Comedy icons back Obama with ‘Ain’t Funny’ TV spots

By Steven Rosen

To emphasize that there's nothing amusing about next Tuesday's presidential election, the Jewish Alliance for Change has launched a series of "Ain't Funny" television and online commercials in support of Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

The spots feature some of America's most iconic older comedians and comedy writers -- Carl Reiner, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, Valerie Harper, Garry Marshall and Larry Gelbart. Their observations, tightly edited and interwoven in three 30-second spots titled, "Vice President," "Fear Tactics" and "Grandchildren," are both humorous and serious.

For instance, in "Vice President," Reiner, while winking, says of Republican John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin: "And he wants to put that girl who winks in the second position?"

"Unqualified," is Harper's serious retort.

All speak in support of Obama's plans for health care, Social Security, the economy and other issues. And they argue in favor of change in the White House after eight years of a Republican administration.

The specific goal of "Ain't Funny" is to help dispel fears and suspicions that voters -- especially older Jews in the swing states of Florida and Ohio -- might have about Obama. Most, but not all, of the on-screen participants are Jewish. The rationale behind the choice of spokespeople, said comedy writer Gelbart (the "M*A*S*H" TV series, the movie "Tootsie"), who is Jewish, is: "They've given me so much pleasure, why would they give me a bum steer now after a lifetime of enjoyment?"

Those contacted by The Journal said they were eager to participate.

"It's absolutely essential to me we hose out the building of this administration," said Harper, who while not Jewish has played Rhoda Morgenstern on television and Golda Meir on the stage. "I was very attracted to not just the candidate but the message of the Democratic Party. So it was easy for me to say yes. I want people to vote and to end the terrible, failed policies."

The nonprofit Jewish Alliance for Change has raised money to broadcast the three short spots on cable networks in four Florida markets -- North Miami, West Palm Beach, Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale. It also may air them in Ohio if it has enough money.

They can be seen in context at www.aintfunny.org and www.Jews4Change.com There is a two-minute fourth spot available on the Internet only.

Supporters can also contribute to buy airtime themselves in any television market they desire through a partnership between Ain't Funny and a new organization, SaysMe.TV. Information is available at the Ain't Funny Web site.

"We decided the most effective way to use the resources we have is to remove the air of fear some older voters have about Obama," said Doni Remba, Jewish Alliance for Change's executive director. "If they hear it from people they've watched and loved and who have entertained them their whole lives, they have an emotional bond of trust with them."

The Republican campaign has argued that Obama is soft on terrorism. And although Obama has repeatedly expressed strong support for Israel, Republicans have suggested, for instance, that Obama might be less confrontational than McCain toward Iran, which threatens Israel with a "second Holocaust."

"It's reprehensible how often they throw that term around," said Boaz Yakin, Ain't Funny's co-producer-director, along with his wife, Alma Har'el. "I think the callous and cynical way those fears are exploited is detrimental to a democratic and open process. I dislike and resent fear mongering and character assassination going on with Obama." (Filmmaker Jesse Dylan helped find a L.A. crew; Doug Limon handled an interview in New York.)

Yakin is a New York-born Jewish director ("Fresh," "Remember the Titans"), who drew on his experience attending Orthodox schools for his movie, "A Price Above Rubies," set within Brooklyn's Chasidic community. His wife is an Israeli-born music video director. Earlier in the campaign, they produced an "Israelis for Obama" video.

"And I'm not minimizing the potential for terrible things to happen to Jews," Yakin said. "I'm an extreme Zionist; I don't take Israel's safety lightly, and I don't take Jewish people's safety lightly.

"A huge difference between us and Sarah Silverman's thing," Yakin said, referring to comedian Silverman's YouTube short, "The Great Schlep," "was that her work was getting young people motivated to talk to parents and grandparents. Ours directly addresses people that she was encouraging young people to go talk to. We felt that generation wasn't being spoken to directly."

Jewish Alliance for Change, founded in February, encourages Jewish involvement in the electoral process, as well as traditional Democratic domestic policies. Its Web site states it supports "diplomatic initiatives for a secure and peaceful Israel" and seeks to "promote better understanding of the policies advocated by Sen. Obama."

Remba became acquainted with Obama while doing graduate studies at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s. The American-born Remba lived in Israel for many years and was a translator for Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan.

"First and foremost, we're an issues-advocacy organization," Remba said. "Our main focus is on agenda and issues, and we think Obama is the better person to further the agenda this country needs and that Israel needs for security."

Capturing the 'youth vote' via Rock Star endorsements is nothing new -- just ask Tommy James

By Steven Rosen

The presidential campaign shifts into super-high gear this week, as the Democratic National Convention begins in Denver.

And if presumptive nominee Barack Obama emerges from Denver as the party's standard-bearer, he will be able to count on active support from many Rock and Pop stars. Already, according to Wikipedia, such names as 50 Cent, Arcade Fire, Sheryl Crow, The Decemberists, Wyclef Jean, John Mellencamp, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Rufus Wainwright, Kanye West -- even Bob Dylan -- have endorsed Obama.

While Obama is bringing it to a new level, support for Democratic presidential candidates by Rock stars (as well as other performers of youth-oriented or -originated music) is hardly new. But one man who could make a strong case for pioneering it, were he alive today, would be Hubert Horatio Humphrey.

In 1968, while serving as Vice President and running for President, Humphrey campaigned with Tommy James & the Shondells, whose Garage-Rock-tinged dance tunes like "Hanky Panky" and "Mony Mony" had brought them Top 40 fame at the time. The band played at numerous Humphrey campaign stops. (Humphrey also received an endorsement from James Brown that year.)

The year 1968 was when Boomer-generation young people made their voices heard in politics -- usually in protest, sometimes violently. Though a Democrat and mainstream liberal, then-57-year-old Humphrey was the target for a lot of that protest. Humphrey had trouble breaking with President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and was nominated amid the police riot against youthful demonstrators during the infamous Chicago Democratic convention. As a result, he couldn't quite unite his party and just barely lost to Richard Nixon.

As The Charlotte Observer reported when the Shondells opened for Humphrey in October, "For the first time, presidential candidates are catering to the growing bloc of young people just under 21, or over the 18-year-old voting age in some states." (This was before the 1971 federal law giving 18-year-olds the right to vote.)

Today, James -- a Dayton native -- is a youthful-looking 61 and on the oldies circuit. A few months ago, he played a sweaty, vigorous set at Grand Victoria Casino in Rising Sun, Ind., working loudly with a younger band -- to an older crowd -- through his late-1960s hits, which also included "I Think We're Alone Now," "Mirage" and "Sweet Cherry Wine."

Backstage before the show, dressed in a "Censorship Off/Free Speech On" T-shirt, James eagerly recalled his work for Humphrey in 1968. With him was an original Shondell, bassist Mike Vale, who had come to visit.

"We had been asked to play (in May) for the Democratic Party at a generic rally," he says. "We weren't endorsing any candidate. We played in the afternoon and there war protesters calling us sellouts." (James says he believes the Lovin' Spoonful also played.)

After Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the night of the June California Democratic primary, James says he went into a funk for several weeks. That was broken when Humphrey's secretary called his record label to see if he might be able to appear with the Vice President after the convention, assuming Humphrey won the nomination. James agreed, thinking anyone would be better than Nixon.

The Shondells first opened for Humphrey at a rally in Wheeling, W. Va., and met the candidate and his wife, Muriel. "We became his opening act," James says.

For Humphrey, James figured, his band was a way to attract young people and increase crowds. But, he now surmises, there was more to it than that.

"He wanted very much to be taken seriously by young people," James says. "He wanted to know how he was viewed, and I was 21 years old."

As a result, James says, a friendship developed that included late-night, post-rally talks on a variety of topics. At one point, he says, Humphrey asked his take on calling for a national referendum on ending the war. Another time, James says, he was asked to become Humphrey's advisor on youth affairs if he won the election.

"He wanted everything from Rock festivals to an open dialogue with young people," James says. "It really bothered him he was thought of in such a terrible way, as a warmonger."

After the election, the Shondells made a splash with a new sound, the neo-psychedelic Pop Rock of "Crimson and Clover" and "Crystal Blue Persuasion." Humphrey wrote the liner notes to the resulting album, Crimson & Clover.

Hubert Horatio "Skip" Humphrey III, 66, the vice president's son and a former Minnesota elected official himself, was eager to talk about James' relationship with his father.

"I know that Tommy James and his group were helpful in the 1968 campaign," he says in a phone interview from his Minnesota home. "My wife and I had an opportunity to be with them a couple of times. I don't recall the specifics, but I can assure you that Tommy James and his group were supportive of Dad and helpful."

Also eager to speak about the relationship was the late vice president himself -- courtesy of a tape of a post-election radio interview sent by James in a package of newspaper clips and other corroborative materials.

"We used to sit up late at night and discuss politics after they'd entertain for us," Humphrey says on the tape. "Gee, they're fine young men. At midnight, we'd sit around and have a visit and talk about what had happened during the day. These are bright young men that want to know a lot about their country."

Incidentally, James now favors Obama.

"What we need is a breath of fresh air," he says. "I really believe what we need most is somebody to make us feel good about ourselves."

From Cincinnati CityBeat
Week of Aug. 27, 2008

srosen@citybeat.com

Dissecting the big fictional dramas of the moment
By Steven Rosen
From Cincinnati CityBeat
08/17/2008

I can mark my life as a Baby Boomer -- and maybe, too, our changing society -- by the ongoing waves of cultural impact Batman has had. As Boomers have grown into adults, Batman has stayed with us as an icon worthy of discussion and analysis. But now, while the latest Caped Crusader juggernaut, the movie The Dark Knight, might just be his biggest ever, it seems time to move on.

As cultural impact goes, I -- and apparently a lot of other people -- have discovered something far more worthy than comic-book-derived movies for revealing the American way: The AMC cable television series Mad Men. Created by Matthew Weiner and set in the Kennedy-esque early 1960s, it is nuanced and sophisticated, full of specific references to its time yet also universal in what it says about conflicted ambitions. It also lays bare how pop culture is actually manufactured and manipulated.

It gets inside the lives and minds (and campaigns) of the kind of real people -- Madison Avenue advertising executives, thus its title -- who subtly and secretly shaped our societal tastes in that epochal era. In fact, it's set in a time when the DC comic book of Batman was first appealing to Boomers -- an accessible hero with exceptional but not superhuman strengths who lived a mysteriously secret life not all that removed from the kind a pre-teen could imagine for himself in fantasies.

Later came a different kind of comic book hero for Boomer teens -- the star of the 1966 tongue-in-cheek Batman television series. Its Batman became something new: Pop Art with a capital P. Because of that, we've subsequently tended to take Batman seriously as art.

So maybe the desire to treat Dark Night the same way is just an old habit. Yet I don't want to dismiss Christopher Nolan's film too flippantly. It has dominated the box office for four weekends now and has already eclipsed $400 million at the box office. It continues Nolan's updating of Tim Burton's popular 1989 Batman film, as well as of the 1985 comic The Dark Knight Returns.

Christian Bale's angst-ridden, unhappy Batman in The Dark Knight is a somber take on the hero -- he seems almost a gravel-voiced Angel of Death rather than an object of inspiration. There is complexity and tragedy in Aaron Eckhart's turn as prosecutor Harvey Dent. And the late Heath Ledger's neurotic, sadomasochistic turn as the uber-terrorist Joker is arresting, especially for making people wonder, as critic David Denby has noted, if the actor ruined his health to inhabit the Joker's manic, bizarre psyche.

Many see in The Dark Knight's exaggerated depiction of good and evil a grand artistic statement about the mood of post-9/11 America, especially life in its fearful big cities. But I find that it pushes its archetypes into stereotypes and in the end exploits the Joker's cruelty by repeating it over and over, continually using a Sophie's Choice-like plot point for cynical ends.

On the other hand, in Mad Men Jon Hamm's Don Draper -- creative director with Madison Avenue ad agency Sterling Cooper -- is one of the most complex characters ever created for television, right up there with Tony Soprano. He's also a sort of dark knight himself. Like Batman, he has a secret identity he's trying to hide -- he walked away from his past to re-create himself for the 1960s. A self-made man.

He broods, usually with mixed drinks and cigarettes, but occasionally wonders what the truth of life is like. Not the ad agency version, but the kind depicted in books like Frank O'Hara's poetry collection Meditations in an Emergency, which he reads in his more private moments.

Three episodes into this second season, Mad Men already has delineated the shadings between good and evil -- between a sense of fairness and callousness -- in a way far more profound than anything in The Dark Knight.

It comes when the agency's staff, like the nation, is shocked by an American Airlines crash just outside New York City. While the rest of the staff listens to the radio, Draper -- unsentimental man that he is -- whips into action, ordering the radio off and canceling his company's ad for Mohawk Airlines that had been ready to run. He then orders his junior executives to devise a new campaign for Mohawk.

But Draper is actually this firm's moral compass, conflicted as he is. Partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery) cynically sees the crash as an opportunity to dump regional Mohawk and pursue American as a new "crisis" client. When Draper resists, asking, "What kind of agency are we," Sterling answers, "The kind where everyone has summer homes." Ledger's Joker couldn't say anything more devastating.

Against Mad Men, The Dark Knight is teen/young adult stuff. This time around, I'm not going to treat it like culture-defining art. Things have changed.

srosen@citybeat.com

By Steven Rosen

(adapted from Cincinnati CityBeat)

A friend of mine, a Democrat who believes "free trade" has been a giveaway of American jobs with little to nothing in return, scoffs at those who say the solution is to retrain all those who have lost their blue-collar livelihoods to cheaper, overseas sources.

"What are we going to do," he says. "Give them all a computer and tell them to start their own Web site?"

He was being bitterly facetious. But to sidestep the "free trade" debate for a minute -- though I do worry we've lost much more than we've gained from this as a nation -- perhaps he has a point. Maybe the best way, the most artistically creative and environmentally sensitive way, out of our current economic mess (especially in Rust Belt states) is for the government to offer financial incentives for people to start up and operate blogs.

Not a fortune, but enough to pay their monthly mortgages. Or medical insurance. Or gas bills. And it can be funded by raising the taxes on the rich, excessive oil-company profits, and maybe by imposing a levy on junk e-mail. I realize some people might not like this, but they can then apply for a subsidy to start a blog complaining about it. (There ought to be, however, an income cut-off for support; Bill Gates or Courtney Love can blog on their own dime.)

That's right. Blogs for everyone!

It's such a good idea that I'll bet whoever would support it first, Obama or McCain, could clinch the election. My guess, however, is that Obama would be far more likely to propose it than McCain. By putting tens of millions of Americans to work in the new information economy, it could stimulate the economy. Those who create demand for their blogs might find themselves in demand as experts of one sort or another, or even literary/cultural figures of influence. Yahoo and Microsoft -- or Hollywood -- might even offer big bucks for a piece.

There are already 112 million blogs worldwide, according to search engine Technorati, and these diary-like Internet web-logs provide 112 million running commentaries -- sometimes with video footage and sound -- on every aspect of politics, the arts, religion, sports, sex ... even daily updates on flying-saucer sightings. They comprise a genuine populist, democratic communications network. They're a public service and a worldwide and nationwide civic asset.

But many need money to keep going. One Cincinnati-based blogger, fantasy-film cinephile Tim Lucas, recently wondered on his Video WatchBlog site (www.videowatchdog.blogspot.com) whether to give it all up. "... Blogging typically invigorates a writer's productivity; it has encouraged me to produce writing that I wouldn't have produced otherwise, for lack of an outlet or market -- but I wasn't paid for any of it," he wrote.

So far he hasn't, but why not let the government help him out? He helps popular culture out tremendously by researching, for instance, actress Mimsy Farmer's earliest TV appearance or defending a film like Speed Racer.

There is a precedent: During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration funded a Federal Writers' Project as part of the New Deal. During its existence, it employed some who went on to become our most important writers once the Depression passed: John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, John Steinbeck and more.

This could do the same, at the same time helping the current almost-Recession pass. Let the government step in now with incentives to create a nation of bloggers. And next, maybe, pay us an hourly wage to read them.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosen@citybeat.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Steven Rosen

Ponderosa Stomp
House of Blues, New Orleans, LA
April, 2008

If you could stop dancing to the sinewy, organ-pumping, garage-rock rhythms of Question Mark & the Mysterians' "I Can't Get Enough of You, Baby," "Girl (You Captivate Me)" and "96 Tears" long enough to stare at 62-year-old Mr. Mark himself, you might want to ask him directions to the Fountain of Youth. His ageless, creaseless face hidden behind shades and a giant cowboy hat, he brought the seventh annual Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans to a thrilling and very late-night conclusion. Once again, this festival organized by anesthesiologist/record-collector Ira Padnos and dedicated to "unsung heroes of rock 'n' roll" proved its point—musicians over 50 (heck, over 80!) can still rock.

Rockabilly dominated the first night: an exuberant Dale Hawkins tackled his classic "Suzie Q"; Roy Head powered through "Treat Her Right"; the Collins Kids' Larry Collins played the fastest double-neck guitar this side of Les Paul while sister Lorrie beamed as she sang "Hoy, Hoy." On the second night, Ronnie Spector belted out Ronettes' classics with a tight, large band. "Isn't she beautiful," one lady cried, standing on a staircase to see 65-year-old Ronnie sing the Students' immortal "I'm So Young" in a voice full of youthful, melancholy longing. Yet another of the endless highlights was Austin garage-rock god Roky Erickson, his mental instability under control, playing ragingly with the Explosives.

Honoring Louisianans, the Stomp featured Dr. John on piano, reprising his earliest songs, while the now-blind old man who produced/arranged him, Wardell Quezergue, ecstatically conducted an accompanying band. Bluesman Lazy Lester showed up to play his "Ponderosa Stomp," the instrumental that gave the event its name. There was so much excellence that the exhilaration could be exhausting—except everybody felt too young to get tired.

From Elmore Magazina

_______

Neil Diamond
Home Before Dark
Columbia Records

Neil Diamond’s Second Coming on his Rick Rubin-produced albums, first 12 Songs and now Home Before Dark, owes as much to Diamond as to the producer’s ability to coax sensitive, subtle musical approaches from his older artists. Diamond toned down his own earnest (and sometimes bombastic) overemoting in favor of real singing, with real warmth, and also started writing less obtuse lyrics that address his maturity in a positive but not vacuous way.

“The Power of Two” is upbeat and engaging; “Another Day” (a duet with Natalie Maines) exudes shadowy, dreamlike mystery. On Home, Diamond and Rubin favor fairly sophisticated arrangements – strings, horns and woodwinds – but also welcome a bedrock, folk-rock-values band that includes Benmont Tench on keyboards and Mike Campbell and Smokey Hormel on guitar and bass. Diamond’s own acoustic guitar allows you to hear the connection between this work and his Bang Records hits of the 1960s– the urgent, sometimes-foreboding romanticism of “Cherry Cherry” or “You Got to Me” creeps through in the gorgeous “If I Don’t See You Again” or “Don’t Go There.”

Diamond could have been content to remain the Jimmy Buffet of wealthy older romantics; instead he’s stretching for musical relevance.

Standout Tracks: “Another Day (That Time Forgot),” “Home Before Dark”

From Blurt Online

______________

Jonathan Richman
Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild
Vapor Records

When a friend learned Jonathan Richman does Leonard Cohen’s “Here It Is” on his new Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild, he said that was perfect – the man who never grows up covers the man who never was young. And there is something about Richman’s goofy wide-eyed innocence – and the openhearted earnestness of his singing – that makes him eternally childlike. But that doesn’t mean his subject matter is juvenile. Or that at age 57 he isn’t a perceptive man of sensitivity and conscience.

Proving that point is his album’s extraordinary closing song, so sad and wise. “As My Mother Lay Lying” is a gentle ballad about spending time with his dying mother. There’s not a touch of maudlin sentimentality or false witness to it, just honest observations uncorrupted by clichés or adult self-consciousness. It’s hard to take; yet it’s also – in its humanistic profession of love – sweet. I can’t think of another songwriter who could face this subject so frankly, yet remain so optimistic about life.

Elsewhere, while there is some filler and the overall sound is familiar to Richman’s fans – nylon-stringed acoustic guitar accompanied by Tommy Larkin’s drums – the songwriting is deeper than usual. Richman seems preoccupied with confronting darkness and life’s disappointments without giving in. “Our Party Will Be on the Beach Tonight” flirts with a muted but scarily discordant arrangement and “Our Drab Ways” and “Time Has Been Going By So Fast” are Richman’s way of pleading for us to stop to appreciate pleasure. Richman thinks so much of “When We Refuse to Suffer” he has recorded two versions – acoustic and a rare electric take. It’s his philosophy of living with eyes (and heart) wide open, and it rocks.

But I have to quarrel with a point he makes: People don’t necessarily take anti-depressants because they “refuse to suffer.” Sometimes they do it because they suffer too much. By the way, his take on “Here It Is” is straightforward but melancholy, featuring his musical simplicity applied to Cohen’s lyrical complexity. And it works – it becomes a slightly unusual folk singer’s Kaddish-like tribute to family. Jonathan Richman is growing up, indeed, in a way that could serve as a role model for his generation.

Standout Tracks: “Our Drab Ways,” “As My Mother Lay Lying”

From Blurt Online

_____________

Emmylou Harris: All I Intended to Be
[Nonesuch]

The 1995 album Wrecking Ball towers as the Mount Everest of Emmylou Harris’ recording career. Before that, she was a very hip country neo-traditionalist—like Dwight Yoakam—with a connoisseur’s taste in folk music and rock ‘n’ roll, thanks to her internship with Gram Parsons. Following it, she was a white-haired pop goddess.

Surrounded by Daniel Lanois’ cosmic wash of a rock production, singing ethereally as if wandering through a David Lynch-directed dream, she established a hierarchy of our greatest living singer-songwriters (plus Jimi Hendrix) by whom she chose to cover.

Harris has been amazingly prolific since Wrecking Ball, especially singing with others or as part of multi-artist projects. But she’s been cautious about solo albums with new studio material; All I Intended To Be is just her third major-label effort in that vein, following Red Dirt Girl and Stumble Into Grace.

It’s been hard telling where she wanted to go on her last two records, which were nevertheless musically strong. Would she continue with Lanois-style sonic mysticism, develop her own voice as a songwriter, or step back a few steps into being a more traditional-sounding interpreter? Turns out she gets the balance just right on All I Intended. Produced by Brian Ahern, the record recalls doesn't try to recreate Wrecking Ball, while also being earthy and more direct.

There is still the sense of nature-inspired awe that carries a spiritual dimension, as on Jack Wesley Routh’s “Shores of White Sand” and Patty Griffin’s “Moon Song.” But there are also songs (like Harris’ own “Broken Man’s Lament,” about a lonely auto mechanic whose wife left him to sing like Patsy Cline) that simply exhibit strong Americana storytelling in the John Prine tradition. Elsewhere, she opts for the soulfully spare, like a duet with John Starling on Billy Joe Shaver’s “Old Five and Dimers Like Me.”

For a while now, Harris has been moving toward the rock-tinged folk aesthetic of Montreal’s Anna and Kate McGarrigle, whose songs seem somehow both ancient and contemporary. Here, Harris becomes an honorary third McGarrigle sister on “How She Could Sing the Wildwood Flower” and “Sailing Round the Room,” which the trio co-wrote and on which the McGarrigles provide enchanting harmonies.

It’s hard to imagine better compatriots for Harris. Both songs are melodically gorgeous and lyrically substantive, with singing that is wistfully romantic but never sweet. Here's hoping they continue working together, and that Harris continues her intriguing evolution as an iconic artist.

From Paste Online

By Steven Rosen

After all these years in decline, somebody has figured out a way to make the movie theater balcony hip again. Not just hip, but -- to use the terminology of National Amusements, owner of a new Showcase Cinema multiplex at northern Kentucky's Florence Mall -- "lux."

It will cost you $10 beyond the cost of your movie ticket to see for yourself. For that amount, you get admission to an upper-level foyer with entrances to private sections of auditoriums. Essentially, these are balconies overlooking the screen -- the hoi polloi sit in a separate stadium-seating area below.

The new theater is called Showcase Cinema de Lux Florence, an upscale concept for the Massachusetts-based chain but not in itself a new one. The Showcase in Springdale also is a Cinema de Lux. But this is the first Cinema de Lux built from scratch to have a so-called Lux Level. Who said there are no new ideas?

Your section of the auditorium has reserved, custom-designed, leather swiveling love seats with moveable armrests. They're the perfect size to rest your food (there's a private Lux Level kitchen) and alcoholic beverages. If you forgot to buy a drink at the bar (with your ticket you get a $5 voucher toward refreshments) before entering, you can silently buzz for a server to come in and take your order.

Best of all, no crying babies or noisy kids brought by parents trying to save sitter fees. No text-messaging teens, either. You have to be 21 or older to get in.

The theater, which opened last Friday, has 14 auditoriums but only four have these private sections. You might think, given the upscale spin of the concept, that these auditoriums would be showing art/independent movies. A Bergman retrospective, maybe? Alas, no. On opening week, they're showing Sex and the City, Wanted and Wall*E.

I'm not sure this is the right time for this concept. With gas climbing north of $4 a gallon and people struggling with plummeting house values and thus net worth, they're probably not looking for a reason to pay an extra $10 to see run-of-the-mill Hollywood fare in cushy, flattering surroundings.

But with Wall*E, Showcase might be on to something. Adults enjoy the new computer-animated family movies (especially Pixar's, like the visually inventive Wall*E). But they don't always like sitting with children to do so -- even their own.

There might be quite a few moms and dads or aunts and uncles willing to pay an extra $10 to swig a martini and relax in the balcony -- oops, Lux Level -- while the kids are delightedly squealing safely below. (You can see the whole auditorium from above, so you can check on their safety and candy consumption throughout the film.)

Of course, what happens if the grown-ups swig too many martinis? Or if they have a fight with a server over an order while the movie is playing? Or with another patron over noisy eating and drinking habits? I trust Showcase has trained its staff in the art of being quiet bouncers.

Actually, I'd like to see a theater offer a surcharge to sit in an auditorium where no food or drink is allowed -- a place where you can just concentrate on a new, beautifully projected movie in peace and quiet, without hearing or smelling your neighbors' food and beverage consumption. But maybe I'll have to wait for the Lux Lux Level -- for a $100 surcharge, you get your own screening room.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Steven Rosen: srosen@citybeat.com

New Rolling Stones concert film brings back memories of Ladies and Gentlemen
By Steven Rosen
(This originally ran in Cincinnati CityBeat)

In Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese's new IMAX film featuring the Rolling Stones in concert, the "boys" are still vital and extremely energetic Rock & Rollers -- even if they are pushing past 60.
But as exciting as they still sound (and astonishingly trim and fit as Mick Jagger still looks), there is an undeniable truth. The decades are piling up between today's Stones and the era that marked the creation of their most inventive and enduring -- and just plain best -- music.

That's why it's a good time to shine a light on another Rolling Stones concert film, an obscure and largely forgotten one that has strong Cincinnati connections: Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones. Its co-producer and director of visual production is Steve Gebhardt, who is now 71 and lives on Prospect Hill. (The film's director of record is one Rollin Binzer.)

It was commissioned by the Stones as a document of their 1972 Exile on Main St. tour and was released to theaters in 1974. It is not officially available in any format, although bootlegs can be found on the Internet.

Gebhardt wishes it could get a new life in theaters or on DVD.

"They were hot," he says of the Stones on that tour. "I haven't heard them do anything like Exile since. I thought it was awesome to be watching them then."

The Stones of the Ladies and Gentleman period consisted of Mick Jagger with Keith Richards and Mick Taylor on guitars, bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts. They were augmented by horn players Bobby Keyes and Jim Price and pianist Nicky Hopkins.

Most critics consider Exile the last in a streak of classic, career-defining albums by the Stones that started with Beggar's Banquet and continued through Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers. It's the album where the group sounded most organic -- like a band rolling and tumbling through the unvarnished, scuffed-up, steaming, updated Roots music they had always wanted to make.

The no-nonsense film, with its many close-ups of the band performing, features five songs from Exile -- an elegiac version of "Tumbling Dice" plus "Sweet Virginia," "All Down the Line," "Happy," and "Rip This Joint." Everything else, save a Chuck Berry cover, is from the three preceding albums. All kick hard. Even "Midnight Rambler," one of the Stones' most mannered and melodramatic songs, turns into an urgently hypnotic and transcendent Blues romp.

In 1972, when the Stones were planning their tour, they hired documentary filmmaker/still photographer Robert Frank to record the behind-the-scenes antics. (That resulted in another film, the legendary Cocksucker Blues, that has never been officially released.)

"They wanted something of them on stage performing, and they knew Robert's thing was backstage," Gebhardt says. "He wasn't equipped to shoot a multi-camera, multi-audio-track film."

But Frank's sound supervisor, Danny Seymour, remembered getting to know Gebhardt and his partner Bob Fries in 1970, when they all were working in the same New York loft. Gebhardt and Fries, also a Cincinnatian, were working for John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Joko film operation making Ono's Fly, about a fly buzzing around a woman in bed. Seymour remembered and recommended them.

So Gebhardt got the call from Marshall Chess, who worked for the Stones. In July 1972, he and three other camera operators -- including Fries -- filmed four shows in Houston and Fort Worth, Tex. A mobile unit from the Record Plant recorded the sound separately, although Fries was in charge of sound mixing.

Fries remembers putting four tracks in then-experimental quadraphonic surround-sound and playing it for Richards and a bunch of the Stones' friends on a sound stage at London's Twickenham Film Studios.

"They wanted to see how it was received," says Fries, who also got a producer credit on the film. "It went very, very well."

That helped the Stones decide to release Ladies and Gentlemen as a filmed concert.

The film took a long time to reach theaters. But when it was released in 1974, it was with all the hoopla of a live concert, booked into big theaters like New York's Zeigfield. Because it used quadraphonic surround-sound system, it needed special audio equipment and its own traveling crews. After that version played out, it was distributed as a mono print.

Gebhardt most recently made Twenty to Life: The Life and Times of John Sinclair, about the Detroit/Ann Arbor radical whose imprisonment on marijuana charges became an early-1970s cause celebre. Much earlier, while working for Lennon and Ono, Gebhardt had directed Ten for Two, about the 1971 Ann Arbor concert featuring John Lennon that was meant to raise awareness of then-imprisoned Sinclair. Gebhardt also currently is trying to arrange financing for a film about controversial Italian publisher Marcello Baraghini.

But he looks forward to seeing the Stones in Shine a Light.

"They're old men -- they're my age, almost," he says, laughing. "I'm amazed to see how Mick looks -- he's taking care of himself. And Keith goes on." ©

(This article ran June 19, 2008, on Variety's The Circuit Web site.)

Film festival awards, like those for the current Los Angeles fest, are about the honor and the exposure, true. But increasingly they’re also about the money.

Big money. In fact, there’s a lively emerging competition among domestic festivals like L.A. to see who can offer the biggest, coolest cash prizes to their award-winning films. And overseas, there’s even bigger money.

It’s taking place outside the flagship fests. Sundance resists such prizes for its competition winners, although they often “win” theatrical distribution. Toronto and New York have no juried competitions.

But a notch below these, money matters. “One way for a festival to get attention is a cash award,” says Waco Hoover, co-founder and president of International Film Festival Summit. “Instead of getting distribution, the filmmakers get money toward making their next movie. And there are always advertisers, sponsors and big corporate brands looking for alternate ways to connect with consumers.”

The Los Angeles Film Festival, which opens Thursday and runs through June 29, offers two sizable cash prizes, both worth $50,000 and sponsored by Target: the Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature and the Documentary Award for Best Documentary Feature.

On the East Coast, New York’s seven-year-old Tribeca Film Festival has three $25,000 cash awards – Best New Narrative Filmmaker sponsored by American Express, an unsponsored Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, and the Cadillac Audience Award Winner.

Currently, Indianapolis’ Heartland Film Festival promotes itself as having the largest single cash prize among U.S. fests, a $100,000 award for Best Dramatic Feature funded by the philanthropic Max Simon Foundation. It doubled its cash prizes in 2006. The festival promotes “positive” films.

Directors of these festivals uniformly say the cash prizes have been good for all concerned. “The film festival has had tremendous growth,” says Los Angeles’ Richard Raddon. “Having high-profile cash awards helps in getting the best films out there.”

Nancy Schafer, Tribeca’s co-executive director, explains, “Filmmaking is an expensive endeavor and we want to support filmmakers. We’d love to give them more.”

For Heartland, which has been in existence 17 years, cash prizes were a way to establish credibility for a festival devoted to “positive” films. “There are a lot of festivals out there, so how do you rise above the pack,” says Jeffrey Sparks, president of non-profit Heartland Truly Moving Pictures.

But there is competition on the horizon. They include, among others, the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, sponsored by Vision Forum Ministries and funded by a private foundation, which announced “the top cash prize in the world” at $101,000. It will go into effect at the fest’s fifth go-round in January.

Overseas, the Middle East International Film Festival, which will hold its second installment this October in Abu Dhabi, gives over $1.075 million in total cash awards.

“I can remember long, long ago when to say ‘we are a non-competitive invitational festival’ was something of a badge of honor,” recalls Ron Henderson, co-founder and senior program consultant of the 31-year-old Denver Film Festival, in an E-mail. “But times have changed and the intensely competitive, commercial culture of film festivals reflects those changes.”

Meanwhile, Raddon knows what he’d do with $1 million. “If anyone came to us with that, we’d tie it to the funding of a film,” he says.

If you follow news about art/independent films, you know they're struggling. The "classics" divisions of the studios have been cutting back because of the softening economy, and it's the rare foreign-language and documentary title that grosses more than $1 million anymore.

On the other hand, the opera film is going gangbusters. The Metropolitan Opera, with its long history of live-radio broadcasts, began the trend with its "Live in HD" simulcast transmissions of productions to movie theaters for the 2006-2007 season.

Using the new high-definition digital-video technology, with upwards of a dozen cameras capturing the action, it was able to prove opera had an audience that -- while maybe not equal to American Idol -- was far more than an elitist blip on the pop-cultural charts. There were six live transmissions that season.

For the second season, which concluded in April, there were eight live transmissions at 600 theaters worldwide, including (Cincinnati's) Showcase Cinemas Springdale, where attendance was so good it sometimes reached capacity, and the less-crowded Regal Cinema in Deerfield Township.

Now the Met has announced the 2008-2009 season, and it's up to 11 HD transmissions, 800 theaters and 17 countries -- plus cruise ships. It begins with a special Sept. 22 presentation of the Opening Night Gala. There will be five new productions, including one -- Massenet's "Thais" with Renee Fleming on Dec. 20 -- with former Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Music Director Jesus Lopez-Cobos conducting.

Were this not enough, two other opera companies have also started offering recorded live but delayed transmissions of their productions: San Francisco and Italy's La Scala. Rave Cinema's West Chester 18 offered both during the last season and plans to do it again despite spotty attendence. It's a way to bring new customers to the theater, says Jeremy Devine, marketing vice president.

The big question, really, is whether this explosion in access to the world's great opera companies will hurt interest and attendance in Cincinnati's own, which is starting its four-production summer season on June 11 with Puccini's Madame Butterfly.

Cincinnati Opera is the nation's second-oldest opera company after the Met, founded in 1920, with a long-deserved reputation for first-rate productions. Because it never had a summer season, Met performers often came here to work. (None of the movie-theater offerings occurs in summer so far.)

Evans Mirageas, Cincinnati Opera's artistic director, believes opera-at-the-movies can only help.

"I think it builds awareness for opera," he says. "Many of the people going are first-timers, taken by a friend to an atmosphere perhaps less intimidating than an opera house. You can eat popcorn.

"Yet there is also something to saying, 'If you like this, you need to see the real thing up front and personal.' And remember, these theaters hold 200 and under -- we seat 3,481. So it's not a threat at all. It's a wonderful plus. More opera means more opera and that's what we're here for."

Mirageas says Cincinnati Opera plans to work with movie theaters to offer information about it to those attending screenings. And Cincinnati, like most other professional opera companies, is considering future expansion into movie-theater and/or Internet delivery. But the expense of doing it right is a factor, he says.

Perhaps if the Cincinnati Opera wants to attract an international theatrical audience for its productions, it might consider staging at least an occasional production at the unique, legendary home for its first 51 years: the Cincinnati Zoo. Nobody else can offer that.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Steve Rosen: srosen@citybeat.com

("Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier" was released on DVD this past August. This story originally appeared in The Denver Post in August, 2001, when "Apocalypse Now Redux" was released.)

By Steven Rosen

"Apocalypse Now." "Helter Skelter."

Two key phrases of American popular culture and social history. Two key shorthand-summaries for the violence and alienation, scars and wounds, of the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet I had never connected the two so viscerally until my recent viewing of "Apocalypse Now Redux," Francis Ford Coppola's newly edited (with 49 minutes of additional footage) version of his 1979 classic about the Vietnam War. This is a movie that never will become "Apocalypse Then."

With time and distance, it takes on new meanings. Or, rather, we see additional layers of meaning that weren't at first visible to us. For instance, while it would be foolish not to acknowledge "Apocalypse Now" as a movie about Vietnan, it also uses the war as a metaphor for our own domestic upheaval. Specifically, for the country's dark side that emerged in the late 1960s. A dark side, some say, that only has gotten darker with time and events like the Oklahoma City bombing and Columbine.

When you see the words "Apocalypse Now" scrawled along a wall in renegade Col. Kurtz's overgrown Cambodian jungle-temple compound, the connection to another famous written phrase is immediate. "Helter Skelter" was smeared (and misspelled) in blood on the home refrigerator of murdered victims of Charles Manson's cult in August,1969. Manson, the hippie who went bad, idolized the Beatles and especially their song "Helter Skelter." It seems Coppola meant for us to see that Manson connection.

Watching the original (not "Redux") "Apocalypse Now" now, it's surprising how few specific references it has to the current events of its story's time period. It basically unfolds in its own hallucinogenic, surreal world - Vietnam as a kind of hellishly beautiful Middle Earth.

But the most overtly specific reference to the home front occurs on the naval patrol boat ferrying Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) toward Kurtz, when Chef (Frederic Forrest) opens a letter from home and finds a newspaper clipping about Manson's arrest: "Charles Miller Manson ordered the slaughter of everyone in the home as a symbol of protest,"' Chef reads, looking at his chilling photo. And he adds, "That's really weird, ain't it?"

Another connection to Manson, although not so direct, is the film's use of music. "Apocalypse Now's" unofficial theme song is "The End," The Doors' mournfully hypnotic, Oedipal ode to familial destruction. The song choice is particularly appropriate for those who see the evil acts of Manson's so-called "family" as the death of the 1960s - a proposition often put forth by cultural critics. One other Manson parallel is Kurtz's babbling, wayward-hippie acolyte, a photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper.

When "Apocalypse Now" first was released, after long delays in completion, I saw it as "getting the war right." Although I hadn't been there, it seemed true to what I had watched on TV news reports at the time. The film felt utterly naturalistic, depicting the way an unpopular war was fought by reluctant, counterculture-influenced soldiers.

This was most evident in its portrayal of the youthfully hip and rebellious crew aboard the boat shepherding Willard. Lance (Sam Bottoms) was a surfer boy; Clean (Laurence Fishburne) a child of 1960s ghettos; Chef was, well, from New Orleans, the coolest city in America. Their commander, known as Chief, was a wary and protective black man who seemed to have survival - not victory - on his mind. (Albert Hall's performance as Chief, especially cradling the slain Clean, today holds up as one of "Apocalypse Now's" very best.)

By contrast, Marlon Brando's weirdly charismatic presence as Kurtz (and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's piercingly intimate close-ups of his shaved head) kept up flagging interest in a final sequence that seemed to lose convincing narrative thrust. Kurtz was obviously more of a metaphoric character than a naturalistic one, it seemed then. He was a product of Coppola and co-writer John Milius' attempt to shoehorn Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" into a movie that didn't need it. It was memorable, but less satisfying than what had preceded it.

But my perception has changed. All of "Apocalypse Now" now seems metaphoric - and the Kurtz scenes play better than ever.

Many people remember "Apocalypse Now" as an utterly realistic war film, a documentary-style look at Vietnam. Yet in Peter Cowie's new "The Apocalypse Now Book," journalist Michael Herr - who wrote Willard's pessimistically melancholy narration - is quoted as saying, "It's not really a naturalistic film. It's very expressionistic, very operatic."

Even though direct American involvement in the war had ended in 1972, and the North Vietnamese had captured Saigon in 1975, it didn't really seem over by 1979. The country was still involved in anguishing over its war-related conduct - toward the soldiers who fought in it, the protesters who resisted it, the Vietnamese and Cambodians who died or had to escape their homelands because of it.

That's why "Apocalypse Now" seemed so true at the time. Also, it seemed about Vietnam exclusively, whereas the major Vietnam films preceding it, "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter," seemed more about the war's impact on domestic life.

But with the opportunity that "Redux" gives us for re-evaluation, the film's much-vaunted realism can be questioned. The war couldn't have been consistently, continually fought the way the patrol-boat crew (and thus us) experiences it.

For instance, the entire sequence in which Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) coerces Lance into surfing during a military attack almost certainly wasn't typical conduct of officers. But it is symbolic, in a 1960s way, of "troubled waters." Now Kilgore, played so struttingly by the brilliant Duvall, has a certain "Dr. Strangelove" quality.

Similarly, the famously riotous nighttime USO appearance by Playboy playmates, scored to Hendrix-like guitar licks and ending with them escaping by helicopter as soldiers grasp the machine, seems a parallel to the domestic rock-festival experiences of 1969 - Woodstock and Altamont combined. The appearance of rock-concert promoter Bill Graham in this sequence underscores the connection.

And the druggy, frightening battle at Do Lung Bridge, where leaderless black soldiers fire artillery into the darkness, is representative of what Vietnam meant to the generation fighting it - a "bridge too far" in Cold War militarism. It's also a blunt statement on this country's then-growing racial divide.

"Apocalypse Now" does, of course, sometimes remind us all too well of the war. The riot also recalls the chaotic fall of Saigon. And Chief's bungled inspection of a sampan, and the resultant massacre of its occupants, connects to recent revelations about former Sen. Bob Kerry's war activities.

But putting it all together, the entire boat journey has a strong metaphysical quality I never noticed in 1979. It was a trip toward trying to answer why the war was being lost - there was too much going on in American culture to want to die.

And it all led to ... Charles Manson?

I'm not alone in connecting "Apocalypse Now" to Manson. At the 1994 Southwest Music + Media Conference in Austin, I attended a seminar called "Helter Skelter," about Manson's impact on rock "n' roll. (A relatively unknown Marilyn Manson was one of the panelists.)

While music was the topic, and the way young people flirted with "Mansonmania" to look anti-establishment, "Apocalypse Now" had a peripheral presence. People spoke of a Manson T-shirt with him behind prison bars on the front and the "Apocalypse Now"-derived phrase "Charlie Don't Surf" on the back. Another had Manson's face with an "Apocalypse Now" slogan.

Now, more than ever, you can wonder whether Manson and not Conrad's literary creation was the source for "Apocalypse Now's" Kurtz. And if so, what then is "the horror?" Himself, or the rot - including the war - surrounding him?

By Steven Rosen

Everywhere you look these days, people are honoring the greatest movies of all time.

There are books, newspaper columns, video-store racks, film series and American Film Institute-sponsored television shows devoted to the task. This is, by and large, a good thing - especially if it encourages film revivals and restorations.

But beyond the canonical Great Movies are the "lost movies." They aren't the well-known masterpieces. They aren't perfect; sometimes they have flaws. And they have been forgotten and overlooked, often from the day they were released. But they are exciting, influential, risky and different - maybe too different - for their times.

Every now and then, I'd like to call attention to such deserving lost movies. And for the first, I've picked
1973's "Payday." It was released during an era brimming with challenging movies full of point-of-view and personality. Many became hits (and classics) - "The Godfather," "Chinatown," "Dog Day Afternoon," "Last Tango in Paris." But there were more good films than even the most curious and receptive of audiences could handle, and some fine ones fell by the wayside.

"Payday" was one.I t stars Rip Torn in probably his best role ever, as reprobate country singer Maury Dann. The film is directed succinctly by Daryl Duke and written by Don Carpenter. And its producers are Saul Zaentz, the owner of Fantasy Records who later made "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "The English Patient,"
and partner/music critic Ralph J. Gleason.

Torn once was considered as powerful and electrifying an actor as Jack Nicholson. In fact, he was scheduled
to play the "Easy Rider" lawyer role that provided Nicholson with his breakthrough.

One wonders if Nicholson was first offered Torn's role in "Payday" as struggling, minor-league country singer Dann. Torn looks a little beefier and bulkier, a little more dangerous, than Nicholson, but they both exude the same kind of gleefully macho, killer-smile self-assuredness.

When "Payday" came out, country music was four-square and patriotic. It also wasn't as fashionable as it is now, when older and/or rootsier performers grow desperate trying to get airplay in a world of more polished, showbiz-schooled acts.

So this intensely critical portrait of Maury and his milieu seemed a stretch. (A very different kind of film, "This Is Spinal Tap," had problems getting audiences to believe its premise of aging metal bands playing well past their prime.)

It also seemed as if Bay area hipsters - Fantasy Records had been home to Lenny Bruce and Creedence Clearwater Revival; Gleason was associated with Rolling Stone magazine - were making fun of country.

Now, after a couple of generations of "outlaw" country singers and their rise and fall, as well as the growth in
knowledge of Hank Williams' life, "Payday" seems extremely honest and true to its character.

And it is a devastating character study, following Maury for the last three days of his life. He plays a small-club date, visits his pill-addicted mom, goes hunting, suffers through a visit with a weaselly deejay, seduces a young woman in his car, violently breaks up with his older girlfriend Mayleen (Ahna Capri) to carry on with a younger one (Elayne Heilveil), fights with and fires a key band member, and kills a man who challenges him to a fight.

Yet he's also irresistible and bullishly charming in his slovenly, cocky, down-home way - he sits on the toilet with the door open to shock people. You also feel sympathy for his neediness and insecurity; he is dependent on his tough manager (Michael C. Gwynne) to help him negotiate life.

Writer Carpenter sees Maury as a guy still searching for his big hit (his latest LP is called "Payday"). I prefer to view him as a guy past his last hit, who doesn't yet know it. Or maybe he just can't admit it.

In a haunting and unforgettable scene reminiscent of Ed Harris' demise in "Pollock," he dies while speeding with an
unwilling passenger in the back seat of his white Cadillac. It's a true death's-head vision - while warbling "She's Only a Country Girl" (a Shel Silverstein song), his eyes bulge and he gives out a short, quick gasp.

Watching "Payday" again recently, I tried to recall another character as compelling as Torn's Maury Dann, as repellent yet also alluring, as frightening yet also appealing, as sexy yet not
conventionally handsome. Then it hit me - Tony Soprano.

(This originally ran in The Denver Post in 2001, before Torn's great performance in "Forty Shades of Blue.")

Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center"

Review By Steven Rosen
From Cincinnati CityBeat
August 9, 2006

There's a perfectly good reason why disaster movies focus on just a handful of characters. It's a way of injecting intimate personal drama into a tragedy whose enormity is so great and whose circumstances so unusual we wouldn't otherwise relate to the casualty numbers as real people, real lives.

Director Oliver Stone, working with writer Andrea Berloff, takes that intimate approach in "World Trade Center," which is based on the true story of Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), who were trapped in an elevator shaft after a tower collapsed on 9/11.

Stone does a somberly realistic, disciplined job, technically accomplished with peak moments of brilliance. It's also a surprisingly apolitical and restrained film, given Stone's predilection for inserting weird conspiracy theories and eccentric narrative twists into otherwise historical dramas ("JFK" and "Nixon"). He rises to the challenge here to not make his views -- whatever they are -- the point of the film. As a result, a filmmaking iconoclast has turned into a statesman.

But there's a problem with this approach, however well realized. We as a nation -- and probably much of the world -- don't need to have 9/11 made personal for us. The 2,749 people who died on that day at the World Trade Center site, when Islamic militants flew two hijacked planes into the tower, are not just statistics to us. Not yet, anyway, not after just five years. (Militants also hijacked and crashed two other planes, one into the Pentagon.) Those victims are us. We feel every death vividly. We take each one personally.

Thus this film's approach inevitably reduces the impact of the attack rather than heightening it. It turns it into something -- dare I say it -- conventional, movie-wise: two injured men trapped in a cave-in, trying to survive while rescuers search and family members at home worry and bicker among themselves.

As this story arc plays out with a few flashbacks and much crosscutting, it's easy to get lulled by its familiarity despite the restrained and unglamorous acting by Cage and Pena and Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal as their respective wives.

It's possible this movie was green-lighted by Paramount Pictures because it is, essentially, about heroism. But Stone isn't quite buying that take on things. He does spend time presenting this story from the rescuers' eyes, but those scenes are as spooky as they are inspiring. And he treats his shots of the twisted steel at the surface of Ground Zero as if it's a sacred war memorial, too sacred for Hollywood melodrama.

Primarily he and his fine cinematographer Seamus McGarvey concentrate on the darkness of the rubble in which the two officers, often shown in close-up, are trapped. It's portrayed as a claustrophobic entombment, and the rumbles and creaks and snaps of the collapsing debris sound like the world as we know it ending. There's even a hurtling fireball or two.

This is apocalypse now. It's also a place for death's-head religious visions, where Jimeno imagines Jesus before him carrying a water bottle.

Yet two of the most memorable scenes are those that transcend the story's particulars. In one hauntingly poetic moment that plays like melancholy Spielberg, pregnant Allison Jimeno (Gyllenhaal) goes out into her deserted suburban street at night, the lights of television sets broadcasting the news shining through all the living rooms. In the other, after the officers become trapped in the debris, Stone pulls back to consider what happened from a higher and higher vantage point -- a space satellite, even. It reminds me of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Never previously shy of graphic depictions of violence in movies like "Platoon," "Natural Born Killers" and "U Turn," Stone this time uses only power of suggestion to show the actual attack. The build-up is crisp and quick, as short scenes of New York life on that morning -- the twin towers sometimes evident in the distance -- pass by like floating clouds, accompanied by Craig Armstrong's ominous score. The attack itself is but a shadow, a muffled boom, a cop looking up, a television report.

Cage's and Pena's characters are not portrayed as gung-ho types. There's fear on their faces -- and on those of their cohorts -- as they initially arrive by busload at the damaged but standing World Trade Center for rescue operations and tosee what's happening. A body falls from a tower; just one, but it's jolting. The sky is turning gray.

There's an extremely odd character in "World Trade Center," one also based on true events even though he seems out of a Stone movie. As played by Michael Shannon, retired Marine Dave Karnes is tall, gaunt and almost sinister -- he's like a stalker. Living in Connecticut as an accountant, he puts on his uniform after the attack because he realizes this is war, gets a haircut and goes down to help with rescue operations. Hooking up with a Marine Sergeant Thomas (William Mapother), they prowl like ghosts calling out for survivors.

In an article for Slate, Rebecca Liss called the actual Karnes "crazy brave," and Stone captures that creepy quality. When Karnes says he's going to re-enlist because "they're going to need some good men out there to avenge this" -- the closest thing to a political statement in the film -- the effect is more foreboding than rousing. Maybe that's as it should be, considering what's come since 9/11.

Within the confines of a movie about "courage and survival," as Paramount is promoting "World Trade Center," Stone has made a film that's a requiem, with a modestly optimistic ending. We're probably not ready for more than that yet. I'm not sure we're ready yet to see 9/11 through the eyes of characters in a Hollywood drama, rather than through our own.

Certainly we weren't ready for "United 93" earlier this year. But Stone has handled his material with respect.

~ By STEVEN ROSEN ~

(This story ran in Los Angeles CityBeat on Nov. 11, 2004. Moog died Aug. 21, 2005. The film "Moog" was screened this weekend as part of Grand Performances film series in downtown Los Angeles.)

Usually, the term “back to roots” in music describes the renewed interest in acoustic styles – especially bluegrass, folk, gospel, and country blues – most recently sparked by the Grammy-winning "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack and its related tours.

So it will surprise many to learn there’s also a roots movement going on in that seemingly most unrootsy of musical regions – electronic sounds. Musicians tired of the digital synthesizers that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s, which encode sound as digital information that can then be decoded, are opting for the more “natural” analog instruments of the 1970s and even earlier. Analog produces direct musical sound, and many synthesizer buffs, like audiophile record collectors, believe it is warmer, livelier, and more responsive to the musician’s emotional state.

And that means electronics inventor Robert Moog, at age 70, and his namesake Moog and Minimoog analog keyboard synthesizers are back. (The part of the instrument that produces the sound is analog; other parts use digital technology.)

Since he reacquired the rights to the name “Moog” in 2002 – almost 30 years after selling them and watching the purchaser eventually cease production – and subsequently introduced the Minimoog Voyager, business has been booming at his company in Asheville, N.C. And now his life and ideas are the subject of a new documentary – fittingly titled "Moog," in honor of his instant name recognition.

Besides Moog, who speaks at length about his vision, the film also includes performances and/or interviews with such Moog-favoring musicians and DJs as Keith Emerson (and his incredible, 10-foot-tall Monster Moog), Rick Wakeman, Bernie Worrell, Stereolab, Money Mark, and DJ Logic.

In this sweet, thought-provoking movie, directed by Hans Fjellestad, the white-haired, grandfatherly Moog expresses a surprising kind of “I Sing the Body Electronic” cosmic consciousness about his creations. Looking a bit like Einstein, and talking like Buckminster Fuller, he just may be the elusive ghost in the machine.

“I can feel what’s going on inside a piece of electronic equipment,” he explains in the film, as the camera pans over the thick, brightly colored wires of one of his instruments. “I have this sense that I know, and to some extent have control over, what’s going on inside the transistors and resistors.”

Director Fjellestad, an American of Danish descent, studied classical piano and previously made a film about Tijuana culture, "Frontier Life." “I’ve been interested in looking at frontiers, and Bob was the archetypal frontiersman exploring the borders,” he explains.

On the phone from Portland, Oregon, where he and his wife are visiting their daughter and her husband, an expansive Moog further elaborates on the spiritual relationship he feels with his work. “When I was a teenager, and a little bit before, I really loved electronics,” he says. “I have a talent and a gift for making contact with electronic circuitry. It’s a gift that enables stuff to come through you. I don’t think I’m so smart or creative that it starts off inside my head and then comes out.

“I think all us humans are capable of experiencing connections – engaging in spiritual things like that,” Moog continues. “Whether or not we take advantage of that depends on a lot of things. But I found it through electronics, particularly musical electronics. Our customers find it through the musical side of musical electronics. I find it through the electronics side.”

In a separate interview, musician Worrell also sees a spiritual edge to Moog. “Thank God for his innovations and inspiration, which I believe came from the Creator,” Worrell says. “It’s coupled with Bob Moog’s knowing how artists think and what kind of tool keyboardists would appreciate. It’s part of his ability to see.”

It should be noted that not every musician views Moog and his synthesizers in such terms. In the movie, Wakeman – who first became famous with progressive-rock band Yes – talks about his motivations for turning to the Moog: “It changed the face of music. For the first time, the keyboard player could give the guitarists a run for the money on stage.”

Growing up in Flushing, Queens, Moog built his first theremin at age 14 from a do-it-yourself kit. The strange, in-vogue-again instrument, invented by Russia’s Leon Theremin, uses high-frequency radio signals to create otherworldly, eerie electronic sounds. To play it, people move their hands and bodies near its antennae, thus varying pitch and volume.

“I was a card-carrying electronics nerd,” Moog says. “My father was a professional engineer, so I used to love to go down in his basement and build things with him. We did that together; that was very nice. There was not too much I could do with the guys at school, other than get beat up.” He was interested in the theremin because it was a do-it-yourself project and looked like fun. “To be able to make something that had a musical sound and could be played was an interesting thing to me.”

While a sophomore in college, Moog sold his first home-built theremin. Eventually, that led to a business, R.A. Moog, selling electronic musical instruments. “When we began making synthesizer components in 1964, we saw experimental musicians as our customers – people putting music together on tape,” Moog says.

“These people weren’t interested in traditional melody or harmony,” he continues. “What interested them the most was tone color. So our early electronic-music instruments were designed with the idea you could make a wide variety of sounds by connecting modules together and setting [the controls of] each one individually. There were a variety of ways to play that sound – a keyboard was just one device that could be used. There were joysticks, sequencers, and a whole bunch of things we built in small quantities and made available.”

One early customer was Walter Carlos – now Wendy Carlos – who decided to use a Moog keyboard synthesizer to record Bach. Switched-on Bach, released in 1968, was as big a pop-cultural sensation as any classical album before or since. It was the first platinum-selling classical record, won three Grammy Awards, and caused the mass acceptance of the Moog synthesizer as an instrument that made music, rather than sound effects. (Carlos did not want to appear in this film, Fjellestad notes.)

Yet, there remain people – including musicians – who feel a synthesizer produces synthetic sounds, unlike a traditional instrument or human voice. As a result, you still don’t expect to see Moogs at folk or bluegrass festivals, or even in symphony orchestras or no-nonsense punk bands.

“But when you think about it, the piano is pretty unnatural, too,” Moog says. “You don’t find pianos growing on trees. The same is true for trumpets and violins; they’re highly artificial. You really have to work to put together a violin. Over the centuries, when musical instruments have been developed, they’ve been developed with the most recent technology of the time,” he explains. “In the 20th century, the technology of our times was electronic. To me, it was only natural that new instruments would be made with that technology.”

(This is a posting of a paper delivered at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle on April 28, 2006.)

By Steven Rosen

After my first direct experience with Tiny Tim – as the guest star at a weird 1992 event in Denver called “Babyboomerama” – I and others left thinking he was an absolute freak.

Around age 60 then, he was wearing a Mickey Mouse-patterned tuxedo, had too much reddish-brown dye in his long scraggly hair and was using hideously applied makeup. He carried around his trademark ukulele in a shopping bag and sang a few rock tunes like “Highway to Hell” with shameless kitsch relish.

There were passages of that piercingly fluttering, trilling falsetto that drove Top 40 deejays crazy when “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips” became a fluke hit in 1968. During a Q&A period, he ranted madly against his first wife, Miss Vicki, the 17-year-girl he married on “The Tonight Show” in 1969. I loved it, of course, as a guilty pleasure. Ah, novelty acts paying the bills after the fall!

So when Tiny Tim and Brave Combo put out a reasonably high-profile album called “Girl” on Rounder Records in 1996, I couldn’t resist interviewing him for a newspaper story. It had the kind of comeback-attempt angle that readers love. And they surely must still remember how bizarre he was back in the day.

True, I dimly remembered old stories that Tiny Tim, in his prime, was a connoisseur of pre-rock pop music and the vocalists who recorded it. I somewhat remembered that he tried to do them honor by singing in their styles. “Girl” even contained some songs that might fit that description. But that seemed such a distant part of his legacy. More important was that “Girl” contained some Beatles songs and “Stairway to Heaven.” Tiny Tim was trying to go tongue-in-cheek “lounge.”

To my surprise, during this hour and half phone interview – I had to cut it short – he revealed something I was not expecting. Sanity, yes, but also a candid integrity. He was frank about what he perceived as the record’s lack of musical quality.

He didn’t much care for “Girl.” He didn’t feel his vocals did the songs justice on most of the tracks. And he didn’t think the producer/engineer understood how to record in a way to evoke the pre-rock-era sound still so important to him. He was upset and hurt.

Here’s a sample passage from that interview: “The problem is there are many types of vocal styles I have, from Rudy Vallee to the young (Bing) Crosby to Eddie Cantor, Jolson, the rest. In my head it sounds fantastic, the heavy type voice, but it’s very difficult to get what I hear in my head onto the recorder...”

I felt a lot of my amusement with Tiny Tim dissipate. This guy, first and foremost, was being sincere. He also mentioned that he had recently made a much better album on a small label, Vinyl Retentive, called “Prisoner of Love: A Tribute to Russ Columbo.” He was proud of this nod to a singer who briefly rivaled Bing Crosby in popularity, before dying in 1934 at age 26.

“I’ve recorded some of his most famous songs, from ‘All of Me’ to ‘Prisoner of Love,’” he said. “This is the greatest album I’ve ever made. I sing in the same key mostly (of Columbo) on all these songs and you’d never believe it’s Tiny Tim.”

He sent me a copy and it was good. It’s the work of an aging crooner whose gentle tenor and creamy baritone are still in pretty good shape. He’s capable at times of a soaring, yearning quality that makes those years disappear. Paul Reller transcribed the original arrangements and used a band called Clang to record with Tiny Tim on vintage instruments.

There’s one especially sweet moment – fittingly, right at the end – when he completes a lovely, ethereal version of “Auf Wiedersehen, My Dear.” The musicians clap in appreciation of him nailing it so well. Laughing as the cut fades, he says, “That may be the million seller.” He died later in 1996.

In a recent biography about Columbo and the era of crooners called “You Call It Madness,” Lenny Kaye said this about that album: “…You begin to realize just how fine and underrated a singer Mr. Tim is, riding the inflections and curling cues that are the hallmark of late-twenties and early-thirties vocal performance, born natural within the arrangements.”

My thesis, then, is that Tiny Tim should not be remembered as a freak or novelty artist. Not even as an outsider artist, a term that carries more cachet. He was certainly unusual, especially in his dress and his ideas about matters of the heart – which I’ll save for another conference. And he played up the comic aspects of his amazingly high falsetto to his own detriment – especially after he was adopted by “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” in 1968, his breakthrough year.

But he was an artist of merit who knew what he wanted to do. I use the term “The Harry Smith of Adult-Standards Singers” to encourage a new way of thinking about him. Smith, not a singer, is now revered – a Grammy recipient – although he was personally eccentric. Both were musicologists. There was also a visionary quality to both men’s work in the arts.

The Smith-curated 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music” helped lure gifted folk and blues performers to Greenwich Village by the early 1960s. Tiny Tim wasn’t one of them, although he played an acoustic instrument. But he was working the same clubs at the same time. And his talent was recognized and respected by his peers.

Here’s Bob Dylan on Tiny Tim, from a 1966 interview with Robert Shelton. “Tiny Tim was around...that was long before,” Dylan said. “That was around 1961 or 1962. He was very far ahead of his time. Hey, even if he's still doing today what he was doing then, he…still is ahead of his time. But he was very hung-up on his mother and stuff like that, so he couldn't get out. But he was a genius. A natural talent.”

(That quote was provided by David Hajdu, author of “Positively Fourth Street,” who discovered it in the EMP archives. He didn’t use it, but provided it to me for this paper.)

Another Tiny Tim admirer was future-Holy-Modal-Rounder Peter Stampfel, still a tradition-minded folksinger when he shared a bill with Tiny Tim in January, 1963. “Him and me and Phil Ochs were working at the Third Side, a club on Third Street. He was playing ukulele and singing all old songs with the exception of Elvis Presley’s ‘Return to Sender’ in his falsetto,” he told me.

“His feelings about it could not have been more sincere. He was absolutely in the thrall of pre-rock pop. Not a phony bone in his body. He was as sincere about what he was doing as I was about what I was doing.”

As Greil Marcus has so famously posited in “Invisible Republic,” Smith opened the door for the roots-oriented (and even secret) music of “old weird America” to sneak into post-war pop culture.

Tiny Tim, on the other hand, loved the “official” pop music of the early 20th Century – Tin Pan Alley, Broadway revues and early movie musicals, suave pop crooners and humorous vaudevillians. He made it weird through his own persona. But he wanted to save worthwhile “old music” from being forgotten.

Some of the singers Tiny Tim loved were still familiar to the public in the 1960s – Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Al Jolson’s legacy. But Tiny Tim went way deeper. He idolized, for instance, Nick Lucas, who played guitar and ukulele and sang the original “Tip-Toe Thru’ the Tulips” in 1929. And Russ Columbo, Gene Austin, Henry Burr, Billy Murray and Ada Jones and Irving Kaufman, among others.

Tiny Tim’s passion for pop came from listening to music and radio shows in his family’s apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. He saw himself as a character within that world, too, in a dream-like and subconscious-tapping way. In a 1976 biography by Harry Stein called “Tiny Tim,” the singer recalls how moved he was as an only child listening to radio.

“Some nights, after I’d been reading comic books or listening to adventure shows on the radio, I’d lie awake in bed and create my own characters. I created my own radio station and I would broadcast my own shows. The most popular show I ever had was ‘The Tom Berry Show,’ which started in 1945 and lasted three years. Its theme song was the theme from ‘Christmas in Connecticut,’ a film that came around the same year.”

Incidentally, this out-of-print book has other trivia about Tiny Tim’s career. The singer says he first grew his hair long to emulate Rudolph Valentino, only kept going. The name Tiny Tim was shortened from Sir Timothy Tims – one of many stage names that he used early in a career that began in the 1950s. (He was born Herbert Khaury to a Lebanese-Catholic father and an East-European Jewish mother.) And Perry Como once told him to “Sing Up, Herb!”

Tiny Tim’s career got a critical boost from Hugh Romney – now better known as the counterculturist Wavy Gravy. And there was nothing smug or ironic about his interest. Romney, a political monologist/humorist in the Village of the early 1960s, had been wowed by Tiny Tim’s singing at a West Village lesbian club called Page 3. So he signed him up for a show with him and Moondog. (Moondog later quit because he thought Tiny Tim was too effeminate.)

The show occurred one night in 1963 at a coffeehouse called Fat Black Pussycat, earning much publicity. It also resulted in the club being shut down for back taxes, Romney recalled, so he organized a homeless “Phantom Cabaret” to continue. Julian Beck and Judith Malina offered him midnights at their Living Theatre, after performances of the groundbreaking play “The Brig.”

“At midnight, we’d gather the cast of ‘The Brig’ up and everybody would go ‘bong, bong, bong,’” Romney told me. “We’d do 20-30 of those and then Tiny would shuffle out onstage, which still had the barbed wire from ‘The Brig,’ with his tiny shopping bag. I maintain he would descend into the cathedral of an old Philco radio.

“Those old-time entertainers, he would channel them,” Romney continued. “They’d come inside him. It was the strangest thing. One time he’d come off the stage trembling. I’d say, ‘Tiny, what’s wrong?’ He’d say, ‘Oh, Mr. Rudy Vallee came inside me and he wouldn’t leave. I lost my Crosby power,’ referring to his ability to sing in Bing Crosby’s style.

“It was an honor to have shared life moments with him,” Romney said.

Lenny Bruce, Romney’s friend, eventually hired Tiny Tim to open at the April, 1964, Café A Go-Go engagement in New York for which Bruce was arrested for obscenity. It was promoted as “Lenny Bruce talks for money, Tiny Tim sings for love.”

Another of Romney’s friends, the Beat Neal Cassady, also became a fan. Romney remembers driving to New York’s Cloisters for sunrise one morning with the two in the car. “They loved singing together and they would harmonize, mostly old Bing Crosby songs,” he said.

Why is this not the Tiny Tim we remember today? His legacy has suffered, starting well before his death in late 1996, because he was misunderstood as a big goof. And he sometimes had to play up to that image to earn a living in later years. Also, his late-1960s Richard Perry-produced Reprise albums had fallen out of print by 1996.

But Rhino Handmade has slowly been rehabilitating his catalogue. Next month, it is releasing “God Bless Tiny Tim! The Complete Reprise Recordings.” “God Bless” was the title of his first Reprise album, the only one of his three that charted.

In 2000 – for the first time, amazingly – Rhino Handmade released his finest work, “Live! At the Royal Albert Hall” from 1968. He performed with Perry conducting a large orchestra and absolutely enchanted an audience. In his prime, he was a master entertainer, a spellbinding vocalist, and an educator who loved teaching his audience about the origins of his older songs.

“My goal was for people to recognize what a truly magnificent singer he was and how he sang in different voices,” Perry told me. “It was all there in the records and the in-person appearances. But unfortunately because he appeared on ‘Laugh-In’ quite a bit, which was great exposure for him, it played up the falsetto thing. So that’s what people think of him more than anything else. But he was just at the beginning.”

No less a composer than Irving Berlin was impressed by the first album’s version of his 1915 “Stay Down Here Where You Belong.” Tiny Tim told Ernie Clark in an interview for TinyTim.org: “Let me tell you the story here: Irving Berlin, when he heard in '68 that I had sung this song, actually called up Warner Brothers and wanted to know where I got it. I said that I got it from Henry Burr, and he couldn't believe that somebody knew it!”

I also might add that Tiny Tim did fit into the world of 1960s rock ‘n’ roll, too. But it was a world that accepted him for what he was. He was part of the youth revolution of the era, even if he was over 30. He played at a midtown rock club, Steve Paul’s The Scene, in the mid-1960s. And there is a handbill advertising him and the Velvet Underground together at Cheetah on April 11, 1967. While he loved material from the 1940s and earlier, he enjoyed an occasional take on a rock hit. And his use of a dramatically high voice wasn’t all that different from Del Shannon, or Frankie Valli. They aren’t considered freaks or novelty acts today – Valli’s Four Seasons are the subject of one of Broadway’s hottest musicals.

In closing, it’s not too late for us to take Tiny Tim seriously. We’re still catching up with many of the beautiful singers and songs he admired. Let’s catch up with Tiny Tim, too, and the uniquely gifted – not freakish – way he sought to make fine music.

The "radicals-on-the-run" theme of Dana Spiotta's second novel, "Eat the Document," puts her in heady literary company.

Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" and Russell Banks' "The Darling" both have dealt with a similar topic - the repercussions of acts of political violence committed by young people, especially young middle-class women, in the 1960s.

But Spiotta, who is younger and whose previous novel was "Lightning Field," adds an additional dimension. "Eat the Document" qualifies as a literary phantasmagoria in which the real world of contemporary pop culture freely intermingles with a parallel fantasy one.

So her book also fits comfortably on the shelf next to Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity," Tom Carson's "Gilligan's Wake" and Brian Morton's "The Dylanist." The latter novel is an especially apt comparison, because this book's title comes from a little-seen, never-broadcast Bob Dylan TV special referenced in the story. It's also a metaphor for all that is hidden in plain in sight.

Another crucial development, for instance, concerns a fictional movie made by one of Spiotta's characters - the fugitive radical Bobby DeSoto - for an actual Los Angeles rock group of the 1960s, Love. And the book frequently stops for discursive asides on the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds," Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" and Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door."

Yet "Eat the Document" is not solely an exercise in inward-turning metafiction. It has a peculiarly mysterious melancholy tone that is all its own - slightly distant and secretive; protective of its characters.

At 304 pages, this is a reasonably short novel considering all that it attempts. The narrative shifts frequently between eras, and the connections made between generations is a major theme. Spiotta is more interested in her characters' inner lives - and their thoughts on American life - than on major plot twists and dramatic revelations. In fact, the way everything comes together almost seems like an afterthought for the author.

As a result, the book's story starts slowly and ends abruptly. But she has rendered the details of her characters' world with clarity. And she has a special empathy for her female characters that may remind some of Ann Beattie.

Part of the story concerns the tumultuous protest years when one of the protagonists, Mary Whittaker, hastily goes underground and tries to re-create her identity while making new contacts. Spiotta doesn't spare her pain - there's a strange and brutally cruel scene in which Mary is raped by a motorist while his girlfriend passively assists.

Hiding in Eugene, Ore., Mary (under the assumed name Caroline) tries to comfort a friend who has been roughly treated by a crass guy she picked up in a bar. The friend explains she just wanted a dalliance with an unpretentious, non-hippie working-class guy like Kris Kristofferson.

"I guess, but Kris Kristofferson is like a Rhodes Scholar. And he has long hair. And a beard," Caroline/Mary answers.

Mary's life as a present-day mother keeping a big secret from her son becomes one of "Eat the Document's" primary focuses. But running parallel to her story is that of Nash, a middle-aged manager of Prairie Fire bookstore in a ruggedly "alternative" section of today's Seattle.

It's a city whose post-grunge radical streak brings out some of Spiotta's weirdest and most appealing descriptive writing. Nash's bookstore hosts myriad mischievous political-activist groups, such as Kill the Street Puppets Project.

"That got a big crowd, as many people seemed to have a secret aversion to papier-mache and chicken wire," Spiotta writes.

And when Nash becomes smitten with one of the store's teenage regulars, a young idealist named Miranda, the writing is sweet and even sexy rather than disapproving or stern. But the author doesn't make it easy for him.

Spiotta understands those who feel lost and left out of a society that seems too corporately driven, including corporate pop culture. Some of her alienated characters, searching for meaningful alternatives, are haunted by past tragedies - some of their own making. Others are young and still idealistic.

Combined, they form a resonant snapshot of disaffected American life, circa 2006.

(This review ran in the Denver Post on July 2, 2006.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eat the Document
By Dana Spiotta

Scribner, 304 pages, $24