Hijinks, pranks and shenanigans
I generally avoid writing about politics, as there are too many people writing about politics already, and little enough being said. But after reading this in the Washington Post, and seeing some of Mitt Romney’s responses to the story here, I have to call bullshit on Romney’s mendacity and callowness in explaining (away) his youthful “hijinks.”
Let me say plainly that there is no reason anyone should be interested in my opinion here, any more than in those of the anonymous or pseudonymous avatars who burn through any political comment thread like fire through a diseased urethra. It may be that all I’m doing here is adding to the sum of misery created by a country as promiscuous with our opinions as we are puritan in our thinking: we’re unappealingly eager to broadcast our separate versions of how the world is going to hell.
My version (thanks for asking!) includes the disappearance of drive-ins, Bon Iver, and the overuse of “impact” as a verb unrelated to dental trauma. It also includes the kind of damage to the language, and correspondingly to the soul, that Mitt Romney perpetrates so effortlessly. For example:
* “Hijinks and pranks”
Some things that fall into this category: swiping a Chunky bar from Woolworth’s, daring your friends to run up to the windows of the old house to see if there’s really a corpse hanging in the dusty living room or a naked lady dancing in the kitchen, popping wheelies, poking dead things with sticks, Dutch ovens, staging and filming an absurdist scene of students dining on fine china and attended by a waiter on a street median. (That last one was something Romney actually did that strikes me as a genuine prank and/or hijink, and rather a good one. Had Romney cultivated that sense of the strange and wonderful, he might have found a higher calling as an artist. Like Herman Cain.)
Some things that do not fall into this category: tackling and pinning to the ground a misfit high school kid a year younger than you and hacking off his hair while he screams for help. Pretending to open a door for a teacher so nearsighted he was known “to walk into the trophy case and apologize” and to “step into wastepaper baskets,” and letting him smack into it. Interrupting a male student in class to shout “Atta girl!”
These aren’t “hijinks and pranks.” They’re basically just asshole maneuvers that reveal a measurable level of hostility and disdain, two qualities that seem to percolate quite evidently beneath the veneer of the adult version of Mitt Romney.
* “The people involved didn’t come out of the closet until years later…. I had no idea that this person might have been gay.”
Even for 1965, this doesn’t wash. I wasn’t “out” in high school, either, but the jocks who so casually made me wish I were dead damn sure knew. In fact, most everybody in school probably knew except me (though some days, especially in gym class, I had a pretty strong suspicion) and a few girls who tried really hard to believe I was just “sensitive.”
And in talking with other folks who have had similar experiences, it seems that one thing is commonly true: bullies know. Blame evolution or ESP, pheromones or phantom visions that burst in streams of revelation. It doesn’t matter if it’s 1965 or 1985 or 2025. And don’t hand me the line about the innocence and naiveté of the ‘60s in a boys’ prep school: the bulk of that WP article lays out a pretty compelling case that this was not exactly A Separate Peace.
Bullies know. In some sense, it’s their job to know. They take it seriously. Like any avocation, like priests or postal carriers, some are way better at it than others. The teenage Romney – in this account – comes off as adequately cruel, if a bit unmotivated, a touch uninspired. Maybe his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe he felt like he had something to prove. Maybe his father’s position or his religion set him apart from himself or from his classmates in some way he couldn’t quite reconcile.
But come on. A teenager at a boys’ school in the twentieth century, who keeps complaining about another boy’s long bleached-blond hair, saying “he can’t look like that. That’s wrong.” Guess what? He knows.
* “High school days, if I did stupid things, why I’m afraid I got to say sorry for it.”
There’s a big difference, a world of hurt, between “stupid” and “mean.” And if someone can’t tell them apart, you have to wonder at their moral compass.
Politicians have mastered the art of the blatantly unapologetic apology, so there’s frankly not much to distinguish the thoughtless, utterly uninterested tone here from that of a hundred other politicians, of every persuasion, for everything from misappropriation of funds to ill-conceived assassination metaphors for local elections to “wide stances.”
(On a secondary point: if you’re actually “afraid” you have to say “sorry,” then don’t. None of us have to face our fears. If you’re really afraid of apologizing, just don’t do it. You don’t see me burying myself alive or listening to Neil Diamond.)
Unapologetic apologies are ridiculous, arrogant things that float away untethered to any actual sense of remorse or regret. They drift heavenward at speed to join unearned vanities and Oscar acceptance speeches and clog up the air we all have to breathe. But you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to issue an insincere and un-heartfelt apology, have the courtesy to define your terms correctly.
Someone might, if you do, even be snookered into believing it.
An apocalyptic string of consciousness provoked by exhaustion, desire and Blue Öyster Cult
The other night around 11:30, on my way home from work, I stopped at the 24-hour Rite Aid to pick up cigarettes and soup. The cashier who looks like Karen Black was working. Her long hair, black and gray, was untidily bundled on top of her head like an unloved cat, and behind her eyes was just the gentlest spark of potential drunk-eyed lunacy. Another employee, a turtle-faced man with a ginger mustache, marked down bags of candy with a pricing gun that stuttered with every few pulls. Each time it did, he made the same noise, which might have been a word, vulgar or innocent. I was too far away to hear, and I’m never one to eavesdrop. The overhead played Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and the light was exhausting, too bright, and it turned everything into an Instagram photo: instant vintage, heat and serve nostalgia. A Peter Berlin type with tight ripped jeans and shaggy blond hair was shopping the deodorants, but in Pittsburgh, this isn’t an immediate cause for concern. For a moment I ached for sideburns and a pair of bell-bottoms, but they don’t flatter my legs, and even though it is Pittsburgh, it isn’t really still the seventies. I lingered for a few minutes by the cereal, picturing a night-wired Romeo and Juliet, shotguns barreling through the automatic doors, the effect of the light and the hour and the song, which always unsettles me in a very specific way. Karen Black would do something heroic: Karen Black kicks ass, always. But Peter Berlin and I would probably still end up as collateral damage, gunned down among the Fiber One and Old Spice. Not the worst end, though not quite what one hopes for, of course. Still: salvation from a retirement filled with defective retail equipment and sleepy mopes with too much useless secondhand imagination jonesing for menthols on a Sunday midnight. Given the choice, though, I’d be in that amphetamine- and neon-spattered pickup headed west, knocking like a cowbell beneath the hood.
Who wouldn’t?
Happy Valentine’s Day
The sounds of the season in a half-dozen (slightly poisoned) sonic flowers.
Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)
Greatest Hits: Sheffield, 1990
Note: The following was posted, in a slightly different form, on a long-defunct blog and is reposted here out of sheer idleness.
One year after The Cure’s greatest album (Disintegration) came out, I relocated to Sheffield, in northern England, for a year of university. Actually, a year of drinking, smoking and rambunctious “coming out” interrupted by an occasional lecture, a trip to Edinburgh with my best friend Grace (yes, her name really was Grace, but she was more Margaret Cho than Debra Messing) and Operation Desert Storm.
By high school graduation, I’d traded in some of the plainness of a small-town background for a bit of Goth glamor. I’d discovered Anne Sexton and Siouxsie Sioux, no small feat in a town whose library catered to Rod McKuen fans and whose radio station played RATT and Whitesnake 24/7. By my junior year of college, I’d fulfilled most of the Sextonian prerequisites: first breakdown and suicide attempt, incipient alcoholism and self-flagellating (if unrealized) sexuality.
So on the late summer night I reached JFK, two hours after my connecting flight to Heathrow had departed, and found myself sleeping on top of my lumpy carry-on just outside baggage claim, I was primed for the next phase of development as a glamorous ruin.
Shortly after my arrival in Sheffield, I began to be invited to parties and discos and Marxist student rallies, staples of English student life back then. There weren’t a lot of Americans at the university, and there was certainly no tourist trade, so I was something of a novelty. I disposed of my virginity, courtesy of a sardonic Mancunian who called himself Jean-Luc (after Godard), took up cigarettes (Benson & Hedges Lights, in those days, sold from a vending machine conveniently located within the residence hall) and started circulating.
Jean-Luc introduced me to a rather posh acquaintance of his named Edmund. His parents paid for his rowhouse near the city centre, he consistently laid in enough wine and liquor to stock an Oddbins, and he affected Joan Crawford-y smoking accoutrements: cut glass table lighter, onyx cigarette box. With his absurd mannerisms and floppy hair, he was a sort of cross between Brideshead Revisited and Maurice. Edmund invited me to his Twin Peaks party, at which there was surpisingly little drag: only two boys came dressed as women, one as Nadine (the crazy-sad neglected wife with an eyepatch) and one, naturally, as Audrey Horne.
Edmund and I had slept together shortly after we met, which didn’t much concern either Jean-Luc or Edmund’s live-in boyfriend, but at the party, I met Adi, a purple-haired waif whom I’d already encountered at a university disco when, prompted by my Robert Smith tee shirt, he’d asked me what my favorite Cure song was. I’d answered him honestly, and he’d smiled, nodded and bounced away into the glittery depths. At Edmund’s party, I discovered that this was Adi’s version of a pick-up line, that if I’d leered and told him “Let’s Go to Bed,” we would have. Adi didn’t have extraordinary social skills, but he did have a surprising number of friends for a skinny Goth boy.
One of them was Marxist Marc. A couple of months after Adi and I called it quits as whatever it was we’d become, he introduced me to Marc, a blond elfen twink of flexible sexuality who seemed genetically engineered to recruit gay boys and vulnerable straight girls to the socialist cause. The Gulf War (version 1.0) was underway, so I’m fairly certain that my signature on various petitions, and my subsequent attendance at meetings and rallies, has been duly recorded and filed away somewhere in Virginia.
If I’m still unwilling to admit that my dedication to global equity was birthed by rampant horniness, I confess that my gradual disillusionment with the revolution was facilitated not only by one too many reductionist, poorly copy-edited pamphlets, but also by an unlikely friend of Marc’s, an ardent libertarian philosophy student named Sean with whom Marc shared epic running political arguments interrupted by occasional (presumably vigorous) sex. Sean was tall, lanky and shaved his head completely bald. He seemed to loathe every form of organized politics and religion and could demolish dogma with the skill of a ruthless, renegade Benedictine.
It was because of Sean that I ended up drunk in the paternoster at all.
The philosophy department party was, as I remember, somewhere near the penultimate floor of the Arts Tower. The Tower, twenty stories of early ’60s beigey-grey-block grandeur, boasted one singular feature which made it a center of fascination and terror for me: a genuine working paternoster, one of the most diabolical personal transport devices ever invented.If you’ve never encountered a paternoster before, imagine a sort of upright MRI machine, a just-larger-than-coffin-sized elevator. With no door. That doesn’t stop between floors. The idea is to wait until the compartment draws even with the floor, then hop in without stumbling, falling or catching any part of yourself or your clothing on anything that’s moving. The chamber conveys you inexorably toward your destination, where you then repeat the process, in reverse.
Legend had it that if you rode the paternoster all the way up, or down, you’d be crushed to a bloody, mangled pulp in the machinery. That seemed at once like perfect logic and utter assfuckery. Not even British builders would permit such a contraption to operate, as Sean pointed out to me after we’d both consumed copious amounts of cheap red wine and spent hours making conversation with people who thought Foucault was a greater mind than Jacqueline Susann.
And so, of course, we figured we’d test the theory.
We decided to go up, as we were already near the top, and we figured we’d have less time to bail out. After a few false starts thanks to impaired depth perception, we nailed the takeoff. The compartment clanged and rattled, producing the sort of sound effects as you’d hear in an old Hammer horror film as a gate or a drawbridge pulled up behind the doomed protagonists, sealing them off from all escape. It must have been only a few floors to the top, but it the paternoster seemed to move more slowly when you were actually inside it.
Sean and I stood facing one another, damp, swaying, the smell of alcohol and smoky denim making it difficult to concentrate on impending death. The chamber climbed inexorably higher. It was close to midnight: if we were mangled, our corpses might not be freed until morning. It was hard to get even a taxi after midnight in Sheffield. We might die miserably, by ounces and inches, our blood lubricating the infernal engines of our destruction as the chains and gears ground our flesh to pulp.
What happens in a paternoster, if you ride it all the way, is this: the compartment basically makes a sideways dodge and reverses direction. But it can be thrown out of balance by excessive movement. If you remain still, you can ride “around the world” in relative safety. If, however, you find yourself overtaken by drunken conjurations of death and naked flesh bound by metal, by animal scents of pheremones and Fahrenheit cologne, by libertine urges compounded by the threat of danger and discovery, you are likely to move, rather significantly.
Thus causing the paternoster to stop. Not even British builders are that careless. It’s surprising what services do operate in Sheffield after midnight.
It took less than an hour to get us out.
What I remember about three encounters with famous gay Englishmen
1. Clive Barker
Brighton, c. 1998-99
He arrives at the bookstore where I work to sign copies of his latest book. He expresses the desire, carefully finessed by our events manager, to smoke a cigar inside during his signing. His neck is enormous.
He shows no interest in sleeping with me. I am crushed.
2. Sir Ian McKellen
Leeds, c. 1999
In the bar of a Leeds hotel, I notice Sir Ian McKellen standing at one of the large windows, chatting quietly with a smaller man dressed carefully in caramel tweed pants and immaculate white shirt. Later, I will discover he was in town to judge the Mr. Gay UK contest. I attempt to draw his attention by composing and transmitting lustful thoughts in iambic pentameter.
He shows no interest in sleeping with me. I am crushed.
3. Marc Almond
Brighton, c. 1999-2000
Back at the bookstore. He arrives to do an interview with a local radio personality and promote his album. I don’t see him come in, but someone tells me a limo is idling around the corner. He asks to use the toilet, and we suffer a crisis. We cannot lead him onto the sales floor, packed with fans in velvet jackets (much like mine), to use the customer toilet, which smells of mint and, faintly, heroin. So instead, we take him to the employee toilet, a closet in the receiving room that smells of mold, vinegar, and old tuna and sweetcorn. He is fluently unhappy. I lean against a tower of incoming Helen Fielding novels as his handler paints a hyperverbal portrait of the sort of toilet to which talent is accustomed. At last there is a flush, the aggressive indelicacy of which finally quiets her.
He shows no interest in sleeping with me. I pretend to be OK with this, but am privately, irremediably, crushed.
Review: Christopher Hennessy’s “Love-In-Idleness”
I bought Christopher Hennessy’s Love-In-Idleness back in December, along with Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. So far, I’ve enjoyed about a third of the Murakami, have yet to start the Hollinghurst (to be fair, I’m waiting for the first real snowstorm of the season, as somehow it seems a better fit with a groaning white roof and a Irish coffee), and have read most of the poems in Hennessy’s debut often enough to have certain lines by heart.
Love-In-Idleness is a book of three parts. The first, The Cicada, and Other Lessons, interrogates the past with an urgency shorn of nostalgia. In “If Recriminations,” the poet revisits a boyhood “you” who remained “hidden / in plain sight on the playground,” observing “the boys / on the blacktop who doffed their shirts / at recess (hot brown backs in the sun).” The poem’s loaded questions escalate in scope and consequence, its references to Toto and Pretty in Pink, to discount soda and “the smell of diesel and sweat,” anchoring its rhetoric in a vivid physical landscape of rural boyhood, to reach a quietly devastating conclusion.
“Gross Anatomy of the Midwestern Body” investigates – with dignity and love, but also without shame – the illnesses and absences of the human body through one family: “Father’s once hooked-out eye,” a grandmother whose “spine / is rent into a question / by years of carrying two / heavy pails of cancer’s milk,” a great-grandfather who “left his arm – forgotten / in the haste for home — / somewhere in the far field, torn off and sown with the corn.” Something of Dorothea Lange’s sympathetic but unsparing eye glimmers in these spare and bleakly beautiful portraits.
The dominant weather is that of fall and winter, a slumbering, cocooning time, haunted by family and familiar neighbors whose own singular mysteries may be questioned, guessed at, but never quite resolved: the eerie Crick sisters of “Ghost Boy,” the father smoking in the snow of a Michigan winter in “Wreckage,” the “granite- / willed farm girls” of “Mud, Milk, Snow, Mud” and “’You Are the Pin-Holder’” and “After My Grandmother’s Funeral.”
The poems of Split Secrets, the second section, assemble an intriguing choir of voices: a fifteenth-century Incan girl sacrificed to the gods, Icarus, the lovers of St. Sebastian and the Emperor Ai (who famously cut off his sleeve to avoid waking his sleeping partner). Hennessy gives startling and artful voice to Romeo’s first (silent, invisible) love in “Rosaline,” and demands in the deadly playful “Satie’s Instructions for Your Love Life:” “Breathe through / the nose so you can / sing into every mouth, / light every orifice.”
Hennessy’s persona poems accomplish this mission terrifically well, even as he wrestles with some truly heavyweight subjects: see “Gethsemane” (which contains the echo of James Wright and the wonderful lines “I would die to live / as a carpenter’s son, to see / my rough hands make a thing / as real and inhuman as I am”) and “Jacob” (“I want you, would again wrestle you / to the ground and deny prophecy / if only to name your beauty”).
In the third section of the book, Almost a Bedroom, the camera pushes in to achieve an intimacy of scale that permits just enough room for two: the poet and “you.” Images of food (eggs figure prominently) and the mouth take center stage in these gorgeous love poems, rich with a fragility that never tips into preciousness.
Here are nights as “a mire of sticky rinds, / bouquets of stiff baguettes” and morning sun that “hums from the homemade vase.” In the beautiful “Still Life with Jars,” apple slices and simple clay jars filled with water are instruments of prophecy, and “Aubade with Plum” reclaims a morning after with language that soars (arms and legs that have “grown together in the night like the dune’s pillow weeds”) and swoops (“you scribbling a note – ‘Gone / to Mickey D’s for a coffee, some grub’”) to land with elegant precision: “I held what felt like a whole plum caught in my throat , / and watched the sky turn from shades of plum / to goddam shades of plum.”
Hennessy is fully capable of springing surprises, too, as in the wonderful “Waiting Room,” in which the glimpse of a woman’s exposed ankle in close proximity to the “anticipation / of the doctor’s press on my bare chest” prompts both an erection and a reflection: “I know there are dips in the human skin, / hollowed out like open mouths, places / meant to be found in the dark, fumbling / to fill or to excavate.”
There’s a persuasive affinity at work in “Waiting Room,” as there is in perhaps the finest poem of this section, “Blood in the Cum,” in which a love poem is figured as a “way to sew / our two mouths shut / with a kiss so thin it’s invisible.” Not a word feels out of place here: confident, concise, the poem moves with a grace and restraint that feel inevitable. It is, to a reader, a remarkable achievement, and to a poet, a goad and an inspiration and a gift all at once, and it leaves me eager to envy more and more of Christopher Hennessy’s work.
Confessional: poetry
Today, officially, at the age of over-thirty-nine, my first published poems appear. (Among them: “Carnival Love,” “Crotch Shot,” and “The Face of God in Johnny Weir’s Ass.” You’ll need to make up your own mind whether the titles write checks that the verse can’t cash.)
Because one of the completely unmarketable skills I’ve mastered to date is ambivalence, along with enormous gratitude (to editor Bryan Borland) and fear (is any of this stuff really good enough to go around in the world meeting people?) comes a weird but not entirely unexpected embarrassment.
Poets, as a UC Davis study is happy to explain, do their best work early. I’m 10+ years beyond my presumed peak. To have only begun publishing now feels… well, slack. Unambitious. And a little embarrassing, like showing up to a party in your best Chess King argyle sweater and feathered mullet having temporarily forgotten that it’s no longer 1985, and no one even remembers Chess King anymore.
I did have an early start.
The first thing I wrote, in third or fourth grade, was a ghost story heavily influenced by Scooby Doo, which I also illustrated with great energy and limited skill and, if I’m remembering right, presented at a PTA meeting as a narrated slide show. It sounds unbearable, and the fact that my childless self will not be forced to bear something similar in my turn seems a failure of karma. (Although I have sat through a number of PowerPoint presentations, so maybe we’ll it square.)
The next few years were a whirl of increasingly uncomfortable clothes, skin concerns, and essay contests. I would write about anything, whether I understood it or not: Martin Luther King, laser technology, Russia. This was pre-Wikipedia, which meant doing research in libararies, with encyclopedias and card catalogs and microfiche and huge green eyestrain-inducing Readers’ Guides to Periodical Literature.
I loved it. Loved. It.
Around eight grade, I wrote my first poem, which I knew much better than to show to anyone, especially the boy who’d inspired it. Unlike the essays, which were explicitly designed for public consumption, calculated to take prizes and win awards — I was an award-seeking missile, a prize-centered SDI system targeting Junior Writer honors like incoming ICBMs –, the poems were secret. At first.
Gradually, I took them public. Not the important ones, of course, the ones about that. But the “serious” ones, the imitations of poets I’d just discovered and wanted to emulate. Plath, naturally, and Roetke, for some reason, and William Carlos Williams. Those were the poems I worked hardest on, and they eventually landed me a spot as a teenager at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts.
Tina Fey, writing in Bossypants about a friend who attended this program, refers to it as the Pennsylvania Governor’s Blow Job Academy, but it should be noted that, while Ms. Fey’s friend and I were probably there the very same summer, this was not at all my experience. I was a relatively unappealing adolescent. And besides, I was in the writing program, not theater.
Instead, I wrote (and read) a lot. (Deborah Burnham, who taught writing there, called it “full contact poetry.” Which, I know, sounds sort of dirty, but see above.) I enjoyed the sensation of being taken seriously, which for any aspiring creative kid is, if not quite the kiss of death, then at least a peck of trouble.
(Gov. Ed Rendell axed PGSA in 2009 to save a few bucks, ending a 35-year-program that helped creative, working- and middle-class misfits build self-confidence, learn discipline and focus, and express themselves with clarity and passion. And apparently, if they were cute theater boys, figure out oral. Fast Eddie sagely ceded regional arts dominance instead to West Virginia, which still has a functioning Governor’s School for the Arts.)
After PGSA, I kept writing, because now, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Dr. Jekyll kept building and polishing the “good” poems to within inches of their lives, studying the Norton anthologies for technique and inspiration. Mr. Hyde kept dashing off the quick and “dirty” poems that steadily accumulated in hiding spaces, potential evidence for a trial I was pretty sure was coming someday, even if I hadn’t yet studied the same curriculum as the theater kids.
tbc….
Happy birthday, Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Faithfull is 65 today.
The first time I heard her was in the almost unbearably gorgeous Jeunet & Caro film, City of Lost Children, where this song played, like a consolation for the movie itself finally having to end, over the closing credits:
I was hooked. I bought every CD I could find: the ’60s-era recordings that showcased Faithfull as a sweet-voiced ingenue and (more interesting) the albums, starting with Broken English in 1979, that marked her re-emergence after years of struggle, loss and addiction.
Blazing Away, released in 1990, features some of her best interpretations of iconic songs from this period: The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, Strange Weather, Why d’Ya Do It? and (especially) the soaring and surreal Times Square. But my favorite track might be this take on the 1969 song she co-wrote with then-boyfriend Mick Jagger:
Faithfull had reinvented herself in 1979, and she continued to do so in the ’90s: she teamed up with Angelo Badalamenti for A Secret Life, often maligned as a subpar effort by fans of both, but actually one of the more fascinating pairings since Liza Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys. She followed that up with a Weimar-era album, 20th Century Blues, on which she restored the moral vengeance, wit and venom to some classic Brecht & Weill songs:
Since then, Faithfull has released a half dozen albums featuring collaborations with such sympathetic souls as Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Billy Corgan, Damon Albarn, and Jarvis Cocker. About working with Cocker on the fabulous and semi-autobiographical Sliding Through Life on Charm (a number that begs for a drag performance), Marianne observed dryly:
“I’d been trying to write this song for 20 years, always getting stuck because I couldn’t find a fucking rhyme. And I thought, when I see that Jarvis Cocker — so I grabbed him in this television studio one day and said ‘Now, look, I want you to take this title and go and write a song from it.’ And off he went. And then he took another year and a half before I got it — and then it took another year and a half before I understood it enough to record it.”
On Easy Come, Easy Go, an eclectic (if the word can stretch to characterize a collection that includes songs by Dolly Parton, The Decemberists, Bessie Smith and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club) collection of covers, we were treated to the intriguing spectacle of Faithfull musing, a la Morrissey, that “there are explosive kegs between my legs.” The verdict on many message boards was unkind, but — as I imagine Marianne might say — fuck it, -I- love it, anyway.
A new album, Horses and High Heels, appeared this year to general acclaim: the usual moralistic and unimaginative complaints about Faithfull’s “ruined” voice, the generally (over)used descriptives of “whiskey-soaked” and “nicotine-stained,” were a bit less in evidence. Like Tom Waits, who wrote the title track to Strange Weather for Marianne in 1987, the preferred adjective for her voice now seems to be “weathered.” Faithfull’s voice still surges (and sure, cracks: there is a crack in everything, sang Leonard Cohen — who really ought to know – that’s how the light gets in) with guts and resilience and authenticity.
Happy birthday, MF.
