MTV Poetry

Well, this certainly seems right up our alley: John Ashbery has been named the poet laureate of mtvU, the "campus" division of MTV.

Not sure what it means exactly, but it seems like something that certainly can't hurt. They've created these nice little trailers that surprisingly focus on the poems, rather than, I don't know, that kid from Fall Out Boy's eyeliner or something.

MTV is stupid and seems to have blocked them from Youtube, so I can't easily embed them here -- if you click on the link above, you can check em out. Pretty nice, actually.

What do all y'all poets make of this?

On a semi-related note, John Ashbery looks a lot like Creed from The Office. Interesting to note.

Thoughts on Owen Wilson

I was shook up when I heard that Owen Wilson tried to kill himself. It surprised me that I could not be blase about it. I'm not sure there are many other celebrities who would have that impact on me. (but let's not test it.) In any case, the story now seems to be that Wilson was abusing drugs, which forced his break-up with Kate Hudson. The claim is that British actor/comedian Steve Coogan of 24 Hour Party People fame is the one to blame -- but that is a tangential point, as it seems beyond dispute that Wilson was doing heavy drugs heavily, and because it's hard to trust Courtney Love as a primary source.

The truly innovative thing that the Wilsons and Wes Anderson brought to movies was male narcissism as a desirable quality. Of course, female narcissism is not just encouraged but assumed, because we men stare at them all the time. But men are supposed to be interested in things -- women, football, cars -- not themselves. In Bottle Rocket, Luke Wilson's character charms the pants off a hotel housekeeper without ever telling her that he loves her...in fact, in the pivotal scene, he asks her if she loves him. Owen Wilson's subsequent roles perfected this idea of the man so infatuated with himself that you can't help but be too -- witness the ending church scene in Wedding Crashers, where Wilson's only argument for getting together with Rachel McAdams is to not get together with her fiance, while also mentioning that he crashed a funeral, leaving deliberately unsaid whether it was successful.

This narcissism is a reaction to an assumption of nihilism on the part of Wilson and Anderson, that there's nothing in this world but yourself, so go with it. Tragedy doesn't play well in this world, because there can be no noble flaws or true passion if there's nothing to anything. (and thus why the Life Aquatic didn't work). Rather, comedy is king, and secondary only to comedy is the fetishization of idiosyncrasy, the demonstration of total commitment to any object or endeavor, no matter how seemingly trivial or immoral, because it is ultimately and supremely distracting.

And narcissism, if projected outward, can harm (and, as amply demonstated by Wilson, give pleasure to) others but keep the self from harm (mostly), but when turned inward, can result in severe depressive episodes as the depths of the self, long unexplored or ignored, pull down and paralyze.

Whether Wilson truly embodies this narcissistic ethos is unclear, but I hope that he makes a full recovery and comes to whatever decision he need to make to best help himself. Right now he doesn't need any more distractions, like trying to entertain us.

Who's in on the Joke? Jody Rosen and R. Kelly Make Two.

According to Slate's music critic (is this also the guy who praised Mariah Carey's miasma?) Trapped in the Closet is a joke*. Granted, i've only seen the MadTV and Weird Al parodies, but if R. Kelly needs to be known as the Subtle Ironist, then I think it's high time I gave up on life.

Money quote:

This is where Kelly comes in. He began his career in the early 1990s by playing to type—crooning come-ons and pleas without a trace of irony, accompanied by the usual pelvic thrusts. But as the years have progressed, Kelly has learned, as Kelefa Sanneh wrote this week in the New York Times, "that a subtle joke, or an unsubtle one, can make a slow jam feel more intimate and therefore more effective."

Baby please, don't tease
I'll tell a subtle joke
To make you squeeze
My ribs with laughter
And then after
We'll make love
Under the cov-
Ers, Now that's an unsubtle
rhyme, but give it some time
For an unsubtle joke
Like you are so fat you eat so much
Then drink a diet coke
Our love don't make no sense
I ask for dollars but you give me cents
oooh
oohh
yeah
pelvic thrusts now, unironic
we'll smoke up with the chronic
ahh
yeahh
ooohhhh



*That R. Kelly is in on.

Dreams Do Come True: Barrelhouse One Degree of Separation from Swayze

Barrelhouse contributor, Parade magazine antagonist, and inventor of the word "fucktard" Tod Goldberg has achieved greatness, immortality, and (even more of) our undying adulation by actually signing a book for Patrick Swayze.


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The West Was Won with Charm

After ordering a little late in the game, last week I received my copy of Jennifer “El” Knox’s Holliday, poems in the voice of gunslinger/dentist Doc Holliday, from Maureen Thorson’s Big Game Books. Readers of the Barrelhouse will recognize Jen’s poem “Doc Holliday on the Importance of Comradeship: Tombstone, Arizona, October 25, 1881” for Barrelhouse Issue 4.

This, along with four other Doc Holliday poems comprise the tiny book. It’s well worth the $3 to read lines like

One should strive to keep the right
Eye under the table, peeled for the pistol
Lying low inside each twitchy, tapping, dirty
Boot but—for the love of God—the left
On the ladies!

To get your eyes on the lady herself, she’ll be reading all around in October when her new full-length comes out from Bloof Books. Dates can be found here.

That’s reading dates, not romantic dates. Perv.

Pop Culture in Brief

The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band, by Motley Crue: Generally, I'm not a fan of memoir, particularly now that every 26-year-old with a laptop and daddy issues has decided their problems are not only unique, but book-worthy. If there are four guys who are allowed to write a memoir, though, it's the members of Motley Crue, who pretty much invented the VH1 Behind the Music formula: talent + craziness + success + drugs = dramatic story arc. On nearly every page, there's something to make you either laugh or cringe. Here's just a brief but representative snippet:

"One night, Vince, Stephanie and I [Nikki Sixx] were hanging out at the Rainbow, eating quaaludes and escargots, and throwing up under the table every fifteen minutes. We got plastered, took her back to our house, and all ended up in Vince's bed. That was never my scene. Vince and Tommy were always piling chicks together. But having a guy there wrecked the moment for me. I couldn't get it up and eventually went back to my room, leaving the two of them alone. That was the last time I saw Stephanie naked, because once you put Vince in the same room as a girl with money and a nice car, it's all over. They dated for months after that and were about to get married when Vince found a richer girl, Beth, with blond hair and a better car, a 240Z." Verdict: Rawk!

Stardust: The girlfriend and I won free passes to an advance screening of this flick last week (thanks, Entertainment Weekly!), and maybe it was just the buzz of getting something for nothing, or the popcorn and soda they plied us with, but I thought the movie was pretty much the perfect summer flick: a good action-filled plot, funny, just brainy and self-aware enough to have some substance. Plus, it's worth the price of admission (even if yours isn't free) to see Robert DeNiro as a light-in-the-loafers sea captain. Verdict: Summery goodness!

Scott Baio is 45 ... and Single: This show is just sad. Scott Baio isn't a nice enough guy to be likeable, but not a big enough douche to be entertaining. Even sadder are some of his exes, like Julie McCullough (Mike Seaver's girlfriend on Growing Pains) whose entire "comedy" routine apparently consists of telling unfunny jokes about how Chachi cheated on her. Verdict: Depressing.

Mad Men: Since when does AMC have original programming? Does the fact I like said programming mean I've officially entered middle age? Is it only a matter of time before I start bitching about colorized movies and downing Metamucil? Maybe it's best not to think too much and just enjoy this show, which attempts to recreate both the alluring bits of early-1960s business life -- big offices! job security! drinks in the afternoon! -- and the not-so-alluring bits, like that whole "women as objects" thing. Bonus points for some great in-jokes, like when a character says he knows his coworker stole papers out of his trash can because "it's not like there's some magic machine that can produce exact copies of documents." Verdict: Timewarp.

The Hater: Sean Lennon and Some Model Named Irina

Are you reading The Hater, the AV Club's pop culture blog thing? You should be, because, like everything else associated with The Onion, it's consistently brilliant.

Here's a little snippet from the latest, Evidence that Sean Lennon and Some Model are a Terrific Couple, a wonderfully snarky deconstruction of a Fashion Rocks article that looks, from the evidence provided, to be completely unbearable, even more so than, um, everything else from something called Fashion Rocks.

Sean Lennon and some model named Irina aren't just partners in love, they're partners in music too!

Lennon...is happy to be working "with someone who doesn't have a problem with inspiration lyrically. I play three chords, and she makes up three verses without a blink, like a free-style rapper. We bang out two to three songs a night." Such is the extent of their connection that when [Irina] gets up from the table, Lennon follows, "Do you mind if I go out and just have one or two drags of her cigarette?"

I personally can't wait to hear the results of these three-chord fashion model freestyle rapping sessions. Sounds like exactly the way Dylan and the Band recorded The Basement Tapes.

Will the Torch Be Lit?

Of course I'm talking about the Van Halen with David Lee Roth as lead singer torch.

Looks like those folks at rotharmy.com might finally have to break out the photoshop.

Police vs. Motormorons

So in case anybody is remotely interested, here's the follow up to my previous post about the Police (or, as Adrock from the Beastie Boys repeatedly referred to them, "the PO-lice") show -- or, the show that had the Police at the end, on Saturday.

The Police are okay. They started off with a pretty muscular version of Message in a Bottle, which really sounded great. More rock, less finesse, kind of a best case scenario, given that their sound can get a little ska-lite radio-friendly, to say the least. From there, it kind of slumped off to what I expected: good songs done well, nothing spectacular. You know, The Police. I also realized that I know every word to every goddam Police song, something that I think was unavoidable if you grew up when I grew up. They sounded great -- actually, everybody sounded great, the sound people at the Virgin Festival did an amazing job -- and Sting made us all wonder why we're not actively doing yoga. Motherfucker looks fantastic. Still, it was kind of underwhelming, and my general impression was unchanged. It was the Police. They sang a bunch of good, solid pop songs. They're not embarrassing by any stretch of the imagination. They're really good, in fact, and you really can't argue about the quality of their overall catalog. But they're not spectacular, either.

My favorite comment was from some random girl, on her way from the direction of the Police stage to the Modest Mouse stage, who said, "who's playing next over there, Crowded House?"

In contrast, the Beastie Boys were pretty spectacular. I'm a Beasties fan, but even I was very impressed with their tight, hour and a quarter set. They came out in matching tailored suits, with hats, despite the hundred degree heat (Adrock on the temperature: "it is hot as a mofo out here..."). They hammered out a hardcore/punk/hip hop set that included a lot of Check Your Head, a few instrumentals, and a few old faves from way back in the day (Shake Your Rump, Brass Monkey). They were tight and super energetic and seemed to be having a hell of a time. Even if I was toned and worshipped and one-named, I would not have wanted to follow those guys onto that stage.

One interesting note is that I suppose the transition from Beastie Boys to Beastie Men has wrought some changes in some of those old school tunes -- for instance, "MCA's in the back 'cause he's skeezin' with a whore" became "MCA's in the back [doing something not as creepy as skeezin' with a whore]," and like so throughout. Can't blame them, I suppose.

Some other random impressions: Amy Winehouse is a hell of a singer, and a truly lackluster performer. She really looked like she couldn't wait to get backstage and start drinking. She is tiny, tiny, tiny. As my friend Marc said, "I felt like I should take her off and buy her some pancakes." Really, it was all hair and boobs and voice up there, and that doesn't actually work as well as it might sound.

Ben Harper sounded fantastic, and focused, rightly, given the festival setting, on the reggae and funk part of his catalog.

Cheap Trick sounded great, although we didn't get a chance to see them, since there was a bit of a line to get in. Same with the Fratellis, who sing just about all the songs that I thought I liked from the new Arctic Monkeys album.

We were in Baltimore, though, and one of the highlights was a local band that summarizes a lot of what I like about Baltimore, mainly the John Waters, willfully eccentric spirit of the city. The Motormorons play punk/hillbilly/country with a don't-give-a-shit flair and, well, tools. The lead singer was playing what I guess you'd call a grinder, or a sander, and she was playing it by grinding coffee cans up in it, complete with sparks. There was a "percussionist" who was playing, alternately, a drill, a dual weed-wacker (as our friend Chris said, "anybody can play just one weed-wacker, but to play the double barrel, you really need to be a musician"), and a sander. The bass player had one string on his instrument. All the songs were about trucks and drinking and trucks.

By far, the most fun band at the entire festival. Check them out, you won't regret it.

The Old Guard

So I'm going to see the Police tomorrow. Actually, the way I should phrase it is this: I'm going to the Virgin Festival in Baltimore to see the Beastie Boys, the Fratellis, TV on the Radio, and Amy Winehouse, and the Police are playing, too.

Am I the only person in my demographic group who really doesn't give a shit that the Police are back together? I mean, the Police were good. They had some great little pop songs. People who know these things tell me that they're great musicians. But half the People Who Know These Things are practically walking around with signs around their necks that say "Ask Me to Explain the Cultural and Musical Significance of the Police."

I mean, this is not the Clash. This is the Police. As my friend Dave put it, "it's like if the Cars were getting back together." A good, serviceable pop group who never strayed so far into embarrassing 80s trends that their good, serviceable music would actually be embarrassing today.

Am I alone on this one? I guess we'll see tomorrow.