Cormac McCarthy's Going To Be on Oprah

No shit. She's picked The Road for her book club. So many questions. Is this a hoax? Could they possibly sit across from each other on two plush couches and jive about novels? Why would he break his media silence on Oprah? Why not?

"Mr. McCarthy respects her work, admires what she has accomplished, has an awareness of her book club, and thought it would be interesting to participate in the conversation with Oprah," McCarthy's publicist Paul Bogaards of Alfred A. Knopf, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Films, Part II

Last night IFC aired Festival Express and William Eggleston in the Real World. The second is about the photographer, an incredible combination of Southern blue-blood and artistic queerness. You can toss some late night whiskey into the equation as well--in fact, it wouldn't hurt to inhale a few while you watch. Two observations:

1. Mississippians all have noses of distinction. Viz....



2. If language differentiates experience and time, photography rescales the world by shaping perception.

Photography might offer the best medium to marry aesthetics and politics. We hereby use this as a poor excuse to produce, sans comment, one of Orwell's better self-reflections:

"And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally."

Do you really ever need an excuse for Orwell in the morning?

MP3 on the other side...


Festival Express followed a 1970 chartered train that boasted The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy, and the Band, among others, as its freight. The locomotive du rock chugged across Canada, stopping for shows in major cities. Financially, the escapade was a bust--something about kids wanting in the gate free, police altercations, and a multiplying number of demonstrators. But it was an artistic smash, in effect an unceasing jam across the countryside. Each rail car took its own genre. If you wanted to get in on some Blues, you had to leave the Bluegrass car, walk through the mess huddled around the pedal steel, and find a seat among Guy's coterie.

Compelling the film is not. But it's worth viewing for evidence of the bands on stage and off, in their element. There's a rendition of Dylan's "Ain't No Cane" that's more stoned out and ramshackle than you can imagine. It's salvaged only by Rick Danko's light-headed exuberance and Jerry Garcia's knowing electric guitar.

Footage of the Band is the most interesting. There are scarce images of them together on the train, while The Grateful Dead might as well be the star of the show. On stage, however, they're tight. Levon Helm sings like good Arkansas leather. In an unforgivable bit of direction, the camera too often focuses on Robbie Robertson's goofy face (apparently in imitation of Trotsky) singing along in harmony. If you didn't know better, you'd think he was the lead singer. Not only is he not the lead singer, he's part of the minority of non-singers in the act. (Garth Hudson's a mute, and our friend Steve tells us Robertson sounds like an owl being hit by a Plymouth).

Watching the Band we realized we just weren't accustomed to seeing them alone per se. We kept looking for someone else on stage because that's what we're used to. The Last Waltz, our only other glimpse, rarely shows them without some special accompaniment. And when it isn't Paul Butterfield (he deserved better applause) or Neil Diamond, it often feels like Martin Scorsese is part of the band. Then, of course, there are the spectres of Ronnie Hawkins and, especially, Bob Dylan who always hover about them.

"Ain't No More Cane" from the Basement Tapes.

Films, Part I

First of all, hopefully everyone agrees that Sam Rockwell is a national treasure. Safe Men suggested it. Watching Galaxy Quest

On Gary Oldman: "I love his ballsiness. Whether you agree with his choices or not, the guy's got 'cajones'--he's got balls."

again confirmed it (throw Box of Moonlight in there somewhere; and while you're doing things, look for Rainn Wilson in Galaxy Quest too). "Look around, can you form some sort of rudimentary lathe?"--no one else could pull this off with his confidence or the general good-natured bongo-ness he embodies. Let's pray the Coen Brothers find a use for him.

We were lucky enough to stumble upon The Host at showtime. It's recommended--that's all we're going to say. The Belcourt Theatre is a marvelous asset for Nashville: independent films, cold beer on tap, and ticket prices less than the mall box office. After a matinee you can browse through the used merchandise at Bookman/Bookwoman or stroll through Vanderbilt's lovely magnolia-filled campus. After a later show just hop around the corner for a half dozen potation spots.

Gotta love the Belcourt

At home it's been all documentaries thanks to the magi at IFC and Sundance. We mentioned two about music in an earlier post. We forgot to mention catching When We Were Kings. Although it's officially about the Rumble in the Jungle (and maybe Norman Mailer and George Plimpton), any film that has footage of James Brown performing inevitably becomes about music as well.

Grrrrrrrrr

MP3 functionality? Not so fast, my friend. We're at the whim of Divshare.

Is is loading? How about now?

Now?

Could be this handicapped machine. Please excuse our mess....

...Just heard Nick Saban's throwing his hat in the ring for the Kentucky basketball job. The short list in Lexington now is Billy Donovan, Mike Krzyzewski, and John Wooden.

Klieg Lights

Now that we've gained MP3 functionality we're not going to waste it on hipster capitalism. Our mania's going to be for quality over and above novelty. Otis Redding beats Ratzinger and the Cardinals every time. But that's not to say something new and sparkly won't ever catch out eye. In fact, we're rather fond of How I Became the Bomb at the moment.

There'll be a number of New Orleans selections, especially in the next few weeks. If you don't know James Booker, then you will. If you've never seen a Mardi Gras Indian, then you've never seen Big Bird duded up to go clubbing.

Our semi-inaugural, semi-signature track: The Kinks' "Have a Cuppa Tea" from Muswell Hillbillies.

Hello, Louisville

We're rescuing the musical republic by arrogating one act at a time. Today's golden child is Wax Fang, a seamless trio from Louisville, Kentucky. Their sound is something like--if we may engage in the intellectual speciousness of le critique musique--Cat Stevens' quavering voice and Led Zeppelin's bent for elliptical thunder pitched together in a centrifuge. (Elliptical, by the way, is usually a bullshit catchword for folks afflicted with murky thinking and verbal imprecision). Let's go ahead and throw Neutral Milk Hotel and the Butthole Surfers in the pot while we're at it. It's smart, impassioned stuff. And, if just to see Scott Carney wring out his guitar, the live show's much recommended.

It's Carney, of course, from lebowskifest.com.

Jeff Skilling

So we said that American Plutocrat is not the exclusive parish of wastrels and weasels. It's still not. But after watching Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, we couldn't pass over former COO, Jeff Skilling. For the ends and outs of his misdeeds, see Wiki. We'll just say he was a casuist of the first class, in love with monumental ideas and his own clever inventions. Perhaps the most important of these was mark to marketing accounting: tallying future profits on the books, even if those profits were never actually going to materialize.

For example, Enron is building a power plant in India. The execs discover what everyone else has suspected for a long time: the Indians can't pay for the power. The project will be shut down. Since the high-ups at Enron are the only ones that know this for sure, they go ahead and mark down the future earnings that the Indian power plant would have made if it were running. That' a few hundred million on the ledger at the end of the year. There's no real money, but the numbers inflate the stock. The execs then cash in through their stock options. The company looks good, but what you get is a sound financial shell with an abysmally hollow center.

One reason he's an ass:

Harvard Business School interviewer to Jeff Skilling: Are you smart?

Jeff Skilling's reply: I'm fucking smart.

Watch the film. Oh yeah, one word: California. If Enron indeed had a conscious hand in the state's rolling blackouts, it's a mortal sin punishable by the ravaging fires of Hell.

Engelbert Humperdinck

So when did F/X stop being the repository for Fox detritus and start airing top shelf programming?

If you've seen Dressed to Kill, you're in awe of Eddie Izzard. His stand-up routine makes history toothsome for stupid Americans. If you've seen Good Will Hunting and you're in your twenties, you probably have a little crush on Minnie Driver--shovel-cheeked Amazon of Albion. The Cover Two adeptly runs down the pair's new show on F/X, The Riches. It's been getting good reviews so far, especially for its scrutiny of class in a putatively classless society. It dares to ask the unaskable: Just what is the American Dream, and who do you have to cheat to attain it?

We don't see much TV. However, last night we caught The Black Donnellys, NBC's mid-season replacement of the far superior Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. We're going to cut TBD some slack since we haven't seen all the episodes. Still, it was shambolic, implausible, and paced for a dromedary. This Irish clan of handsome hoodlums utterly lacks reason and charisma. We found ourselves hoping they would all get exploded, or at least one character would spike the inanity with some remotely sexual action (like with the big-foreheaded girl in training for the Bene Gesserit). Watching the literally tight-lipped Jonathan Tucker mope around for half an hour--in the stead of clever plotting--is not only dull but also patronizing. Maybe the show will improve as the grand narrative coalesces. For now we can only wish the black in the title had a small relation to humor.

Film Aubades

Some really good news this morning. What, prospects of gainful employment? Fie! A pox on that and its mother. We're aping Ignatius Reilly, even as the spring lillies mock us.

Instead we're availing ourselves of the Samsung plasma screen and HD and adventitious airing of two music docs.

The subject of the first, New York Doll, is an important though slightly macabre footnote in the history of rock 'n' roll. The film follows former bassist of the proto-punk group New York Dolls, Arthur "Killer" Cane, as he reunites with his bandmates in 2004. After their breakup Arthur spent his days strung out and spiteful of David Johansen's kitschy commercial success. He hit bottom and jumped from the kitchen window of his third story apartment. Curiously, he didn't literally hit bottom, at least not squarely, as the building's entrance canopy bounced him onto the sidewalk. Having been unexpectedly rescued from death, he found succor with the Latter Day Saints.

Long story short: Arthur prays. Jesus helps get the band back together. Arthur seems like a guy who's spent too many rounds in the ring, but he's happy. His new carbonation-free life has meaning. Then he dies suddenly of leukemia in July of 2004.

The other film is about a real heavyweight: Tom Dowd, the meister behind the curtain at Atlantic Records. Not only perhaps the greatest recording engineer in the history of popular music, he also had a hand in the Manhattan Project. Hmm, if we assign moral values to historical events, the atom bomb would seem to mitigate the invention of eight-track recording (with a nod to Les Paul). But then we remember that history isn't perspicuous to those who are making it, and Dowd had his deft fingerprints on the most important music in a century.

We're just going to throw a few things out there, and you can decide for yourself.

• Otis Blue (!!!)


• "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"


• Ray Charles


• John Coltrane


• Charles Mingus


• The Drifters


• Wilson Pickett's "Hey Jude" (with Duane Allman)


• The Stax/Atlantic partnership (How about catching the Stax revue that toured Europe in '67? The MG's backing Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Rufus Thomas and others. For more on Stax, watch Only the Strong Survive.)


• "Layla"


• The Allman Brothers (We've decided that the Brothers' jazz-jammy sound is the closest analogue to My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves. The latter without the swampiness.)


• Skynyrd and ilk


• Ruth Brown

The title of the work is Tom Dowd & the Language of Music. Dowd also died shortly after the completion of his film.

We'll write something on You See Me Laughin,' a portrait of Oxford blues label Fat Possum Records and its sundry artists as soon as we finally see the first fifteen minutes.

One-Thumb Down Review

There's only one thing the Nashville Scene feels more ambivalent about than The Whigs: and that is downy, sloe-eyed chow puppies.

Old picture from arktimes.com.

Up next were THE WHIGS, who might have been brilliant, but wedged between The Spinto Band and THE FEATURES were kind of hard to make out. PARKER GISPERT's growly melodies are tired, but the trio bashed out simple, gut-level tunes with such confidence that it was hard for us to keep still. Boys in khaki pants and worn baseball caps and girls who claim to like "all types of music" were in thrall. So while the band won't be refashioning any wheels, they're a solid new contender in frat-friendly, Southern rock 'n' roll. Speaking of solid contenders, you know when you go to see a band and they play a lot of new songs that nobody really knows yet, so the band frontload their set with them and the crowd endures them tepidly as they wait for the hits and old songs they love? This Features show was nothing like that. Their entire set was hotly received by the packed crowd, and their mix of oldies and new stuff was capped with a searing final half-hour that included "The Gates of Hell," a mental "Mosis Ptosis" and an uproarious encore.

Making French Sexy Again

If we're doing weekly features, why not do a weekly man crush? This week's victim...

Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister of France.

What makes him sexy?

• His real name: Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin.


• His birthplace: North Africa, like Camus. Morocco in Villepin's case.


• His hair: Full and silver like a ravenous fox.


• Typical French suavity: He could have danced with Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut.

Evidence:
Montaigne looked like this, only better and without the sash.

Beyond Black & White

Louisville's silver-spooned poet, Will Oldham, has forsworn the hushed tones of his balladeer persona Bonnie Prince Billy for the moment. Perhaps in the primordium of a new, less regal avatar, he's dallying in the graphic arts as the guest editor for Zoetrope: All-Story magazine. We don't know much about Francis Ford Coppola's pub--only that it's a potential screenplay factory (fine print) and Woody Allen's in the current issue. Maybe not the best place to break in.

Foreign Affairs

With stops this week on All Things Considered and The Daily Show, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, is making the promotional rounds for his new book Second Chance. His most intriguing subject--at least so far in his interviews--has been, one, his evaluation of the foreign policy of the past three presidencies. Proving himself above robotic partisanship, he rates Clinton rather poorly. And, in fact, last night with Charlie Rose, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin echoed Brzezinski's statement that America wasted its capital opportunity for a pax international after the fall of the Soviet Union. The other subject of note has been the suggestion of a possible "global balkanization." In the case of the second, he posits the treacherous morass that would ensare the U.S. and mortally threaten its global ascendancy if the conflict in the Middle East expands into Iran. If such occurs--and Brzezinski's prognostications equal more than doomsday commercialism--Pakistan would indubitably join the war's theater. And Americans forces would run schizoid combating a disjointed and polycephalic enemy.

Having just become acquainted with the gem-like acuity of Hendrik Herzberg (former chief speechwriter for Carter), we're immeasurably impressed here with the proponderance of z's and intellectual heft of the Carter administration--an estimation irrelative of the current levels of incompetence at 1600 Pennsylvania. Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland and became a U.S. citizen in 1958, when he was thirty. Surely, the foreign element apparently represented in Carter's staff reflects the greatest American ideal. To make our way diplomatically, we should be parading out our eclecticism and inclusiveness. Our face now has a monolithic pallor--made up of a cadre of paranoid Texans and neocons sucking at the corporate teat--instead of resembling the world's most benevolent custom house. Then again, maybe that's not who we really are.

Racial profiling is fine, as long as it means making a Muslim Secretary of State.

Social Sublime: Herzog

An early entry this week, and perhaps the first of many. Indices point to Esquire as today's impermanent center of the universe. Why? Fawning over the Classic City, of course. Julian "Doro" (also spelled Dorio, D'Oro, and Doughrreoh) of The Whigs has just been awarded the Esky for best drummer. Apparently, it's down to Julian, The MG's Al Jackson, Art Blakey, Ginger Baker, and Keith Moon for drummer of the A.D. We think the safe money's on our Athens man.

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The measured and astute never boasts the same arresting power of the absurd. Otherwise, we'd be reproducing Chuck Klosterman's disappointment at the constant frittering away of personal responsibility. No, we're going for absurdity, currently embodied by director Werner Herzog (friend to Klaus Kinski, creator of Fitzcarraldo). In his defense it may just be that individuality and authenticity, as well as colossal stubbornness, have the first appearance of crazy to folks accustomed to putting square pegs in square holes. But then there's this:

"I was shooting a film with an entire cast of midgets, and one caught fire and was run over by a car. He was completely unhurt, and I was so astonished, I told the cast that if they all escaped filming unscathed, I would jump into a cactus for their amusement. And they did, so I jumped into a cactus."

So I jumped into a cactus. We like to imagine that the ghost of Gram Parsons was also there. When Herzog finally goes, the earth will shudder. Weirdness aside, he's got it right artistically, "Facts do not interest me much. Facts are for accountants. Truth creates illumination." For more on this topic see, "Doctorow's Brain and Other Special Problems in Literary Realism" by Chris Bachelder in The Believer.

52 and Some Odd Flavors

Before toppling off the edge of the planet, we've landed in Nashville for now. In the interest of returning to regular posting (and in the hidden spirit of hipster taxonomy), we're pondering an installment of new weekly features. Forms are so much easier to fill out--and often so much more fun and enlightening--than lucubratory capsules of the modern narrative. Sigh. The cherry-picked propositions:

A. American Plutocrat: Not necessarily the province of egregious wastrels and weasels--see former Tyco CEO and procurer of Michelangelo's vodka-spraying ice penis, Dennis Kozlowski. Sometimes we're just looking for capitalist dynamos and sui generis bigwigs operating under the local radar.

B. Venal Politocracy (title under construction): Simony, graft, prevarication, and vanilla types of demoralization of the body politic. For recent examples, see Walter Reed and the V.A., or the unprecedented case of federal attorneys sacked en masse.

C. Social Sublime: A pithy adducement, from the poetic to the perverse and vulgar. For our first witness, we summon starlet toughie Michelle Rodriguez. After a hit-and-run and a separate DUI charge and mucho community service, she gave us this karat: "Eventually, you're going to see me do some Jane Fonda-type shit. I'm keeping it hush right now. But it's going to be fucking hot. I'm going to make giving back sexy and fuckable." Thanks to New York magazine for continuing to adjudicate arrant bullshit. Thanks to Ms. Rodriguez for making "fuckable" part of our daily parlance.


We're also thinking about indulging our inherent English dorkiness with a focus on choice uses of hendiadys, e.g. "the sound and the fury" as opposed to "the furious sound." See C. above for a pretty fuckable illustration.

Ciao, kittens.