Champion of Dogs and Underdogs

Singer-songwriter-pianist-activist Nellie McKay, whose latest CD packs a melodious punch.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

In a tease for Nellie McKay’s performance tomorrow at the Greene Space, for WNYC’s “Soundcheck,” someone called her new CD, Home Sweet Mobile Home, “whimsical.” Perhaps, I thought—in a Weill-Brechtian way. The shark has pearly teeth, and also, with her sweet, slightly askew smile, does Nellie, who is sharklike only when she’s fighting the good fight, on behalf of animals (“Eatin’ that burger… Eatin’ that torture”), the disenfranchised (“So you’ll find me/Here right beneath the underdog”), and the never-franchised (“Please sir let me lay in the sewer that claimed me”).

Since Nellie played Polly Peachum in a 2006 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, the Weill-Brecht influence would not be surprising, but, aside from last year’s Doris Day tribute album, which involved singing (beautifully) about cockeyed optimism and sentimental journeys, Nellie has from the beginning—after all, her first CD was called Get Away from Me—given us clever, sometimes acerbic, always enlightened songs couched in a Tin Pan Alley musical sensibility. (For my interview with Nellie on the Doris Day album, go to Vanity Fair’s website.)

I had assumed the CD title’s mobile-home reference had to do with today’s economy—and it might—but Nellie told an interviewer that her “nana” lived in a trailer and she used to like visiting there, and the cover shows a faux-naïf painting (her own) of a happy, lipsticked cat putting on Nellie’s record in a cozy, rosy setting. The inside packaging contains more animal art, along with photos of a smiling, saronged Nellie (the album includes the lilting “Caribbean Time,” recorded in Jamaica), but in the background are drawings of smokestacks spewing pollution—yet, indeed, rather whimsically!

Such is the despairing/rejoicing world of Nellie McKay, which I hope you will enter if you have not already. My favorite song on the CD is “Bruise on the Sky,” with its poignancy, lovely and inventive harmonies, and typically startling lyrics (“I need your loving eyes/At least your cyanide”).

Nellie will be on “Soundcheck” October 12, and you can check out tour dates and download “Caribbean Time” at her website.

The Return of von Pauli

My favorite Nazi has posted another propaganda video.

Transcriptions from the Universe

Headpress 2.2

Excerpts from a new article I wrote about John Lennon’s diaries, “Transcriptions from the Universe,” have been published in the online edition of the Headpress journal.

Headpress, the independent British publisher that’s bringing out my book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, asked me to explain how my Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, which languished unpublished for 18 years, became a bestseller in five countries and three languages. To do that, I published reproductions of key pages from my own diaries from the time I was recreating Lennon’s diaries from memory. (I originally told the story of how I came to temporarily possess Lennon’s diaries in Nowhere Man.)

The complete article is available only in the print edition of the Headpress journal. —RR

First "Beaver Street" Promo Video

My new book, Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, is scheduled to be published in the UK on October 7 by Headpress. This is the first promotional video and it’s already kicking up a controversy. Play it loud and in full-screen mode for maximum impact. You can also check out the newly launched Headpress media site. And please stay tuned for more breaking news on Beaver Street. —RR

A Latter-Day Doris Day?

Singer Nellie McKay, deceptively light as air, is appearing at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

I hesitate to use the image for someone who I’m guessing is a pacifist, but Nellie McKay reminds me of a stealth bomber. With her creamy skin, blonde curls, silky voice, and sweet manner, she seems a throwback to … well, Doris Day, to whom she pays tribute in her current show at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency (and also in her CD Normal As Blueberry Pie). Yet McKay has a steely resolve when it comes to such issues as animal rights, the disenfranchised, gentrification, and her own musical integrity. (After a falling-out with Columbia Records, she is on the jazz label Verve.)

At the early show Saturday night, her politics were not much in evidence (she did mention Doris Day’s own animal activism) but her absurdist humor was—she introduced a couple of members of her excellent band (Jay Berliner on guitar, Ben Bynum on drums, Kenny Davis on bass, Glenn Drewes on trumpet, Belinda Whitney on violin) as “the Antichrist” and “the original Anna Karenina” (and that wasn’t Belinda). Wearing a retro black strapless gown with red lining, along with silver pumps with rhinestone bows, she began her set with “Sentimental Journey,” and in a sense that’s what she was taking us on. Along the way—with standards like “Close Your Eyes” and “Mean to Me”—there were overtones of big bands, the 1940s, swing, and Alice Faye, with special dedications to the late Kitty Carlisle Hart, who began playing Feinstein’s in her 90s, and Rue McClanahan, who died last Thursday.

And all of this was beautiful (especially in the swank environment of Feinstein’s)—with such instrumental touches as delicate xylophone on “The Very Thought of You” and violin doubling a vocal line on “Do Do Do.” Still, it was great to have the singer leave her piano and stroll to the center mic with her ukulele for a rendition of Lennon and McCartney’s “A World Without Love” and her own songs “Bodega” (“Adopt a bodega!” she urged), “Caribbean Time,” and “Mother of Pearl.” She introduced the last, on its surface an antifeminist diatribe, by saying, “This is from Miss Day’s little-known album Viva Vajayjay.” And ended it with, “I’m Sarah Palin and I approve this message.” (Hmm, maybe I’m a little wrong about the politics.)

There are perhaps not many performers who could blend the sensibilities of “The Dog Song” (“If you want a companion/Well just go right to the pound”) and “Black Hills of Dakota,” but by following her passions and her own musical style, the exuberant McKay has created a lovely, entertaining, beguiling, and even edifying show (pretty stealthy, Nellie).

“Normal As Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day” continues through June 12 at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency in N.Y.C.

Boy II Man

Ben (Michael Douglas) and ex-wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon) on the campus bench where they first met.

Solitary Man
Directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien
Written by Brian Koppelman
Starring Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Jenna Fischer, Jessie Eisenberg, Mary-Louise Parker, and Imogen Poots

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Coming across as a potent combination of Rabbit at Rest and Wonder Boys, Solitary Man explores, among other things, the combustion that can occur when deteriorating, experienced middle age meets beautiful, inexperienced youth. “You can’t cheat death,” his ex-wife, Nancy, tells the 60ish Ben (played by Michael Douglas, appropriately craggy and sexy, who also starred in Wonder Boys). But once his doctor finds a worrisome heart abnormality, Ben does try, by cheating—spectacularly—in both his marriage and his business. A former Forbes cover boy, Ben loses it all by perpetrating a scam in his auto dealership empire (ironically, he’s touted himself as “New York’s honest car dealer”). He’s reduced to asking not only Nancy (the ever lovely Susan Sarandon)—with whom he’s on good terms, perhaps because she’s found her own success in real estate—for the occasional “loan,” but also their daughter (Jenna Fischer, here a homemaker out of The Office), whose lawyer husband is onto Ben’s manipulative tricks.

Ben thinks he’s found a solid way out of his financial predicament, however, and of course it takes the form of a woman: his girlfriend (on whom he also constantly runs around), played icily by Mary-Louise Parker, whose powerful father can get Ben restarted. But first, a favor: she asks Ben to accompany her 18-year-old daughter (Imogen Poots, in a role right out of Gossip Girl) to his alma mater and use his influence there on her behalf; after all, the library’s named after him, a reminder of radically better days. Once they’ve arrived, Ben’s cockiness—he engages in a dangerous conversation about sex with the girl and takes a nerdy sophomore (Jesse Eisenberg) under his broken wing—leads to events that cause his new foundation to crumble.

The movie’s title—it opens with Johnny Cash’s cover of the Neil Diamond song—could be a joke, given Ben’s epic womanizing. But this is a serious film that knows that this man—despite his supportive ex-wife, loving (though reaching her limits) daughter, adoring grandson, and loyal friend (Danny DeVito as a campus café owner)—is alone, because of his actions and, ultimately, because we all are. Looking at mortality, and one man’s understandable but impossible flight from it, in the way it does, Solitary Man could have been depressing. Instead, because it also uncovers the richness and complexity of life, it’s uplifting.

A New York Estate of Mind

Walking and talking: Teenager Abby (Sarah Steele) and her mother, Kate (Catherine Keener).

Please Give
Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener
Starring Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Ann Guilbert, and Sarah Steele

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

As I have a bit of a skin problem myself at the moment, I can sympathize with Abby (Sarah Steele), the 15-year-old character in Nicole Holofcener’s new film, Please Give. Abby is dealing not only with a mother melting down from liberal guilt, but, worse, with acne (“Oh, that’s bad,” says another character, who gives facials, “it looks cystic”)—which is both on her face and in ours. Can’t she cover it up a little? I couldn’t help wondering. But such is the way of Holofcener, whose movies (Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, Friends with Money) are much more like real life than most of what you’ll see on the big screen. (Her one “lapse” may have been the use of the glamorous Jennifer Aniston in Friends with Money, except that Aniston fared much better in that movie and in Miguel Arteta’s The Good Girl than she has in more air-brushed, so to speak, films.) During Friends with Money, when Holofcener’s muse Catherine Keener, as half of a screenwriter couple, berates her husband for not properly sympathizing when she gets hurt, my own husband whispered to me, “Sounds like arguments we’ve had.” Indeed.

In the director’s new film, Keener plays Kate, a woman uncomfortable with her own upper-middle-class comfort, which is, oddly, enhanced by the dead and almost dead: She buys furniture from the estates of the newly deceased for her upscale antique store, and she and her husband, Alex (the “real”-looking Oliver Platt), have already bought the apartment next door from the elderly woman, Andra (Ann Guilbert, once a neighbor on The Dick Van Dyke Show), who lives in it; when she dies, they’ll be able to smash right through and have an even bigger place in their stately East Village building.

Andra’s granddaughters—Mary (Amanda Peet), who is almost unbelievably blunt (see acne remark above), and Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), the sweet to Mary’s sour, who does most of the caretaking for their grandmother (also sour)—only serve to exacerbate Kate’s guilt about Andra, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Yet they affect Kate’s family—Abby and Alex—in ways that Kate cannot. Somewhat distracted by her desire to make the world a better place, Kate tries to volunteer for work with both the very old and children with Down syndrome but finds herself overcome by their situations (in a reversal, one of the children attempts to help Kate when she ends up a blubbering heap in a restroom stall). Instead, Kate hands out money and leftovers indiscriminately to anyone who even appears to be homeless.

This is kind of Wallace Shawn Lite, yet Kate truly is struggling and she truly does love her family. (In an unusual and touching development, Abby and Alex indirectly share a secret they keep from Kate, demonstrating the sometimes delicate interweaving of family dynamics.)

Holofcener does not concern herself too much with plot. In her movies a person can have an affair without any eventual explosions or can suffer a depression that shows itself, rather than in hitting the bottle, in not hitting the shampoo. This can make her work seem more natural than contrived—a more leisurely and less intellectual Woody Allen, whom Holofcener once worked for.

In the character-driven Please Give, there is only one off note that I can perceive (well, apart from nearly every New Yorker going bonkers over getting to the country to watch the fall leaves “peak”): Those two young women never give a hint of being resentful at not inheriting their grandmother’s great apartment. Really?