Trapped In the Closet

My curiosity finally got the best of me and I was able to find the time to rent R. Kelly's Trapped In the Closet. The rampant homophobia and midgetphobia, as well as stereotypes of overweight white women, that ran through the piece were exactly what was to be expected from a man who gets his thrills by pissing on underage girls.

Still, I found these twenty-two chapters worth of epic saga appealing. R. Kelly has taken on the role of the minstrel. I don't mean to say that he is rehashing Dust Bowl era minstrelsy such as black face. He is working in an older tradition, a bardic one that stretches back through Chaucer and Homer. His rhymed and sung narrative is cheesy, stupid, and self-absorbed, but something about it makes it an achievement that it is hard to turn away from.

Blazing Saddles

Well, I finally saw Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles for the first time since I had a real conscience. I may have watched parts of it out of curiosity over the years, but I remembered what I had seen quite differently. My overall impression was that it was hopelessly racist against so many different types of people. No group comes out of this unscathed, though whites are the least obviously stereotyped. This may be because I'm not accustomed to searching out white stereotypes, though. Needless to say, I was offended by various times by portrayals of Hispanics, Arabs, Native Americans, Jews, etc. The movie did have, potentially, two saving graces however.

The first was its wonderfully post-modern ending where Bart and the Waco Kid are riding through Hollywood and decide to go catch the ending of Blazing Saddles. Once they begin watching the movie, they themselves as characters are even more hyperaware of themselves as artifice than usual. My favorite touch was that on screen, the Waco Kid is eating movie theatre popcorn even as his doubled character is watching him from the confines of a movie theatre seat.

The other saving grace arose from the plot. While it is racist against everyone, it does save itself a little bit in regards to African-Americans by having Bart be a brilliant hero who thinks outside the box. This allows the film to create a situation where the whites who are stereotyped as racist (with a couple exceptions) are made into complete idiots. This allows Hedley Lamarr, the head-honcho of the jerks, to instruct his gang of criminals to "do that voodoo that you do so well." The line is of course stolen from Cole Porter, but what makes the line brilliant, and the movie's second saving grace, is that Hedley Lamarr, who abhors non-WASPs, is invoking a traditionally black, pagan belief system in order to cheer on his motley crew.

Birthday

I get to share my birthday with some pretty kickass people. Billie Holiday, post-modernist Donald Barthelme, Romantic poet William Wordsworth, Will Keith Kellogg (who was a trusting enough capitalist that he let Mr. Post steal his recipe before patenting it himself), Ravi Shankar, Francis Ford Coppola, Janis Ian . . . hell, even James Garner is pretty cool. Before some late-career features that proved a little light, he was the badass gambler I got my middle name from (Bret Maverick); not a bad compendium of folks at all. Definitely enough to overshadow John Hall's contribution to the world.

If it wasn't completely obvious, I love music, and so I got to thinking today about The Beatles' song "Birthday" and its strengths and weaknesses. Its strengths are all obvious. It has a great guitar riff and some shredding vocals. Sir Paul gives it a real workout. Its weaknesses all stem from it being a birthday song.

Let's start at the beginning (a very good place to start). The joy of birthdays is their exclusivity; it is the one holiday of the year that is meant to celebrate you -- your own special day. The openings lines of "Birthday" are "you say it's your birthday. / Well, it's my birthday too, yeah." No one wants to hear that on their birthday. Who is going to come to your birthday party if they have the option of punch and cake with your parents or jammin' to the Venus and Mars rock show in London? Your own siblings would sneak out to go to Paul's party. I mean, maybe Matthew and Gunnar Nelson love this song, but unless you're a twin, sharing your birthday sounds like a nightmare.

Then you get a verse where Paul wants you to dance and take a ch-ch-ch-chance. That's great. I love to dance. But then at the end of the verse, Paul gives this gut-wrenching scream where he sounds like a mad scientist caught in a bear trap. It's a little scary. Bill Nye can come to my party, but Gargamel can stay home.

Still, Ringo keeps the beat rockin'. And, if today is your birthday, I'm glad it's your birthday. Happy birthday to you.

The Dr. Pepper Sham

I'll eat my words if I'm wrong (I assume some of them, such as "Dr. Pepper," will actually be quite tasty), but anyone who automatically buys into this fraud about Dr. Pepper pushing for Chinese Democracy's release is too easily led. Ok, the NY Post covering it looks real, but if you go to nypost.com and search for the article title, anything on Axl Rose, etc. you come up blank. Also, it is appearing on their gossip page and, as a tabloid, the Post hasn't always been the most believable of New York's journalism institutions. I dunno, this just can't be real. More to follow ... ?

Even if this is a real promotion, I still agree with Chuck Klosterman: China will get democracy before we get Chinese Democracy.

Some thoughts on "Highlands"

“Highlands” is a Bob Dylan song that takes place on Easter. There is plenty of evidence of Easter in the song’s setting. Physically, the song is not set in the Highlands as one might expect, but rather in Boston. Boston has a tradition, historically, of being a heavily Catholic town, lending the necessary religiosity. Dylan wanders into a restaurant and deduces it must be a holiday because “there’s no one around.” He sees people in the park wearing “bright colored clothes,” a bit reminiscent of the beginning of Spring and the pastels associated with Easter. The big piece of evidence, though, is that the waitress expects Dylan to order hard-boiled eggs.

In this context, the Highlands seem not to be the Scottish highlands that Robert Burns wrote of (and that Dylan steals from in the chorus), but rather a metaphorical highlands of the soul; one that is far away from the secular world. Potentially, this could even be read as heaven – especially given the line “big white clouds like chariots that swing down low – although I think that reading limits the song’s potential. As Dylan sings, “my heart’s in the Highlands, and that’s good enough for now.” If one reads it strictly as heaven, then the song is about death. Dylan is still alive, though. If the Highlands were heaven and he needed to get their, he could accept death. Death certainly is one aspect of the song, but it doesn’t seem to be the most important aspect.

The song seems focused instead on contemporary society’s focus on image and how that leads us toward vanity and away from the Highlands. In this context, the Highlands can be described as a mindset, a moral high road which will help lead one on a path through life which will help them reach a potentially more concrete Highlands in the afterlife. Certainly, this is not a new theme for Dylan, but he does a great job of expressing it here nonetheless. The most central summation of this theme comes in a conversation the narrator has with a waitress. She asks him to draw her, and the artist doesn’t want to. After trying to dodge the issue for several verses, he finally draws her on a napkin. She is horrified by the drawings ugliness, and he tells her that it looks just like her. What happened is, he drew her insides rather than her outside, and what he found there disturbed him. He didn’t want to have to draw her because he knew that she wouldn’t be able to face the truth of herself.

There are other intimations of image and wealth as well. The idea of image is alluded to with the line “wouldn’t know the difference between a real blonde and a fake.” Part of that is that there are so many people with false hair colors that it has gotten difficult to remember whose is real. The other important part of this line is that blonde is often seen as the ideal hair color. People are trying to make themselves match the ideal in their heads, and companies, looking to profit off of this, are making hair dyes so realistic that they cannot be detected. Similarly, those most interested in image get their hair recolored so often, again fueling the capitalist cycle of the whole thing, that one can also not tell they have dye in by examining their roots. Dylan at one point suggests that if he had a conscience he could “sell it to the pawn shop,” showing that everything has a price and that the moral high ground that has been represented for so long as the conscience has been traded away in exchange for more wealth.

Elsewhere, life is described as the “same old rat race, life in the same old cage.” The idea there is that the “rat race,” the rushed pace of always trying to better ones self, often financially or in terms of image, actually imprisons people. It makes them a slave to their image or to their bank account, a slave to their own base desires. Stuck in this cage, people feel unable to life freely. Later, the narrator “feels like a prisoner in a world of mystery,” furthering that sense of claustrophobia brought on by the contemporary, post-industrial age. Looking around at what has happened to the world saddens the narrator to the point where he has lost his conscience. He feels that he has lost it because he is no longer angry at the world. As he claims, “If I had a conscience, well I just might blow my top.”

This all sounds pretty hopeless, but the song is not without the potential for change. There are two possibilities for a return to grace that Dylan implies in the song. Early on, Dylan says “I wish someone’d come and push back the clock for me.” As with much of Dylan’s work, most notably the liner notes for World Gone Wrong, this calls for a return to a simpler time that has faded away. Judging from the World Gone Wrong notes, this seems to be a return to an agrarian society, one of the pre-industrial age. Of course, this change seems improbable at best and errs on the side of impossibility in truth. The other possibility seems to be the youth. Dylan describes “the young men with the young women lookin’ so good” and claims he’d “trade places with any of them in a minute if [he] could.” There are many readings to these lines. Dylan could want to erase all of the mistakes he has made in his life. He may just want a chance to do different things or to have the vitality to go out there and change the world. From the song’s overall tone, though, one would imagine that he’d want to be young again for reasons that reach deeper than “drinkin’ and dancin’ [and] wearing bright colored clothes.” I think Dylan may see some hope in the coming generations. Of course, youth turns into old age, and soon the young generation will turn into the old.

The young becoming old and being replaced by new young brings us back, in some ways, to the idea of resurrection, which is what Easter is all about. The spirit of a strong moral structure (though not necessarily a traditional moral structure) being reborn within America’s vibrant youth.

Queens Logic

I finished watching a movie called Queens Logic just now, and it struck me as a really brilliant and underrated movie for one main reason, which I'll get to later.

As an overview, its one of those nearing-thirty crisis movies where everyone seems to be coming to terms with who they are and where they fit in the world, if they fit at all. The cast was a great ensemble cast of people who were about to make it, some who were in a fallow period, and some who never did. It has Joe Mantegna and John Malkovich in possibly their finest roles, as well as Tom Waits, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kevin Bacon. I don't usually like Kevin Bacon, but he played an asshole, so its alright. It had a few great lines. My personal favorite, for obvious reasons to those who know me, is when Kevin Bacon falls down and hurts himself dancing. Someone asks whats wrong with him and John Malkovich says, "oh, he's just a white boy who thinks he's James Brown." I also have to give kudos to the soundtrack, which was absolutely amazing. I have never seen Van Morrison, Marvin Gaye and Benny Goodman mix so eloquently together. Not to mention Sly & the Family Stone, David Bowie and Cheap Trick.

What really struck me about this movie, though, was its portrayal of homosexuality. The group basically follows a group of friends reconvening as the second member of the group moves towards marriage. Meanwhile, another member's marriage is falling apart. John Malkovich is the gay friend. Gays in films are often portrayed as a bit flaky and quite a bit feminine. There is a scene where John Malkovich explains why he is lonely; gay men fall into a trap of emulating otherness because society expects that of him, and he doesn't want to give up his sense of himself as being naturally masculine, and thus he is doomed to being alienated from relationships with either sex. Basically, he's a tough gay guy.

This was a pretty odd yet liberating image for 1991, but its still fresh. Here's why. The most memorable film about masculine gay guys in the mainstream public's mind is Brokeback Mountain. The problem with that is the two guys know their gay, and we see that they are gay when they are together, but they are in denial to the rest of the world. Along with their image of "straightness," namely their masculinity, they put up a front of being straight in public. What this means is that the movie is really saying that society isn't ready to accept masculine gay men. If society was, then they wouldn't have felt the need to repress their relationship in public. Queens Logic is built on an ensemble cast, though, and that means Malkovich's character is constantly surrounded by a variety of people, both straight and gay, but he's still open about it. John Malkovich's character is the most openly gay masculine character I've seen in a movie, which is what I think makes the movie worth one viewing. (I'm probably leaving someone out, but at the moment, he's the most mascuiline openly gay character I can think of, especially in an American film pre-1992.)

Overall, Queens Logic isn't a great film. In the end, it's rather predictable and none of its promising aspects (the cast, the soundtrack) carry it enough for it to fully succeed. Still, if you see it in a bargain bin (like I did) or at your local video store, it might be worth picking up.

On Monetary Denominations -- The Penny

I got my first new five dollar bill today, and they are more interesting than I expected, but I don't think they are as pretty as the orange ten or the red white and blue fifty (which I've glanced at just once). I'm curious as to what the hundred has changed to, but I haven't seen one of those in ages. It got me thinking about pennies.

Pennies are an annoyance, and every once in awhile as a diverison from more important issues there will be talk of eliminating them. I think it is finally time for the penny to go, but I think that if I were six years old I would disagree. When I was six, I loved pennies. I'd hear talk of the treasury getting rid of them and I'd freak out. I thought, "how will I ever make it in this world without pennies?" When you are a kid, parents let you use pennies like they are play money. They are about all you ever get. When I was little I thought that one day I'd collect enough pennies that they would amass to something. So, while old me is tired of pennies, the idealist in me thinks we should keep them around for the kids.