Adam and Miranda Lambert
Revolution For Your Entertainment (bootleg/streaming on adamandmiranda.com)
4 stars
The husband-and-wife team has had quite a year. Having topped the country and pop charts with their respective solo albums (Miranda’s Revolution and Adam’s For Your Entertainment), they’ve rush-released a website stream, for the close of what the drawling Miranda has called “an Obama-lama-ding-dang year,” of a new album: Revolution For Your Entertainment, a gleefully bitter mash-up of their public and private concerns over the past 12 months.
The album leads off with “Poor Ol’ Simon Cowell,” in which Miranda playfully castigates Cowell as “The man who turned my lover-boy gay”:
“Well you said you liked your t-shirts tight
That you were straight and I was right
To stay in Nashville while you had your way
With my eye-liner honey, so horny, so fey…”
Of Miranda’s very public affair with her opening act, Blake Shelton (detailed with uncommon explicitness in her contribution here. “Shelton From The Storm”), Adam has written new lyrics to one of the songs he covered on American Idol, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”:
“I see a little silhouette of a man
Shelton-douche, Shelton-douche, will you do the fandango
Thunderbolts and Sugarland very, very frightening to me
Taylor Hicks-o (Taylor Hicks-o)
Taylor Hicks-o (Taylor Hicks-o)
Taylor Hicks-o Figaro… “
In addition to the passion and quality of the music, Revolution For Your Entertainment has had the added pop-cultural frisson of confounding country and Idol fans alike. Typical of the response within the industry is Carrie Underwood, ambushed last week by TMZ and asked about the new album, said, “Frankly, I don’t get it, but I love them both and they’re very fine artists and I hope to collaborate with them together and separately as soon as possible to help promote my new concept album, Carrie Underworld.”
Revolution For Your Entertainment (bootleg/streaming on adamandmiranda.com)
http://watching-tv.ew.com/
Also, for more Tucker writing on different subjects, go to my Best American Poetry blog :
http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/ken_tucker/
And my Facebook page for links to my music reviews for NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross.”
Thank you.
Ken
]]>The biggest laugh Watchmen got at the sold-out, 9 A.M., IMAX suburban-theater show I went to on Saturday occurred when the Lee Iacocca-businessman-figure said, “Free is just another word for socialist.” It was the happily derisive laugh of a crowd that was totally into the movie, and which also seemed well aware of the recent effort to label the Obama stimulus package as “socialist”–and the audience clearly thought the use of that supposedly-inflammatory word was a joke. Of course, director Zack Snyder couldn’t have known that line would have that context when he was filming Watchmen however many months ago, but movies have a way of capturing what’s in the air at the moment of their release-date in uncanny ways.
In general, no matter what you may think are the flaws in director Zack Snyder’s version of Alan Moore’s book, it does one thing consistently and assiduously: It seizes upon Moore’s long-standing sympathy for ’60s-style politics, strips away much of Moore’s bluster (that’s one of the advantages of having to pare down the novel), and hammers at the idea that Nixonian politics don’t work. Even the libertarian sentiments spouted by the movie’s Rorschach, positioned in the movie as its most interesting figure (thanks to a combo of his CGI mask and Jackie Earle Haley’s terrific performance) are viewed by Moore/Snyder as Walter Kovacs’s one crucial character flaw.
Watchmen is the most “political” movie in theaters now, and will be seen by many people who’d never dream of going to a Michael Moore documentary or of NetFlixing All The President’s Men (I caught at least two shout-outs to Woodward and Bernstein in Watchmen) or Three Days of the Condor. Pretty soon if not already, those who disagree with Alan Moore about the cleansing power of… what? liberalism? (Let the “masks” coexist with ordinary citizens!) anarchy? the nihilism some people (not me) believe is inherent in the movie’s violence and sex?… pretty soon those people may start inveighing against Watchmen. Me, I think it’s just more evidence that pop culture works in mysterious ways that even its creators can’t predict.
Sending a book out into the world is of course at once exhilarating and underwhelming. On the one hand: Yay! It’s done and can be found in Barnes & Noble. On the other: Oy! B&N is only stocking two copies of it at my suburban store?
But today I had a nice experience. After asking at the information desk where the devil I might find Scarface Nation (not on the New Books table—that’s the kind of placement a publisher has to pay for, and mine is thrifty), the cheerful B&N employee insists on escorting me to the movie-books section and we discover it together. We talk a bit, I show him my picture on the back to prove my authorship, he returns to his post, I move the two copies to the New Books table. Then I go poke around the magazines (a new issue of Black Belt featuring “Reality-Based Fighting”! a new issue Poetry with a section on “visual poems”! I snap up both to purchase).
As I’m walking to the cash register, the helpful employee brings along his manager, a smiling woman who says she’d be glad to have her store host a book-signing for me as a local author. She gives me her card; I tell her the name of the publisher’s p.r. person. She promises me I’ll sell “a lot of books.” This is very kind and optimistic. I remember the last time I published a book and did a reading at a Philadelphia Borders. Five people showed up: my wife, two friends, and two people who looked as though they needed to get in from the cold outside. Purchases that night: 0.
Did you know that Al Pacino went through nine suits to shoot the final, copiously bloody, “Say hello to my little friend!” machine-gun shoot-out in Scarface? Oh, this book is just full of fun facts like that… ]]>
John Leonard, who died Nov. 5 at age 69, was a dizzyingly inspirational critic. Lots of people are going to write appreciations of his extraordinary body of literary criticism, and although I am here to speak for his television criticism, I will inevitably include some of Leonard’s observations about books, because for him, one informed the other.When he began simultaneously reviewing books and TV in the early 1970s, he wasn’t someone who wanted to make you feel it was okay to like pop culture (and he was then writing at a time when his readership often wanted such reassurance). No, Leonard’s writing stood as proof that high and low culture could and should spark off each other, yield up fresh juxtapositions and ideas. He didn’t merely write about watching TV, he Leonard-ized the experience, noting that we tuned in “wishing merely for a chortle or a pipe dream, suspecting our cable box is just another bad-faith credit card enabling us to multiply our disappointments, we are ambushed into sentience.”
Leonard’s crammed prose was a series of cultural references packed into sentences so densely that they exploded in your head. Lots of critics write year-end summation pieces; only Leonard could summarize 1971’s TV-year thus: “The mind is a vacuum tube. The memory is artificial turf, videotape, consisting of images of George Plimpton and Archie Bunker; beneath it lies the bodies of four thousand lobotomized network vice-presidents, sewn together at their pineal glands and Achilles’ heels… FCC commissioners and the bureaucrats of public television scrimmage with cleated prose and padded brains.”
Twenty-six years later, showing not a trace of abated energy, he praised an episode of Homicide: Life On The Street that focussed on a long interrogation scene by saying, “for a single hour in March, for which Tom Fontana won the Emmy he deserved, I learned more about the behavior of fearful men in small rooms than I had from any number of better-known movies and serious plays and modern highbrow novels by the likes of Don DeLillo, Mary McCarthy, Alberto Moravia, Nadine Gordimer, Heinrich Boll, and Doris Lessing.” With Leonard, this wasn’t idle cultural name-dropping—he had read and written about all of those novelists. That comparison was not idly made; he had also spent the year watching Northern Exposure and Roseanne (”about joblessness and lesbianism as well as bowling”) and Picket Fences and the TV-movie “Roe V. Wade, with Holly Hunter as a Supreme Court case.” He had his blind spots (he couldn’t get past Archie Bunker’s bigotry to appreciate All In The Family’s craft and sociological impact), and he had his TV crushes (Blair Brown and Veronica Hamel felt his prose caress many times). But he remained not merely sensible and passionate but revelatory. No one could review a travel documentary with a sentence like this, a glorious example of the way one of Leonard’s signature devices—the list-sentence that becomes in itself a form of criticism: “We wandered with a shopping list—Greek light, German sausage, Russian soul, French sauce, Spanish bull, Zen koans, hearts of darkness, the blood of the lamb, and a double-knuckled antelope humerus from Oolduvai Gorge. We’d rub our fuzzy heads against the strange, and see if something kindled.” We’d rub our fuzzy heads against the strange—that’s poetry as much as it is criticism, and Leonard spun it out without warning, without pretence, like a newspaperman on deadline delivering a staggering gift.
Over the years I have often repeated to writers who bitch about lack of recognition the story Leonard told in his first collection of criticism, 1973’s This Pen For Hire, that he started writing TV reviews for Life magazine. But when he became the editor of the Times Book Review, he was told “it was considered inappropriate” for a Times man to write about that lowly medium, and so he continued writing about TV, but under a pen name, Cyclops. “Life still receives letters thanking the magazine for getting rid of me in favor of Cyclops,” Leonard wrote, “or demanding my return and the firing of Cyclops. So much for a distinctive prose style.”
But it is precisely his prose style that made anything Leonard wrote immediately identifiable. He was the first great TV critic. Of those who followed, James Wolcott, Tom Carson, Mim Udovich, and Clive James are the only other ones who can touch him. But none of them—and few of us—can rub our fuzzy heads against the strange and come up with thoughts as clear and complex as those of John Leonard. ]]>
Snoop Dog is currently on tour, and the screens behind the stage are showing clips from “Scarface” edited with Snoop-reenacted versions of them.
Does Brian De Palma know about this? Does Universal? I say, more power to Snoop Dogg… ]]>