A very Imperial Christmas
How was your Christmas? With my boy in California with his mother and the g.f. visiting her parents, I was all alone, but that's what was called for. I had gifted myself a day without social obligations or human contact of any kind so I could sit down and write a long-procrastinated chapter for an upcoming book in which a bunch of critics each eviscerate a classic LP of their choosing. I loved the idea, a flip-flop of the old "Stranded" book (where critics described their desert island disc), and signed on, forgetting for a pivotal moment how much I dislike free-lance gigs. I mean, I've got a full-time writing job. I don't want to write on my time off any more than a chef wants to come home and make his family a paella after a long day at the restaurant.
I did have a bit of a head start on this project. In a much hated/marginally loved 1996 XL cover story, Don McLeese and I butchered a whole slew of vinyl sacred cows with "The 25 Albums That Killed Rock 'N' Roll." It was a lotta fun ripping up such pioneers of pretentiousness as "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Joni's "Hissing Of Summer Lawns." McLeese was a great collaborator because he doesn't have a big ego. His feelings didn't get hurt when his ideas were rejected or, as was often the case, improved upon by my efforts.
When I started thinking about it, I realized that there were a couple of huge differences between the XL article and the task at hand. For starters, I had to write 2000 words on a single album. This wasn't dismissing "Ziggy Stardust" in two paragraphs. To do this thing right I'd have to listen to an album I didn't like over and over. Then I'd have to think about it while my fingers made typing sounds for about six hours straight.
I pitched four titles via e-mail, but quickly eliminated three: Radiohead's overrated "OK Computer," Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," which just sounds like overwrought yoga music to me, and "Time Out Of Mind," the Bob Dylan album which is to "Highway 61 Revisited" what "Rumblefish" is to "The Godfather." My fear with these choices was that oversaturation might be to their liking and I'd end up flipping my opinion and joining the dreaded kneejerk party line.
No, I wanted to go after an album I knew inside and out, one which had honed my talent as the human skip button. Before CDs you had to pick up a needle on the turntable to skip lame tracks and Elvis Costello's "Imperial Bedroom" trained a steady hand. The 1982 album includes three or four magnificent tracks, (most notably "Man Out Of Time" and "Kid About It") but the rest is just overproduced dreck. You have to understand just how much of an Elvis C. fanatic I was at the time to know how disappointed I was with "Imperial Bedroom."
The record was doomed from the outset, with Columbia ads heralding a masterpiece. There was talk E.C. had gone Tin Pan Alley on us and keyboardist Steve Nieve had supplied orchestral arrangements. Hiring renowned Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick to produce, Costello set out to make the new wave "Sgt. Pepper." Unfortunately, he succeeded.
Rule # 1: You can't make a masterpiece on purpose unless you're mentally ill. Rule # 2: French horns should be restricted to the symphony.
The UT football team didn't do too well in the Ho-Hum Holiday Bowl last night. Washington State unveiled a new defensive strategy -- something called a "blitz" -- and our two befuddled quarterbacks together equaled about half an effective one. As my boy Kirk Bohls pointed out this a.m., UT was too quick to abandon the run -- Cedric Benson spent most of the second half trying to stay between sprinting linebackers and safeties and QB Chance Mock, who showed flashes before he ultimately flopped. Don't know why Coach Brown didn't put Vincent Young in for at least a series in the second half. It couldn't have hurt.
The Longhorns play-calling was abysmal throughout. Going for a fade route (which almost never works) from the three when the Horns were losing 26-10 and having to settle for a field goal was one of many judgement misdemeanors. It was a felonious coaching move, however, to decline a 5-yard penalty late in the game that would've made it third and nine in WSU territory. The Horns elected to keep it at fourth and three. They were in four down territory, with two chances to make nine yards. Instead, the Horns decided to go for it on fourth down and didn't make it.
That's displaying almost no confidence in the offense. If you can't make nine yards on two plays when you're trailing in the fourth quarter, you don't deserve to be ranked in the top five.
On the upside, the Holiday Bowl is an almost meaningless exercise. Losing the game didn't bother me as much as regular season losses to Texas Tech or Texas A&M would've. The Horns played like they had nothing to prove and little to gain and I watched with the same attitude.
Well, that's it for the "Imperial Bedroom" of football seasons. There were a handful of great victories -- Vince Young's heroics against Kansas State, the thrashing of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, punking the Aggies on Kyle Field. But ultimately it was a big letdown.
After the Cowboys lose Saturday, my weekends will be free once again.
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The trouble with 'Angels'
Three critics I trust concur that Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" is not worthy of its exalted reputation. Since I have praised four different versions of this drama about AIDS, politics, sex and religion -- including the recent HBO adaptation -- it pains me to acknowledge that their commentary carries some validity.
My partner Kip Keller -- writer, editor and book critic -- was not impressed by the 1993 Broadway staging. He resisted seeing it later at Houston's Alley Theatre and attended the Zachary Scott Theatre rendition only out of respect for director Dave Steakley and his cadre of artists. He has not viewed the HBO movie. His aversions to Kushner's script relate to its ideological talkiness, sketchy plot development and, especially, the playwright's ill treatment of certain characters, such as Joe Pitt, the closeted Mormon Republican lawyer. Kip's right. The play is talky, sketchy and vengeful. But I'd argue that Kushner's mixture of high ideas and sitcom diction sparkles for contemporary audiences, his interlaced stories tug at one's sustained attention and Joe's plight is (more) honorably treated in the television version.
My good friend Jeff Gortvetzian, one of this city's sharpest cultural critics without a portfolio, saw no version of the play and bases his remonstrations on the published script and the HBO movie. He confessed that the slick Mike Nichols screen adaptation was better than he expected. Still, he felt Kushner's treatment of angels was hokey and the soap opera at the heart of the script only passable. Yet he adored the Roy Cohn character as played by Al Pacino, saying that the fictionalized Cohn stood for raging life in an almost Falstaffian sense. Jeff's weakest rhetorical device was to suggest, reductively, that I and others were open to the play's charms only because it was written for our "demographic," meaning gay theatergoers with a sometime history of liberalism. Setting aside the condescension of such a remark, Jeff is right about some things. Cohn holds the center of the play, rather than vacillating moralist Louis, the stand-in for Kushner. And Jeff correctly identifies the angel's message about progress as a crib from philosopher Walter Benjamin.
Then came the killer: Television critic Lee Siegel (The New Republic, Dec. 22) called it "a second-rate play written by a second-rate playwright who happens to be gay, and because he has written a play about being gay, and about AIDS, no one -- and I mean no one -- is going to call 'Angels in America' the overwrought, coarse, posturing, formulaic mess that it is. And the Bandwagon Plays On." He calls Kushner an adaptor of ideas, not an original thinker (OK, yes) and one who tells rather than dramatizes (yep). Then Siegel takes apart Mike Nichols' direction and almost all the acting from the cast that includes Meryl Streep, Mary Louise Parker and Emma Thompson. And, although I disagree with the degree of his displeasure, almost every point -- especially about the difference between theater and television viewing -- is cogent and well-argued.
Except -- and this is a crucial exception -- the play has spoken powerfully to so many audiences, moving spectators to tears and (rare these days) intelligent conversation. Its characters remain engaging and have evolved substantially through each subsequent version. Even the play's ideas have altered, become more sophisticated through different interpretations.
It has not yet stood the test of centuries or even decades, but "Angels" does not feel overly dated, even though it deals almost exclusively with the Reagan 1980s. Siegel may be right about the "Angels" bandwagon, but he seems to be joining an anti-"Angels" bandwagon and, no, the play is not immune from criticism, even from its admirers. ...
Panicky culture watchers often decry the decline of arts education in our public schools and they are usually right about the low value placed on the arts, especially in comparison to sports. Yet I was struck by the impromptu Barnes orchestras formed over the holidays in various homes of my siblings. The youngest generation -- public schoolers all -- count three violinists, a cellist, two flautists, several piano players, a few guitar strummers, a clarinetist and a euphonium player! Care to hire a baroque orchestra anyone?
Two of my sisters and their families have settled in The Woodlands, the preternaturally calm and green suburb on Houston's far northern marches. They all seem very happy there and the schools are good -- if oversized -- but once again I was totally creeped out by this master-planned community of 70,000 souls in the piney woods.
It must be said that oilman and developer George Mitchell followed every rule of suburban design from the 1970s and '80s.
1. Preserve the natural landscape, even wetlands. (Check.)
2. Plan sensitively around the greenery, screening houses and yards from sunlight and prying eyes. (Check.)
3. Keep the scale of residential projects small, villagelike. (Check.)
4. Link these villages with parks, trails, protected walkways and generous sidewalks. (Check.)
5. Discourage theme-park like decor and keep building styles within a comfortable range of styles reasonably appropriate for the climate, topography and culture. (Check.)
6. Dampen ugly commercial development with strong planning codes and direct density to central transportation nodes. (Check.)
The Woodlands followed this formula with a vengeance. The result is a strangely void mass of trees and brush that masks dozens of virtually identical "villages" lining streets without any landmarks or character. Chain stores and public buildings lurk behind screening brush and even if you spy the low, tasteful signs, you might not find the actual establishments. With so little distinguishing one clump of brush from another, getting lost in The Woodlands is a way of life.
Despite all the biological activity, it feels lifeless. The development's slogan, "It's only natural," directly contradicts the evidence right before one's eyes. Driving around this utopian nowhere, listening to ambient music that never before sounded so depressing, I couldn't help but think that The Woodlands did not belong to the real world, but existed in a fictional plane closer to "Fahrenheit 451" or some humorless android movie. ...
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My iPod, myself
In a fit of almost reckless generosity, my wife got me an iPod for Christmas. So I'm sitting here transferring the outta-print "Africa Dances" a bunch of Steely Dan tracks, Sonic Youth singles, Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," a mess of Jackson C. Frank songs and the good stuff from the five years worth of Outkast albums even as we speak (even as I type? Something like that.)
I was a reluctant convert. I had heard all of the stories about the battery wearing down after a year and a half. But once it revealed its powers to me . . . man. I now firmly believe this is the greatest invention since 64 slices of American cheese. (Scroll down to No. 7.)
I have thus far dumped about 800 songs onto the thing and can dump about 9.5 times that many before I reach the hard drive's limit (I received the 30 GB version, which I have seen discounted by some retailers to make room for the 40 GB upgrade.) While I don't have any long commutes on public transportation, it does make raking leaves that much less mind-numbing.
A pal who had been proselytizing about the things for months sent me this e-mail: "Today I was walking in the woods around Milton and my iPod gave up the greatest segue ever: from Peter Laughner's 'Amphetamine' to Iggy's 'Nightclubbing.' " Something about his comment caught my eye, and I didn't figure out what until a few hours later, halfway through buying a few singles from iTunes.
The best thing about the iPod is the shuffle feature. Throw on a couple thousand songs, hit shuffle and you have a jukebox for the ages, which is what he meant by "gave up the greatest segue ever." But it was the "gave up" that got me. For a serious music hound, iPods on shuffle are like oracles. We dump our collections into them, let it shake the tunes like a Magic 8-Ball, slip on some headphones and an unexpected segue lets us in on a secret about a couple of songs we already thought we knew everything about. Nifty.
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High-tech holidays in the Valley
The stretch of Old Highway 83 that connects the small to largish-small towns of the Rio Grande Valley lies parallel to Business 83. They're less than a mile apart, but that mile is the difference between driving through the Valley and passing over it.
On Business 83, you pass Home Depots, the Peter Piper Pizza between Weslaco and Mercedes, the strip clubs that seem to increase every year (a recent addition: Spanky's), multicolored multiplexes showing the same seven or eight big-budget holiday releases.
On Old 83, there are tire repair shops in rotting wood shacks, convenience stores stocked with Coors and Tecate, bridal and quinceañera shops with piñatas lining the display windows. You see lots of raspa stands closed down for the holidays (though it's certainly warm enough for a snowcone as the windy and humid air hovers at about 65 to 70 degrees).
A new Church's Chicken has hatched about two blocks away from where the yellowed, slightly smaller, emptied-out shell of an old Church's Chicken still stands. That's in La Feria, where the priest tells his Sunday flock he's going to the Philippines to have a belated family Christmas for the first time in 21 years. This is after the tiny baskets pass their way among the pews, but before "Silent Night." Everyone applauds, and some wish him well as they head out to have carne guisada at home or a botana platter across the way in Alamo.
My Christmas was spent in San Antonio with the family, but the weekend that followed was spent here in the Valley, where I grew up, where babies are born, where grandparents die and oversized, full-color signs telling you who to vote for in the county sheriff election are propped up with wind-resistant posts on corner lots.
Grandma has new sofas and a surround-sound DVD player system she bought at Wal-Mart the day after Christmas (her birthday, incidentally) for about $99. Otherwise, the house has the same wood paneling (wood paneling works well to disguise black speaker wire), the same mix of base-brown dirt and grass in the backyard and the bounty of aloe plants along the front entrance. My uncle and my dad talk about USB thumb drives, DVD burners and the relative merits of Ford's trucks versus Chevy. (Chevy all the way, my uncle concludes. An F-150 couldn't even haul his boat to Corpus Christi without straining its engine.)
More DVD players: I set up a surround-sound system at the home of my future in-laws; my other grandmother's early-'80s wood-box TV set has a snazzy Pioneer DVD 5-disc player hooked up to it. There's even a Netflix envelope sitting on the coffee table, a piece of furniture older than I am.
The Valley is, in my dreams and in the dreamy present of a visit (I always feel like I'm floating here), an uneasy mix of old and new. The valley feels and looks old; dust reaches into every crevice, making anything new seem out of place.
I went with my future in-laws to visit an aunt, and next door was the house in Blue Town where my fiancee, Rebecca, grew up. The family living there now was nice enough to let us come in, see the entertainment room that used to be a garage and the add-on bathroom with a huge Jacuzzi. A modest home has been turned into a life-size ad for Home Depot.
There's life here, changing, dusting itself off, doing everything but standing still. And I've been away so long that the personal has become anthropological. Once I felt the warmth of home here; now, I'm on the outside, looking in.
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