Andanh.com

MISANTHROPE SEEKS . . . MISANTHROPE So, do Alex and Vivian get what they want?

As the retro guitar music twangs and the overwritten voiceover of the lovelorn, nebbishy hero backs black-and-white images of Los Angeles (filling in for Manhattan), one has a hard time forgiving the baleful effect Woody Allen has had on American independent movies. That, and independent filmmakers’ onanistic insistence on making movies about characters very much like themselves.

Try counting the indie clichés in that premise. But there are lots more to come. Holdridge even slums in the mainstream by sampling a slice of American Pie when Wilson is caught with his pants down paying his respects to a photoshopped porn shot of Jacob’s live-in girlfriend, Min (Katy Luong). That plot thread does introduce a note of kinky sexual intrigue that might have been followed up by, say, David O. Russell. Especially since Jacob, as played by the gangly, sweet but hapless McGuire, would have been a more appealing protagonist. (McNairy comes off as Steve Buscemi’s less talented younger brother.)

But Holdridge is committed to following Wilson through his self-pitying, self-conscious New Year’s adventure. He finds his own Annie Hall (or is it Julie Delpy in Before Sunset?) when Vivian (Sara Simmonds) responds to his ad, setting up a rendezvous and giving him about 10 minutes to sell himself before she moves on to the next name on her list. Although foul-mouthed, abusive, and utterly unappealing, Vivian is not the tough cookie she pretends to be . . .

FORGET THE MORAL LESSONS These boys just wanna have fun.

Judd Apatow brand comedies may deliver the most unbounded hilarity to be found on the screen these days, but too often they lack the courage of their own bad taste and anti-social attitudes. Wouldn’t Knocked Up have been a better movie if Seth Rogen’s character had refused to grow up? If, instead of dumping his doper pals for the dubious pleasures of bourgeois maturity, he had hung on to them and their dream world of slovenly hedonism, pop-culture joking, and a potentially moneymaking “Fleshofthestars.com” Web site? But no, the movie had to wither into a promotion for motherhood and male responsibility and make $150 million.

Not for lack of trying, however, because for a while the story unfolds like a Jobian assault on Dale and Saul and their deviant lifestyles. After a hard day of wearing disguises and delivering subpoenas to more-respectable members of society, Dale drops by Saul’s apartment, where the stoned and lonely loser offers him an exclusive on the killer weed of the title. Through plot convolutions only a cannabis-afflicted mind could conceive, Dale then witnesses a murder pulled off by Ted (Gary Cole), a local drug kingpin, and Carol (Rosie Perez), a crooked cop. Spotted by the killers, Dale and Saul must flee, pursued by Ted’s henchmen and beleaguered by increasingly brutal, and hilarious, acts of violence.

SÃO PAULO ROCK CITY? “It’s our home, we love it — but I think everyone in the band feels that
every time we come back, nothing’s really changed.”

CSS guitarist Luiza Sá is resting in New York City, on a rare break from her band’s non-stop tour, and reminiscing about the first song they played at their first rehearsal: Madonna’s “Hollywood.” “We met up to rehearse, we were all in the living room, and we’re like, let’s just play something to see how it sounds. And then [CSS vocalist] Lovefoxxx came in wearing a Motörhead T-shirt — I think she was scared that we were going to be all ‘Rock and roll, grrrr!’ — and we turned to her and said, ‘Hey, we just learned Madonna’s “Hollywood,” ’ and she was so happy about it, just ‘Oh, thank God!’ ”

Said songs are fun and wacky; they’re also naively naughty. “Fuck Off Is Not the Only Thing You Have To Show” is all the more insanely catchy for its nutty use of the English language. “When we did the first album, we didn’t speak English all the time, so we could say a lot of shit and we didn’t realize it. Now, we’re not the same people because we’ve toured a lot, and we speak English all the time, and the new album shows that. The first album we recorded not really even considering that we were going to tour; and then we toured so much that we changed as musicians. This new album is much more organic, much more how we sound live. We’re not being all serious and trying to start a revolution, you know. It’s still us, we’re just a little bit more mature.”

As indie rock extends its colonial gaze eastward, ravishing (in several senses) the musics of the Balkans, Russia, and (increasingly) Southeast Asia and Indonesia for their odd meters, gudoks, and slendro scales, you can’t help feeling that, despite all the gusto and the well-intentioned curiosity, something essential’s getting squandered in the fusion. If much of the fervor over Eastern adventures mounted by bands from Brooklyn seems charitable, meet Alina Simone — who, despite being Ukraine-born and now residing in Brooklyn, considers herself “a Boston person,” having grown up in Medford. On her newest album, Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware (54°40’ or Fight!), she may have discovered the easiest (and most difficult) strategy for preserving the power of music from elsewhere: language.

Those who see the opacity of a foreign language as prohibitive to their enjoyment have probably overdosed on shittily produced Starbucks-ready “world music.” The language barrier is no hazard when it comes to Simone, whose voice (despite an American accent that I can’t detect but that she swears is there when she sings Russian) quivers and hovers around its unfamiliar phonetic terrain while deftly conveying the dark, frustrated emotions of the songs — each one a cover of Siberian-born punk-folk singer Yanka Dyagileva. Along the way, searing guitars creep, trumpets swoon, moody backdrops unfurl, and scratchy hard-struck acoustics light up each track with arresting immediacy. It’s no act of tourism.

While living in Hoboken, Simone hopped the F-train to Brighton Beach — her first entry into a predominantly Russian community since departing Ukraine at the age of one. “I was in a state of shock,” she says, at seeing signs in Cyrillic and hearing couples conversing in Russian and, especially, the music of the street performers. They weren’t playing the “thinly veiled political songs” Simone had endured from her parents’ hi-fi. (Her father, a Russian ex-pat, fled to the US after his rejection of a KGB recruitment overture — and “flagrantly checking out of books from the library” — landed him on its blacklist.) It was straight-up indie rock, but in Russian, odd in its competing familiarities. The performers invited Simone to Manhattan’s Elbow Room, where a steady stream of Russian rock was carving out a niche. There, she was given a cassette with some Yanka songs.

Eli “Paperboy” Reed seems dubious about my following him for a few hours before and after his five o’clock Lollapalooza show in Chicago’s Grant Park last Sunday. “I’m not doing anything,” he says, looking up from two girls he’s chatting to as I walk up. I dispel his fears that I’m looking to play Rock Band with an up-and-coming R&B star. If he wants, we can just have a quick chat.

Reed says goodbye quickly and we’re off to his band the True Loves’ dressing room. But we’re inside just long enough to compliment the A/C — God’s gift to August — when he observes we’ve only 20 minutes to snag grub from the buffet. We’re up again and moving.

Actually, Eli Reed seems dubious about my being able to write an interesting article about him at all. While I’m eating lunch with him and the True Loves, he keeps asking, “What’s this article about again?”, his eyebrows raised over rectangular, bank-teller glasses that he eschews during performances. It’s no wonder — pretty much anything written on the guy (a) calls him a Jewish kid from Massachusetts or (b) compares him with any number of soul legends from the ’60s or (c) calls him a Jewish (!) kid (!!) from Massachusetts who likes gospel music (!!R.U.F’NKIDDING?!?!). Yet according to Eli, the Dutch have US writers beat with the compact headline: “Courageous Jew Guy Knows What To Do With Jesus Music.”

“So, what’s this article about again?” I tell him I’ve been thinking about Monterey Pop, the difference between . . .

“Otis! And I’m gonna be Otis! Say this [hands up and swooping for emphasis]: ‘ELI REED SAYS HE’S BETTER THAN OTIS!’ Say that, put that in the article.” The band and I giggle, and for a second I zone out thinking about Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival singing “I’ve Been Loving You.” Shot on 16mm, D.A. Pennebaker’s famous footage of the performance catches Otis from the back during part of this song, the 25-year-old (six months from death) bending and swaying, his body fighting against (reaching out to?) an insistent spotlight that cuts his silhouette and overtakes the frame, blinding the viewer.

“I mean, obviously, Monterey was important because it was the moment that all these boundaries came down.” Musical boundaries, Eli means, the moment when the folk festivals and the rock festivals and the country festivals and the soul festivals and whatever genre we’re putting Ravi Shankar in came together and decided to be one big lollapalooza.

Milli-selling rapgoblin Lil Wayne probably didn’t worry too much about borrowing the Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire” for the hook of his track “Playing with Fire.” Hell, it wasn’t even a sample. He hired R&B sublegend Betty Wright to sing it, shuffled some words around, changed the tune a bit, and called it fair. In the grand scheme of hip-hop infringement, it seems like a mere trifle.

But no! A suit has been filed against Mr. W.F. Baby and Universal Records seeking undisclosed damages in return for their reckless theft. Aside from the copyright issue, Wayne had the indecency to use ripped-off Stones lyrics alongside “explicit, sexist, and offensive” language, something of which the Stones would surely never approve. But wait! Before you accuse the Stones of being huge fucking hypocrites, consider this: the senior rockers lost the publishing rights to their entire pre-1970 catalogue decades ago, and they most likely have nothing to do with this lawsuit. (In fact, they just signed a huge contract with Universal.) A far more malevolent force is at work.

I’m guessing Weezy didn’t realize how appropriate the title “Play with Fire” is. In releasing a track that borrowed from classic Stones (however lightly), he not only played with fire, he stirred the wrath of someone whose strongarm tactics over the years have earned him a reputation as one of the most sinister, bellicose volcano gods of the recording industry. ABKCO Music holds the rights to an exceedingly valuable catalogue, one that includes the classic work of the Stones and Sam Cooke plus material by many other eminently reissuable ’60s hitmakers. It’s quite a nest egg, and ABKCO defends it like an angry mother eagle.

ABKCO is the brainchild of Allen Klein, a classic supervillain of the music biz who spent a few years handling the business affairs of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles before bitterly alienating them with self-serving management and ugly dealings. Klein’s first major taste of infringement litigation put him on the wrong side of the courtroom; while he was managing George Harrison, he was involved in the famed “subconscious plagiarism” suit regarding the ex-Beatle’s hit single “My Sweet Lord,” for which Harrison had unintentionally used the tune of the Chiffons’ 1963 hit “He’s So Fine.” Bright Tunes, the owner of the “He’s So Fine” publishing rights, had a strong case and stood to make millions.

YOUR PROBLEM “I know we’re making quality music, and if people don’t like it, they’re just wrong.”

Strange hairdos aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find a link between Melvins frontman Roger “Buzz” Osborne (a/k/a King Buzzo) and 13th-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. But over the phone from a tour stop in central California, the 44-year-old singer/guitarist loosely paraphrases the Dominican friar in summing up his band’s long, bizarre career: “Basically it’s like, if you get what we’re doing, then no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t, then no explanation is possible.”

That’s true. The more-than-30 full-length albums and EPs the LA-via-Washington band have issued since 1984 defy all attempts to define their style or determine their genre or even say what the bleep is going on. That hasn’t stopped people from trying, however. The Melvins’ sound is most often reduced to either “stoner rock” or a slow, Sabbathy sludge “that begat grunge.” Both of which it has been, at various points, but such descriptions don’t take into account the forays into menacing ambient/industrial creepiness, thrashy noise punk, trippy psych freakouts, and even something approaching pop, however skewed and darkly humored — experiments that can all pop up on the same album. It’s like watching one of David Lynch’s baffling cinematic sequences: you’re better off just enjoying the strange ride than stopping to try to figure it out.

Which brings us to the band’s new Nude with Boots (Ipecac). The one-two opening punch of “The Kicking Machine” (with its Zeppelin-style boogie rock) and “Billy Fish” (built on a guitar riff very like the one in Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush”) would seem to augur a quasi-conventional outing. But that turns out to be a tease. “Dog Island” writhes in an electronic-dappled tarpit for nearly eight minutes, and the unsettling instrumental “Dies Irae” summons demons quicker than that puzzle box in Hellraiser. The nimble, comparatively speedy “Suicide in Progress” and the title track might be some of the Melvins’ catchier work, but then there’s the soothing “Flush,” which sounds like whales and birds swimming together in ocean depths, and the howling, clattering closer, “It Tastes Better Than the Truth,” which sounds as if it had been recorded during the Spanish Inquisition.

In other words, it’s another killer Melvins album, and another killer Melvins album that’ll probably sell fewer copies in our lifetime than Coldplay move in an hour. “We’ve been far more adventurous than most bands, and paid the price for it as well,” says Buzz. “It’s strange. It’s something that I’m used to, I guess, but you just hafta realize that, you know, I’ve always been right about everything I’ve done in life, and I’m still right. We’ve never been welcomed with open arms, but I don’t care. I know we’re making quality music, and if people don’t like it, they’re just wrong.”

Tana French’s background as an actor has made her value character — which explains the psychological depth of her wonderfully literate crime fiction. In town to read from The Likeness (Viking), the follow-up to her Edgar-winning debut, In the Woods, the Dublin-based author discussed means, motive, and opportunity.

In both your books, backstory plays a major role. Do you think the past determines the future?
I think there is a context in which life takes place. I’m a big believer in crime being shaped by context. Not in any way that people aren’t responsible for their crimes, but an individual’s psychology shapes whatever goes on around them, whether it reaches a moment of violence or not.

Backstory seems important to your protagonists, as well.
In In the Woods, Rob Ryan’s mind was cracked straight across at the age of 12, and when the book starts, he’s actually doing pretty well. He’s got a career he loves, he’s got a partner and best friend, but when pressure is brought to bear on this crack, it starts to deteriorate — not just his memory but his whole idea of who he is. Cassie [Maddox, Rob’s partner and the protagonist of The Likeness] was orphaned very early, and her life has been creating roots.

To an extent, it seems to me that for people who were interested in these questions of action and consequences, of identity and past and present, it would be natural to become detectives. Because as a detective you’re doing something very much like what mystery writers and mystery readers do. You’re fascinated by the process of discovering answers — not just by the answers themselves, but by the process. There’s an interplay between who they are and what they do, and that works both ways. The strangeness in their pasts comes through in their identities and what they do.

Each of these books has a different protagonist, and the one you're working on now features a colleague of Rob and Cassie, Frank Mackey. Does this mean that each character has only one story?
I know the standard thing is to write a series of books about the same detective. But what I’m interested in are those crucial turning points in people’s lives where you know that whatever you decide in that situation, you’ll never be in the same place again. In the Woods was that for Rob — the decisions he made have shaped the rest of his future, probably not in very healthy ways. The thing is, people only have a certain number of turning points. So I could keep dumping this poor guy into high-stakes, life-changing situations, or I could dilute it and write about less important situations in his life, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I kind of envisioned Rob spending the next couple of years trying to patch himself together. I wasn’t sure he’d have that much of a story. Or I could change the narrator. Cassie is interesting and hadn’t had a chance to tell her story, so I wondered what might happen in her life, what she might be doing next.

THOBA, UTSALE UMNXEBA When he finished his performance, it seemed Hlobo could use a hug.

The South African artist Nicholas Hlobo quietly walked into the hallway at the Institute of Contemporary Art, sat down in a corner on a nest of curry bush, and put on a black headdress or crown that was connected by braided cords to plant-like suction-cup-looking things clinging to the walls. The July 29 performance, Thoba, utsale umnxeba (in Hlobo’s native Xhosa language it means “to lower onself and make a call,” or, as the wall text described it, a “gesture of respect and diplomacy”), was part of his new exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “It’s about the idea of communication,” Hlobo says of his act when I telephone the next day. “I was trying to make some sense of the space and the idea of the space, the museum, the gallery, the location of the museum, the culture — the culture is almost foreign to me.”

He sat on the circular nest and fussed for a long while with the hat, adjusting its fit over his dreadlocks, shifting the red tassels on the side, and pulling on his goatee. Then he settled into a long silent sit, seeming to meditate, eyes closed and then open, rocking forward and then sitting upright again, repeat. VIPs arrived for the show’s opening reception, watched him for a while, then wandered into the gallery to see the rest of his art and chat.
The exhibit, “Vula zibhuqe” (which means “to turn a blind eye”), was organized by ICA associate curator Jen Mergel. The 11th in the ICA’s Momentum series, which showcases emerging artists from around the world, it features the props and the costume from Hlobo’s performance, a soft sculpture, and two “drawings” in colored satin ribbons stitched into 10-foot-wide sheets of white paper. Pink scrims, placed over ceiling lights to give the gallery a fleshy feel, make the room seem murky, underwater.

“In my works,” the 32-year-old Johannesburg resident explains, “I celebrate my identity as a South African, a gay man, a Xhosa man, which is my ethnic identity, and I also celebrate my colonial heritage.”

The best piece here is Umphanda ongazaliyo (2008), an 18-foot-long black sack made from old-rubber-tire inner tubes, with pink ribbon stitched along ribs that run from its head to tail. Veins of colored ribbon wander the surface. Pockets and protrusions grow along the sides and the bottom. Metal nozzles sprout from the skin. The whole thing dangles from the ceiling by wires. A tube tail burrows into a gallery wall, with a ring of pink fringe, and emerges on the other side as a large black “orifice” — as the wall text politely describes it.

HAY FEVER Ignorance is Bliss — or maybe it’s the other way around — in Noël Coward’s vintage
piffle.

The drawing room moves outdoors at the Publick Theatre, which fields an al fresco staging of Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy of bad manners, Hay Fever (in rep through September 14), that whips the vintage piffle into a paradoxical froth of lightweight histrionics. Coward is said to have written the play in three days, in the wake of a nerve-racking weekend at the country home of American actress Laurette Taylor and her British-playwright husband, J. Hartley Manners, who penned the hoky Peg o’ My Heart for her. If so, Coward was probably not invited back, for the Blisses of Hay Fever are hardly portrayed as heavenly hosts. In less than 24 hours, the self-absorbed and self-dramatizing quartet of actress mom Judith, novelist dad David, adult son Simon, and 19-year-old daughter Sorrel, each of whom has invited a weekend guest without informing the others, manage to drive their company not only out the door but over the edge.

Described by Sorrel, the sole still impressionable Bliss, as “slapdash,” the bickering and eccentric family unit revolves around Judith, who may for the moment have retired from the stage but can no more retire from drama than she can from breathing. Neither can she be weaned from the adulation beamed across the footlights, so she’s asked athletic young blockhead Sandy Tyrell to spend the weekend making eyes at and declarations to her. David has invited a diffident and somewhat dithering flapper, Jackie Coryton, whom he wishes to study “in domestic surroundings” with an eye toward turning her into fiction. Sorrel’s guest is the dapper, much older “diplomatist” Richard Greatham; Simon’s is a sultry Mrs. Robinson of a London socialite called Myra Arundel, whom his mother accuses of using sex “like a shrimping net.” There is, moreover, only one desirable guest room (the second best is referred to as Little Hell), and the meager staff are under the command of Mom’s former dresser, the lackadaisical Clara, who’s generous with neither tea nor sympathy.

The brief weekend evolves over three acts, which director Diego Arciniegas has trimmed to less than two hours including intermissions. So even though the action consists of little more than petulance, posturing, and the plotting of escape, it’s easy to be charmed and hard to be bored as the Blisses conduct their delicate grandstanding, first disregarding, then swapping, then ensnaring their guests in arbitrarily conjured romantic melodramas that culminate in a reprise of Judith’s own Peg o’ My Heart, a cheesy potboiler called Love’s Whirlwind.

FEY APPEAL Pegg’s may be the famous name, but the real discovery here is Jessica Hynes.

Simon Pegg is funny. Anyone who’s seen Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz knows that. So why has it taken us so long to find out about Jessica Hynes? Known by her maiden name, Stevenson, back when she created the BBC series Spaced with Pegg and director Edgar Wright in 1999, Hynes is a comedy dynamo: pratfalling, deadpanning, and decked out in thrift-store chic, she’s a little like a North London Tina Fey.

It’s a mystery why Spaced: The Complete Series (BBC) has taken this long to be released stateside on DVD. As Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader says, in an effusive packet of press blurbage from high-profile fans (Patton Oswalt, Diablo Cody, Eddie Izzard, Judd Apatow), Spaced is “the show we American comedians watch and say, ‘How the hell did they get away with this?!’ ”

For Spaced novices: Pegg plays Tim Bisley, a comic-book artist who works in a comic-book shop (with a boss whose name is Bilbo Bagshot). Hynes is Daisy Steiner, a writer who doesn’t do a whole lot of writing — she’s far too busy being bubbly and babbling, doting over her miniature schnauzer, Colin.

Tim and Daisy, platonic friends, decide to pose as a “professional couple” so they can apply for an exclusive apartment. Not that their landlady, Marsha (played to pickled perfection by Julia Deakin), who’s never without a bottle of wine in one hand and a lit fag in the other, is all that picky. They get the flat and soon find themselves neighbors with Brian Topp (Mark Heap), a conceptual artist who deals in “anger, pain, fear, and aggression.” (“Watercolours?” Daisy asks. No, he says. “It’s a bit more complex than that.”) Tim’s best mate, Mike Watt (Nick Frost), a militaristic geek with detached retinas, and Daisy’s fashionista friend Twist (“my parents were hippies”), played by Katy Carmichael, round out the cast.

Over Spaced’s two too-short seasons, we follow the quotidian existences of these six characters, who co-exist, as one promotional blurb puts it, “in a world perched precariously on the edge of normality.” But though these humdrum lives may lack a certain élan, they’re related to us with a cartoonish joie de vivre: flashbacks and flash-forwards, jump cuts, rapid-fire edits. Tim is a video-game addict and a movie geek, and the funniest thing about Spaced is how these banal lives — clumsy romantic entanglements, joblessness, procrastination — are presented using the language of silver-screen epics, sci-fi movies, and horror flicks.

CRYING TIME FFIV is one of few games of its era to evoke real emotions.

They say there are no new ideas in Hollywood, but when it comes to advancing sequels, remakes, and general nostalgia exploitation at the expense of more creative concepts, the major motion-picture studios have nothing on the video-game industry. Square Enix has now released its fourth different iteration of the landmark game Final Fantasy IV, this time for the Nintendo DS in all its 3-D graphic glory. In the video-game world, however, it makes sense to update these things, and FFIV both retains its original charm and feels upgraded enough to justify revisiting.

Cecil is a troubled Dark Knight in the monarchy of Baron. Already ambivalent about Baron’s “might makes right” policy, Cecil finally snaps after the king — who’s been acting odd lately — orders him out to sack a peaceful magic-loving village. To quell an uprising, the king sends Cecil and his lifelong friend Kain on what seems an insignificant mission, though in fact it will take them on an epic journey involving brainwashing, bratty ninjas, spoony bards, romance, airships, trips to the moon, and ultimately, self-discovery.

This wasn’t the Square folks’ first attempt at a grand story line, and it wouldn’t be their last, but in 1991 its scope and ambition were unprecedented. The characters range from the noble Cecil to the eccentric Cid to the mysterious, wise Lunarian FuSoYa. The romance between Cecil and his girlfriend Rosa is hardly matched in subsequent FF entries. Indeed, FFIV is one of a few games of the era to evoke real emotions; when two characters sacrificed themselves for the greater good, I nearly burst into tears. The dialogue has been retranslated to clarify certain situations, but some of the character development feels a touch rushed. The narrative economy works here, however — the game is long enough as it is.

In the development process, Square focused on the storyline, so combat and gameplay get short shrift. Several staples of the RPG genre are absent. Characters aren’t especially customizable; for the most part their abilities are fixed. You don’t even get to control which spells the magic users learn. The story also dictates which characters are in your party at a given time — which means you have to battle monsters with what you have. Random battle encounters, standard in the ’90s but a relic today, have survived into this edition, and they annoy with their frequency. And the battles against the scrub monsters can get repetitive. But the boss battles more than compensate. These require strategy, planning, and creativity, as you seek to find and exploit some specific unusual weakness, such as whether a spell is effective when reflected back against the user, or whether a particular weapon can produce a one-hit kill.