Adam D. Roberts

Eyes Wide Shut

When Stanley Kubrick's final movie came out, there was so much buzz--Nicole and Tom together on screen in Kubrick's last cinematic gesture--that all that media hoopla got in the way of what is a truly excellent film. I've seen it several times now and watching it again tonight, I marvel at how deeply probing and profoundly honest this film is about human relationships and how they're both reinforced and threatened by our conscious and unconscious desires. In the film, Tom Cruise plays Bill, a doctor with a foxy wife played by Nicole Kidman. Together they traverse the traditional bonds of marriage: they flirt with other people openly at a party, they smoke dope only rooms away from their precious red-headed daughter (whom, it seems, they both merely tolerate--there's not a lot of gushy love for their kid). What sets the movie rolling, though, is a frank discussion--a deadly discussion, really--about sex: Tom Cruise argues that men want sex only, that women aren't driven by desire. Nicole Kidman, aghast, says that Bill has no idea and then tells a story that is the psychological equivalent of murder: she confesses that last summer, on Cape Cod, she saw a sailor who she found so attractive, so wildly alluring, that she would've given up EVERYTHING--her marriage, her daughter--for just one night with him. The look on Tom Cruise's face is one of devastation: it's as if she ripped his heart out and pissed on it.

And the rest of the movie is how he deals with that. What has she done to him? How can he get revenge for a crime that she never really committed--a crime that took place in her head? Tom Cruise wanders the streets and begins an adventure of his own. Is it a quest for revenge? That's not clear, but by his actions it is clear that he wants sex: or to get close to sex. He goes home with a prostitute and just when they're about to, perhaps, get hot and heavy his cell phone rings: it's his wife. (Saved by the bell: we later learn the prostitute was HIV positive.) But the great set piece is yet to come: he finds a piano bar where an old friend of his, Nick Nightingale, is playing. And it's when Nick's set is over that he learns that Nick's next gig is at a secret party, the location yet to be revealed, where he'll play blindfolded. "But last time," Nick confesses, "the blindfold slipped" and the women, he tells Bill, were the most beautiful women he'd ever seen. Immediately Bill wants in. And it's Bill's lust for adventure, for danger, and--of course--for sex that brings him to the brink of travesty.

Anyone who's seen the movie knows what unfolds: the famous orgy scene. Its not so much an orgy scene, though, as a cultish nightmare. The sea of masks that Kubrick photographs so gorgeously is the sea of anonymous faces you see out when you go to a club or a bar or anywhere late at night in rooms filled with possibility and only the slightest hint of danger. That's why this movie is so brilliant: it captures the allure, the excitement and the palpable thrill of sexual adventure and then, of course, it demonstrates how such an adventure can destroy you and everything you love. (We see this play out every day on the news: a Florida Congressman just busted in a men's room for soliciting a cop.) By the end of the movie, one person is definitely dead, another is missing and Bill is face-to-face with the mask he was wearing the night before placed menacingly on his pillow. That mask, of course, is the face of Bill's unconscious desires and its physical presence causes him to unravel: he breaks down crying and says to Nicole that he'll tell her everything.

Filled with unforgettable images (the Christmas lights, the masks, the mysterious man following Bill down the street) and an unbelievably haunting and disarming soundtrack (that piano key hit over and over again, almost inducing madness), this is a movie worth revisiting. It may not be Kubrick's best, but it hits upon the best of Kubrick: notice how the camera outside the mansion gate is a bit like HAL in 2001, or how the little girl at the costume shop screams of Lolita, or how the sprawled out naked hooker in Sydney Pollack's bathroom matches the painting on the wall (done by Kubrick's wife) in a way reminscent of the painterly tableaus in Barry Lyndon. This is the work of a master and like all works done by masters, it deserves your attention.

Strangeness in Seattle

Rena and her boyfriend Aubrey were driving me back to their apartment where Craig and I are staying temporarily. Rena was telling us about a movie she saw last night called "Walking To Werner" about a guy who walks from Seattle to L.A. to meet Werner Herzog. "Sounds interesting," I said. And then Rena, pulling to a stoplight, looked out the window and said, "There he is."

"What?"

"That's him."

And the guy on the corner holding a video camera was the guy whose movie she was just talking about. She rolled down her window and told him she just saw his movie; he said, "Awesome" and then asked if we could drive him to the Post Office. We said, "Sure." He's working on a documentary about homeless people and he was looking for one particular guy who hangs out around there. Only when we got there the area looked really sketchy and he didn't think it'd be smart to get out there alone at this time of night. So we drove him to a bus stop and proceeded on our way home. I just watched the preview for his movie online (you can find it by Googling it) and it looks pretty cool. All in all, it was a strange and surreal Seattle evening.

I'm In Heaven

Those who read this blog want to know the real me. Well the real me loves musicals and this web page--BlueGobo--is like crack. It's an online musical theater video archive and some of these clips are like mannah from heaven--at least for someone who grew up listening to these soundtracks always wondering what the shows looked like onstage. My favorites, so far, are the clips from Guys & Dolls, the original Evita (Patti singing "Buenos Aires"), and--just for kitsch value--Merlin (the little boy in it is Christian Slater). Now I have to get back to my new drug of choice.

Pure Expression

Music week has been really good for me. Ten years ago I was writing music all the time--I was more confident as a musician, in many ways, than I was as a writer. I wanted to write musicals. In fact, in college I started to write one called "Joe: The Musical" which was a modern day version of the Biblical story of Job. The best song in it was a song called "Different Now"--my friend Meredith (Girl Robot!) sang it at her senior recital--and it featured the lyrics: "Joe would say I drink too often / oy: boray puree hagafen." (Those lyrics will only be funny to Jews. It's the Jewish prayer for wine.)

Then something very damaging happened in college. His name was Stephen Sondheim. My friend J.T., a very talented musician, came to listen to my score for "Joe: The Musical" and subtly told me that the chords were predictable, the harmonies simplistic, and the overall feel way too amateurish to be taken seriously. If I wanted to really do this, if I wanted to write musicals for a living, I needed to listen to the music of Stephen Sondheim. He was the master, the guru, the one all musical theater composers needed to bow down to before beginning their journey. It was time to drink the Kool-Aid.

And drink the Kool-Aid I did. I started with "Assassins," worked my way to "Company," "Into the Woods," "A Little Night Music." But it was "Sweeney Todd" that really won me over: it quickly became my favorite musical (especially after watching the Angela Lansbury version on DVD). That and "Merrily We Roll Along" are my two favorite Sondheim scores.

Yet, despite the alacrity with which I tackled Sondheim, it had a devastating effect on my ability to compose: it just made me feel inept, ill-equipped, out of my league. Unlike Sondheim, who studied music theory in college, I had no real music training. Like my dad, I play piano by ear. It's all instinct and impulse: I can hear a song and play it. I write songs by improvising on the keyboard. There's no logic to it, no rhyme or reason. And Sondheim is nothing if not rhyme and reason: his songs are the most worked-over of any musical theater composer I know. Which is why, quite frequently, they're so difficult to perform.

I just stopped. Here and there I'd write a song, but I no longer saw a future in it. I shifted my interests to just writing: there I was in complete control. I had a degree in Creative Writing, I could read all the books I'd need to read to be well read. I understood the parameters within which I was working; I knew the context in which I fit. And that's why, to this very day, I spend most of my time behind a computer keyboard, not a piano keyboard. With writing, I'm the Captain of the ship and I know how to steer it. I know what body of water I'm in. I know how to get from here to there.

But with Music Week, I'm starting to rethink this. It happened when I wrote "The Lasagna Song." I could've crafted an ultra-sophisticated, highly complex song about lasagna. Instead, I just started playing and singing that bouncy, joyous tune. It felt like a song a little kid might sing if he had to make up a song about lasagna. And that, to me, gets at the root of what I did well before and what I might be able to do well again: pure expression.

When I say "pure expression," I mean just that: the nexus between the idea that motivates the song and the song itself. The Beatles, for example, are masters of pure expression. You can imagine somebody walking down the street with the girl they like and spontaneously composing, "I wanna hold your hand." Conversely, you wouldn't expect someone at a barber shop to magically break out into "Pirelli's Miracle Elixer" from "Sweeney Todd." And that, to me, is the divide between two very different types of art: that which is crafty and that which is pure.

Great art is often a mixture of both. "The Catcher in the Rye" is a very raw book, but it's also very carefully composed. One doesn't doubt its authenticity, and yet there's still a measure of craft. Music is more forgiving. Many musicians aren't trained and, in many cases, their craft is simply a matter of tweaking forms that have existed for generations. Like the blues. To be a great blues artist, you don't have to innovate musically. You just have to have soul--there has to be pure expression.

What does that mean for me? It means that I feel more empowered now as a writer of songs. Will I give up my book writing career for musical theater? Nope: I'm definitely still more comfortable here at my computer than over there by the piano. But who knows, maybe one day inspiration will strike, and the music will come pouring out of my fingers. But for now, let's just sing about falafel.

Yoo-Hoo

You didn't think I could do it, did you? Well I just wrote a song using all 23 of your words! Here I am playing it and singing it. What do you think, could it make the Billboard charts? [And for those who missed the previous post, I asked readers to come up with words that I'd have to put in a song. Here's the result!] [Note: Apologies to Vicki who gave the word "kink" and I meant to use it in the second part of the chorus, so please substitute "kinky" for the second "sexy." Thanks!]

For those who want to sing along, here are the lyrics:

YOO-HOO
by Adam D. Roberts and the readers of adamdroberts.com

Don't be persnickety
I'm not a superfluous beefcake
I'm not forecasting aspects of our family meal.
Don't go to Michigan
with a bagel and a bottle of Jack
I'd be blue as a noodle
and purple as Ohio
and randy as an effervescent quack.
Yoo-Hoo
it's me at the piano
Yoo-Hoo
It's me looking sexy
Yoo-Hoo
It's me with antibiotic resistant tuberculosis
Yoohoo, it's me being niggardly
Yoohoo, it's me being sexy
Yoohoo, it's me with my zipper over the rainbow and on the way to Oz.

Song Challenge

Write a comment with a word in it--any word. I'll try to write a song using all the words people leave (or as many as I can). Woohoo!

The Producers

I just caught "The Producers" movie on TV. No, not the original "Producers" with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, but the new "Producers" with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick based on the Broadway musical. I saw (and loved) the musical the year it first opened--the year it won more Tonys than any show in history and that seemed to herald a new golden age for musicals--and yet this movie somehow depressed me. I think it depressed me because it was like a copy of a copy of a copy. The musical copied the original movie but magically improved upon it. This movie just copies the musical without new innovation and that's why it fails.

What Rob Marshall, the genius behind the "Chicago" movie, knows that Susan Stroman (the director of "The Producers" both on Broadway and on film) doesn't is how to make something theatrical cinematic. The reason "The Producers" was so wonderful on stage was that it was so theatrical: the big flashy numbers, the tap dancing old ladies, the giant mirror that descends so you can see the Nazis form a Rockette-like swastika. All of these things happen in the movie, and yet they lose their zip. A comedy must speed along or, in the dead air, you begin to think about logic and reason and the confection falls apart. "Chicago" is a comedy--a satire, really, of celebrity and America--and it's relentless with its speed, its sound, its images. And Rob Marshall (like Bob Fosse before him) knows how to edit. The cuts are rapid and smart--they're on beat with the dance. You'd think Susan Stroman, also a choreographer, would use editing to her advantage, but she doesn't. Many of the scenes in the "Producers" movie feel static. The whole movie, in fact, feels static, two-dimensional. Stroman's natural medium is the stage, and that's the tragedy here.

Still, as a preservation tool for the show itself (which has since closed) it's a useful artifact. If you didn't get to see The Producers on stage, this will at least allow you a glimpse of what it was like. And Nathan Lane is pretty wonderful--his comic timing and delivery matches that of all the great comics of the early 20th century: Laurel & Hardy, Bert Lahr. He's the best reason to see the movie. And of course "Springtime for Hitler" is a catchy tune...

Beefcake

Craig: You're a beefcake.

Me: Yes. I'm filled with beef and cake.

Rosie

Is there anything more riveting, right now, on television than Rosie O'Donnell on The View? "Lost" lost me months ago (though I hear the season finale was stellar); American Idol had its appeal--Paula's drunken cheerleading kept us laughing--but by the end I was disillusioned: I live in a country that put Melinda Doolittle in third place. "The Office" makes me laugh, but does it make me cringe, yell at the screen, bite my pillow? Nope. Only two shows do that: "The Sopranos" and, believe it or not, "The View"--especially Wednesday's episode when Rosie and Elizabeth went at it.

We are living in war times and in war times passions run high. In the 60 and 70ss, Americans vented those passions into rock n'roll, "Hair" and Woodstock. Today, what do we have? We have "The Daily Show" which uses humor to help us cope with the anger. Often, that's a great release--to highlight the absurdity of our government, this administration, the way the world feels about us now. Irony, sarcasm: it's how unpopular kids survive high school--they sit at the back of the class and mock. But sometimes you want those kids to stand up and put it all on the line, to give an emotional speech about how much it hurts every time someone trips them in P.E. class: that's why we have Rosie.

It's fascinating that Rosie got into the business as a comedian. It's like, as her career developed, she shed all those layers of emotional insulation that made her funny and amusing and revealed the vulnerable little girl within. She's a raw nerve now--a pulsing, desperate-to-be-heard raw nerve of emotion, anger, fire and brimstone. Does she make clear, concise, rational arguments? Not at all. On her blog, which I confess I've been reading a bit too regularly lately, someone wrote her a note: "I’m a Democrat and a patriot. You are making us who oppose the war look bad - please be more articulate. You do not sound educated, I hate to say that but please-enough with the political talk."

I both agree and disagree with that note. Rosie isn't so much a thinker as an expounder of liberal sound bites and statistics that she has memorized but doesn't really understand. "655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead," she says. "Who are the terrorists?" Well, wait a second Rosie. Isn't there a civil war going on in Iraq? If America leaves, won't those numbers continue to rise? Those aren't American-killed Iraqi civilians, those are just dead civilians. That's an important distinction.

Even more infuriating is when Rosie repeats a platitude that has no real intellectual basis: "War is not a solution," she'll say. "War is always bad." Well. Wait a second. Sure, war is unpleasant, no one likes war, but this country was founded because of a war. We fought a war with England. Then, to end slavery, we fought The Civil War. World Wars I and II were so profound that we still feel their ramifications today: and as a Jew, I can say I'm pretty glad we won that second one. War sucks, of course, no one likes it: but some wars are worth fighting. Unfortunately, we're in one now that most of the country agrees is a mistake. But we can't confuse that mistake with the sad truth that sometimes, to preserve and protect democracy both here and abroad, we have to fight a war.

Yet, despite Rosie's intellectual sloppiness, she has something almost all pundits lack: and that's heart. She is so purely emotional about these topics, so clearly invested to the depths of her soul, that it's actually kind of tragic: here is a person with all the power of a great performer (she's a compelling presence, whether you love her or hate her) and the rhetorical might of a very bright 12th grader. She wants to be taken seriously, but mostly we're just watching to see what she does or says next. And Elizabeth Hasselback is her perfect foil: perky, effervescent--she uses her high school sweetheart persona to bring out the bully in Rosie. And Wednesday's show was the show to end all shows.

I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. The two were primed for battle: for Rosie, it was all personal. She just wanted Elizabeth to let her off the hook, to stand up for her and say she doesn't think Rosie thinks the troops are terrorists. Elizabeth, towing the party line, wanted Rosie to be accountable for her words. The two, despite all their faults, made politics feel vibrant and vital. It's as if their entire relationship--a friendship that felt genuine, at least for the middle part of the show's run--hinged on this squabble over the Iraq war. And it's riveting.

What will happen next? Will Rosie not come back at all to finish her contract, as has been reported in The New York Post? Will Elizabeth and Rosie kiss and make-up on Tuesday, when they're all scheduled to return? I'm not sure. But I know one thing for sure: I'll be there watching. (Well, I'll watch it later in the day on Tivo.) Who needs an action thriller to kick off the summer when you have Rosie's last few weeks on "The View"?

New York Moments

Because of the "video capture" feature on my camera, I have recorded two indelible New York moments to share with you non-New Yorkers. New York is my favorite city in the world and sometimes it's difficult to explain that to non-New Yorkers who come here and visit Times Square and think we live in a Disney theme park with angry cab drivers and a giant M&Ms store. If you could see New York through MY eyes (cue cheesy song: "New York Through My Eyes") you would be out late on a Thursday night and arrive at the Union Square Subway station at 2 am and find this girl dancing. That's Craig watching her:

It's odd isn't it? A little disturbing? True. But it's also fantastic. It's what makes living in a city great: the surprise, the way everyone's part of a large community (all the people watching her were equally amused). You turn a corner in a subway station and POOF, there's a girl rocking out.

Or you go to the MoMA (this was a few weeks ago) and while watching Andy Warhol's Empire (a 14 hour video of the Empire State Building at night) a little girl creeps on to the bench in front of you and puts on a little show:

I love how the video behind her is incredibly still and how this little girl is incredibly restless. It's just one of those moments that makes life in this city wonderful: it comes out of nowhere and takes you by surprise. And, true, it could happen in another city where Andy Warhol's "Empire" was showing, but for some reason--when it happened--it felt like it could only happen here. I love New York.