. He’s wearing a red bowtie and a black mask. He smiles, and pulls off his head, revealing a cartoonish skull. He keeps changing heads, revealing a repertoire that includes a large rodent, a pharaoh, and a sardine can.

posted 2 December 2009 in 1988. no comments yet