Tori Amos Puts Her Own Spin on the Season

Originally posted December 10, 2009

Live series, Tori Amos gives an intimate concert at the Spin offices in Lower Manhattan. Photo by Ben Rowland.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Under black chandeliers, Tori Amos, her long hair nearly as red as her multi-gathered minidress—which, along with her gold stretch leggings, made her look like an exotic Christmas present—started her set at the Spin magazine loft Tuesday night with her song “Ophelia,” whispering at one point “I feel you.”

We felt her too. While not exactly going all Jerry Lee Lewis on us, the dramatic Amos would not be contained by anything so prim as a piano bench. She stretched out a glimmering leg, stomped a metallic stiletto, and at the end of “Wednesday,” her arms flying out behind her, appeared to be the eagle of her lyrics, about to land.

In a set of only six songs, the other four were from her new, seasonal CD, Midwinter Graces. Unlike Bob Dylan, who sings—rasps?—such holiday standards as “Here Comes Santa Claus” seemingly straight for his recently released Christmas in the Heart, Amos, a minister’s daughter, has delved into carols such as “Silent Night” and “Star of Wonder” to create her own rich works. Thus, “Silent Night” becomes “A Silent Night with You” (in which the singer at times sounds surprisingly like Madonna on a very good day).

My favorite from the album, however, is wholly original, the feel-good—you can almost see the confetti falling—“Pink and Glitter,” written, Amos explained while introducing the song, because in this time of celebrating the birth of a baby boy, she wanted to honor little girls (but nevertheless gave a smiling thumbs-up to the guys while singing the line “Little boys are getting an honorable mention from me”).

Her last song was the atmospheric “Snow Angel,” whose most memorable moment came when Amos briefly stopped, after making an undetectable mistake on the piano, and exclaimed “Fuck!” This only made her audience more delighted than they had been a second before—and I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.

Leaving Reason?

Originally posted September 30, 2010.

What they did for love: Kristin Scott Thomas and Sergi López.

Leaving (Partir)
Directed by Catherine Corsini
Written by Catherine Corsini with Gaëlle Macé
Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Sergi López, and Ivan Attal

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

We first discovered Kristin Scott Thomas in the African desert, wowing Ralph Fiennes with her Katharine Hepburn–esque trousers and, later, her elegant clavicle. (Small-breasted women everywhere felt a moment of triumph as she glided sinuously from bed to tub.) Their illicit affair was at the heart of the somewhat soapy The English Patient, which provided that breakout role for Scott Thomas. Fourteen years later, we find her, as Suzanne in Leaving (Partir), in the lush South of France, married to a doctor and living with him and their teenage children in a sleek, well-appointed house. Suzanne is The Woman Who Has Everything—except, of course, passionate love, and so she is about to tumble for a penniless Spanish workman. He, Ivan (Sergi López), has come to help build her new reflexology office on the estate; their first meeting occurs when he spies her caressing her own foot while intoning other parts of the body.

As with just about every movie in which a married woman gets involved with another man, tragedy ensues (this isn’t a spoiler—the opening scene makes it clear, with the film then going back in time). But first there is plenty of very erotic love-making, tempered (a little) by the penury the new couple find themselves enduring—in that sense perhaps it’s a movie for our times—brought on by the rage and influence of Suzanne’s husband (Ivan Attal, who dubbed Tom Cruise’s voice for the French version of another troubled-marriage movie, Eyes Wide Shut).

Their efforts to keep afloat—does this well-established woman have no friends or family who could lend her a little money?—finally reach a point that you may or may not be able to accept. My fellow blogger Adam Nadler used the word “ridiculous” to describe it, while “unhinged” popped into my mind in regard to Suzanne. Perhaps this was intended, but since her actions strain credulity, even the remarkable Scott Thomas, who was nominated for a César Award for meilleure actrice for the role, cannot fully get back the pathos the story warrants. Still, watch her expressive, wide-eyed face—reminiscent of Diane Lane’s in the similar Unfaithful, itself based on the late Claude Chabrol’s film La Femme Infidèle—and fall in love again, consequence-free.

Dreaming Florida

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago on assignment for a short-lived magazine, Florida Personalities, for a section called “Dreaming Florida.” Unfortunately, the magazine folded before they could publish it. I’ve decided to publish it here.

My parents, Irwin and Eleanor Rosen, on their honeymoon in Miami Beach, December 1948.

By Robert Rosen

The way I remember it, the water was turquoise, the sand was gold, and, yeah, the memory plays tricks, but I saw the picture every day, every time I walked into my parents’ bedroom.

At least they look the way I remember them from when I was a kid. My father, Irwin, an athletic ex-GI home from the war, appears to be enjoying two weeks in paradise with his 21-year-old bride, my mother, Eleanor, who for the occasion of her wedding had painted her fingernails red. It was December 3, 1948, and they were on the Miami Beach Boardwalk, at 44^th Street—near what was then the Tatum Hotel and is now a high-rise condo adjacent to the Fontainebleau—when a roving photographer snapped this photo.

When the image first penetrated my consciousness some 50 years ago, I thought Miami was the most beautiful city in the world, a magical place where the ocean, unlike the bracing surf of Brighton Beach, was a soothing bath that required no “getting used to,” and the sun was so strong that, as my mother often told me, “you can only take it for 15 minutes at first—you have to be very careful.”

My God, how I wanted to go to Miami. But talk about impossible dreams. In 1957, around the time I grasped the concept of a state called Florida, traveling anywhere more exotic than Poughkeepsie seemed as fantastic as space flight. Miami may as well have been Oz, a Technicolor fantasyland, where, if I was lucky, I might get to someday in the distant future, but only briefly, and only to return to a black-and-white Brooklyn with one colorized photo as proof that I was there. Live in Florida? You’ve gotta be kidding. Real people, like my mother, my father, and me, didn’t live in Florida. We lived in Flatbush, on the third floor of a run-down walk-up, upstairs from a bus driver, whom I can still see sitting in his window, looking like Jackie Gleason and wearing his uniform, laughing as he watched his son brawling in the street below. That’s why I didn’t like The Honeymooners. It was too real.

That it took 18 more years for me to find my way to Florida wasn’t a question of deferred dreams; Europe and California started calling more loudly, and I listened. But the 24 hours I spent in Daytona Beach as a speechwriter for air force secretary John McLucas—he was delivering the commencement address for Embry-Riddle university—finally gave me the opportunity to take a dip in the balmy Atlantic and watch, from my hotel terrace the next morning, as sunrise turned the ocean a shade of blue that at least approximated turquoise.

I began traveling to Florida regularly within a year, usually to visit an old friend from Flatbush who was attending Nova Law School en route to becoming a Palm Beach prosecutor. Each semester he rented a cheap apartment in some little town I’d never heard of—like Davie—and, always happy to have my company, he’d let me crash on his couch for weeks at a time.

While he pursued his legal education, I spent my idyllic freelance days swimming laps in his pool, sauna bathing, and working on a competitive tan, being careful not to overdo it, just as my mother had advised. By the side of a pool in a town called Plantation, it occurred to me that I’d found the Promised Land—a place where even the poorest student could enjoy what in New York was unaffordable luxury.

And it was Florida economics that enticed my parents to retire to Greenacres, near Lake Worth, their condo at one time or another within miles (if not yards) of two uncles, one aunt, two cousins, and four friends, all originally from Brooklyn, some with their accents intact.

My father’s been gone a few years now, but my mother, now 84, is still a shrewd canasta player, a crossword puzzle demon, and a volunteer victims’ liaison in Palm Beach juvenile court. When I visit her, I find myself doing what I’ve always done in Florida—swimming laps in an enormous pool, though I do it now in the peaceful hour just before dawn, stopping only when the orange sun floats into view over the picture-postcard palms.

And some nights in my mother’s guest room, I lie awake dreaming of Brooklyn.

A Clockwork Skinhead

Originally posted, May 4, 2007.

 

The “enlightened” skinheads of This Is England. Sitting, left to right: Gadget (Andrew Ellis), Milky (Andrew Shim), Kes (Kieran Hardcastle), Woody (Joe Gilgun), and Pukey (Jack O`Connell); standing, Shaun (Thomas Turgoose).

This Is England
102 minutes
Written and Directed by Shane Meadows
Starring: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Jo Hartley, Joe Gilgun, Andrew Shim, Rosamund Hanson, Jack O`Connell, Kieran Hardcastle, Andrew Ellis, Vicky McClure, Sophie Ellerby, Chanel Cresswell, Danielle Watson, George Newton, and Perry Benson

By Robert Rosen

Despite the cross tattooed Charlie Manson-style in the middle of his forehead, for a gentleman who’s just gotten out of prison he seems like a decent enough chap. And he’s quite the orator, too. Combo (for that is his name) is telling an amusing story to his rapt audience at a small gathering of friends—something about a bloke stealing his “puddin’” in the joint, I think, his anecdote liberally sprinkled with fookin’ this and oi that. (His Scouse accent—at least I believe it’s a Scouse accent—is a little difficult to understand, and the occasional subtitle would not be out of place here.) The real problem with this Combo chap, however, is that to feel completely positive about him you have to overlook his rather dramatic entrance. Apparently, he’d instructed his mate, a fellow skinhead, to barge into the party and, pretending to be a neighbor displeased by the loud music, indicate that he was about to hack everybody to death with the machete he was wielding like a ninja gone bonkers. It’s not until Combo, played with menacing verisimilitude by Stephen Graham, waltzes in and announces that oi, it’s just a bleedin’ joke, lads, that we realize this party is not about to devolve into a total helter-skelter bloodbath. 

What we have here is not the bucolic Britain on display in the “English Garden” calendar that hangs on my kitchen wall, its pages a seductive riot of “Red Georgette” tulips and blue forget-me-nots set against a background of green in all its glorious shades. It is, rather, the Britain of Shane Meadows’ stunning and brutal film This Is England, which is so different from the one I see every morning in my calendar, it may as well exist on a different planet.

Let’s call the planet “July 1983,” which is the date flashed on the screen following a rousing opening montage—set to the music of Toots and the Maytals—of every iconic image that was England at the time. And though the credits later say that the film was shot in Nottingham and Grimsby, which are about 50 miles apart, the setting is a generic East Midlands city gone to seed—a fictional town, based on Meadows’ experiences growing up in the area. You’ve got your blocks of council flats, some inhabited, some abandoned ruins; you’ve got your vacant lots, your bleakly unappealing beach, your “Maggie-is-a-twat”-style anti-Thatcher graffiti scrawled on various bits of concrete, and your young people dressed like Boy George and Cyndi Lauper, listening to the songs that pour from the radios, like “Come On Eileen” and “Tainted Love.”

Oh yeah, then there’s the kid, the star of the show. Shaun (Thomas Turgoose, making his acting debut) is 12 years old, lives with his mother, Cynthia (Jo Hartley), and he’s got issues. Primarily, he’s being picked on at school, cruelly taunted by the older kids about his father, who was killed in the Falklands war the previous year. Shaun will, without hesitation, go berserk on anybody who insults his dad—and he doesn’t give a flyin’ fook how big they are. His violent outbursts, however, tend to land him in the headmaster’s office, and in one memorable scene he coolly waits his turn for corporal punishment while listening to the screams of the kid he was fighting with as the headmaster beats him with a cane. Shaun, in short, is fearless.

The characters’ emotional complexity, as portrayed by a stellar ensemble of mostly unknown actors, is what makes this film extraordinary, one of the best to come out of England in a long time. The plot itself is simple—it revolves around Shaun’s relationship with two local cliques. First, he falls in with some stylish, semi-enlightened skinheads, apparently descendants of the Mods, who are led by Woody (Joe Gilgun), an appealing and articulate young man who takes pity on Shaun and invites him to hang out with his gang. They transform him into a miniature version of themselves, teaching him how to dress, buying him new clothes, and shaving his head, which freaks out his mother. But Cynthia understands that Shaun needs a father figure, and all she asks of Woody and the gang is that if Shaun is going to hang out with them, then they must take responsibility for him, and to please ask her permission before they shave his head again.

There’s genuine affection between Shaun and the skinheads; they even invite him to their parties. One of them, the Lauper-esque Smell (Rosamund Hanson), who’s about 19 and wears braces, takes a fancy to Shaun, and they become, essentially, an item.

“You might look like a baby, but you kiss like you’re 40 years old,” Smell tells him, later asking, “Why don’t you want to suck my tits? Don’t you like me?” Shaun says that he likes her just fine, but he hasn’t had a lot of tit-sucking experience and is a little nervous about it. Though essential to understanding the characters, this is a perfect example of the type of “taboo” material that’s so rarely seen in American films, and one of the reasons that This Is England has such an exotic feel to it.

It’s after Woody’s old mate Combo returns from prison, and begins to dominate the picture with sheer force of personality, that Shaun drifts over to the neo-Nazi skinheads. The crucial moment comes when Combo—furious with the Pakistanis and West Indians who he says are taking over England—delivers an eloquently fascist speech, which he begins by asking the one black man in the group, Milky (Andrew Shim) if he’s English or Jamaican. The moment is ominous, Combo’s propensity for violence always lurking just beneath the surface.

“I’m English,” Milky says after some hesitation.

“Good man,” says Combo, switching to a critique of the government’s stupidity in waging the Falklands war—at which point Shaun physically attacks him. This provokes Combo to declare that Shaun’s the only one in the group with any guts, and that he sees himself in Shaun at the same age.

Combo becomes Shaun’s new father figure, and along with the gang of neo-Nazis, they rob and trash Pakistani-owned liquor stores, harass Muslim kids playing soccer, and go to National Front political meetings—until it all culminates in an inevitable bit of completely insane Clockwork Orange-like ultra-violence.

It’s shocking, it’s horrible, it’s bloody, and it reminds you that, even though July 1983 was a long time ago, it’s still a lot closer than you might want to believe.

Gamekeeper Gets Lucky

Originally posted April 24, 2007.

Parkin the gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) and Lady Chatterley (Marina Hands) run naked in the rain.

Lady Chatterley
Directed by Pascale Ferran
Written by Pascale Ferran and Roger Bohbot
Starring: Marina Hands, Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, Hippolyte Girardot, Hélène Alexandridis, and Hélène Fillières
From France/Belgium

By Robert Rosen


Set in England in the aftermath of World War I, Lady Chatterley, an enhanced retelling of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover—originally published in 1928 and banned in America until 1960 due to its allegedly pornographic qualities—is a deeply subversive film. But this subversion has more to do with the film’s explicit antiwar message than it does with its explicit eroticism, which includes full-frontal female and male nudity, as well as a lingering shot of a semi-erect penis that will guarantee an NC-17 rating and very limited theatrical distribution in the United States.

The antiwar message is graphically spelled out in the film’s opening minutes. Sir Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot), a crippled veteran (and super-wealthy owner of a coal mine), and his friends are sitting around the drawing room of his country estate after a dinner party, matter-of-factly discussing their gruesome battlefield experiences. One of the men tells how, as he was charging into a fusillade of cannon fire, he felt what he thought was warm water splashing on the back of his neck. Then he turned around to see that it was blood spurting from a comrade who’d just had his head blown off yet continued running “surprisingly far, like a chicken.” Sir Clifford, who despite his own war wound seems glad to be alive, and manages to keep a stiff upper lip (so to speak), does not yet know the profound effect that his injury will have on his young and beautiful wife, Lady Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands), who’s in the next room, eavesdropping on the conversation.

This scene not only serves as a poignant reminder that once upon a time the upper classes fought in wars, too. But even those who don’t already know where the plot is headed will soon get another message: If you go to war, get your fool ass shot off, and end up impotent and in a wheelchair (even a gasoline-powered one), you can presume that some uncouth ruffian will soon be banging your wife silly, and probably impregnating her with his child, which, if you’re a decent chap, you’ll have no choice but to accept as your own. What a demoralizing message to send to the troops! But what else would you expect from the French?

How about a vaguely Brando-like (from certain angles) ruffian, the gamekeeper, Oliver Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h)? But his affair with Lady Chatterley is not only about sex; it’s about sexual politics, and it raises the question: Can a man from the working class—poor but proud and self-sufficient—have a relationship built on love and mutual respect with an aristocratic woman who in addition to much primo real estate, has an allowance, as Lady Chatterley tells him to his amazement, of, “I don’t know, £500, £1000 per year”?

Perhaps he can—if they really care about each other and the sex is hot enough. And the sex is hot, indeed, starting with some rough and hurried animal-like couplings on the floor of Parkin’s rude hut, with both of them mostly clothed, and progressing over time to slow, sensual, multi-orgasmic, completely nude lovemaking with lots of foreplay and in a variety of positions. (It’s not until the two-hour point of the film that they achieve total nudity, but it’s worth the wait.)

The director, Pascale Ferran, has a poetic feel for sensuality in all its forms, and Lady Chatterley is ultimately a film about the beauty and poetry of natural forces, particularly the force of two naked bodies writhing in an orgasmic embrace. Sometimes, watching this movie is like watching the Discovery Channel in high definition—there’s shot after shot of flowers, trees, flowing water, birds, little animals. But even though the film clocks in at nearly three hours, none of these images slow it down; Lady Chatterley never seems boring or overly long. Ferran has recreated the world of 1921 England, and once she has you there she intends to keep you there.

And let us not forget poor, crippled Sir Clifford. His character is far more developed here than in the book, where he remains almost a cipher and mostly in the background. Especially notable are Constance and Clifford’s frank conversations about the possibility of her having a baby with another man and of Clifford calling it his own, with just one stipulation: “He must be English and from good stock.”

This is a distinctly English story filtered through a French consciousness, with Constance and Clifford, in one scene, arguing about the merits of socialism, as if she’s supporting Ségolène Royal and he’s supporting Nicolas Sarkozy. In another curious scene, Constance walks into a store to pick up some groceries, and the clerk tells her how revitalized she looks, and that she’s heard rumors that Sir Clifford is recovering nicely from his war wounds and has apparently gotten his mojo back. Maybe in France such things were discussed over the purchase of a baguette, but in the fading years of the Victorian era in England, I doubt that shopkeepers openly alluded in public conversations to the private sexual activity of their landed-gentry customers.

Lady Chatterley did have its moments of silliness, particularly towards the end when Constance and Parkin decorate each other’s genitalia with flowers and then run naked through the forest in the rain, like a satyr and nymph. But lovers, especially those in the full bloom of passion, can be silly, and this movie was otherwise so good, I can’t hold it against them.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Porn Stars

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They Shot Rock ’n’ Roll

Originally posted November 7, 2009.

David Byrne. © Marcia Resnick

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

A bespectacled Tina Weymouth was sitting on the edge of the stage, watching projected photos of CBGB pioneers, including David Johansen eating pie, the Ramones Ramoning, and Weymouth herself playing bass with the Talking Heads. Lively NYC rocker Jana Peri was explaining that she missed some of the photos at the opening of the Brooklyn Museum exhibit “Who Shot Rock & Roll” because she had to run to the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court to catch featured act Blondie (with a nonblond Debbie Harry). Photographer Danny Fields, endearingly incoherent, was lamenting the exhibit’s exclusion of a few worthy colleagues but was gleeful that he had walked off with a bunch of copies of the companion book (not realizing they weren’t giveaways).

Johnny Thunders eyes Cheetah Chrome. © Marcia Resnick

This was Exile on Bowery’s Tuesday-night celebration—with such luminaries as painter Duncan Hannah, designer Anna Sui, and former Talking Head Chris Frantz (husband of Weymouth) also on hand—of its seven photographer members whose work made the landmark exhibit, which covers 1955 to the present. As Jana Peri, who had her first record release party at CBGB’s, told me, the group Exile on Bowery provides a place for CBGB “alumni” of all sorts—performers, waiters, habitués—to regularly get together. The theme is always spelled out with CBGB OMFUG as its acronym, just as in the party invitation (below).

Here’s what one of the CBGB Seven, photographer Marcia Resnick, said of the event, held at the Bowery Electric: “What a blast from the past! The same approximate location, the same enthusiastic people, the images by the same photographers made it feel like some kind of time warp.” Take a look at Resnick’s evocative photos, shown above courtesy of the photographer, and you’ll find yourself on the Bowery—and in another decade—too.