Mew's Album with the Painfully Long Name

Dedicate five or six listens to Mew's "No More Stories Are Told Today Sorry They Washed Away etc etc..." Any less and you might not fully sink into their Danish dream-pop, but overbearing name aside, this album is every beat as beautiful as Grizzly Bear's overhyped "Veckatimest". Check out "Introducing Palace Players."

CHAPTER 77: LOUIS XV DOES SOME MINISTRY WORK

If Versailles was a mill, then it would be a rumor mill. But it's a palace, so it's a rumor palace, and rumor has it that the Minister of State, M. De Choiseul (Tom Wilkinson), is going to be frantically searching the classifieds- possibly from a cell in the Bastille.
It's ten in the morning outside the King's work-office at the Grand Trianon, and little huddles of courtiers fear or anticipate the news. The Marshal of Richelieu (Jack Nicholson) is high-fiving the Viscount Jean, (Gerard Depardieu) at the center of a Dubarry-loving crowd, while across the aisle followers of De Choiseul pack bags for a possible long winter. It's a long hour, because the King (Robert DeNiro) rolls in at eleven, and rockets down the aisle to his office, ignoring everyone. Five minutes later, De Choiseul does exactly the same, clutching his portfolio like they might jack it right off his hands. Everyone pretends not to see the deadman walking.
Once Louis XV and his favorite employee are in the closed office, the King kicks back, boots on the desk:


ABOVE: De Choiseul sweating it out!

LOUIS: "Morning, De Choiseul! How are your tinglies hanging?"
CHOISEUL: "The tingles are hanging fine, and I am very grateful to your Majesty for not making the rest of me hang as well. But in anticipation of such a circumstance, I'm respectfully resigning from my role as Minister."
L: "Resign-who? And why is that?"
C: "Your Majesty, everyone is aware you've left in the hands of Madame Dubarry a letter announcing my dismissal, so there's no need to perpetuate my humiliation."
L: "Do you believe in ghosts and aliens too? Come ON, De Choiseul!"
C: "Your Majesty, EVERYONE knows you signed a letter that..."
L: "Hey, Choisy! Breathe! Didn't you ever tell your girl..."
C: "MY WIFE, Your Majesty!"
L: "...Didn't you ever tell your wife a little white lie just to have some peace at bedtime? But come morning time, don't you or anyone forget this, I am the King. Sometimes one throws a little honey cake for the women, to keep them busy. That's all. You do your job, and show up to do it every morning, and never pay attention to what Paris says. So what's on today's portfolio?"
De Choiseul flips through the papers, quickly eats the "You Can Shove This Ministry" letter he's written for the King: "Sorry, I must have skipped breakfast! What else is here? WELL, remember that outcry about those fireworks that caused a stampede? Parliament tried to pin the whole disaster on Monsieur Bignon, but Attorney Seguier gave a really nice speech and Bignon is off the hook."
Some squinting from the King: "Am I supposed to know who any of those people are?"
De Choiseul smiles- things are back to normal: "No, Your Majesty. In other Parliament business, I am much spoken against for refusing to support M. D'Aiguillon in his feud with M. De La Chalotais. I'm not saying he started it- I'm just saying we should finish him."
The King yawns: "Mon Dieu, why do people have so many NAMES to remember? How do we end that feud?"
C: "End all support to D'Aiguillon, and you'll benefit from it by having Parliament purring like a big ol' kitty, Your Majesty."
L: "Ugh. What about world news? I heard something about how I'm starting a war?"
C: "Correction: a GOOD war! Against the English. Do recall, Your Majesty, how you almost choked on scones! And they're hostile in India. Our officers have received orders- from you- to give them hell over there."
L: "Oh, who wants India, De Choiseul? Let them keep it. It's sooo far away, and I once tried to ride an elephant and the rash was unsightly."
C: "The danger is closer than that! The English clash with the Spanish over ownership of the Falkland Islands."


ABOVE: There they are! The contested Falkland Islands. See, my educational-value quota!

L: "But correct me if I'm wrong, which, as a King, I'm not: Falkland... Does that sound SPANISH to you? Clearly the Spaniards are on the wrong there."
The Minister is exasperated: "Yes, but they're wrong ON OUR SIDE! Leave it to me, your Majesty. You won't even NOTICE there's a war going on."
L: "All right, you get your foreign war- but you have to end the war at home."
C: "I'm pretending not to understand and/or be slightly offended!"
L: "I mean these squabbles between your crew and Madame Dubarry's. I know you used to get along with Madame Pompadour in the old days- hahaha, don't deny it, you old dog, I don't mind- but you have NOT tasted Madame Dubarry's pheasant! I insist, you will dine with her at Luciennes tonight!"
C: "But, Your Majesty! Tonight I trim my nose hairs!"
L: "I'm trying to please everyone. I warn you: make peace with that charming woman."
C: "There's only one Minister of State; there are many charming women. Ask Madame de Grammont. She's VERY eager to please your Majesty!"
L: "She can't please anyone if she goes into exile, De Choiseul." The King suddenly jumps off his chair: "HEY, forget all this nonsense, how long have we been WORKING? I'm not a peasant! We'll carry on later, I'm sweating here, bud!"
And Louis XV, dazed by a half hour's worth of laboral exhaustion, puts an arm around the safer-than-ever Minister and leads him out to the hallway. As the folding doors of his office are thrown open, the entire court reads the situation on the King's casual hugs and De Choiseul's gloating face. One half of the aisle breathes out happy sighs, but in a corner of the Grand Trianon, Jean Dubbary turns red. In turn, the Marshal of Richelieu turns yellow, but he shakes it off and runs to greet De Choiseul:
"OH, I had no idea you were in here, old chap... You lucky, lucky old chap. Anyway, what was that ridiculous report I heard about some letter?"
De Choiseul: "A letter! Haha! You know Louis, he's a jokester! Good day, Marshal!"
And the King and the Minister struts off while Jean starts punching a beatiful marble column: "He just lied to us! HELLSTICKS! THUNDERBUCKS!"
Richelieu is considerably calmer- even though he's just lost an easy bid at the Ministry: "There, there, Jean, watch how they run to the Little Trianon to laugh at us."
Jean howls: "How can you just take it?!?"
Richelieu smiles, displaying his magnificent set of fake teeth: "Because, my dear uglier member of the Dubarry family, I calculated something like this might happen. So the countess' plans failed. Big deal. Now it's time for MY plans to kick in. And those... Well, let's just say I don't DO failure."

Josh Neufeld's "A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge"

Talk about "Altered States": How's about Louisiana after Katrina!
...
(Sorry, that was oficially the lamest, most tasteless transition in HALLUCINA's historied history.)


Josh Neufeld's celebrated graphic novel "A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge", originally serialized in SMITH magazine, is firmly grounded on the journalistic tradition of Joe Sacco's work ("Palestine", "Safe Area Gorazde"). Like Sacco, Neufeld wants to stick to reporting the facts about Hurricane Katrina's devastation, but his indignation keeps coming through. "A.D." is drenched in anger: at a failed FEMA; at a leadership that reacted in ways that are best explained by racism; and at that wrathful, random deity that rains- and rains and rains- on the just and unjust alike.
But mostly anger at our helplesness, at the realization that our ant-hills are not meant to contend with sights like these:

In a startling opening zoom-in, Neufeld does more to convey awe before Nature's whims than a thousand Weather Channel reports. The book then settles for the human: six survivors share their real life experiences, their features morphed into caricatures that universalize their plight rather than reduce them to "you had to be there" racounteurs. There's Denise, close witness to the horrors of the Superdome; Kwame, who watches his hometown disappear from afar; Abbas and Darnell, loyal friends caught on the roof of their sinking corner-store while rats swarm the nearby trees; the hurricane-party-throwing Doctor, a French Quarter fixture out of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"; and Leo and Michelle, probably the more "relatable" couple.

All of these people lose a lot- sometimes practically everything they have- but it is the not-particularly-dramatic tale of Leo that clearly gives Neufeld a place to quietly examine loss from a place dear to a cartoonist. Leo edits a music 'zine called "Anti-Gravity" but his pride and joy was a collection of some 15,000 comic books. On several panels Neufeld lovingly browses through these books, with the same detail he elsewhere dedicates to flooded neighborhoods. Leo is a fan of the Marvel and DC standards, of "Watchmen" and "Maus" and "Palestine" and "Strangers in Paradise", but it's the cover to the first issue of Warren Ellis' "Transmetropolitan", (about future-gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem), that gets framed on the wall of his apartment.

When Leo and Michelle return there post-flooding, that truth-pusher journalist is the only superhero left standing. Neufeld latches on to that detail. It's appropriate: bearing witness to what happened may be the only way we have out of nightmares like Katrina.
It's also how we reach out to get our faith back: After hearing of Leo's plight on the internet, fellow nerds have sent him box after box of classic comics. He's getting his collection back on track.

Ken Russell's "Altered States"

It now strikes me as odd that people flock to noisy churches to try and discern God's will from under the boom of organs, the whoop of choirs, or (depending on your denomination), a soft rock band strumming bastardized covers of The Carpenters. No, the monks of early Christianity, or Paul Bowles, had it right: to find your own truth you must become a student of silence. If you get it from a concert, it's someone else's truth.

That extreme silence that awakens inner consciousness was its own fad under the watch of John C. Lilly and Timothy Leary, in the form of isolation chambers in which - aided no doubt by a variety of pharmaceutics- people (ok, hippies) would trip through canyons of druggy imagery. In Ken Russell's "Altered States", the good doctor played by William Hurt subjects himself to increasingly grueling stays in one such isolation tank, and what he drags out of the experience serves as an evolutionary summary, a send-off to the '60s, and a compilation of Russell's kitschy '70s visions (this IS the director of "The Who's Tommy").
Based on a disowned sci-fi script by Paddy Chayefsky (the screenwriter of "Network"), "Altered States" was Hurt's breakthrough movie. He's a mad scientist extraordinaire looking for the meaning of life at the risk of losing his life- his love interest, played by Blair Brown, despairs from extracting anything like an emotion from him- but his icy inhumanity is a compelling center as the psychedelia spirals out ever sillier. This is a weirdly entertaining movie, precisely because of its commitment to the silliness, (cruficied goats with many eyes? Huh?) Maybe one doesn't want to hear God's truth too loudly after all!

Yuki Amemiya's "07 Ghost'

Kapitel 26 of Yuki Amemiya's "07 Ghost": "Would You Like to Be my Date to the Gayzaar"?
Get the idea?

It's interesting to note how homosexuality in Japanese society talks loudest in cartoons- and how it's rarely addressed at homosexuals, but at young girls. As a sexual display it's hardly socially stirring and closest to those two straight chicks making out by the bar just because they suspect there's a camera- and free drinks from the guys- nearby. Still, it can be shocking to Westerners when the Japanese Teletubbies really DO give each other blowjobs. Season 1 of "07 Ghost" centers on the very gay friendship between Teito Klein and his beloved bud Mikage- and expands from that bishounen focus to a Churchy world of strict sexual roles encompassing celibate priesthood, ghost-battling angels, and nuns who (horrific but true) mock-fuck each other with knifes. Not the place to start an exploration of anime, but the initated, and the many fans of Yuu Watase's work, will feel at home with the deep mythology.

Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked"

Dylanophiles - (particularly fools like me who mentally compare the released version of "Tangled Up in Blue" against that rare live version from August 1981 where Dylan flubs and says "Mangled Up in Glue")- get gently mocked in Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked". It's his best novel since "About a Boy" even though it allies all too predictably Hornby's twin concerns: music and maturity, (a.k.a., "when is it time to let go of your obsessive music blogging and actually pay attention to your neglected girlfriend?")

At first Horby's snipes at his own "High Fidelity"-loving audience irked me: this is the story of every-girl Annie, whose insufferable boyfriend Duncan is always pontificating on the work of punk poet Tucker Crowe ("Dylan-meets-Leonard-meets-Bruce" as the ad would put it). Tucker has been mysteriously aping Salinger since his last big divorce album, "Juliet", so it's kind of a surprise when Annie gets her hands on an exclusive demo-only version called "Juliet, Naked"- and hears it before her boyfriend does, the first in a series of escalating betrayals. When the mythical ex-star resurfaces to start an e-mail correspondence with Annie, can true love be behind?
Luckily, (LIFE SPOILER!) there's no such thing as "true love". Hornby has enough maturity to dole out some sympathy to all the characters- even Duncan the tool- so that as the novel proceeded I got over the fact that I generally I hate novels that target discontented women (and aren't all women discontented? If you're a woman, and you think you're not discontented right now, let's wait half an hour.) I guess I rebel against the soothing cultural message that seems to go: "Girls, if you're bored in your relationship, it's because the guy's an asshole. Guys, if you're bored in your relationship, it's because YOU are an asshole." Guys don't win. I HATE stories where the bored, wonderful girl wisens up and abandons her stagnating boyfriend with the lame blog for the dashing, interesting, REAL SATISYIN' MAN. I AM the stagnating boyfriend with the lame blog, bitches, stop abandoning me!!!

And how exactly is this song not worth writing about obsessively?!?

Thanksgiving Gratefulness

Thank you, Turner cable networks, for reminding me of how much I love the first two Godfather movies!
And the third one is okay, if you add lots of gravy and Thanksgiving goodwill.

Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience"

Oh, Sasha Grey! I almost didn't recognize you without the anal beads!



Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" is a bit much ado about... nuttin' much. The stunt casting of porn not-so-ingenue Sasha Grey as "Chelsea", a "high class" hooker with a heart-of-complete-emotional-emptiness, (what a stretch!) gets attention, until you realize you don't want her to put ON clothes and be emphatically less entertaining than she is in her over-the-top porn provocations. The movie attempts to establish a (too obvious) link between frantic pre-bailout Wall Street corruption and sex-as-a-Manhattan-commodity. Your eyes opened, yet? It's beautifully photographed with the meticulousness of a gallery shoot, unnecessarily chopped-up in time, (it's not "Memento"!), and loaded with improvisational dialogue more reminiscent of a James Toback movie than a solid Soderbergh effort. As for Grey, the movie suggests she's worth her $2000 dollars-an-hour because she provides more than sex, the "full" girlfriend experience. Maybe there are deleted scenes where she complains about her water retention and her cat's allergies, because all I see her do here is blankly strut a bath-robe while businessmen unload about how the recession is hurting their bonuses. I can't say she's a bad actress- she's true to the pretty, refined, vaguely threatening emptiness of women who approach their bodies as investments to be carefully guarded against illness, men's predations, and/or love, (something which one doubts she can feel): the heart, like any muscle, wears away with ill-use.
"The Girlfriend Experience" IS worth a little indie rental, but I think you'll find "Sasha Grey's Anatomy" far more stimulating.

HAPPY INDIAN SLAUGHTER!!!

Dear Imaginary Reader:
Enjoy this holiday! Do not stab family members, no matter how sharp the carving knife is or how infuriating their political opinions are!

MY GOD THIS WOMAN

Woody Allen's "Whatever Works"

I had to watch Grandpa Allen's latest movie, "Whatever Works". This time I can blame it not on England or Spain, but on Evan Rachel Wood. Woody and Wood had to meet at one point, that much was obvious. As for Larry David alter-egoing as a slightly taller Woody Allen, it seems a little much- one wishes David had brought a little of the modern acerbity and improvisation that "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has, instead of simply reading Allen's lines- which is a spade imitating a shovel.

The plot, recycled from Woody's "funny" years, (meaning that back then he put it aside knowing it wasn't up to snuff), is ridiculous and fizzy, but also relatively tight compared to Allen's formless filmmaking of the 2000s. Boris Yellnikoff (David) is a cantankerous insulting creep that finds a bordering-on-minor lovely Southern ditz called Melodie (Wood) in his doorstep, and after a barrage of put downs they get married. It actually works out less creepily than you would imagine, and there are some twists when Melodie's family shows up- (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr. are pretty good, as are Michael McKean and Conleth Hill as Boris's buddies). But the speechifying is so familiar, Woody's condescending attitude toward people who aren't him is appalling, and the one-liners are scarce for a script that supposedly comes from the halcyon days. I did like Evan Rachel Wood, (PARTIALITY ADMITTED!) She clearly has fun playing dumb instead of the manipulating/tormented object of prurient interest she's so often forced to be.

Yes, it's third-tier Woody, but third-tier Woody is better than fourth-tier Woody ("Cassandra's Dream", remember that one?).

Laurent Cantet's "The Class"

Laurent Cantet's "The Class" made me realize how undemanding we are of our movie spectacles. We usually don't ask for or need didacticism, but here is a great movie that teaches, and expands you as a human being. You will emerge from it having experienced- in two riveting hours- what it's like to be in an urban classroom in France for a year.

I meant that riveting; it's an overused reviewer's term, generously handed out to thrillers, but recall it comes from being metalically pinned down. I was hungry throughout this movie, but I couldn't stand up and walk away from it. There's no moment where the movie isn't being fascinating and immersive, there are no pee breaks. You swim against it in the same confusion in which you swam against those hallways crowded with adolescence. And this is all without car chases, or ticking bombs, or much drama, really: the closest moment "The Class" has to action is when a heated up African student bolts out of the classroom and accidentally injures a school mate, precipitating an unfortunate expelling. Unfortunate, notice. Not tragic. In an American movie we would have been treated to a schoolyard shooting, innocents slayed. Here we just have a well-meaning teacher destroy a student's life out of bureaucratic procedure.

Classrooms are warring microcosmos. I'm not French but if I've learned anything from recent French movies as diverse as "Cache", "Lila Says" and "Aborigines" is that immigration is the national guilty obsession. (America only THINKS it has a race problem. France is seething. Never forget that one of the most chest-thumpingly liberal countries in the world is built on a gruesome history of class warfare, racism, anti-semitism and imperialism that makes America look positively pure.) But don't be put off by any of that, this isn't a heavy symbolic movie. It's too honest and humanistic for that, drawn from Francois Begaudeau's experiences as a teacher- he also stars, in a self-effacing, unsparing performance. This isn't "Mr. Holland's Opus", no tributes to martyred instructors: the moments in which the adult slips and bares his teeth to the unappreciative teens are frequent.

And that delicious, subtle pay off at the end! (Spoiler? This isn't that kind of movie.) Francois has dismissed- and indeed insulted- a girl throughout the year. He finds her common and insolent, and as the students recapitulate on what they've learned, the girl says she's learned nothing and read nothing. The teacher is hardly surprised, and snarls: "Not even outside of class?" "Actually, I did read this one cool book on my own," says the girl, and the teacher rolls his eyes (in anticipation of "Twilight" possibly).
The girl says it's called "The Republic."
Yeah. PLATO'S REPUBLIC.
See, it's about this dude, Socrates. And he goes around telling people to think, and argue, to distrust the shit they're fed, to examine where they got their ideas about God and love and society and all that stuff. TO QUESTION THEIR TEACHERS. She leans back and licks her lips triumphantly.
Consider the Teacher Pwned.

GO WATCH NOW!

David Dillehunt and Bryan Kasik's "Craptastic"

Critics, even imaginary ones like me, have to 'fess up to their partialities and conflicts of interest, so I wasn't sure how to approach "Craptastic": it's written and directed by a good friend of mine, so if I say it's a forward-thinking masterpiece of sketch comedy, you'll be right to be suspicious: the thing is called "CRAPTASTIC"! On the other hand, if I shit on it, my friend will raise zombie roosters to torment my sleep. So let's agree on this middle ground: it has NO BUDGET, but it's very funny- if you tune in to the wavelength of this Virginia troupe who were behind the Belly-Flavored Candy sketch show. Add a few bucks and decor, and the sketches are perfectly worthy to be part of "The State" (an obvious inspiration). I liked it. Will you? Do you like crazy skits shot on someone's yard? Have YOU ever shot crazy skits in your yard? Watch out for cameos from Bill Paxton, Tom Waits, and Rachel Dratch.
Not really.

Craptastic Trailer (HD) from DND Films on Vimeo.

Gavin Hood's "X-Men Origin: Wolverine" VS. Bill Jemas, Joe Quesada, and Paul Jenkins' "Origin"

While everyone else complained about the generic crapiness that was Gavin Hood's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine", was I the only person sad to see that the story had very little to do with all the retro-active revelations we were given in the Emily Bronte-meets-Jack-London "Origin", written by Joe Quesada, Paul Jenkins, Bill Jemas, and beautifully illustrated by Andy Kubert and Richard Isanove? Had the powers that be thought to melt Wolverine's Canadian- and- Yakuza backgrounds into a powerful saga that would have been great. Instead I was given an origin that had nothing to do with the character I love, and I DO love Wolverine as a character. But what I like about him has disappeared in these movies as he's become more dour. Wolverine used to be a grizzled guy with a sense of humour. He wasn't Batman. He was a fellow you could kick back with.
Ryan Reynolds does try hard as Wade Wilson/ Deadpool, and Taylor Kitsch's Gambit gets a long overdue screen cameo, and Liev Schreiber chomps in. But there's just such a vulgar chasm between the comics and this joyless movie.
Who would ever have thought a superhero story had to be dumbed up for the movies?

Might As Well Live!

First I shot myself, but the gun I bought was plastic.
Then I hung myself, but the rope was too elastic.
I went right for the oven, but I hadn't paid my gas bill
I swallowed lots of aspirin, but threw up every las' pill
I tried to cut myself, but the razor was too blunt!
Dorothy Parker was right. Golly, how I hate that @&#^!

Richard Hawley's "Truelove's Gutter"

Like the Arctic Monkeys, Richard Hawley hails from Sheffield, but theirs is a divey Sheffield: his is a romantic one, where offerings of tears melt in morning dew, with lovers meeting by the river banks for an afternoon roll, and with an alabaster moon to howl at in the grief of night. He just wasn't made for these times, which is why one of the most sophisticated English-language singers is still an obscurity, at least in the States. If you're taken back by lush arrangements, you coud mistake Hawley, (who once shredded with Pulp) for a Michael Buble type, but his lyrics and vocals come from a much more mature place. It's not necessarily that lyrics need to be downers to suggest maturity: it's just those hills of joy only seem mature from someone who's scrambled through mud to get there. Happiness is only admirable when it emerges from a triumph over sadness, from an awareness of despair, and not if it's the deluded, stamped-on smile of the infantile. This is a middle-aged lover's album, and middle-aged love is, and should be, about resignation, forgiveness, contentment and ease."For Your Lover, Give Some Time" states it all.


Every Richard Hawley album comes with an insta-classic. On "Lady's Bridge" it was "Valentine"; here, it's "Open Up Your Door". That's the song HALLUCINA'S house band plays when it's beyond hours of decency and people have to go home to sleep with whomever because there isn't much choice. I don't know, maybe he's filched it from someone else, but listen to that song two or three times and then try to tell me it hasn't lived in your heart since 1958.


http://www.shropshirestar.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/hawleypressphoto11.jpg

Tite Kubo's "Zombie Powder"

Somewhere on Volume 3, "Zombie Powder" emerges from the overly familiar future-Western world of Yasuhiro Nightow's work to offer some truly distinctive sights. It came too late: the series was cancelled and creator Tite Kubo had a breakdown, but don't cry for him, Hiroshima. He's since cashed in on that sweet "Bleach" money.
I would only describe "Zombie Powder" if I was collecting 12 magical tears of boredom across a punkish wasteland, accompanied by an eager underage sidekick and an H-Cup perk-girl. The only things of interest here are the fights centered around a character called Balmunk the Magnificent and his bizarre killer circus. Up to that moment, Kubo has confused weirdly-shaped hair with characterization, but here he stretches his imagination as circus tents morph into checkered snakes, big boxes sprout murderous limbs, and flesh trains engulf our characters.


"Zombie Powder" is worth checking out for those scenes, but don't go out of your way for it unless you already read massive amounts of manga.

BELOW: A "ZP" character in a rare "reality" appearance.

Lope De Vega's Selected Works- "La Gatomaquia"

Reading that Guide to World Comics reminded me of how confined even the most educated of us can be by language and geography. As part of what's basically an ex-British colony, you know Shakespeare; if I suggested you didn't know what happens to Romeo and Juliet, you might be offended. But it would be rare indeed if you'd read anything by the literary monstrosity that is Lope De Vega: the Phoenix, as he's know in Spain; the Monster of Nature, as his awed/mocking contemporary Miguel de Cervantes called him.

Lope is the closest playwright to Shakespeare in genius, and might have surpassed him in quality if he hadn't surpassed him- and pretty much everyone else- in quantity. Critics attribute some 1,800 plays to him: at that cranked out rate, there was plenty of mediocre plot-recycling, but some 100 of those are considered masterpieces. One of them, "Fuenteovejuna" or "The Sheep Well" is an obligatory inclusion in any reasonable anthology of world drama. When an arrogant commander of the Order of Calatrava mistreats the villagers of occupied Fuenteovejuna- and rapes a local girl- the upset townsmen take revenge. The King's wrathful envoys try to solve the murder, only to find that the united villagers agree that "Fuenteovejuna did it." Power to the people. Mob lynchings are not cool, but "Fuenteovejuna- todos a una" is still a kick-ass rallying cry against tyranny in the Spanish-speaking world.

As if shelves of plays weren't imposing enough, Lope left behind some 3,000 sonets, a few experiments in a novelistic field that was just taking off, and some large poems, one of which, "The Gatomaquia", anticipates T.S. Eliot- and Andrew Lloyd Webber- by some 4 centuries: it's an antromorphic mock-epic about fighting-and-romancing cats. T.S. Eliot must have been at least partially aware of it when writing "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". Specifically, I find it hard to believe he wasn't inspired by Lope De Vega's fanciful cat addressing: (Garraf, Clawhilda, Micifoof, Marramaquiz, Mowlero, etc... how are they NOT the ancestors to Growltiger, Grizabella, Mistoffeles, Mungojerry, and Macavity, down to the preponderance of Ms?)
BELOW: A Spanish production of "La Gatomaquia". Is your, er, "memory" stirred?

CRITERION: Milos Forman's "The Firemen's Ball"

Not THAT kind of fireman's balls!
This kind:

It might take someone from a Communist country to fully appreciate the great satire that is Milos Forman's "The Firemen's Ball." (Unfortunately, I'm it.) Not that this is a closed-in allegory: it works perfectly well as an anarchic comedy about an inept crew of aging firemen trying to stage a grand ball and fucking up in every possible way: the wrong person wins the absurd beauty contest, a mini-riot of lechery breaks out, and every valuable item slowly disappears from the station, while an unattended fire rages outside.

"The Firemen's Ball" prompted Milos Forman's defection from then-Czechoslovakia, reputedly with the help of admirer Francois Truffaut: irreverence and totalitarianism have some sort of immemorial feud. Ironically, it was banned "forever" from Czechoslovakia, but the movie's still around: the country not so much. This a pointed political tale of 1968 (there's a band playing throughout the ball, and it segues at one point into "From Me to You"). But it's aged magnificently: there's always a plethora of countries where the incompetent, self-important old guard are still organizing their corrupt, lecherous events for a dying leader (no one dares tell him he's dying!), while everyone's busy stealing what they can before the building flames down.



It's just not as funny outside the ball, and the movie offers one truly poignant moment as an old man watches his life burn away before his eyes- and prays. At the end of the day, all the old fools have left him out in the cold.

Lou Reed's "Transformer"

"I've been told/ That you've been bold/ With Harry, Mark and John."
Or:
"You made me forget myself. I thought I was someone else, someone good."
I'm not sure which is my favorite line from Lou Reed's "Transformer", but those two duke it out for casual heartbreak.

Most artists are either good or bad or somewhere in the steady middle ground of acceptability, but no one like Reed to just forget who he is, to dive from GREAT to AWFUL. That's not even a dig at "Metal Machine Music"- which believe it or not has been redeemed by history, judging by the staticky gas I get to hear from my local college station every time I try to be "hip". (I'm not saying anyone can LISTEN to MMM, I'm just saying it's influential.) I'm thinking instead about bad turns in the middle of otherwise excellent songs which we always charitably choose to believe are "humorous" ("Surely a writer as knowing as Reed, a student of Nelson Algren's, can only produce such terrible lines as a JOKE!")

I'm only a sporadic visitor to Reed's work: after "NYC Man" I naturally digested "Transformer" (which if you know anything about me it's that I love it), then "Berlin" (which I love and fear), then "Rock 'N Roll Animal" (messy and bombastic but fun) and then, this could be my mistake- a quick succession of "Sally Can't Dance" and "Growing Up in Public": baffling albums that place ocassionally funny and cutting lines in self-defeating musical contexts, or else find Reed half-absent from his own performance- I'm not even sure if he was shootin' up at the time, but if I was him I would go with that as an excuse.
There was also a valiant attempt at "MMM": 14 minutes of the thing, which is two more than Reed himself managed- and then I moved on to someone else's catalogue (there's always someone else's catalogue to lure me). I'm repeatedly told I'm missing out on some '80s greatness. I'll get to it, I'll get to it.

But now I get back to "Transformer"- or, as I think of it, "the one with the Frankenstein cover". Its prominence in the soundtrack to "Adventureland" has had me revisiting it. I used to think of it as an extension from the Velvet Underground's "Loaded" but now I see it as one of the best Bowie albums that aren't Bowie albums... unless you accept, as I do, that a producer is more than a valet to a musician, in which case this is definitely Bowie's show. "Transformer" IS closer in sonic spirit to "Ziggy Stardust" than "White Light/ White Heat". Bowie and Reed have always had overlapping lyrical concerns, but here the student lends the master drums and guitars and doo-wop choruses: "Transformer" is really about a knowing fan helping his seedy idol get a song on the radio.
That they did with the starkly beautiful "Walk on the Wild Side"- an undisputed masterpiece. Lines like "shaved her legs and then he was a she" and "she never lost her head, even when she was giving head" can still make first-time listeners go like: "WHOA!" Rap may have ruined shock, but when treated this honestly, shock, and appreciation- return, because Reed is not mocking his transients and tranvestites: the words are blunt but he gives them dignity.


There are two more GREAT songs in "Transformer":

1-The inmensely Bowie-esque "Satellite of Love", (NOT, recall, "Shed a Light on Love"). Check it as Reed guest-stars in U2's mysteriously whiny cover during the ZOO TV tour:


2- "Perfect Day"- Perfect song, but since perfection is boring, you must watch in this video as Lou Reed is accompanied by Bono, Bowie, that chick from Morcheeba, Suzanne Vega, Elton John, Emmylou Harris, Shane McGowan from the Pogues, Garfield the Cat and even... hahahaha.... Boyzone. The combined amount of cheerful celebrities can't mask the fact that "You're going to reap just what you sow" is the scariest ending to a love song imaginable.


On the next "Transformer" tier are "Vicious" (Those put-downs!); "Andy's Chest"- a Warholean moment where the Reed weirdness actually resolves in his favor; and "Make Up"- with its trombone's call for gay power. (In Reed's world, "slick little girls" putting on Max Factor # whatever are seldom actual GIRLS)
You can argue amongst yourselves where "Hangin' Round", "Wagon Wheel", "I'm So Free" and "Goodnight Ladies" go- they're not shameful failures but they simply don't match the above stuff. ("New York Telephone Conversation" could, if it wasn't such a snippy throwaway.)

So that's my breakdown of "Transformer": one masterpiece for all time, two great songs, three that are pretty good, and a bunch that don't entirely work. That says it all about the man, doesn't it?

Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks' "The Essential Guide to World Comics",

A foreword by "Watchmen"'s Dave Gibbons lays out the situation: you need some sort of "Essential Guide to World Comics" because it's a big-ass globe and we're tiny, tiny people. I find it disheartening that so much of this is inaccessible to American readers: yes, I know my Tintin and my Asterix and my highly-marketable Marsupilami; I know the Brit invaders like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison; and I've been known to dabble in Tezuka and Masamune Shirow's stuff. But did I know about the inmense output by Filipino artists? About South African soccer sagas? About Indian superheroes like Peter Milligan's Rogan Gosh?

It's a dizzying array- and I was made slightly dizzier by trying to read the tiny illustrations. This book ought to have been on a much larger format, with entire pages dedicated to the artistic samples. But I suppose we've had centuries of advances in the magnifying lens industry- gotta keep those folks busy.

I was on the conflicted side about the rather large section on Cuban comics. I felt some vicarious pride (it's just one of four Latin countries represented, along with Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.) Some sadness: no better place than the comics to watch Cuban's genuine love affair with Communism ossify into propaganda and then descend into hungry disillusion. The passages on Cuba avoid politics, (which, call me biased, means ENDORSING politics), but the authors can't hide the fact that the '70s and '80s were the apex- and end. When there ain't toilet paper, there ain't comics.
But few things could tarnish my childhood memories of Cuba's greatest creations: the above-pictured mambi Elpidio Valdez by Juan Padron, (the closest thing Cuba has to a national superhero), and Oli's green-hued Captain Plin. (Padron, BTW, is Cuba's greatest animator- not a crowded field- and more "famous" in the states by his animated satire "Vampires in Havana".

Also a wordlwide hit: "Quinoscopios", Padron's short-film collaborations with Argentinean great Quino, the creator of Mafalda- (think of a very sardonic Charlotte Brown).

3-EP (BONUS TRACK)

FIND OUT LIKE THAT

Didn't wanna find out like that
Notified by a bureaucrat
On a poster at the laundromat
I thought I knew better, but I didn't know squat

Didn't wanna find out from them
Who said they saw you touch the hem
Of her miniature theorem
To that played-out aria from "La Boheme"

Didn't wanna find out from him
As he laughed and said: "That chick can't swim
But I spotted her back at the gym
Hey, we'll all get your chance, dudes, right after Tim."

Didn't wanna find out like this
As she stumbled off her cloud of bliss
And she screamed out: "I've just been kissed
And I would have liked it better if I wasn't so pissed!"

Didn't wanna find out from you
You simply smiled and said: "That's what I do.
Love's not an alley, it's an avenue
And everyone who knows that keeps on walking through
People who have known that keep on walking through."

NOTE FROM HELEN SANDBORG (Drummer, Walmart Greeter.)
I've been fighting with Alvis and Matt so they would allow me to write lyrics for a song, and this one's really personal, which was embarrassing but I figure, what the hell, it's my band too and I'll cry if I want to. So they allowed me to make it as a bonus track. Ok, here's the tale: I was seeing this guy who was really smooth or thought he was really smooth and whatever, maybe I fell for it, and then I was at this party and I looked away for two seconds and I heard his friends talking about how he was making it out with some other girl, and you won't believe this, but he comes up to me and asks me if I want to take a cab home because, get this, "his tires were low on air and he didn't want too much weight in the car"! I didn't even know what to say! I ran off crying but then I come back to the party to apologize thinking I'd been rude and there he is in the parking lot in the backseat of his stupid Camaro with Miss Ameriwhore and from the way the car was bouncing, let me tell you, the air in the tires was JUST FINE.
Whatever, I probably dodged a bullet loaded with gonorrhea. Fuck men. I'm not going to feel bad about it.

Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho's "Tokyo!"

In the vein of- although not affiliated to- the "Je T'Aime" series that has covered Paris and more recently New York, "Tokyo!" is a tryptich by talented people: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax (who made "Pola X" and "Lovers on the Bridge" back in the '90s), and Bong Joon-Ho, director of South Korea's highest grossing- and perhaps most famous- horror movie, "The Host".

So why isn't this "Aishiteru Tokyo"? The shorts are too eccentric, they examine the city briefly with a nervous gaijin's- or Korean's- eyes before setting down to the little stories that take place in surreal film-maker realms. Leos Carax's clip in particular will not thrill any tourism boards: it's more or less literally about a Caucasian shit creature that crawls out of Tokyo's sewers to go on racist killing sprees. It's called "Merde", and it's as unpleasant as that.



Gondry's segment, by contrast, starts as a realistic story about a country couple adjusting to a metropolis that careens by them like a concrete satellite, and then turns into a very Japanese oddity that possibly pays homage to Kobo Abe's metamorphoses. Abe, one of my favorite Japanese novelists, made a career of exploring the implications of Kafka's work in classics like "Woman in the Dunes" and "The Ruined Map". Often his characters would get entangled in bizarre situations, they would turn into sticks or boxes or radishes or what not, and there wouldn't even be a wink in the reader's direction. Similarly, Gondry has his female character inexplicably mutate into a wooden chair, a disturbing development through which she discovers a long-sought usefulness.



Bong Joon-Ho's "Shaking Tokyo" is the most approachable story here- gently weird but not off-putting, it follows a hikikomori as he's forced out of his apartment by an earthquake... and love. "Hikikomori" is a Japanese word for a willful, almost perversely resourceful hermit, an umbrella diagnosis that Western medicine would gladly label as a variety of social and neural disorders. Supposedly something like 1% of Japanese are hikikomori, go on an anti-social withdrawal and never get invited to parties. These weirdoes are just locked up in their apartments, chatting online, playing videogames or reading their comics, listening to their angry "rock" music, obsessively watching TV, evading their family and sticking to a very small circle of friends.
FREAKS!!!