When We Were Kings (1996)

USA, 89 minutes, documentary
Director: Leon Gast
Photography: Maryse Alberti, Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles, Roderick Young
Editors: Leon Gast, Taylor Hackford, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Keith Robinson
Appearances: Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Don King, James Brown, B.B. King, Mobutu Sese Seko, Spike Lee, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Lloyd Price, Miriam Makeba

At the time this came out, not too far behind Terry Zwigoff's groundbreaking Crumb, it seemed as if the dawn of a golden age of documentaries just might be upon us. What was missed in all the charismatic pyrotechnics—which remain, and as potently as ever—is how safely isolated in the past are the incidents that When We Were Kings recounts, at the time over 20 years and now closing in on 40, and how conventionally it follows the outlines of the typical sports documentary: set the terms, tell the story, and let the athlete's performance provide the drama. In other words, there's little that's new here. The events are ripe for mythologizing and that's pretty much what we get, with all the heady passions such exercises inspire. Arguably the greatest moment of Muhammad Ali's storied career, the1974 heavyweight championship bout with George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, the so-called "rumble in the jungle," pitted an aging Ali against the reigning champion, at the time a relentless engine of destruction. Throughout the preliminaries, agonizingly extended six weeks at one point because of a minor injury to Foreman, Ali dances and jabbers, playing always to the cameras and press—but more significantly, it turns out, playing with Foreman's expectations, his very head, carefully assembling the pieces of what may be his most stunning triumph. Useful commentary from Spike Lee, George Plimpton, and particularly Norman Mailer fleshes out the terms of the accomplishment (for those of us less informed on the nuances of boxing), exactly what makes it both unique and ultimately characteristic. The fight itself, the way it proceeds, comes as a complete surprise after what we've seen of Ali in the run-up. But it appears he knew exactly what he was doing, executing the only plan that could have fetched him the win. It's an amazing sequence, and nicely done. But wait, there's more. Music from James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba (unfortunately mostly used as a caricature), and others who appeared at the festivities surrounding the main event, are nearly as thrilling. In fact, I wish there were more of them (it's a pretty short movie at less than 90 minutes), but I suppose that might have diluted the impact of the fight itself. If the moment was an exhilarating one for American followers of the sport, it was even more so for the Africans who played host to it, and their enthusiasm and excitement throughout is as palpable as it is infectious, contributing to the air (and myth) of an event of unprecedented historic significance.

101 Two Minute Pop Songs, pt. 3

Last 33 and third of the two-minute pop songs. Come and get 'em.

Fats Domino, "I'm Gonna Be a Wheel Someday" (1959) Dig the chattering sax. (2:03)
Paul McCartney, "Junk" (1970) Pretty. (1:57)
Pepsico, "Come Alive! You're in the Pepsi Generation" (1963) I've noticed this one grows on you. By the way, Snopes.com has evidently not yet determined whether the Chinese version of this tagline does indeed translate to "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead." (2:02)
Quarteto Uai, "Na Tarde" (1973) (2:00)
Queen, "We Will Rock You" (1978) Now a classic sports anthem, like Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life." How do these things happen? Do sports fans know what they're doing? (2:02)
Ralph McTell, "Willoughby's Farm" (1969) Mysterious and lovely and perfectly simple. (2:02)
Ralph Nielsen & the Chancellors, "Scream" (1962) Shrill. (1:58)
Ramones, "Teenage Lobotomy" (1977) (2:01)
Randy & the Rainbows, "Denise" (1963) (1:59)
Randy Newman, "Political Science" (1972) You can't argue with common sense. (2:01)
Ray Coleman & His Skyrockets, "Jukebox Rock 'n' Roll" (1957) (1:59)
Richard Hell & the Voidoids, "New Pleasure" (1977) (1:58)
Richie Havens, "Lady Madonna" (1969) (2:00)
Robyn Hitchcock, "Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl" (1984) What a weirdo, yet somehow I like him more all the time. This from one of his best albums, I Often Dream of Trains. (2:00)
Rockpile, "Crying in the Rain" (1980) What I did after my cat died. (2:02)
Rolling Stones, "Good Times" (1965) (2:02)
Rolling Stones, "One More Try" (1965) (1:58)
Sam Cooke, "(Don't Fight It) Feel It" (1961) Good advice. (2:02)
Sam Cooke, "There, I've Said it Again" (1959) The guy is just poise itself. (2:02)
Serge Gainsbourg, "Cha Cha Cha Du Loup" (1964) (1:59)
Simon & Garfunkel, "We've Got a Groovy Thing Goin'" (1965) You must be out of your mind. Do you know what you're kickin' away-ee-ay? (2:01)
Sol Hoopii & His Hawaiians, "Palolo" (1927) (2:01)
Sound Dimension, "Soulful Strut" (1969) Good song. (2:02)
Stooges, "Loose (Take 26) (False Start)" (1970) Can you blame them after 25 takes? (2:00)
String-A-Longs, "Wheels" (1961) (1:58)
Suicide Commandos, "Call of the Wild" (1978) (2:01)
Teenage Fanclub, "What You Do to Me" (1991) (2:01)
Tim Hardin, "Reason to Believe" (1966) Very lovely. (2:00)
Triumphs, "Burnt Biscuits" (1961) Probably the best song here. (2:02)
TV theme, "The Jackie Gleason Show" (1952) Luscious. (2:02)
Ventures, "Frosty the Snowman" (1965) Oh gosh this is swell. (2:00)
Wanda Jackson, "Man We Had a Party" (1961) She sounds a hundred years old in this. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Anyway, I guess she always does. (1:58)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Art Star" (2001) (2:01)

Peepshow (1992)

Joe Matt's first and so far still best foray into comic book autobiography (his self-declared career, even raison d'etre, from approximately the age of 24), this collection of a few years' worth of the mundane adventures of his daily life in the late '80s and early '90s opens an intriguing window into his development as an artist. That's not the only window it opens, of course—it's notorious for the ludicrous and occasionally grotesque candor of its revelations, which include shrieking fights with his girlfriend, repulsive habits of thrift and laziness, and, yes, it's all true, the inside view of a porn habit with a few particulars regarding fetish. It is indeed a consummate portrait of ongoing selfish narcissism. He gets away with it (as much as he does) by dint of the comic book art, which is perfectly charming, by the fact that he tends to take ownership of his warts with aplomb and even relish rather than getting defensive or blaming anyone else for them, and because he's just plain likeable. In controlled doses. At a distance. And via the mediation of the printed comic book page. (Everyone who knows him reports that he's exactly as he describes himself, perhaps more so, and it's not like he doesn't catch on—he's often able to convey how others struggle to cope with him.) In the end he's not so different from you or me, just more willing to talk about his stuff and put it out there. What makes this worth visiting and revisiting is the chance to trace the self-discovery as it happens. In the earliest pages you can see him feeling his way toward what he's doing. R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and many others by now have made careers of comic book autobiography, but no one does it like Joe Matt, who soon enough flails his way to a discipline he mostly manages to stay within: the single-page/tiny-panel installments he is able to deliver on about a monthly schedule. He explores variations along the way, but never drifts far from what he can do with a single page, a minimum of cross-hatching (it's nearly all line work), and plenty of black ink. And he not only discloses the various personal details of his life and volatile relationship, for which he's famous, but also explores a good many other angles of his life along the way: the philosophy and practicalities of living cheap (some good tips!), his infatuations with showering and collecting and walking, the strange cats with whom he has lived, and all kinds of aspects of his art, including comical abstract exercises. If I didn't know better I'd be tempted to compare him to Montaigne.

In case it's not at the library.

Around the Fur (1997)

A few things I know about Deftones: They appear to want to eschew the definite article (like Shoes, a very different act), so don't call them "the" Deftones. The designation for those inclined to label is "Nu-Metal." They are from Sacramento. This is their second album, and it's on Madonna's Maverick label. Singer and guitar player Chino Moreno, the ostensible front man, has a hellacious voice to which prolonged exposure just might raise nodes on your own vocal cords. Careful here. Peers include Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age. I found out about them at an outdoor festival in 1996, where they were playing the second stage in the middle of a sweltering high-summer afternoon. They appeared alternately nervous and juiced, with Moreno pacing and making casual jokes from the stage, in between fits of the band letting loose with the kind of thing you find here: atmospheric blasts and shards of mighty guitar noise across which Moreno's aforementioned vocals surf until they are swallowed by the eddying battering ram of sound only to reappear again whenever the flotsam clears. Only to be swallowed again. Loud, quiet, loud, open space, bludgeon, open space. A kind of stern black and white drama marked out in bold strokes. There was something remarkable about the juxtapositions of their scruffy appearance and the wall of sound and the jokes and how wrong the light and heat of the summer day was. The set didn't last even 40 minutes, but it's something I have never forgotten. And if I've never experienced anything quite like it again, in this or any of their releases I've heard, much less anything by anyone else, it's something I'm looking for again even still.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

USA, 113 minutes
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writer: Jenny Lumet
Photography: Declan Quinn
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger, Tunde Adebimpe, Mather Zickel, Anna Deavere Smith, Anisa George

Is it possible that this is Jonathan Demme's best movie? I have long thought he is most winning the closer to music (or performance, in the case of Swimming to Cambodia) that he manages to stay—most conspicuously Stop Making Sense, of course, which if not still the greatest concert film ever made certainly is on the short list of them, and I don't know what else is close. This movie comes chockablock with music, chiefly in the form of the joyful and spontaneous and heartfelt contributions to the wedding that sits at its center (including Demme's son Brooklyn playing "The Wedding March" on an electric guitar). Some spectacular business otherwise here as well, including Anne Hathaway's performance, which occasionally feels studied but more often is one she simply disappears into like something taken by the wind, painful, cringe-inducing, probably a little overwritten, but profoundly demanding to be taken on its own 12-step recovery terms. I think overall it's one of the most faithful and unsentimental renditions of the experience that I've seen yet. This is often filmed like a documentary, heavy on the handheld camera and the strange jerks and sweeps and odd frames of a restless camera on the move—although just as often the framing is deliberate and surprising and perfect—and, too, it often feels staged like an Altman picture, with characters and dialogue cascading and swirling in and out of it, until finally sometimes the only way to cope is simply to give in to the sensory overload and let the threads pull you which ways they will. For once the travails of the poor put-upon clichéd upper-middle-class American dysfunctional family, complete with divorce and substance abuse and rehab and siblings who die in childhood and that old favorite, the perennial Cold Mother (here done to a tee by Debra Winger), are counterbalanced with a genuine sense of the lovingness that can accompany such sad sacks and their connections and actually goes quite a ways towards explaining what they're all doing hanging around together in the first place. In fact, some of the scenes at the rehearsal dinner and then at the wedding itself—notably Tunde Adebimpe facing Rosemarie DeWitt, the titular Rachel, at the altar, taking her hands in his, gazing into her face, and getting off a breathtakingly poised serenade to her of Neil Young's "Unknown Legend"—are nothing less than transcendent, beautiful moments that remind that life may be a funny old dog but, in such moments, is probably worth it all, even if fleetingly. Some people always cry at weddings. I always cry at this.

Phoebe Snow (1974)

Phoebe Snow's auspicious debut is not the only album we have got from her—including anthologies and live sets, I actually count 16 at Wikipedia—but it's the best I've heard by a far sight, scoring a #5 hit in the gorgeous, quavering "Poetry Man" and winning warm accolades across the board. I like Robert Christgau's take best, describing her in 1981 as a New York woman "from a liberal background, with loads of artistic interests, she's insecure about her weight and hence her looks (which are OK at least) and hence her talent (which there's no questioning), and after plenty of therapy her emotions are still all over the place. Only none of her sisters can sing the postblues like Snow—neurotically, that's what she's about, but with incisive power." In December 1975, a year and a half after the release of this album, Snow gave birth to a daughter who was severely brain-damaged and subsequently elected to see to the girl's care herself, opting out of institutionalization. The consequences are easily imagined and confirmed: her career foundered and never again came close to the heights touched here. Her daughter, Valerie, died three years ago at the age of 31; at home with her mother nearby, one imagines. More recently, again according to Wikipedia, Snow suffered a brain hemorrhage at the beginning of this year and had to undergo life-threatening surgery. A twitter tweet via her website in April tells us that she is "awake, alert, and trying to talk." Even under the heavy shadows of this news, her music remains warm and vibrant, healing even. I rediscovered it last year in the wake of some losses of my own, and it provided layers and depths of solace I never would have anticipated. "Take Your Children Home" in particular grew to be a kind of lifeline, but any of the songs from this album, appearing at random in shuffle, stopped me whatever I was doing and for a few minutes seemed to open a place to enter that felt safe and comfortable. Maybe it's just nostalgia for times past when I was infatuated with this album. For many of us, not just Phoebe Snow, the world had a terribly different and far less threatening cast to it in the mid-'70s. I hope for all the best for her.

4/27/2011 update: Phoebe Snow passed away yesterday at the age of 60. My thoughts and condolences to her family and friends. She provided tremendous amounts of comfort in her time.

The Dark Stuff (2nd ed., 2002)

Nick Kent, self-declared Lester Bangs idolator and star NME staffer back when it really counted, brings all the soft-pedaled erudition, unblinking cynicism, and dead-on wit we have come to expect and appreciate from him and his '70s (and into the '80s) generation of British rock critics. A glance at the table of contents quickly reveals the usual suspects (plus a few ringers) in stark relief: Brian Wilson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roky Erickson, Syd Barrett, Brian Jones, Lou Reed, Sid Vicious, Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Shane MacGowan, Iggy Pop (twice—and he also writes the foreword), Miles Davis, Roy Orbison, Neil Young, Kurt Cobain, Prince, Johnny Cash, Eminem, a few others. In compulsively readable pieces that comprise equal parts interview, thought experiment, and nicely observed detail, with revisions and second thoughts and perspectives that stretch across the decades, Kent goes one on one with all our favorites, or a good many of them, as he works to get at the music and the players and fans and the scenes that spawned them. One of the most surprising portraits for me, though perhaps it should not have been, was his staggering wade through the torrents of Elvis Costello's head, with Costello stalking through endlessly spitting petty vengeance fantasies when he was not yet even 22, circa 1977, just at the precise moment when success seemed within his reach but not yet quite even partially within his grasp, focused so intently on what he was about that the intensity and confidence and overpowering creative energy read like a kind of brutalizing, primally infantile rage—hardly the mellow, kindly, slightly sour or acerbic old uncle figure he seems to me to cut now (the mellowing likely part of the continuing fallout of the 1979 contretemps with Bonnie Bramlett and Stephen Stills in a Columbus, Ohio, bar—more evidence by implication how much the incident changed him). But there it is, in black and white, along with Lou Reed as mid-'70s wastrel speed freak (yes, that really happened, children), Jerry Lee Lewis still plotting a comeback bid and imminent takeover of the entertainment world in 1989, and Kurt Cobain all MIA, the ghost who haunts every performer from Seattle across a six-week period that ended in April 1994. I can think of some I really wish Kent had been able to get to, e.g., Boy George, the Thin White Duke always, of course, and maybe Ian Hunter or Pete Townshend or Bob Mould or Nikki Sudden? Some others. But this will do. In fact, it's a real page turner.

In case it's not at the library.

Electric Ladyland (1968)

It took me awhile to catch up to the unrivaled Jimi Hendrix magnum opus, only to find out that I'm not sure it's possible to ever fully catch up to it, even now, better than 40 years later. For 20 years I never had my own copy—I listened to it in the basements of the houses of my friends in high school, and later they put tracks from it on mix tapes, and of course it even spawned a radio hit in the Bob Dylan cover, "All Along the Watchtower," and then, sure enough, at some point a lot of us began to forget about it. I've always heard it and known it on some level, even in the obscurity of memory. But it wasn't until I actually came into possession of the thing, first finally as the double-LP and later as the lengthy CD disc, that the majesties and depths started to really unfold. There's the muscular confidence and sheer blues brawn of the 15-minute "Voodoo Chile" (side 1/track 4) and the echoing "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," which closes the thing. There's side 3 (on the CD, tracks 10-12, intended to be seamless), one of the perfect album sides in all of rock: "Rainy Day, Dream Away," which boldly starts with the sound of toking indoors as skies outdoors empty, followed by a guitar that speaks, then "1983...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)," and finally "Moon, Turn the Tides...Gently, Gently," increasingly spacy, ambient, production-heavy sounds that nevertheless retain the swooning cathartic presence of unearthly and utterly inspired music. Then side 4 (track 13) opens on "Still Raining, Still Dreaming." All through, themes are established, elaborated on, and left, only to be taken up again elsewhere. Side 1 follows side 4, track 1 track 16, as simply and precisely as any of the sequencing throughout. And through all of it the playing of Hendrix is as self-assured and poised as any guitar player anywhere ever: pyrotechnics when he feels like it, more often the gentle touch that accomplishes what it needs to with a perfect economy of sound and texture. He's a good singer too, don't let anybody tell you otherwise. I'm not normally comfortable with bloated terms like "masterpiece," but this is one case where I can use it with no reservations whatsoever. The rest of his catalog is good, great, brilliant. Here is where all that comes into focus.

Ghost World (2001)

USA/UK/Germany, 111 minutes
Director: Terry Zwigoff
Writers: Daniel Clowes, Terry Zwigoff
Photography: Affonso Beato
Production design: Edward T. McAvoy
Art direction: Alan E. Muraoka
Set decoration: Lisa Fischer
Cast: Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Illeana Douglas, Bob Balaban, Dave Sheridan, Brian George, Brad Renfro, Stacey Travis

You have to tread carefully with anything that purports to be a coming-of-age story about an 18-year-old girl, especially when it stars a 28-year-old woman, co-stars a 44-year-old man, is directed by a 51-year-old man, and is co-written with and based on a comic book by a 40-year-old man. So consider all caveats in place, including that the person offering this evaluation is a man now older than anyone involved at the time the movie came out. With the possible exceptions of Thora Birch, the aforementioned star who plays Enid (or sidekick Scarlett Johansson, who plays her best friend Rebecca and in fairness was 17 at the time this was released), none of us are in good positions to comment on its veracity. Ghost World tells the story of Enid, who is appealing both because of and in spite of her elaborate adolescent disaffection and who kinda sorta falls for Seymour (played by Steve Buscemi, in a wonderfully tempered performance), an introverted, self-loathing collector nerd who is more than twice her age. Oh hell, who am I kidding—this is first-rate fantasy intended for middle-aged males of a certain temperament who, all of us, to a one, collapse over it in admiration. And, yes, that's me getting up from the floor after having just seen it again, wondering if I actually liked it more the first time or this second time, and wondering indeed what that will mean for future viewings. But all I know is how much I dearly wish the events could be true to life. That said, there's little question about other qualities in effect here. There's a lot to like: for all its plot holes and misfires, the events move perfectly believably from point to point until all the characters find themselves in an immaculate muddle, the exasperating sort that people in real life, not to mention such TV and movie stalwarts as Lucille Ball or Jackie Gleason, are forever entangling themselves in. Seymour offers a refreshingly equable and serene, even self-aware, version of the kind of bitter misfit previously seen perhaps most famously in director Zwigoff's other great movie, the documentary Crumb, while Enid is like nothing so much as an idealized youthful female version of it. The production comes with a nice unforced comic book simplicity to the framing of its shots, likely the result of input from co-writer Daniel Clowes, whose comic book work on which this is based is widely admired (though it has never particularly appealed to me). The whole thing looks and feels just great, colorful and exuberant and creative and original, and it's overflowing with terrific music. There are also a good many fine, small performances in the supporting roles, most notably from Illeana Douglas, Bob Balaban, Dave Sheridan, and Brian George. This is a joy and a pleasure from beginning to end, and recommended without reservation to all disaffected middle-aged men anywhere who have ever clung to an adolescent preoccupation beyond their 20s.

More information in comments.

Avalon (1982)

You can't really call this the best Roxy Music album, because in a lot of ways it's hard to make the case that it is a Roxy Music album. Mackay and Manzanera are reduced to sidemen, and after Bryan Ferry they're the only originals left. But, damn, is it sweet and pretty, impossible to resist, even overwhelming—which might only mean that you have just developed a taste for adult-oriented rock. But there's little point denying its effects. At a certain vantage, it feels like the entire world opening up wide. All of the art here is softly compressed into the structures and melodies and layers and nuances of affect. It barely moves, but it saturates every available space. Even in the background, where arguably it belongs, it calls insistently. It's meant to lull, seduce, beguile, draw you over, win you to its side—Ferry perhaps attempting to actualize his never-ending riff as the consummate gigolo. If it has its antecedents in the previous two late-period albums, Manifesto and Flesh + Blood, not even they prepared anyone for this. And if it is essentially the end of the line for Roxy Music as an enterprise—a live EP and an anthology (and not the first) is all the more we got from them—somehow in memory it seems to herald the beginning of a long, slow fade into a vanishing relevance textured by brief and occasional flashes of interest. I guess I must be thinking of Bryan Ferry's solo career from that point forward because all these years later it's as clear as can be. This is an end, not a beginning. And by the way what is that, a Viking on the cover? (Actually, it's Bryan Ferry's girlfriend at the time, Lucy Helmore, wearing a helmet to play King Arthur.)