Review: Max Tundra, Parallax Error Beheads You

Of the handful of CDs I'm reviewing for Beyond Race, this one is my favorite. I still haven't heard Some Best Friend You Turned Out to Be or Mastered by Guy at the Exchange yet.

Go listen to "Orphan" from PEBY.

"Oh, Ted. Don't be so conventional."

And so, we return to the Divorce Ranch. Or more accurately, movies in which Norma Shearer plays an ex-wife. The Divorcee (1930) shows her in much more glamorous and pre-Hays-code form. Nine years prior to her matronly turn in The Women, Shearer doesn't look classically beautiful so much as she looks like an art deco illustration come to life – a perfect aesthetic match to the time period.

Check out that profile!

Ok, I am going to try and restrain myself from getting too obsessive about set/costume design. Despite the lack of a technicolor fashion show, however, the turbans and dresses and furniture and flatware are AMAZING.

I can't restrain myself from getting more into Shearer's personal life, though, as it's pretty fascinating stuff. One of MGM's stable of stars since the mid-1920s, she successfully transitioned from silent to talking films, and apparently managed to overcome a lazy eye as well. She married one of MGM's top producers, “Boy Wonder” Irving Thalberg, in 1927, which had a lot to do with her ability to land plum roles. Joan Crawford hated her (who didn't Joan Crawford hate?), especially as Shearer managed to oust Crawford from the lead role in The Divorcee by sending Thalberg some racy lingerie shots; he had told her she wasn't sexy enough for the part. Crawford fanatics bemoan this fact even today, but I'm kind of glad. Love Joan and all, but she's so larger-than-life that it's hard to get past HER, you know?

Thalberg was a sickly Brooklyn-born Jew (Norma converted) who lived with his mother, and then his wife and his mother, until his death at age 37. Bum ticker. His various afflictions left Shearer a little sex-starved, and supposedly she made up for the lack while shooting love scenes. Depending on which semi-trashy Golden Age of Hollywood Tell-All you're reading, Clark Gable either said that she “kisses like a whore in heat” or that she didn't wear underwear to the set “for realism.” Also, she was Quebecois. God, don't you love her?

A quick synopsis of the movie itself: We open to a party of high-class NYC types gallivanting at a country estate. Jerry (Shearer) and Ted make out in the woods and Ted proposes. The announcement of their engagement distresses Paul, her would-be lover, so greatly that he drunkenly wrecks his car on the trip back to the city, nearly killing one of his passengers, Dorothy.

Then, three years in the future, Jerry discovers Ted is having an affair. He insists it's no biggie, totally meaningless. In despair and retaliation, she sleeps with Ted's caddish friend Don (“I'm just trying to hang on to the marvelous latitude of a man's point of view,” she tells him). Jerry confesses her infidelity to her husband, who promptly freaks out about it, leading her to utter the line serving as the title of this post. They get divorced; Jerry proceeds to have lots of vague affairs with minor European nobility. Sex: implied. “What you feel for me is not love; it is the call of the gorilla to his mate.”

Paul comes back into her life, although it turns out he married Dorothy because he felt bad about permanently disfiguring her face in the car accident. He heroically saves Jerry from some date-rapey foreign fellow on a train, and promises to leave the maimed Dorothy, whom he has never really loved, in order to wed Jerry. But then, Dorothy arrives at Jerry's apartment, shrouded in an eerie black veil, begging Jerry not to take away her husband. Jerry gets noble and realizes her folly, tells those two crazy kids to work it out, and reunites with Ted.

So: is The Divorcee any more progressive or scandalous than the divorce movies made later in the decade? Well, for starters there are some lines that wouldn't get past the focus groups today, for sure -- “I want to make love to you until you scream for help” comes to mind. That Ted, so suave! (The appropriate response to this is to clutch your throat as if you've lost your voice, coyly claim you cannot scream, and giggle.) So, yeah, it's obviously not exactly a feminist polemic. Jerry does have a career and her own money, though, and pretty directly addresses the double standard with which Ted slams her when he finds out about her infidelity.

In general, sexuality is just way nearer the surface here. For Mary of The Women, divorce means moping around, catfighting and wearing cowgirl outfits. The thought of another man never seems to enter her mind. The divorcees of The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday spend most of their time bickering with their ex-husbands and ignoring their less-charismatic new fiances. Jerry, on the other hand, sleeps the hell around. In a choice that reminds me of the “no men on screen” rule of The Women, most of her lovers don't quite make it into the frame – we hear their voices and see their hands dart in to give her jewelry but they stay largely anonymous. It's not the faux-feminist “empowering” sluttery of Sex and the City and its ilk – moral judgment gets passed, and hard. Remember, girls, being easy will get you RAPED by a EUROPEAN COUNT, and also you will become a wannabe homewrecker of poor mangled drunk driving victims. But none of that means the picture doesn't try to make her affairs titillating and glamorous – what better way to get the audience into the theater?

The ending is the strangest part, really. It's interesting that Paul is willing to commit to Jerry, in full knowledge all her shenanigans. But spectral Dorothy steals the show. Never removing the (short) black veil, she acknowledges that Paul never wanted her but weeps that he's still her only reason for living. Like some creepy apparition of The Ghost of Shitty Marriages. When Jerry acquiesces, she announces that the only time she has ever broken her word was when she broke her marriage vow, and that she shouldn't have quit trying just because the relationship wasn't perfect. Like Dorothy, she now intends to hang on for dear life, no matter how crappy things get, because a promise is a promise, by God. It's a logical enough argument, I suppose, but it's not exactly convincing. The moral lesson seems more conditional than universal -- if Paul weren't burdened with a disfigured spouse, nothing would have been standing in their way.

After this scene, there's a brief tacked-on bit where Jerry and Ted reconcile at a New Year's Eve party, but even the filmmakers don't seem to think it's that interesting. The party noise is so loud it almost drowns out the dialogue. They embrace, fade to black, etc. Unlike the movies I wrote about last time, the reunion hasn't been set up as inevitable or expected. Perhaps because the movie was based on a scandalous book, The Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (fabulous name!), in which the heroine does not remarry her first husband. Hollywood pictures may have been a little more unfettered in 1930, but to leave Jerry single or on a second husband was still pushing it too far.

I kind of want to get my hands on a copy of The Ex-Wife, and check out some other scandalous flicks from the early 30's. Sign of the Cross looks especially good. Claudette Colbert in a milk bath!

Review: Chairlift, Does You Inspire You

Aaaaand here's that one.

I've seen Chairlift before -- back in March, they opened for Mixel Pixel in the Special Agent Dale Cooper Basement, but I must have been upstairs getting some air or something because all I remember is the ridiculous giant '70s eyeglasses the lead singer chick was wearing. Tiana saw them at First Unitarian last week and said that her experience was kind of transcendent, but she's just now hearing the CD so her overall opinion may change.

I'd get on board if they went way experimental or made themselves into synth-heaven Jens Lekman, but I kinda doubt it.

My first Beyond Race review: Femi Kuti and Positive Force

Here's what I think of the new Femi Kuti and Positive Force album. It's pretty bangin' -- "Tension Grip Africa" might not have the same familiarity and cachet as "Paper Planes," but it'll fit perfectly on the playlist for your next "Global Clusterfuck, Let's Dance" party.

So fucking psyched for this

It's chilling in its little red envelope on the table right now. Cockneysploitation!

My Origivation debut and such

Heyo, my first reviews for Origivation, a Philly-based music mag, are out in print and pdf form! I reviewed Sexcop's new EP (witty and spry pop ballads, rather 69 Love Songs-y) and did the mini-blurb for TVOTR's Dear Science in the Top 10 of '08 list. Read them here (I'm on pages 35 and 38).

More nooz: I'm currently in the throes of reviewing a bundle of discs for Beyond Race magazine's blog, woohoo. Be on the lookout for my thoughts on Femi Kuti, Chairlift, Rio En Medio, Max Tundra, and the new Danielson 2-disc set.