DISQUS

You nailed it. The impression of Lipton that Will Ferrell used to do on SNL was good not because he looked or sounded that much like Lipton, but because his over-the-top unctuousness was so recognizable. I always figured that the whole point of the show was to make money for the Actors Studio, and Lipton had very deliberately left his pride at the studio door.

I'd never thought about it before, but Grace Kelly was a sort of Americanized Deborah Kerr: the aristocratic blonde angel with an obvious emotional strength, including least a hint of raw sexuality, under all that hauteur. Like Sharon Stone, only under control. Okay, that's not fair, I actually like Sharon Stone, but restraint carried its own power, and it seems to be lost.

Just because they sucked live most of the time doesn't mean that they sucked live all of the time. And even they thought that they should never have released their live album--Cameron Crowe in his notes for their first box set refers to the performances on TSRTS as "achingly average." Plus, adding extra musicians to fill out the sound in live performance didn't become common practice until after they had disbanded. So take them for what they were--a mostly studio band that could under the right circumstances turn modified versions of their recorded work into compelling live material. Hell, the Replacements were glorified for doing shitty shows half the time. Why use a different standard for LZ?

Excellent post. It's great to hear from someone with your perspective, having interviewed her over the years. Like a lot of people who appear perfect in the spotlight, it wasn't just that she was only human once out of it, but that she had worked very hard to create that illusion of perfection. And all that hard work eventually added up to...a lousy marriage, an unhappy life. I remember reading an article at the time of her death that included an example of Rainier publicly humiliating her in such a way that he could pass it off as a joke. Storybook marriages are for storybook characters, not human beings.

When Isabella Rossellini in Wild at Heart posed in front of a dark background with out-of-focus flames in the corner of the frame, wagging her tongue while looking directly into, and walking straight towards, the camera, and instead of looking shocking, creepy, or cool, it just looked dumb, then I understood that David Lynch was only human. I've seen and enjoyed a lot of his work since, and imagine I will again, but he's one of those artists who never seems to step back, look at what he's created, and say to himself, "This was an interesting idea, but does it actually work?"

Glad you wrote this, Jason, as it makes me want to check this song out. That matters because I listened carefully to "Radio Nowhere" and agree with you completely--it's lame. So I had written off the album on that basis. I'd bet the rent money that RN was chosen as the single by some record company stooge doing a paint-by-numbers audience profile.

I remember seeing Hellzapoppin on TV about forty-five years ago and have dim but happy memories of it. I think it was a topic of family conversation for several years after--it's that strong. Free Olsen and Johnson! Release Hellzapoppin on DVD!

There's a good overview here.

Very good, Maud. I was introduced to her work about twelve years ago and pretty much devoured her collected stories. Like other fiction writers who began as poets, her command of language was at a very, very high level, but her concern for real-world matters (feminism being the most obvious) kept her rooted to the, well, real world. We were lucky to have her.

It's worth pointing out that one of Curtis Mayfield's lesser known legacies is his influence on Jimi Hendrix. The Impressions-era guitar work on songs like "People Get Ready," with a lot of gentle yet still somehow powerful double-string playing, which falls between single-string soloing on one hand and full chording on the other, shows up in an altered form in songs like "One Rainy Wish" and "Little Wing."
And, it just occurred to me that "gentle yet still somehow powerful" may be a pretty good description of Curtis Mayfield's work in general.

Thanks for the post, Shamus. There's a moment in Peter Guralnick's biography when Elvis realizes that he's sabotaged his own career as an actor by putting out nothing but schlock for several years in a row. It makes for sad reading. Elvis's career as a serious actor makes another topic in the long list of alternate-universe histories.

Thank you for wading through all that crap and reporting on it in such a diligent yet entertaining fashion. Me, I wouldn't have had the stomach.

For some of these people, it's as if they want to be Hunter S. Thompson but with "taste," using slash-and-burn rhetoric to skewer their enemies while pretending to uphold standards of civility. A pointless exercise, not least because of the oxymoronic nature of such an effort.

I'm glad you mentioned "truth" first. It hit me last night that under his great gifts for cinematography, screenwriting, directing actors, etc., all talents on display in his work, there was a core of integrity. And that was what made his work special. Being human he was not right all the time, but he was nearly always honest about what he felt. Extremely rare, and not show biz at all. When people say that there's really no difference between entertainment and art, Bergman stands as a rebuttal.

And yet there are people who will tell you that the golden age of television is over. Do I foresee a special guest appearance by a certain Mister David Hasselhoff?

Is this singing, I ask you?!

Is it?! Is it?!!

Oh God. How I hate it!

Well, some of it is singing, and the rest of it is in a style that's actually been pretty common since the birth of punk thirty years ago. But how old is your son? If he's a teenager, part of the appeal is probably that you hate it.

Love the photo, love you, disagree. But I'd rather read you and disagree, because you actually know what you're talking about and really do give a shit, than read any of a hundred other writers on the Web on these issues. One more "Ian Curtis was god and the Beatles were shit" post--and that's in the generic sense, it could just as easily be "Tupac was god" or "The Beatles were god"; any kind of intense but airheaded and uninformed low-key bombast--and I will shoot the monitor, innocent though it is.
Frank Zappa pointed out that for most people their choice in music is like their choice in clothes, cars, or wallpaper: they don't care about it much, they just want to project a particular image to the world. Not for everybody, though. Not for all of us.

One could argue (and I do) that his burst of creative output is just as important as the Beatles’ similar stretch in the ’60s, or Dylan’s.
No argument here. It's no surprise that his works from this era have been heavily sampled by hip-hop artists.
Another reason it was wonderful to live while these works were being released (besides how good they were) was because Stevie had been around for years by then (his first big hit was in 1963). So the musical performer that we were all used to and already loved suddenly blossomed into something of a wholly different order. It was like watching magic happen right in front of you.
And those Grammies--Stevie had won for best album two years in a row. When Paul Simon won for "Still Crazy After All These Years" the first thing he said was, "I'd like to thank Stevie Wonder for not releasing an album this year." Wise man, because Stevie won again the next year for "Songs in the Key of Life."

Dennis, your comments are very perceptive, but why write about exactly the same songs we can read about in People magazine? Next time, maybe you should try to cover something really obscure, or hell, even imaginary.

Yeahbut...in every one of his movies that I've seen, the ending is pure treacle. Which is even a worse problem than it seems because the earlier parts of the movies are just as good as you say. Somehow, at the wrap-up, the balance between honey and vinegar shifts badly. Billy Wilder definitely did not do that.

Yes yes yes. And in that scene where Redford has a mini-breakdown, babbling insane variations of his key stump-speech lines, there is (if I remember correctly) another telling moment. He's alone in the back seat of a car, on the way to yet one more campaign appearance, while two aides ride in front. When Redford starts babbling one of the aides turns around, looks at him, then faces front again, likes he's seen such things before, and knows that the candidate will still deliver at the next stop. Like such behavior is a little odd, but nothing worth stopping for. The car, and the campaign, continue on.

Yah, the movie looks awful. And you nail it here: You, me, Bobby DeNiro, Steve Martin, Dusty Hoffman, we all used to be somebody. But we got rich, and our shit got soft, and our edge got as dull as a Republican housewife’s brain. If all these actors had died young, I could pretend that the reason new movies sucked would be due to the fact that the talented people were gone. But they're not. They're still here. They're just doing bad work.

On the other hand...actors don't really make movies. Writers, directors, and producers (in reverse order) do. So the real question might be, where are the Goldmans, Coppolas, and Evanses? As long as Hollywood wants more Michael Bays, and hires all the USC film school grads who are geniuses about production design but morons about writing and acting, we'll keep getting these movies. To put it politely, oy.

For "disciplined" in my previous comment, substitute "boring." Nothing like blunting your point...

I live in Austin. I would be happy to shuffle many of the recent arrivals here off to Buffalo, even though I know that Buffalo does not deserve such treatment.
I think what you're describing is really the same phenomenon as people moving to LA or DC--they see what they think is an exciting lifestyle and are attracted to that for its own sake. The dedication to the actual work itself that characterizes, to take just some examples, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Harry Reid, and Lou Reed, is alien to scenesters. But every scene attracts them.
It's sort of an inversion of Flaubert's famous statement about being disciplined in your life so that you can be outrageous in your art. They just flip that idea on its head.

I've been wandering the web for the last ten minutes looking for references. I feel like a cat that's looking all over the house trying to find the other cat who didn't come back from the vet. I left a longer response over at Dailykos so I'll leave it at that, except to say that this is sad news indeed.

Dan, I honestly hope this doesn't sound like I'm at all unenlightened, but with the names "Gabby," “Marty,” and “Lou,” are you sure...mm...well...let's say, are you sure that Gabby was ever actually Tom Dooley's girlfriend? Now if "Midge" had used the name "Mac," we might have some real pioneers, pre-Sleater-Kinney.