Film Friday: How Much DID Wes Anderson Learn from Harold and Maude?

Last week, I watched Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby's 1971 cult classic, with my eldest, who is fourteen, fairly goth in taste, and possessed of a pretty morbid sense of humor.  I had intended to make a post about it for my first film friday in ages, but I let time slip, and then, as you probably read, death kind of took a hand and made me write.

When I watched the film, for the first time in perhaps decades, I was struck by its composition.  The story line is so funny of course, and when you watch it the first time -- I was probably fourteen -- you are fascinated by the odd couple, by Maude's eccentric joie de vivre, her almost Zen-like approach to other people's property, and her crazy driving, teaching Harold, whose obsession with death manifests in driving around in a hearse and staging fake suicides, to celebrate life and living.  And let's face it, the story is wonderfully funny, touching, and occasionally thought-provoking.  But pay attention to the choices Hal Ashby makes in how he frames his shots, and you realize how much of a specific type of world he is creating, especially the world associated with Harold's life.

One of my favorite early shots is from the first time we see Harold at a psychiatrist's office:

Here we see first of all Harold's subversion of the traditional position of the patient.  But we also notice that Harold is directly imitating the psychiatrist in clothing, manner, and even pose. (The actor playing the doctor is G.Wood, known for his appearances in both the film and tv versions of M*A*S*H, looking purposely ridiculous with a rug on his head.)

(I know this image doesn't show Harold in the exact same pose, but I'm too lazy to screen capture my dvd, so I'm just google-imaging. forgive.)

Harold's home is the perhaps stereotypical mansion of the bored/boring well-to-do.  Vivian Pickles' performance as Harold's mother is a brilliant portrayal of the society woman who has absolutely no idea who her son is and what he needs. Here's a shot from the first suicide Harold presents:

It is a castle filled with things, Harold's home, but there is no soul to it, just Mummy's overbearing, self-absorbed personality.  Yet Mrs. Chasen never becomes a caricature, like, say, Matilda's mom in the stage and screen adaptations of Roald Dahl's children's book.  Credit Ms. Pickles for that.

Maude is an intrusion into straight society, the society that holds on to rituals and to principles like private property.  In perhaps an obvious manner, Ashby shows this when Maude leaves a funeral that Harold is attending.  (For those who don't know the film, going to strangers' funerals is one of Harold's hobbies, and it is in so doing that the two meet.)

Maude refuses to accept the conventions -- easier to do of course when one is attending a total stranger's funeral.  Her home is warm, and full of living things and life, unlike the sterile stiffness of Harold's mansion:

One of the most famous tracking shots in the film occurs during a picnic the two friends have in a cemetery.  As the couple chat about life and death, the camera pulls slowly, as Cat Stevens' "Where to the Children Play" accompanies the shot, until we are in a sea of white stones:

Consider also the use of Stevens' "Trouble," during the "hospital montage," as Maude tells Harold at her 80th birthday celebration that she "took the pills" and will die at about midnight, and again the shots of Harold waiting and waiting for news if the doctors could save her.

The use of Stevens' music has contributed to the film's cult classic status, and here we might as well bring in the obvious point: how much Wes Anderson has "stolen" from Ashby's film.  The careful framing of Anderson's shots is the most apparent.  There are too many one can choose from, but here's one from Rushmore I love:

There he is, Max Fischer, against all odds, the genius misfit.  This is of course another element of Anderson's films that owes something to Harold and Maude.  His main characters are usually of the well-to-do, the disaffected wealthy rich who can't find their place in the world.  And  has anyone used music the way Anderson does that is so clearly influenced by Ashby's use of Stevens?  (As if to make the point, Rushmore features a Stevens song, though not one of his early-seventies folk-rock classics, but one of his sixties shiny pop tunes, "Here Comes My Baby.")

In showing the film to my eldest, I had hoped to impart some kind of "lesson" about enjoying life, something she has a hard time doing.  (I realize now, as a parent, that it's what being a teenager is.)  I also thought she'd find Harold's fake suicides gloriously sick, especially that involving his last computer-date, since she participates with Harold, and re-enacts Juliet's farewell speech. (The kid is a big Shakespeare fan, for which I am eternally grateful.)  Perhaps the film will grow on her, much like it has on a generation.  It's important to remember that the film was a disappointment at the box office, and that it was over time that it achieved cult status, due to art house screenings and of all things cable tv services; I recall seeing it for the first time on PRISM, which was the local cable tv's version of HBO at the time, only showing movies, uncut and commercial free.  (And that was all it showed: this was before such networks decided to produce original programming and cover live sporting events like boxing and MMA.)  That was about ten years after its theatrical release; for those of my era, who grew up very much in the shadow of the boomers and their culture, it felt like a real doorway into that world.  And at the time, I preferred that world to the one I was currently living in.  (I tended to avoid the John Hughes films at that time, though there were exceptions, and even as my kids now love The Breakfast Club and Ferris Beuller's Day Off, I must caution them that that's not how it was then.)  My eldest does see herself as a misfit, but I hope she can see the light at the other side of this tunnel of adolescent angst. And in the wake of my friend's death, it seemed somehow fitting that I would have been thinking of this film and its celebration of life just before finding out about the loss of one who really did live.

Maude is a Holocaust survivor; witness the tattoo on her arm.  She had everything taken from her, and perhaps that's why she "borrows" people's cars and takes a tree from a public building and give it more room to breathe by re-planting it in a field.  Some psychologists refer to two broad types of Holocaust survivors: those who did not die and those who lived.  The former were unable to fully get past those traumas, but the latter somehow managed to recover their spirit and would not give into the misery and evil they suffered.  Maude clearly is someone who lived.  And I want my eldest to understand that.

That said, she's still bummed at what Harold did to the Jaguar-hearse at the end of the film...

Note: I'm not the only one who sees this film's influence on Anderson.  It's pretty obvious, I suppose, but I hadn't seen Asbhy's film in ages, and it just struck me. 

Don't Give Up. Don't EVER give up. V Foundation auction today on ESPN

Today is ESPN’s auction day for the V foundation for cancer research.  I’m sure if you’ve listened at all to ESPN Radio you’ve heard the neat stuff you can bid on, and how all the dollars you donate will go directly to fund research projects into beating this bastard. The foundation was started by ESPN in conjunction with the late Jim Valvano, former men’s basketball coach at North Carolina State and ESPN analyst who died in 1994.  Valvano announced the formation of the foundation at the 1993 ESPY awards when he accepted the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.  The speech has become legend for a number of reasons, and to suggest that you are tired of hearing it is to suggest you’re tired of watching It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmas.

I was thinking how different in personality Ashe and Valvano were.  Ashe called his book Days of Grace for a reason; that’s the way he carried himself on the court and in his battle with AIDS.  He was a many of great dignity and character.  Valvano was a character all right, a paisan from New York who coulda been the next Pat Cooper if he’d tried.  He was manic, energetic, talking with his hands like we who came from the neighbuh-hood do. And always willing to laugh at himself.  (The most famous image of Valvano as coach comes from the seconds after his team pulled off the great upset of the University of Houston in the 1983 National Championship: amid the craziness of celebration after Lorenzo Charles put back Derek Wittenberg’s desperate heave into the basket for the win, the CBS cameras caught Valvano running on the court looking for someone to hug.) It seems like you could not have chosen a more different person from Ashe to win the first ever award in his name.

But both men were competitors.  Both men fighters to the end.  Valvano used the ceremony to urge for more funding of cancer research, which amazingly had been stagnant for years, even as the many foundations created to fight AIDS had achieved so much success in funding research.  He was determined to change that, and he did.  He almost didn’t get to attend the ceremony, let alone deliver the speech. He was in such pain from the bastard, that it was really touch and go.  But he managed to get to the stage, and with the help of his friends in the coaching fraternity, especially Dick Vitale and  Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, got down from the dais after draining himself with the passion to share his love of life.

The speech is memorable for many reasons, especially the moment where he tells everyone that there is a guy on a screen telling him he’s got 30 seconds.  I got tumors all over my body, you think I’m gonna care about a guy telling me “30 seconds! 30 seconds!”  He follows it with a classic Italian curse that makes the guyz from Brooklyn laugh and cry. He went on for another three minutes, insisting that we all enjoy every second we have to live, quoting Emerson, and announcing the foundation he was creating in his name, with its logo: don’t give up…don’t ever give up.

On this day, for my friend Jane, who like Jimmy V. lived a full joyous life in half the amount of years most of us get, I made my donation, and I hope others will too, if not to this foundation, than to whatever charity moves them.  Let’s beat this bastard.  

Weird Al does it again...

Okay, you think it would be easy to write a song parody.  And let's face it, there are many pretenders out there, especially in the age of YouTube.  But c'mon.  For thirty-five years, there has been one master, and that is Al Yankovic, the Weird-master.

I must work on a longer piece concerning Weird Al, but he's got a new record out, called Mandatory Fun, and as part of the promotion, he's releasing eight videos in eight days. (Not sure if we're supposed to celebrate with candles.)  The first two are out, and they are just dead-on. 

Yesterday, "Tacky,"  a parody of Pharrell's "Happy,"  came out, thanks to nerdist.com.   I'm still hypnotized by Al's pants from the opening verse.  For this track, Al had some friends lip-synch, and yes, Jack Black is last and funniest, but give props to Kristen Schaal and Al's old buddy Margaret Cho for their moves, too. What's great about the lyrics he comes up with here is that they show a man fully in touch with the pop culture of the era.  "I instagram every meal I've had," he declares. and later, "I would live-tweet a funeral, take selfies of the deceased." 

Today's release took on Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines."  It's one of those cases where the imagery of the video is almost necessary to appreciate the humor. (It helps to have an English degree, which luckily, I do.)  Where Thicke had a number of controversies associated with the song and its video, Al doesn't give us any thing but text text and more text, as he tackles internet writing, which is prone to a real butchering of the language. 

Funnily enough, some of the computer screen images he shows us take us back to Windows 95, but it makes sense because 1)it suggests that the singer is of an era before social media reduced our words to tiny characters and 2) that little joke about the "biohazard bin" next to the recycle bin is a perfect throwaway (so to speak). 

I still don't know how he does it, really.  Hell, I wrote more than a few song parodies in high school and college, some of which I'm even proud of (like my "Money for Nothing" parody that rips McDonald's), but then I grew up.  Al has made a full career and has pulled it off brilliantly.  I suppose he has an advantage in that he works with the contemporary music scene, so that his act is not all that tired. He's moved from the Knack ("My Bologna") to MJ ("Eat It" and "Fat") to Coolio ("Amish Paradise"), but even as he's done so, he's looked backward musically to stay up on the contemporary cultural scene (e.g. the Star Wars songs "Yoda" and "The Saga Begins").   And he's also given the great DJ Doctor Demento new material for decades.  (It was the good Doctor who discovered Al back in 1980.)  I'm just in awe.  Imagine if the Stones could be this inventive.  (Mick and Keith, or even Fred and Barney.)

Elegy for Jane

 (apologies to Roethke)

My God, Tom, she wrote in my yearbook, what the HELL are we going to do with our lives now? That was always one of my favorite entries.  On rare occasions when I'd look back at it, when I'd visit my parents' house in Lancaster, it always brought a smile.

My friend Jane died yesterday.   (No, that’s not meant to be an answer to her question.)  We’d only lately been in touch, like a lot of people in the Class of 85, who used Facebook to reconnect.  I once swore I’d never go back to a reunion, but largely thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, I did.   Jane and I were in many classes together, and she was always good fun.  We didn’t hang out together after school, but she was someone capable of making you laugh, even when the joke came at her expense (which I confess happened more than a few times courtesy of yours truly).  

I had a chance to talk with her quite a bit at the reunion, and at the after-party at the bar near the convention center where the reunion had been held.   As the two of us wandered to the back of the pub, where the outside garden was, she looked around and then at me and said, oh wait, this is for the young crowd over here! While twenty-five years had passed since graduation, we fell into conversations about what the hell we’d been doing with our lives so easily, smiling and laughing, enjoying life and one another’s company.  Seeing her again was one of my fondest memories of that reunion. 

A few weeks after the reunion, I had lunch with another classmate of mine, and we both shared one observation:  the gals looked great, and the guys much less so, ourselves included!  I’m forty pounds heavier than I was, and while I have my head by choice every summer, more than a few of us don’t have to waste their time combing.   Yes, the women probably spent more time getting ready to be seen – stereotype that that is – but Jane struck me as Belle of the Ball totally without effort, just by showing up and being a presence.  Jane was a very tall person, as the pic above shows, and at the reunion, she seemed to own the joint, the years of global travel and success wearing so well on her dress and her face.   In the pic below, that's Jane in the back, arms upraised in joy, triumph, or just for the fuck of it.) 

A year or so later, when my family were contemplating a trip to London, we posted a few concerns about being there so soon after the riots.  Jane generously offered us her place in Amsterdam to use, and while we decided to go to London anyway (which was not a problem at all, safety-wise), I never forgot that kindness and hoped one day to avail myself of it. 

Last summer,  I happened to post that I would be in town, bringing my kids to visit my parents, and asked if anyone was up for a meet.  Jane happened to see the post as she was traveling by train to her parents, and we messaged back and forth and set up a breakfast date, right in downtown, at a place whose name is also its location, On Orange.  We did some more catching up, and that’s when she told me she had skin cancer, stage four. She’d come to Sloan Kettering to consider her treatment options and was discussing the matter with her parents.   It wasn’t public knowledge on FB, and I appreciated that she confided in me.  (It may have been coincidence that she saw my post, but karma’s a funny thing.)  I’m pretty sure I bought, and I’d buy her a dozen more breakfasts in town if she would only still be alive.  Eventually she let the word out, and posted pictures of her recent visits, having undergone her chemo treatments.  She never talked much about her battle, and I don’t even know where she got her treatments, whether in Europe or the States.  (She was a global citizen, living in Holland and Tanzania among other places.)  The last time we spoke directly was at that breakfast.  (I was recently in town visiting, and I parked near the place, and thought of Jane, hoping she was okay, not knowing that she was leaving us soon.)

This is the point where the writer says something pompously profound about life, but I don’t have much.  I’m grieving for my friend, who returned to my consciousness for such a short time after twenty-five years of being a nice memory in a yearbook, long enough to remind me how much fun a person she was, long enough to make me write about my grief, long enough to make me decide to post a blog, something I’ve not done since about November. (Looks like one of the last things I wrote was after Lou Reed died.)  Maybe she’ll be just a push to get me return to writing more than assignments and letters of recommendation.  Maybe not.   Maybe I’ll reflect on what the hell I have been doing with my life, though having been in and out of therapy for so long, some days it seems like that’s all I ever do. All I know is, I’m grateful our paths crossed once more before she had somewhere else to go, and right now it just hurts that she's gone. 

(A note on the Roethke: technically, an elegy is a poem, not a prose piece, honoring the dead.  And Roethke’s poem about “my student, thrown by a horse,” is certainly richer than what you’ve just read, more concentrated an expression of grief from a speaker who is in an awkward emotional role, “neither father nor lover,” yet still pained at the loss of a very young life.  The title of the poem, which I regularly teach, came to me before I even contemplated Roethke’s language and mood. I suppose I connect to the speaker, in the sense that my affection for Jane was at a distance, even more a distance than the speaker has with his student.  But Roethke manages to make his elegy about Jane as much as it is for her. I’m too connected to my own sadness to pull that off, preferring to let the pictures show you my friend.  But it’s a good excuse to send you off to read a great poem by a great writer, who also left the world too soon.)

Film Friday: Recording and Re-presenting JFK

On the 50th anniversary of his assassination, I wanted to reflect a bit on the many different ways we have seen John F. Kennedy on the screen, in his lifetime, his assassination, and in countless fiction films and documentaries ever since.  It's not especially a comprehensive discussion; if you want an interesting book on the subject of the assassination, you can check out a copy of my friend Art Simon's Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film. But this is more or less just what has come to mind as this anniversary has approached. 

"We all killed Kennedy."

"I shouted out 'who killed the Kennedys?'
 when after all, it was you and me."

The first quote comes from Doug Hall of Ant Farm, a radical art/media group that created a series of challenging independent video art works about media culture.  The line comes near the end of a video collaboration with T.R. Uthco (get it?), called The Eternal Frame.  The video involves the group recreating the motorcade that went through Dallas -- except with only one car, carrying the President and Mrs. Kennedy, and Texas Governor Connolly and his wife. After the final recreation is completed, with people watching the car go by and crying as they conflated present and past, an obviously fake reproduction with the real thing, Doug Hall, who played Kennedy -- referred to as "the Artist-President" because he's not the real thing and because he seems very aware of his and Kennedy's own existence now only as an image -- is being asked to reflect on the exercise, and also on Kennedy's death.  When asked if he knew who killed the President, he responds: I don't care anymore.  It doesn't matter.  We all killed Kennedy.

The second quote you probably know very well; it's sung by Mick Jagger, in one of his most notorious guises, in the Rolling Stones classic "Sympathy for the Devil." (Jagger said the phrase came from a line from French symbolist poet Baudelaire.)   I don't think I'd fully appreciated the implications of the line until after Princess Diana's tragic death: it was the obsessive desire the public had for images of the Princess that led to the circumstances that put her in that car being chased by tabloids, leading to a terrible accident that left her dead.  And that, I think, is what Jagger meant by those lines.  Because Kennedy and become a media icon, the first Television President, and because the public had such a strong desire to see him and be close to him, Kennedy was more exposed in Dallas than he should have been.  (His increased visibility also was likely a source of anger for his enemies, inspiring at the very least the contemplation of killing him -- I'm no conspiracy buff, but let's face it, most leaders draw the ire of people who wish to kill them.)

Kennedy began to make a name for himself in the midfifties, even challenging Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic party nomination in 1956.  The media love affair with Kennedy began even before the famous tv debates against Richard Nixon (who had been pretty good at using media prior to these debates).  In 1960, a crew from Time-Life began following around the two main candidates seeking to win the Wisconsin primary election for the Democrats, Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.   What made this crew different was that the equipment was innovative, having created the ability to record images with synchronous sound but still using lightweight cameras.  The result: Primary, a film that not only helped Kennedy, but helped put a new group on the map: Drew Associates, led by Robert Drew and with camera work by some of the legends of the American Direct Cinema movement.   (Go here for a short clip that helps situate the film in its specific context.) Drew and his team -- Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker -- made numerous films, broadcast either on ABC or on local stations that Time-Life owned, after Kennedy entered the White House.  The most notable one was Crisis: Behind a Presidential Committment , which concerned the integration of the University of Alabama.  (JFK is not the real star in the film; his brother Bobby, as Attorney General, is, along with his aide working in Birmingham, Nick Katzenbach.) Kennedy admitted, "we would be nowhere without [television]." 

 It was JFK's enormous popularity, created in no small measure by television, that allowed him to be put in the cross-hairs in Dallas.  And his death at a young age has led him to become even more of an icon of the tragedy of youth, alongside Marilyn Monroe, James Dean,  and others who leave us to fill in the blanks as to what their lives could have been.  The eternal frame, indeed.

Obviously, the most famous images of the assassination came from the camera of Abraham Zapruder, because it gives us the horrific shot that Kennedy took to the head that without question killed him. (You can click here to see what comes up if you put a search of "Zapruder film" at YouTube.)  As Simon observes in his discussion of the film and its use by Time-Life, by the Warren Commission, the New Orleans trial of Clay Shaw (dramatized in Oliver Stone's controversial film), and in other contexts, that these few frames were once thought to be an "unimpeachable" witness to the murder, but ultimately, we are unable really to come to any conclusions about what happened.  This film became the most famous home movie ever made. (Yes, even more famous than Justin Bieber's early videos.) And in a sense because of that, the images of the assassination don't lead us to the truth. We project too much of what we want to see in them.  The irony of Stone's film is that he very carefully manipulates the viewer even as he shows how the public could be manipulated in 1963. 

Kennedy's assassination generated many historic images, as did his funeral.  It was covered nationwide, and in a sense paved the way for the ways that the networks covered the funerals of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968.  The funeral gave us young JFK junior in that legendary pose, saluting as his father's casket passed him. 

Since 1963 there have been numerous considerations of the assassination.  Obviously, there have been numerous news stories about possible conspiracies leading to Kennedy's death.  The publishing world is loaded (as it were) with books about the assassination, and the internet has been a boon to the buffs, who can connect to one another much more easily now than ever before.  Oliver Stone's JFK is probably the most notorious film from Hollywood, but the assassination also was used by the avant-garde.  I mentioned Ant Farm; also, noted avant-garde film-maker Bruce Conner presented images of Kennedy for his film Report. In this film, Conner intersperses images of Kennedy arriving at Love Field with other images of that day with a sound track of a news broadcast covering Kennedy's assassination.  The film ends with an earlier report of what happened with Kennedy at Love Field, including an eerie moment when Kennedy has, impromptu, gone over to a crowd of supporters to shake their hands, much to the surprise and dismay of the Secret Service. The word "report" does not just refer to news reports but also to the sound of gunfire, a clever pun. 

Why so many images of Kennedy, of his death? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that so much of the information collected by the authorities over two separate investigations -- the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late seventies -- is sealed up, and no plans have been made to release them.  When you keep things in secret, invoking whatever excuses governments use, you just play right into the hands of Conspiracy Theory Guy. We can never know the truth of those events because too many people question everyone's evidence.  There's no real trust established.  The assassination ushered in a new era -- no, not just "THE Sixties," as many aging boomers like to tell ya -- but one in which average citizens were able to try producing a counter-narrative to the Official Story.  As marginalized as the assassination buffs may have been, they are the early wave of those interpreting mass mediated images critically, especially those that support an assessment of a crime that the critics deem improbable.  Nowadays, everyone has a forum to share unsolicited opinions, and everyone can break down other discourses to try to seize the ole talking stick, but such a practice existed in crude form fifty years ago. 

Like I said, this is no definitive consideration.  But amid the saturation of anniversary specials all over mass media, it's worth understanding what all these images really mean.

Film Friday: Who You Gonna Call?

About a  month ago (or was it yesterday?) I finally got to show my kids Ghostbusters.  Now they understand half of what I say. 

The movie came out in what for me was the Summer of Movies.  I don't think I've ever been to movie theaters as much in one season as I was then. I wasn't working much, and I had enough allowance money to pay for what was then probably about three or four bucks a ticket.   A lot of pretty awesome movies came out that summer, and a few crappy ones, but Ghostbusters is the one we all go back to, the one we quote obsessively.

It was one of many projects Dan Ackroyd had conceived for himself and John Belushi before Belushi died.  (Another one was Spies Like Us.)  Once Bill Murray was signed on, Ackroyd and Harold Ramis (who'd directed Murray in Caddyshack and co-starred with him in Stripes) re-worked the script, with probably a little help from director-producer Ivan Reitman.  It was one of the first comedies to use bigger-budget special effects, which were pretty cool in 1984 (and impressive enough for my kids nearly 30 years later).

The story is engaging if completely silly.  It probably is of a piece with Reagan-era entertainment, as the left-leaning critics of the old British film magazine Movie maintained, with interdimensional apocalypse standing in for the nuclear one that pop bands were writing about, and a pretty crude, boyish sexism to boot.  But of course what matters is the personality of Bill Murray, and the way his cohorts feed off him.   After that, it's all about the classic lines:

(i know some of these are from the inferior sequel, but what the hey.) 

And of course the most important advice anyone has ever given anyone in the movies:

Oh, How, I Miss Him: Lou Reed (1942-2013)

So this is what I have to write about after nearly three months away.  That Lou Reed is dead and that that fact totally sucks.  

I mentioned in my last blog post that I was in quite some agony, thanks to a badly pulled back, followed by not properly taking care of it, followed by an acupuncture treatment that eased the muscle pain by touched the sciatic nerve and left it impossible for me to sit for more than five minutes at a time.  (More about all that some other time.)  I had figured that, when I got better, I’d tell the whole saga, you know, write about a movie or two, etc.  But the pain has subsided enough only recently, and then this old bastard dies on us.  

Okay, let’s be fair: for someone like Lou, 71 is a pretty good run.  And also to be fair: I feel kinda crappy that he had a liver transplant in the same way that it was probably crappy that Mickey Mantle got one near the end of his life.  Not only did they do much of the liver damage to themselves, but they were probably on the outside age range of liver transplant recipients, and I wonder might someone else have benefitted from the donated organs.  (I am fully aware that organ transplants are complicated because of tissue matches and all that, and it’s probably true that the recipient lists were not rigged, but still.  I understand the feeling that somehow guys who damage their livers are less deserving of a new one than those who have lead cleaner lives.)  

But enough about the messiness of death and the efforts to prolong life.  I’m trying to explain here why Lou Reed matters.  At least to me, if not to any other soul.

That was always part of the point of Lou’s recordings: it’s not always the kind of music you play at parties, but rather the kind you take home and listen to privately, connecting to it (or not) the way one relates to reading a novel.  It was the immediacy that Lou was always after, the one-to-one effect on his audience. (That’s why he mixed the third Velvet Underground LP in such a way that made it seem like you were listening in a closet -- that mix was rejected by Verve, but in the box set from the nineties, it’s Reed’s “closet mix” you hear.)   His best stuff was not something to be glossed over quickly, like the disposable songs he wrote for Pickwick Records in the early sixties. You took the record home and played it, over and over.  

Though I was a kid in New York in the Seventies, I hadn’t heard much of Lou’s music; much of my musical taste was shaped by my dad’s record collection -- a collection Lou probably would have approved, with its emphasis on doo-wop.  I was too young to fully comprehend the punk scene itself, let alone realize who the “Godfather of punk” (and glam) (and electronica) (and metallica) (and grunge) (and New Wave) (and who knows what else) was. In my teen years, the radio it doth play one of the greatest triumphs in the history of the charts: a song where a character stays cool even during oral sex, a song that somehow gets into the top twenty.  (I’m still trying to figure that one out.) Lou was about to embark on a pretty successful run during his final years at RCA: The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts, New Sensations, and the import Live in Italy. And subscribing to the usual magazines of the day, I knew all those records got four- and five-stars and A-minuses and B+’s.  What made me pick these records up was hearing that rapid minimalist beat that begins by quoting from the Contours’ “Do You Love Me” and proceeds to  tell the same basic point: you do what you wanna do, but I loves ya, Suzanne, which was a staple on college radio stations.  

While New Sensations , featuring a video-game console cover and a user-friendly sonic interface (“My Red Joystick” perhaps overdoing things), was another attempt by Lou to make the charts (cf Sally Can’t Dance), the fact is he made his records the way he wanted to. No compromises.  Take no prisoners.  Once, feeling quite arrogant in conversation with (I believe) the legendary critic Lester Bangs, Lou said, “my shit is better than most people’s diamonds.”   He was not all that off the mark, really, though it does depend on your definition of shit.  If  you’re like most people, who can’t stand the noise of Metal Machine Music (and lots of fans can’t), then there are a lot of diamonds out there for you to point out.  (I’ve listened to MMM straight through only once; it’s not for the faint of heart.)  Was it a joke on RCA?  Or his fans, the way that Dylan deliberately made Self-Portrait? Who knows.  But Lou was never one to care all that much about what anyone thought.  

And Lou was so fucking cool that in the middle of the 1980s, when critics were bashing rock stars for selling their songs to be in soda and beer commercials (and Neil Young got in on the act, too, mocking everyone with his hilarious “This Note’s For You”), Lou did an ad for Honda scooters that used “Walk on the Wild Side” and was the coolest commercial by a long shot.  There he is, at the end of a montage of streetlife scenes, telling us, “hey -- don’t settle for walking,” in that Noo Yawk accent of his.   We might have bashed Clapton and Brian Wilson and Steve Winwood for being whores, but Lou could do whatever fuck he wanted and that was okay by us.  And this weekend, visiting my parents’ house, I found this in a box of my old stuff: the print Honda ad, with Lou standing so cool next to the scooter, the tag line printed below as a caption.  Lou is standing near the docks in Brooklyn, and behind him is another New York legend no longer with is: the World Trade Center’s twin towers.  

I was in college when i bought the Velvet Underground catalog, playing them with a passion normally reserved for my Stones records. They were more cohesive than most of Lou’s solo work, and even Lou came to understand that, that being in a band -- even when you’re its leader -- is really magical.  something special happened When Lou, John, Sterl, and Moe laid down those first two records. I hate to repeat old truisms, but dammit: what makes the VU’s career so amazing is that each of their four studio albums was brilliant on completely different terms.  The Nico album is a stunning mix of gorgeous but weird pop songs and arty epic noise/poems.  It should have been a hit, but no one got it.  the west coast scene called the band “the virus from new york.” (Never trust a hippie! Even Frank Zappa -- fellow doowop fan -- told us that.)  White Light/White Heat is the prototype for all metal machine music to come. Then that third record, with Doug Yule: god, what beautiful ballads, softly sung.  “Pale Blue Eyes.” nuf said, except there’s that great experiment “the murder mystery” and Moe’s first vocal, “after hours.” and Lou’s rhythm guitar on “What Goes On.” And the poetry of “Some Kinda Love.”  You get the idea. And then the last album, made when the group was fragmented, without Moe on drums (unofficial maternity leave), but songs that are rock and roll standards.  “Rock and Roll” is about me, Lou famously said.  and for a lot of us, too.  

So it’s no dishonor if Lou could rarely match the glory of the Velvets.  He certainly had a more productive solo career than John Fogerty, who was even more dominant in Credence than Lou was in the Velvets. And except for Plastic Ono Band and maybe All things must pass, the Beatles’ solo work was rarely compelling. Entertaining, yes, but necessary? Not really. The Blue Mask is necessary.  Transformer is necessary. “Street Hassle” is totally fucking necessary.   And New York is vital. And the live records are pretty damn awesome too. Everyone knows the raucousness of Rock and Roll Animal, but the Lou-Quine exchange on Live in Italy may be the closest Velvets sound Lou ever made after  1970. And Perfect Night, with Lou using a beautiful sounding acoustic guitar amped up and so clean that it sounds electric, contains devastating versions of a range of hits, esp. “New Sensations” and “Dirty Blvd.”

Speaking of “Dirty Blvd,” I was in college in Pittsburgh when New York came out.  I was already accepted into grad school back in Brooklyn when I bought the record.  The sound of course is classic Lou -- like he says on the back of the jacket -- you can’t beat two guitars, bass, drum. But those great images, starting with the first song: “a diamond crucifix in his ear/is used to help ward off the fear/that he has left his soul in someone’s rented car.”  The moving tribute to the Village characters of the “Halloween Parade,” and how AIDS has created such bittersweetness. (When I did move to New York, friends of friends were having parties when their tests came back negative. It was a scary decade or two.)  Some of the lyrics betray what one critic called Bono-itis -- a little social consciousness stuff that’s less cohesive, no doubt an influence of being on the Amnesty International tour with U2 in 86 -- but he nails his targets hard. “There’s no such things as human rights/when you walk the new york streets.”  The multiple references to “the Statue of Bigotry” still resonate the age of stop and frisk laws and stand your ground laws and a War on Poverty turned-War on Poor People.  Do The Right Thing was released that summer; things got ugly.  But I was thrilled to come home.  (studying with a famous poet who’d bared his brains to heaven under the El was a nice deal, too.)

As I said, the records carry personal meanings for each of us, like a great novel or poem. “Dirty Blvd.” -- in its live version from Perfect Night -- was a song I played relentlessly loud, in my headphones, the night that the cops who shot West African immigrant Amadou Diallo in front of his apartment building were acquitted in  Albany.   “Did you ever have RAGE in your heart?” Lou asks us.  Goddamn I did. Diallo was just another Black man whose life was not worth shit.  Defenders of the cops -- who fired 41 shots at Diallo -- point out that it was a split-second reaction, since Diallo (they say) was reaching into his jacket pocket for his ID but of course might have been going for a gun.  But the problem was far worse than this: the cops thought he resembled a rape suspect -- which he did not, except that both had dark skin.  it pointed to an underling assumption of many cops in new york -- and the carte blanche they felt they had under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. (Ironic, perhaps, since he fought tooth and nail with the cops over contracts every year.  I taught cops at John Jay College, and they often were pissed that Rudy exploited the cops for his Law and Order tough-guy rhetoric but didn’t want to pay them what they deserved.)  and this is why I believed that Giuliani was the one really responsible for Diallo’s death.   But all I could do, after listening to Lou over and over and over, was write a poem, out there somewhere on the web if you hunt for it.  

I could blather for hours about Lou, and probably should.  But I’ll finish with one last personal story.  When I was tutoring at the Writing Center, a fellow tutor was trying to explain to another student she was assisting about the idea that New York City is sometimes spoken about as another kind of Rome-in-decline.  I wasn’t working with anyone, so I listened in, and not being able to help myself, I just quoted: “Manhattan’s sinking like a rock.” And she heard me and finished the line: “into the filthy Hudson what a shock.”  (“They wrote a book about it, said it was like ancient Rome…”)  And that’s how a dear friendship began and has continued for over 20 years, over lots of drinks and smokes and a few tears over loves gone sour but many more joys over families -- she’s got a great son, and I’ve got two great kids, and facebook and Lou keep us all close. I haven’t stopped thinking about Lou Reed since I heard he died.  But maybe that’s all right. Despite all the amputations.

I’m not linking anything: he’s everywhere right now.  Just google him your damn self.