A Belated Birthday Note to Shawn Colvin

Shawn Colvin turned 51 on January 10th. That makes her a Capricorn like me - I turned 25 on January 17th, after all. Perhaps it is the state of my time availability that it takes me three weeks to write this, but the day that NPR told me that tidbit - January 10th was that day, it turns out - I felt compelled to wander to a bus listening, for the hundredth time, to Colvin's "Polaroids."

I want to write out a verse of "Polaroids."
"I was so weary then
the ugly American
thinner than oxygen
tough as a whore

I said you could lie to me
I own what's inside of me
and nothing surprises me
anymore"

The verse, and I suppose the song, is a type of autobiography - a time in New York as an artist and a type of life spent on the edge, poised for a purpose of making art, of "speaking truth" and all those wonderfully appealing and embarrasing-to-say Bohemian lifestyle choices. It's interesting that I was listening to the song 13 or 14 years ago, from her album Fat City on a tape deck in my mom's Toyota Previa as she drove everywhere, humming along to its tune. It's interesting that anyone can write a song whose relevance would not be clear to a listener over a decade later. It required context, though - tough thoughts on life's choices, and some education and thought on great verse. She composes great verses - they're lines that carry you from one glorious, profound idea to another.

Yet Shawn Colvin is not the sort of person who one would think of writing essays about, or birthday notes to. Shawn Colvin is a sort of Lillith-era fluke of a success, winning her 1997 Grammy for Record of the Year for "Sunny Came Home" and going platinum with its album A Few Small Repairs. The year that "Sunny Came Home" was a hit, in fact, I remember friends laughing at the line "Sunny came home with a vengeance" - asking, I suppose reasonably, "how do you come home with a vengeance?!"

Setting aside that I personally enjoy that play on words and phrases, and think "Sunny Came Home" a fairly moving and intricate song, it wouldn't surprise me much if she'd been utterly forgotten. She is, after all, the type of person a young person might hear in his mother's car on her tape deck. Her music is sonorous and pleasant, melodically not risky. She, in a move her managers later described as "ill-advised," made an album of covers in 1994 called Cover Girl - it was bland and poorly timed for her career.

She simply is not the type of artist that takes the type of risks that get a female artist noticed. She is not as meticulous as Lucinda Williams, not iconoclastic like Liz Phair or PJ Harvey, not even ambiguous like Neko Case. She is, simply, a professional. I left her album this past year, These Four Walls, off of my list of the albums of the year simply because it was not, in fact, all that memorable. Yet for the life of me, I can't pick out a bad song on its set.

A couple of years ago, I pulled up an Entertainment Weekly archive of the review of Fat City - a review that gave the album a D+. The writer, Billy Altman, clearly had a bone or two to pick with a certain brand of folk singers. "Things that make you squirm: songwriters who seem to think it's not a song until the page is filled with words; songwriters who seem to think music and lyrics need not be wedded or even living together."

I might not have found that conclusion so far off base the first two times I heard the Colvin song "The Facts About Jimmy." I might have wondered, as I do often about many conventional aritsts, what the appeal of a square, verse-bridge-chorus type female-led song is after a while. Recently I drove home on a Friday night from the U District in Seattle - it was hopping, and people were everywhere, and I, on the way to a friend's house with Korean take-out, did not quite have that type of energy. I heard the song. Colvin's voice in it is thinner than usual, frailer. She sings, at one point, "I used to get drunk to get my spark/ And it used to work just fine/ It made me wretched but it gave me heart/ I miss Jimmy like I miss my wine." She sings of Jimmy as the type of person who says, in the line that concludes each chorus, "There's somebody for everyone." The guitar was safe and soothing. The song has, I think, a loneliness that cannot be described in words. It is a feeling one gets driving home from the U District on a busy Friday night. It is a thinness in a voice that misses Jimmy like it misses wine.

Notes on a Scandal-less movie season

At my 25^th birthday party this week, I knew I must be turning some nondescript adult age as in my kitchen, 5 people were discussing grad school, by the dining room table, 2 guys talked about the recent Seahawks loss, between the two, my friends Dan and Aaron wondered about the real estate future of a new townhouse in Phinney Ridge. So it went. During the week I turned 25, I had a chance to get caught up on movie watching – the Oscars this year essentially predetermined anyway (you heard it here fifteenth! This year’s best picture race will be: The Queen, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, Babel, and Dreamgirls!), it made sense to try and watch some of the movies doomed to being nominated.

Because movies of this kind come with a storm of press and expectations these days, it’s difficult to make objective judgments about them. At least on first glance, or for those paying attention. The end of this past year wasn’t marked by much ceremony for me – I happened to work 16 hours on Christmas Day, 60 the week between Christmas and New Year’s. My yearly sojourn with Entertainment Weekly’s Best of the Year issue was delayed, and if it weren’t, I still would have likely felt disconnected with the year that saw Grey’s Anatomy, a show I don’t care for much, turn into a phenomenon and, as such, find itself and its cast named the Entertainers of the Year by, and thus appearing on the cover of, Entertainment Weekly’s Best of the Year issue.

The thing that drives me nuts about Grey’s Anatomy is something that would likely not have bothered me 5 or 6 years ago. It’s a show with a hint of bravery in that its characters are always seemingly making terrible decisions, as people do. But it seems like bad decisions of its type are more proscribed than they used to be – more “sexy” and made-for-TV salacious, grandly melodramatic, and irritatingly devoid of life. There is, for example, none of the silent gestures employed by the cast of its brilliant timeslot competitor The Office – a show that I wrote had entered sitcomville and headed for death three months ago, only to find itself beyond reinvigorated in its branch closing/ merger with Stamford plotline, becoming something like the most riveting and honest television on the air. Allegedly taking place in Seattle, it has nothing that resembles anything of the life of a person in Seattle. There is, for example, none of the expressway-and-bird-shit-on-strip-club-signs specificity of The Sopranos’ New Jersey, the hide-behind-the-Lincoln-Center marquis cleverness of the far soapier Sex And the City. Grey’s Anatomy annoys twice as often as it succeeds, but more importantly – and this says more about me than it – it just represents too much of a false reality while claiming to comment on the behavior of actual people. When I watch it I see its designer sweaters and elegantly rehearsed brattiness passing off as personality.

What I missed in the convocation of Grey’s Anatomy is the same thing I tend to miss around Oscar time these past few years – a shared knowledge of the obvious conclusion. Each year of the revamped Oscar schedule, the ones that occur in late February as opposed to Spring Break time in March, Oscar voters are required to submit their choices for nominations a week into the new year, meaning that by sheer amounts of time available, only the already-hyped movies will get seen, perpetuating the same myths of what the year’s best work was. These conclusions lead in odd directions – George Clooney’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year, for example – directions I never feel particularly inclined to agree with. So, I saw some of those movies that, until recently, were just names in Oscar Hopeful articles. Each one had something of a surprise involved.

Notes On A Scandal: It’s pure sensationalism – a teacher fucks her 15 year old student! A crazy spinster older teacher uses it to enact an obsession with the teacher! The plot that should be pure kitsch, though, is something else – with Judi Dench as Barbara, the older, obsessive, note-taking teacher, it becomes a puzzled, fascinating study of loneliness. In voiceover, Dench says, in one scene, that the younger teacher, Sheba, played with Grey’s Anatomy flightiness by Cate Blanchett (a good thing, in this case, as the character demands it), has “never known the long term sting of loneliness… She’s never known what it’s like to arrange one’s weekend around a visit to the launderette.” The image shown during this monologue is Barbara in a bathtub, smoking. The face Dench shows us is embittered, wrinkled, completely free of hope or possibility. What I love most about Dench’s performance is the way that as the movie erupts into histrionics, her brave depiction of loneliness at its coldest makes the chaos seem like a natural reaction. May none of us be forced into the type of desperation that creates that face.

Children of Men: Declared by Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times as a masterpiece weeks before it was released, what Children of Men is to me is a damn bitter breath of well created recycled air. It is rather shapeless paranoia – what are we supposed to determine from this bleak future, a future done in by the impending end of humanity (it is about the year 2027, 18 years after women on the planet became infertile). The director, Alfonso Cuaron, proves himself a magnificent orchestrator of chaos and paranoia, tapping into a sense of dread never even hinted at in his other movies – even the good ones like The Others or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Thinking about Children of Men, I like it more and more. Watching it, though, I don’t actually remember enjoying it, and I think that’s because I never really bought the premise the way it was sold – people get desperate, people do each other in, and that’s about the extent of what it says, which makes it morose for the sake of being morose.

Little Miss Sunshine: You know you’re in quirky Sundance sitcom hell when there’s a character who doesn’t talk, but limits all communication to hilarious asides on notebook paper. Speaking of not buying premises, the idea that chunky little Olive was ever in and prepared for a beauty pageant is a tough swallow. I think I’m supposed to find Little Miss Sunshine endearing because all of its so clearly flawed family members are alright with who they are at the end of the movie (for glum, mute Paul Dano, it’s convenient his sister picked up an eye chart so his oh-so-believable dream of being a pilot could be dashed in a timely manner), but I disliked every false minute of it… that is, up until the raucous “Superfreak” dance number at the end. Even I couldn’t resist.

Pan’s Labyrinth: I admit I shouldn’t watch movies after long days of work, so it might not do me much good to comment on the first 45 minutes or so of Pan’s Labyrinth as my viewing was so often punctuated by bouts of narcolepsy. However, Pan’s Labyrinth strikes me as the most fantastically assembled movie of the year – a gruesome fairy tale contrasting with a far more gruesome reality. It follows a young girl named Ofelia as her magical world becomes increasingly related to revolutionary Spain. What works about it, and especially about Guillermo Del Toro’s direction, is the way that the queasiness never seems to end – inside her mind, the good and bad creatures alike are horrifying, allegorical creatures of suspicious allegiances. Outside, the violence becomes rapt and overwhelming – a note on this one, for viewers used to the most violent moments of torture and violence shown in film, there will be an expectation that the camera will cut away, leaving things to your own queasy imagination, but this one will, shudderingly, not give you such an option. See it anyway.

Dreamgirls: I had heard that some 7^th place finisher of American Idol is about to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and that Eddie Murphy, her counterpart in the movie, was about to win an Oscar too. Crazy, eh? That version of “I Am Telling You I Am Not Going” is iconography already, and Jennifer Hudson, that 7^th place finisher of American Idol, tones down the stuttery, passionless delivery of her AI days and acts with a ferocity I couldn’t possibly believe she could conjure. I find Dreamgirls second hour a little miserable, very much a let down after its blast of glitz for its first hour. As soon as the movie turns on the sainthood of Beyonce’s Deena, I began to check out. Still, Bill Condon knows how to work with actors – beyond Hudson, beyond an eerie and astonishing Murphy, Foxx holds his own, and Beyonce herself proves an actress capable of an understanding that her Deena, a whitewashed and uninteresting version of Diana Ross, doesn’t need.

The Trailer for Inland Empire: Of all the movies I’ve seen this Winter, nothing quite compares to the 1 minute that is the trailer for David Lynch’s Inland Empire. And by nothing comparing I mean no other minute inside the cinema will require you to ask the question with such vehemence. That question? What the fuck was that? Reading about it recently, I discovered that Inland Empire started as a 14 page monologue for Laura Dern that was meant to be released online only. The other story about Inland Empire lately? My brother took a date to see the movie with him at a movie theater in Manhattan. That she sat through all three mind-narcotizing hours with him makes me wonder when the wedding will be. I haven’t seen the movie, but anything whose minute of pre-release press makes me long for the clarity of Lost Highway must be… well, something.

Lost Battles

When I was in middle school, there was no comparing my obsession with Wings to anyone's obsession with any other TV show.

Come to think of it, it was a time of rather intense viewership for me anyway. Wings towered above all others as my favorite comedy, but thinking back on it, I tended to organize my time in those days around TV shows. Nowadays, I catch up on the few TV shows I watch on DVD and downloads, and even those are slow to plod through. Then I had a listings grid organizing my thoughts - I'd see a 7-7:30 block on Tuesdays, for example, and know what my options were. I was up to date on every time slot Empty Nest was shifted to. I knew the name of the wife that Anthony suddenly picked up in Vegas on a very special Blossom. I had arguments with myself about who was better comic relief, Alfonso Ribero in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or, the king of spastic cluelessness, Thomas Haden Church on Wings.

Because Wings was the top contender for any prize then. It's interesting to think of Wings now alongside The Fresh Prince of Bel Air because they are, in fact, once again neighbors on Nick At Nite. And, more importantly, they can be viewed now, a good 10 to 15 years later, and be exposed - at least to people of similar backgrounds as myself - as the absolute least funny things this side of slavery.

I've always remembered a joke that Wings tried to pass off as funny, but it made little sense to me even then. Lowell is asking for time off to go to his cousin's wedding. "What's her last name?" Fay asks. "Hmm. Mather," Lowell answers. "No, what is it going to be," Fay asks. "Hmm, Mather," Lowell answers. The bride and groom, you see, are both Mathers - cousins, Lowell tells us. "Kissing cousins?" asks Fay. "Well, they did a lot more than that, that's why they have to get married." Zing.

To succeed, if such a thing were possible, this joke requires two things - the assumption that one might ask with total sincerity if two people were, in fact, "kissing cousins," and two, that the audience is so familiar with calling any two distantly related people kissing cousins that there would be no question as to what Fay would be referring to in this situation. You see, it's funny because Lowell took "kissing cousins" literally and we, the country of kissing cousins, would never do such a thing.

At the time, I assumed something must be wrong with me for not laughing at this joke. In truth, I still have no idea what a kissing cousin is, but more to the point, I can't imagine anyone bringing the term "kissing cousins" up in any type of conversation, and if they did, I cna't imagine anyone not seizing the opportunity to make a sexual joke (né, an incest joke) on sight.

In fact, Wings trafficked in this type of mistaken-assumption humor. The other terrible joke I recall involved an episode in which Joe and Brian decide they must, for the sake of their dear friend Helen, buy Helen a cello. Brian has looked into the price. Joe asks what it is, and Brian answers, "Fifteen." Joe shakes his head in disbelief. "Well, I guess you can't put a price on friendship - $1500 is a lot of money, but we can do it." "That's good," Brian answers, "because it's $15,000."

Once again, this assumes, to be funny, that a person simply saying "15" about the price of cellos brings up an automatic assumption in the hundred rather than thousand dollar range. Once again I did not laugh at the time, not knowing, in fact, that Brian did not simply mean $15. Once again, this is still not a remotely funny joke.

It may seem like the dregs of minutiae to pick fights with long defunct sitcoms that weren't particularly popular to people other than me. It is, in fact, the dregs of minutiae. Yet I wonder why no one said anything at the time. In fact, watching Wings and The Fresh Prince (of which, seriously, don't get me started) today makes a person wonder why someone didn't say the obvious now or then - that watching a half hour of those programs is something like a perverse form of torture. To be stuck in an episode is to be stuck in a nasty parallel world where people stop having reactions and act like clueless cartoons. I cannot even describe my discomfort in a sitcom of this type except to say that a sense of frustration burrowed deep within myself takes over after even a minute of watching one.

A few years ago, in my heyday of being a film critic, I wrote a DVD review of 1998's Central Station, a Brazillian movie that was marginally successful in America at the time, earning its star, Fernanda Montenegro, a Best Actress Oscar nomination - rare for a foreign language film. This was, I am certain, the result of an especially successful Miramax ad campaign, but that is not the point. My review was patently negative - I greatly dislike Central Station and the type of patented successful-international-release formula it represents: one wise, down-on-his-luck, plucky, misunderstood kid meets one cranky, Scrooge-like curmudgeon of a woman, and despite her initial reservations, she warms to the kid, allowing him to teach her a valuable lesson on life.

A question I never received at the time of that review (and to have received questions about my reviews would have been shocking anyway - that anyone read the things came as a surprise) was why bother, in a DVD recommendation column, to hash out a 6-year-old grudge against a movie that wasn't all that successful in the first place? The next logical question is why pick on Wings or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air? They were enjoyable enough at the time, weren't they?

Perhaps they were, I remember some belly laughs during Wings episodes, but for the life of me I couldn't pick them out today. These fights got lost because the context shifted, but it would make me a little sad if the fights got lost altogether - I think the errors in Wings are instructive for writers, and the last thing anyone should have to do is watch the goddamn thing to find those errors out. I think a successful international release of a foreign language film should not, in fact, have a wise or plucky kid involved. And I think writers and viewers should mock these things until they don't exist anymore, they should get the cliches out in the open until no writer would dream of even typing the things. We should pick the lost fights, the easy fights to knock out creative laziness, or at least, to save our children from canned laughter.