Random 10 for September 22, 2008
1. Loney, Dear, “I Am John.” While the first two minutes might make you think you’re listening to a lost B&S track, this Swedish single toughens up considerably at the midpoint crescendo. Much more in a chamber-pop vein with subtle Motown references.
2. The Dirtbombs, “Chains of Love.”
3. Feist feat. Chromeo, “Sealion.”
4. Pink Floyd, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 1-7).”
5. Girl Talk, “Summer Smoke.” I have to hand it to the independent video artisan who tracked down the appropriate clips for this. And as an added bonus, it’s all synched.
6. Portishead, “Hunter.”
7. The Roots, “Here I Come.”
8. Ice-T, “I’m Your Pusher.”
9. Hot Chip, “Don’t Dance.”
10. Roxy Music, “Angel Eyes.” This was the discofied single version from Manifesto that presaged the New Romantic movement and basically provided the template for Duran Duran, not the far superior, more rock-oriented original, which ranks with some of the band’s best work. Where’s this new album we hear tale of?
Emmys Continue the Year of the Underdog
Tina Fey and her gold.
This spring, when the Oscars overwhelmingly rewarded independence and commercial ambivalence by raining gold on “No Country For Old Men,” “There Will Be Blood” and “Michael Clayton,” it was clear that there was an expanding gap between commercial filmmaking and the movies that collect trophies. Pundits at Fox News even tried to start an ancillary battle in the culture wars, claiming that critics and the Academy were “out of touch” with most moviegoers. Of course, that was before “The Dark Knight” closed the gap and people started talking about a posthumous statuette for Heath Ledger.
So it wasn’t much of a surprise that the Emmy Awards, ironically hosted by noxious and obnoxious reality TV hosts representing the dark path much of television currently traverses, rewarded shows that relatively few people see. The superlative “30 Rock” won Best Comedy Series and its stars, Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, won the major acting awards for comedy. “Mad Men,” a relatively low-rated AMC show that I and most critics cannot stop talking about even under threat of a gag, won Best Drama, and then Bryan Cranston, star of another AMC show that doesn’t do even the traffic “Mad Men” enjoys, “Breaking Bad,” pulled an upset over the favorite, Jon Hamm. (Cranston, formerly of “Malcolm in the Middle,” is great in this series about a high school teacher dying of cancer who becomes a meth kingpin to pay his family’s debts, but Hamm’s shaded and shadowy portrayal of Don Draper in “Mad Men” should have gotten this one) And Glenn Close won for FX’s “Damages,” which means basic cable and one of the lowest-rated sit-coms on the fourth-place network carried the evening.
So I wonder if anyone else saw the irony in having the awards show run by a gaggle of reality hosts led by Tom Bergeron, Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel and Jeff Probst goofing around like high schoolers doing a student council skit. They were embarrassing, but there’s always hope that a few “Dancing With the Stars” fans, lured by their Bergeron love, will tune in to “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad,” or will finally give the genius of “30 Rock” the look it so richly deserves.
Behold, the winners:
COMEDY SERIES
“30 Rock”
DRAMA SERIES
“Mad Men”
MINISERIES
“John Adams”
REALITY COMPETITION PROGRAM
“The Amazing Race”
VARIETY, MUSIC, OR COMEDY SERIES
“The Daily Show With Jon Stewart”
MADE-FOR-TV MOVIE
“Recount”
ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES
Alec Baldwin, “30 Rock”
ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES
Tina Fey, “30 Rock”
SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES
Jeremy Piven, “Entourage”
SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES
Jean Smart, “Samantha Who?”
GUEST ACTOR IN A COMEDY SERIES
Tim Conway, “30 Rock”
GUEST ACTRESS IN A COMEDY SERIES
Kathryn Joosten, “Desperate Housewives”
ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES
Bryan Cranston, “Breaking Bad”
ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES
Glenn Close, “Damages”
SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES
Zeljko Ivanek, “Damages”
SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES
Dianne Wiest, “In Treatment”
GUEST ACTOR IN A DRAMA SERIES
Glynn Turman, “In Treatment”
GUEST ACTRESS IN A DRAMA SERIES
Cynthia Nixon, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”
ACTOR IN A MINISERIES OR A MOVIE
Paul Giamatti, “John Adams”
ACTRESS IN A MINISERIES OR A MOVIE
Laura Linney, “John Adams”
SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A MINISERIES OR A MOVIE
Tom Wilkinson, “John Adams”
SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A MINISERIES OR MOVIE
Eileen Atkins, “Cranford”
Video of the Day: Desolation Wilderness, “Come Over In Your Silver Car”
The video for the first single from White Light Strobing takes its literal cues from that title. As for the song, it’s beautifully echoing chamber pop with a slight surf-guitar undertone. In other words, quietly excellent.
Video on the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss Announcement
BREAKING: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss To Perform Hurricane Ike Benefit in OKC
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss will perform a special benefit concert on Friday at the Zoo Amphitheatre, 2100 NE 50, with all proceeds going to help victims of Hurricane Ike. The duo, whose 2007 disc Raising Sand made several year-end Top 10 lists, including mine, were originally scheduled to perform at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavillion in Houston, but rerouted to Oklahoma City.
Ticket prices have yet to be set, but the general range will be from around $35 to around $135. Tickets go on sale Monday at Tickets.com and at (800) 511-1552.
Random 10 for September 19, 2008
1. Marina Celeste, “Under My Skin.” Nouvelle Vague was a slight but perfectly enjoyable pleasure with its gauzy Francophile renderings of New Wave classics, but it’s been a nice launching pad for its vocalists, including Camille and Marina Celeste, who have both excelled at oddly seductive videos.
2. Outkast, “God Interlude.”
3. Marvin Gaye, “You.”
4. VHS or Beta, “Bring On the Comets.”
5. Todd Rundgren, “Hello It’s Me.” One of the most exquisite ballads in pop history. Until I was about 13 or so, I thought it was a Carole King song because the arrangement, chord progression and even the vocals dovetailed so closely with Tapestry. One day, and I guess it was at a point where I was predisposed to hearing things a little differently, ”Hello It’s Me” came on the radio and blew my mind. The melody is fairly straight-forward, but the bridge is all over the place with a time signature change, the sax filigrees and a series of notes that are just plain hard to sing. Also, the whole thing is built on a peculiar rhythm, but not nearly as peculiar as Todd’s butterfly eye shadow and Eno-circa-”Here Come the Warm Jets” outfit on this clip from the ”Midnight Special.”
6. Radiohead, “All I Need.”
7. Vampire Weekend, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.”
8. Fountains of Wayne, “Radiation Vibe.”
9. Great Northern, “A Sun A Sound.”
10. Ween, “It’s Gonna Be a Long Night.” This is the first time I’ve done this, but let’s be honest: “It’s Gonna Be a Long Night” was a Motorhead homage in every possible way, so the video link above is actually Gener and Deaner covering “Ace of Spades.” It’s probably better than Lemmy himself can muster these days.
Movie Review: “Lakeview Terrace”
Kerry Washington in “Lakeview Terrace.”
Rating: 59
The underlying layers of racism lurking in modern suburban life provide the essential grist of Neil LaBute’s “Lakeview Terrace,” in which an idyllic cul-de-sac in the San Fernando Valley becomes ground zero in one man’s battle against the steady march of progress. But LaBute’s effort to address societal ills gets sidelined when the film downshifts into familiar thriller territory.
Chris and Lisa (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) are recent transplants from Oakland, Calif. to the Los Angeles area, having recently purchased a nice stucco home in an affluent subdivision. She is black, he is white, and their union is a happy one. But it gets under the skin of their new neighbor, Abel Turner.
As played by Samuel L. Jackson, Abel is a police officer who runs his home like a boot camp, keeping his kids under his heavy thumb and illuminating his property with security lights to ward off criminals. Just like those lights, the intimidation techniques Abel brings to his job never get turned off, and when he meets Chris and Lisa, he sees their marriage and their presence on his block as a direct affront to his world view.
Samuel L. Jackson in “Lakeview Terrace.”
Abel, whose views on race and behavior are fueled by years on the beat, sees Chris as an interloper and a poseur who has no business listening to old-school hip-hop or being married to Lisa. For that matter, he thinks Lisa is a bad influence on his kids. So Abel brings the full brunt of his bad attitude to bear on the couple, and between Abel’s oppressive behavior and the threat of a wildfire just over the ridge, Lisa and Chris soon wonder if it’s too early — or too late — to put the house back on the market.
LaBute has a lot on his plate with “Lakeview Terrace,” and issues of racism, abuse of power, the environment and crime are all addressed in his screenplay. But at its heart, “Lakeview Terrace” is nothing more than a bad neighbor thriller such as “Pacific Heights.” Abel is so over-the-top, and Jackson doesn’t spare a glare in his menacing portrayal, that most of the societal subtext gets steamrolled.
Toward the end, the circumstances surrounding his behavior don’t matter: Abel just becomes a monster that must be stopped by any means necessary. LaBute has taken on difficult territory in the past — “In the Company of Men” is an unforgettable horror show of sexism and interoffice skullduggery — but in “Lakeview Terrace,” all those points get drowned out by Jackson’s show of force.
Hanson: Power-Pop and “MMMBop,” 11 Years Later
Isaac, Zac and Taylor Hanson
Isaac Hanson and his younger brothers, Taylor and Zac, are men unstuck in time. It doesn’t mean that they choose to live in their ’90s pop-idol past, but their reference points are from another era. And it all comes down to the Time-Life Music collection of classic rock ‘n’ roll that the boys constantly played before they formed Hanson and tipped over the pop world with “MMMBop.”
Over a decade after the Jackson 5-like “MMMBop” and “Where’s the Love” bounced through pre-teens’ personal soundtracks, those classic R&B artists, doo-wop vocal groups and rock ‘n’ roll pioneers remain imprinted in Hanson’s DNA. In 2008, it’s as if these men in their 20s started out in 1956 and lived every musical transformation that followed in the next 15 years: Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke, girl groups, the Beatles and the singer-songwriter boom that was launched by James Taylor and Elton John.
“I joke that we’re not dissimilar to a rock band in the ’70s,” said Isaac Hanson, who will perform with his brothers at 7:30 tonight at the Toyota Stage at the Oklahoma State Fair.
“I kind of feel like every single time we sit down and play with one another we rediscover how elemental it (the Time-Life collection) was, and how elemental it still is. You can’t get away from the fact that what we were listening to was two minutes of straight-to-the-hook rock ‘n’ roll,” he said. “It was the birth of modern music in many ways. It helped us hone what we thought was a good song and helped us understand what song structure was all about at an early part of our lives.”
That knowledge served Hanson well when 1997′s “Middle of Nowhere” sold 10 million copies worldwide and made them, at least for a while, superstars. It also kept them steady when the music business ripped the rug out from under them. When their label, Mercury Records, was folded into Island Def Jam during the spate of mergers that resulted in the Universal Music Group, Hanson soon found itself without the leadership of the core people who helped shepherd “Middle of Nowhere.”
Compounding their problems was the state of pop music as Britney Spears, ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys took over not just radio, but most record executives’ idea of how Hanson should progress. Isaac, Taylor and Zac weren’t ready to grow sculpted facial hair and do synchronized dance moves in videos.
“I certainly feel like where we were going musically was not where pop culture was going,” said Isaac Hanson, now 27. “As much as we were very proud of being a pop band, I know we never felt like we fit into that category. We felt like, first and foremost, we were songwriters. That was a big difference between us and a lot of things that happened at that point.”
As they grew up, the Hanson brothers’ music retained its pop sensibility but became less easy to pin down, and that didn’t play well with the record company. “This Time Around” from 2000 showed considerable maturity, but got lost in the merger shuffle. In “Strong Enough to Break,” the documentary the Hansons produced about the struggle to release the next disc, “Underneath,” the brothers are shown getting picked to death by executives and producers until they leave the company and form their own label, 3GC Records, named for the “three-car garage” in Tulsa where they recorded their first songs.
“It’s a classic sob story, but nonetheless for us, it’s not a sob story,” Isaac said. “We’ve spent the last 10 years of our lives staying true to ourselves in one way or another. The only way that you can ever continue to have a career and have success and have hits is if you are honest to yourself in the same way that you were in the beginning.
“I think we’re in a good position. It’s a very difficult business to be in,” he said. “We made the best decisions we could given the cards we’ve been dealt, and we feel really good about the future. It’s a weird business. I feel like there’s 10,000 ways things can happen, and it’s really about reacting to your circumstances as best you can.”
Hanson released a new studio disc last year, “The Walk,” produced by Danny Kortchmar, a Los Angeles session musician known for working with Carole King and Don Henley and who helped them finish “Underneath.” A disc with several introspective ballads, it shows the band’s continued evolution. But after all his band of brothers endured, Isaac Hanson said the group’s next record will be brighter, lighter and celebratory. Fun will be the premium ingredient.
“One thing I do know is I’ve been really excited about the music we’ve been writing for the next record,” he said. “There’s a certain levity that we’re looking forward to in the future. Not sacrificing a good song or something that’s musically interesting, but a levity and pop sensibility that’s …”
Then the word comes to him, and naturally it’s a term from another time. “I think swing’s coming back,” he said. “Not like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, but a nice swung groove is a good thing.”
– George Lang
Hanson
When: 7:30 tonight.
Where: Toyota Stage, Oklahoma State Fair.
Information: www.okstatefair.com.
Dead Can Dance
I guess it wasn’t enough that Tupac and Kurt Cobain have distinguished themselves as among the most posthumously prolific people in music.
Now even Mozart is getting in on the act.
– Chase
DVD Review: “The Visitor”
Rating: 91
In Thomas McCarthy’s “The Visitor,” a sleepwalking man gets a jolt that shocks him back to life. Walter Vale, played with uncommon grace by Richard Jenkins of “Six Feet Under,” is a widowed social sciences professor whose life has slowed to a crawl. When Walter is asked to deliver a paper at a conference, he reluctantly goes to New York where he learns that his Greenwich Village apartment, where he and his wife lived as newlyweds, is occupied by Tariq and Zainab (Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira), an immigrant couple who sublet the flat from an illegal broker.
At first, Walter is happy to let Tariq and Zainab leave the apartment, but eventually warms to the couple. Tariq, a djembe player, teaches Walter about Fela Kuti and African rhythms, and slowly Walter starts showing signs of life. When Tariq is arrested on a minor complaint and faces deportation, Walter becomes his only true advocate as he helps the young man’s mother (Hiam Abbass of “Munich”) communicate with her detained son and fight for his release.
Watching “The Visitor,” it becomes clear how much McCarthy (“The Station Agent”) trusts his audience. By not explicating every single element of Walter’s life, he allows viewers to fill in the blanks, and while there were possibilities for Hollywood endings, McCarthy pivots before anything sappy can happen. “The Visitor” is a film that is pure and free of manipulation. Thanks to Jenkins’ extraordinary portrayal of a man renewed and the open-endedness of this quietly magnificent story, it never really resolves or wraps up, allowing us to continue Walter Vale’s life in our own minds.
