Last Week's Movies, This Week's Music

I don't think Shortbus is really all that great a movie, but I liked it a lot just the same. The fact that it was so heavily improv-based made it feel, as many of the reviews have noted, formless and repetitive, but, to its credit, John Cameron Mitchell has a way of bringing out the swoony sappiness without making you feel guilty about it. I was moved to tears right along with the random extra during that final marching-band-
orgy-by-candlelight scene. It was ridiculously over the top, yet ridiculously life-affirming, which might be another way to defend the inclusion of all that un-simulated sex. A lot of it's funny, some of it's hot, but none of it's dirty. As Stephanie Zacharek was right to point out in her Salon review, "I've felt sleazier looking at ads for Captain Morgan's rum." Plus, it just goes to show ya how much we need more gay male filmmakers (who are actually dealing with gay themes and not just trying to pass) because, egad, I can't remember the last time I saw so much wang! It was completely refreshing to see the male form joyfully eroticized on film instead of the passing glances at Ralph Fiennes's artfully soapy d or some twinked-out doe-eyed CW star trying to do "edgy" in a microbudget indie like we usually get. Bring on the autofellatio! Bring on the national anthem being sung into that cute young guy's ass!

Say what you will about Sophia Coppola's cinematic pedigree, she does have some really good taste. After all the hullabaloo about the non-period specific music in Marie Antoinette, I was expecting the tone of the thing to be very Moulin Rouge-ish and zingy (not that that would have been a bad thing, of course, ardent Moulin Rouge defender as I am). But, I was shocked by how quiet so much of the movie was (which may have been an inadvertent side effect of the theater I saw it in; I don't think the sound system was cranked very high anyway). The minimal dialogue, the long stretches of unblinking behavioral observation, the deliberate, heart-on-sleeve bites from Barry Lyndon--this does not a "giddily postmodern" take on the Marie Antoinette mythology make. It's one of the better things I've seen Kirsten Dunst do, Schwartzman continues to impress with his on-screen warmth and comic timing (his delivery of the word "obviously" in the first half hour or so is motherfucking plated in gold), and I don't think you can really ever go wrong getting Shirley Henderson to run around the place, making catty remarks under her breath. Enjoyable, if not exactly life-changing.

This essay/interview with Zach Condon of Beirut is a leeetle wanky, but mostly right on the money. I'm glad to see someone taking him down a few notches, as I, personally, got tired of Gulag Orkestar real fast and think a lot of it was fatigue with the disingenuousness of Condon's cultural appropriation. Not to keep hammering away at the tired (and, let's be honest, slightly unfair) Gogol Bordello comparisons, but Eugene Hutz just has so much more integrity in the way he's bringing gypsy music to the forefront of indie kids' consciousness. He knows what it means, politically, to harness the raw power of that playing style ("IF WE ARE HERE NOT TO DO WHAT YOU AND I WANNA DO, AND GO FOREVER CRAZY WITH IT, WHY THE HELL ARE WE EVEN HERE?") and uses that power for good, not just for good feelings (even though, obvy, the good feelings flow like the finest vodka when Hutz is rocking the mic or the decks). Sure, Condon's got a nice knack for pleasant melodies and the album has some good songs on it, but how much more apparent can his tourism be when he's already anticipating copping from Portuguese folk and Fado on his next album?

We're all enjoying Ys, yes? I'm still thinking about what I think about it, but it's wondrous, heady stuff. And, oddly, it puts me in the mood to listen to Rufus Wainwright. I think a lot of it is due to the Van Dyke Parks connection (he did some arrangements for Rufus's debut), but there's also their similar vocal quality shift from reedy-shrieky on the first album to stronger and mellower on the second.

Ooh, speaking of Rufus, Pitchfork gifted us with a whole passel of news today, including the fact that he's working on an opera commissioned by the New York Met. I've had a hunch that his career would eventually wend that way since around the time I first heard that duet with Antony on Want Two, but I just didn't think that time would come so soon. Kudos to him, and I can't wait to hear the Judy Garland concert CD.

Wang, twinks, autofellatio, Rufus, Antony, and Judy Garland--this is officially the gayest blog post I have ever written.

And, a big happy birthday shout-out (one day early) to my best girl Mary.

The Notorious Jimmy James

OK, if there are any pussified and whiny indie kids out there who want to start a band so they can wear cool clothes and sing about their feelings and chat up pretty emo girls with pixie haircuts and facial piercings, LISTEN UP. You are forbidden to do any of this until you study at the feet of My Morning Jacket.

Other than a vague perception of them being jammy and Southern-fried, I knew nothing about this band, and largely because of the aforementioned perceptions, didn't think I needed to know anything about them, before I saw them play on the Northwestern campus last night. Kittens, I have been touched by the power of ROCK. Those motherfuckers walked on stage looking like they'd just been released from prison somewhere and played their fucking hearts out. They could have phoned it in for this student show in the gym. They could have fooled us by hiding behind the bluster and momentum of their hair and beards. But, no. They flung their bodies across the stage and whipped that hair around and screamed and sweated and went through some kind of public musical catharsis for our benefit. It was spectacular, in the truest sense of the word. I mean, yeah, there was a fair amount of guitar wankery, but, my background in jazz being what it is, I have infinitely more patience with semi-indulgent soloing in a live setting than I do on a recording. Not to mention that the kind of music they play is best experienced like a blast from a furnace at the gates of hell: hot, loud, and overpowering, which is to say, not through the tiny plastic earbuds plugged in to your iPod. It deserves a stack of amps and groovy lighting and the reverence of a crowd of kids who were inspired to shout things like, "why don't you just play all night!" I have a better understanding now than perhaps I ever did why Pamela des Barres wrote I'm with the Band, and why she lived it before she wrote it. Oh, and they played maybe four or five songs, and then, by way of greeting and introduction, lead singer Jim James steps up to the microphone and, perfectly framed against a bastketball hoop and the gray cinder block walls of the Patten Gymnasium, drawls, "I hear you don't have a fencing team here at Grover Cleveland. Well, I'm going to do my best to start one up for you." I nearly died.

Oh, yeah, and Stephen Malkmus played a solo set (which I unfortunately missed but I'm told was chockful of older Pavement and Silver Jews material) and the New Pornographers, including Neko Case, were the second band on the bill. Did I forget to mention all that in the heat of my excitement about MMJ? Pretty much best concert ever. Thanks again for the heads up, KP and DS. (I still owe you for the ticket.)

The reason I missed Malkmus's set was because I was en route from Navy Pier to Evanston after seeing A Flea in Her Ear at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Ah, who doesn't love a good, fast French farce? GH asked me a while ago to tag along with her and her gals to their season-subscription seats, and the show, while by no means revelatory, was still a delightful, brightly colored bit of piffle. Rick Hall was so effective in his dual role as man-of-the-house Chandebise and bellboy Poche that I found myself illogically wondering how in the world they were going to stage a face-to-face confrontation between the two characters.

This just in! Christianity is repressive, men are assholes, and the U.S. government hates pornography. All this, and not much more, courtesy of The Notorious Bettie Page, the kind of biopic that gives biopics a bad name. Lots of shuttling from plot point to plot point with only the skimpiest of G-strings connecting them to a greater theme or raison d'etre. Now, I don't necessarily go to movies based on true stories or real people looking for historical accuracy or trenchant re-creations of a larger social context, but I do, at the very least, expect to be entertained. The one-note-ness of Bettie Page was not only reductive in its simplifying of the character and the era, but deeply boring as well.

Sure, Gretchen Mol (Rounders, anyone?) looked great and was sexy as hell in the title role (though I do tend to agree with Violet Blue [beware the link; NSFW] when she says Mol doesn't exactly fill out Page's "ruffle-butt panties"), but, when basically all the part required of her was the repeated furrowing of her immaculately tweezed brow in earnest consideration every time her boundaries were being pushed by the series of increasingly fetishistic photographic demands being made of her, looking good is pretty much the most a person could ask for. She does work extra hard in one of the final scenes showing her, after recommitting her life to the Church (which, after a garish and blatantly sexualized "conversion" sequence, complete with her kneeling all dewy-eyed in front of the preacher man, is mainly dramatized by showing her buttoning a white sweater up over a black brassiere), reading from the Bible to (ahem, mostly male) passersby in an autumnal-looking park somewhere. Though her leap from slightly daffy but deliriously exuberant pin-up queen to devout evangelist has, despite some heavy-handed foreshadowing, no sense of dramatic inevitability whatsoever, Mol does her absolute best to translate her radiance from the flesh to the soul. Yet despite Mol's best efforts here, this fact of Page's personal history is just one more inconvenient episode to be gotten through until director Mary Harron can show us Bettie dancing (in homage to this ridiculous yet adorable video? [she's fully clothed and completely SFW here]) over the final credits.

Though I think Bettie's pictures and persona are totally awesome, I've never been one of those leopard-print, cat-eye-glasses hipster gals who would cite her as a major hero or sexual influence or anything, so my complaints here don't really stem from any kind of proprietary sense that no one's ever gonna do my Bettie justice. But, I did want to leave the movie theater feeling like I knew even a little bit more about her and her milieu than I did when I went in; I wanted to feel like I had something to chew on, some tangled tensions to try to resolve in my own head in idle moments of pondering on the train or at lunch this week. And this isn't to say that I didn't glean a few factoids about the nature of her work with Irving and Paula Klaw and Bunny Yeager and the Kefauver hearings on juvenile delinquency. But, Harron tips her hand so strenuously in favor of Bettie's heroic place at the center of a very thin slice of 1950s female sexuality, with only the barest, Walk the Line-esque examination of the events that led her there, that, quite apart from accounts of Page's post-cheesecake life, there was no ambiguity in this version of her story at all. It's all, yay Bettie, yay sexytime, fuck anything that distracts us for a moment from images of her frisky smile and plump bum, including the messy complexities of the woman herself. Yet, as we all know, the most effective titillation requires a little something be left to the viewer's imagination.

Giving New Meaning to the Term "Wish List"

Amazon quietly cashes in on sex toy market (via Nerve's Scanner). I love that the article was originally published in MSNBC's financial section.

G.B. and A.C.

Not that I really have much by way of point of reference, but the Gurlesque Burlesque show at the Abbey on Saturday night was amazing. Aside from being sweaty, drunken, hilarious, rowdy, political, inclusive, and sexy as hell (um, and did I mention sweaty?), it served as a potent reminder that we so often overlook imagination as a key component of sexuality and eroticism. The unbelievable creativity on display in the performers' choice of music, motif, and message turned the night into this anything-goes party where everybody was desirable, everybody was a star. The room felt united in this friendly, communal, participatory celebration of the place where the delights of the body and mind intersect, rather than being a slimy, leering, onanistic spectacle to be consumed solely for pornographic titillation. This allowed for a two-way street of maturity and respect between the performers and the audience, which, oddly enough, generated a vibe that felt almost innocent. (Which was enhanced, of course, by the reverence with which many of the performers held all things World War II– and Cold War–era.) We cheered as they shed their clothes, not solely because we were turned on (though these fine specimens were most definitely hawt, in their splendid array of sizes, shapes, colors, ages, experience levels, and attitudes), but also because we were so thankful—thankful for their sharing their talents with us, thankful to be hanging out together for the night, thankful that this wonderful art form has been revived with such a genuine passion for the lessons it can teach us about gender and sexuality in an engaging and non-militant way. And, aside from only a handful of cheap jokes, which seemed to be all in good fun, there wasn't an overabundance of hatin' on the straights in the crowd, which is always nice. Highlights for me included the amazing song stylings of Nomy Lamm, a performance by the Hellcat Hussies that I'll bet damali ayo would have approved of, the smokin' hot Michelle L'Amour and her award-winning Snow White dance, the thrillingly bizarro Lady Ace, and the inspiring grande dame and headliner Satan's Angel.

I've been loving the New Pornographers' new album Twin Cinema. I can't fully support this theory yet, but I think it might make an excellent companion piece to Spoon's Gimme Fiction in the way they both use, uh, cinema, as jumping-off points for these rangy, jangly sonic treasure maps of texture and emotion. Neko Case nearly brings me to tears on "These Are the Fables."

A big welcome back to LBLA and CTLA and a shout-out to the cutest baby in the world, whom I finally got to meet this weekend.

Three Thousand, Six Hundred and Fifty-Odd Days

This is dedicated to all my home fries who live (or used to live) in Rogers Park: the Morse Ave. Is Great! blog (via Gapers Block). "That's way too blue to be safe, mister sky. How'd you get so blue? You stop that right now!"

The El-Dubs have an EP coming out in October, called Ultimatum, whetting our collective appetite for the full-length slated to drop in early '06. I'm glad they're getting some stuff out there, and lord knows John could always use a few extra pennies for new notebooks and #2 pencils and whatnot, but aside from "Everything Is Talking," all of the others songs have been made available (granted, in different versions, yes) elsewhere: "The Commander Thinks Aloud" was featured on last year's Future Soundtrack for America, "Bride and Bridle" is from When I Pretend to Fall, "Delicate Hands" is included on a sampler that comes in the new issue of Spin with Death Cab on the cover, and "Ultimatum" has been posted as an MP3 on the Barsuk web site.

For those of you who are into mash-ups and Kanye West, Stereogum has the goods you crave: Sufjan and Kanye become "Zombies Walk" and the Beach Boys and Kanye become West Sounds. I can't vouch for the quality of either, as I haven't listened to them yet, but thought they looked promising enough to post anyway.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in this week's Chicago Reader on Terry Gilliam's new movie The Brothers Grimm: "With Lena Headey, Monica Bellucci, Peter Stormare, and Jonathan Pryce, the latter two giving some of their broadest turns as comic grotesques." Hummina-huh? If those bitches got any broader than they usually are, they'd have to start showing that shit in IMAX!

I just bought my tickets for tomorrow night's big Gurlesque Burlesque show at the Abbey. Our girl Nora Rocket, who is running tech, tells me Lady Ace is not to be missed. It's gonna be a fab time—Chicagoans with a taste for the bawdy should be sure to check it out.

To all of my wonderful and faithful readers, you'll notice that I've enabled the word verification step in the "post a comment" pop-up window. I've been getting some annoying comment spam in the past few weeks, and Blogger has made this safety function available to prevent it. This makes me a tremendously happy kitty and will help keep the playground clean for everyone. But be careful on the tire swing, for fuck's sake! I don't want to have to drag your ass to the emergency room with a concussion and projectile vomit streaked down your shirt. Heavens.