Devil's Music (2011)

So you probably already knew this (I'm behind on everything as always), but it turns out the Teddybears have been a band for more than 20 years with deep roots in Swedish grindcore/death metal. Now those old impulses seem relegated to elements such as titles or maybe themes (e.g., "Devil's Music" feat. ADL, or "Cisum Slived," which reminds me happily of the mentality of Miles Davis circa Live Evil). I must say nonetheless the Teddybears do not strike me as the least bit evil in any way. I would not have even begun to guess the roots from this or the previous album (Soft Machine, 2006), which are a lot closer to product from the Silicon Teens (with star power) than Carcass. By star power I'm talking about the various "feat." guests on display—Robyn, Eve, B.o.B., Flaming Lips, Cee Lo Green, B-52's, etc.—which mostly seem to me irrelevant. I note the heavy Flaming Lips vibe because I know it already. I wouldn't necessarily have picked out the B-52's on my favorite song here, "Cho Cha," an appreciation of a pet cat, but recognizing it's Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson singing doesn't hurt anything. More to the point, the parade of guests does nothing to obscure the overriding unifying vision of the project, which seems on the usual errand of many great albums: having a real good time. You can complain that it amounts to little more than lightweight techno grooves and pop music gestures, but even if you do, I can only respond, "You say that like it's a bad thing." "Cardiac Arrest" is their turn with countryman Robyn and it should have been a hit if it wasn't. "Get Mama a House" makes me want to stand up and jump about the place and I appreciate the sentiment about doing right by one's mother too. "Cho Cha" (so clearly the B-52's playing, now that I know) is funny and tender about the affection between pet and caretaker, soaring on precisely that in the chorus. The instrumentals are good too. Because I happen to love the way this album insists so single-mindedly on the simple pleasures and joys of a dance groove, boppy tunes, and cool beats, I'm left to conclude that I must recommend it, even as I set it on repeat for awhile, till I'm tired of it for another day.

The Rescue Artist (2005)

If nothing else, I appreciate The Rescue Artist for clueing me in to the intriguing factoid that Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's famous 1890s painting The Scream is actually painted on cardboard rather than canvas, an evocative point I somehow can't quite get my head around. The painting also holds the distinction of commanding the highest price in history for one sold at public auction, when it went for just short of $120 million at Sotheby's this last spring. It has also been the target of multiple thefts. This book is about one of them, which occurred in 1994 from the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. It's a great idea because it brings together the appeals of both police procedural and art history lesson. Crossing and breeding such thematic elements seems to come naturally for author Edward Dolnick, formerly a science journalist. His interests are obviously catholic—this is the only one by him I've read, but he's written at least one other about art crime, another about psychoanalysis, and another about 19th-century explorations of the American West. In The Rescue Artist he finds a hundred roads to chase down, and they are always interesting, weaving about across art history, art crimes, and forensics. As detective story, it's a relatively simple and straightforward case but Dolnick makes it a real page-turner, simply because his research has produced so much of interest and he is a deft and effective writer with a sure feel for the delightful fact. He mentions in passing, for example, Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which was stolen in 1961 and recovered in 1965; a reproduction of it, he reminds us, makes a cameo appearance in the villain's lair in the 1962 James Bond picture Dr. No, emphasizing the popular but generally wrong idea that art thieves are eccentric criminals with fine taste. Our hero and the self-same "rescue artist" of the title is one Charley Hill, a Scotland Yard investigator (and undercover agent) and also a Fulbright scholar specializing in stolen art. He knows a lot about it and had a lot to tell Dolnick. I liked it best when the book stayed close to art crime, not just involving The Scream. It was honestly a bit of a shock to find out how much work has gone missing this way and may ultimately have to be presumed destroyed. A Vermeer, The Concert, one of only 35 works by the artist known to exist, has been missing since 1990; other works for much longer, by artists such as Caravaggio, Raphael, and Van Eyck. As an added bonus, even my trade paperback copy comes with eight pages of gorgeous color plate reproductions of paintings and details discussed in the text, including work by Goya, Manet, Munch, Picasso, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Vermeer, and others.

In case it's not at the library.

Learning to Crawl (1984)

This must be approximately the point where Chrissie Hynde made the calculation to break for the mainstream even as she managed to retain a modicum of punk-rock credibility. Both factors were more or less direct result of losing half of her band—guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon, both to drug overdoses—in the intervening years between the second Pretenders album and this one. Also having a child by Ray Davies, a marker of whose development provided Hynde with the title of the album. That title is obviously apt in other ways as well. No small part of the work of getting this album done was finding players, thus for example the appearances, on "Back on the Chain Gang," "My City Was Gone," and "Thin Line Between Love and Hate," of Andrew Bodnar, Billy Bremner, Tony Butler, and Paul Carrack. There's a lot of good stuff here; it's a very strong album, with a brooding, rueful air that developed a side of Hynde previously sidelined for the most part. The material is a little uneven, a motley hodgepodge of singles and multiple sessions. Long-time Pretenders producer Chris Thomas and indeed Hynde herself account for continuity. But there's also a powerful sense of searching and probing here. It is an aftermath project, connecting naturally to albums like John Wesley Harding or Tonight's the Night, proceeding out of a post-traumatic emotional state and carefully putting pieces together again. It's probably Chrissie Hynde's most thoughtful album and second only to the amazing debut in her catalog. She's never done anything quite like it before or since. "Middle of the Road," "Back on the Chain Gang," and "Time the Avenger" is the 1-2-3 way she starts it, and there you see the themes she is working with plain. Some of it is lightweight throwaways, such as "Watching the Clothes," which somehow reminds me of something on Double Fantasy (as you can see, she is either determinedly projecting herself into the rock pantheon at this point, or I am framing it to see it that way). But my favorites are toward the end of the set, with "My City Was Gone," which is actually one of the best songs about Ohio in a surprisingly crowded field, produced to a tee but convincingly full of tender and bitter emotion. That is followed by the cover of the 1971 Persuaders soul hit, "Thin Line Between Love and Hate." I love the way that nothing in the story of that song of simmering domestic tension has much of anything to do with anything Hynde had recently experienced, but she nonetheless took all that and poured it into the song. It is a remarkable performance, as fragile and beautiful as it is hard-hitting, and feels to me somehow like one of Hynde's most nakedly confessional songs even though it is a cover. Classic.

Ray (2004)

USA, 152 minutes
Director: Taylor Hackford
Writers: Taylor Hackford, James L. White
Photography: Pawel Edelman
Music: Craig Armstrong, Ray Charles
Editor: Paul Hirsch
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell, Aunjanue Ellis, Harry Lennix, Terrence Dashon Howard, Larenz Tate, Bokeem Woodbine, Sharon Warren, Chris Thomas King, Curtis Armstrong, Kurt Fuller

All right then, one more beloved dead icon of various complex attractions up for our end-of-year delectation. Granted, Ray now happens to be many years old. But it's a product of a reasonably unchanging formula, which has been in place since at least The Glenn Miller Story, and in a way, seeing an older version now sets off the basics in stark relief. Ray is a biopic, most plainly and fundamentally. But also Oscarbait, major career enhancement vehicle, hoaried slice of 20th-century popular culture, heroin cautionary tale, inspiration narrative for the disabled, civil rights story, and a few other things as well. It's trying to hit a lot of notes, pun not intended, with a little bit of sugar for everyone. But here's the kicker: it doesn't matter that much because the little bit of sugar for me (division of invention of rock 'n' roll) in many ways trumps all. Critical acumen, such as it is, goes right out the window. All sins instantly forgiven whenever the music starts to play.

Now I happen to be fond of Ray Charles—as who isn't?—so there was always cause here for both interest and wariness. If we have to wallow in something it might as well be Ray Charles. And for the most part Ray seems to get the basics right. But too often it becomes overly wince-worthy, playing for too-easy emotional effects by springboarding transparently off troubled childhood, dead younger brother, impoverished single mother, Jim Crow South, and the loss of his sight as a youth. Fine and good, because true enough, but in Ray it's just the context for various outrageous, unfortunate exaggerations, which only caricature the man that the film is attempting so self-seriously to canonize, even as it seriously bags what it existed to bag: Best Actor, Best Sound Mixing, and nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editor, and Best Costume Design. Yippee!

Bob Dylan, "Clothes Line Saga" (1967)

(listen)

I think this is one of Bob Dylan's best and most funny moments and he's not even trying very hard. But that's what makes it. It seems so effortless. It's some vaguely sketched easygoing neighborhood scene with people shuffling about the place tending to laundry and bantering back and forth. "It was January the 30th / And everybody was feelin' fine"—somehow a portentous statement. The tones of Garth Hudson's organ drone on like someone nodding their head as they listen to a story. The whole band is into a poky groove. It swirls about with nothing much making sense, when all of a sudden striking events are reported, and the song snaps into sharp focus: "'Have you heard the news?' he said, with a grin / 'The vice-president’s gone mad!' / 'Where?' 'Downtown.' 'When?' 'Last night' / Hmm, say, that’s too bad!' / 'Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about it'..." And then the song goes shuffling off to other precincts, even attempting less successfully to replicate the rhythms of that "where? downtown, when? last night" little trick, which is so much fun to sing with too. In general I prefer these throwaways that so generously pepper The Basement Tapes ("Lo and Behold," "Don't Ya Tell Henry," "Please, Mrs. Henry") because it feels more like people enjoying themselves and I think that's the best point of this and the best of his stuff from the time, immediately post-famous motorcycle accident. But I'm equally intrigued by a song traveling under very nearly the same name ("Clothesline Saga") on the big "Genuine" Basement Tapes, in which he seems to be singing "Get your rocks off" as much as anything. Maybe a mislabel.

The Mother and the Whore (1973)

#4: The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973)

I first encountered this long, slow, drab, confounding, and utterly engrossing four-hour last gasp of the French New Wave on its U.S. release circa 1975. It was formative in its way—I was barely out of adolescence. I went to it with a bunch of people with whom I shared a house and we all spent the next few weeks smoking Galouise and Gitane cigarettes like Jean-Pierre Leaud and his pals and women. Of course the themes and subtexts were over our heads—what was 1968 to us but ancient history already? But the desultory, dissipated lives that it reports on so talkily seemed at once fascinating, seductively appealing, and a kind of promise of a road we could well find ourselves on one day ourselves. Not exactly a cautionary tale, more like a preview of one version of adult life.

I've had similar reactions every time I've seen it since, though I've long since given up cigarettes of any brand, French or otherwise. I dread seeing it every time on some level for its punishing length (217 minutes). My back aches and my butt hurts from the kinds of seats found in the theaters that show it. But once started, there's virtually no going back. One time I noticed shortly before I was planning on going to bed that it was on a cable channel—unusual in itself. My girlfriend at the time had never seen it, never even heard of it. "Let's watch a little bit of this," I said. "We can turn it off when we get tired." We watched all of it.

The Road (2006)

It's probably just as easy to make criticisms about Cormac McCarthy's end-of-the-world exercise as it is to praise it to the skies. I have heard it both ways, mostly the latter. There's definitely something about it that gets inside of you—I've been reading it the past few days, and in the past few days I've been in a mood—sad, depressed even ... "emotional," as people say when they don't know what else to. Whether it's the book or other external factors is hard to say. But I keep thinking about the book a lot, as when I am on walks. I don't know how much I believe some of it, notably the cannibalism and the pederasty, but who knows what such a world would look like. Little things just take your breath away, like a thought in passing about how cows have become extinct. Or a conversation between the protagonists, a father and his son, about how there probably aren't any crows anymore. Or birds. That's when you start to grasp the scope here. It's a devastatingly imagined picture. I like that the great disaster that caused it is unknown—nuclear war is the first place you want to go, but there didn't seem to be any issues with radiation. Just fire, or rather, now, ash. Whatever the event was it happened in the lifetime of the father. It pleases me somehow to think that Yellowstone went, although it could as well be a meteor strike. In any event, it's not central to the story, which is about the will to survive and, even more, the faith that there is purpose in it, on which the stakes are raised as high here as I can remember ever seeing them. McCarthy is probably most often compared with Faulkner, but long passages here often reminded me of Hemingway, because of the simple, rhythmic dialogue between the father and son that occupies so much of this. Overall it's not as scary as I thought it might be, though there are some indelible images, most of them horrifying, such as the cellar where people are kept imprisoned and alive even as they are chopped apart for food. Or the newborn infant on a spit. Just awful stuff. The wife and mother committed suicide before the action of this book even starts. I have a feeling, if I ever did become a survivor in such a scenario, I'd be likely to go her route. I'm just not sure I have that much faith, and perhaps that is what gives me such profound pause about The Road.

In case it's not at the library.

Pretenders II (1981)

I've spent so much time thinking of this as a bad album that I was surprised when I returned to it recently and found more than I expected to like. This is overall a good example, maybe the best, of the "sophomore slump" problem that dogs many rock artists. Symptoms include the tired Roman numeral in the title, songs that sound dangerously close to retreads from the first album, and perhaps most discouraging the abject trivialization of themes that made the debut interesting. For example, the album opens on "The Adultress," a gleeful embrace of an ethos or orientation Chrissie Hynde seemed explicitly to be rejecting before. And the next one, "Bad Boys Get Spanked," is more indication of the direction of cheesy exploitation in which it gets stuck. If you never liked Hynde or the Pretenders project as it developed from here—I've known a few people of this persuasion, some quite adamantly about it—there's surely little here. Perhaps only "Talk of the Town," a good single that came a few minutes late for the first album (which even the naysayers generally do not try to deny). It's true there aren't many new ideas here. Pretenders II often sounds uninspired or overly familiar from track to track. On the other hand, there is at least one notable Hynde trademark that finds its origins here, in "I Go to Sleep." These Hynde torchers, which start approximately here, are songs and productions designed to highlight the soaring, aching, nakedly emotional strengths of her voice, which steps out leaving the rock band behind for orchestral touches. By the time she gets to the chorus it is swooningly gorgeous; in live shows this is where the arm is raised and swayed slowly back and forth. She usually found room for one or two of them on most albums from then on—she even had a hit with one, "I'll Stand by You" (#16 in September 1994). Everything else I have to say about the album would almost certainly be damning with faint praise—good band, good band, the calamity not yet upon them. But given the subsequent dimensions of Hynde's ambition, I'm not sure they ever had a shot at making a lasting impact as a band, even if most of them had survived. This one's for fans only.

Dead Ringers (1988)

Canada/USA, 116 minutes
Director: David Cronenberg
Writers: David Cronenberg, Norman Snider, Bari Wood, Jack Geasland
Photography: Peter Suschitzky
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: Ronald Sanders
Cast: Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold, Heidi von Palleske, Barbara Gordon, Shirley Douglas, Stephen Lack, Nick Nicholas, Lynne Cormack, Jill Hennessy, Jacqueline Hennessy

Director David Cronenberg suffered the indignity of seeing what is arguably his greatest film headed for release in the same time frame as the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito comedy vehicle Twins, which necessitated a retitling exercise for Cronenberg. It's a small thing in the larger scheme, but what a clanking substitution. This is not a movie about the idiomatic senses of the term, a casual way of remarking on a surprising resemblance, but instead more explicitly about profound psychological implications of a reasonably common biological occurrence, identical twins. In many ways it is all about the process of psychological separation—individuation, if you will.

It is also, no surprise, an unrelieved creep show with a masterful performance at its center by Jeremy Irons as a pair of identical twin gynecologists who have their own approach to things. That might just be Cronenberg having fun the way he does (and many parts of this are actually very funny, another of his hallmarks often missed)—but it's also not hard to imagine a case for Cronenberg's entire career having been always pointed, true north fashion, toward making just such a movie about twin gynecologists.

Lincoln (2012)

USA/India, 150 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Tony Kushner, Doris Kearns Goodwin
Photography: Janusz Kaminiski
Music: John Williams
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, Tommy Lee Jones, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Bruce McGill, Peter McRobbie

Over his long career Steven Spielberg has always seemed to find ways to inject himself into the zeitgeist, even to the point where sometimes he seems to seize control of it and point it in new directions. With Jaws, he took a gnawing fear pervading vast numbers of lives and gave it a name and a place to focus—was anyone really that worried about sharks before 1975? With Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he took a groundswell yearning for meaning and did the same, extracting the spiritual out of the secular impositions of superior technology.

In many ways the historical film Lincoln plays to that pattern. I keep returning to the extraordinary timing of it, even knowing how hard it would have been to plan for, let alone achieve, and even given that ultimately it is beside the point. But I keep trying to imagine what Lincoln would have looked like if Mitt Romney had won the presidential election last month. And I find that I can't imagine it at all. I'm convinced that a good deal of the power of Lincoln—and I think it is an extraordinarily powerful movie—lies in the way it resonates with our present circumstances. Abraham Lincoln is one of our greatest presidents precisely because as Americans we return to him and his era whenever we find ourselves plunged in internal crises, as we are now.