Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

1. Spike Lee in “When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts” (HBO, Aug. 21 and 22, with numerous rerunnings): He’s there not just as a director, but also as an off-camera voice, asking quick follow-up questions to New Orleans residents who survived Hurricane Katrina. While there is nothing in Lee’s voice that suggests the fervent anger that fuels this magnificent, heartbreaking documentary about the human causes of the Katrina tragedy, Lee’s urgent questions and there aren’t many, spread over four hours, but they’re key; fully convey the sympathy, rage, disbelief, and shock that registers anew, over and over, as you listen to how these Americans respond to him, his voice, and his cameras.

2. The Temptations, “Ball of Confusion,” used on commercials for HBO’s “The Wire”: No narrator speaks, telling you to watch the new season starting Sept. 10–I mean, if you’re stupid enough to subscribe to HBO and not watch “The Wire,” what hope is there for you?–but instead, there’s a montage of tantalizing scenes, with characters familiar and new, more black faces than you’ve ever seen in any other TV series, more excitement, more humor and passion, more chaos. No wonder the only song that could convey all this is the Temptations’ 1970, Norman Whitfield-produced hit, one of the rare songs of the psychedelic era that used the notion of a “bad trip” to convey a world of exhilarating pain. Just like: “The Wire.”

3. “52″ (DC Comics): As in an issue-a-week, for 52 consecutive weeks, part of DC Comics’ re-alignment of its superhero universe. If you’re not a comics fan, should you care? Yes: Normally, I have an aversion to big, multi-character projects like this, and I barely know Black Adam from Animal Man (well, I do, but I’m trying to convince you of the accessibility here). However, writers Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, and Mark Waid have come up with plots about transformation, betrayal, love, and commitment that are enhanced by the myth-making super-powered characters. Now 16 weeks in, this is as addictive as any good TV series, any good mystery-novel series, any good comic-book series.

4. Slayer, “Flesh Storm” on “Christ Illusion” (American Recordings): Usually don’t have much use for this kind of thrash-metal; I need more rhythm, more sensuousness, in my music, and my inner-adolescent rage gets channeled elsewhere, but the lead-off cut here, “Flesh Storm,” is a super-fine anti-war, anti-news-media anthem.

(As always, go to EW.com for all 5 Reasons columns and other reviews.)

1. New York Dolls, One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This (Roadrunner Records): The first Dolls album since 1974 proves they’re not the pussycat kind. Sole survivors David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain growl, strut, and philosophize about evolution as it pertains to mating rituals (”Dance Like A Monkey”’s immortal couplet: “C’mon shake your hips/My little creationist”) and the Phil Spector-ish, stomping ballad “Plenty of Music” When Johansen sings, “I see superfluous beauty everywhere/Why should I care/What does it matter to me?” he’s providing sustenance to those of us who know that, for example, the superfluous pleasures of Laguna Beach (see below) don’t matter, as irresistible as they may be.

2. The Naked Spur (Warner Bros. DVD): James Stewart was never meaner than in director Anthony Mann’s ferocious 1953 revenge Western, as a bounty hunter out to capture a murdering Robert Ryan for the reward that’ll enable Stewart to regain the ranch stolen from him while he was in the army. Shot against the Colorado Rockies, the entire film, its look, its aura is infused with the angry bitterness of Stewart’s character. Consumer advice: don’t bother buying the new, mediocrity-padded James Stewart Signature Collection that includes Spur (The Cheyenne Social Club? No thanks), just get the single DVD and witness a side of Stewart that few movies captured.

3. The poetry of A.R. Ammons: It’s summer-time, put aside those mind-melting beach-reads and pick up some poetry. Archie Ammons (1926-2001), master observer of nature both wild and human, even made it easy for you by publishing The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons, which contains just what it says: Easily read, a nourishing challenge to fully appreciate. A sample of Ammons, called “Release”:
After a long
muggy
hanging
day
the raindrops
started so
sparse
the bumblebee flew
between
them home

4. Golden Smog, “Corvette” on Another Fine Day (Lost Highway): A reader of this column nominated this new album a couple of weeks ago, and he or she was right: this semi-supergroup of musicians from Wilco, the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum, and other bands have come up with another fine collection, which peaks with this song written for, but never used in, a car commercial.

5. Laguna Beach (MTV): No, I haven’t seen it in advance, but after the disappointment of The Hills (how could such a kee-ewwwl internship at Teen Vogue prove so dull??), I’m rooting for the third season of MTV’s unscripted-yet-super-edited-and-directed experiment in the sociology of pampered dimwits to yield further revelations about the state of cell-phone use, slang, and the dismal failure of the American school system.

1. Elizabeth Hasselbeck, The Terror of The View (ABC): Last week, the inarticulate mouse of The View suddenly became the primary reason to watch the show. First, on Aug. 2, she went off on a gibbering tirade about the evil of the morning-after birth-control pill, to the point where Barbara Walters had to tell her to calm down. Two days later, she revealed the harsh mistress beneath her genial thoughtlessness by telling an anecdote about encountering a babysitter whom Hasselbeck felt was neglecting her young charges on a New York City street. She freely admitted to yelling at the young woman and read a description of her (she’d taken notes!) so that the girl’s employer could be sure to fire her, and so, presumably, would scores of other babysitters who may have fit that description. Woe unto you should you be the luckless waitress, taxi driver, or other service employee who does not behave as Ms. Hasselbeck thinks you should. She seems like one of those people whose TV prominence has made her just arrogant enough to think she wields enough power to get someone terminated. Dubious human; great TV.
2. OutKast, “Idlewild Blue” video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXfwnyPucEA): Andre, shirtless, strumming an acoustic guitar–plays funky blues at a Southern house-party. The song is all gutbucket rhythm, his voice a snake curling around the melody. The house begins to fill up with water; pretty soon, he’s holding the guitar above his head before he and the houseguests are submerged underwater. Yet the party goes on. Final image: the words “Dedicated to all those tryin’ to stay afloat.” Exploitation of the Katrina tragedy? More like triumph of will and artistry over impossible circumstances. You bob your head, snap your fingers, and feel goosebumps on your arms.
3. T.C. Boyle, Talk Talk (Viking): Boyle, who comes on like an impious imp when he’s out promoting books but really delivers the goods when he actually writes them, has a great commercial hook here; a deaf woman is the victim of identity-theft by a guy who’s so into his crimes, he barely knows his own identity anymore. Boyle understands why so many readers buy bestseller fiction, not for fiction, but to learn fact, and he fills his novel with meticulous details about how easy it is to snatch details from your life and have them turned against you. On that level, the book is genuinely scary, and you feel for Dana Hadler, the schoolteacher who’s arrested for scam-crimes she didn’t commit. But the literary novelist in Boyle won’t permit him to pass off her victimizer as a creep: he’s nearly as sympathetic. And like so many of Boyle’s terrific short stories and deceptively-loose novels, Talk Talk tightens up at the end like a noose around your neck.
4. Joshua Clover, The Totality For Kids (University of California Press): A sincere trickster, Clover writes poems with quick bursts of beautiful images (”So I went out into the nervous system of the air,”), prose-poems that mix different conversational voices (”Now I like to read magazines called TeleStar and Shock and post to my blog in what Teen People called the latest in mediated indifference. Sometimes I like to compose little poems and imagine you reading them.”), and in general combines romance, politics, literary theory, and humor. Who else would write a poem called “What’s American About American Poetry?”, and then translate it, across the facing page, into French?
5. The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman (IFC): Comedy-writer and former SNL cast member Laura Kightlinger plays the title character, a refreshingly unjaded L.A. screenwriter-wannabe. The show trafficks in the sort of isn’t-Hollywood-hideous jokes that Curb Your Enthusiasm has definitively curdled, but Kightlinger’s presence lifts the show to a buoyant level—no matter how mean-spirited the jokes (she scorns a director who turns out movies “the way my cousins make fat kids”), Kightlinger makes you understand through Jackie that very often good people say naughty things, and that brains and good actions redeem a lot of superficial

GO to EW.com for more of my columns, reviews, etc.

I’ve started this new column on EW.com called “5 Reasons To Live,” about TV, books, movies, music–anything that I think is worth calling attention to, to point you toward, or to provoke reaction from readers. I’m going to start posting the column here as well, but I urge you to check out the column in its EW.com format as well. Here’s the most recent one.

5 Reasons to Live

1. Jamie Foxx breaks somebody’s hand in Miami Vice Some critics are comparing director Michael Mann to avant garde filmmakers in his abstract, fluttery approach to narrative, but, even beyond the stars’ threats to splatter a bad guy into a Jackson Pollock pattern–I also saw painterly influences like Franz Kline’s slashing blacks and Ed Ruscha’s bruised purple skies. Which is not to say the movie is static: Yes, the shoot-out in the white supremicists’ trailer makes your blood pump faster, but I also love the smaller moments, as when, early on, Farrell and Foxx move through a nightclub and Foxx casually, in insoucient bodyguard style, cracks the hand of a thug approaching his partner. Beautiful, brutal stuff—finally, a summer movie that pays off in emotion as well as action.

2. Scritti Politti, White Bread Black Beer (Rough Trade/Nonesuch) The first album in eight years by the fluttery-voiced British one-man-band Green Garthside, White Bread is filled with pure-pop confections that yield emotional nourishment. Listen to the mini-epic “Dr. Abernathy” for a ferociously cavalier drug-use tale that’s colder than Steely Dan in its prime; listen, for range and contrast, to “No Fine Lines,” a gorgeous dream about how sunlight looks on fresh snow, and brings you up short with the abrupt realism of “Looks like maybe we’ll lose our home/Out of pocket and all alone.”

3. Poetry magazine July/August “Humor Issue” The best humor in this determinedly wacky issue (they spelled their name, just this once, as “Peotry”, har, har), comes from Dean Young’s “Sean Penn’s Anti-Ode” (”Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing/the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge/is his face?…”) and in Mark Halliday’s impeccably poet-self-absorbed parody “All Me.” Oh, and Halliday’s back-page Contributor’s Note: “Mark Halliday teaches at Ohio University. Due to some quirk of genetics or fate, his opinions about poetry are never wrong.”

4. Pink, I’m Not Dead album Picking up on an astute posting last week by reader “djm,” I agree that this woefully underrated album is a bold, fun chunk of music. While “djm” digs “I’m Not Dead,” I also love “Dear Mr. President”: it’s not often a pop star gets this specific without seeming like a knave or a tool. Pink is the total opposite: a wise woman who’s deepening her music every time out.

5. George Pelecanos, The Night Gardener (Little, Brown) Seems like every thriller novelist writes serial-killer stories these days, and the results (it’s so easy to render remorseless multiple murders) verge on the obscene. But Pelecanos actually does something with this sub-genre: He brings a sense of moral indignation that’s never pious, a sense of history that’s never ponderous, and his depictions of Washington underclass life give equal human weight to whites and blacks. By not exploiting anyone, he actually provides more thrills than all of the exploitive-thriller hacks out there on the bookshelves.