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Halston: The Boys In The Bland

My best friend suggested that it's possible Ryan Murphy was put here to destroy all our icons, but I'll be slightly more charitable. Halston means well - unlike, say, Glee - but the combination of Murphy's expansive deal with Netflix and his usual hangups and tics when it comes to storytelling lay waste to what clearly could have been a dazzling, messy epic of gay life in the seventies.

Halston is, of course, one of fashion's great stories of success and self destruction, played out against the backdrop of Studio 54, the cocaine years, and too much too soon careers. Originally a hat designer much loved by the ladies who lunch crowd, Halston had to reinvent himself as hats fell out of favor in the mid sixties, and he launched a high end fashion line noted for his easy, breezy use of flowing fabric and a keen eye for distilling the key elements of American style. I remember the first time I saw Halstons at the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum in New York - what amazed was not the sense of their time, the height of seventies style, but the way most of them could have been taken out of a closet and worn today without a second thought.

It's very obvious that part of what's missing in Halston is just that sense of the clothes. The show keeps sort of showing them, as if somewhere, in a room just off camera, there's a collection of stunning clothes we've only been allowed to glance at. It's frustrating, and eventually exasperating - especially in key moments like the famous "Versailles Show" of 1973 - that what was boldly beautiful about Halston's work is mostly merely sketched at.

Yet the other frustrating element is that if this was then meant to be a juicy, dishy tell all of famous messes and their excessive ways, the series only sketches at that, as well. Halstoin swans around a lonely, oddly depopulated Manhattan that lacks grit or glamour or a sense of the city's energy, and that's just deadly for the story of someone who clawed his way to the top of New York's ultimate importance. Wearing Halston, knowing Halston, being Halston... it's hard to understate how off the wall his celebrity as a fashion icon was... and yet, somehow, that's what Murphy manages to pull off.

And all of that makes what works here all the more puzzling. Halston's genuine closeness to Liza Minnelli is beautifully portrayed, as is Liza's intelligence and sense of herself. Halston's ability to see women, and to get what they're looking for in clothes and style is instinctive and that clearly comes across. But too often the film both madly name drops and yet not enough. Where's Diana Vreeland? Grace MIrabella? Why is Eleanor Lambert coyly half revealed when every fashion person on earth will love the character on display here? why two mentions of Jackie O and then... nothing?

Meanwhile, what could and should be a frank assessment of drugs and louche behavior is just... wasted. Too often Halston's descent into addiction has the feel of the kind of music biopic lampooned in the Dewey Cox Story: some man of color Halston is having sex with pulls out poppers or coke... and off he goes. Clearly Halston's tastes were well established, but it's hardly surprising that more white gay men trying to make sense of Halston's dark skinned boyfriends comes off as pretty much as problematic as it could possibly be.

None of which is to fault the performers Krysta Rodriguez' Liza is indeed a delight, Rebecca Dayan's Elsa Peretti floats around the edges of scenes like any good Italian heiress of the seventies would. Halston's various louche bedmates are fine. And Ewan McGregor? It's not the first time he's played a toppy (not necessarily bossy) bottom - that would be Todd Haynes' lovely Velvet Underground, where he finishes the film getting railed by Christian Bale on a London rooftop - but I sure hope the intimacy coach made sure he had a safe word here in Halston. I've rarely worried so much for a star in sex scene after sex scene - getting pounded never looked so, well, pounding, and God knows, Murphy should know enough about that. To his credit McGregor goes balls to the wall (no, literally) on playing Halston at every level, but it's hard when a key role like this is so emotionally cut off from himself that it becomes hard to know what's going on in side his head at all. A better film wouldn't leave us wondering, if only by distracting with endless falderal, a party that seems to neither start nor end. Because that's what the seventies were, and the film just fails at it, utterly.

I suspect Murphy tried to impose all the lessons learned from remaking The Boys in the Band - itself a reminder that, armed with solid material, this Netflix deal gives Murphy room to fly - and on the one hand he's right: Halston, too, is a stunted boy from a deeply repressed background covering it up with style, wit and a lot of drugs and sex in pre and post Stonewall realities.  The trouble is, you can't tell Halston's story and mistake the former for the latter... that is, the story needs a lot of style and drugs and sex... and probably less psychologizing about What Made Him That Way. Halston - which could yes, use a lot less of people walking into rooms saying "Halston" - takes the racy, sexy undercurrent that both defined the seventies and the stylist who dressed it, and trades it for a morality tragedy of lonely people looking to connect. As Halston - or Steve Rubell or Liza or any number of seventies icons would say - "how boring." And, well, they had a point.

Then, too, a crowded messy orgy of a superstar existence is probably the absolutely wrong thing to expect to tell well when filming into the teeth of the pandemic. One wonders why launch a project like Halston right now, really, at all. And still, the bigger struggle of a Halston is when and how someone will step in and give Murphy the kind of feedback he needs to balance his ambitions in ways that deal more constructively with his limitations as a storyteller and producer. Big, beautiful, yet emotionally inert and off the mark, almost anyone can see what Halston lacks... except apparently, the person making it.

Real Time: Ain't No Mountain Low Enough

"Did you see that clip from Bill Maher" comes at you one of 2 ways, ways you can usually spot in the tone of the questioner. It's either the "can you believe this" tone of exasperated outrage or the "You've gotta see this" of a Maher loyalist often meant to imply to the questioned that your similar balloon of preconceptions needs bursting. This week, of course, it was "Have you seen Sharon Osbourne" though Maher managed to upstage both her and himself, with a separate bombastic rant about covid hysteria and praise for Ron DeSantis.

Yeah... I'm not here to get into most of that... but maybe I'll circle back to it.

No, what struck me is how I mostly consider Maher an irrelevancy. I've never bothered to review Maher's shows, or even discuss him generally when discussing tv comics; I don't really see the point. Maher's essentially been doing the same shtick for years (even arguably launched a slew of wannabes, like, say, Greg Gutfeld), with about the same effect on the national conversation all along. And me... I don't really see the point.  

But hey, I'll say it: Real Time with Bill Maher is an overhyped, undercooked mess of classy trash - insult humor for the quasi-sophisticate set who enjoy the self satisfied host's air of smug superiority and takedowns of easy marks. Granddad to all the "nothing matters and what if it did" comic takes on politics (oh wait, that's George Carlin), Bill Maher can probably ride this dead horse into retirement... but that's not going to change the pointlessness of it all.

Maher started his career bouncing around the middle of the stand up golden years, back in the eighties when the spots were plentiful and the white guys ruled. Not great, not terrible, Maher has a way with a sly wisecrack or arch putdown and what was, at the time, a "postmodern worldview towards current events" that only afterwards did many of us notice was upscale nihilism in a deadpan dress. In the early nineties, Maher parlayed that shtick into the nascent Comedy Central's late night offering "Politically Incorrect" which, largely by timing, arrived in the right place at the right moment. Skewering "political correctness" in a modest, nobody cares timeslot was a good perch for him and the growing power of cable combined with an appeal to college kids and recent grads lent him an air of Letterman like hipness.

In general, Maher isn't: arriving in the early moments of the Clinton era made him the perfect foil for West Wing era type Kennedyesque hopefulness; it helped that Maher's personal presentation was straight out of the Rat Pack/Playboy After Dark hipsters of a similar era. When Clinton's personal issues blew up into the impeachment saga, Maher rode his act over to parent ABC, and took over their late-late slot (after Nightline), again showing that being a modest success in a nothing timeslot is a kind of stardom. That gig fell through after 9/11 when Maher's screeds against Muslim terrorists crossed from sarcastic to, well, all too real.

And that's Maher's real problem, trying to find that knife edge of just outrageous enough, but not pushing it, insults to the hobby horses of one side or another. Self described as liberal, Maher is just another cynic who is pretty sure they're all liars and crooks, or not cool enough to get what's really going on. He bolstered that act by combining a mix of generally 2nd to 3rd rate celebrities with the kind of political bomb throwers (legendarily, Ann Coulter... but pretty much most of those nineties right wing "author/pundit/columnists" and the eventual lefties who chased after them), tossing a straw man amongst them, and seeing if it caught on fire. Oooh, the outrageousness! Cue the clutched pearls!

Since getting tossed by ABC, it was inevitable that Maher could still find a buyer for what he was selling, and so... there he is, muddling through on HBO as he has for 18 years and counting, still hawking it like an aging stripper who went up market and is now mostly rhinestones and feathers and a lot less skin. Maher skews the proceedings by giving himself both an opening and closing monologue, ten minutes or so with someone usually hawking a policy book or memoir (I'm guessing John Boehner, soon enough), and another 10-12 with 3 "guests": still a Coulter like object, a well meaning but usually clueless Hollywood type and a DC pol looking to ziz up their recognition numbers. No insight, I guarantee you, will be derived.

Trying to get through it is exhausting - I suspect Maher sustains himself, these days, on the fact that John Oliver, while funnier and more topically relevant, comes across as a bit dry and airless. Maher's always been the class clown of the frat party, frantically working the room, pushing any button til he hits, and that desperation does get the job done, eventually and usually. Maher's real Achilles heel is that his monologues, while clever, insist on making him the hero of the joke: he's the one armed with the brilliant insight, the "secret truth," the last thrilling reveal. It's hard being Pithy on Purpose - it is, actually, the opposite of pith. If Maher's occasional flashes of brilliance lead to an indeed meaningful insight, he drowns the good in a sea of "it's meaningful because I say it is." It's too easy, in the end, for Maher to simply play the eternally cynical contrarian, reminding you - the audience - that your real weakness is caring about something, someone, or worse, a principle like justice or ultimate good. Pour yourself a whiskey and listen up kids... the world is going to let you down. See how right I am? QED.

And so Maher tried to double bill his cynical counterprogramming, absolving Osbourne of the racist stench that got her booted from The Talk, while simultaneously piously intoning that only he could serve as arbiter of what is sensible covid health policy and what is overkill. On the latter, he's neither, though the antiscience, anyone can play expert motif is probably more in tune with the times (and why that story mauled Osbourne's, yet again). Osbourne plays to his personal, still Rat Pack-y demeanor as an aging hipster who is weary of the performative wokeness. She may play well to a part of his audience, but Maher's own bad reputation is starting to catch up to him... and Osbourne's presence just underscores how much of Maher's act is long past its freshness date.

Because, ultimately, the "cancel culture" myth is just the "politically correct" bugaboo in new words: a sort of "it's unfair to criticize me for saying this awful outrageous thing when you're just as awful, mostly for being critical." As Politically Incorrect demonstrated, Maher can beat that dead horse all he likes, and make a clever not exactly funny show of it... but ultimately, there's nothing there but dead ends. Real Time may let him take the old material and dress it up like Dick Cavett, but the shtick remains and the act is beyond old. It's not that Maher may get cut, yet again, on his knife edge of outrageousness... it's that the knife is pretty dull these days. Even if the faithful haven't yet caught on to that.

The Best Of What We Heard 2020

The easy excuse is to say I haven't done this in a while because I was busy... but let's be honest: pop music hasn't been in a great place for a while, and, if anything, composers and songwriters may be the biggest beneficiaries of the Pandemic in the arts: those who write have in many ways been gifted with the time and space to create in a way that there hasn't been in years. While performing artists have struggled, creativity and imagination aren't bound by a quarantine. And the steady, yet persistent appearance of a considerable amount of new music from musicians of all sorts suggests there's definitely been a flowering in the quarantine hothouse. 

For me, it was an amazing year to see pop, but especially dance music, rebound so thoroughly. By the end of the year, two major international stars had returned to their dancefloor roots. and several others were exploring the surprisingly alive, and not merely retro faddish take on classic disco. And I do mean classic... much of the work could have played through the heyday of 1978, and not in a cheesy way at all. And that, my friend, is progress.

In no particular order, but all with a lot of joy:

• Kylie Minogue, Disco. Kylie shot to stardom as a high eighties pop princess with Stock Aitken Waterman in Britain, then left them at the height of success... only to dip back into retro dance grooves (try "Light Years") and then neo New Wave ("Can't Get You Out of My Head"), before heading off into new and different directions, record after record and a string of smash world tours to boot. So it's hilarious and scary to see her loop back around... to a straight up retro seventies disco record that is also a Star at the height of her powers. Disco is pure ear candy of a sort Kylie has made a career on, each song more glittery and joyous than the last. For my money, the best grooves are some combination of France Joli meets The Sylvers at some intersection of Chic and Giorgio Moroder (Spotlight, I Love It)... but there's an embarrassment of riches here for diehard dance fans of all sorts.
• BTS, Dynamite. K-Pop's leading export has smoothly jumped into an American presence after "Boy With Luv" suggested that even a smidge of English splashed across their super sweet grooves would vault them to the top here as in the Far East. But Dynamite goes a step further, finding a new sweet spot in their own take on retro disco, while swiping the feel of Bruno Mars if he overdosed on starshine. If the lure of BTS remains primarily visual (the candy colored videos, spot on choreography and winsome good looks), Dynamite holds up, play after play after play...
  

• Harry Styles, Adore You. I'm not a fan of Styles' heavily overexposed "look at me I'm wearing a dress" attention seeking in Vogue and elsewhere... nor do I think his blandly pleasant (no current song stylist is less readily identifiable) singing is the biggest or best export from One Direction (I'll take Zayn or Liam -- see below -- any day). Which is why no encomiums to "Watermelon Sugar" or its saucy suggestiveness. That said, the man knows his way around good ear candy and Adore You swoops and soars on creamy harmonies and just within reach high notes. A little stalky? Sure. Still a bit oversexed? Absolutely. Without that dress, really, he's just one in a long line of pale male stars.
• The 1975, Notes on a Conditional Form. I find the 1975, and my love of them, hard to quantify... it's like if Yes woke up and decided to be Haircut 100, or something. There's definitely Art Rock in there, and a love of 80s synth pop that's breathtaking to behold... but what's remarkable, really, is how it all makes such brilliant sense. Proving that their run of success is no fluke, Notes on a Conditional Form builds solidly on all they've done so far and moves forward on the art rock, the glorious synths, and the angelic vocal harmonies that accompany them. Fuzzed up lyrics might be less than meets the eye... but is "Leave It" or "Owner of a Lonely Heart" really that deep? I think not... and isn't that really the point?
• Lady Gaga, Chromatica. She continues to go her own way musically, so after A Star is Born and "Shallow" why not... go back and reassert your dominance in dance music? The "larger than life and twice as natural" quality of Gaga can be... a bit much, but as dance divas go, this is a vastly more conceptual and complete record than anything Madonna's done in at least 10 years, and at least a "something for everyone" notion of songs. For my money, she's at her best when it's not trying too hard, which is why "Rain On Me" works best as that Ariana Grande single that shakes the guest's complacency, or why "Sour Candy" isn't so much "Gaga does K pop" as "BlackPink works in American too". Off the guest appearances (why Elton John, why?), "Free Woman", "Replay", "1000 Doves" offer solid grooves and just enough lyrical thoughtfulness to prove that good dance music can think, too. Not everything can be an instant stomper, but mad respect for aiming for the 3rd mezzanine every time.
• Post Malone, Circles. I don't know much, but when rap/hip hop stars are versatile enough to go acoustic eclectic, well, I'll totally show up for it. In a year when rap seems a bit lost (don't get me started on that "WAP" business), Malone made the best case that labels, at best, should mean nothing. "Run away... but we're running in circles..." is just about the best lyrical sum up for life, relationships, and a year like no other.
• Taylor Swift, Betty (and folklore). Swift couldn't quite contain herself, dropping "folklore" in the spring, and then whooshing out "evermore" at the end of the year. It's an overwhelming indication of her talent that she has 2 full (fuller than full, really) albums in her on a slow day... but evermore's endless flow of "sad pieces I wrote at the piano" could perhaps have used some time to percolate. But why quibble? folklore, on its own, isn't just a brilliant Swift album, it's a folk rock arthouse gem that silences virtually all the nitpickers at Swift's ability to stand tall with giants in the music biz. Not necessarily a singles album, and I don't need a "fuzzy sweater and cocoa" record, myself... but "betty" is masterful songwriting at its peak, no matter how you slice it.
• Dan+Shay and Justin Bieber, 10,000 Hours. Bieber is still very much a post rehab work in progress... but there's a lot to suggest he's on the right track.  "10,000 hours" benefits from his vocal drop in... but more than that, it's a reminder that Bieber's real strength as a vocalist doesn't often get the recognition it deserves. Wide open and exposed on this acoustic track, the warmth of Bieber's tenor and his ability to inhabit a lyric isn't anything bravura or showy... it's just stars, after all, are meant to shine.
• Liam Payne, LP1. Amidst a glut of One D solo efforts, Payne has run somewhat under the radar, dropping singles and building interest while the others jumped out fully formed. I'd say the wait was worth it... Payne manages to carve out a pop/dance space for himself that isn't as tortured as Zayn's, not the attention whore of Styles and not afraid to embrace the mix of sex and mass appeal melodies that made him a star. "Strip that Down" and "Stack it Up" aren't subtle... but they are minimalist surprises, while "Bedroom Floor" makes its point without overdoing it. But for me it's "Polaroid" and "Get Low" that suggest the party by way of Ibiza vibe that the others just miss. 

Other notes: I spent the year rounding out and revisiting my favorites: a slew of Jody Watley, moving Thompson Twins to my iTunes, Finally grabbing this Jackie Wilson tune and that Meghan Trainor song that Target used so effectively in ads. That, and I largely gave up on Top 40 radio. Which makes me sad, especially in a pandemic.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: Art Isn't Easy

In a "quality film" season deeply truncated by the pandemic - we will never know what we're not seeing until well after the fact - it's easy to overstate the relative importance of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom finally getting a film adaptation. No doubt, it would be a contender even in normal circumstances. But this is not normal, and this Ma Rainey will shine more so by being the only game in town.

The second recent adaptation of an August Wilson play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom secures the down payment on Denzel Washington's commitment to produce the full "decalogue" of August Wilson's plays, meant to cover the twentieth century experienced by black Americans. First up was Fences, which won Viola Davis her Oscar. And here, as Ma Rainey, her presence makes clear how these projects will be approached: as prestige vehicles with top flight casts, big name directors, and handsome productions.

Whether that's the best approach is harder to say; I suspect few will want to quibble, but like Olivier in the forties, filming Shakespeare's major works as prestige projects, the approach to Wilson may just be a necessary, well intentioned step towards cementing his importance. Later, when the stakes are lower and/or different, we can take apart these works and evaluate different ways of seeing them. But for now, presenting them as Very Important Art may be just how we get from here to wherever it is we wind up.

As it is, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is an impressive mounting of an important works - the performances sing, and much of it is richly emotionally resonant. But for its impressiveness, choppy storytelling and the weight of expectations does rob the overall work of some of its potential audience impact. It's very well done; which is not the same as creating a visceral audience connection or response.

The setting is a sweltering Chicago recording studio in the twenties, where Ma Rainey, the Queen of the Blues, is set to record some sides. A "small" play, the action revolves around the interplay of her band, particularly a talented trumpet player with dreams of stardom; and Ma herself, the definition of diva, complete with a small entourage of a young man and woman who both attend to her needs and demands.

While overall, there's not necessarily much happening - the recording process at the time requires perfect takes captured mostly with hope and prayer - the tensions of recording, the demands of performance intersect with Wilson's storytelling, which is the real draw here. There are beautifully laid out monologues (acting arias, really) for several of the male principles, and Rainey herself talks about her realistic assessment of just how much stardom she has and its actual worth. Lost in these stories, the film takes on incredible depth, profound sadness, and the omnipresent powerlessness of people trapped in a society that can rob them of their humanity in a flash.

The role of Levee, the young trumpeter with big dreams, was the last project Chadwick Boseman filmed before his untimely death this past year, and it is definitely a rich, brilliant performance. Never one to phone it in, his commitment and intensity shines through, and I wouldn't rule out posthumous recognition. As big, important roles in major works go, this is a dream job for many young black actors, and having seen it, I can now see why. Still, "over the top" doesn't fully convey what Boseman has to try and make sense of here in his performance. As good as he is - and he's masterful - the screenplay isn't doing him a lot of favors, and it would be miraculous to pull off where this story goes. Boseman delivers a lot of miracles; so many, that what's not working here is definitely not on him.

As for Davis, I'm not entirely sure she's exactly right for the role; now in that rare position of stardom where her capabilities are matched to the best material, it's gratifying to see her stretch and take on roles outside of her comfort zone. Hell, we should all have so much willingness to dare to try. But this isn't an especially up piece of work to begin with, and there's a sense of joy missing from her solid, but often grim seeming, performance. Seeing the role, I'm curious how a number of "singers who act" (Jennifer Hudson leaps to mind) might tackle the part. No doubt, Davis is a fierce actress at the top of her game, and reverent with the material. I'm just not entirely convinced reverence is what this film needed most. 

George Wolfe's long history directing Wilson, and overall artistic commitment to chronicling the black experience makes him a natural for directing this, and he does what he can to open out what is, ultimately,  a great one set play (or one great set). More frustratingly, there's a choppiness to the storytelling that feels unnecessarily forced. I'm not sure film is Wolfe's strongest medium. As for the script, Ruben Santiago-Hudson has a sure hand for adapting works to film, and here he mostly seems to get out of the way and let Wilson's words speak.

And again... whether that's the best approach, or not, could be, and probably should be, debated at length. As it stands, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom lets an impressive cast, led by 2 stars in their prime, set a marker for bringing Wilson effectively to the screen. It may well be expecting too much to get a fully transcendent, moving experience to boot. In its best moments, this Ma Rainey really sings. Getting to a film that's more than moments may require trying less hard to make very important art. 

Alone, Yet Not Alone

I'd been trying - as part of my general "time to reboot consistent blogging" strategy - to put together a piece on Justin Bieber, because his arrest really caught my attention.

And then Philip Seymour Hoffman died.

There's been the usual mix of sarcasm and disdain expressed for Bieber's behavior, a sadly familiar spectacle of acting out and getting caught. It's been harder (though not nonexistent) to find those who worry about the kid (he's only 19!) and hope he gets himself some treatment.

There's an awkwardness in America to discussing and dealing with drug use, abuse and addiction issues, a remnant of our distant history of puritanism, a distinctly American sense of privacy and suggestions that difficult family matters be kept behind closed doors. We are at once a people who want uncomfortable matters swept quietly aside, yet fascinated with the intimate details of each other's lives. It doesn't help that popular culture both rewards and gives notoriety to bad behavior and acting out, our fascination with a life that dares to color outside the expected lines vexing our expectations that people stay within those lines at all times.

When a drunken celebrity - often a young woman - is caught on camera stumbling and slurring and causing a scene, it's the mix of fascination and revulsion that propels it, often, into our national consciousness. Less consideration is given to how we (or more to the point, the person doing it) got to that moment, or what happens next. We talk vaguely of "the downward spiral of child stars" as if its an interesting abstraction, and less the painful trajectory of actual people and their actual lives.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the couple of weeks since Bieber's arrest in Miami, about signs and warnings, and downward spirals. Those who follow celebrity gossip closely - or not even, since I really don't invest the time in it writing like this might suggest - could tell you that Bieber's slide has been widely seen and discussed, bubbling just beneath the kind of coverage that happens once an arrest is made, or the problem becomes impossible to hide. Like Lindsay Lohan, Bieber's early life has been carefully dressed for PR purposes as less chaotic and tumultuous than it might seem on closer examination, the kind of warning signs of someone at risk long before the fame and the easy access arrives.

Addicts tell surprisingly similar tales of pain, isolation and loneliness leading to use and abuse of substances. I've thought about that as well with the Bieber story, how sad can it be to have all that he seemingly has, yet to seem so alone, so fragile, so determined to anesthetize oneself?

But what also comes to mind is a grim reality that's less discussed, partly because, I suspect, Bieber's kind of success doesn't necessarily evoke sympathy, or a certain kind of respect. One can miss the kid's obvious talents, his appealing singing voice, the grace of his dancing, his natural ability as a performer. Some talents, once squandered, can be lamented and and missed. Whitney Houston, or Heath  Ledger come to mind. But a Bieber, whose celebrity has trumped his talent... that lament can seem less obvious. But it's still there.

The sad reality is that Bieber's career has been the first, most obvious casualty of his behavior. Though he's toured successfully in the past few years, his status as a teen idol has been almost completely eclipsed by newcomers (One Direction, as well as newer teens like Austin Mahone and Cody Simpson) and established acts (Justin Timberlake, most obviously, has reasserted himself as the kind of heartthrob act Bieber aspires to be). His arrest occurred on the eve of the Grammys, where he was hardly missed, and in no contention for any award. The music world has already moved on, and so has much of the listening public. He hasn't charted a single, or released new material in some time. It's hard to see how he can collect himself, or his thoughts, for a project anytime soon.

That's where, to me, this story of Bieber intersects with Philip Seymour Hoffman. Amidst the lamentations for the loss of a prolific, widely admired actor, there's been the kind of immediate reassessment that happens with death, where the work takes on a fresh glow, and critics tend to emphasize the good and ignore the rest. Hoffman was indeed an actor of amazing range and depth, but he hadn't necessarily enjoyed anything like a career renaissance in recent years. His performances in The Hunger Games were not entirely well received, and underscored a kind of typecasting he endured as a smug, especially cold villain in big budget films. He had more opportunity to showcase his ranginess in smaller dramas, yet even there, it's hard to point to exceptional work in recent years.

Many will protest "but what about The Master?" No doubt his work was intense and skilled; but the film is chilly, dense, hard to love, and failed to find an audience. That's not a failure of the performers, per se, but it goes to a question that lingers about Hoffman, his addiction issues, and his admitted spiral into relapse. What choices might he have made had his addiction been less present, his sobriety more certain? Sober choices are smarter ones, more thought out, riskier yet also less dangerous, based upon more than a check, or a need to prove oneself. Onstage, his turn as Willy Loman was similarly curious, not a bad choice, necessarily, but an awfully big bite for an actor so young, in some ways still maturing and finding all of his potential. It's telling, that the reactions were so mixed, and so extreme; those who loved it, those who didn't have the heart to say it didn't really work.

It's hardest, I think, to have such a phenomenal talent, one that's expressed so young and so well and so naturally that it seems effortless. Hoffman's early roles have a sureness to them that really was breathtaking. Or think of Whitney Houston as Clive Davis found her, such an amazing raw talent for singing and interpreting a song just waiting to fly. And yes, Justin Bieber and his soaring young tenor, that need to be in front of an audience, that eagerness to please and to succeed. Judy Garland always spoke of the inner resources and energy it took just to be the Judy Garland audiences came to expect, capable of singing and performing others just couldn't touch. It should be easier, effortless, not isolating and difficult. And that's not really the case. It isn't easy. There's a lot of effort. And sometimes, it's easier to just fake it. Go onstage a little drunk. Phone it in. When you're that good, you can get away with it. At first, for a while, maybe before people notice, or suspect. For a while anyway. Especially when they don't look. Or pretend not to see.

We'll never know, now, what might have been, the actor Hoffman might have become, the actor he might have been in a more sober state. That loss is genuinely painful to contemplate, as is that question of what or who could have intervened, or knowing that no one could stop a path of self destruction unless he decided himself. If Hoffman's death is a cautionary tale, can someone get it to caution Justin Bieber, to help him see that there's no one to stop him self destructing except himself? I wish he would. I hope he does. The alternative remains too tragic. But not unthinkable, or unforseeable. If we choose to look.

Related articles

RIP Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Miley Cyrus Advises Bieber, Brags About Never Being Locked Up

The epidemic we were ignoring before Philip Seymour Hoffman died

Reports: Bieber's plane searched; pop star questioned - Houston Chronicle (blog)

Justin Bieber Arrested for DUI, Smiles in Mugshot

Saturday Singalong: Hep Cats And Gossip Girls

...and I was accused today of being too attached to old, classic looking clothes, too:

Ella Fitzgerald - Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone. This is a fairly rare track, compiled as part of a collection for my coffee house job, and one of my favorites, because it's such a great opener - for an album, a concert, or a mix tape. I particularly like when usual ballads from the "singer/songwriter" era are given spiky, peppy arrangements. I had a friend who pointed out that Ella had a tendency to "sleepwalk" through drowsy arrangements; this one has none of that, giving a real sharpness to her attack. By the end, you will do exactly as she asks.

Lena Horne - Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me. Horne's career was all about a series of reinventions, including her late life transformation into the great jazz interpreter she was always meant to be. This is from one of her last albums, inspired in part by her friend Billy Strayhorn, who helped shape her singing. The remarkable thing isn't just that she's in amazing voice, it's the incredibly light, playful, downright sexy way she plays with the lyric. She weaves the spell so seamlessly that you can almost miss the "...and you never will" she appends to the title lyric. She's that convincing.

Nat King Cole - I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter. One of my favorite, and wisest, album purchases is this collection of Cole's work with Billy May, one of the greatest arrangers of all time. May was instrumental in creating the fifties-era jazz style of slamming, chatty horn arrangements, which require some similarly strong singing. The apex of this may well be May's work with Sinatra, but Cole's arguably the better singer. The way he crashes into the final "make believe it came, make believe it came... frooom yoooou" is amazing. 

Sammy Davis, Jr. - That Old Black Magic. I tend to think that time has not been kind enough to Sammy Davis, practically the Michael Jackson of his era, a star from the time he was small, and one of the most natural performers and entertainers ever. Something about "Candyman" and "Mr. Bojangles" and his later apearancs in the seventies overwhelms the crucial role he played defining the sound of sixties jazz-pop and set the standard in most ways for a Vegas performer. This track is but one easy example, pure performance magic with some of the most amazing singing attached. And his final "under that old black magic called love" and the way he jumps high-to-low and back again on "called" is indeed magical.

Frank Sinatra - Luck Be A Lady. The remarkable thing about Sinatra, or one of many, is the span of his career. Just when you think his voice is finally giving out, he pulled yet another amazing trick: think "New York New York" in 1977 or even "Teach Me Tonight" in 1982. Luck Be A Lady was an amazing track when it premiered in Guys and Dolls, and when it entered the American songbook. But Sinatra recorded it fairly late in his career, at the height of his powers as a Vegas headliner, and his version drips with the late sixties, early seventies rhythm track of High Vegas. But it's his vocal attack that's just breathtaking; he's aging, there's definitely smoke in his chords, it's almost flat in spots, but how he soars on the peaks! Stick with me baby... I'm the fella you came in with. You can just see the chorus girls with the feathers all around him.

Frank and/or Sammy and/or Lena - The Lady Is A Tramp. This is less about the singer, and more about the song - "She gets too hungry to wait for dinner at eight" is about the best opening ever, a clear definition of a person and a lifestyle choice in a sentence. Frank's version is classic, Sammy's is all sass and the tightrope between black and white in the era of integration ("she likes the free fresh... wind in her wig."), Lena's is all about reclaiming your power and finding yourself - "That's why this here lady - is a tramp." Indeed. 

Worst Song Ever: Let Go. No Seriously, Let Go.

And now, a round of "it's just too easy":

Justin Bieber, Boyfriend. There's a rhythm track these days that just plucks my last nerve: it's this kind of very spare, very slow beat box, often accompanied by a high pitched whistle, and it's really popular with rappers, and I think it came from Timbaland and the only person I've heard use it effectively without killing me is Missy Elliott. And that, my friends, is the signature hook to "Boyfriend," the lead single from Justin Biber's "Now I'm a Grown Up" second album. Bieber's got a serious case of Timberlake envy (all Justins are a problem: discuss), and just as Timberlake pursued an awkward melange of blue eyed soul, rap beats and techno edginess until a world cried out "enough already and take sexy back where you left it!", Bieber is similarly poised to wear out his welcome, and fast. Tween girls will, no doubt, lap this stuff up with a spoon (through radio has been curiously slow to dive into it), but with the usual amount of stalker lyrics and PG 13 sexiness, Bieber's both dull and dishonest, rather than sly and sexy, traits I'm pretty sure he enturely lacks. It's hard trick, drifiting from pre-teen bubblegum to young adult serious pop stardom (Leif Garrett, anyone?) and even Timberlake has fled to film acting (where, sadly, I think he's probably going to fulfill his promise). Here's hoping Bieber gets acting lessons. Or a fresh approach to songwriting.

Fun, We Are Young (featuring Janelle Monae). A song with a chorus so annoying, I've literally turned away every time; except one, when I decided I had to listen all the way through, just to be sure about my sense that it is indeed a Worst Song. Nope... I was right all along. My only question is who thought the reasonably interesting, if downbeat, verses of the song ought to marry up to that inane, loud, chant-like chorus (and sub question: can anyone find Janelle Monae in this)? Dopey, meaningless, yet somehow perceived as deep, We Are Young makes actually being young sound far worse than it is, or was. And this, from a group named Fun?

Train, Drive By. For me, Train exists on this knife edge of pop kitsch: in their bombastic, middling way when they shoot for the moon they often get further than they rightfully should, and it really is pop magic (Drops of Jupiter, Calling All Angels, Hey Soul Sister, Marry Me). Too clever by half, the lyrics are often just short of treacle and musically, the band is workmanlike without necessarily being revelatory (the Glee arrangement of Hey Soul Sister for The Warblers actually imroves the song's dynamics, just as a f'rinstance). Drive By is a good example of how that all looks when it goes wrong: the lyrics are a mush of cheap sentiment and couplets that try too hard, while musically there's no payoff (it doesn't help that Patrick Monahan has a voice nearly as high as Adam Levine's, and is scraping the ceiling, much like Payphone). There's even less payoff in comparing love to a "drive by" - which usually refers to shootings, IIRC. All of which is a creepy reminder that Train tends to look daring singing about reinfocing social norms and standard expectations (Gee, Drive By seems to say, I hope you don't think I only screwed you once and walked away, cause that would make you look really bad). Still, I'm in a forgiving mood, and I suspect this was just a random misstep. So don't go proving me wrong, tramp.

Rock Of Ages: Sticky Sweet

Rock and Roll has a long, checkered history on film; in part, I suspect, it's because the anarchic rebel heart of rock can't really be subsumed or captured by Hollywood's embrace of the most "conventional" conventions. So much of what defines pop culture - the very structures of our popular entertainments - are the hoariest notions of storytelling enshrined onscreen. From HIgh School Confidential to The Girl Can't Help It, through Help! and the counterculture apex of Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, into the seventies era morass of Streisand's A Star Is Born and Midler's Rose.... Hollywood's history is littered with attempts to use "rock" as a way to give voice to a "youth culture" as a way to challenge a "status quo" that fails on all counts. 

If Rock of Ages is a dreadful dud - and it's surely one of the most dreadful, duddiest attempts out there - it would be a mistake
to isolate it as a lone example of the "rock musical" gone bad. "Rock musicals" are, in fact, generally problematic, the good ones (I'd say, well, Hair... and then what? Grease?) not so far from the bad, and all struggling with, as I said, trying to square a circle of presenting youthful rebellion in a clean, neat Hollywood package.

Sloppy and lazy, Rock of Ages pulls together a fairly random set of eighties "rock" songs, packages them up with a fairly limp familiar plotline of "I wanna be a star!" and flails around in search of a conclusion. Originally created for the theater, Rock of Ages - still running - is mostly a tired excuse to pull in kids my age with a vaguely familiar soundtrack of songs from our youth, packing them in even if, under even mild examination, the show is illiterate and incoherent. One of the most obvious problems is the show's soundtrack, which  vaguely assembles  eighties "hair metal" songs, a genre which, I'd argue, isn't really a genre at all: the real story of the eighties is how the notion of "rock" splintered apart after a seventies era apex of Album-oriented rock (AOR, in radio parlance) and hard rock ubiquitousness. By the mid-eighties, "rock" was, in many ways, nearly dead, with hair metal and other sub-genres simply serving as the dead end for diehards - who, it could be noted, amount to a white working class of mostly men holding out against the resurgence of dance and urban music that was really changing the face of pop.

That whitneness is a large chunk of Rock of Ages' dilemma onscreen, only partially solved by the late appearance of Mary J. Blige, in what appears to be the show's second act. By then we've been introduced to Sherri, a young aspiring singer who leaves Oklahoma to come to LA and pursue her dream. She quickly gets mugged (this happens in more Broadway shows than you might think), and meets her male counterpart, also an aspiring singer who works in The Bourbon Room, a larger scale club space that has a long history of launching and promoting up and coming rock acts. Drew, the young man, brings Sherri to the cliub, gets her a job, and the two begin a fairly conventional romance.  The club, meanwhile, under pressure from Moral Majority types, is struggling to stay in the black, and the owner pins his hopes on a desperate plan to revive the club's fortunes with a concert by popular band Arsenal, fronted by the charismatic, yet odd, Stacee Jaxx.

Tom Cruise, as you may have heard, plays Stacee Jaxx, and the performance is, by now, classic Cruise: a true movie star, Cruise may not be the strongest actor, but he plays Tom Cruise really, really well, and to the extent that Stacee Jaxx works, it's because Cruise exudes the star quality needed to pull it off. Say what you will, but Cruise has never been one to just phone it in, and he's not starting now. There's an intensity and determination to his performance that goes a long way to lifting this material above where it might be otherwise, and Cruise deserves credit, as he did in Magnolia, with proving that he's at his best, often, in these supporting roles where he can dare to be less than entirely likable.

But Cruise is no singer, and it shows. As much as he swaggers and stomps through his backstage drama, once he's onstage as Jaxx, Cruise's studied approach to "Rock God" reveals his limitations. Compare Cruise, for instance, to Blige, and the contrast is obvious: Blige, as usual, inhabits her singing with a passion that's almost impossible to bottle. Cruise, by contrast, gives the impression of moving across the stage, striking pose after pose, vaguely reminding us of other stars (Jagger, Tyler... you know the drill), without a real feel for how these stars found their stage presences in the songs they sang. It doesn't make him a failure in the part, but it's a reminder, however subtle, that Cruise is, in some ways, enitirely miscast in this role, struggling to make it work.

Much of the casting is similarly head scratching: actors with no real musical background, like Cruise, Alec Baldwin and Paul Giamati (who makes the film's irredeemable villain so irredeemable as to be a cartoon), against more traditional musical theater types like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Diego Boneta and Julianne Hough, and more rock and radio based types like Blige and Russell Brand.  That the musical theater types fare best (CZJ, however thankless her role is as the uptight antirocker, can't hide her ways with a good number) gives away the game that for all its claims to a rock and roll heart, Rock of Ages is grounded, really, in terribly conventional musical theater cliches: this is a showbiz, backstage musical with "rock songs" where 42nd Street should be, which goes a long way towards explaining why it doesn't really work.

As the young leads, Hough and Boneta are pretty enough - too pretty, really, on both counts - but they're both saddled with some of the worst of this film's material, particularly Boneta, mouthing words to Foreigner and Journey songs that seem, in context, like gibberish. Hough, as she demonstrated in the Footloose remake, is tougher and smarter than the limited, good girl in trouble business she has to put over here. Her character's hardest choice is going from waitress to stripper, and Hough radiates the kind of unreality that she's too sweet to get too jaded from it all, but even she's too smart to buy it.

The film struggles, really with the challenge of being "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll" while being the more PG-13 "Smooches, Occasional Drinking and Pop Rock" family friendly alternative. No one in the movie gets stoned, never mind the odd absence of coke or heroin, even in an ostensible mess like Stacee Jaxx (Cruise is no one's idea of a hardcore alcoholic, no matter how he strolls around, scotch bottles in hand). And while the film pants with a kind of soft porn leeriness, the sexual situations are mostly tame, even in an obvious over the top number like the version of "I Want to Know What Love Is" that Jaxx sings while laying Malin Akermann's patently unbelievable Rolling Stone reporter on the back room pool table. Raunchy sex never had it so sad.

Most everything is this film is a pale carbon of other, not necessarily better, but still more committed rock films. Mark Wahberg, I think, can rest easy knowing that his own turn in Rock Star - along with Jennifer Aniston's - has more heft than anything Hough or Boneta can produce. Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous is way more true to the seventies era ethos of groupie/rock god, Rolling Stone excess than anything here. Blige's turn as a strip club owner with a heart of gold is essentially Cher's role in Burlesque, and both women have the star power to exceed weak material, but even Burlesque feels more ultimately authentic than anything Rock of Ages can conjure. 

Perhaps most weirdly, the flm can't shake the odd homoerotic undertone of its material; there's a whole lot of creepy male bonding on display here, too much crotch level interest in the men's leather pants to be ignored (Cruise, ever the tease, can't resist parading around in codpiece, jockstrap and assless chaps, and even his twin gun tats aimed at crotch level are really gay porn iconography). The film's cringiest, yet oddly sublime scene has Baldwin's club owner finally admitting his dirty desires for Brand, as the club's manager, to the tune of "Can't Fight This Feeling" the REO Speedwagon tune rock fans are most likely to call "That's so gay." That Brand has the verve to do the number in his best Freddie Mercury impression only adds to the subtlety, and to his credit, Baldwin is actor enough to sbubsume his "straight stud" history and commit to the moment at hand.

Fundamentally, though, that psychotic number is, in a nutshell, all the Vegas-y, trashy incoherence that sums up everything wrong with Rock of Ages: the wrong material, the wrong performers, the wrong (and false) emotional notes (as a runner up, among a "hard to choose just one" field, let's nominate Blige's strip club ode to "Any Way You Want It"). Director Adam Shankman can't begin to find a sustaining tone for this material, veering between satire, leaden humor, and melodrama without ever touching passion, intensity or ecstasy in any real way. Shankman managed to make sense of all of this with Hairspray (and try not to imagine how Blige could have steamrolled the Queen Latifah role there, either), but that just underlines where pop rock conventions and Hollywood work best in familar frames. Rock of Ages can either fit in the box and be denuded of its real danger and pathos... or it can soar. This film decidedly doesn't, with it's feet firmly on the floor, however strewn with used beer cans.

Finally, this film deserves two final slaps: one for the shoddy score, which is too lazy to include either Def Leppard's title track or Steve Perry's "Oh Sherrie", despite the obvious references to the lead character. Too many of the numbers smash together incongruous pairings (Harden My Heart and Shadows of the Night? We're Not Gonna Take It and We Built This City?), and find little musical payoff. Too many of the songs, especially the Foreigner material, turn out to be full of weak lyrics (making Mick Jones his generation's Jerry Herman, I think). Even the moments that work - especially Cruise's actorly reading of "Pour Some Sugar on Me," which was already all about sex, but becomes all about sex and Tom Cruise - have a sleazy obviousness that's trite. And yet more insulting, if that's possible, is the sleazy costuming which make the eighties look even worse than we all might remember them - from Zeta Jones' ill fitting suits to Hough's hooker streetwear, to Boneta and Cruise in tight jeans and nothing to the imagination tops, this film makes a whole era into a sleazy looking cartoon. And that, I suspect, is its real point. Hot and sticky sweet... those used to be good things. I swear.

Forever Donna

Somehow, I never expected to live through one year where two of pop music's greatest singers died.

Donna Summer was the lifeline of my childhood, the Queen of Disco who made the world safe for teen age gay boys yet to come out. She was beautiful, insanely talented, and she put dance music on the top of the pop charts. 

Of course she was much, much more than that. She was a stage performer. She was a survivor, one of the brightest examples of a seventies cocaine casualty rising from the ashes. She survived the "death" of disco and rode the return of dance music wave of the late eighties and early nineties back to her rightful place in pop history. 

I am blessed, in my life, to have known one of her most ardent fans, my best friend. His love became my love; his joy in her music became mine. I am chocolate... but I don't like the heat.

She was the greatest of gay stars, a career created and supported by gay men, who managed to say "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve"... and still managed to make it right in the end. It helps that, you know, she wasn't necessarily a genius... but man, could she sing. So that's mostly what she did.

People will talk about Last Dance and MacArthur Park and Dim All The Lights - the longest sustained single note in a number one song by a singer - but my two favorites are earlier and simpler. No one has, or will ever improve on "I Love You" and "Heaven Knows."

I am a dancer. I love to dance, to feel the rhythm on the dance floor. I have been dancing to Donna Summer since I was 12, and almost consistently ever since. And we will dance again to her music. And it will all be all right.

 

 

On Hookers And Secret Services

Okay... so where were we?

I've been sort of chomping at the bit to comment on various stories - Ann Romney, George Zimmerman, you name it - but nothing is quite as captivating as the scandalous non-scandal of The Secret Service in Cartagena, now, is it? (And really... Cartagena? Other than Romancing The Stone... who's ever cared about Cartagena?)

My raction to the Secret Service story hasn't changed much since it broke: so... apparently after work the agents like to drink, carouse a bit, and maybe pick up a local resident for some R&R. And that's bad... why?

I'm not trying to excuse hooking, but in my own curiously twisted thinking on sex and sexuality, it's not people paying for sex that bothers me. What bothered me, say, about the Elliot Spitzer scandal, and made it scandalous, was both the outrageous prices he paid (which was simply foolish) and the fact that being Attorney General means enforcing the laws he was breaking at that time. That's hypocrisy, and that, it strikes me, is scandalous.

(Also, going to prostitutes while married strikes me as tacky and poor moral character, but that's a separate issue.)

So here's my thing: if the Secret Service agents were, say, using counterfeit money to pay hookers... then maybe we'd have a similar case; but  drinking in bars and bringing someone home for sex doesn't strike, entirely, as a firing offense. Again, tacky, perhaps; but not quite the federal crime it's being made out to be. Indeed, I'll be curious to see if some of these attempts to discipline Secret Service employees stand up as proper for a federal employer. Is off hour behavior really fair game for the government as an employer?

In any case, there's been a lot of huffing and puffing to try and dress up what is basically a salacious exercise in peeking behind other people's bedroom curtains as somehow a major breach of national security. You can almost see the visible relief of many media organizations reporting today's triumph "hooker may have been in President's hotel!" That's, you know, serious. It's almost like, you know, she was in the President's room. Except, you know, she wasn't.

All the heavy breathing doesn't amount to much, and can't really make the agent's behavior seem much more than what it is - tawdry, mostly, with a side order of tasteless. The idea that patronizing hookers might "lead to blackmail" is an old saw that was always meant to comment more on sexual behavior than any actual threat - it's the same nonsense that was trotted out about gays during the Red Scare years, and just as dopey. It's a suggestion that sex is dirty, embarrassing, and rather than be humiliated for a peccadillo, most people would, I don't know, pay thousands and reveal state secrets. Evidence of this actually happening isn't just mostly scarce... it's basically nonexistent. It's the stuff of movie plots and bad novels one buys in airports.

More to the point, these ideas of salacious blackmail seem especially absurd in this era where people's nude photos wind up on internet websites. Shocking? Embarrassing? Does anyone even know what these words mean anymore? The small number of people actually "shocked" to discover that Secret Service agents hire hookers lead especially sheltered lives and are, in general, awfully naive (almost as naive as the people who seem to think this only happened, once, in Cartagena). There's nothing especially shocking, or possibly even embarrassing about the President's guards getting randy after hours in a foreign country. The trope that this "could lead to national security breaches" is pretty much nonsense, and most sensible people, I suspect, get that, even if they hate to admit it. Because once you admit it... then we also have to admit that this story is getting way more play than it ever deserved.

I don't think, as Americans, we'll ever get over our nosiness, our voyeuristic tendencies, or our confused notions about sex generally. That's our culture, and that's how we define who we are - simultaneously wildly open and free, and puritanical and judge-y, all at once. By all means, go overseas and go wild with the foreigners. Just don't get caught. Or we'll really be mad. And if it helps us to pretend that somehow this is crucial to our "national interests", it's just a reminder of the lengths we go to when we need to justify our prejudices. Mostly, I suspect, the excessive interest in this story is about envy. And that's never pretty. And we're lousy at hiding it.