Author: David Ross

LFM Book Review: David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge

By David Ross. I wrote a while ago about David Mamet’s splashy conversion to conservatism (see here), about which I was naturally excited, Mamet being the highest ranking defector in the modern Cold War between right and left. I eagerly awaited his book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, hoping for a manifesto that would function as an elegant rapier thrust, or at least a solid groin kick, and hurt all the more coming from a man whom the left cannot write off as a cretin from the land of “low-sloping foreheads” (to borrow a phrase from New York Times columnist David Carr). Mamet has, after all, lent intellectual heft to Broadway and Hollywood for more than three decades.

It pains me to confess that Mamet’s book is dreadful. It’s not, as one might imagine, that his conservatism turns out to be a smug centrism in the David Brooks mode or an idiosyncratic wire-drawn intellectual construct in the Hitchens mode. On the contrary, he shares the talk-radio mindset of bitter far-right disgust, and he seems sturdily committed to the entire Republican platform, for better and for worse. Conservatives will immediately recognize Mamet as their man.

The problem is twofold: 1) What seems to Mamet revelatory a year or two into his conservative phase is not so revelatory to those of us who’ve spent twenty or thirty years toiling in the conservative vineyards. He’s like a blind fellow who can suddenly see and proceeds to inform everybody that the sky is blue and the grass is green and chesty women look good in tight sweaters. 2) The book is badly argued (where it’s argued at all) and badly written in the basic mechanical sense. Mamet’s prose is gnarled and parenthetical and weirdly affectless (c.f. his nerveless, deadpan directorial style). It’s not as bad as Sean Penn’s prose, which is almost literary anti-matter (see here), but, lord, it ain’t good. Here’s a sample, cherry-picked only slightly:

If a country, a region, a race is in difficulty because of a lack of funds, any new or recurrent failure subsequent to any subvention in aid may be attributed to insufficient aid, and provide the rationale for that funding’s increase. But it may only do so given the acceptance of the nondemonstrable, indeed disprovable theory that government intervention increases wealth. (pg. 36)

This is to say, more or less, that governments like to throw good money after bad. I can only suppose that writing street-smart dramatic dialogue and writing elegant expository prose are entirely different skills, and that Mamet is a writer only in a restricted sense. Continue reading LFM Book Review: David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge

Rock Mega-Concerts

Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck at the 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival.

By David Ross. Two rock mega-concerts are now streaming on Netflix: the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th Anniversary Concert (2009) and the third installment of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival (2010), each weighing in at something like five hours. I have nothing very nice to say about the Hall of Fame concert. Like rock itself in its thirty-five-year phase of senescence, the concert has a smarmy self-congratulatory masturbatory quality that quickly becomes nauseating. A fair representation of the rock aristocracy is present – Jackson Browne, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Mick Jagger, Billy Joel, Metallica, Prince, Lou Reed, Simon & Garfunkel, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Sting, U2, Stevie Wonder, etc. – but the music has a mere pretense of energy and inspiration. It’s a slick simulacrum of an inspiration that fled in the seventies. For the most part, this concert is no better than a Vegas floor show.

Little Anthony, Buddy Guy, Dion, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Darlene Love are duly wheeled out, but their participation is gestural and patronizing. The baby boom billionaires can thereby flatter themselves as reverent keepers of a tradition that they have of course utterly sold out.

U2 particularly irks me, not because they’re not good – they are very good – but because they’re good in the wrong way. Theirs is a triumph of will – of sheer determination and professional organization and marshaled nerve; not for them the more equivocal experiments in interrogation, introspection, or poetry, the anxious plum-line dropped deep. Their real genius is steering their own ascension as icons and negotiating the cultural politics of their own global gigantism. Though they’ve made a lot of good music, they turn out to be oddly cognate with postmodern media manipulators like Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Bruce Springsteen & Tom Morello at the Hall of Fame concert.

The only performance worth mentioning is the Springsteen/Tom Morello version of Springsteen’s dustbowl anthem “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” As much as he seems like he could use a good knock on the head from a cop during one of those IMF or World Bank melees, Morello, I have to admit, kills it. He may be the single-most annoying guy ever to play the guitar really well. For his part, Springsteen begins by issuing platitudes about “high times on Wall Street, hard times on Main Street,” which is a little rich coming from a guy who’s worth maybe $500 million, most of which, I hazard to guess, is invested by these very same Wall Street vampires. Springsteen has lost a good deal of his voice and looks increasingly like an aging tough guy from The Sopranos, but he’s still a rock’n’roll true believer, the last of them perhaps, along with Patti Smith. You won’t see him cavorting with Jay-Z and Beyonce at Cannes or hobnobbing with Sir Mick at the Monaco Grand Prix. Continue reading Rock Mega-Concerts

LFM Mini-Review: Cars 2

By David Ross. THE PITCH: Hayseed tow-truck gets mixed up in international espionage. Strange alternate universe in which cars behave like people. No explanation. Kind of creepy.

THE SKINNY: Cars 2 brings Pixar’s exuberant twenty-five-year spree to a grinding halt. Call it a mid-life crisis. The problem is not moral – the usual descent into greed, cynicism, and indifference – but conceptual. The plot is a confused and hyperactive whirlwind of genre elements and action sequences, perhaps amenable to the ADHD generation, but constantly preventing the film from taking emotional or moral root. Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, and Toy Story 3 – Pixar’s three incontestable masterpieces – are likewise action oriented, but they have a certain organic rhythm, a pattern of pause and eddy. They feel human, in short, while Cars 2 rushes in unremitting machine rhythm, much like a NASCAR race.

WHAT WORKS:

• Pixar’s technical genius has reached new and incredible heights. In the opening sequence, Finn McMissile – a 007-style Aston Martin played by Michael Caine – plunges off an oil derrick into a stormy ocean. The rolling, frothing, thoroughly natural wave dynamics are pure geek showboating. Pixar has evidently conquered all the primary technical challenges of computer animation: water, fire, wind, hair.

• Larry the Cable Guy is full of hillbilly fun as the loyal bumpkin Mater. Olivier he’s not, but then again he’s playing a buck-toothed tow-truck. Apprenticeship with the Royal Shakespeare Company not required.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK:

• In my un-American, dubiously male opinion, cars have ruined the world with their noise, pollution, and facilitation of urban-suburban sprawl. Imagine a time when it was possible to open one’s front door, pick a direction, and walk for twenty miles without fear of being flattened or suffocated in toxic fumes. In light of which, a world consisting entirely of cars – a world that is already ours in some sense – is intrinsically obnoxious and unsettling. How about a world consisting of humanoid retroviruses? Anthropomorphized Iranian centrifuges? Continue reading LFM Mini-Review: Cars 2

The BBC’s Desperate Romantics

Amy Manson and Aidan Turner from "Desperate Romantics" (2009).

By David Ross. In my comments from last year on the Keats biopic Bright Star I opined that “film has no idea how to approach lives that are largely interior, with driving purposes that are inconveniently invisible and inscrutable. In consequence, film tends to emphasize the gossipy and scandalous, dwelling on the externals of sexual deviancy, alcoholism, and nervous breakdown.” This certainly describes the BBC’s Desperate Romantics (2009), but such a zesty and funny travesty is hard to resist, especially if, like me, you tend to think the twentieth century was rather a mistake.

The six-hour miniseries tells the story of John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt – the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” – as they scheme and bumble in pursuit of eternal art and sub-eternal flesh. Rounding out the dramatis personae are John Ruskin, the sexually neurotic titan of Victorian art criticism and incidentally one of the greatest prose stylists in the history of English; Effie Ruskin, the great man’s warm-blooded young wife, disconsolately intacta after five years in the marriage bed; the flame-haired milliner-cum-muse Lizzie Siddal, the “original supermodel”; and the milksoppy hanger-on Fred Walters, a fictional contrivance who narrates the whole business from a perspective of exasperation and vicarious titillation. Rossetti and Fred competitively love Siddal (what’s not to love!), while Ruskin is disgusted by his wife’s post-pubescent nether parts and schemes to fob her off on the virginal Millais. Meanwhile, the prostitute-model Annie Miller – a buxom, lusty lass – places the inconsistently evangelical Hunt in a series of difficult, shall we say, positions.

Rafe Spall and Jennie Jacques.

Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris make a late appearance as nerdy idolaters of Rossetti, the former vaguely epicene, the latter fat, manic, and socially incompetent. This ignores Morris’ polymath command, the hard will of the inveterate and consummate creator, but it serves a dramatic purpose, I suppose, providing Rossetti with a foil and the show with a cuckold-ready goof.

Unlike the BBC’s reverent and impeccable interpretation of Pride and Prejudice (see my comments here), Desperate Romantics is a cheese fondue of pros and cons. It takes liberties with the biographical record (Wikipedia totals up the damage); it has no interest whatsoever in the substance of the Pre-Raphaelites’ art or ideas; it depicts Rossetti – an artistic and poetic giant – as a charming but shiftless skirt chaser, which is at best a partial truth; it takes a particularly sunless view of Ruskin, depicting him as coldly repressed rather than as gloriously nuts; and its theme song, a thumping folk-rock jig, is the most annoying piece of TV music since the Seinfeld bass segue. On the other hand, the series is full of impish humor and salacious shenanigans, and the brotherhood’s banter abounds in dry British wit. Especially delicious are the episodes in which the Ruskins and Millais bumble toward what we’ll delicately call a physical outcome. We might ask: “How many Victorian geniuses does it take to screw in a -.”  Apparently it takes quite a few. Continue reading The BBC’s Desperate Romantics

YouTube Jukebox: Meeting of the Spirits

By David Ross. In Greek mythology, the distinction between heroes and gods is rather thin; and so too in the world of the guitar. The film Meeting of the Spirits, which features Larry Coryell, Paco De Lucia, and John McLaughlin in concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1979, makes the point. Olympian is the appropriate adjective.

Those who associate the acoustic guitar with Peter, Paul, and Mary – who’d love to do something like this – are in for a surprise: imagine a trio of F-22s engaged in precision maneuvers at multi-mach speed. Coryell and De Lucia are consummate musicians, but McLaughlin, who is all but nerve-connected to the guitar, his left-hand so fast and economical that it seems not even to move, is something else entirely. During the long title cut – a version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra standard – he seems to enter a trance and channel strange melodies from beyond the realm of logic and reason.

Let me adduce three songs of staggering technique and emotion: “Lotus Feet” (song of supreme spiritual beauty), “Meeting of the Spirits” (with uncanny solo by De Lucia), and “Meeting of the Spirits II” (with equally uncanny solo by McLaughlin). The latter clip is one of my YouTube favorites. I watch it repeatedly and obsessively as a kind of talisman against the slackness and mediocrity of daily life. Yes, there is some ‘fret buzz,’ but this is incidental. The Venus de Milo lacks arms. Who cares?

Meeting of the Spirits (DVD available here) was preamble to the McLaughlin-De Lucia-Al Di Meola collaboration captured for posterity on the classic 1980 concert album Friday Night in San Francisco. This concert is equally or perhaps even more dazzling in terms of technique, but less soulful and deeply felt.

Posted on June 20th, 2011 at 2:20pm.

YouTube Jukebox: Miriam Makeba

By David Ross. My daughter and I heard the Tokens’ “Wimoweh” somewhere or other; this led to Ladysmith Black Mambazo; this in turn led to Miriam Makeba, and ever since we’ve been listening to Makeba day in and out, with no weariness – indeed with ever deepening respect – on the adult side. My daughter wanted to be an ‘African singer’ last Halloween, but we talked her down from this ledge of potential racist scandal, and she wound up going as a ‘Chinese princess.’

Let me offer a simple conviction: during the 1960s Miriam Makeba was one of the very greatest vernacular artists in the world, in a category with the likes of James Brown, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Mingus, and Thelonius Monk. She might be reasonably compared to Aretha Franklin or Sarah Vaughan, but on the whole she was their superior, combining the former’s soaring voice with the latter’s genius for phrasing, and endowing everything she did with a palpable personal charm. As a politically resonant Third World artist combining native and American idioms, the obvious – and fair – comparison is to Bob Marley.

Here (see above) is a tremendous clip associated with Makeba’s appearance in Stockholm in 1966. The concert is available as a DVD import titled Miriam Makeba Live at Bern’s Salonger (I purchased mine from Amazon.co.uk), but the film does not include this sequence. I gather that Makeba appeared on TV in support of the concert proper. The clip features two tremendous songs and some comments on the arch-nastiness of the racial politics of South Africa, with Makeba herself utterly fetching in her duality of girlishness and loftiness. This second clip, a bossa nova delight from the live appearance at Bern’s Salonger, highlights Makeba’s remarkable versatility. This third clip drives home her capacity for massive, earth-shaking grooves.

Enjoy this material while you can. YouTube has lately been stripped of Makeba material.

The core of Makeba’s sixties output is available on three CD sets that repackage seven of her albums. These sets are a must for anyone with a serious interest in twentieth-century music, as indispensible as Live at the Apollo and Kind of Blue.

Posted on June 11th, 2011 at 9:23am.