Showing posts with label 2000. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2000. Show all posts

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The Last Dance (2000)

So, yeah, this is helping to answer my questions about the end of the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which wasn't his real name either)—not bad. As it happens, this is also a milestone in the series, the 50th book, so perhaps McBain was unusually up for it. The main case is a pretty good tale of murder for greed. Fat Ollie Weeks has more than ever become a character of interest, and it's all for the good. He represents a very adroit balance of loathsome and fascinating. Lots of nice touches here such as some misdirection about Houston, Texas, or the Broadway-style panache of the stage show producer and his minions. I'm not sure I hear the same hum and crackle of earlier titles, but it's still plenty serviceable as a procedural thriller. Multiple bodies are involved, the cruelty is wanton but comes in a variety of styles. I love the feeling of Isola as an alternative universe New York City that somehow exists with New York City in this world, though little is said (that I've seen / recall) about New York City in detail. Steve Carella feels a little tired or exhausted. They all do, a little, those left. I wonder how the timeline works in this series, because here we are, some 44 years later, and Carella is just turning 40. I am not trying to involve the consistency police and cause trouble—just curious. Because that makes apparent there is no one-to-one kind of correspondence with reality and instead something more complicated, or nonexistent. Why complicate it? It's just one of those things. I can roll with it. I was particularly happy to see Law & Order referenced, as I was curious about his take. It seems to be a favorite of at least two characters, the longstanding Bert Kling and his love interest, a highly accomplished African-American woman, a surgeon liaison with the police, Sharyn Cook. One of the detectives is shot and injured. But that and the Kling thread do feel a little pro forma. So overall maybe a B+ for this one, upped a notch simply for making it to 50 in reasonably good style. But let's put this in perspective. There's no reason I've seen yet not to keep at the '70s and '80s titles, which are generally best, though the '50s—oh hell, all eras really up to then, the '60s too—definitely have points to recommend them. Before you get to these later ones in the '90s and beyond. In general, they can wait. This one too.

In case it's not at the library.

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Wo hu cang long, Taiwan / Hong Kong / USA / China, 120 minutes
Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Du Lu Wang, Hui-Ling Wang, James Schamus, Kuo Jung Tsai
Photography: Peter Pau
Music: Dun Tan
Editor: Tim Squyres
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, Lung Sihung, Cheng Pei-pei, Li Fazeng, Gao Xian, Hai Yan, Wang Deming, Li Li

Director Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—a project of love if ever there was one—still sits comfortably high on the list of 21st-century films at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, some 14 years on. But it seems every time I see this valentine to Lee's origins I like it a little less. Equal parts old-fashioned Hollywood potboiler, newfangled martial arts epic, overindulgent fairy tale, and great swooning romance (make that two great swooning romances), it shows among other things how deeply Lee had embraced the aesthetic of Oscar-bait even then, with its expensive color tones and crane shots, its impressive roster of Asian stars, and its clockwork alternations between ponderous exposition and gripping action scenes.

For balance, for fans, here is Richard Corliss of Time outlining the appeal: "The director convened stars of three movie eras—pioneer kung-femme Cheng Pei-pei from the 1960s, Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh from Hong Kong’s glorious ’80s and bright new lights Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen—and set them to battling over a magical sword. When the actors aren’t flying across roofs and balancing on treetops, in fight scenes choreographed by the great Yuen Wo-ping, they are navigating the murkier regions of personal responsibility and unspoken love. Crouching Tiger is a movie of gravity and buoyancy, of high art and higher spirits. It’s contemplative, and it kicks ass."



Thus, caveats, folks. I don't know enough about Asian cinema, now or then, to judge the star impact. It still has almost none on me, though everyone is clearly good. It reminds me of a latter-day Star Wars entry, specifically Episode I: The Phantom Menace, overburdened with careerists eager to get the franchise on their resumes and so blinded by its own regard for itself it never seems to notice its own inertia—seems unlikely even to grasp that it could travel to such backwaters as boredom. Lee had earned the opportunity with a number of successful Hollywood productions, including Sense and Sensibility, and two others I like much more by him, The Wedding Banquet and The Ice Storm. And the American public was well primed for something like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with a long-percolating underground interest in Hong Kong action movies dating to the '80s and a surprise hit in The Matrix in 1999.

Certainly there is no denying the soaring yet visceral appeal of the fights in Crouching Tiger, specifically the wire work of Yuen Wo-ping cited by Corliss. These flights of magic that have long populated Asian cinema have always been among my favorite parts of the pictures I've seen, such as A Chinese Ghost Story, and unquestionably they are arresting when they are on screen here. They are the best example of a fluid and lyrical style carried through on every level—camera movements, acting styles, the complicated fairy tale of the sword at the center of it, but most especially when it comes to weapons and combat. The motions are graceful, beautiful, skipping across roofs and treetops, running headlong up and down walls, and clanging and bashing steel on steel. They are wonderful dance scenes, energized by the combat that drives them.

The story is not without some nice moments along its arc. There's a wonderful long crazy love scene between a high official's daughter, Jen Yu (Ziyi Zhang), and an orphaned bandit, Dark Cloud (Chen Chang), inserted as a flashback and then brought seamlessly back to the main narrative. Jen Yu is the most unbelievable character of a bunch of unbelievable characters—with a secret identity no less, she brings the story right down to the comic book level—but she is also the most fascinating character, the most rewarding of the suspension of disbelief that is so necessary here, and Zhang's performance is impressive. The long flashback scene set in the desert offers up an alien landscape and turns the picture into a weird mix and match of Lawrence of Arabia and an American Western (I had to look up to confirm the whole thing was filmed in China). But somehow it works, perhaps as a function of the spectacular landscapes.

Still, the only things new about any of this were probably the money Lee was able to command for the project, and the mass American audience that came prepared to love it. I've seen enough Hong Kong cinema to know that for every element that works in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon there are movies that already did it, and better. Lee's achievement is a matter of synthesis (and the money). His movie never had to try that hard outside of the marketing department, and it shows, which as much as anything is why it reminds me of The Phantom Menace. But I don't bring a fan's enthusiasm to these judgments. To me Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon doesn't read like a great story so much as a rather mechanistic workup of fairy tale elements for the sake of providing context for brilliant fight scenes. Brilliant fight scenes, but isolated here as much as they would be if they were truncated from the narrative and scored with seething, churning, pumping pop music. In fact, I suspect they're even better that way, but I haven't been moved yet to look for examples on YouTube.

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On the Rez (2000)

The "Rez" in Ian Frazier's second book about his travels on the Great Plains of North America is the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which famously is among the most impoverished regions of the country. Le War Lance, Frazier's Native American friend he met on the streets of New York City (as detailed in Great Plains), takes an even more central role in this rambling and always interesting collection of facts and anecdotes. Frazier makes it sound as if Le is always pressing him for money. But Frazier gets something in return, as he reveals in one telling moment near the end. Le and his friend Floyd John have once again beaten Frazier out of rides and cash as they attempt to repair an ailing car. Frazier writes: "On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains." It's not that Frazier entertains and can express such a fantasy, but that he does so even in the face of all the disturbing news he has to tell about the Rez. Maybe it's the only way he can bear the reality, which is here. It's bad, and he knows it, and there's more than 100 pages of notes sourcing it all. It is heartening and yet enormously sad, enormously sad and yet heartening, to read these stories of the Oglala Sioux and the life at Pine Ridge. It's mostly bad news but not all. He finds a hero he can believe in in a teen girls' basketball player named SuAnne Big Crow. And the pathos of his plain love for the Oglala, which does verge on obsessive, is always most apparent. For me, I like how it works as a kind of sequel to Great Plains, so focused on a palpable sense of place, if here focused even more, almost exclusively, on the modern-day reservation. He continually makes it come alive in totally unexpected ways.

In case it's not at the library.

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Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s (2000)

If Amazon reviews and general word of mouth over more than a decade are any indication, this is widely agreed to be the least of rock critic dean Robert Christgau's consumer guide books. Everyone complains about the byzantine grading schema, with its confusing array of letter grades, stars, and symbology, among which are numerous overlaps and counterintuitive distinctions (viz., turkey v. bomb). But the main problem is elucidated by Christgau himself, in the introduction: "The factoid I latched onto, a possible fabrication that's tres poetic regardless, was that between 1988 and 1998 the number of recordings released annually increased tenfold, to something like 35,000. Even if the 35,000 included a whole lot of singles, which as near as I could tell it didn't, this would mean that there was more music recorded than there were hours in the year—quite possibly twice as much." Me, I have always pinpointed the early '90s as the time when my tastes began to diverge from Christgau, who until then had been a reliable arbiter, albeit with the usual quirks and oddities that come from such work (he presently has a mysterious problem with David Bowie, for example). Just a few years ago the difficulty was thrown into relief when I made a long-term project of picking up as much of his top 10s as I could from his annual "Dean's List," which has so far continued without interruption since 1974 (plus there's one for 1971). I already had many of the albums until approximately 2002, of course, many of them my own favorites too over the years. This was more about filling in the gaps and getting up to date. The result was a little discouraging—a sense he had become more unreliable for me. I heard a good deal of wonderful African music that was new to me, but on other fronts it felt like a kind of samey-ness had settled in at some point: Fountains of Wayne, the Mountain Goats, Randy Newman, Liz Phair, John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, even my beloved Sonic Youth, became way overrepresented in shuffle play, beyond anything that held up even to passing scrutiny, while others with some or very much merit by my lights (notably in the '90s) were slighted, misread, or entirely missing in action: Beulah, Catherine Wheel, Consolidated, House of Love, Lush, Mudhoney, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Primal Scream, Ride, and the Wedding Present. These are all matters of taste, of course, and as the old saw has it, a critic can't get to everything—especially when the new saw is that there is more music released every year than there are hours in the year. Discrimination sets in out of necessity, making matters of taste even more crucial in this line of work. That ultimately leaves this particular book at some distance from being a useful consumer guide. Christgau's writing is still in fine form when he stretches out and talks to us awhile, as in the introduction. But more often the language itself is compressed to the point of cramping and distortion, held too close to account to the grading system. I couldn't read through and through this as I had with the first two. And there's the matter of taste. My own is that this should be approached and/or used with caution.

In case it's not at the library. (Better yet, his website.)

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A Vast Conspiracy (2000)

I guess I can start this by noting I don't care much for Jeffrey Toobin's incarnation as a TV beltway pundit, at least not since the coming of Bush/Cheney. He was a little better in the Clinton era, but has always displayed too much of that "going along to get along" ethos that so pervades DC media culture. I know, you have to do what you have to do, and if Toobin didn't do it he wouldn't be there at all to annoy me. There's the rub when it comes to cable news. All that said, however, I think this is basically a solid job of journalism and thus a more or less essential primer on the whole Whitewater contretemps, which eventually became the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which led to the impeachment of a sitting president, prosecuted by handfuls of serial adulterers. The impeachment of Bill Clinton at a historical moment when the unregulated economy had begun to metastasize and terrorists abroad had declared war on us struck me even then, without benefit of such perspective, as the most irresponsible instance of governance I had seen in my life. Then came Bush v. Gore, 9/11, Iraq War II, Katrina, and finally the economic collapse of 2008, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney. I suppose you can make a case that other political crimes are worse, but the foolish recklessness of Republicans in attempting to take down a president who was too inconveniently popular (and who was all the while implementing their favorite policies) nonetheless happens to mark my own political reawakening, such as it is. This was bad stuff that was going on, acts of political depravity that don't fall far short of treason, to evoke one of their favorite terms. Certainly it shows continuing lack of faith in the country's most sacred document by definition, the Constitution. Toobin does a good job of laying out the whole story here, one I found myself reliving painfully as I read. It made me sad and it made me angry, and even though my personal inclination for sympathy toward Bill Clinton has fallen away in the years since, it comes back any time I review the facts of this excruciating episode. It was wrong what happened here, and there's no evidence that the long national nightmare it arguably started (with the Newt Gingrich class of '94 House) is even close to being finished yet. Chris Christie, for example, is still no idle threat (though hopeful about latest scandal, too soon to tell).

In case it's not at the library.

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Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

Werckmeister harmóniák, Hungary/Italy/Germany/France, 145 minutes
Directors: Bela Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky
Writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Bela Tarr, Peter Dobai, Gyuri Dosa Kiss, Gyorgy Feher
Photography: Patrick de Ranter, Miklos Gurban, Erwin Lanzensberger, Gabor Medvigy, Emil Novak, Rob Tregenza
Music: Mihaly Vig
Editor: Agnes Hranitzky
Cast: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla, Janos Derzsi, Djoko Rosic, Peter Dobai

Werckmeister Harmonies is the usual study in contradictions for a long and difficult art film, or at least for one that grows better with familiarity—bewildering but mesmerizing, confusing but lucid, slow and ponderous yet frequently nimble-witted. It opens on a strange and elaborately staged barroom demonstration of an eclipse, with drunkards standing in as the heavenly bodies. It finds its narrative focus (around which it stalks sideways fashion) in the arrival of a traveling circus, so called, to a small city. The circus features a whale exhibit and "The Prince," some sort of charismatic cult figure. The town, seen mostly through the eyes of its overnight newspaper delivery person and would-be litterateur Janos (Lars Rudolph and his haunting, fearful face), is in fragile condition, wracked by unknown forces politically, emotionally, existentially.

These elements are as carefully chosen as everything else in this movie, which is nearly as deliberate as it is possible to be. Whales carry portent that stretches back to the bible, revived again in the advent of the New World. "The Prince"—who is likely the strangest and most mysterious character in a movie stuffed with them—grounds it deeply in European experience, bearing the colossal burden of everything from Machiavelli and Saint-Exupery to the feudal estate itself. In many ways the opening scene works as prologue, because the narrative arc, such as it is, most closely resembles an eclipse, the single most cinematic natural event that occurs (aside from perhaps only tornadoes), ending at that moment Janos himself describes in his barroom exposition: "Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open under us? We don't know. We don't know, for a total eclipse has come upon us... But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the moon swims away...."



And so we proceed, across a night, a day, another night, and dawn. Evidently set in the post-Soviet aftermath, shot in a dour yet evocative black and white, it feels modern and ancient at the same time. Roger Ebert famously pointed out that Werckmeister Harmonies consists of 39 tracking shots, chained into a movie that runs 145 minutes. Indeed, this is much of what makes it work. It goes from place to place, it is always moving, probing, if slowly, and strange things happen and are seen all around it—bonfires raging on the town square, a mad police chief and his madder children, "The Prince," seen only as shadow and understood only via a translator, and the moments of sudden aggression that well up continually.

The experience of it is something like riding a subway and observing dramatic scenes at each station—a sensation of hurtling forward into light, followed by slowing and a stop and color and action, and then moving forward into darkness again. If occasionally impatient with how slow and random the journey feels, one also feels in the hands of forces that know what they are about, a firm sense there's a destination and it will be reached.

Director Bela Tarr is so coherent and yet so organic about the way he conceives his scenes that, as with Andrei Tarkovsky, an obvious antecedent, it is often fascinating just to watch the way it moves, even if the movements don't necessarily appear to have immediate point. It is somehow always insanely compelling. Tarr is remarkably good at using people walking to ground the pace in human dimensions, here and in his other pictures too (on this, he has an obvious heir in Darren Aronofsky, among others). There are many long shots of people walking, shot from cranes overhead, shot in profile tracking, shot from immediately behind, from further behind, from way far behind, from in front, in and out of darkness and shadow. But it is taken to a whole new level here with a nighttime shot of a very scary, very silent mob moving to attack—walking, walking, walking, staged much in the way of mobs in Metropolis. It is a scene of tremendous power.

Similarly, when Werckmeister Harmonies strains for notes of chaos, as in the hours before the riot, which eventually must be put down by the military, it can hit and sustain them quite well. Much of this element revolves specifically around the police chief (Peter Dobai), whose mistress Tunde (Hanna Schygulla, who is about perfect) is significant in Janos's life. We first see the police chief drunk and ranting at Tunde's, followed immediately by the scene at his home, where his two preteen boys are left without minders. They are jumping on a bed, playing a marching record at top volume (in fact, the same one the police chief plays at his mistress's), pounding on drums, screaming into a fan for the effect on their voices—dismayingly out of control. Janos, who has been sent there to put them to bed, finally just leaves.

More on notes strained for: Andreas Werckmeister is a real historical figure, a music theorist of the baroque era whose writing on counterpoint influenced Bach. He invented a tuning system, the "Werckmeister temperament," which makes some appearance here via a scholar in town whom Janos knows and admires and may even be related to, "Uncle Gyuri" (Peter Fitz, whose craggy impassive face balances Lars Rudolph's anxiety nicely). It is music theory well over my head, based on planetary movements, underlining again the eclipse theme. There is some element in the way music is used here that works constantly to blur the line between music and natural objects. Mihaly Vig's score is often poignant and swelling but even the sound effects, as in industrial interiors, have a musical quality.

Ebert also makes a point about the reveries produced by long movies, which of course Werckmeister Harmonies is also playing to, again very deliberately. At two and a half hours, it's not as long as Tarr's Satantango, but it's long. And watching it very much becomes a hypnotic experience, particularly as one comes to know it better. Each scene is practically like a short film itself, with beginning, middle, and (of course) ambiguous end, some of them quite remarkable: the arrival of the whale in town at night, that marching mob and riot, one outrageously long (and very funny) shot of Janos and his Uncle Gyuri walking side by side in profile. Like an eclipse, Werckmeister Harmonies feels momentous and yet without adequate explanation but still, somehow, tremendously satisfying too.

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Traffic (2000)

Germany/USA, 147 minutes
Director/photography: Steven Soderbergh
Writers: Simon Moore, Stephen Gaghan
Music: Cliff Martinez
Editor: Stephen Mirrione
Cast: Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle, Luiz Guzman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid, Erika Christensen, Topher Grace, Amy Irving, Albert Finney, Clifton Collins Jr., Tomas Milian, James Brolin, Steven Bauer, Miguel Ferrer, D.W. Moffett, Peter Riegert, Harry Reid, Orrin Hatch, Viola Davis, John Slattery

However permanent it may or may not turn out to be, Steven Soderbergh's scheduled exile from filmmaking has motivated me to pile on his surprisingly big output as a director (and editor, and cinematographer) and do some catching up. He has had his prolific periods. Traffic, which I saw when it was new, was a part of a rush of work he released at the turn of the century, with The Limey (still my one favorite by him, despite its unfortunate influence), Erin Brockovich, and Ocean's Eleven, all released within a year or two of one another.

Traffic may be the most self-consciously "serious" of them, pretty close when all is said and done to what used to be called a "message picture." The societal issue under discussion is public policy on recreational drugs, and the message is "the War on Drugs is not working." It helps that I am heartened to see the issue taken on and that message delivered, but it helps even more that the movie, though not without flaws, is also a pleasure to watch, a great big snack cake of a movie, with a relaxed confidence about knowing what it is and what it can and cannot do, packed full of memorable performances, and deftly managing the subtleties and nuances not just of the characters and their interactions, but perhaps more importantly (for me, in this instance) of the sensitive, complex, and explosive issue at its core.


It is arty, deliberately so, throwing yellow and blue filters over scenes and sequences shot with handheld cameras, and otherwise using a saturated palette that glows and hums with radioactive menace (that's all Soderbergh, by the way, director of photography under the pseudonym Peter Andrews). Yet alongside that are the coldly clinical public policy complexities, soberly considered, fully engaged to my sights and taking on the main planks of the argument as it existed then, and mostly continues to exist today: interdiction versus treatment models, with many permutations of both, and consequences considered—the unintended, as always, the most fascinating and horrifying.

Traffic is also an extravaganza of celebrity, with a large cast of well-knowns and insidiously familiars playing out multiple stories winding around one another in ever-tightening knots: Michael Douglas as Robert Wakefield, a DC pol on the move from an appointment as a circuit court judge into the role of "U.S. Drug Czar," director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Benicio Del Toro as Javier Rodriguez, a low-level policeman in Tijuana, Mexico, where, as one character memorably explains it, "law enforcement is an entrepreneurial activity." Luis Guzman and Don Cheadle as Ray Castro and Montel Gordon, DEA agents and partners. And Catherine Zeta-Jones, who I think gives the best performance here, as Helena Ayala, whose California husband is facing major felony charges for drug smuggling.

So far so good, but there are a lot of ways to go wrong with a star-studded message picture about drug policy. The little miracle of it is that it manages to cover a lot of ground and makes very few mistakes. In fact, the title is unusually apt. Moving drugs has become the oxygen and lifeblood of a significant part of the economy, and thus of our lives, in one way or another, in many ways, as this movie so convincingly shows. Thus, almost naturalistically, Traffic simply sits and watches them move—watches the whole system move them, a convincing picture of a giant, clanking juggernaut of self-destruction.

The thread with Del Toro built around the goings-on south of the border remains the most compelling, probably because it remains most relevant today. If anything, according to streams of reporting, the brutalities on display have only become worse among the drug cartels, law enforcement, and federal, state, and local government in Mexico (notably Tijuana and Juarez), including the military. As a broken record, I will now note that this is because the essential calculus remains in place: if the "demand" side of the equation is not addressed, there will always be someone willing to take the risks of the supply side. The rewards simply remain too great.

Javier Rodriguez has defined his role as a Mexican police officer in the equation as providing safety. He has decided that if he can earn enough money, he can build a baseball field with night lighting, where kids can play and a community can come together and be safe. He cannot change the corrupt system with which he is involved. He can only make it work toward the end of making a neighborhood safe. We watch him walk a mile or two down a road that stretches for hundreds of miles, but it gives us a good sense of the journey, an infinitely sad one that Del Toro's face alone is well suited to play.

The weakest thread here is the Wakefield one, not just the phony West Wing feeling of an overt and deliberate fiction that must necessarily dog it—Douglas earned his bona fides for this in An American President, so it also feels a little stale, though Douglas is good as always—but especially the arc of his overachieving 16-year-old daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) into drug addiction. It has good parts: the underrated Topher Grace is terrific as usual, some of the most harrowing scenes in the entire movie are in this thread, and certainly I like the message. But it's all a bit mechanical to move Robert Wakefield from his hard interdiction stance to a more moderated embrace of treatment, and plays much like an illustrative morality skit. About Wakefield's actual moment of truth, the less said the better, except to note that it was shot on a borrowed set from The West Wing. Apparently they forgot to borrow the theme music too.

The Helena Ayala thread and Catherine Zeta-Jones's icy note-perfect performance are what make it easy for me to classify Traffic not just as one of Soderbergh's "goods" but as more one of his "betters" (could I be any more tentative?). Helena's transformation from a country club wife and mother who treats her girlfriends to roasted duck at lunch into a monster of power is swift, to be sure, but explained deftly by the ominous implications of an orphaned childhood south of the border. I bought it anyway. She says at one point that she will do anything to avoid "going back there" as a single mother, and it is Zeta-Jones who makes that and everything in every scene with her absolutely convincing.

It was the best part of the whole thing, I thought, and the whole thing is full of good parts. In terms of its status as a message picture, I think Traffic remains useful, unfortunately. Things have changed in 13 years, but not that much, and hardly all to the good. I look forward to the day when we can view Traffic as antiquated. On that day, I can only hope—I'm pretty sure, in fact—that it will turn out to be better than, say, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (perhaps, one can hope, even as good as most believe that M is).

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Kirsty MacColl, "Here Comes That Man Again" (2000)

(listen)

I know most of us are still not prepared to talk freely about cybersex among ourselves, but 13 years ago the late Kirsty MacColl gave it a perfectly charming, lighthearted whirl. It's fully marinated in the Cuban sounds and rhythms that mark the album it comes from, Tropical Brainstorm (see also). It's dated, to be sure, lurching out of what suddenly now appear to be more innocent times, the late '90s. You don't hear modem tones so much anymore, for one thing, and "get your rocks off" goes back even further to the era of "humping." But this shticky number sketches the screaming weirdness with almost clinical precision, sighing contentedly at one point, "Who'd have thought I'd have so much fun ... I never knew I had it in me." She always treads lightly, but seems to have the basics right: "oops, another file on the email, oh oh-oh ohh," so on so forth. The compulsion, the payoffs, the many surprises, not all good. It's extremely silly, nearly as silly as it is intoxicating, thus a topic perfectly suited to her style of songwriting. Through the swirl of rhythms and arrangement, broad sound gags bubble up and charge the energy, such as a wacky muted trumpet that serves as ba-da-boom for one of the punch lines. There's a Monica Lewinsky joke too, in the thick of the big finish, which lets loose with a tattoo of "sha la la la la, get your rocks off baby." This may or may not be my favorite song by Kirsty MacColl but everything I like about her is in it: it's equally funny and poignant and fearless, and musically it's Tin Pan Alley sophisticated with an eye on the rest of the world and winning popcraft all the way.
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