cultural cocktail

musings on music, film, pop culture, literature, and whatever else is top of my mind

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

some kind of doc



Want to do see the therapeutic process in action? I've seen no better example than the documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which captures the two-year regrouping the heavy-metal band underwent with the help of Kansas-city based therapist/performance coach Phil Towle after bassist Jason Newstad jumped ship. When I professed my enthusiasm for this doc to one friend, he immediately assumed I was a fan of the music. HUH? That so doesn't fit. Naw, dawg (as Randy Jackson says, and yeah, for the record, I have watched too much AI), it's the voyeurism here that's the thang. To watch Metallica's lead singer, James Hetfield, hardly Mr. Touchy-Feely, go through soul-searching moments with drummer Lars Ulrich (an aside: the man has a stellar art collection) who articulates his frustration with the narciscistic lead dude by saying "fuck" over and over, which is surprisingly articulate given the circumstances, is far more fascinating than reading People. Whether you've written the band off after their Napster temper tantrum or never gave them the time of day because metal isn't a genre you traffic in, well, no mind. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster isn't about any of that. It's about the group's collective creative process as they work through all the hardships involved in creating their CD, St. Anger, and they learn to see each other anew after 20 years of working together. Ultimately, this is a film about long-term relationships, a subject fthat holds some interest for us all. Fuck, yeah.

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Monday, May 08, 2006

freedom of what?



This past weekend, I was reading my favorite SF Chron columnist Neva Chonin (Live! Rude! Girl!) who enlightened me about the news event of the past week I'd managed to miss when I took two days off work. Chonin was bringing readers like me up to speed regarding Stephen Colbert's brave speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner in which he roasted the Commander-in-Thief over an open flame. Colbert isn't a "real" journalist, whatever that means in this day and age of wimpy press that cower down to their corporate owners. He comes from cheekier, braver stock: His Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, is a spin-off of Jon Stewart's much ballyhooed The Daily Show.

Some news outlets, such as C-SPAN, are pulling the video of Colbert's dry-as-a-James-Bond martini speech from the web, in deference to the freedom to squelch creativity and genius, I suppose. Who needs the truth, sigh, when we can have freeze-dried pellets of news that come straight from the presidential press secretary? Bully for Colbert! In this seemingly never-ending era of deception and Orwellian doublespeak, a guy with his cajones is just what we need.

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