As promised, the last set of Burning Man photos. Closing out the year, appropriately enough, is the Temple–which burns the day after the more-famous Man, and is for many people, a more intense, thoughtful experience. The surfaces of the temple are covered with memorials to the recently dead; when it all goes up in flames, it can feel like your grief is beginning to boil away.

It’s also a great place to see the sunrise.

Posting will be more erratic than usual during the holiday season; best wishes to all of you for a happy 2009.

posted 19 December 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

Another year goes by, and Philip Seymour Hoffman keeps kicking ass and being the best thing in whatever movie he appears in. Right now, you can check him out in either Synedoche, New York or Doubt (I’ve seen the former, not the latter, but they both seem to be unwieldy first-time directorial efforts from well-regarded writers). I thought I’d add my 2005 profile of Hoffman to the archives here, if only so you could enjoy Paul Thomas Anderson’s reaction to my theory that the name of the Hoffman character “Phil Parma” in Magnolia is a reference to ham. (Factual updates since the article was printed: Hoffman did end up winning the Best Actor Oscar for Capote, bruited as a possiblity in this article. PTA made a movie without Hoffman. And by the time Have You Heard? was released, it had been renamed Infamous.)

I ran into Hoffman on a downtown New York City playground about a year after this story was printed; I was there with my son, he was accompanied by his young son Cooper and infant daughter Tallulah. I reintroduced myself and we had a friendly chat–which ended when I made a funny face at Tallulah, hoping to make her giggle, and instead induced hysterical squalling. Hoffman was amused, at least.

posted 15 December 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

Some months ago, I promised that if I posted any more Burning Man photos, they’d be as counterprogramming to the Christmas season. So whether you find this to be an antidote to commercialism or cold weather, here’s today’s moment from the desert.

posted 12 December 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

We begin with Jody Watley in backlit silhouette, running her hands through her hair, making sure it’s still there. She will go on to do more hair-fondling than anybody in this countdown (except maybe Cher).

This video is a performance clip, featuring Watley shimmying around a black-and-white op-art set. To spend more of the record company’s money, the director (Brian Grant) frequently deploys split-screen images in various irregular shapes. So we get a horizontal widescreen box of somebody’s hands playing the drums (the percussion we hear is obviously synthesized, but that’s show biz), soon overlaid with a vertical box of the guy connected to the hands, who turns out to be a light-skinned black man with sunglasses and a Kangol-style cap. I believe this is André Cymone, the track’s cowriter and coproducer, former bassist for the Revolution with Prince–and unknown to MTV viewers at the time of this countdown, the secret husband of Watley. (By 1988, pretty much everybody who had ever played with Prince was in demand as a producer, with the possible exception of Doctor Fink.)

More vertical boxes: Watley’s hips, covered in tight black shorts and shaking from side to side; a close-up view of Watley’s lips, covered in bright red lipstick; somebody playing a standup bass (again, clearly not the instrument employed on this track); somebody else hammering out a beat on some congas. We zoom through a three-tier closeup of Watley: her lips, her eyes, and her lips. The placement of these close-ups implies that Watley has a second pair of lips on her forehead and is actually auditioning to be a founding member of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow.

More full-screen hair fondling makes way to Watley caressing her own breasts. More precisely, she’s running her fingers through the metal ornamentation dangling from the cups on her corset: it looks like she’s carrying a full set of wind chimes on each tit.

We meet another backing musician, who’s sporting a high-top fade (not as extreme as those belonging to Cameo or Kid ‘N Play, but impressive nevertheless). “Can you feel the passion?” Watley asks amidst a series of quick cuts. Unfortunately, I can’t. I’m feeling the “professional piece of craft that’s the fourth single off a surprisingly successful debut album” vibe, but maybe that’s just me.

Every few seconds, Watley changes into a new outfit, although most of them feature the same large hoop earrings. In one shot, she’s sporting a leather jacket that has an oversized portrait of a woman on the back–Watley herself, I think. She keeps her back to the camera for several seconds so we can get a good look at the jacket: maybe she got the record company to pay for it and wants to make sure she’s justifying the expense? More shimmying, including a closeup on Watley’s chest vibrating inside a pink corset. A third musician is introduced to the visual mix, playing electric guitar and wearing a brimmed hat.

The riff kicks in; it sounds like it’s recycled from a Janet Jackson single or some other Minneapolis project. A drummer hits a cymbal covered with talcum powder, which predictably flies everywhere. It’s a shot with visual punch, albeit not as much as the time the J. Geils drummer hit the snare drum filled with milk in the “Love Stinks” “Centerfold” video.

Watley hops around energetically. She dances really well, but appears to be unchoreographed. You’d think they’d want to give her some moves, being a Soul Train dancer and all. (I didn’t know the Watley biography until recently, so here it is: She was the goddaughter of Jackie Wilson and a dancer on Soul Train. Circa 1978, still a teenager, she was recruited for the band Shalamar, along with her dance partner and boyfriend Jeffrey Daniels, who soon spurned her and married Stephanie Mills (star of the Broadway production of The Wiz) instead. Blocked from a larger role in Shalamar by lead singer Howard Hewett, Watley quit in 1984 and moved to England, which is why she appears on “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”)

The director sets up an elegant shot of Watley dancing, framed by a transparent bass drum. “I can’t explain it, how you made me open up / And you showed me things I never thought I’d do,” Watley sings innocently, looking unaware of the raunchiness of her own song. No, wait, in the next shot she’s humping a big white pillar–maybe she does know.

Watley walks sideways through the white pillars, keeping eye contact with the camera, waving her arms around like one of Barker’s Beauties showing off the merchandise. Cut to Watley shot from behind, from the waist up, apparently naked, with her hair flowing down her spine. She’s caressing her own back to simulate the embrace of a lover, the way you used to in eighth grade. Cut back to Barker’s Beauty mode, with more dancing and spinning: Watley tosses her leather jacket aside, and is rewarded by being split-screened into three identical Watleys. (Why didn’t Beyoncé just use split-screen technology with Destiny’s Child and cast three versions of herself? Wouldn’t that have saved her the trouble of interacting with the other group members and periodically firing them?)

More quick cuts, including Watley blowing a kiss, standing on a spiral staircase, shaking her butt, giving love to her hair. The song burbles along pleasantly and forgettably: there’s no hook here as good as “Don’t You Want Me” (which Ted, whose house I watched this countdown at back in 1988, used to sing as “Watley / Jody Watley”). Watley changes into an outfit with a Chanel belt (I can say this with some confidence because of the big white block letters on the belt saying “CHANEL”) and then does the Macarena.

Instrumental break: a rubber-legged saxophonist honks out a rather lame solo, but does a high kick and puts his legs into other improbable positions while he does it. As we head for the fade-out, the video editor does one final around-the-horn loop of Watley’s various outfits, but first includes a new clip: Watley leans up against a mirror, looking chagrined that she can’t slip herself the tongue.

“Some Kind of Lover” hit #10 on the singles charts. You can watch the video here.

posted 10 December 2008 in 1988. 4 comments

I actually wrote two different pieces about last month’s Van Morrison concert, which was an interesting exercise. I was trying to repeat myself as little as possible–but make sure that each dispatch made sense. (It helped that the Rolling Stone website wanted a newsier angle, while the paper magazine asked for a critical review.) I linked to the online article last month, but the review got boiled down to a Random Note (victim of the same page crunch that claimed the Pete Townshend article). I thought you might enjoy reading the longer version before too much time had passed (you can see the show on DVD in 2009, after all):

VAN MORRISON
November 8, 2008
Hollywood Bowl, Hollywood CA
(four stars)

Over his career, Van Morrison has gradually exchanged divine inspiration for chops. So his recent return to the never-before-performed-live Astral Weeks was cause for celebration, but also a mystery. What would the experienced bluesman bring to the legendary album he made forty years ago as a young Irish poet?

After an opening set heavy on other early material (including “Caravan” and two Them singles), Morrison donned an acoustic guitar and played Astral Weeks in its entirety, albeit with the songs’ order rearranged (either because he was unhappy with the album’s flow or because he really likes the “shuffle” mode on his iPod). He stretched out most of the songs with additional solos and scatting, sometimes riffing on Astral Weeks lyrics, other times just kicking around one of his favorite words, such as “Caledonia.”

Morrison is now a more confident singer than he was in 1968; at times, that overwhelmed the album’s innocent magic, but more often, it let him find new accents and meanings. For example, on the original version of “Beside You,” the lyrics “you breathe in, you breathe out / you breathe in, you breathe out” tumbled out of Morrison in an orgasmic rush. Live, he actually inhaled between each line in that verse, pacing himself and extending the pleasure.

Accompanied by a crack ensemble of a dozen musicians (including original Astral Weeks guitarist Jay Berliner, but not bassist Richard Davis, who bowed out due to a family emergency), Morrison seemed genuinely moved to be venturing once again into the slipstream, even if his customary sour mien didn’t crack. Dressed like a Jewish gangster, Morrison hid behind oversized dark glasses and a custom-made “VM” microphone stand. He addressed the audience exactly once, before concluding the show with “Madame George,” saying only, “Thank you, thank you. You’ve made a happy man very old.”

–Gavin Edwards

posted 8 December 2008 in Reviews. no comments yet

This week’s flipwalk takes us two-thirds of the way through the whole project (see here for details if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

The teaser image (blown up a bit for your viewing pleasure):

The whole picture, plus the story of how I got there, awaits you here.

posted 5 December 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the storied Troubadour nightclub in Hollywood to see the latest installment of “In the Attic,” the series of acoustic showcases starring Pete Townshend (on his days off from the Who’s world tour) and organized by his girlfriend Rachel Fuller. I interviewed the two of them (plus Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie); the resulting article was intended for Rolling Stone, but due to the magazine’s ongoing page crunch (times are tough all over), it ended up on their website, which means that you can read it by following this link.

A few stray thoughts that I didn’t have room for in the article:

1. Townshend’s a marvel on the acoustic guitar. He didn’t ever solo by finger-picking; he did it strictly by varying the tempo of his attack, but always kept the beat swinging.

2. It’s remarkable how few studio albums the Who have released: just eleven, including 2006’s Endless Wire. Sure, they’ve had regular hiatuses, but so have most bands of that ilk. The Stones, who have been active over roughly the same four-decade time period, have twice as many to their credit. R.E.M. gave the Who an eighteen-year head start, but have released three more studio records.

3. I asked Townshend about his autobiography, which he used to mention periodically in interviews. I was quite eager to read it, and wanted to know how it was coming along. Alas: “That, I dumped,” he said. “I write all the time. I write essays and poetry and stories and stuff, but you know, it [the book]’s nowhere at the moment.”

posted 1 December 2008 in Articles, Outside. 2 comments

I apologize for the lack of posts this week; due to a family medical emergency, the regular schedule here at Rule Forty-Two HQ may be disrupted for some time to come.

I did want to mention, in a followup to last week’s post about how various songwriting partnerships work, that in an effort to plumb the depths of the Jagger-Richards collaboration, I read the Stones’ 2003 coffee-table book According to the Rolling Stones. It’s an oral history as told by the four current Stones; it’s far from comprehensive, but it’s often amusing (Jagger is charmingly bewildered as to why people like Exile so much) and surprisingly candid about some subjects. For example, Ron Wood is very blunt about the Jagger-Richards penchant for swiping song credits from junior collaborators. “It’s Only Rock ‘ N Roll (But I Like It),” for example, was actually a Jagger-Wood composition. Wood on the song “Black Limousine”: “I fought until I was blue in the face to get the credit, going on and on, ‘I wrote that, I wrote that.’ One of the lessons I had to learn was that if you want to get a credit, it has to happen there and then in the studio, as you’re recording it.”

At any rate, Jagger says that he only started seriously writing songs by himself at the end of the 60s; before then, most Stones songs were true collaborations. Songs that were apparently solo Jagger compositions: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Yesterday’s Papers,” “Brown Sugar.” Song that was apparently a solo Richards composition: “Beast of Burden.”

posted 21 November 2008 in Self-reflexive, Tasty Bits. no comments yet

As promised last month, I’ve added another one of my Chris Rock interviews to the archives. This one’s from 2005, when he was promoting Madagascar and The Longest Yard. You might not care about either of those movies, or Rock’s ruminations on Jude Law and Sean Penn after hosting the Oscars, but you should check out what he had to say about health care, which I still think about on a regular basis: “People have no idea of the difference in health care in this country. I mean, my father got sick when I was poor. My mother got sick when I was rich. My father’s dead. My mother’s alive.”

More of Rock on the medical system (and “bitch hands”) here.

posted 17 November 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

This is how the LA Times arrived on my front lawn the other day. Apparently losing politicians now get appropriately tattooed.

posted 14 November 2008 in Photos. no comments yet