un-Phair?

Confession time: I actually like much of Liz Phair. Now that it's been out several months, and the furor over Phair's image makeover has died down, all that's left is the music. Admittedly, my version of the album begins with the "online-only" EP, including the iTunes-exclusive track, and is resequenced to put most of the Matrix-produced material near the end, frontloading the stronger tracks - but the results only foreground that some of these are indeed strong songs, that Phair's talent (and, uh, taste, if that's the right word for someone whose most infamous song features the line "I'll fuck you till your dick is blue") hasn't completely deserted her.

I still think she's trying to hard to be disposable - yet the results come across more like Aimee Mann trying to get more play on World Cafe than Britney Spears. And really, that isn't such a bad thing. As for lyrics...okay, they're a bit dumbed down generally, "H.W.C." is still pretty stupid, and some lines that would have read ironically in a Brad Wood world come across poorly on the album's brightly spotlit stage. But unlike some folks, the underwear thing in "Favorite" seems kinda charming to me - and no, that's not because I'm some sort of Liz Phair underwear fetishist. (If you are, though, the last line of this piece should give you hope...)

My hope is that Phair realizes that, yes, her music can work in a sonically upgraded world, but that the musical mainstream right now is so incredibly narrow and shallow right now as to admit only the most insubstantial talents, and that no matter how hard she tries, she can't be un-Liz enough to do it. And so, if she isn't satisfied with a smaller, indie-rock audience (if that audience hasn't completely left her), working with someone like Michael Penn makes more sense than a completely mainstream production team like The Matrix.

Still, the album's an in-spite-of victory for me, rather than something I can wholeheartedly endorse. But given the way I was fulminating against it months back (not here), mostly based on its marketing and my evaluation of its decisions, it's heartening to see that marketing and production can't completely overcome talent, at least not unless that talent wants to be overcome. And I'll take Phair at her word that this was really what she wanted to do, not something she was forced into doing.

The next album will be telling...

sous les pavés, les...politiques?

I got mentioned in a CD's liner notes, for the second time I'm aware of. I mention this not only because, hey, it's kind of an ego boost, but also because it speaks to a truth about all that music reviewing I used to do. Somewhere, there are sadly misguided individuals who think that rock criticism is a member of the same species of journalism as, say, writing about public policy, and that the traditional canons of objectivity ought to be applied.

Yes, I'll wait, while we both finish laughing at the notion that journalists covering public policy have the first idea of the ethics of objectivity.

Better? Anyway, as I was saying: the whole notion of "objectively" reviewing music is nearly nonsensical. I suppose if all we did was provide an accurately transcribed score, that might come close - but of course, musical notation is notoriously inept at capturing the subtleties of popular music. Still, despite a general awareness that what's going on is the circulating of opinions, there's still an odd objection to critics openly admitting that, in many cases, they are - we are - essentially cheerleaders for our favorite bands. And why shouldn't we be? Most of us start doing this not because of the bulging rolls of large-denomination bills - except for those of us so gullible as to, say, believe anything George W. Bush says - but because we love music, we love lots of music, we know lots of music, and if we work this critic thing right, we get to hear a lot more of it. And when we hear something we like, we want to tell people about it, hoping they'll learn to like it too.

So what it really means to me when an artist thinks enough of my writing to thank me is that I've done my job well, and that the artist, at least, thinks I'm helping other people hear about the good music he's putting out. What's distinctive about Tris McCall, whose site is linked above and also on your right there, is not only that he's rooted in music in a highly developed sense of place (New Jersey, in this case), since that's true of many artists, but his approach to his subject is almost completely free of rock'n'roll cant. I mean, god bless Bruce Springsteen, really - and I'm sure the Jersey of his songs has its reality too - but it's not the whole story. And the stories McCall tells, both on his newest release Shootout at the Sugar Factory and on his previous album If One of These Bottles Should Happen to Fall, manage to be both extremely rooted and specific in addressing subjects and persons not often sung about, but also genuinely evocative of lives beyond those of his community. (Addendum 11-7: the CD is also worth owning just to hear him rhyme "orange" with the middle syllables of "bizarre enjoyment.")

One of those rock'n'roll myths is that of the outsider, the aloof artist, who sneers at the mundane. Harry Dean Stanton, in Repo Man (maybe the most rock'n'roll movie ever - I love it, but...), expressed it best: "Normal fucking people - I hate 'em." And because of the prevalence of that sort of attitude, it's probably difficult for someone hearing a song whose chorus is "please legislate," or a song called "The New Jersey Department of Public Works," or a song about a building inspector, or a song earnestly telling people not to litter the singer's neighborhood, to escape the notion that such sentiments must be meant sarcastically, that a rock band or singer must be way too cool to concern themselves with such mundanities. But McCall is serious - fortunately, he also has a sense of humor - and it's a damned good thing, too. We rely so much on expected everyday reality, to the extent that we're unaware of it, just as we're most often unaware of the air we breathe. It takes an unusual event - a garbage strike, say - for us to recognize just how much we owe the people whose jobs it is to remove our trash. More: someone has to pay for all this. And that someone is us - because we are the ones who benefit. The phrase "your tax dollars at work" is a cliche - and like most cliches, it hides a truth behind the veil of overfamiliarity. We drive on roads, we walk on sidewalks, we send our kids to school, we trust our safety to traffic signals and streetlights - and still, many of us rant on talk radio about getting "nothing" for our taxes.

Yes, there's wasteful spending - and god knows higher levels of government aren't accessible to average citizens - but the more we disdain the very concept of government, the more we elect grinning, nicely tanned figureheads (you know who I mean, of course), the more power we deliver from our own hands. And then, while those who can afford private security, maid and pool service, and gated communities squeeze dry the last ounce of public funding, we complain about government's inefficiency, and (mostly) don't vote at all, or vote for talk radio's pet "outsiders," who continue to choke off government at every level.

We can be young and cool and spout off about anarchy - but really, if we were all individually responsible for everything local government in particular does, we'd never have a spare moment to create art. We'd be too busy picking up trash and pouring gravel into potholes.

Elliott Smith

I'm just numb. That surprises me; I'm more affected by Smith's death than I thought I would be. I like his music, but it's not a touchstone of my musical life. Yet I spent today shuffling around gloomy, distractible, and listless. Perhaps it's the sense of huge waste: early Heatmiser albums gave no hint that Smith could write the intense, focused, barely-there songs on his first two solo albums, with hushed singing that forced you to listen. Still less did those albums prepare you for the melodicism and textured orchestration of his last two albums, as if Simon and Garfunkel collaborated with Lennon and McCartney.

That sense of waste grows from that capacity for surprise: who knows where Smith's music might have gone, what it might have achieved. And I'm sick, just sick, of stupid decisions: not only the stupid - but unfathomable and hence difficult for me to condemn - act by which he ended his life, but the stupid decisions about heroin. The truth, though, is that it's hard to say who made that decision. I don't know whether Smith suffered from what we're nowadays pleased to call a "chemical imbalance" - as if the hell of clinical depression can be lessened by giving it such a bland name - but it seems likely, and having known enough people in similar situations, I know they often feel that decisions are things well beyond them. And I'm not in any position to judge the truth of such beliefs. All I'm left wondering is how much you have to hate yourself to stab yourself to death - and where that self-hatred comes from.

I'll tell you what I don't want to hear: I don't want to hear journalists blathering about suffering being noble, about addiction fostering art, and about the glory of outsider cool. I don't know if anyone could have helped Elliott Smith - but there's the rest of us, and if some of us can't be helped, at least we're not as far beyond help as Smith is now.

(Death must be clearing the decks of musicians this year - my grimly humorous attempt to deal with it here.)

urk

Every year, Matt Groening produces a "Life in Hell" cartoon about the "List of Forbidden Words" for the upcoming year. These lists usually include jargon and buzzwords that allow the pundit classes and their readers to avoid thinking in favor of pointing at pre-approved thought-wardrobes. May I nominate for the 2003 list the term "metrosexual"? First, it's just queasy-making, as if there's some new sort of sexual orientation out there that's so attuned to the whims of fashion that the very vibrations of those exquisite tendrils arouse sexual desire. And...how to put this...okay, I believe the whole anti-PC backlash of the late '90s was almost completely unjustified, and motivated by a weird desire among social conservatives to avoid having to think about their own actions, along with the strange public trend of the time to imagine that political resistance primarily consisted in acting like an asshole. But..."metrosexual" seems to participate in a tendency to imagine sexual variation from the norm (and I mean these two terms in a strictly statistical way) as far more common - and more importantly, far more a source of a sort of cultural authority - than they are. This is dangerous to say, as it's way too easy to slide such a comment into generic homophobia. So let me say, outright, that I am personally pissed off to a high degree at those who would presume to judge others' sexuality when absolutely no harm is done by the nature of that sexuality, and to condemn in the strongest terms those who would attempt to rule out of bounds something which is among the most deeply constitutive elements of human personality, one's own sexual desires. Still, in an effort to counter the ongoing right-wing effort to restrict sexual expression generally, and to suppress queer sexuality completely (I here use "queer" in the sense of "anything differing from the prevailing, socially acceptable norm"), at times it seems as if every artist, and everyone trying desperately to seem trendy and culturally aware, somehow manages to embody "transgressive" sexuality and perform or comment upon the same in their work. Sorry, but this has become popular to such an extent that I can't help but feel at least some of these folks are play-acting.

The term "metrosexual" isn't strictly related to that, but in trying to come up with a way to make yuppie (old-fashioned but still accurate terminology) ways of sexuality and consumption intimately yoked, it's just yuksome in both its etymology and its surface meaning. I think my objection, really, is to the effort to confine anyone's personality and sexuality into such a tiny little package - and to connect such an intimate, personal, deeply important thing to the trivial public realm of consumption.

Still, I think at least part of the phenomenon of pro-"transgressive" art is genuine and positive. At most levels, we do live in a tremendously conformist society, and the attitudes that accompany such ideas can be extremely limiting and depressive. So even if such expression gets coopted into buzzwords, and any physical manifestation of those ideas turns into regularized ethnic dances (say), there's a sense in which the receptiveness to that which displays "difference" is useful: we never would have seen the stuff otherwise. But like most terms, "metrosexual" oversimplifies and flattens the dynamic of the situation the term is designed to address...and this is in fact, a serious problem.

None of which has anything to do with whether so-called "metrosexuals" are really worthy of media attention...especially since the whole notion seems merely a modern buzzword for "those who construct their sexiness on popular consumer products."

The Impossible Bubblegum Wrapper

Over to your right, you'll find a link to something called "The Truck Driver's Gear Change Hall of Shame." The term is someone's colorful way of referring to corny key changes in pop songs: think of every Barry Manilow song ever written (sorry I made you do that), which modulates upward for the last chorus or verse, dragging your sap-ridden heart along its merry melody-line paved with good intentions. Used poorly, such blatant jimmying of the chordal rigging is a cliche, an embarrassment, dirty highlighter all over Trick No. 37 in a beat-up, yellowed copy of the Hack Songwriter's Manual. Used creatively, though - and this generally means, "used to modulate to less obvious keys, or in less obvious places" - such key changes can provide a subtle yet effective insight into the songwriter's craft. When the "Gear Change" site came up on a music mailing list a month or so ago, someone mentioned Tommy Roe's 1969 hit "Dizzy." Without particularly examining the song, the writer claimed it modulated upward with every verse. It doesn't; however, it does something far more clever, moving through a, well, dizzying series of keys that create the effect of constant upward modulation while, in fact, always returning to the same place, in a scheme worthy of M.C. Escher (the painter, not the rapper).

The intro to the song establishes its basic rock'n'roll three-chord pattern, oscillating from D to G to C and back to G again. (Note already the circular motion of chords.) After a brief drum break, what sounds like the chorus kicks in, but this time, after going from D to G, the sequence modulates to B major, which proves to be the dominant of what we think is the new key, E major. We move from E to A to B ("I'm so dizzy my head is spinnin'...") and repeat the same sequence twice. Then, lurchingly, on the line "You're makin' me dizzy," we move to F major, a diminished fifth away from the preceding chord (B), to establish the I-IV-V-IV sequence in F major. For those of you scoring at home, this is the nearly same sequence that opened the track, only in a different key and substituting the V chord (C) for the flatted VII chord in the original sequence. Whew!

We stay here, in F major, for the verse, working that F-Bb-C-Bb series. You will note, we're only forty seconds into the song, we've heard an intro and a chorus, and already we've modulated upwards two times (from D to E, and from E to F). The most important thing, though, is how effortless this all feels: it's an eminently catchy bubblegum pop tune, not some turgid ELP opus.

Okay, so I've already said the song does not, in fact, modulate upwards for every verse, yet it creates that impression. How? After eight bars of the verse, the bridge arrives, and while it remains in the same key, it heightens tension in two ways. First, for most of the song, the chords change every two beats. Now, we change chords half as frequently, giving each chord an entire bar to itself. Second, up to this point, the offbeat's been heavily accented, with both drums and high-pitched string chords. The strings quiet down, and the drums play a steady four-on-the-floor beat for three bars before breaking into eighth notes (double the speed of the four-on-the-floor figure, that is) for the fourth bar. Those first three bars of the bridge stay in the same key, moving from C to Bb to F - but then, at the same time the drums play those eighth notes, we begin to modulate again, moving to A major, which becomes the dominant of...wait for it...D, the key we started in! And voila, we repeat the sequence (with its upward modulations).

The ingenuity here is that this modulation is motivated by the same type of harmonic movement that underlies the initial key change that leads into the chorus. In both cases, we move upward by a major third, and the resulting chord becomes the dominant of the new key. But in the first example, that chord is the sixth degree of its scale, while in this one, it's the third. Because the key change is accomplished through the same device, however, we feel as if we're hearing the same thing. And so, when we modulate upwards into the verse, our impression is that we've been modulating upward all along. In fact, the last modulation moved downward by a minor third (from F to D) but cunningly arranged to do so with upward harmonic motion. Such clever bastards! And because nearly every cell of chord sequences in the song is the simple, basic I-IV-V, nothing sounds complex.

For now, I'll spare you a run-through of Thin White Rope's "On the Floe" - I'll say only that it modulates downward over an entire octave, descending a whole tone each time, through a rather tricky maneuver that initially looks like a half-step upwards modulation.

random neuron-firing generator: today's results

Has anyone else ever noticed that you can sing the lyrics to the Scooby-Doo theme song to the melody and chords of Mott the Hoople's "Momma's Little Jewel"? Rather changes the mood...

And is there a more blatant example of self-plagiarism in music than "Frosty the Snowman"? Its middle eight is almost exactly the same as the middle of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" - also written by Johnny Marks, one year earlier. Every time I hear "Frosty," I keep switching in midstream to "Rudolph."

Oh, the embarrassment..."Jeff, we're singing about a goddamned snowman, not a drunken reindeer!"

plus ça change...

I see that Kobe Bryant's attorney has brought back the worst cliches from the bad old days when rape was a crime women committed upon innocent men, asking whether the plaintiff's injuries "were consistent with those of a woman who had sex with three men in three days."

Who knew that having sex with different people could injure you? Medical science should be alerted immediately.

That Bryant's attorney is a woman (surely a complete coincidence, nothing to do with calculating how to up Bryant's credibility and image of women) sadly makes no difference.

Welcome to Stupidville

I'm not sure why anyone's surprised at the results of the California recall and election; it's been clear from before Arnold Schwarzenegger even announced his intentions to run that he was the favored candidate - at least in the eyes of the media. Furthermore, Arnold's ascension to the governorship is all too emblematic of America's position in the world today: a mediagenic, musclebound, grinning ape, regarded as utterly innocent of thought or complexity, who approaches everything as if playing a role in an "actioner" (the Varietyspeak term actionizing the noun "action" by turning it into a verb, whose "-er" ending is oddly Teutonic in this context), disdainful of wimpy "expertise" or any sort of knowledge requiring reflective thinking, blissfully secure that good things come to those who merely act, as if action, regardless of quality, possesses a sort of gravity to which good ends are inexorably attracted. (And here I thought it was impossible to elect a person even less qualified to hold office than George W. Bush.)

Of course, this is an oversimplification: by all accounts, Arnold has, if nothing else, the intelligence of shrewdness, and frankly, in a battle of wits, he'd demolish The Smirking Chimp. But few people think of him that way, instead regarding him as either A Man of the People in a Jesse Ventura mode, or simply as bearer of the sacred chalice of fame. (The unaccountably high vote tallies for a nobody named "Schwartzman," though, suggest epidemic levels of sheer idiocy.) And in many ways, that's even more disturbing: how can it be that so many people (135 or so?) imagined that they were capable of grappling with the immensely complex data-set that is the California state government, one of the largest economies in the world, without in many cases even the most rudimentary knowledge of, say, the budgetary process? (Arnold's degree in economics is a red herring: it was achieved largely through correspondence courses, and is from the academic powerhouse known as the University of Wisconsin-Superior - "Superior" being the name of the locale, not a description of the caliber of the school's education.) Probably for the same reason underlying the blase reaction to the coup whose victor still governs (if that's the word) our nation: we sense that, regardless of whose name is on the label, a committee of unelected professionals will actually run things. And here irony comes full circle: the election of an Arnold, or a Jesse Ventura, is often read as a triumph of the "outsider" versus the consummate insiders, experts, and policy wonks: yet the less expertise and experience such outsiders possess, the greater their reliance upon precisely such bureaucratic insiders, and the more they become mere figureheads, the face on the coin, the name above the marquee.

Yet the burden of democracy has long since been sloughed off by most of the population, for whom "politics" is a word uttered in tones only marginally less nasty than, say, "child molesters." I could lay the blame for this at the feet of "the media," or "consumer culture" (the difference being?), but in the realm of politics, this self-disdain is the trademark of the modern Republican Party, who've transformed themselves into a horde of positively Escheresque anti-political politicians, anti-government governors, and anti-tax spenders. The genius of this strategy is simply this: they hold a wrecking ball in suspension poised to demolish government, claim the public forced their hand in releasing the ball, and then come 'round pointing at the wreckage and saying it demonstrates what a mess government makes of things. Should anyone be uncool and gauche enough to care, such people are labeled "liberals" - who are spoken of as child molesters who also torture puppies in their spare time.

(Speaking of molestation, it's difficult to talk about Arnold's little problem there without falling into the trap last noisily set out by a particularly repressed horndog named Kenneth Starr. And if I do that, someone's going to want to compare the scorchmarks on Arnold's and Bill Clinton's zippers, and that is a task I'll leave to others. However: it's certainly the case that the Republicans have been curiously less than zealous in their usual attempts to police morality. Furthermore, as Katha Pollitt pointed out a month or so ago, just imagine the public response if a female politician had spoken so freely about a sexual past as varied as Arnold's. Worse yet, right-wing talk radio would positively explode if an African-American politician freely confessed to having participated in a "gang-bang" involving "some white girl" in the '70s...and then claimed he couldn't remember whether that was true, or that he was lying to improve his image among his cohorts. But Arnold, he's one of theirs...so he gets a free pass, accompanied at most by a few embarrassed looks of chagrin and conspicuous avoidance of eye contact.)

But back to those "liberals": their problem is, they actually have a conception of democracy broad enough to go beyond mere "majority roolz." And here, the particulars of the California recall process are revealed as particularly insidious. While an incumbent can be tossed out for receiving one vote less than 50% of the ballots cast, the election portion of the recall process requires a mere plurality. Given that the recall's threshold of entry into the gubernatorial pool is so low, not only can a highly vocal minority mount a recall challenge at low cost (and such minorities typically prove capable of mobilizing anti-incumbency fanatics), but the high number of candidates tends to ensure that no one candidate will achieve a majority. It's quite possible that fewer votes can be cast for the incumbent's successor than were cast to toss him out. The will of the less-fanatic majority, as expressed in the official electoral forum, is readily denied. And not just once, but repeatedly (in theory), thereby creating a sort of tumbling chaos wherein no one can govern, since the supposed term of governing is reduced to some unknown set of probabilities; and our already dim concept of long-term planning finds its horizons even further foreshortened.

But then, such a scenario is exactly what anti-government Republicans want, with those oh-so-tired hands holding back that wrecking ball. Create chaos to demonstrate that government doesn't work, win election over the officeholder unfortunate enough to serve during that chaos, then apply the blameshifting algorithm whereby chaos is the current administration's fault if it's not Republican, and the previous administration's fault (for building up that unwieldy Big Government) if Republicans are the current incumbents. It's a thing of beauty: Republicans know that this strategy, if people buy it, all but guarantees Dems and others only single-term incumbencies, since somehow they never get blamed for the chaos. How could they, since they're against big government, and therefore by definition blameless for any problems supposedly caused by the government? In the battle of Tax and Spend vs. Don't Tax but Spend Anyway, Tax and Spend will always lose.

Because really, we're just plain stupid.

the hardest one to pass

Once in a while, I develop a minor obsession for some old song that, until that point, I hadn't thought of for years. Sometimes, the stimulus for the obsession is mysterious, but more often, it's the obvious one: I hear the song again, and am reminded how much I used to like it. Increasing the odds of this sort of retrospective exploration is one advantage of the fact that my car doesn't have a CD player and radio mostly sucks: it does have a cassette player, and I'll end up randomly going through elderly cassettes and hearing things I wouldn't have intentionally chosen to listen to.

This week's obsession is "The House Song" by Peter Paul & Mary. When I used to make cassettes, I'd generally record entire albums, but I'd put stray tracks at the ends of sides to fill up the tape. This one ended up at the end of a 10c.c. album or something (along with "The Great Mandella," another favorite). I'm not a Peter Paul & Mary fan - I doubt I've given them a moment's thought for a decade or more - but evidently my parents were, as I remember four or five of their records being around the house when I was growing up. Since they weren't major music consumers, it was unusual for them to buy that many records by the same artist. Anyway, these two tracks were from their 1967 release Album 1700 (probably the first album to utilize the rather minor titling subgenre of borrowing the label's catalog number for the title: Dave Davies had one, and of course there's Yes with 90125 ). The hit on this album was their version of John Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane," but "The House Song" was always my favorite. The album found them moving away from their iconic incarnation as purist folk trio (a la A Mighty Wind) and making use of some rock instrumentation and production techniques (as well as wicked impersonations of the Mamas & the Papas and Donovan, on "I Dig Rock & Roll Music").

What's interesting to me about my reaction to "The House Song" is that, even as a child (I was five in 1967 - although it occurs to me my folks may not have bought the record until "Jet Plane" became a hit a couple years later), I got the emotional timbre of the song...even though I obviously knew nothing about the breakup of a love affair, still less the "house" metaphor the song works with. That metaphor isn't always the most gracefully deployed, and I remember as a kid thinking, "well how come no one wants to buy his house, and why does he keep trying to sell it?" But it wasn't the lyrics that communicated to me then (obviously), it was the music: the way each verse begins hopefully in the singer's upper register, and gradually falls away to a despondent, near-mumbling by the ends of the verse. And if the house in the song is haunted by the narrator's memories, the aural equivalent is the spooky treatment of the backing vocals: lots of reverb, but the original signal is muted nearly to inaudibility, so what we hear is almost exclusively the reverb: spirit without the flesh, gesture without the feeling.

It's funny: in my mind, and in my memory, had you asked me, I would have said the song was a minor hit - but it appears to have sunken into almost total obscurity. Our own mental jukeboxes differ from the physical variety. Seeking to replace my worn cassette, dubbed from a record subjected to all the abuse a child playing the same song over and over again could muster, I was unable to find a copy online (the album's in print, though - but I can't see paying full price for two songs I want, one or two I wouldn't mind having, and another six or so I'm indifferent to). Apparently, Rhino's preparing a Peter Paul & Mary box set - so who knows, maybe legions of fans will end up making available digital copies of the track.

(Segue to a rant about how if record companies were smart, they'd've realized long ago that with catalog items, casual fans would be more interested in ad hoc collections than whole albums. If Warners were to make the track available for a dollar or so, or say five or ten dollars for a twelve-track self-assembled collection of Warners catalog tracks, I'd pay for it. Instead, I'm forced to illegally download a copy - okay, "forced" is too strong, but it seems reasonable to me that the economics of MP3s might return the basic unit of popular music to the song, as it was in the days of singles, rather than albums. Or even better, allow the coexistence of both: I'm generally an album-lover, but I wouldn't want to just eschew stray tracks for that reason.)

Two Unconnected Brief Thoughts

1. The DVD of Todd Solondz's Storytelling gives viewers the options of watching the R-rated or unrated version of the movie. Assuming that the unrated version was the one less market-driven and closer to what Solondz wanted, I watched it first. Out of curiosity, though - since, while I was watching the unrated version, I couldn't figure out what the MPAA would have wanted cut to make it an R - I watched the R-rated version (okay, at 4x speed with subtitles). As far as I can tell, the only difference between the two versions is this: in the sex scene set at the professor's apartment, the unrated version shows him thrusting from behind as Vi leans up against the wall. It's a medium-long shot, from across the room, and nobody's business is visibly on display - but apparently, the MPAA gets the heebie-jeebies at thrusting (or, as in the unrated version of Y Tu Mama Tambien, head-bobbing).

This strikes me as deeply weird. I mean, it's not as if the rest of the movie is all Bambi, flowers, and babies petting puppies: anyone who's watched the movie that far will know that the Christian Mothers' Temperance and Decency League will not be screening this movie at any of its meetings. I'm trying to imagine a hypothetical viewer who has no problem with any other part of the movie, but is suddenly deeply offended at the sight of thrusting. Or (to take the MPAA's rating system rather more literally than it's applied in practice) some parent needing to explain things to the naive teen he or she is accompanying (remember, "R" means "under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian"), doing fine with everything else in the movie, but suddenly blushing and stammering: "avert your eyes from his thrusts, Junior, and we may yet be saved!" For that matter, I can't imagine someone renting this from Blockbuster and complaining about that scene - at least not if the rest of the movie generated no complaints. I can only conclude that the folks who rate movies are batshit crazy.

The best part, though, is what Solondz did to keep his R-rating and allow Storytelling to terrorize suburban DVD renters everywhere. Most directors, asked to modify this scene for an R rating, would probably have reshot from another angle, or perhaps digitally zoomed in on the longish shot for a closeup, thereby avoiding the terrible, awful thrusting might of Robert Wisdom's pelvis. Solondz, in a move that I can only interpret as a gigantic "fuck you" to the film ratings board, instead blocks out both figures with a gigantic, bright red rectangle. That all by itself, I think, justifies the R-rated version - and not incidentally, adds an interesting frisson to his examination of what happens when "stories" are documented, published, and set loose in the world.

Of course, it also spares viewers the trauma of seeing Selma Blair's frighteningly thin, pre-pubescent -looking body. Somebody give that woman a cheeseburger.

2. It's a sad time when once-intriguing cartoonists devolve into repetitious shtick. Two cases in point: Matt Groening's "Life in Hell," and Bill Griffith's "Zippy the Pinhead."

At this point, I think even a relatively small number of monkeys could provide captions for every damned Akbar & Jeff cartoon - certainly, Groening's not exactly stretching his draftsmanship on the visual end. And it seems like for the last several years, 75-80% of "Life in Hell" cartoons are Akbar & Jeff in their endless, "Cathy"-like roundelay of angst and thwarted desire. (Yes, I just compared "Life in Hell" to the execrable "Cathy": that's how painful things have become.) Of course, the repetition makes it Angst Lite, now with lower carbs, and lo-fat, sodium-free, pasteurized, sterilized-for-your-comfort Desire; there's no longer even a hint of the darkness that "Life in Hell" once cleverly examined.

And "Zippy"? The former clown prince of the non sequitur has been reduced to a catatonic spectator of Bill Griffith's obsession with nostalgic roadside shlock: okay, Griffith loves the stuff, and enjoys rendering it (certainly he's a more technically skilled visual artist than Groening), but why not stop drawing the daily strip as an excuse to fetishize the roadside icons, and just put out a coffee table book already? Griffith at least had the wit, a few weeks back, to refer to this obsession as an obsession - but he seems to have gone back to just merrily dragging Zippy from icon to icon, with Zippy's increasingly zombie-like, flat remarks reading more and more like the last few, inadequate squeezings from a spent tube of toothpaste.

Berke Breathed and Bill Watterson retired before they ran out of ideas. Much as I miss Breathed in particular (although apparently he's returning with new cartoons), the decline of Groening and Griffith suggests they were onto something.