Archive by Author
February 21st, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
All of a sudden, it’s hard to be Lady Gaga.
Since bursting onto the music scene in 2008, the artist born Stefani Germanotta has achieved that rare alchemy of massive commercial success combined with highbrow fascination (albeit grudging fascination.) Standing almost alone amidst an imploding music industry, she has sold over 55 million albums in the past three years and racked up 340 million views on the avant-garde themed video for her song “Bad Romance.” Considerations of the meaning of Gaga littered the landscape, and her eclectic stew of references had many a university cultural studies department working overtime.
And what brought her to the top of this zeitgeist pyramid were her unrivaled skills in the post-modern art of pastiche. She patched together bits of Madonna, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Laurie Anderson with performance art, ’70s avant-garde, Wiemar Berlin—the list goes on and endlessly on. To her fans, such vigorous borrowing is an art form in itself; juxtaposing various found objets was a commentary about the transient nature of artistic reality. The more she took, the more celebrated she became.
Until Sunday, when the train finally hit a wall. If her songs in the past have seemed sprinkled with fairy dust from previous artists, her new single “Born This Way” has been drenched in a Seaworld-sized orca tankful of Madonna; to be precise – about 10 thousand gallons of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Express Yourself,” to which the new Gaga outing bears an almost note-to-note resemblance. And in case anyone missed the point, Gaga debuted the song at last weekend’s Grammy Awards in an outfit that could only be described as a Madonna Halloween costume, complete with head-topping ponytail.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast
January 18th, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
Picture, if you will, the opening scenes of next year’s blockbuster, The Quagmire—a dramatic account of America’s descent into the war in Vietnam.
The film opens on young Lt. Lyndon Johnson of the U.S. army. He is stationed in Tokyo in the 1950′s. As the opening credits roll, he is sulking away from the base’s fancy officers’ club, his application for membership having been rejected. He realizes that try as he might, with his poor Texas upbringing, he will never be one of them. Stung, he ventures out into the field, across the Asian continent, turning over those stones that the well-to-do ne’er-do-wells back at the club couldn’t be bothered with. While travelling through Indochina, he sees up close the resistance to French rule and, in it, sees opportunity for a young soldier! Meanwhile, while passing through a village, he falls in love with a Vietnamese girl, who ultimately abandons him, because his poor Texas upbringing means that, try as he might, he will never be one of her people.
Read the rest at the awl.
January 5th, 2011 by Richard under elsewhere writings. No Comments.
America’s Joan of Arc returned to the airwaves Tuesday night, this time not as a bumbling sideshow, but with her stake aflame as the main attraction on center stage.
After a near decade long trial by fire as Simon Cowell’s hapless sparring partner on American Idol, Paula Abdul stepped into the limelight on her own as the chief jurist of Live To Dance, CBS’s new competition show and the latest entry into the surprisingly durable TV dance genre. Since her exit from Idol, the question has loomed, after walking away from the biggest show on television, the show which gave her one of the greatest career second acts in recent memory, what would Paula next do with herself? Would she try to reinvent herself for a third time in her career—showing up the ditsy reputation she earned on Idol? Or would she go in a completely new direction, leaving the whole mean judge/nice judge dynamic behind.
As of last night the answer seems to be, Paula has decided to double down on being Paula—hyper-dramatic, gushy, tongue-tied Paula, staging a house to house battle with emotions at every turn.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
January 3rd, 2011 by Richard under News. No Comments.
During the past few years, accolades have routinely fallen on a quintet of Kirsten Dunst’s twentysomething colleagues—Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Carey Mulligan, and Michelle Williams—while little Kiki has festered in the background, a victim of too much, and too mainstream, success (Spider-Man), and too many projects that missed the mark with both critics and consumers (Elizabethtown, Wimbledon). And then her recent two-year absence from the screen was accompanied by wild tabloid talk suggesting she was heading for a Lindsay Lohan showbiz netherworld.
But now she is back. Over the next year, no less than four Kirsten Dunst projects will reach screens, a parade of dramatic movies that seem likely to showcase that a serious actress has been developing under our noses. The festivities kicked off last month with All Good Things, the first fiction film by Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki. Inspired by the notorious case of Robert Durst, a Manhattan real-estate scion suspected of, but never charged with, killing his wife, Dunst plays Katie, the presumably offed wife, opposite Ryan Gosling as her disintegrating husband. The thankless role of victimized spouse is one that has ground to dust many a fine actress, but in All Good Things, Dunst gives the character a quiet power, persistently making her a more compelling presence than the showy part of the psychopath at the center of the story.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
December 24th, 2010 by Richard under News. No Comments.
In 2003, Sofia Coppola, earned her place as a lioness of the independent film world when she wrote and directed, Lost in Translation, a film about an affectless young woman, fighting off boredom and ennui as she kills time hanging around a luxury hotel in Japan. The film won Ms. Coppola an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Best Director nomination. In 2006, she followed up Lost in Translation with Marie Antoinette, a film about an affectless young woman fighting off boredom and ennui as she kills time hanging around a gigantic palace in 18th Century France. And now she is back with Somewhere, a film about an affectless, not-as-young-as-he-dresses actor, fighting off boredom and ennui as he kills time hanging around a luxurious hotel in Los Angeles.
There is no rule of cinema stating that the problems the wealthy face in killing time while hanging out at luxury hotels can never be the stuff of good drama. (For the purposes of this article, we will count Marie Antoinette’s Versailles as a luxury hotel of its day, which to many thousands of its guests, it was. And will be again: This week, The New York Times reported that an annex on the Versailles estate will soon be a 23-room hotel.) Tolstoy, to name one artist, managed to spin a decent yarn or two around the travails of the extravagantly wealthy. The comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age were typically set in grand hotels or on cruise liners or country estates. And in these cases, their authors (or auteurs) created works that were accessible to a broad audience largely composed of classes other than those of the ridiculously wealthy. They may have been works that were by the rich, they may have been of the rich, but they decidedly were not only for the rich. However, much love stricken Anna Karenina may have suffered, acute consciousness of the social context was never far from the surface in Tolstoy, who titled one of his most famous stories Master and Man. And while the comedies of the ’30s contained a certain real-estate porn element, ultimately the point of setting the films on mammoth estates was not to set the audience ooohing and ahhing at the silver soup tureens, but to set up laughs when the tureen went flying and everyone got turtle soup all over their tuxedo fronts; the grander the staircase, the bigger the pratfall down it.
Read the rest at The Daily Beast.
December 10th, 2010 by Richard under News. No Comments.
Once upon a time, an accent, like an actor’s dimpled chin, was part of the furniture that made a star. Whatever the film’s setting, a director would no more mess with Gary Cooper’s diction than he would have cut off Rita Hayworth’s flaming tresses.
Cary Grant’s cockney bluster sufficed whether he were serving ‘er majesty in Inja’s sunny climes or reconstructing fossils as a paleontologist in the New York Museum of Natural History. Audiences found Errol Flynn’s watered-down Aussie lilt believable whether it came from Robin Hood or General Custer. In the big-screen adaptation of Julius Caesar, Rome was big enough for Marlon Brando to play Mark Antony with a Brooklyn snarl while James Mason’s Brutus elocuted in the Queen’s English.
Read the rest here
December 3rd, 2010 by Richard under elsewhere writings. No Comments.
The nominees are in. And at first glance, the overwhelming, almost prohibitive favorite here in the “Best New Age Album” category has to be considered Zamora’s “Instrumental Oasis Vol. 4,” which is astonishing considering where we’ve been with him. After “Instrumental Oasis Vol. 3,” there were many, myself included, who felt that with that bone crunch of an album, the Magical Places genre had nowhere else to go. I mean, not to get fanboyish, but six years later, every time I play the “Midnight Mystery” track (for the thousandth or two-thousandth time), I still find new things in it. That an artist working in Magical could at once repel and delight, horrify, enrage, captivate and caress was something no one saw coming. After that, I think it’s safe to say, the music world, public and critics alike, just threw up their hands and said, that is it. Like, the end.
Right? Take me to environmental, take me to soft jazz, take me to harmonium, because there is no way another Magical track is going to come along and slug me in the solar plexus and have me doubled over spitting up blood like that again. That’s what I said.
Read the rest at theawl
November 19th, 2010 by Richard under News. No Comments.
My stunning memoir of my life at Hampshire College, Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost a Memoir of Hampshire College in the 80′s is now available in thrilling paperback format, suitable for people of all ages.
I miss the beaten up couch from the cover of the hardback but love this new design. Makes the perfect stocking stuffer for the deadbeat in your life.
Buy it now here or here or here or here or at the local independent bookstore of your choosing.
November 9th, 2010 by Richard under book review, elsewhere writings. No Comments.
Brought to power on a wave of impossibly high expectations and then judged an abject failure at their first stumble, their every utterance picked over by an unforgiving 24/7 media and blogosphere while their fate is toyed with by dark, shadowy powers beyond their control.
What kind of lunatic would want to be a late-night talk-show host, that crucible of fire in which mighty careers are brought to ruin?
The answer, as portrayed in New York Times reporter Bill Carter’s The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy, is the sort of lunatic with a lot of unresolved emotional issues that he (almost always he) channels into the pursuit of that mythic grail: the Carson legacy.
Read the rest at thr.com.
April 23rd, 2010 by Richard under News. No Comments.
I have the honor of being anthologized with some of my favorite writes in a new collection edited by the great Anna David entitled Reality Matters: 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can’t Stop Watching .
I write, people will be shocked to learn, about American Idol, telling the epic tale of my permanent branding by an in-law of the show.
Elsewhere in the anthology, read the majesty of Stacey Grenrock Woods, Neal Pollack, Mark Lisanti, Jerry Stahl…as I say some of the very funniest. Buy it now!
The New Yorker’s Book Bench mentioned my essay in their item on the book, kindly in general but taking on my declaration that Idol is the most dramatic stage performance ever, suggesting life and death gladiator matches were perhaps more…life or death’ish. To which I say, how can you declare the mere life of a captive marauder to the potential for unlimited fame that our young dreamers stand on the cusp of at the height of the celebrity age? Doesn’t even come close!
