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Ooey and Gooey

In the planet K-PAX, there are two suns and several purple moons. The light, according to K-PAX‘s hero and alien, Prot (Kevin Spacey), is twilight soft. Here on Earth, however, the cast of the sun is a good deal harsher, and quality of life depends largely on the angle from which you view it. The same can be said of the quality of K-PAX.

Prot just appears one day at New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Unable to explain himself satisfactorily (he has no luggage), Prot gets tossed into a mental hospital and into the care of Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges). Prot is clearly delusional, though there are things he says that make sense and some other things that are truths yet to be discovered.

If it sounds corny, it is. The whole idea behind K-PAX is that of letting go of the understood and being open to the impossible. Mental-patient Prot is the noble creature here, free of society’s gobbledygook and tuned into the real nitty-gritty so he can give us the lesson of the day: Appreciate, appreciate, appreciate. What’s more, Prot may just be that alien he claims to be. He can cure the sick and talk to dogs and work out complicated astronomical problems. For someone to bring about this wealth of goodwill and wonder he just can’t be human, can he?

Whether you like K-PAX or not depends largely on your willingness to be led on this parade of hope. If you buy it, then the curve the film takes is that much more meaningful. If you don’t, then you can blame it on Spacey’s spaced-out performance. The burden of belief is all on him, and, boy, does he work it. His movements suggest he’s a tourist on this planet: His steps are shy and careful, as if testing the ground for stability, and his head swivels to check out everything. Later on, he runs through different ages: He’s a scared young boy, then an overconfident teen, and finally a man with a family. It may come off as Oscar-winning acting, or it could just be a hell of a lot of overemoting. — Susan Ellis

It’s a damn-near tragedy, really. Here she is, multiple piercings, heavy liner and heavier attitude, surrounded by a bunch of girls happily named Ashley. The real humiliation is that her name is the equally peppy Jennifer.

It’s just one of the many indignities that 17-year-old Jennifer (Leelee Sobieski) — call her “J” — suffers through in the ultra-light, super-awful My First Mister before she realizes what’s really important.

The path to that revelation is through a high-end clothing store, where she’s hired by Randall (Albert Brooks) to work in the stockroom. While J uses her goth look to intimidate, Randall’s merely curious. She goads him about his belly; he questions her about her nose ring. By not backing away from J’s hostility, Randall becomes something different entirely. He, this square, 49-year-old man, is dark teen’s friend.

The first quarter of My First Mister is promising. Sobieski’s scowl and Brooks’ gentle sarcasm mix well. She buys him a Hawaiian shirt; she takes him to get tattooed. He loans her money and makes sure she doesn’t rent a ground-floor apartment. They bond over music. She forces him to have fun, while he tears down her defenses a little.

And while everything between them is officially chaste, J wants to be Randall’s lover. She likes the way the word “lover” rolls over her tongue. It’s absurd. But that absurdity is dropped in favor of an ooey-gooey storyline that’s beyond cloying and beneath everyone involved — the actors and the audience alike. Is that paper airplane in the film really floating to heaven with a note to a departed loved one? Yes, sadly, it is. — SE

As far as scary movies go, I do not watch them. Well, if you count the slivers of screen visible between my fingers, then I watch “parts” of them.

13 Ghosts is different. It was actually quite good, in a ghoulish, not gross, sort of way. A remake of the 1960 William Castle film — this time directed by music video and commercial vet Steve Beck — 13 Ghosts revolves around the Kriticos family, which has seen its share of hard knocks. The mother (Kathryn Anderson) has recently died in the house fire that destroyed all their possessions; and the dad, Arthur (Tony Shalhoub), is just getting by. So, all the responsibility falls to Kathy (Shannon Elizabeth), the trustworthy daughter.

Just when they think all is lost, Arthur inherits a house from his estranged Uncle Cyrus (F. Murray Abraham), who has mysteriously passed away. The family gets to the house, which is made completely of glass, and loves it. They figure: put up some curtains and everything will be okay, right? Wrong. Soon Rafkin (Matthew Lillard), the tortured psychic, shows up and makes them see that their house really isn’t a house and good ole Uncle Cyrus really isn’t good. In fact, the house is a machine ruled by the devil and Cyrus is a collector of spirits.

Of course, the ghosts are conveniently located in the basement. In the original film, Castle lured theatergoers by promoting the “Illusion-O!” viewing glasses which allowed audiences to see on-screen spirits that were invisible to the naked eye. Although glasses aren’t passed out for the remake, the gimmick infuses in the movie. The actors cannot see the tortured souls without donning special glasses. And once they put them on, see the souls, and are attacked by the souls, they finally realize that “it’s time to get out.” Had any thinking person walked up to an all-glass house which contained a massive gear-shift contraption inside, they would have immediately known it was “time to get out.” But this is the movies and intelligence isn’t always in this script.

Either way, the family, Rafkin, and babysitter Maggie (played by female rapper Rah Digga of the Flipmode Squad) continue to battle the ghosts and finally Uncle Cyrus while simultaneously freeing all the trapped souls.

The film does a good job of scene-setting by having most of the action take place in the house. The ghosts look real but aren’t too scary and don’t yell mindless threats of death and destruction. It is clear that they, too, are victims of crazy Uncle Cyrus. Also, the film avoids the typical horror-film scenes of people running through the woods, ax murderers chasing teenagers through abandoned homes, and the continuous flow of victims’ blood.

Take your hands away from your face. This scary movie is worth watching. — Janel Davis

Categories
Book Features Books

Rejected By Jesus

It took a while,” Michael Schiefelbein says about his novel Vampire Vow and about the two years it took him to find a publisher. Key word he heard over the course of those two years: “but.” As in:

“My agent told me he really liked it, but he also told me from the outset it was going to be a hard sell. But I got some great rejection letters from publishers! Really nice ones. Like, ‘I like your writing, but …’ Or, ‘You’ve done something different with the vampire genre, but I can’t touch it. It’s too controversial.’ Or, ‘We do gay literature, but this isn’t exactly gay lit. This is popular writing, but it’s gay. It’s somewhere in between.’ Pigeon-holing for some was a problem.”

Forget the book business of pigeon-holing. The book’s set-up alone could be a problem for more than some, and check out Vampire Vow from page one for starters.

A Roman officer named Victor Decimus (whose job in Judaea under Pontius Pilate is to “bark orders and look good”) has it for a 23-year-old, unmarried “Jew boy” and “boy prophet” named Joshua, aka Jesus, aka Christ. Joshua joins Victor in activities that will be news to a lot of people — skinny-dipping by day, “hot and drunk on the Mount of Olives” on Joshua’s “homemade” wine by night — but he keeps Victor off his back because of “religious qualms.” This drives Victor’s lust into overdrive and into the arms of a dark sorceress named Tiresia, who promises Victor eternal life and mastery over all, all but that circumcised Joshua guy, whom even the grave can’t master. The downside to all this? Victor will have to leave “the world of the living” and enter “the league of the night” on his way to eternal life in the Kingdom of Darkness alongside his “consort,” if and when he can finally find a boyfriend man enough to stand up to Victor’s brand of really rough trade.

Not a bad offer, however, on Tiresia’s part, except for the vampire part, which sends Victor, in revenge over Joshua’s rejection, on a raping, killing spree across the centuries and in and out of Europe’s juiciest monasteries (“the harems of Joshua’s god”), until he ends up stateside a bloodthirsty sex fiend and Christ-hating monk among monks outside Knoxville, Tennessee. An early conquest, young Brother Luke, is a sex-starved pushover, so a no-go in the “marriage” department. It’s hunky, weight-lifting, soul-lifted consort-of-choice Brother Michael who forces Brother Victor — who suffers from a “skin condition” that puts sunlight (the Son’s light?) out of the question — into a feeding frenzy and totally bonkers. Bonkers too: readers easily offended by the sexually explicit, the graphically violent, and the patently blasphemous.

Not all readers, though. Vampire Vow is into its second printing. The publisher, Alyson Books, has featured it in ads in Out and The Advocate. A Memphis booksigning last August was a hit. Recent booksignings in Washington, New Orleans, and Topeka (the author’s hometown): ditto. Next stops, Chicago and New York: more than likely, ditto on the ditto. But how’s the book doing among Schiefelbein’s colleagues at Christian Brothers University, where he teaches literature and specializes in the Victorian novel?

“I’ve been kind of surprised,” the author admits. “People in the English department don’t seem scandalized at all. A nun in the theology department called me up and said, ‘I read Vampire Vow.’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ And she said, ‘I think your portrait of Jesus is very orthodox.'”

(Huh?)

“Victor’s attracted to Jesus, he’s attracted to someone who’s good,” Schiefelbein explains. “And vampires are essentially sympathetic in some ways. They’re lonely. But I also agree with a lot of Victor’s criticisms of organized religion. That makes him sympathetic to me. At the signing in Topeka, though, someone did ask me about the controversial elements, whether I’d got angry responses, and I really haven’t. The worst response came from a couple who told me they hated Victor, that he was despicable. They didn’t see any redeeming qualities.”

That couple needs to get a grip. For “redeeming qualities,” we do indeed see Brother Victor suffering from isolation, suffering the “silence of Joshua,” suffering the “detestable life of feedings and tombs and flights from those who hunted [him].” We just don’t see him (forever unredeemed?) exactly at his best. (We will see him, however, again. A sequel, planned for fall 2003, is already in the works, again for Alyson.)

But what is an ex-seminarian and ex-Catholic (turned First Congregationalist), a teacher at a Catholic university in Memphis, Tennessee, doing writing such a book? Schiefelbein’s other new title, The Lure of Babylon (Mercer University Press), is a study of anti-Catholic sentiment among 19th-century British novelists, and at first glance the two titles make an odd combo. Not according to this author:

“In Lure it’s all about the mystique of Catholicism. Catholicism identified with superstition, with unenlightened thinking, backwardness, idolatry in terms of statues and icons and even the pope. But so many of the monks in the novels that I discuss in Lure are kind of vampire figures or at least ghoulish, unnatural characters who fall into the ‘outsider’ category.

“Plus, I’d just taught Paradise Lost and was thinking about the Satan figure, the most interesting figure in Milton’s poem. Thinking about the kind of person who challenges God, Christianity. And then I thought it’d be interesting to write about a vampire, and the first line of Vow came to me — “I wanted Jesus.” Once it did, the book really wrote itself because I had to explain how it was that someone would fall in love with Jesus, who that someone was, what happens because he does fall in love. That got the story going.”

Anne Rice was an obvious model?

“Anne Rice, no. I was thinking of a generic, confessional kind of writing where someone is pouring out his soul. The secrets, the dark secrets particularly. A lot of Victorian fiction is like that. My own adult, seminary experience … I drew from it to create the atmosphere, the dynamics inside a monastery.

“But before that, when I was 14, at a high school seminary in Kansas City, I was really idealistic. I wanted to be a saint. My friend Kevin and I wanted to be saints together. We had this whole regimen of prayer and fasting. We’d eat one meal a day. We’d sleep without a pillow. We said the rosary on our knees on the floor. We even incorporated cross-country running. The idea of sainthood was a way to perfection, of becoming one with God. So I think there, in that relationship with Kevin, were seeds for the novel. For me, with Kevin, I had a real emotional attraction and probably a physical attraction too. But I can’t say I was very conscious of it. The dynamics of the spiritual and the sexual became intertwined.

“Catholicism, though, it’s always going to be part of me. It shaped me. It shaped my spirituality. It’s my foundation. I don’t feel somehow now I have to reject everything it’s about.”

This is good. It means Michael Schiefelbein, who may have known versions of Brother Michael, who may have even known less drastic versions of Brother Victor, knows a good foundation when he sees it.

On the outrageous goings-on inside the pages of Vampire Vow … it’s only a book, for God’s sake, and, to go with this year’s Day of the Dead, sexy as hell. No “buts” (that’s with one “t”) about it.

— Leonard Gill

Why Did I Ever

By Mary Robison

Counterpoint, 200 pp., $23

The book: Mary Robison’s newest novel, Why Did I Ever. The gripe, at length: In a fictional world constructed of words, narrative continuity is essential to understanding. Complete artistic enjoyment is impossible without this continuity, which, when well executed, creates in the average or expert reader an empathetic consciousness careful to follow and relish the story no matter what contortions of logic or unexpected nonsense and craziness occur. This consciousness, like any focused attempt at comprehension, is attained through the acquisition of information flowing in an orderly, constant manner, with point in time made manifest. To masquerade any kind of guessing-game narrative as authorial license in rendering the psychological state of the narrator is to craft for oneself nothing but an artistic crutch and ruinously reveal a story for what it is: inchoate.

All this may sound redundant, but this crucial narrative flow — present even in something so famously opaque as Ulysses — is what’s missing from Why Did I Ever, which might truthfully be described as a haphazard, fragmented, journal-like work of disconnected schizophrenia narrated by a woman who, it seems, has Attention Deficit Disorder, two troubled kids, three ex-husbands, and a perpetual Ritalin jones, among other woes both explicit and unidentifiable in origin.

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a graduate of Johns Hopkins University who studied under John Barth, Robison is a writer much associated with the Minimalists who triggered the short-story revolution — and subsequent glut of “writers’ workshops” — of thse ’70s and ’80s and whose unlikely hero was that heavily edited but wonderful author of striking, stinking drunk fiction, Raymond Carver.

Unlike Carver, Robison has eschewed formal storytelling for the irritating bit-by-bit method of slow expository writing meant to sear with its emotional resonance. It does not ring true. This choppy style of paragraphs separated by pregnant pauses, vaguely allusive titles, or dubious numbering is better left to authors like David Markson. In such works as This Is Not A Novel, Markson employs this fragmentary style in a manner consistent with his aim. The inclusion of stabbing anecdotes and frightfully brilliant observations serves as an end unto itself while Markson fleshes out a very simple, very harrowing personal narrative. This narrative, constructed at intervals, is supported by and eclipses the accumulated minutiae that make up the greater portion of the work.

Why Did I Ever, in its attempt to portray what may be a woman’s descent into schizophrenia, falls prey to confusion and cleverness. — Jeremy Spencer

Mary Robison will be signing and reading from Why Did I Ever at Burke’s Book Store from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Monday, November 5th.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

No More Drama

Mary J. Blige

(MCA)

The first few times we heard “Family Affair” on the radio, my wife didn’t believe the single was really by Mary J. Blige. And who could blame her? Blige’s vocals on this lead single from No More Drama (already the biggest pop hit of her career) are lighter and jazzier than we’ve come to expect from “just plain old Mary” (per “All That I Can Say,” the gorgeous lead single from 1999’s Mary) although every bit as strong and assured. And the carefree sentiment of the song isn’t exactly what we’re used to from R&B’s reigning Queen of Pain. “Come on, everybody get on up/’Cause you know we got to get it crunk/Mary J. is in the spot tonight/And I’m gonna make you feel alright,” Blige, now Queen of Bling, sings about a minute into this insistently funky Dr. Dre production, later tying the song into the album’s title concept directly by explaining that she’s “celebrating no more drama in our lives.” On the title track, producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis construct a tornado of drama for Blige to fight her way out of, balancing a gospel-y choir against an interpolation on the theme from The Young and the Restless, as Blige promises, “No more drama in my life/No one’s ever gonna make me hurt again.”

The problem, of course, is that drama is exactly what we’ve always cherished about Blige, who brings more gravity to a song than any other contemporary R&B singer. It’s Blige’s ability to bring old-soul pain into a post-hip-hop R&B sensibility that has fed her best work: bearing down hard on Share My World‘s “Not Gon’ Cry” or coming soft-but-serious on Mary‘s “Your Child,” paying homage to Aretha and Dorothy Moore by closing her live record, The Tour, with “Day Dreaming” and “Misty Blue” or putting the soul-deep exclamation on Ghostface Killah’s galvanizing childhood remembrance “All That I Need Is You.”

No More Drama isn’t exactly free of the heavy stuff, of course. On “Crazy Games” and the Neptunes-produced “Steal Away,” Blige brings troubled-relationship clichés to life where lesser, younger divas wouldn’t be able to break out of the conceptual. And the Blige-penned “PMS” (which wittily samples Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful”) is a bluesy slow-burner so unexpectedly direct that it’s worthy of a chitlin’ circuit label like Malaco.

But Blige’s new positive attitude ultimately results in a more generic record, one that exudes less personality than anything else in her oeuvre. Sometimes we need drama. — Chris Herrington

Grade: B+

Internal Wrangler

Clinic

(Domino USA)

If, like me, you’re the type whose life is driven by musical fanaticism, then get ready to add an item to the ever-changing “most important albums ever” list that is no doubt recited ad nauseum into every half-listening ear. Internal Wrangler has been an underground smash in Clinic’s British homeland, and Radiohead have been liberally spreading the Clinic gospel after taking them on tour as an opening act. But however well-oiled and dubiously effective, the British hype machine is to be believed in this case, and whatever stardom, exposure, cash, or party favors are hoisted in Clinic’s direction are well-deserved.

Like most wholly transcendent albums, I will forever remember what my life was like, or maybe even where I was, when I first heard Internal Wrangler. It will enter that exalted tier occupied by Television’s Marquee Moon, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Mission of Burma’s VS, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Wire’s Pink Flag, and the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension. (There’s that aforementioned list; must stop NOW.) But unlike a few of the above, Internal Wrangler is not a genre definer, nor will it change the way you hear music. What it does do, with an almost creepy ease, is take a disparate palette of tasteful influences (the Seeds, Suicide, Can, the Buzzcocks, the Velvets, a touch of new wave, and a sprinkle of minimal, left-field disco) and pull off the ever-elusive, all-over-the-map pop album that includes a song for everyone.

“Distortions,” track four and the album’s first “pretty” song, is the perfect combo, flaunting three decades worth of great pop: Tommy James, Slider-era T. Rex, and New Order’s “Leave Me Alone.” The title track has the distinctive Talking Heads-by-way-of-the-Sweet bounciness that will become a trademark when the band is old enough to have one of those, and “The Second Line” dirties up Roxy Music while trying to emulate Can’s “Moonshake.” Then there are the two-minute-or-less “rockers” thrown about the album, adrenalizing ’60s garage rock into raging punked-out capsules meant to keep you on your toes (not that you will need it). Clinic is further proof that rock is not, nor has it ever been, dead, as is perpetually declared. For better or worse, Internal Wrangler is one of those records that I’ll have to put away for a year because I wore it out in a month. — Andrew Earles

Grade: A+

All Is Dream

Mercury Rev

(V2)

I have never been one to claim that Radiohead is groundbreaking or unique: They are merely a good pop band greatly influenced by more challenging yet lesser-known artists, and they are simply fashioning these influences into something acceptable and understandable on a very large, if not mainstream, scale. Mercury Rev is one of these “lesser-knowns,” but the grand scope of their latest effort may result in a deserved change in that status.

All Is Dream places Mercury Rev five albums into a career that started with 1991’s Yerself Is Steam, an album that was peddled from the trunk of a car after the collapse of their label, Rough Trade USA. Obviously cursed from day one, Mercury Rev would go on to be kicked off of Lollopalooza ’93’s second stage (for being so loud that the main stage was drowned out) and experience label and lineup turmoil that would crush most outfits. All Is Dream is the new, mature Mercury Rev coming to complete fruition, a trend that was started about halfway through 1995’s See You On The Other Side. No longer do they sound like the 1910 Fruitgum Co. competing with both a boozed-up marching band and a gymnasium full of idling school buses. Now it’s a more measured approach to surpassing what the Flaming Lips (who once shared members with Mercury Rev) did with The Soft Bulletin or Spiritualized did with Ladies and Gentlemen , but Mercury Rev eschew the Lips’ gimmicks and Spiritualized’s junior-high study-hall drug imagery for soaring psychedelic-pop anthems devoid of pretension. Plus, they write far better hooks than those two bands or, for that matter, any band affiliated with Elephant 6 — a much-doted-on indie contingent that has helped overshadow the past half-decade’s real pop craftsmen. I don’t normally find myself recommending fifth albums as places to start with bands, but All Is Dream is the perfect introduction to one of the era’s more pathetically overlooked musical treasures. — AE

Grade: A

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Last White Queen

CREDIT: PHOTO BY LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Not very long ago in a land not very far away, there lived two queens. Each
had equal power, each had equal respect, but one was always black, the other
always white, for as long as most people could remember.

All of that ended a few weeks ago. In the town of Coldwater, Mississippi,
four homecoming queens — two white, two black; two old, two new — stood
together one last time, their faces bright with makeup and sore from smiling
as the crowns were passed from one pair to the other.

Elected by their peers, the Coldwater High School seniors were treated to
a night of formal dresses, high-heeled shoes, and sparkling tiaras — symbols
of the end of an era. For these were the last, separate but equal,
“white” and “black” queens. Next year the school will
elect only one.

The town, located about 30 miles from Memphis in Tate County, held its
last dual coronation on October 5th. There was little fanfare — in fact, the
two-queen system ended with a whimper rather than a bang, like the final
sputter of a broken-down car.

Cold Water Ruins the Game

Coldwater is not one of those front-porch, magnolia, and mint-tea
Mississippi towns. It’s a truck stop compared to nearby Oxford’s Tara, a blue-
collar afterthought, a broken necklace of gas stations, pool halls, and
aluminum-sided homes crowded tightly together as if to mourn what must have
been a prettier past. The high school varsity team plays its games at an
elementary school, where the football field has no track. Flanked on either
side by generic metal stands and on one end by a conspicuous, garishly lit
scoreboard, the field seems accidental at best.

On the night of the last double-queen homecoming, a chilly rain pours on
Coldwater. Water falls from the brims of umbrellas, slides down the back of
camouflage ponchos, and runs off the gutters of the tiny brick concession
stand. Inside — serving hamburgers and hotdogs — are the only people who
look remotely happy to be here.

Maybe homecoming would have been more festive had the weather held out.
Maybe all the students would have worn new clothes and giggled over dates for
the big night. They might have crowded into the backs of pick-up trucks
tugging chicken-wire-and-tissue-paper floats around the field. But tonight
there are no floats and not even a track on which to circle the field. No
cooing couples sit under wool blankets; there is no halftime show, no band
trumpeting Sousa marches, no flag corps. The two weeks of perfect fall weather
prior to the big game are a memory, replaced by a bone-chilling downpour that
seems to leave everyone huddling, mud-splattered and shivering.

Before the day of homecoming there had been talk of a protest. But on
this night there are no angry students, no stony-faced parents; in fact there
are virtually no students or parents at all. The stands are empty. The
visitors’ side looks sad and the home stands are positively anemic.

Rather than encouraging their supporters, turning back-flips and forming
pyramids, the cheerleaders seem to have decided that they need an evening off.
Only two are in sight and they never bother to remove the warm-up pants that
obscure their skirts, opting instead to sit in the top row of bleachers,
blanketed under clear ponchos. Five boys make up the entire student section.
The band, if there is one, is invisible. Has the protest become a boycott?

“Oh, no,” says a woman working the concession stand.
“Everyone’s in their cars staying warm.”

The few CHS fans present are not students but parents, and mostly black
females at that. But what the crowd lacks in numbers and diversity, these
women make up for in enthusiasm. Cheering, jumping, screaming, celebrating
each tiny victory, they try to fill the void left in the absence of the
cheerleaders. One, in a fit of excitement, suddenly utters: “Homecoming
is the best time of year. It always was when I was a student anyway.”

On the field, the home team’s warriors –Cougars, actually — are taking
a beating. Water sprays up from the field and the time between plays seems
long and tedious. On the bench the players huddle together for warmth. Some of
the spectators in the stands do likewise.

And except for occasional glimpses of sequins peaking out from the bottom
of long coats and girls navigating high heels carefully through pools of
sucking mud, there are no signs of any homecoming royalty, black, white, or
otherwise. Homecoming seems to have faded into just another poorly attended
football game.

A Queendom Divided No Longer

Senior Homecoming Maids (l to
r): Jessica Hollins, Holly Turley, Nia LeSure, and Kristin
Spencer.

In the spring of 1997, Hernando (Mississippi) High School made national news
when one of its students complained about race-based student government
elections. After the federal Office for Civil Rights got involved, the DeSoto
County School Board abolished any sort of race restrictions on elected
positions. The high school, which is less than 10 miles from Coldwater, had
its first race-neutral homecoming elections the following fall.

According to Roger Murphy, spokesperson for the Office of Civil Rights,
there is presently an open complaint against the Tate County school district.
Murphy says the complaint alleges racial discriminatory practices with regard
to homecoming queens and the matter is currently being investigated by the
department.

The only other high school in Tate County — Independence High — also
elects dual homecoming queens based on race. However, no one at Independence,
where the student body is 57 percent white, has filed a complaint with the
Civil Rights Office.

In Coldwater, the practice of dual homecoming queens was first questioned
by a group of parents last spring.

“There were some concerned parents who thought it should be
changed,” says Coldwater High School principal Kevin Knox. “They
wanted it ended this year and they went to the school board last May, but no
one ever followed up on it.”

When homecoming rolled around again, interest in abolishing the dual-
queen system was renewed. But because the students had already voted on two
queens, the system decided to let the practice continue for one final
year.

On the ballot, the students choose one black “maid” and one
white “maid” from grades seven through 11 for the homecoming court
and vote for two black and two white 12th-grade girls as homecoming queen
finalists. Two queens, one of each race, are named the night of the game. But
Knox says because the practice has been around for so long, the ballot doesn’t
even need to explain the choice. The students know to choose one of each. And
as far as the principal knows, the school has never had to deal with a
situation where a girl was of mixed parentage.

Asked when the practice started in Coldwater, Knox quips, “When was
integration?”

“That’s when it started,” he adds, “back in the 1970s
sometime. From what I hear the school was majority white and they started the
practice to make it fair for the black kids.”

But these days Coldwater’s student population is mostly black.

“It’s gone on too long,” says Knox. “I guess it’s just
time to change it. It’s probably been time to change it before, but the
students never complained.”

In fact, most of them want the homecoming election to stay the way it
is.

“The black kids feel like it won’t be fair,” says Knox. “A
white girl won’t have a chance.”

Passing the Crown

High on a hill and overlooking the field is a tan-colored, aluminum
gymnasium where the coronation will take place. Just before halftime, a
hodgepodge of students with instruments — the band — parades past the
football field, through the drizzle, and up to the gym. Eventually, the white
kids standing by their cars and the black kids standing on the bleachers begin
to follow them.

The remaining spectators are urged on by those few enthusiastic mothers,
maybe former cheerleaders themselves. They race to the gym, urging everyone in
front of them to move a little faster, the coronation is about to begin.

Inside the impossibly humid gymnasium, the stands are a riot of hormonal
teens, waiting noisily and impatiently. Everyone wants to know who the queens
will be.

A basketball goal hangs over a row of waiting folding chairs, which are
surrounded by expectant friends and family bearing cameras. One by one the
announcer names the “maids” and the awkward girls in prom dresses
walk nervously past the free-throw line. Each is on the arm of a father,
boyfriend, or cousin, and they walk in high-heeled shoes across the shiny
floor, alternating by race: black, white, black, white. The order is
apparently not coincidental. They also sit by alternating color. It’s as if
the school reasoned that checkerboarding the students would somehow make the
whole odd process more acceptable.

Finally the last two girls, one black, one white, walk across the floor,
each on an arm of the principal. Both have small tiaras adorning elaborate
hairdos. These are the previous year’s queens.

After a moment of anticipation, this year’s winners are announced: Holly
Turley and Jessica Hollins. The emcee does not mention their races, only calls
them “your 2001 Coldwater High School homecoming queens.” The new
queens stand up, ecstatic, and the coronation begins.

With all four queens standing, principal Knox gently lifts the tiaras
from last year’s queens and crowns the two new royals. The crown from last
year’s black queen is passed onto this year’s white queen and vice versa. One
of the crowns gets stuck in the hair of last year’s queen, as if,
symbolically, she were not ready to give it up. After a long, awkward moment
spent separating hair from rhinestone, the tiara is freed and two new queens
emerge.

There are still no protesters in sight, only well-wishers. An orgy of
picture-taking begins: black girls with white girls, white girls with white
girls, black girls with black girls, girls and their mothers, girls and their
fathers, girls and their brothers, girls and their dates, all of them hugging
each other and smiling.

Some of the student body agree that, yes, it is time for things to
change, for the school to be unified, but others are indifferent.

“It really doesn’t bother me all that much,” says Coldwater
band member Tameka Dowl. “I think two queens gives everybody a chance to
win, but having just one queen will give everybody a chance to come
together.”

PHOTO BY LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Justin Clemmons, who graduated from Coldwater last June, doesn’t understand
what all the fuss is about.

“When I was here nobody really cared one way or the other; now
that’s all changed,” he says.

Likewise, no member of the royal court seems unhappy about being one of
two racially chosen queens or one of two similarly selected maids.

Pershanona Leverson is the black representative from the eighth grade.
The soft-spoken girl, wearing a powder-blue dress, says the change is
fine.

“Most of the students feel okay about it,” she says, shrugging.
She doesn’t care which way the voting is done, so long as there’s a queen and
she has a chance to be that queen someday.

Right now, Holly Turley is one of those queens, perhaps the last
“white” one.

“I don’t care,” she says about the switch to only one.
“I’m gone next year anyway.” But when pressed, she says, “They
should have two, I think. Look around. This school is mostly black. They’ll
always win.”

As quickly as it all began, the students file out of the gym, bypassing
the game (where the second half has already begun) and disappearing into the
darkness of the parking lot, splashing through puddles as they drive away. The
ceremony lasted less than half an hour, and now it seems no one wants to hang
around for the end of the game. Even those cars that are parked around the
field begin to leave.

Behind the school, two interracial couples share cigarettes, alternating
between inhaling and making out in the classic high school manner. Thoughts of
queens and courts and elections don’t seem to matter much to these four.
They’ve integrated on their own.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Live At the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970):

It’s About That Time

Miles Davis

(Columbia/Legacy)

The most important aspect of this previously unreleased two-disc set,
which was recorded at New York City’s premier rock-and-roll venue of the time
a month before the arrival of the nonpareil Bitches Brew, is that it
marks the first time on non-bootleg disc for the legendary Miles Davis quintet
(a sextet for this concert) of ’69 and ’70: Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on
soprano and tenor sax, Chick Corea on electric piano, Dave Holland on acoustic
and electric bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums. (Brazil’s Airto Moreira
supplies additional percussion.)

As ’69 became ’70, Davis — a leading proponent or initiator of jazz’s
every metamorphosis after the late ’40s, save avant-garde — was sloughing off
the once-revolutionary bebop sound he alone had dragged kicking and screaming
into the kingdoms of rock and funk. Others tried to follow, but most stuck
safely to the old school. Alternately derided and praised by contemporary
critics, what Davis was doing is in retrospect quite evident: always listening
to and one-upping himself.

Each disc of It’s About That Time is a breathless, nonstop suite
running approximately 45 minutes. Three of the tunes on this turning-point
recording appear on both sets, with drastic changes evident. Such was the
nature of Davis’ improvisational approach, steeped as it was in the Charlie
Parker aesthetic of unrestrained invention. Davis’ fragmented, elliptical
trumpet directs his band into ecstatic renditions of “Bitches Brew,”
“Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” and Joe Zawinul’s
“Directions,” among others. Undoubtedly, few present at this
concert, which was an opening gig for Steve Miller (!), had any idea that
these unearthly sounds would affect American music ad infinitum. The
hallucinogenic cocktail being served up for their astonished ears was
distilled from the psychedelic blues of Jimi Hendrix, funky electric soul
courtesy of James Brown, and re-Africanized jazz in the wake of pop
bastardization. It was about time. — Jeremy Spencer

Grade: A

Rockin’ the Suburbs

Ben Folds

(Epic)

If I were Robert Sledge or Darren Jesse (the much-forgotten other two-
thirds of Ben Folds Five), I’d be sending Mr. Folds several angry letters to
the tune of “Why didn’t you write songs like this for our last
record?” Two years after the release of the musically ambitious but
commercially underperforming final Ben Folds Five record, Folds has written
what might be his finest batch of songs to date. And while the songs are
recorded and performed well-enough on this solo foray, I find it hard not to
miss Sledge’s manic fuzz-bass work, Jesse’s pounding drums (which have been
replaced by a mixture of tame drum loops and Folds himself behind the kit),
and the trio’s quirky harmonies. But, quibbles aside, Rockin’ the
Suburbs is a really good record.

The album opens strongly with what should have been the lead single
(instead of the overly witty title track, which is the album’s only low
point), the upbeat and catchy-as-hell “Annie Waits.” But what truly
shines is Folds’ ability to write emotional pop ballads. The creepy “The
Ascent of Stan” and the genuinely gut-wrenching “Carrying
Cathy” are up there with Folds’ best tearjerkers from Whatever And
Ever Amen. And then there’s Rockin’ the Suburbs‘ highlight,
“Still Fighting It.” Only Ben Folds can begin a song with the lyrics
“You want a coke?/Maybe some fries?/The roast beef combo’s only
$9.95” and turn it into a touching anthem about lost youth. Yeah, that
other piano man, Billy Joel, only wishes he was this good. — J.D.
Reager

Grade: A-

Robert Pete Williams

Robert Pete Williams

(Fat Possum)

This is an uncharacteristically restrained release for the Fat Possum
label. No photos of goose-stepping in a cotton field (remember the picture
used for a T-Model Ford release a few years back?) or boasts of moonshine-
induced intoxication (again a la T-Model Ford and several other Fat Possum
artists who have indeed set some records for steady-state drunkenness in North
Mississippi; it’s not all mythology or record company hype — these are some
thirsty men). Instead, this is a soberly presented re-release of an album that
originally appeared on the small Ahura Mazda label in 1971. The black-and-
white photos and original cover and liner notes are all reproduced here with
only the Fat Possum logo stamped unobtrusively on the CD’s back cover to
identify it as a new release on that label.

This album was recorded at Robert Pete Williams’ small house in
Maringouin, Louisiana, around Christmas 1970, but the performances and sound
quality of the recording are anything but sloppy or lo-fi. Williams sings and
plays guitar (both acoustic and electric) on 11 originals. Williams grew up
around Baton Rouge and was convicted of murder in 1956 for shooting a man in a
bar brawl. He was sentenced to life at the infamous Angola State Prison but
was finally granted a full pardon in 1964, after which he returned to
intermittent farming, recording, and live performing until his death in 1980.
Williams’ style was uniquely his own, sounding like few other country
bluesmen. His guitar-playing, vocal delivery, and songwriting on this
recording are characteristically eccentric, highly personal, and deeply
passionate. No, Williams’ music doesn’t sound like the one- chord hill boogie
that the Oxford-based label is noted for, but it does evoke an almost trance-
like response in the listener. Nice going, Fat Possum. You’ve proved that it’s
okay to leave the corn liquor out of the marketing process and still release a
good record. — Ross Johnson

Grade: B+

It’s the Black-Eyed Snakes

The Black-Eyed Snakes

(Chair-Kickers Music)

This funny little side project has two punch lines, one spiritual and one
geographical. First one goes like this: This may be the finest Mormon-led
white blues band of all time. Second one builds off the first: They are
definitely the finest white blues band based in Duluth, Minnesota — you know,
where the Replacements played their first paying gig at the dawn of the 1980s.
And the lead Mormon is none other than kindly parent Al Sparhawk of Low,
indie-rock’s most delicate band. Like I said, it’s a funny little project, and
I get off on the idea of an earnest Jon Spencer Blues Explosion at least as
much as I dig the music, though both suffered from the transfer from stage to
tape. So see ’em live if you ever get the chance. Sparhawk, aka “Chicken-
Bone George,” sits on a chair, howls through an old microphone, and leads
his bass-less trio through a whistle-stop tour of pomo blooze: Muddy Waters
and Willie Dixon, sure, but also Moby and the Fall and originals as simple as
stomping your feet. And their theme song is so addictive they usually play it
twice. It’s The Black-Eyed Snakes is currently available through Chair-
Kickers Music, PO Box 600, Duluth, MN 55801. — Addison Engelking

Grade: B+

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Hoods

Good manners are no excuse for criminal behavior,” one bank manager says in Bandits. That might be true, but the other 122 minutes of the film would have you believe otherwise.

Joe (Bruce Willis) and Terry (Billy Bob Thornton) are bank robbers with a better way. Deciding regular robbery is too risky (the guards, the tellers, the customers) the duo become … the Sleepover Bandits! — the most successful bank robbers in the history of the United States.

Sadly, it’s not as exciting as it sounds. The evening before a heist, they show up on the doorstep of bank managers’ houses, eat a surreal dinner with the families (never injuring even a hair on any hostage’s head), and politely rob the bank the next morning, all the while becoming media darlings.

Told within the framework of a real-life crime television show, the story is a little uneven. Some things make perfect sense; others will leave viewers shaking their heads and saying, “Huh?” (especially a side story about a pretty hitchhiker and the duo’s frontman). And the time element is downright confusing. During what seems to be a 12-hour period when Terry’s getaway car runs out of gas and he’s forced to bring a lonely housewife (Cate Blanchett) to the group’s hideout, Joe has spent two weeks and all his money with some Norwegian girl. It’s a problem for much of the movie; during any given scene, it’s impossible to tell how much time has passed or how many banks have been robbed.

But the film’s director, Barry Levinson, is not as concerned with that part of the plot, because the movie isn’t so much a high-flying crime-spree adventure as a madcap menage a trois love story: an update of Bonnie and Clyde and Clyde’s best friend. Both Joe and Terry fall for Blanchett’s Kate and she, a case of Stockholm Syndrome just waiting to happen, says that together the two make the perfect man.

Luckily, in this parade of neuroses, the entire cast shines. Willis and Thornton are both at a comedic high point: Willis as a man who charms women out of their cars (as well as their pants) and Thornton as a hypochondriacal basket of nerves. Blanchett strikes the right chord of misery and hopefulness as a woman whose husband says her house misses her more than he does. And Troy Garity, the aforementioned frontman, rounds out the cast as a stuntman with a penchant for lighting himself on fire. The only question, really, is how these characters can stand being around each other for very long.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the movie is the way the “American people” (as well as the audience) take to Joe and Terry. When they show up at one house, the woman at the door says almost gleefully, “Hot damn, you’re the boys from TV. Guess that makes me a hostage.” At another robbery, a hostage says, “Bye, Joe. Bye, Terry,” as they walk out the door with all the loot. They’re celebrities. It’s a theme that has shown up in other movies but never this pervasively — or, at the same time, this understatedly. It just goes to show how accustomed we’ve gotten to reality programming. Good manners might not make criminal behavior excusable, but it sure makes you look better on TV.

— Mary Cashiola

There is no question that since the arrival of action stars Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun-fat, the Eastern martial-arts film is here to stay. But here’s a simple request: Make the movies in their original languages with indigenous casts, writers, and directors. Don’t let American influences screw the whole thing up a la Rush Hour.

A good example of pure martial-arts filmmaking is director Yuen Woo-ping’s Iron Monkey. This re-release of the 1993 movie is already better than most of the action fare in today’s market. And though there are some Western tweaks in the subtitles and in the music, this version still holds the original’s vibe. The main reason: Unlike their Western counterparts, Asian filmmakers understand that their audiences are smarter than the average bowl of rice.

Dr. Yang (Yu Rong-guang) is the Robin Hood-esque Iron Monkey, a mischievous and benevolent superfighter bent on stealing from the rich and giving well, you know the story. Anyway, the evil Governor Cheng has his hands full with the Monkey’s antics and forces young martial-arts master Wong Kei-ying (Donnie Yen) to fight the Monkey and holds Wong’s son, Fei-hong (Tsang Sze-man), as collateral. Okay, sure, it’s a simple plot device; there’s no argument that the movie’s focus is the fighting.

At the same time, please understand that the similarity with American fare ends there. An example is the ubiquitous verbal sparring between combatants. The good guys don’t content themselves with beating the crap out of opponents. A good martial artist must also have a quicker wit. There is also emphasis on achieving goals without the use of violence. The Monkey illustrates this by playing trickster to the governor and getting a bit of gold in the process.

The director uses food as an indicator of moral status. The bad guys want shark’s fin soup. The good guys want fresh bread. The bad guys want their food served. The good guys cook their own or at least buy it themselves.

All this comes together in a well-told story, with each character shining in his or her own way. Dr. Yang’s father was killed by corrupt officials and the Iron Monkey was born to avenge him. Dr. Yang’s helper, Miss Orchid (Jean Wang), is no less than a reformed prostitute who lost her child. Little Fei-hong yearns for his strict father’s love and becomes the Drunken Master Wong Fei-hong, one of the most famous characters in Chinese folklore. This movie isn’t just about characters running around kicking each other. This movie is about people trying to prove something to themselves about those who look to them for guidance and about those who think that evil pays.

Bottom line: This movie is good for the soul. The good guys kick butt and the bad guys don’t.

— Chris Przybyszewski

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

tuesday, 16

Ah, just go to Anderton‘s and eat several dozen raw oysters. There’s an
‘R’ in the month.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Last Man On Earth

Loudon Wainwright III

(Red House Records)

It’s funny how much Loudon Wainwright and his rock-star son Rufus complement each other. Rufus embraces melodies from every era of history; Loudon’s been writing with the same few chords for years. Rufus’ voice soars and purrs as he preaches sweet nothings to an imagined heavenly choir; Loudon’s slurs and trails off as he says things no one wants to hear. Rufus is dizzy and self-conscious in concert; Loudon on stage is a born comedian with an impeccable sense of timing. If you could combine Rufus’ vocal and melodic links to the pop cosmos with Loudon’s withering introspection and gift for the unlikely punch line, you might get one of the most compelling and literate popular musicians of all time, equal parts Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson (just before his final freakout), and Albert Brooks.

Alas, such things are not to be, and this year both father and son have left behind fascinating, infuriating what-ifs: Rufus’ gorgeous and opaque Poses and Loudon’s less successful collection of self-lacerating tales about being old, horny, and misunderstood, Last Man On Earth. While Loudon is no major star, he is a daring, incisive songwriter, as his live Career Moves attests. But like many a would-be genius, he’s erratic almost as an aesthetic strategy, and his biggest problem is the problem shared by smart, self-aware ironists and jokers throughout history — they tend to use confessional honesty as an excuse for bad behavior. So as unexpected and up-front as “Surviving Twin” (a song in which Loudon grows a beard to remind him of the dad he can’t stand) might be, it’s a discomfiting, self-satisfied gesture rather than an exciting social truth, and it’s not funny, either. Other targets of private scorn: cell phones, organ donors, single men, winos, and e-mail. As far as the father/son thing goes, give me pretentious nonsense over dour bitching any day. — Addison Engelking

Grade: B

Tied To the Wheel

Bill Kirchen

(Hightone)

It only took Bill Kirchen 30 years to produce a worthy follow-up to Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen’s 1971 Lost In the Ozone, a classic slice of hippie honky-tonk on which he played guitar. Commander Cody anticipated the Western swing revival, redneck hippie chic, roots rock, and alt-country at a time when playing straight country music branded a musician as either a reactionary or a visionary with little room left in between. The Airmen maintained a balance that allowed them to play clubs full of slumming hippies who wanted to enjoy a band that sounded country but had its roots in bong-hits and college dorm rooms. For a brief time, the Berkeley-based Commander Cody band pulled this trick off very nicely, but in later years the group turned into a touring institution a la the bloated Western swing of Asleep At the Wheel and other Nash Vegas-styled entertainers.

Kirchen stayed with the band throughout the ’70s but later served as a sideman with Emmylou Harris, Danny Gatton, Elvis Costello, and Nick Lowe (he has toured with Lowe several times and always made those live performances memorable with a chicken-pickin’ Fender Telecaster style that complemented the white-haired one’s pop proclivities very nicely). This is Kirchen’s third record for Hightone and easily the best thing he’s done on his own in decades. Loosely a concept album of trucker tunes, Tied To the Wheel sees Kirchen and his band trying on the Bakersfield sound, a bit of Western swing (no, it doesn’t sound anything like the aforementioned Asleep At the Wheel or the soporific gunk Lyle Lovett peddles), a taste of bluegrass, a chicken-pickin’ instrumental, what sounds like a Don Williams vocal tribute on Tommy Collins’ “Roll Truck Roll,” and a guitar-heavy version of Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues.” Albums this eclectic usually sound forced and awkward, but Kirchen and his rhythm section make everything sound natural and of one piece. A surprisingly good record by a sideman who sounds like anything but one here. — Ross Johnson

Grade: B+

Concussion

Matthew Ryan

(Waxy Silver Records)

A Pennsylvania native whose promising debut drew comparisons to Bruce Springsteen for his taut, working-class story songs, Matthew Ryan finds himself in starker territory than ever on his new album. Although his previous release, last year’s East Autumn Grin, had some stunning moments, Ryan seemed a bit confused. He flip-flopped between small-scale folk and rock-god opera, with whoppingly great U2-style guitar sweeps that often overwhelmed his subtle strengths. But it’s his ever-poignant storytelling that draws the listener in, and, luckily, Concussion focuses on that ability. The new record is pared down to essentials, a much better milieu for his low-key, often whispered vocals. His songs tell tales so impressionistic and dire that you find yourself straining every nerve to decipher the story as it unfolds. In that way he reminds me of a more direct, male, blue-collar version of Cat Power.

This time around, Ryan relocated permanently to Nashville and recorded all the tracks there. The result is a bleakly beautiful parade of dramas and feverish confessions that is powerful and compelling. No one is better than Ryan at writing about the hunger, spiritual or otherwise, of working-class America. You know you’re in for a downer when the peppiest track here is a cover of the Clash’s “Somebody Got Murdered.” But regardless of its tone, the album still shines. On a duet with Lucinda Williams, their whiskey-and-gravel vocals blend together seamlessly, and her ballsy alternative Southern-belle delivery is the perfect foil for Ryan’s nihilism. “Chickering Angel” is a study in despair so beautiful it haunts you long afterward. Recorded in a mere eight days on a diet of “whiskey, cigarettes, coffee and raisin bread,” as Ryan recalls, Concussion is a dark tour de force indeed. — Lisa Lumb

Grade: B+

The Tall-Tale Storyline

Mazarin

(SpinART)

Considered part of the City of Brotherly Love’s Psychedelphia scene, Mazarin play a brand of pop music that mixes and matches sounds and genres. Their varied second album kicks off with the quirky “Go Home,” which features found sounds singer/songwriter Quentin Stoltzfus recorded in Thailand, and ends with the country-flavored “Limits of Language,” a Gram Parsons-inspired tune complete with weepy pedal-steel. Between these two poles is a little bit of indie rock (“Suicide Will Make You Happy”), some trippy psychedelic folk (“What Sees the Sky?”), and two bizarrely misplaced acoustic interludes (“2.22.1” and “RJF Variation 1”).

Certainly, The Tall-Tale Storyline is diverse, and perhaps the band intended this to be its strength. But the album’s eclecticism is actually its fatal flaw. There’s no logical progression from the spacey vortex of “Go Home” to the power chords of “My Favorite Green Hill” to the Elliott Smith pop sheen of “Flying Arms for Driving.” It all feels so aimless: There’s no overarching theme or concept connecting all these disparate elements, not even a reckless sense of why-the-hell-not. Ultimately, it’s not that The Tall-Tale Storyline isn’t the sum of its parts, it’s that its parts don’t seem to add up at all. n

— Stephen Deusner

Grade: B-

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

To the Streets

With the dusty Western noir Red Rock West (1993) and the fabulous
The Last Seduction (1994), director John Dahl emerged as a fine
“B” movie director in an age when action blockbusters had supposedly
eradicated such distinctions. But Dahl’s subsequent graduation to bigger
budgets and more respectable projects with 1998’s generic poker tale
Rounders was an artistic regression, and now he’s back to where he once
belonged with the boilerplate cheapie Joy Ride.

This sardonically titled film is an entirely familiar mix of
horror and noir, a road-bound thriller that consciously evokes Steven
Spielberg’s Duel as well as lesser antecedents such as The
Hitcher and Breakdown. But Dahl’s film brings its carbon-copy
skeleton to life through often inspired directorial craftsmanship and
characters (and performances) that are sharp and believable by present
Hollywood standards.

The film’s setup is deftly handled and thankfully swift, if a
little unlikely. California college kid Lewis (Paul Walker, who also starred
in this year’s other highly entertaining “B” movie, The Fast and
the Furious, although one that banked “A” box office) buys a
beat-up car in order to pick up high school friend and unrequited love
interest Venna (Leelee Sobieski) at her Colorado campus en route to their East
Coast hometown for the summer. But before he leaves, Lewis finds out that his
troubled older brother Fuller (Steve Zahn, whose calculated goofiness balances
nicely with Walker’s bland good looks) has been arrested in Salt Lake City and
reluctantly decides to pick him up on the way. Dahl is such an ace
practitioner of these scuzzy little genre exercises that you almost suspect
that he named his protagonists after bygone pulp-fiction auteurs Samuel Fuller
(Pickup On South Street) and Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy).

Fuller has a cheap CB radio installed in the car and gleefully
(and recklessly) spouts CB lingo into the contraption, exclaiming to his
brother that it’s “like a prehistoric Internet.” Fuller convinces
Lewis to play along with a practical joke, aping a woman’s voice under the
name “Candy Cane” to get the faceless truckers on the road all hot
and bothered. This prank works, with a trucker calling himself “Rusty
Nail” responding to Candy Cane’s call.

In order to pay back an obnoxious racist at the roadside motel
where the brothers are staying, Fuller and Lewis make another Candy Cane call,
asking Rusty Nail to meet them/her for a “romantic” rendezvous at
the motel and giving him the room number of the aforementioned nemesis. What
follows is the film’s strongest scene, as Fuller and Lewis wait in the room
next door, ears pressed against the wall, a cheap seascape painting between
them, the lightning outside almost making the canvas’ stormy mise-en-
scène come to life. Rusty Nail is never seen and the conversation next
door is heard only in muffles, but Dahl, along with his two actors, finds an
eeriness here often lacking from modern scary movies. Unfortunately, it’s a
style that Dahl sometimes neglects throughout the rest of the film.

Joy Ride may be a return to Dahl’s “B” roots,
but it’s a compromised return. At its best, Joy Ride makes sparkling
use of its seamy, intimate interiors, the shoddy roadside motel rooms and the
interior of the car, where the disembodied voice of Rusty Nail, accompanied
only by the bloody-red glow of the CB volume levels, is extremely
discomforting. But Dahl also succumbs to the sadism and sensationalism that
tend to mar modern Hollywood thrillers, devoting too much screen time to
grisly visuals and relying too much on crashes and explosions when simpler,
more human developments provide the real thrills.

— Chris Herrington

When it comes to fighting crime, is there one moral code or
several? Which do we want more: law-abiding police or police who get the job
done? Can there be any compromise in between?

Training Day director Antoine Fuqua takes us deep into the
world of police and criminals and crime that isn’t always perpetrated by
criminals. Denzel Washington plays 13-year veteran narcotics officer Alonzo
Harris. Years of patrolling the streets have conditioned him to live by one
rule: “In the streets you must figure out which you are, a wolf or a
sheep.” Alonzo has become a wolf but not a lone wolf. With his group of
crooked police counterparts, he has built a reputation for doing whatever is
necessary to survive, even if it means excessive brutality, planting evidence,
or murder.

Ethan Hawke plays a wet-behind-the-ears cop, Jake Hoyt, whose
dream is to be a narc officer. But first he must impress his new boss (Alonzo)
and prove that he, too, can be a wolf.

The film takes place in a 24-hour period, beginning with Jake
leaving home for his first day on the job and ending with his return. During
the course of the day, Jake comes to understand the intricacies of police work
as the lines of justice are continually blurred by Alonzo and other law-
enforcement officials.

As soon as he reports for duty, Alonzo takes Jake straight to the
streets. Here is where his teaching begins as we meet the drug dealers, petty
thieves, and muggers who make up Alonzo’s Los Angeles. These interactions
provide insight into the ways in which Alonzo may have shifted over time.

Hawke does a good job playing the new, naive kid on the block.
It’s easy to identify with his clear-cut form of enforcement and the morals
that shape his actions. He is the perfect foil for Alonzo, who started out
like Jake. The characters make you question your own standards, though the
film never jumps to conclusions. No excuses are made for the criminals and
none are made for Alonzo. Each character truly believes in what he is doing,
and that’s all that matters.

Also, the film is not overdone. Los Angeles is not made rougher
than it actually is, project residents and gang members are portrayed sensibly
instead of as mindless criminals, and as in real life, everyone doesn’t live
happily ever after.

Why did Washington want to play a role out of the realm of his
usual, however imperfect, heroes? Maybe he figured playing a bad guy would win
him an Oscar since portraying a race-harmonizing football coach, Civil War
soldier, imprisoned boxer, and religious leader did not. Or maybe he was just
bored with being the good guy and wanted a taste of how the other half lives.
Either way, Washington delivers a good performance as always, but we still
like Denzel the hero. Some guys just aren’t meant to be bad.

— Janel Davis

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Blowback, Tricky (Hollywood)

When he emerged from Bristol in 1995 at the height of yet another
Rock is Dead craze, Tricky did indeed seem to herald a new age of pop. A child
of Prince and (Eric B. and) Rakim, Tricky seemed electronica’s best bet for
stardom — a Phil Spector of the post-rock era, a poster boy for a faceless
genre. His debut, Maxinquaye, finished second to PJ Harvey’s To
Bring You My Love in The Village Voice‘s definitive Pazz and Jop
national critics poll that year — and it should have won. A bone-deep blast
of dystopian dream funk rivaled only by Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s
a Riot Goin’ On, Maxinquaye was one long, brilliant, claustrophobic
groove. But Tricky’s subsequent albums increasingly traded groove for
claustrophobia. Each and every record was still fascinating on its own terms,
but each was also harder to listen to than the one before, and each was
greeted with diminishing commercial and critical returns.

Six years later, rock is alive and well, and more pleasure-
intensive imports — Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx, in particular — have stolen
Tricky’s trick of uniting electronica’s dance-floor functionality with classic
rock’s album-oriented demands. Nevertheless, Blowback is a comeback of
sorts — the one-time wunderkind’s strongest and most tuneful album since
Maxinquaye, arriving at a time when it’s almost too late to matter.

The guest stars here — Alanis Morissette, Live’s Ed Kowalczyk,
the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana in cover form — are naked bids for
crossover action that hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t. But more than
that, they’re also merely new sonic elements for the studio wizard at the
record’s core to play around with — and most of them have never sounded
better than they do here. Blowback starts strong, fades late, and is
too dependent on the auteur’s newfound obsession with dancehall toasting, but
it still burns with ambition and the music to match. — Chris
Herrington

Grade: A-

Tricky will be at the Mid-South Coliseum on Monday, October
15th, with Tool.

Gravitational Forces, Robert Earl Keen (Lost
Highway)

Robert Earl Keen’s best album in his decade-plus career is No.
2 Live Dinner, recorded at Floores Country Store in Helotes, Texas, and
the Cactus Café Ballroom in Austin. This makes perfect sense: Keen, a
chummy Texan with a nasal tenor, a warm stage presence, and a profound talent
for songwriting, is more at home on stage than in the studio. His studio
albums have been a little too spotty and unfocused to stand up to his famously
raucous live shows, which attract everyone from roots-rock elitists to beer-
drenched frat boys to NPR suburbanites.

Keen’s latest release, Gravitational Forces, doesn’t
change that trend. Just as some authors are better writing short stories than
novels, Keen’s specialty is an intelligent, evocative song rather than a
cohesive album. So all of his releases, no matter how spotty, contain enough
highlights to justify the sticker price, and Gravitational Forces has
more than its share.

Dusky and beautiful, “Wild Wind” recounts the fates of
different characters within a community. Keen does equally well with a tender
cover of Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone,” and his take on
Townes Van Zandt’s “Snowin’ on Raton” is a gentle and wistful gem, a
lovely road song that ends most of his concerts. But the best moment on
Gravitational Forces is “Not a Drop of Rain,” a heartbreaking
song about emotional and romantic distance with an unusual rhyme scheme and a
sad-eyed hook: “A string of broken promises/Another link of chain,”
Keen sings. “It’s been a long hot summer/Not a drop of rain.”
Possessed of a simple, dusty elegance, it ranks among Keen’s best, most honest
songs.

Gravitational Forces showcases an undeniable songwriting
talent working in the awkward album medium. It’s a fine record with some great
songs, but one can’t help thinking they would all sound better live. —
Stephen Deusner

Grade: B

Robert Earl Keen will be at the Library in Oxford on Saturday,
October 13th.

Anthem Of the Moon, Oneida (Jagjaguwar)

It is perhaps inevitable that fellow New Yorkers the Strokes will
garner the lion’s share of drooling publicity and licentious backstage
anecdotes (undoubtedly future Behind the Music fodder). But Brooklyn’s
Oneida, at the very least, deserve a drunken hosanna and a sloppy wet willie,
which I will be more than willing to deliver when they play here next week.
The Strokes’ debut Is This It, an ennui-soaked love letter to their
city, possesses an urbanized, irresistible sheen — as if saying to NYC,
“You bore me, you sweet-assed son of a bitch.” With Anthem Of the
Moon, the druidic Gothamites of Oneida, on the other hand, seem to be in
full retreat from their hometown. The band’s rustic, ritual vibe evokes
Zeppelinesque images of Bron-Y-Aur and Aleister Crowley’s Loch Ness estate.
The new record even arrives with the legend that it was recorded in an
“array of Colonial-era ruins in the woods of western New England in the
midst of stones.” Very Lovecraftian.

Oneida’s previous full-length, C’mon Everybody Let’s Rock,
was an infectiously populist arena-rock record. It appealed equally to
high-minded critics and ass-shaking proletariats, not unlike the best work
from Long Island’s own Blue Oyster Cult. The band’s newest one, however, is
darker and more pastoral. It’s a prime example of the ever-burgeoning genre of
bucolic psychedelic rock. Perhaps their closest historical antecedents might
be the original Transcendentalists of 19th-century New England, though Oneida
doesn’t wield such stately surnames as Thoreau, Emerson, or Holmes, choosing
instead monikers more suitable for cutout bin gangstas: Papa Crazee, Kid
Millions, PCRZ, and Fat Bobby.

Make no mistake. Oneida’s brand of provincial psychedelia has
nary a trace of countrified whimsy. This is head music of the lowest order.
The band’s trademark buzzsaw organ stirs up the dark bits of our collective
unconscious and their lysergic melodies distract us from the gurgling void
below. — David Dunlap Jr.

Grade: A-

Oneida will be at the Map Room on Monday, October 15th, with
the Interceptors.

Let’s Go, The Apples In Stereo (spinART)

Robert Schneider is truly a man to be envied.Just look at all the
fun he’s having. His band, the Apples In Stereo, is resting comfortably atop
the Elephant-6-collective heap (which also includes such recently notable
indie bands as Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control) and making some
of the sunniest American music since 1965.And with the release of his newest
Apples EP, Let’s Go, Schneider is poised to take everyone else on this
fun ride with him.Well, not exactly.

Released in conjunction with Heroes & Villains, the
soundtrack album for The Powerpuff Girls cartoon on which the Apples
contribute the bouncy but forgettable “Signal In the Sky” — also
Let’s Go‘s lead track — this EP is a self-consciously fun-filled
affair.The problem is that there just isn’t much to it. The record’s two
highlights, a live, punked-out version of the Beach Boys’ cult classic
“Heroes & Villains” and a surprisingly touching, introspective
acoustic demo of “Stream Running Over,” which originally appeared on
the band’s last full-length, The Discovery Of a World Inside the Moone,
are worthwhile enough.But two good songs do not a wise album purchase make.
The rest of Let’s Go is filled out by a demo version of “Signal In
the Sky” and a droning ditty called “If You Want To Wear a
Hat.” In all truth, this record really is probably only notable for
hardcore Apples or Elephant 6 fans. — J.D. Reager

Grade: C