Weeds, Season 1

The most subversive aspect of the show is the way the creators do everything in their power to make Nancy Botwin genuinely likable — she is playfully attractive, fashionable, capable and sharp of wit, if charmingly naive at times — while dancing around the Joe Friday fact that she is neglecting and recklessly endangering the welfare of her children. The pluck and whimsy that livens every briskly-plotted episode is a seduction, luring you into an irresponsible diversion, gaining your lazy consent. The writers work with incredible dexterity to periodically expose and dismiss the reality of the situation; moments of clarity cut through the smoke. The watchword is responsibility. Unless someone calls a spade a spade relatively soon the outlook is *ahem* sticky for Nancy (but she's so cute!) and her kids.

Flight of the Conchords, Season 1

At first I wasn't prepared to let the gonzo splatterama of early Peter Jackson speak for the character and tastes of all New Zealanders (just as I'm sure most Baltimoreans would prefer not to be represented by John Waters), but after viewing the clearly Jackson-inspired Black Sheep (2006), that beguiling tale about an outbreak of vicious weresheep, I was beginning to waver in my conviction that not all Kiwis could possibly be quite so utterly barmy. But it does kinda makes sense. I mean, what happens when you take a fleabitten shipload of Welsh and Scottish nutters, turn them upside down and force them to gather wool for a century at the end of the Earth? Hey, even Australia considers New Zealand a laughable backwater.

So what's a novelty music duo to do but embrace the stereotype? The craziest damn thing about these perpetually shellshocked rubes is that they seem to like being thought of that way. Contrast Australia's designated rep, Mick "Crocodile" Dundee, who is secondly a yahoo but firstly a toothy Harlequin hunk. That's a rather more assured self-image but far less funny, even when the humor draws from the same fish-out-of-water premise. And whereas Mick is competent and canny in his element, one gets the impression that the Conchords (and Murray), for all their sweet sincerity, would be just as adorably out of step back down underer, as if it's impossible to get your bearings on the other side of Oz.

NEW ZEALAND
DON'T EXPECT TOO MUCH — YOU'LL LOVE IT

Inglourious Basterds, Part XIV

14. Sabotage (1936) is the source of the clip of the boy trying to carry flammable nitrate film canisters onto a London city bus, only to be admonished by the conductor. I tack on this necessary installment to the IB film series for several reasons, one being that it is my favorite movie of pre-Hollywood Alfred Hitchcock, from whom Tarantino has inherited the mantle of master of suspense; a second being that echoes of the plot are heard in IB, involving propaganda bombings and central intrigue that revolves around a movie theater. Based on the 1907 Joseph Conrad novel, The Secret Agent, which foreshadows a century of violent terrorism in the service of revolutionary movements, Sabotage is darker, more horrifying than anything Hitchcock would make until Vertigo.

9

Within moments I was thinking of Myst, of the loving attention paid to small, functional objects and materials and their tactile quality, placed in context in an intimately realized space. Ray Bradbury would know how to describe that love. It has to do also with the natural delight taken in the working of simple devices and the way, under the close observance of a child, every thing seems to have something like a soul.


Note: Whatever had been reported about the use of a new CGI process to mimic the stilted movements of traditional stop motion animation (see Coraline) turns out to be unfounded, to my vague relief.

To Mega Therion

Re: Communication Breakdown

If you've been listening to Katy Perry (or Guillaume de Machaut) all week you might reasonably balk at the task: Train your blissfully undamaged ears to distinguish between some two dozen willfully inaccessible subgenres of extreme metal (inasmuch as the genre distinctions are substantive and not meaningless inventions of the music press). Well, put your misgivings aside! We do not have any choice but to climb the metal taxonomy tree because, as George Mallory put it, it is there.

We shall bypass the NWOBHM roots of the extreme metal phyla, preferring the aberrant outgrowths therefrom, with one outstanding exception: Motörhead. Hurtling through old-time rock and roll on enough amphetamines to power Tokyo, Lemmy is bigger than metal itself, and he and his warts have long been considered trustees of punk rock.

Let's also get a nod to Metallica out of the way. They, like Green Day, functioned as a gateway band for many of us of a certain age, and we pay our respects. That being said, I have previously summed up thrash metal in one word: Slayer.

The following patchwork of notes pertains to my initial experience with the pioneers of black, doom, power and death metal.

The prehistory of extreme metal ends with Venom, the hallowed Geordie trio who first applied the brute aggression and DIY production of hardcore punk to heavy metal; their first album (Welcome to Hell) is prototype for the sound of America's thrash metal and textbook for the blasphemous lyrical and iconographic fixations of Europe's black metal. (The sonic template for black metal, however, was later set down by Bathory and Celtic Frost, to whom I'll return.) Critics invariably note that Venom were rather amateur musicians, but myself — coming from a position sympathetic to the one-chord wonder of punk rock, I hear an unsettling authenticity in Venom's professions of allegiance to Lucifer that slick production and showy fretwork would only undermine. Their primitive woodshed recordings never sound like anything other than three blokes banging on cheap instruments, and that's exactly what I imagine unhinged devil freaks do.

For pure entertainment I point to the farcical posturing of the black metal prince of Copenhagen, Mercyful Fate; good clean fun, in the unholy scheme of things — I challenge you not to snicker the entire time. Every song is a precious ritual diablo, drawn as precisely as a pentagram, and the stratospheric castrato cackle is exactly as threatening as Skeletor. Plus they can boast the hands-down funniest album cover in the long tradition of ridiculous metal artwork: a horned skull half-submerged in a wall of flames, with outstretched hand pointing directly at YOU and the terrifying admonition, "Don't Break the Oath". I want to drive all night with my evil friends and be awesome.

Now let's switch sides and be the good guys! Just reverse your reversible cloak and join ranks with the Excalibur-wielding wizard heroes of this most mystical tale — presto, power metal! You've been rocked by the DragonForce song on Guitar Hero III so you know how friggin' sweet Gauntlet-based rock and slash can be. The elder lords of this dorkus magnus genre are Hamburg's non-non-non-heinous Helloween; mandatory listening if ever you calculated THAC0.

If you prefer piracy to sorcery: Alestorm.

The village-stomping doom metal of England's Witchfinder General is what Black Sabbath would sound like if I liked Black Sabbath. (The thing about Ozzy Osbourne, let's face it, is that he is and always has been a whiny git.) More accessible to those who fear immoderate shredding, Witchfinder blew away my expectations (abstruse druggy drivel) with tight, stripped bare songcraft and gleefully calamitous burn-a-wench-drink-a-beer attitude. Smell the bitch cooking as the prior looks on with cool approbation. Cheers as well to a goddamn brilliant band name.

Most of these groups inspire a mixture of amusement and awe, but when listening to Bathory I feel an urge to fall to my knees and proffer a goat. The fourth track on Under the Sign of the Black Mark made me scream aloud in distress at what I was hearing. I had to shut it off and put on Robert Johnson just to chill the fuck out. Jeez...I felt like a Baptist schoolmarm reacting to Blue Suede Shoes, This is the devil's music! It's hard to say exactly what horrible images are brought to mind, but I think that's part of Black Mark's potency: it's an abstraction of pure terror.

To Mega Therion conjures more tangible nightmares. The second album issued down from the nape of the alpine glacier where dwell in isolation Celtic Frost, inventing and discarding the sounds that later bands would take up and call black or death, is announced by the baleful sounding of the horns of Hannibal's decimated legion. The muscular thrash that ensues is at times accented by the ringing of iron on anvil — hammer falls no doubt shaping some fell implement — and the coldblooded song of revenant whores. Lead vocals are frequently punctuated by a Hetfieldian Ooh! Indeed, Celtic Frost has been referred to as Europe's Metallica both in terms of their orchestration and unparalleled influence.

Death metal is however an altogether American folly. The sound can be described as Slayer, only more so. Frankly I'm having a hard time getting into it, at least the early stuff. As gestated in Florida by Death and Frisco by Possessed on such albums as Scream Bloody Gore and Seven Churches, the squalling infancy of metal's most brutal branch presents a serious challenge to the listener: the monotonic delivery deadens what should be very colorful subject matter. The death growl and blast beats and other raw materials are there — leave it to the Swedes to figure out what to do with them (I'm eager to visit the more melodic Gothenburg metal). But I've peeked into the later work of Death, which transitions into the frightening prospect of technical death metal, and am happy to report that upon hitting maturity in the early nineties the American scene is a well articulated monster.

Further up the tree it gets pretty woolly. Hold on to your butts.

Whiskey and Cookies

Re: Communication Breakdown

Whilst wending a course over and through this Walpurgian wilderness, trying to make sense of the cacophony and put like with like, I have kept in mind a favorite passage from Chuck Klosterman's indispensable Fargo Rock City:

But what makes metal "heavy"? Good question. It becomes a particularly difficult issue when you consider that rock fans see a huge difference between the word "heavy" and the word "hard." For example, Led Zeppelin was heavy. To this day, the song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is as heavy as weapons-grade plutonium. Black Sabbath was the heaviest of the heavy (although I always seem to remember them being heavier than they actually were; early Soundgarden records are actually heavier than Sab ever was). Meanwhile, a band like Metallica was hard (as they've matured, they've become less hard and more heavy). Skid Row and the early Crüe were pretty hard. Nirvana's first record on Sub Pop was heavy, but Nevermind was totally hard, which is undoubtedly why they ended up on MTV's Headbanger's Ball (that was the fateful episode where Kurt Cobain wore his dress, thereby providing the final death blow to the metal ideology).

Clearly, the "hard vs. heavy" argument is an abstract categorization. To some people it's stupidly obvious, and to other people it's just stupid. Here again, I think drugs are the best way to understand the difference. Bands who play "heavy" music are inevitably referred to as "stoner friendly." However, "hard" bands are not. Find some pot smokers and play Faster Pussycat for them — I assure you, they will freak out. It will literally hurt their brain. They'll start squinting (more so), and they'll hunch up their shoulders and cower and whine and kind of wave their hands at no one in particular. I nearly killed my aforementioned drug buddy by playing the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" when she was trapped in a coughing fit. Her recovery required a box of Nutter Butter cookies and almost four full hours of Frampton Comes Alive.

Sociologist and Teenage Wasteland author Donna Gaines described the teen metal audience as a suburban, white, alcoholic subculture, and she's completely correct. The only drugs that go with "hard" metal are bottles of booze (and cocaine, if you can afford it, which you probably can't if you spend all your time listening to Who Made Who). Conversely, "heavy" metal meshes perfectly with marijuana, especially if you're alone and prone to staring at things (such as Christmas lights, the Discovery Channel, or pornography).

It's tempting to suggest that "heavy" metal came from acid rock (like Iron Butterfly), while "hard" metal came from groups who took their influences from punk (that would explain Guns N' Roses). This seems like a logical connection, but it rarely adds up. A better point of schism is side one of the first Van Halen album ...

And then Chuck goes on to pontificate about the "shackled genius" of Eddie Van Halen for two pages and never really finishes his point. I happen to think that the acid/punk account adds up nicely. Heaviness is the very quick of doom metal, the parthenogenetic offspring of Sabbath. Contrast the buzzkilling lethality of black and death metal, enervated by the seed of hardcore (not heavycore) punk. It's stupidly obvious.

Kill City Nights

My faith in radio was renewed last week when, whilst driving down a road that used to be the edge of town back when the town had edges and flipping stations between classic hard rock and classic album rock, I heard Alice Cooper's I'm Eighteen for the first time. Not since high school have I discovered a new favorite song via Marconi; I had forgotten such things were possible. As to how this essential track managed to evade me until now, well, these things happen. I admit to neglecting Alice Cooper, having only a peripheral awareness that Wayne and Garth were not worthy. Now I know why the Aurorans fell to their knees.
...
Most people probably think of Metropolis and Gotham City as alternate New York Cities: the Big Apple by day/night or, as their respective creators have put it, Manhattan above/below 14th Street. Well that's horseshit. A proper understanding of Americana places Metropolis nearer to the capital, somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay, while Gotham City adorns the rust belt between Chicago and Detroit. Frank Miller's Sin City belongs someplace out West.

Each of these serves its purpose in our national mythology, but I think there is room and need for another. A less conspicuous figure of the gothic Midwest as crossroads of labor and freight, situated upon the leviathan Mississippi and circumscribed by the brooding menace of the prairie. A watering hole for cowboys, truckers and sailors where the grain elevators stand sentinel and no one much looks at your face. At all times can be heard the rumble of a railyard. You can get there by heading west out of Indianapolis on I-74; else just follow the Lincoln Highway to the roller dam where the Rock River slips it to the Miss. Let's take our cue from Iggy, baby, and call it Kill City.

Heard in the roadhouses and subterranean downtown dives is the sound of rock and roll engine brakes and crane wreckage. A touch of the blues has wormed its way upriver. From out of every culvert echoes someone's last ruddy spittle and song. Have a listen: I call this sampler Kill City Nights.

[All songs made available for illicit download here — Get 'em while they're hott.]

1. What You Need — The Hookers
2. Gimme Danger — The Stooges
3. I'm Eighteen — Alice Cooper
4. Get It On — Turbonegro
5. Slicker Drips — The White Stripes
6. I Want You Right Now — MC5
7. Swing Low — The Gossip
8. Dear Hearts — Murder City Devils
9. Black Diamond — The Replacements
10. So Alone — Johnny Thunders
11. Kill City — Iggy Pop & James Williamson
12. Night Theme — Iggy Pop & James Williamson
13. Forming — Germs
14. Not Anymore — Dead Boys
15. Wall of a Song — The Whore Moans
16. T.V. Eye — The Stooges
17. Hospital — The Modern Lovers
18. So Cold — Rocket from the Tombs
19. Murder City Nights — Radio Birdman
20. Are You Ready (For Some Darkness) — Turbonegro
21. Broken Glass (live) — Murder City Devils

And I like it, love it, like it, love it

Flammen & Citronen

Gangland Chicago transplanted to occupied Copenhagen, 1944: That's right, we're in thriller heaven. We've got what appears to be the entire Danish resistance (all twelve of them) operating under supposed orders from British Intelligence to assassinate key Danish collaborators and Nazi officials, all of whom claim to be double agents when least convenient for our faltering would-be assassins. Matters slightly complicated by the fact that the Brits do not recognize the existence of a "German resistance". Need I mention the inscrutable femme fatale? Trenchcoats and Thompson guns shepherd black market munitions through daylight street bombings and running board getaways; substitute bootleg and the corner pub haunts and country safehouses of drizzly Zealand make kissing cousins to Capone's drizzly Chicagoland.

Make a point to see this.

Taking Woodstock

If Ang Lee wants to make a doe-eyed tribute to the transformative power of good vibrations, I guess he has the right. But me, I need to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas right away, to get out the patchouli stink.

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously — all those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create; a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the acid culture: the desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

— Raoul Duke

Halloween II (2009)

Artwork by Rob Zombie

Rob Zombie is one gracious motherfucker. Many directors, from John Ford to Robert Altman to Christopher Guest, are known for gathering to themselves a stock company, typically a dozen or so players with familial chemistry; Zombie seems determined to assemble the largest stock company on record. His casting credo could be "No role too big or too small" for to be filled by his ponderous mental Rolodex of befriended B- and Z-list celebrities. I don't think Roger Corman is as well-connected. (I imagine Zombie to be the bugbear that haunts the staff at Fangoria and Bloody Disgusting with feelings of fanboy inadequacy.) In a Zombie movie everybody is somebody you swear you've seen somewhere before; you can't even assume the teen meat are fresh faces: Playing Laurie Strode's friend Annie is none other than Danielle Harris — that's right, the seven-year-old girl from Halloweens 4 and 5 all grown up (and how). Zombie you magnificent bastard howdoyoudoit!?

I must relate that at one point during his audio commentary on the Halloween DVD Zombie's grumblings about how this-or-that particular day of shooting was plagued by faulty squibs and errant palm trees (he repeats a variation on this anecdote of woe for every scene, making perfectly clear that filmmaking is a monumental pain in the ass) are interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone, "Sorry, it's Malcolm McDowell..."

What's most remarkable about Zombie's growing troupe is that, unlike those of Corman, Ford etc, these actors have not been mentored and brought up by Zombie; just the opposite. The Astro Creep is above all a fan-turned-promoter. This guy doesn't even come from the film industry; he's been the frontman of a highly visible metal band for over twenty years. But to examine his career in the music biz as producer, recording artist and director of music videos is to realize that Zombie has always been an effective champion of his idols and influences. Case in point: the Zombie-produced Ramones tribute album, We're a Happy Family — take a gander at the list of artists that Zombie assembled, and note also that he got Stephen King to write the liner notes.

Now, in feature films, this Renaissance subhuman has synthesized his interests and expanded his audience as center-ring purveyor of Perdition, American Style. Zombie furnishes his pics with loving showcases of vintage rock/punk tunes and imagery and acts as a steadfast supporter (that is, employer) of the legions of forgotten, underappreciated and otherwise minor figures who have manned the trenches of cult film and television. Every time someone like P.J. Soles or — holy shit! the teacher from Head of the Class! — pops up in a Zombie cameo, if only long enough to be stabbed in the face, a rare thing is somehow conveyed: the sense that this actor is a person who is grateful to be remembered. Zombie gives each a moment of glory, a tasty line or the rare chance to play against type, and on screen they seem to be having fun. The performances are uniformly solid; these are workhorse actors, after all.

Zombie's movies are flawed. (Except Devil's Rejects...that one might be perfect.) He loves his cast and his reverent homages a bit too much, at the expense of structure and overall coherence. Halloween II is a big improvement over the first, but many of the kills still lack rhythm. Suspense is not his strong suit, but then I don't think suspense has ever been the strong suit of American pictures. Hitchcock was British of course, and what he brought to Hollywood will always be more or less an imported good. Zombie works in the tradition of Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre, my candidate for the most American movie of all time: big and punchy and messy and wickedly fun.

Texas chain saw massa-cree
They took my baby away from me
But she'll never get out of there
She'll never get out of there
I don't care, whoa oh oh

— The Ramones

My photos of the Johnny Ramone cenotaph and detail,
Hollywood Forever Cemetary

Inglourious Basterds, Part I

Normally herein, when writing on a movie, I try to refrain from merely rattling off a list of the pop culture references astutely identified by yours truly. After all, that's what those discouraged trivia sections on Wikipedia are for. But I'll make an exception if I smell a potential film series. So, on the grounds that Tarantino wishes us to be informed on interwar cinema, and on the condition that we therefore restrict to cultural items of the 20s and 30s (that means no ticking off the various spaghetti westerns and military espionage flicks of the 60s that inspired QT's soundtrack and plot), I offer this splendid little program: a primer to enhance one's enjoyment of the finer points of Inglourious Basterds, in twelve parts.


1. Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (1929), aka The White Hell of Pitz Palu, is the feature presentation on German night at Shosanna's cinema, Le Gamaar. An early draft of the Inglourious Basterds script includes this bit of voiceover narration:

To operate a cinema in Paris during the occupation, one had two choices. Either you could show new German propaganda films, produced under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels. Or...you could have a German night in your weekly schedule, and show allowed German classic films. Their German night was Thursday.

Evidently Goebbels approved of this Bergfilm (a genre of mountaineering adventures popular in Germany in the 20s for their kraut-conquers-nature iconography) co-directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Arnold Fanck (pioneer of the Bergfilm) and starring the statuesque Leni Riefenstahl. Pabst is a pet topic of conversation throughout IB, even getting a nod of respect from our French-Jewish heroine, which embarrasses me as I know nothing of his work. My knowledge of Weimar cinema is mostly limited to Expressionism, whereas Pabst led filmmaking into the counter-movement known as New Objectivity (see Part X below). Riefenstahl began her infamous career as an actress — the epitome of the perfect German female, according to Hitler — and graduated to become the Führer's most favored director of propaganda (see Part VIII).


Addendum: White Hell turns out to be a stupendous adventure film — the most dramatic location photography I've seen in the silent era...flickers of Herzog.

Inglourious Basterds, Part II

2. Le Corbeau (1943), aka The Raven, advertised on Shosanna's marquee, is some kind of indictment, maybe, about someone or other, perhaps, in contemporary Vichy France. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot apparently managed to simultaneously piss off the stalinist Resistance, the Catholic Church and his fascist underwriters, which makes him sound like my hero. I can attest that his later thrillers (Wages of Fear, Diabolique — made after the French government consented to restore his legal right to operate a camera in 1947) are beautifully bleak.

Inglourious Basterds, Part III

3. Glückskinder (1936), aka Lucky Kids, the film Goebbels chooses to screen privately at Le Gamaar, was one of the Reichsminister's own productions as de facto head of Ufa, Germany's principal film studio. From the early draft of the IB script, Goebbels speaking:

Ahhh, "Lucky Kids", "Lucky Kids", "Lucky Kids". When all is said and done, my most purely enjoyable production. Not only that, I wouldn't be surprised, if sixty years from now, it's "Lucky Kids" that I'm the most remembered for. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but mark my words.

This screwball Frank Capra-knockoff features Lilian Harvey, one of the biggest stars of early German talkies — dubbed the "sweetest girl in the world". But Lilian was no Leni. Following her return to Germany in 1935 after a stint in Hollywood, Harvey's ties to Jewish theatre landed her under observation by the Gestapo. Indeed, while continuing to star in hits for Ufa, she secretly aided the escape of several Jewish contacts and herself fled to France, then the US, in 1940. Goebbels, in his fury, revoked her citizenship.

Inglourious Basterds, Part IV

4. Seven Years Bad Luck (1921) is the best known of the few feature films of Max Linder, to whom Shosanna devotes a film festival. A predecessor to Charlie Chaplin in many respects, the French-Jewish Linder was writer/director/star of hundreds of slapstick shorts in the 1910s, appearing always as his dapper character Max. Failing to achieve comparable success in Hollywood after a traumatic tour of duty in WWI, Linder and his wife committed suicide in Paris on Halloween, 1925.

Inglourious Basterds, Part V

5. The Kid (1921) is the one where Chaplin is bought as a plaything for a wealthy brat and the whole time he wears Spider-Man pajamas. I think. Private Zoller prefers Linder, but remarks that Linder never made a movie as good as The Kid.