Day: October 27, 2013

The legendary Lou Reed, the unaffected king of solid, straightforward, basic-style rock ‘n’ roll poetry — that deep, bullshit-free voice plus bare-boned New York street lyrics with a good old twangy guitar, bass and drums — and one of the most important rock music influencers of all time….Lou Reed is dead? He was only 71, for Chrissake…oh, I see…”complications due to a liver transplant”…uh-huh…a rock ‘n’ roll pay-the-piper death. But what matters at the end of the road is quality, not quantity…right? Reed’s contributions to the Velvet Underground banana album plus Transformer alone were enough to cement his reputation as a seminal ’60s and ’70s legend. Being something of a middle-of-the-roader (musically, I mean) I was no fan of Metal Machine Music or The Bells or even Berlin for that matter, but Reed was “the guy” to me…the Real McCoy of flinty, tough-as-nails, occasionally flamboyant but at the same time plain-as-can-be rock ‘n’ roll authority. I turned to his cuts over and over and over. “I Love You Suzanne” is one of the great lightweight rock anthems of all time. The kids and I used to sing along to New York (particularly “Dirty Boulevard”) and Magic and Loss in the ’90s. But quantity counted also as Reed stuck to it for a much longer and arguably more impassioned period than Elvis Presley (whose peak influence period lasted from ’55 to ’58) or the Beatles (’63 to ’70) — he kept writing and composing and strumming away for 45 years, and mattered a great deal for at least 30 if not 35 of those. He went away from time to time but never retired, never recycled…well, he “recycled” but he never stopped looking for the next thing. I love that he didn’t smile very much. I can imitate Reed singing “Venus in Furs” really well.

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I’ve long advocated the idea of parents taking their tweener kids to films that portray real history and stark present-day realities. Once in a blue moon a Hollywood film portrays violence as the truly horrid thing it is — I would take my ten year-old to that film in a New York minute. 20 years ago I wrote a piece for a parenting magazine that urged parents to take their younger kids to Schindler’s List. If it upsets their tender sensibilities to see what it was like to suffer and die in a Nazi concentration camp, good — maybe it’ll teach them something. I would also take my ten-year-old to see 12 Years A Slave, no hesitation. I would tell him or her “put your shoes on…you’re seeing this movie.”

I suspect that most parents don’t see it this way. My two sons are grown, but having been in the trenches in the ’90s and early aughts my impression is that most parents want to protect their kids from the harsh realities of life and raise them inside a kind of ultra-sensitive alpha bubble. One reflection of this is the way Screen It, a movie-screening website for parents, is noncommittal about 12 Years A Slave. It doesn’t ask if kids should see it because of the moral lessons it contains, or whether they should be taken to see it by their parents. It asks if kids will “want” to see it, and it answers as follows: “If they’re interested in the subject matter and/or are fans of anyone in the cast, they might. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem too likely.” That’s it?

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Last night’s SNL Wes Anderson spoof [previous post] reminded me that it’s been almost exactly 20 years since I tapped out the very first Wes Anderson-and-Owen Wilson interview, which came out of a phoner that happened a while before this 11.7 L.A. Times Calendar piece was seen. The wheels of newspaper journalism turned fairly slowly back then. It could take as long as two or three weeks for a 750-word article to happen — initial pitch, library research, interviewing, writing the piece, editing, an occasional re-write and re-edit and finally the physical publishing. And then you’d buy a few copies and cut out the article with scissors, and then make copies at Kinkos. The process is a teeny bit faster these days.

Published on 11.7.93 in L.A. Times Sunday Calendar

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Bull’s eye. Bonus points to Edward Norton for capturing Owen Wilson‘s voice just so. Best bit: Reactions from N.Y. Times critic (“You had me at ‘Wes Anderson'”) and Fangoria (“Da fuh?”).

Richard Gere is obviously trying to get Andy Garcia‘s goat, but his analysis about how busy yuppie couples sometimes lose the spontaneous sensual element is spot-on. I was married when Internal Affairs came out in ’90. The recently released Bluray, which I bought this evening, sounds good but doesn’t look that exceptional. Better than a decently mastered DVD, but not that much better.