The new world

To commemorate X's 13-31 tour this past Sunday, I decided to get into character. X, the formative Los Angeles punk band, whose four records released from 1980-1984, helped establish the Los Angeles punk scene, was coming to town to commemorate their 31st anniversary... I think. Or maybe they're doing 31 dates. In any case, I don't know what the 13 refers to, or the 31, but I was happy to see one of my favorite bands returning to their touring glory.

But I specifically needed to be in character. My friends created a mohawk - first with mouse, then with hairspray, then with hairspray sprayed on my head as I held it against a bathroom counter - and I found an old shirt (a 1998 gift from an especially cranky friend that read "The Boat Sank - Get Over It) stained with my blood, no less, that I ripped up with the aid of a butcher knife. I was not exactly a participant in the "punk scene," certainly not in the early 80's, nor in whatever weird manifestation the punks of my childhood were - wallet chains, Vans shoes, New Found Glory poster. None of that.

For once, though, I wanted to experience a punk show from the inside. A wonderful photographer, Nikki S. Lee, used to develop project after project where she "became" one of her subjects - a lesbian, a stripper, a housewife, a tourist - and give others her camera to capture her image. In the most interesting of all of those, she too became a punk, complete with chains and dyed hair, and leather jackes and fishnet stockings. I, on the other hand, got some hairspray and ripped up a t-shirt, but it's still a rather therapeutic transformation.

Anyway, apparently only I felt this way, because at the X show the audience - probably representative of X fans at large - was mostly middle-aged, certainly not buttoned down, but not exactly dirty or angry either. I could not have found a bottle to throw or glass to break, and in any case that sort of thing would only get me kicked out. There were some leather jackets, I think, but besides me, on this Sunday night at the Showbox, I saw one mohawk bouncing up and down in front of the stage.

Anyway, I was not the point, although I enjoyed myself. X took the stage right at 10 as planned, Exene Cervenka wearing a black dress with a french collar and an apron, John Doe looking about how he has for 30 years - which is to say, like your cool uncle in a leather coat who never seemed to ever get a job. Billy Zoom, the guitarist, looks the part of a man in his 50's, even though his guitar was bright silver and covered in sequins. At times you'd catch Zoom lip synching their 30-year-old lyrics along with Doe while grinning in a way that reminded me of "The Colonel" in Boogie Nights' grin as he asks Dirk Diggler to "see that great big cock" he heard so much about. They began by singing "The Once Over Twice," the first song from 1981's Wild Gift, and it sounded, lo and behold, about as it did in 1981.

But perhaps some background on X is required. I found myself at a bar sometime later talking about the time I heard "Los Angeles" for the first time in 1999, and that, being 8 years ago now, "Los Angeles" recalled a different era for me - a dinge and dirt that I must have thought at the time was an undercurrent of all of suburban society. It was, however, first released in 1980, and who knows how long before that it was written. To me, X has great nostalgia, but it's certainly a different nostalgia then is intended.

But that is my background, not X's. X released Los Angeles in 1980, Wild Gift in 1981, Under The Big Black Sun in 1983, and More Fun In The New World in 1984. They also released two more records in the 1980's - Ain't Love Grand and See How We Are, but the band had "a new creative direction," which was to say they tried to be famous and made a couple of half-baked pop records. Although one song from Ain't Love Grand showed up on their set list Sunday night, they almost never perform songs from those records, even though a couple ("Burning House of Love" "4th of July" "You") are somewhat interesting. Even less heard than those terrible records was 1993's Hey Zeus! which sounds, in its way, like grunge - so though it may have been considered a "return to form" at the time, the record was still an example of X trying to fit in with contemporary pop.

And contemporary was never what X did well. I've had to explain to many people over the years who they were, some turned off by all music termed "punk," some excited by it, but virtually all are surprised to hear "punk" and then hear X. If I could describe X as anything, I would say they are indeed punk, but also rockabilly, and a little spoken word rolled into one. Billy Zoom clearly grew up on Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, and his guitar is pure rockabilly. Mix him with John Doe, who, as his name might imply, has a fasciation with gutter culture, the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles, and brings all of the band's most direct vitriolic, dirty lyrics, writing songs like "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline," "Sex and Dying In High Society," and "Adult Books." Then add in Exene Cervenka, the lead singer, once dubiously called by VH1 "Rock's first antiheroine," who has a background as a beat poet, and a terrible singing voice, but the right type of terrible singing voice. She and Doe create something beyond harmony when they sing together - a sort of fusion of criticism and anger, their voices are simply how their most poetic and interesting thoughts take hold. And they truly take hold.

Or, at least did between 1980 and 1984. It interests me that in X's terrific set Sunday night of, say, 15-20 songs, all but one were from those four great albums (the other, "My Goodness" from Ain't Love Grand, was, without a doubt, the show's only lagging point). And for the most part, they sound just like they did then. It's interesting - Cervenka, whose voice gains so much credibility on being off-key, irreverent, the voice of the gutter, but it hasn't changed at all. On "We're Having Much More Fun," the set's second song, has a climax every chorus of "We'll crawl through your back yard/ and whack your yappin' dog," and the emphasis on that lyric - hitting the long a's of "whack" and "yappin" with Doe and Cervenka in unison, did not change at all. Me and my mohawk sang along unabashed. And why wouldn't it? X knew, despite being not quite punk and not quite not-punk, how to write a perfect rock song. I'd imagined for years a sea of fans bobbing their heads and chanting in great unison the chorus of "The New World," in my mind the most perfect of all of their songs - "It was better before before they voted for what's-his-name! This is s'posed to be the new world!"

X was once considered, in those early 80's heydays, one of the great live acts of all times, and I wondered if that could be true as the songs sounded so close to the recordings still, after 24 years. What struck me was that their song order was just right - the slash-and-burn gutter punk of "We're Desperate" eminating out of the slightly calmer "In This House That I Call Home," and turning into the more churning and pointed "The Hungry Wolf." I wished I had a pad and paper to write down the smart lineup of all of these great songs.

I also wished I had a pad and paper to write down what I remembered of all of the great l yrics that never quite registered until they were played too loud and in my ear. Since Cervenka is a beat poet at heart, and since Doe is, perhaps, a social critic at heart, their lyrics are always straining on social poetry, and I used to think that though certain song lyrics were unimpeachably perfect (say, "The World's A Mess, It's In My Kiss," the closest X came to a gutter-punk-poet anthem), for the most part great fragments searched for a greater whole. I don't think I agree with that anymore - the lyrics take ideas and let their beat notions fly with the same skill and abandon as the great guitar work, truly. Under The Big Black Sun, an album focused on mortality surrounding the shock death of Cervenka's sister Mary in a car accident shortly after her (already unhappy) marriage, to me maintains the best words and ideas the band came up with - the combination of "Come Back To Me," a sweet, saxophone laiden song of loss, into the beat anger of "Under The Big Black Sun" (the telltale lyric: "Everybody asks me how I'm doing/ I'm doing everything alone") was always central to that record, but they didn't perform those two songs on Sunday. They did perform the songs on either end of them, and it was the haunted fragments that stuck out to me - in "Riding With Mary" : "The next time you see a statue of Mary, remember my sister was in her car;" in "Because I Do" : "My nights are numbered/ they don't count for nothing." In fact, "Because I Do," about a bride, a fool, and a ghost in one, seems to me, even more than before, the most haunted, interesting song on that record - to say nothing of it being the loudest. As X still has no fans that I've ever met (scratch that, I have one friend in Atlanta who's a fan), maybe it takes 30 years of identical tours to get the songs truly heard in the way they deserve - for me, 9 years after my first exposure to the band, seeing them live is like hearing them the first time.

Remembering the dead... actually

"Veteran British" director Anthony Minghella died this week - it's been in the news. He has an Oscar, for 1996's The English Patient, perhaps the most poorly remembered winner of 9 Oscars ever, and he directed a few more successful movies on top of that, as well as a couple of duds, and a couple of movies that were supposed to recapture his prestige and didn't.

Scratch that, according to Entertainment Weekly, he leaves a "brief but vibrant" legacy to movies. He "restored prestige adaptations" to Hollywood making megaplexes "safe for adults" once again. He "made Jude Law a star" and "displayed and epic scope and humanity."

Perhaps these things are true, but I think it's actually tough to tell what's true anymore of celebrities after their death, especially in the movie industry. Before Minghella's death due to a brain hemmorhage after cancer operations, there was Heath Ledger's infamous "old story" of exhaustion and pills, and Brad Renfro's older story of heroin addiction in the previous two months alone. A lot of deaths lately, and a lot of selective memories too.

Let me say simply that I think it helps no one to remember these screen personalities as they weren't, or to overemphasize their accomplishments. At Brad Renfro's chilling, too-cautionary death, "I remember seeing him in The Client..." craziness abounded. Renfro had perhaps given foreshadowing to his work in a creepy performance as a stilted, angry adolescent in Sleepers, where he plays a young man acting out vengeance for sexual abuse. Or perhaps he had given foreshadow with his, frankly, terrific performance in Apt Pupil in 1998, where he played... a stilted, angry adolescent, obsessed with a Nazi.

But really, that was it. I cannot recall any performances Renfro gave other than those three, and in speculating on the life of a young celebrity, I have to assume that the anxiety of figuring out the direction of your life ten years after your last well known movie must be incredibly difficult and awful. I can't understand how anyone manages to retain a shred of honest self expression in a land as nitpicky, ruthless, and heavily under scrutiny as Hollywood is. So when people talked about Renfro - and many didn't - it didn't help to discuss his loss as a personal one, as if to exempt us from that culture and create us in a culture that is nurturing of "art and artistic expression." It would be nice if we were, of course, but we are not.

So let us talk about these men as they were. Heath Ledger's death stung more because his successes were so recent, and, I suspect, will be greater after The Dark Knight's release in May, in which his intense method identification with The Joker is rumored to have sent him into therapy. Heath Ledger was a former teen idol with an edge, who, desperate to fully shake off his junky pop movie past, took a daring role as a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, gave a performance of such precise identification that he made that movie truly work as a recognizable, human entity. Beyond that?

Beyond that, let's not say that Ledger was a great hope of indy acting - he wasn't. He was excellent in a small part in my favorite movie of last year, I'm Not There, but his work did not, as many have said since his death, "steal the movie." Daniel Day Lewis, upon accepting his Golden Globe for There Will Be Blood, spoke of remembering the "power" of Ledger's work in Monster's Ball - I am convinced that there is no way any human being could believe this. Not everyone who remembers the movie (which is, honestly, not many) agrees, but it's a terrible movie, and ask the fans of it what they'd remember, the answer would be Halle Berry, possibly Billy Bob Thornton, not Heath Ledger, although it was certainly a daring choice for him to take a part in the movie. Was he good in the part? I have to believe so, he was talented, but I don't honestly remember.

Beyond that? Ludicrously, in tributes, critics begin to fawn over the junk of his past - Four Feathers! The Brothers Grimm! A Knight's Tale! Huh? When people begin remembering the "sensitivity" he brought as Mel Gibson's son in The Patriot, I think we need to make sure we're talking about the right person here. Ledger was a gifted actor for whom existing in Hollywood probably hastened the causes of his death. He was extraordinary in Brokeback Mountain. Let's not make things up on top of that.

Now the tributes for Anthony Minghella have begun posting left and right, and I'm glad for that, as I hope that any artist is remembered fondly in his death - but I don't wish people to be remembered incorrectly. In discussing Minghella, there is an assumption based on the "epic sweep" and 9 Oscars garnered by The English Patient that everyone remembers the thing fondly, when I would defy you to find five people who remember the movie fondly. That goes double for Cold Mountain, a movie done in by marketing and hype - remember the foofaraw about its (deserved) exclusion from the 2002 Best Picture category at the Oscars? That happened, despite its "epic sweep" and 7 Golden Globe nominations received, presumably, by Harvey Weinstein going door to door with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

I'm happy that fans of Minghella's 1990 romantic comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply now feel apt to come forward with their fondness for that movie, although I've never seen it - at least that, to me, seems a genuine bit of appreciation. But looking over the list of his 6 movies, something strikes me to come forward as the sole fan of The English Patient back in 1997, and the only person I know who continues to defend the movie to this day.

I saw The English Patient in January of 1997, and remember it so fondly as the first movie that made me cry in a theater. I fell in love with its tragedy and hope, and applauded loudly alone when it won Best Picture that year, presumably by Harvey Weinstein promising roles to everyone in the MPAA, despite remarkably low ratings (no one tuned in to "watch The English Patient win everything" even though they did tune in in record numbers a year later to see Titanic do the same thing), and the hipster fondness for Fargo, a fellow nominee. I've seen The English Patient twice since then, and haven't liked it as much, though it is still powerful. The sensuousness of its images is still stunning, as are the extraordinary performances by Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliette Binoche (who won a deserved suprise Oscar that year for Best Supporting Actress). The power of its tragic scope, though, is not recreated on subsequent views.

In retrospect, the movie of his I like the most - né, the only other movie of his I like - would be The Talented Mr. Ripley, which, again, was a disappointment at the time - a "prestige adaptation" that was too "dark" and "ambiguous." People expecting a star-studded thriller with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow instead got a hermetic character study of homoerotic sexual panic and of the ways that social expectations can be all powering. To my shock, I loved the character-based "prestige" of the movie - and the extraordinary performances of which, it's true, helped establish Jude Law as a credible star. The movie is great, and with expectations gone of what's inside, it gets better on repeated viewings.

Minghella was a talent of "epic sweep" who kept his biggest pretentions in check - he was, I think, rather thorough in his large visions, but not showy, despite the beautiful cinematography in all of his movies. Cold Mountain was a crock, as was Breaking and Entering, his fizzled 2003 original thriller with Law and Binoche. That's ok - directors twice his strife have made far more than two crocks, and, whatever can be said about Weinstein's marketing techniques, Minghella's skill sure convinced a lot of people to vote for him for that Oscar in 1996. I'm afraid his namelessness though makes writers think it's ok to exaggerate his accomplishments in the hope that it creates a better story - although, it is in vain mostly, a week from now, people still won't know who he is. The interesting story is this - Minghella directed a few successful movies, a couple were great and allowed us to appreciate something in human behavior and grand storytelling. He made Kristin Scott Thomas an actress who I'll always admire due to one heartbreaking performance, and made me aware of the beauty and sincerity of Juliette Binoche's face, as well as maximized the charisma of Jude Law. That, to me, is a plenty fitting tribute.

Nitpicking The Wire Nitpickers

I’m writing this at an interesting time, for which a week and a half form now might make my writing different. Perhaps at that time I’ll feel compelled to write again, perhaps not.

At this time, I have caught the second to last episode of The Wire before it airs by viewing it on HBO On Demand, a strange option HBO has given Wire fans all season – allowing them to access episodes a week in advance. The show airs its final episode on Sunday, March 9th, and it comes at the end of a shortened, 10 episode season focusing its usual hermetic scrutiny on the media – this season has taken us inside the walls of The Baltimore Sun and found us a morally wise, rather idyllic editor named Gus, played dutifully by Clark Johnson, to be our entrance into another season of an institution in cynical decline in the wake of modern capitalism.

It’s interesting to think of writing that last line – “another season of an institution in cynical decline in the wake of modern capitalism” – considering what really is prompting me to write this. The Wire has to be the most popular series I’ve ever witnessed amongst critical press. Salon.com, Slate, The New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly each have weekly online recaps and opinions on every episode, some of them including debate amongst its entire editorial staff. And though each vary in the amount they fawn over the greatness of every moment, and nitpick over every line they dislike.

They’ve written a great deal about the Sun plotline, certainly the least compelling of the show’s seasonal focuses. Each season chronicles a different institution in decline – the police force, the port, politics, the schools, and now the media – all while continuing to tell the stories they started even 5 years ago, and while continuing to comment on its main storyline, about the drug trade in Baltimore, and chronicling both sides of how police track down the thugs, and how the thugs “change up” in response.

But again, it’s not necessarily The Wire I want to discuss as much as what critics do to maintain relevance, or feign relevance, as the case may be. I say this as a critic myself, or one who has always seen myself as one, when I’m working as a critic or not. A recent list of Salon’s complaints about this season of The Wire: Omar seems “too superhero-like,” McNulty has re-descended into alcoholism too quickly, the Sun plot is "2 dimensional" and is too quick to label the editors as scumbags, the Sun plotline is 2 dimensional and too quick to label editors as saints. Scott Templeton, the scheming reporter played by Tom McCarthy once "set out on a reporting trip to the underpasses of Baltimore wearing a Kansas City Star t-shirt." Every time a second feels “unrealistic,” the writers of Salon mail three emails to each other, debating the second that is too “unrealistic.” Every time they see a plot coming, they complain. Every time they don’t see a plot coming, they complain.

When even your shirt choices are incorrect, it must be hard to win in that environment, eh? A similar phenomenon took over The Sopranos amongst critics in its final seasons. The first half of season 6, while unpopular by many, remains some of my favorite work of The Sopranos, anxious and confounded about life and meaning in every brave second. Still, critics balked, and balked loudly, every single goddamn episode – Vito plotline moving too slowly? The blogs are set afire! Carmela’s concern for Adriana seems too little too late? Ooh, there’s another topic to “argue.”

The arguments made about The Wire and The Sopranos on episode recaps, however, aren’t just nitpicky – they’re not very much fun. And it’s because these shows drew us in by their astonishing seasonal arcs, marveled at the way they developed characters and set off bombs when we least expected. There is no doubt in my mind these are the two greatest drama series ever to air, and now, writers who agree with that sentiment have found themselves in the position of having to predict their unpredictability, to comment on their perfection by saying things other than “they’re perfect!” And most importantly, the writers of the columns have had to make themselves above the plotlines and above the show in order to make themselves have something to say.

Now, I can’t begrudge people for wanting to move the conversations that fans of the shows are having online, but in all the whining and nitpicking, writers are losing their ability to truly submit to them. Later, one writer, in discussing The Sopranos, made the baffling suggestion that “We expect more of The Wire because the other seasons were so great, whereas when The Sopranos limped into its final season after two terrible seasons, we were truly surprised at everything good that happened.”

That’s a strange case of selective memory even if you agree that Season 6’s first part was not great (and I do not agree with that). Season 5 was a hit by everyone’s standard, won the Emmy for Best Drama series, and won back all of its fans lost amidst the first Sopranos backlash that developed in season 4.

Much the same, I never quite got the fawning the world did over The Wire’s 4th season, the one taking place in the schools. Now, my work is with kids with emotional disruptions and inner city backgrounds, so maybe I just didn’t find the work that surprising – it was very accurate, and very good, but it did not show me something I didn’t really know, while season 2’s great diversion into the port did. Season 4 is great, don’t get me wrong, but it is the season of The Wire I’d least likely watch again – too much procedural ho-hum about budgeting in the mayor’s office and having to take math tests slowed it down immensely.

But here I am again, being above the plotlines, and that, I think, is the problem. These columns that dissect episodes of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos - well, truly only those two shows - cannot continue to treat shows of that magnitude as normal television. Even Buffy The Vampire Slayer, that extraordinary example of network ingenuity, could be treated as normal television. The Sopranos and The Wire exist on their own canvas of time, establishing plotlines over seasons and years, so commentary and judgment on individual episodes as they come out is a bit like yelling at a painter midway through the painting. The thing only works if you surrender yourself to the whole product.

Worse than that, however, is too many assumptions about what it is to be a TV show, or to be these TV shows. This is what I mean by surrending yourself to the whole product - on a network show like Lost, fans can complain about plotlines beginning in October loudly enough that the writers, worried about the loss of fans, can adjust and jettison those plotlines by March (as evident when exactly this happened, famously, in Lost's third season). The Wire and The Sopranos know exactly what they want to accomplish in their seasons. And, they do this by intentionally producing the emotions that the plotlines get criticized for - Slate complained rather loudly that McNulty (Dominic West) seemed to re-emerge too suddenly as an alcoholic this year, and that his fabricated serial killer plotline was frustrating. Yes and yes - McNulty is so self-destructive his tendencies can re-emerge quickly, like many self destructive people; how frustrating! He invented a serial killer, which the audience felt resistance to accepting - much like Bunk (Wendell Pierce) did on screen. Worse - it worked! Imagine our frustration about how easily one can abuse the system. As for Scott Templeton's irrational clothing choices for wandering the streets of Baltimore - yes! True! What an irrational character!

Much in the way The Sopranos "too philosophical" season 6 was too philosophical. Yes, by posing the question "Who am I, where am I going?" famously in "Join The Club" (the love-it-or-hate-it center of that season, for its 40 minute hallucination), the show challenged you to ask that question of its characters - many refused. That's fine enough, but let's not criticize the show for meeting its own intentions.

The problem is that when writers take to whining about shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, they have to attack the details because the whole is too good and established to truly criticize. But in the nitpicking, columns about these subjects only reveal how irrelevant they are. Writing about movies and music that astonishes you can be relevant (Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" column comes to mind, as does Lisa Schwarzbaum's enraptured own Sopranos season 6 episode reviews), but only when a writer makes him/herself deferential to the subject, and approaches his/her experience honestly. Nitpicking the shows is dishonest in the extreme - a lie to maintain relevance, which is exactly what the Sun plotline in this season of The Wire chronicles. No wonder the Slate writers don't like it.