Review: Jeff Bridges, "Jeff Bridges"

Jeff Bridges
Jeff Bridges
Blue Note/EMI
08.16.11

So some famous actor decides to make a country-folk album and enlists some a-list talent to help it come across. What has that got to do with the price of rice, right? Damn movie stars, always trying to hyphenate us poor folk into thinking they're geniuses. And in this case, into thinking he's a man of the people and a deep thinker to boot. Apparently acting, cartooning, photography, narration, voice-overs, and humanitarian concerns aren't enough -- Jeff Bridges has to rub our faces in it by jamming with Neko Case, then making an album with T-Bone Burnett, Sam Phillips, Marc Ribot, and Rosanne Cash. Hell, anyone could sound good with that backup. Who does this guy think he is, anyway?

Well, he's Jeff Bridges. The man several of our best film critics have called the most natural actor working, or even of all time. He's like the anti-Tom Cruise: you never notice him acting, you just hang out and watch some fascinating character you just met slowly winding his way through life. Which is what he does on this eponymous major-label debut. (Actually his second effort, after a few soundtrack items and an abortive attempt at a side project done with Michael McDonald eleven years ago, when the world and Jeff and you and I were all in a much different place.) T-Bone gives Jeff aural backdrops as stark and beautiful and natural as a John Ford western and as darkly strange and full of portent as the Coen Bros., and Bridges holds you in the spotlight by, as always, disappearing into himself. Only this time its his real self. And you get to come with.

A practicing Buddhist since before most of today's big stars were going to calls, Jeff's themes are existential in nature, pondering the beauty/tragedy of existence and the wobbly nature of our perception. That he does this largely with other people's songs is even more stunning -- his taste is excellent, as he sticks to thoughtful uberfringe folkies like John Goodwin, Greg Brown, and the late Stephen Bruton, but like any good country singer, he finds the humanity in their tales and translates it for us average Joes. That goes equally for the gorgeous, twisted fantasia of "Blue Car," the deceptively understated epic "Slow Boat," and the meta-hangover of his own deliciously jazzy "Tumbling Vine." ("Here is the freedom / I have been sent: / I'm alive and I'm Buddhistly bent / wonderful moments / the past is a dream / the future is hiding / ice and steam.")

Actually, "deceptively understated" is an apt descriptor for this entire album, not to mention Bridges' whole career. Fans of the Dude, his now-legendary everyman from The Big Lebowski, may be disappointed at the lack of slapstick in these cosmic punchlines, but like that masterpiece, it's still dark, worn around the edges, refreshingly human, and, sometimes, more touching than it has any right being. New shit really has come to light. (I kept myself to one Lebowski joke.)

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 81. Hushed and profound. Imagine Mazzy Star making a John Hiatt album.
Invention: 74. How someone who grew up in the Platinum Triangle of L.A. developed an authentic Texas twang, I have no idea.
Integrity: 92. Jeff's total lack of affectation and everyman version of existentialism really tie the album together. (sorry.)

The Loaded Question: How Hot Is It?

How hot is it?

Who's the New Girl? Episode 109: Project Moonbase

the babes of MST3K

Having both an unhealthy obsession with classic pin-up style, which is coming back, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, which lives on forever, I've decided to combine my two lusts and create yet another series, this one based around pin-ups of the lovely ladies that starred in the b-movies MST3K skewered so hilariously. I will be taking on every single one of the relevant episodes, in order, because I have problems. Enjoy!

The series begins here. 

Episode 109: Project Moonbase (1953)

Donna Martell

"She's absolutely ballistic!"

Donna Martell was better known for her TV roles than her movie career. Indeed, the incredibly, incredibly sexist Project Moonbase -- actually based on a short story by Robert Heinlein but badly mangled as it made its way to the screen -- was supposed to be a pilot for a TV series. Martell thought so, too, and only found out differently when the cameras started to roll. She puts in a near-heroic performance by just showing up, though; she's supposedly a colonel in a dorky American orbit rocket space team crew thingy, yet she's constantly belittled as if she were a spoiled child. Her immediate superior threatens to spank her at one point. But hey, you let women into the armed forces, you gotta expect that kind of thing. She probably had her period right there.

Martell (born Irene DeMario) was best known for her Westerns, having gotten her first gig in a Roy Rogers film at the tender age of 17. Hooking up with Universal, she navigated through several b-movies, also serving as the fresh-faced sweetheart in Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer before quitting the "studio system" and  graduating to TV. In 1963, the Los Angeles native married Hollywood soundman Gene Corso and never looked back, ending her career and raising a family with him. The two are still married in the San Fernando Valley, and Donna, now 84, can still be seen guesting at various Western and sci-fi conventions. MST3K fans may be interested to know that she also appeared on an episode of Rocky Jones: Space Ranger. No word on whether Winky tried anything. 

Monopoly cards for the New Great Depression, Part 3

Buy everything you can, as fast as you can

(For the first two sets of 21st Century Monopoly cards, look here and also here.) 

Everyone around the world is familiar with the beloved game of Monopoly. You know Monopoly. It's the board game where you spend two hours (if you play it correctly) or three hours (if you don't) slowly tightening the financial noose around your friends until you're able to toss them out into the street to starve.

This is hilarious for at least three reasons:

1. Monopoly was based on The Landlord's Game, a teaching device meant to expose how landlords bled tenants dry.
2. That game was eventually stolen by one Charles Darrow, who'd lost his job after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
3. It made Darrow a millionaire. The inventor of the Landlord's Game wound up with a cool $500.

Monopoly taught generations to become ruthless capitalists, including me. (The secret to winning? Buy as much property as you can, as fast as possible, no matter what you have to do to get it.) But the original game became outdated, especially those pesky Chance and Community Chest cards. "Poor tax"? "Building and Loan"? "Life insurance"?

A few years back, Parker Brothers Hasbro finally updated the old cards for a modern audience, and as you might have guessed, the result looks like shit. So I've kept the stylish old look of the original cards, yet added some new ideas for what the kid of the 21st century will have to expect. Enjoy!

The Phone Call Sketch, Ladies and Gentlemen

Hey man, this is Rob from the future. I'm you exactly ten years from now. Ten years to the day. August 3, 2001 there, right? Yeah. Okay. Good.

Sup? Yeah, they still say sup.

Anyway. I'm calling from 2011. No, no, this is not a Dickens thing. You're fine. You've figured a lot of stuff out, and you're a lot better at, well, everything. Which is kind of the way it's supposed to go. You're good. A lot better than you are right now, actually. You kind of suck right now. No, stop agreeing. That's part of your problem.

The future? It's... good. It's good. It's going to be good. Yeah, the internet blew up, like you figured it would. Everybody's on here now. Your relatives, your high-school classmates, your exes, your mom. Everybody. What? Yeah, actually it does kind of suck. We're working on that. Turns out a lot of the people you know are gonna go, you know. Crazy. Not to put too fine a point on it. The internet's killing newspapers and TV, like we figured, right on schedule. Hmm? Oh yeah, people still chat! There's this thing everybody uses where you can only talk in, like, a sentence and a half at a time. No. I don't know why. But it's worth it, because you get to find out how celebrities feel about things.

No, it's cool. Kind of.

Yeah, that election thing was disturbing, with the chads and the thing. I know, right! Nobody could tell the difference between the two candidates. Yeah. That was, um, that was funny. Heh. No, I just have a cold. It's fine.

No, no, everything's cool! We, um, we eventually elected a black guy President! Not Colin Powell, I thought that, too. Some dude you don't know. With a weird name. A really weird name. It's kind of a long story. He only got elected to stop the wars... yeah. Plural. Two of them. Well, it was two. I think we're at four or five now.

I really can't remember. We're all just trying to concentrate on our work. On finding work. Yeah, another recession. I guess you could call it that. Sure. The President is on it, no problem. He's, um, doing things. Oh, and remember that NAFTA thing everybody got all upset about? You probably want to speak out more against that.

Good music. Good music. Um. Hang on, I know there were a few songs. I have to think about it. No, I'm not just getting old. Remember that Telecommunications Act that Clinton passed? And then the record industry started consolidating? Yeah. That. The good news is that the net killed it off, too. No, no CDs. All mp3s now. You had that part right. Portable music players and phones got really small. And you can browse and do all kinds of cool stuff on the phones! There you go! That's something good about the future right there.

Oh, yeah, also, you can record music and video with anything, anywhere, so everybody has a band now. And a video. A terrible, terrible video.

Huh? Columbine? Columbine. Oh! The school shooting. Yeah, I remember that. Um, we don't notice those too much now. Yeah, those. Some woman killed her baby, though. Everybody got real upset about that.

So yeah! You personally are fine. I wouldn't be talking to you right now if you weren't. Just a side note here, though, since you're living in New Orleans: is the truck gassed up? Do you have bottled water? No, I'm just asking. Always a good idea to be safe. Oh, and you're not going to New York anytime soon, right? Don't go to New York.

I told you, it's just a cold. Hang on.

I'm back. Yeah! So keep going. You're gonna get a lot better.

The world? Uh, it's still here. Yeah. Batman movies are awesome now. I don't know if I mentioned that. And gay people can get married legally. So that's something. Hey, I don't remember, did we own any gold?

Hello?

Review: Fountains of Wayne, "Sky Full of Holes"

Sky Full of Holes
Fountains of Wayne
Yep Roc
08.02.11

It's not easy being the smartest kid in the pop-rock class, even less so when you're the most real, and Fountains of Wayne have always been both ever since their 1996 self-titled debut. They began as an intoxicating mix of jangle-pop and Beach Boys beauty imbued with post-Weezer pop-punkish energy, but their secret weapon was nonetheless lyrical: a real gift for characterization that made every song a little five-star romcom.

You'd never know it from the way they were presented by their record label, though. As they grew bigger, the pressure to turn up the volume and turn down the empathy made their literary-grade sketches seem more like frat boy jokes. The subtle nuances, the tells that made Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood's songs open up and bleed, weren't obliterated, but they were made harder to spot. The big stupid hit, "Stacy's Mom," seemed like a novelty song on the radio; in the context of their whole catalog, it almost takes on the weight of The Graduate.

They followed up the hit with 2007's Traffic and Weather, the nadir of their corporate relationship. Though it still contained much of what made FOW great, the punchlines seemed more important, the irony less necessary than ever -- "Revolving Dora" was just a bad pun, "Planet of Weed" a bad skit. And when NFL films started using the heavily ironic "All Kinds of Time" (from the previous album) straightfaced under highlight clips, it seemed like the real point of Fountains of Wayne might be lost forever.

But maturity is not always the death knell for pop-rock bands, especially those who were never taken as seriously as they should have been. Four years later, Sky Full of Holes is the place where the band gets serious. And obviously so.

It doesn't happen all at once. "The Summer Place" is a lyrically grim opener about the PTSD of childhood memories, and how they leave ripples throughout our adult lives, but then "Richie and Ruben" and "Acela" show up, respectively, to rag on two get-rich-quick friends and to catch a little strange with some random train passenger.

But here's the thing. Adam and Chris actually have a game plan this time out, even if they don't claim to recognize it themselves in interviews -- all of the above songs deal with the possibly inevitable failure that comes with middle age. The dad of "Action Hero" sublimates his dreams and loses his sanity, "Radio Bar" pretends to rock out as a Dickensian dream trip back to a wasted youth, and "Hate To See You Like This" delineates the kind of clinical, everyday, non-emo depression that adults simply learn to live with.

And when the duo stretches out, it hits even harder: the way "Cold Comfort Flowers" drifts into psychedelic poesy merely to punch up the sting of bitter celebrity failure, or the way "A Road Song" -- a new high in vulnerability -- acknowledges its own cliches while somehow rhyming "Cracker Barrel" and "Will Ferrell" and making it work. The climax is the deceptively simple "Cemetery Guns," which may be the last nail in the coffin of millennium irony, a stark portrait of a military funeral that's direct without being mawkish. Fountains of Wayne have spent 15 years at their job, subtly revealing the emotional warzone hiding behind suburbia; with this release, they've proven they can look life square in the eye without flinching. Stacy's mom, wherever she is, can probably relate.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 78. Musically, they've slowed down a bit, but emotionally, they've hit the ground running.

Invention: 68. The music rarely matches the mood with FOW, but that's often the best thing about them. Quietly devastating, and not necessarily quiet.
Integrity: 88. HBO wishes it was this subtle in creating characters.

Internet Killed the Video Star

Because today is the 30th anniversary of MTV, and because my friend Cyndi asked for it. Literally.
--

I saw you on the cable back in '82
Wearing a jumpsuit and a keytar, it was true
And if it stormed it used to stop you coming through 
Oh-a oh 

They took the credit for your sampled symphony 
Rewritten, autotuned and not on MTV 
And now you don't know how to upgrade to 4G 
Oh-a oh 
You tweet your children 
Oh-a oh 
But did you tell them?

Internet killed the video star 
Internet killed the video star 
YouTube came and broke your heart 
Oh-a-a-a oh 

And now we meet in an abandoned studio 
The record label closed it up so long ago 
Now they make music using ProTools don't you know
Oh-a oh 
Don't use the old one
Oh-a oh 
I bought the new one

Internet killed the video star 
Internet killed the video star
On my phone and bookmark bar
A million clicks and you're a star
Oh-a-aho oh, 
Oh-a-aho oh 

Internet killed the video star 
Internet killed the video star 
YouTube came and broke your heart 
Oh-a-a-a oh 

On my phone and bookmark bar
A million clicks and you're a star
Rebecca Black has gone too far
Which seat will she take in his car?

You are an internet star. 
You are an internet star. 
Internet killed the video star... 

The Loaded Question: America Goes Broke

Aside from the debt ceiling debate,
what are some other warning signs
that America is in a financial crisis?

Who's the New Girl? Episode 108: The Slime People

the babes of MST3K

Having both an unhealthy obsession with classic pin-up style, which is coming back, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, which lives on forever, I've decided to combine my two lusts and create yet another series, this one based around pin-ups of the lovely ladies that starred in the b-movies MST3K skewered so hilariously. I will be taking on every single one of the relevant episodes, in order, because I have problems. Enjoy!

The series begins here. 

Episode 108: The Slime People (1963)

Susan Hart

"Ohhh! Tasting my daughter, I see! Well, I'll just stare at these curtains." 

Girl-next-door cute, and yet undeniably curvy, Susan Hart was one of those '60s starlets who learned how to make the most of her short career. This Washington State native found herself transplanted down the coast to Palm Beach while still in high school, and it was there on the beach that she was discovered by a rep from American International Pictures. The Slime People was actually her first film role; in it, she plays Lisa Galbraith, the older of two Professor's Beautiful Daughters put there to romance the male leads while they attempt to save the city (and the audience) from some kind of deadly, impenetrable fog.

Her combined film/TV career last just over two years, but she helped define the era, starring in AI's biggest and goofiest beach movies, from the Tab Hunter vehicle Ride the Wild Surf to the second of the Annette Funicello beach movies, Pajama Party, and both Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and its Italian sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. Soon after, however, she married the studio president, James H. Nicholson, and settled down to raise a family. Upon Nicholson's death in 1973, the plucky Hart took over his  current projects, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and Legend of Hell House, and saw them through, eventually owning over 40 of Nicholson's classic horror films outright. By that time she was on her way to a semi-successful singing career, scoring a minor country hit in 1981 with "Is This a Disco or a Honky Tonk?" She then married Harvard prof Roy Hofheinz (son of the famed Texas pol) and took on a new career as an ice-skater!