Friday, May 25, 2018

Alec Baldwin's Impersonation Is As Awful as the Trump Presidency Itself

Donald Trump is defiantly ignorant, stupid, amoral, indecent, inhumane, delusional, vainglorious, and incompetent, and, if you ask me, a fecal stain on American history. I must nonetheless confess that I regard anyone’s finding funny Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live nearly as disturbing as anyone regarding him as a viable president. 

I suspect there are few high schools in the country lacking a kid who could eat Baldwin’s lunch as a Trump impersonator. 

I've greatly enjoyed some of Baldwin’s serious work, none more than his spectacular Always-Be-Closing monologue in the movie version of Glengarry Glenn Ross. Given what I know him to be capable of, I sometimes dare hope it isn’t Trump he’s impersonating on SNL, but the least gifted, most obnoxious member of a high school drama club impersonating Trump. 

"Doing" Trump, Baldwin seems to  have forgotten everything he knows as an actor. It isn’t the actor’s job to judge the character he or she is playing, but to bring that character to life and let the audience decide for itself. To bring a character to life, the actor must suspend judgment and do his best to become him — to experience the world as the character does, to try to protect himself as the character does from the pain life can inflict . Baldwin does nothing of the sort, and is content with puerile mockery. His impersonation is all about Trump’s physical tics, but at least one, the endless lips-pursing, strikes me as more something Baldwin thought funny than something Trump actually does. 

As though we wouldn’t be able to figure out on our own that Trump’s The Great American Jerk without Baldwin's relentless mugging. 

Contrast this to Ricky Gervais’s sublime portrayal of the fictional character David Brent he created for The Office. Brent desperately wants to be admired, if not adored, and thought hilarious. But the harder he tries to endear himself to the world, the more disgustedly the world recoils. At the end of the series, in the sublime scene in which he finally removes his mask of breezy self-assurance in the wake of having been fired, Gervais shows us just enough of the poor devil’s terror and insatiable neediness to break our hearts. Finding no trace of humanity in Trump (and I’m not suggesting that’s easy), Baldwin is able only to make the least demanding of us snicker. He should be ashamed of himself. 

The writing on SNL is very much on a par with Baldwin’s acting — that is, almost inconceivably awful. Forget about the high school kids we were invoking a moment ago. I can’t imagine many middle school kids coming up with less funny scripts than SNL’s. That Lorne Michaels, the show’s producer (he who makes the final decision on which writers to employ), is widely viewed as American humour’s great arbiter is as ludicrous as viewing Donald Trump as a viable president. 

A free idea for SNL. Have Baldwin do his Glengarry Glenn Ross monologue as Trump addressing his Cabinet. One suspects it’s not terribly different from what the great man says in real life to his underlings. It’ll need a bit of rewriting, but I’m a phone call away. I envisage a Mike Pence surrogate licking the side of Baldwin-as-Trump’s face during the harangue. 


You’re welcome, Lorne. You'll find some of my own stuff here

Why I'm Not Yet a Rock Star


I have finally figured out why I have not yet become the (pop/)rock god I have long believed I deserve to be. I’m too well adjusted, and just too…nice. Lots of very nice people lacking substance abuse problems — Paul McCartney, the late Otis Redding, Pat Benatar — have managed to ascend to the top of the heap, of course, but in general audiences prefer those who are their own worst enemies, like Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Axl Rose, and Beyonce. That I have never known a day’s unhappiness, and am seen by most of my many, many friends as an exemplar of inner (and outer, thanks to the weight training!) strength, wisdom, patience, and empathy, has undoubtedly held me back. But you know what? I like me. I admire me. I am able to look at myself in the morning and think, “You’re a good egg, dude,” though I customarily scorn the use of words like dude and awesome and amazeballs. I can get away with it in the bathroom because I’m thinking the word, and not actually verbalising it.

Rock audiences want rebels without causes (those with causes are generally seen as tedious, self-important, and even messianic), brats, and scalawags. If one could somehow redeem the person-hours wasted over the years by young people in many lands waiting for Mick Jagger, Axl, or the guy in Jane’s Addiction to get their makeup just right and get themselves the fuck up on stage, he or she could compete with the Chinese in manufacturing. 

There are certainly many things in which I believe strongly — reproductive choice, mutual tolerance, fairness, peace, and what-have-you. But I believe equally that rules exist for the common good, and should be followed to the letter. When I received a parking ticket in Santa Monica, California, at age 18, I was so ashamed that I couldn’t leave the house for 24 hours. That’s the sort of person I am. 

And this sort too. While others of my vintage were feigning homosexuality or bone spurs, or heading for Canada or Costa Rica, I eagerly defended Our Way of Life in the steamy, fetid jungles of southeast Asia. I mention this not because I expect my fellow itinerants at airports to get all dewy-eyed when I walk past in uniform (it still fits, after all these decades, thanks to my rigorous physical fitness regimen), but because it goes a long way toward explaining why my beautiful music hasn’t been embraced to the extent many brazen rule-breakers’ has.

[The foregoing paragraph contains blatant lies intended solely for the reader's amusement. There's nothing about the American war machine I don't despise, and I was declared psychologically unfit for military service — as indeed I was, and remain! — when my number came up.]

I have a hair on my mighty (the weight training!) right arm that is now over five inches long, and am very proud of it. Sometimes, while we stare numbly at the television together, Dame Zelda will notice that I am stroking it proudly, and either hit me over the head with a rolling pin or stab me with a paring knife, but I think she’s jealous. I torment her by claiming to be considering having the hair highlighted, though I appreciate it’s probably impossible. And at some point the hair — which, no, I have not named — will fall out. And then where would I be? 



Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Mendelssohn's Rock Bible: Lennon's Dream Date With Destiny


Half a century after the fact, the greatest pop vocal performance ever recorded remains Lorraine Ellison’s harrowing, desperate, anguished, heartbreaking Stay With Me. But some of the fellows have done some pretty terrific singing in their own right. 

I’m not so sure that there’s ever been a better rock singer than Little Richard. To listen to the  original version of Tutti Frutti and Elvis’s back to back is to feel embarrassed for Elvis, to realise that Richard was by far the better musician. It isn’t only his exuberance and energy that dwarf Elvis’s, but his musicality. Witness his multiple-note runs, of the sort that would become (entirely too) popular decades later. 

Fifteen years later, Al Green came along and the difference between him and Richard was probably greater than between Richard and Elvis. No pop singer has ever sung more inventively, more nimbly, with greater, well, suppleness. 

Ray Charles’s version of the Eddy Arnold country would break my heart if the schmaltzy arrangement didn’t keep intruding. Bobby Hatfield’s performance of Unchained Melody, credited to the Righteous Bros., is a proper jaw-dropper. Few have ever crooned more gorgeously than Scott Walker does in The Walker Bros.’ The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore. His taking seven notes to get “baby” out before the coda makes one gasp in wonder. I may have loathed Journey. but loved Steve Perry’s glorious, soaring singing. Brad Delp’s vocal on Boston’s More Than a Feeling made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I don’t doubt a syllable Levi Stubbs sings in what I regard as the greatest of all Motown hits, The Four Tops’ Bernadette.  

All that said, I don’t think there’s ever been a vocal quite like Mr. Lennon’s on Twist and Shout.  At the end of the marathon session during which they recorded their first album, The Beatles had at the year-before Isley Bros. hit, which they’d been enjoying performing live the previous several months. George Martin had saved the song for last for fear of its leaving young the Lennon voice in tatters. As it was, he had little left in his vocal tank after having spent the day singing with a sore throat. Through sheer force of will, though, he absolutely sang the hell out of it, evoking the manic energy of Little Richard fully as vividly as young Mr. McCartney’s party-piece version of Long Tall Sally ever would, sounding like a young man on a dream date with destiny, sounding possessed. I fucking want this, his voice seems to say, and I’m fucking having it, son. His vocal eloquently refuted the idea that rock and roll had been a dead genre walking since Elvis’s conscription, Chuck Berry’s incarceration, Richard’s return to Jesus, and the fervent attempts of the likes of Dick Clark to replace it with insipid frankiebobby crooner pop. It ensured that no one listening to that first Beatles album — which the group had every reason to believe might also be their last — wouldn’t be open-mouthed at the end. 

In decades to come, one wouldn’t hear less and less like it. Sure, The Swinging Blue Jeans’ Hippy Hippy Shake, a virtual homage to Lennon, is also pretty thrilling, and a decade later Noddy Holder would sound comparably manic and ferocious on such Slade records as Cum On Feel the Noize, but as recording technology improved, one heard singers leaving it all on the field, to invoke a trope from sport, less and less often. Why retain a phrase in which the singer is clearly straining when it’s possible to “punch in” a more self-assured sounding take?

Of course, The Beatles’ T&S was pretty wonderful live too. Stage left you had the squinting Lennon singing magnificently, while stage right his backing singers were cheek-to-cheek at their microphone, shaking their girlishly long hair at each other while exulting, “Ooh!” fully a decade before David Bowie scandalised the nation by draping his arm collegially around Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops.

I can’t resist the temptation to name and shame three of my least favourite male rock singers. Steven Tyler seems never to have met a song he didn’t want to oversing. In that way he’s sort of the male Mariah Carey, without Carey’s remarkable range and chops. Maybe you recall the movie True Grit? What the unlistenably affected-sounding Jon Bon Jovi’s got is bogus grit. And the piglet-in-agony shrieking of such emulators of the young Robert Plant as Axl Rose and the guy from Motley Crue have always made me yearn for deafness.






Pay me the compliment of listening to my own music, credited to The Freudian Sluts, The Stonking Novels, and Isambard Jones, on Spotify, Amazon, GooglePlay, and elsewhere. And please do have a look at my ezine, For All In Tents and Porposes