Robert David Sullivan

Critics, binges, and blind spots

New Yorker music critic Ben Greenman writes about the challenge of keeping up with everything in his field (using the band Vampire Weekend as an example), a problem that television critics are getting more familiar with:

So what’s a critic do when he or she must venture forth into a world filled with unheard acts? There are roughly three options. The first involves dogged and vigilant compensatory research: maybe there’s a week spent filling in gaps regarding mid-seventies Genesis, or late-nineties R.E.M. I once knew a critic who would set aside a week each summer to listen to all the albums he thought he had missed through the first half of the year, and another week around the holidays to catch up on the second half of the year. After many years like this, he began to suffer from anxiety attacks, which may or may not have been related. The second option involves critics pretending they have listened to albums that they in fact have not heard. This is called “lying,” and it goes on a fair amount. [...] The third, and easiest, way for a critic to deal with gaps in her history is just to leave them there. [...]

That first option is often taken by TV critics and viewers, leading to the disgusting habit of "binge watching" a series over a few days. I agree with Matthew Gilbert: "The binge [...] tamps down your imagination, as it eliminates those between-episode interstitial periods when your impressions run wild."

I have some blind spots as a TV critic. I've only seen a few scattered episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, missed out completely on Downton Abbey until only a couple of months ago, and have yet to see anything of Homeland, Parenthood, Revenge, or Scandal. I've been making detours to less popular shows (Enlightened, The Hour, Rectify) that took up a lot of time because they demanded to be seen in their entirety. But even when these shows grab my attention, I feel that they'd lose their power if I watched three or four episodes in a day. I wouldn't appreciate the subtleties of character development or enjoy things like the closing-credits music that put a button on each episode. I probably wouldn't notice plot holes as much if the episodes came at me quicker, but if I want to give my mind a rest, I can go to the movies.

As platforms for TV series proliferate — Netflix! Amazon! — my blind spots will surely grow. But it's still worse for a music critic, who is expected to know every major artist of the past 50 or 60 years. It's otherwise regrettable that television is so forgetful about its past (just try getting a lot of web traffic for an article about a show that aired last century, other than Star Trek and Seinfeld), but I can feel safe knowing that almost all of the buzzworthy shows on TV now will be completely forgotten in a few years.

Boring Game of Thrones; luckless Lawrence, Mass.; missing out on culture

UPDATE: Hello, Game of Thrones fans! You've made this my most-viewed post of the year, even though I hardly say anything about the series. Take a look at my other TV posts and you'll see I don't hate everything. I even watch a lot of stuff before writing about it!

• HBO has already renewed the epic fantasy Game of Thrones, despite unimpressive ratings for Sunday's debut episode. Vulture reports that HBO is hoping for word-of-mouth to boost the ratings, as it did for True Blood. I skipped the show myself (instead catching up on The Killing and Justified), partly because fantasy is a tough sell for me and partly because of awful publicity photos like the one at right. Most people watch TV series for interesting characters (either fictional ones like the vampires on True Blood or historical figures like the ones on Rome), not for costume design or horse training. Everything about the marketing for Game for Thrones suggested that the show is about spectacle, not character, so I'm not surprised that it's having trouble reaching viewers unfamiliar with the books it's based on.

• Gabrielle Gurley has a good piece about the cursed city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the new issue of CommonWealth. What strikes me is how many of the mill city's disadvantages can be attributed to its small geographical size (seven square miles). As Gurley points out:

The wealthy men who made their fortunes in Lawrence did not invest in the city by founding museums or universities, or even by building mansions in exclusive pre­cincts like the elites did in Boston’s Back Bay or even in nearby Lowell’s Belvidere neighborhood. Immigrants un­wittingly followed this pattern. Since Lawrence, a city of about seven square miles, did not have many areas with the spacious homes and yards that newly successful workers wanted, those that made it moved to Andover, North Andover, Methuen, or elsewhere.

Lawrence's bite size also means that it's stuck with a very weak tax base, heavy demands on social services, and increasing ethnic segregation (it's now about 70 percent Latino). It's a core with no apple around it. The sensible thing would be to consolidate Lawrence with some of the surrounding towns to create a city with a more stable economic base, but such a thing is unthinkable in New England, so Lawrence has to rely on state aid (including the recent "rescue package" of up to $35 million in loans).

• NPR's Linda Holmes tells us to just accept the fact that we're never going to consume all the culture that's expected of us:

Surrender ... is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn't have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. Surrender is the moment when you say, "I bet every single one of those 1,000 books I'm supposed to read before I die is very, very good, but I cannot read them all, and they will have to go on the list of things I didn't get to."

Holmes prefers this sense of surrender to what she calls "culling," or ignoring entire art forms or genres as part of an "well, I don't care about that anyway" defense mechanism against missing out on stuff.

I suppose I do some culling; I just don't care about reality TV shows or sci-fi fiction, and I'm never going to get into heavy metal music. But if someone whose judgment I trust raves about a particular example of an art form I don't care about, I'm going to watch or listen to it. So I love the movie Tremors and Janelle Monáe's dance song "Tightrope" (to take two very random examples) even though I'm poorly versed on horror flicks and contemporary R&B music. It was just fate that I stumbled onto them, and I'm fine with that.

Maine as Tea Party Central, gay penguins in libraries, Graceland turns 25

Some stuff to talk about if you end up in a cartoon graveyard this evening:

• Mother Jones and other sites have praised the Los Angeles Times for the "unusually clear and accurate headline" pictured at right ("GOP governors say they have a recipe for recovery/Reduce healthcare aid to the poor and give tax breaks to the wealthy"). It's been less commented-upon that the state of Maine serves as Exhibit A in the story about Tea Party principles being put into action. The "pugnaciousness" of Gov. Paul LePage is one reason, but it can't hurt that the state is blessed with a slogan — "The Way Life Should Be" — that started as a benign tourism marketing tool but can seem rather arrogant when a steamroller-type governor is standing beneath it, as in the LA Times photo. BTW, if Maine and New Hampshire ever merge, the new state slogan can be "Live the Way Life Should Be or Die."


• The American Library Association has released its Top Ten List of the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010. No. 1 was And Tango Makes Three, about two gay penguins raising a chick in the Central Park Zoo (not to be confused with the two gay penguins in Pawnee, Indiana, that got married on Parks and Recreation). The ALA lists the most common reasons for challenging the books, and "political viewpoint" is cited for only one book in the Top 10: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which makes the unpatriotic and unashamedly anti-Ayn-Randian argument that a lot of poor people have to take terrible jobs that don't give them much chance to get out of poverty.


• Paul Simon's album Graceland turns 25 this summer, and Nell Boeschenstein has a great essay about it at This Recording. ("We also recognize not just our parents in the words of those songs, but ourselves and our own impending midlives that loiter like shortening shadows on the horizon. ") It makes me want to find a cassette tape of the recording so I can listen to it the same way I did in college, when I was already acting as if I had hit midlife.

Talking Heads revenge, stupid punditry, hating on the Greenway, etc.

Here's what to talk about tonight if you feel the need to make factual statements:

• Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (at right) was legally forced to release a video apologizing for using a Talking Heads song, "Road to Nowhere," during his failed campaign for the US Senate without songwriter David Bryne's permission. Crist may have passively-agressively gotten back at Bryne by erroneously referring to the band as The Talking Heads, but given his machine-gun-pointed-at-head-just-outside-of-camera-range expression, it was probably an innocent mistake. Bryne should still make him do the video all over again.


• Jonathan Bernstein takes apart a fellow pundit who downgraded Mitt Romney's presidential prospects by noting that only five people in more than 200 years have reached the White House on their second try. Bernstein makes good points, but he could also note that almost all of these "only x times" statements are ridiculous. The current presidential election process has really only been around since 1976, when Jimmy Carter was the first to win a major-party nomination solely through primary wins. Before then, the process was so radically different ("smoke-filled rooms" and all that) that pre-76 nomination battles can't be used to develop any rules of thumb.


• Old Urbanist joins the haters of Boston's Rose Kennedy Greenway, writing that "the mantra that the Central Artery had severed the city, and that its burial underground somehow would "knit the city back together" seemed oblivious to the fact that it was not the Artery which had severed the city, really, but the demolition of over 1,000 buildings for the Artery's right of way which had done so." Market Urbanist concurs, quoting Jane Jacobs herself to the effect that city dwellers really prefer pocket parks to sweeping or serpentine expanses of green.


• The Boston Globe reports that food deemed too old to give to public schoolchildren was shipped off to prisoners instead, though most of it was thrown away all over again. If Slate's Justin Elliott is correct, Massachusetts prisoners may be at a disadvantage, since we don't have a lot of conservatives like Duke Cunningham who get sent to the slammer and then start to agitate for improved incarceration conditions.

"My Sweet Lord": Guitar-riff mantras and theocratic congressmen

No. 291: "My Sweet Lord," by George Harrison (1970)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Yes, George is my favorite Beatle. It makes sense. I'm not a class clown like RIngo, and I've been a pretty solitary creature, not inclined to get into John-and-Paul love-hate relationships. Facial hair has never worked for me, and I never learned to play the sitar, but I identify with Harrison's inscrutability. (Maybe not accurately; for all I know, I come off to my acquaintances as a perfect drama queen.)

I'm not a Hare Krishna adherent either, even though I once took advantage of the sect's hospitality to get a free vegetarian meal in a basement on Boston's Newbury Street. So Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," infamous as the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit, doesn't speak to me as a religious hymn. Stoicism is fine, but any tolerance I once had for the idea that our fate is in God's hands vanished after I saw a high-ranking member of Congress deny the possibility of catastrophic climate change by declaring that "The Earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth." Congratulations, US Rep. John Shimkus (R-Illinois): You've made the best moral argument I've ever heard for athiesm.

But I doubt that Harrison was encouraging religious faith as a way for humanity to duck responsibility for its actions. The song appeared on the double album All Things Must Pass (which briefly posititioned him as the Beatle with the most acclaimed solo career), whose title song is about using spiritualism to get through a rough patch — and not using belief as a way to say, "fuck it, nothing I do matters."

Though "My Sweet Lord" was a staple of AM radio in the 1970s, it has been an earworm for me only since 2001, when I learned that Harrison died and, a few moments later, heard the song from a passing car as I was walking in Somerville's Davis Square. It was if he was playing himself off the planet with the song that's his most striking use of a guitar riff as a mantra.

"Jessica" notwithstanding, I'm more taken with the guitar as a meditative tool than as a phallic instrument, so there's a lot of Harrison in my most-played tunes. It also means that should you get me drunk enough to play an air guitar, you'll probably be disappointed by my lack of Spinal Tappish movement. (Put on Edith Piaf if you want me to emote.)

Below is a concert version of "My Sweet Lord." The album version is here.

Early Valentine's Day Gift: "This Year's Kisses," by Nina Simone

No. 292: "This Year's Kisses," by Nina Simone (1964)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Do you have a new love who's just not working out? Need a twist on the "it's not you, it's me" speech as Valentine's Day approaches?

Why not take a tip from the Dr. Phil of her day, Ms. Nina Simone? With help from lyricist Irving Berlin (aka "The Slut of Tin Pan Alley"), she explains her dilemma. Nice interpretation: She hasn't gotten over her last boyfriend. Nasty interpretation: Her new guy is lousy in bed.

This year's crop of kisses
Don't seem as sweet to me
This year's crop just misses
What kisses used to be

This year's new romance
Doesn't seem to have a chance
Even helped by Mister Moon above

This year's crop of kisses
Is not for me
For I'm still wearing last year's love

"So Very Hard to Go," by Tower of Power

No. 294: "So Very Hard to Go," by Tower of Power (1973)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Uh-oh, another song about romantic martyrdom. At least this one doesn't have the singer killing himself or going into a walking catatonic state. Instead, he's on Soul Train, wearing some cool threads and grooving with his friends.

Ain't nothin' I can say, nothin' I can do
I feel so bad, yeah, I feel so blue, hmmm
I got to make it right for everyone concerned
Even if it's me, if it means just me
That's getting burned

Maybe he's giving himself too much credit (full lyrics here). His girlfriend has apparently found someone else, and he's essentially making a big deal about not stalking her. "I'm gonna step aside," he sings with a pat on his own back, "'Cause I could never make you feel unhappy."

Anyway, it's a nice change of pace to have a heartbreak song with a bit of swagger and an outstanding horn section. Live performance below; album version here.

Surrealist imagery: "Rene and Georgette Magritte" and "Lydia the Tattooed Lady"

No. 297: "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War," by Paul Simon (1983)

No. 295: "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," by Groucho Marx (1939)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

I felt discombobulated today, what with having to warn friends that I caught a Facebook virus (I'd almost — almost — rather admit to having bedbugs) and looking out at yet another snowstorm doing strange things to the urban landscape. So I was already in the mood to listen to two songs that are all about planting odd images in the listener's mind.

First is Paul Simon's "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War," which puts me in sort of a trance until it ends with Simon repeating the title as he moves from a singing to speaking voice. I always feel sad when he does that, as if he's interrupting a dream and sending me back to reality. (Then again, all pop songs kind of end that way, if not as gently.)

The song, of course, is about Surrealist painter Rene Magritte (image from The Magritte Site). Simon reportedly was inspired by a photo of the painter and his wife to write a song that incongruously depicts the couple as fans of '50s doo-wop groups "like the Penguins, the Moonglows, the Orioles, and the Five Satins." He also puts Rene and Georgette in several dreamlike situations (complete lyrics here):

Side by side
They fell asleep
Decades gliding by like Indians
Time is cheap
When they wake up they will find
All their personal belongings
Have intertwined

Music to stop time: "I Go to Sleep" and "Let's Never Stop Falling in Love"

No. 299: "I Go to Sleep," by The Pretenders (1981)

No. 298: "Let's Never Stop Falling in Love," by Pink Martini (2004)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

A lot of songs are about the desire to stop time — that is, to be able to inhabit a moment of joy or passion forever. (Turning back time, as Cher can tell you, is quite different.) A three-minute song is a perfect way to express this idea, since it's long enough to get us into a specific mood and is short enough to leave us wanting more. The end of a good pop song is like the hot water running out while you're taking a shower. (Nooo!) I think most of us have had the experience of getting so infatuated by a new song that we play it over and over, trying to extend that moment, and even getting impatient waiting for the end so we can start again. (In the days of record players, I would stare at a 45 and move the needle back to the beginning as soon as the song ended. On an iPod, I often cut off the last few notes of a song in my haste to repeat the whole thing.)

My last post was about freezing time, though I didn't think of it until moving on to "I Go to Sleep" and "Let's Stop Falling in Love." Rufus Wainwright's "Sanssouci" is a fantasy about a carefree (or hedonistic) moment that seems to last forever. (Note: Bruce Springsteen has said, "I think part of what pop promised and rock promised was the never-ending now.") Ricky Nelson's "Gloomy Sunday" (a.k.a. "The Suicide Song") is a fantasy about ending one's life, which is the most certain way of stopping time as far as the singer is concerned. Even better, the song is about killing oneself in grief over a loved one. It may seem strange to want to lock oneself into a moment of such sadness forever, but the feeling must be so pure, so noble — and, OK, so narcissistic — that one can understand the temptation.

(Spoiler: This post ends on a happier note, but we're not there yet.)

"Sanssouci" (Rufus Wainwright) and "Gloomy Sunday" (Ricky Nelson)

No. 300: "Sanssouci," by Rufus Wainwright (2007)

No. 299: "Gloomy Sunday," by Ricky Nelson (1959)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

After the exuberance of "Dancing Queen," my music countdown gets mellow, if not totally dissipated, before plunging into a strangely wholesome argument for suicide.

I know some people can't stand Rufus Wainwright's "whiny" voice, but I can identify with his defense-mechanism jadedness that keeps getting upended (sometimes very briefly) by a fairly energetic optimism. I first heard him play "Sanssouci" — which he says he wrote about Frederick the Great's summer palace in Germany — at a club on Lansdowne Street in Boston. In the clip below, from a concert in Belgium, he explains that the song represents "my own hell. But, like, a good hell where you're going to go and do lots of drugs and hang out with hookers."

Shortly after playing this song, Wainwright changed into Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall costume and sang "Get Happy."

"Dancing Queen," stunt blogs, and Gay Pride in Boston

No. 301: "Dancing Queen," by ABBA (1976)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

Would you like a year's worth of blog posts on '70s disco hits? Sorry, "Dancing Queen" is important to me, but it's not much more representative of my taste than "Jessica" is. 

So the hunt for a blog gimmick goes on. And here's one that Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project beat me to. That blog is by a guy planning to watch the film Julie & Julia every single day for a year, each time finding something new to snark about:

Naturally, since Julie & Julia is a food movie, its characters tend to spend a lot of time chewing. So today, I tried to count every instance of chewing...

The film Julie & Julia was based on the book that was based on Julie Powell's blog about making every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year. (That blog is no longer accessible online.)

Powell's multimedia success has a lot of us trying to think of ideas for blogs with similar hooks. Having a fixed end point seems like a great way to impose discipline and structure on what can be a sloppy, aimless medium. More cynically, it's a way to keep to readers who might otherwise get bored and wander off. (The TV series Lost similarly kept people interested by announcing the date of its demise a few years before the fact.) Maybe readers are curious to know if the blogger will meet his goal; maybe they just want to know how the hell someone plans to get 365 blog posts out of watching the same movie over and over. Either way, the blog gets visitors.

I've tried to come up with my own concept, but others are ahead of me. Watching a terrible movie every day for a year sounds like a natural, but Nathan Rabin has already done My Year of Flops. So how about My Year of Menu Typos? Or My Year of Finding and Eradicating Double Spaces? How about watching every episode of The Simpsons, or every film ever to win an Oscar for costume design, but doing so in reverse order? There's gotta be room for a Benjamin Button Pop Culture Blog.

A blogger called the Gay Groom has already considered one gimmick with superficial appeal: trying out everything listed in the how-to book The New Joy of Gay Sex. But there were complications:

[It] turned out that there were a number of things I just don’t want to do… like a big hunk under S (I suppose it’s rather like Julie Powell’s difficulty with having to cook Julia Child’s unappealing French aspics) and I’m surely not prepared to try Celibacy, Promiscuity or Suicide.

Nor am I.

Getting back to music, I'm not sure there's a New Joy entry on shirtless dancing in public, but I would qualify for that one partly because of "Dancing Queen." In the early '90s, Boston's Gay Pride Day ended with a huge dance party in City Hall. Yes, in the multi-story lobby of Boston City Hall, one of the most-hated (and also much-loved) buildings in American architecture. It was actually a great place for a dance party, thanks to the disorienting layout that doesn't work so well if you're trying to pay a parking ticket.

My Tunes No. 302: "Jessica," by the Allman Brothers (1973)

This post is part of a countdown series on songs that have stuck in my head and are part of my iTunes "hit parade" of most-played tracks. See all the posts here.

The scene in the video below is so alien to me that I don't even think it's possible I could have nightmares about it. If I were there, the best outcome would be sunstroke; the worst would getting my ass kicked for saying the wrong thing about God, guns, or Garth Brooks. But at least I wouldn't get in trouble for looking at someone the wrong way. Nobody on that stage has to worry about me staring at anything other than his guitar.

So why have I played the Southern rock classic "Jessica" so often? Well, it has been an earworm for almost all of my life, blasting from car radios and jukeboxes. And unlike most earworms, it's not hobbled by insipid lyrics (or any lyrics), so I could never hate my brain for idly playing it. Though it's seven-and-a-half minutes long (as it appeared on the album Brothers and Sisters), I remember it as getting a lot of radio airplay -- in part because it was one of those songs that DJs would play near the top of the hour and just fade out whenever it was time to cut to the news.

But I mostly blame my sister and the video game Guitar Hero. My sister is a quiet, petite woman who drinks wine and doesn't put up with good ol' boy behavior. But one Thanksgiving I saw her go beserk playing "Jessica" on Guitar Hero (it was better than watching football), and the song has never been far from the front of my mind since.

One more thing: "Jessica" makes me tap my foot and tap it hard, but it doesn't have much effect on the rest of my body. Bowie's "Sound and Vision" makes me jerk my head around, but it's not a foot favorite. Is there something about the tempo or beat to explain this? Or is it because songs written by potheads are feet-friendly while those written by cokeheads are better for tempting whiplash? I'll have to start looking for a pattern.