In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House's Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America's "silent majority." "Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.
"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of "Okie From Muskogee." With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer's rendition of the explicitly antiwar "What Is Truth?" and "Man in Black" ("Each week we lose a hundred fine young men") and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash's fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself -- a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.
Years later, "Man in Black" is remembered as a sartorial statement, and "What Is Truth?" as a period piece, if at all. Of the three songs that Cash played for Nixon, the most enduring, and the truest to his vision, was "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." The song was based on the tragic tale of the Pima Indian war hero who was immortalized in the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, and in Washington's Iwo Jima monument, but who died a lonely death brought on by the toxic mixture of alcohol and indifference and alcoholism. The song became part of an album of protest music that his record label didn't want to promote and that radio stations didn't want to play, but that Cash would always count among his personal favorites.
The story of Cash and "Ira Hayes" began a decade before the meeting with Nixon. On the night of May 10, 1962, Cash made a much-anticipated New York debut at Carnegie Hall. But instead of impressing the cognoscenti, Cash, who had begun struggling with drug addiction, bombed. His voice was hoarse and hard to hear, and he left the stage in what he described as a "deep depression." Afterward, he consoled himself by heading downtown with a folksinger friend to hear some music at Greenwich Village's Gaslight Café.
Onstage was protest balladeer Peter La Farge, performing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." A former rodeo cowboy, playwright, actor and Navy intelligence operative, La Farge was also the son of longtime Native activist and novelist Oliver La Farge, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1930 Navajo love story, "Laughing Boy." The younger La Farge had carved out an intriguing niche in the New York folk revival scene by devoting himself to a single issue. "Pete was doing something special and important," recalls folksinger Pete Seeger. "His heart was so devoted to the Native American cause at a time that no one was really saying anything about it. I think he went deeper than anyone before or since."
Cash never pretended that music could stay immune from social, but he tried his best to "not mix in politics." Instead he talked about the things that unite us like the dignity of honest work. "If you were a baker," he told writer Christopher Wren in 1970, "and you baked a loaf of bread and it fed somebody, then your life has been worthwhile. And if you were a weaver, and you wove some cloth and your cloth kept somebody warm, your life has been worthwhile."
Raised in rural poverty on the margins of America, Cash empathized with outsiders like convicts, the poor and Native Americans. But his identification with Indians was especially deep -- even delusional. During the depths of his early '60s drug abuse, he convinced himself, and told others, that he was Native American himself, with both Cherokee and Mohawk blood. (He would later recant this claim.)
At the Gaslight, once he had listened to "Ira Hayes' and La Farge's other Indian protest tunes, including "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" and "Custer," Cash was hooked. "Johnny wanted more than the hillbilly jangle," Peter La Farge would write later about meeting Cash at the Gaslight. "He was hungry for the depth and truth heard only in the folk field (at least until Johnny came along). The secret is simple, Johnny has the heart of a folksinger in the purest sense." In fact, Cash had written an Indian folk protest ballad of his own in 1957. "I wrote 'Old Apache Squaw,'" Cash later explained to Seeger. "Then I forgot the so-called protest song for a while. No one else seemed to speak up for the Indian with any volume or voice [until Peter La Farge]."
Cash, like many in the 1960s, could see that everything that was certain, rigid and hard was breaking apart. Social movements were blossoming. But the thunderous American choir that was singing "We Shall Overcome" and "We Shall All Be Free" drowned out the cry of the loose-knit Native movement. As Martin Luther King and other leaders steered their people toward legislative victories that would further integrate them into a society they were locked out of, the rising tide of Native youth activists wanted something different.
"In my mind, Native people could not have a civil rights movement," American Indian Movement activist and musician John Trudell says. "The civil rights issue was between the blacks and the whites and I never viewed it as a civil rights issue for us. They've been trying to trick us into accepting civil rights but America has a legal responsibility to fulfill those treaty law agreements. If you're looking at civil rights, you're basically saying 'all right treat us like the way you treat the rest of your citizens'. I don't look at that as a climb up." Rather than pursue assimilation into the American system, Native American activists wanted to maintain their slipping grip on sovereignty and the little land they still possessed.
By the early '60s, the burgeoning National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was attempting to stake its own claim for their equal share of justice. With the expansion of fishing treaty violations and the breach of two major land treaties that led to the loss of thousands of acres of tribal land in upstate New York for the Tuscarora and Allegany Seneca (the story behind La Farge's "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow"), the NIYC, led by Native activists like Hank Adams, responded by adapting the sit-in protest. Rechristened as the "fish-in," the NIYC disputed the denial of treaty rights by fishing in defiance of state law. Fish-ins were held in New York and the Pacific Northwest.
The fish-in tactic worked in helping build some public support, but it did little to stop the treaty violations. Instead, the U.S. government ramped up its efforts to crush any momentum the Native movement was building. Oftentimes their tactics were brutal and violent. "This was the time of Selma and there was a lot of unrest in the nation," remembers Bill Frank Jr. of Washington state's Nisqually tribe. "Congress had funded some big law enforcement programs and they got all kinds of training and riot gear-shields, helmets. And they got fancy new boats. These guys had a budget. This was a war."
By 1964, the Native American cause had attracted the interest of another celebrity. On March 2 the NIYC gained national attention as actor Marlon Brando joined a Washington state fish-in. Already an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement, Brando's very public support and subsequent arrest for catching salmon "illegally" in Puyallup River helped to boost the Native movement. Brando's involvement with the Native cause had begun when he contacted D'Arcy McNickle after reading the Flathead Indian's book "The Surrounded," a powerful novel depicting reservation life in 1936. Brando's involvement in Native issues led to government surveillance that lasted decades. His FBI file, bursting with memos detailing possible means of silencing the actor, quickly grew to more than 100 pages.
Three days after Brando's arrest in Washington, Cash, fresh off the biggest chart success of his career, the single "Ring of Fire," and having just finished recording a very commercial album called "I Walk the Line," began recording another, very different album. When Cash left Sun Studios for Columbia in the late 1950s, he believed his rising star would give him the creative capital to produce and record something a little outside the pop and country mainstream -- albums of folk music and live prison concerts. He was alternating folky albums like "Blood Sweat and Tears," a celebration of the working man, with commercial discs laden with radio-ready singles. "Ring of Fire," which had reached No. 1 on the country charts and had crossed over to pop, had bought him the permission of Columbia to make an album of what he called "Indian protest songs."
In the two years since Cash had first met La Farge and listened to "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," Cash had educated himself about Native American issues. "John had really researched a lot of the history," Cash's longtime emcee Johnny Western recalled. "It started with Ira Hayes."
As Cash explained, "I dove into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. By the time I actually recorded the album I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage."
But Cash felt a special kinship with Ira Hayes. Both men had served in the military as a way to escape their lives of rural poverty longing to create new opportunities. Plus, both suffered from addiction problems; Cash and his pills and Hayes with alcohol. He decided to anchor the album with "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." And since the song had provided the spark for Cash's vision, it just felt right that he should learn more about the song's subject.
Cash contacted Ira Hayes' mother and then visited her and her family at the Pima reservation in Arizona. Before Cash left the Pima Reservation, Hayes' mother presented him with a gift, a smooth black translucent stone. The Pima call it an "Apache tear." The legend behind the opaque volcanic black glass is rooted in the last U.S. cavalry attack on Native people, which took place on Apaches in the state of Arizona. After the slaughter, the soldiers refused to allow the Apache women to put the dead up on stilts, a sacred Apache tradition. Legend says that overcome by intense grief, Apache women shed tears for the first time ever, and the tears that fell to the earth turned black. Cash, moved by the gift, polished the stone and mounted it on a gold chain.
With the Apache tear draped around his neck, Cash cut his protest album. He recorded five of La Farge's songs, two of his own, and one he'd co-written with Johnny Horton. All were Native American themed. "When we went back into the studio to record what became 'Bitter Tears,'" Cash bassist Marshall Grant says, "we could see that John really had a special feeling for this record and these songs."
Yet the album's first single, "Ira Hayes," went nowhere. Few radio stations would play the song. Was the length of the song, four minutes and seven seconds, the problem? Radio stations liked three-minute tracks. Or maybe disc jockeys wanted Cash to "entertain, not educate," as one Columbia exec put it.
"I know that a lot of people into Johnny Cash weren't into 'Bitter Tears,' " explains Dick Weissman, a folksinger, ex-member of the Journeymen and friend of La Farge. "They wanted a 'Ballad of Teenage Queen' not 'The Ballad of Ira Hayes.' They wanted 'Folsom Prison.' They didn't want songs about how American's mistreated Indians."
The stations wouldn't play the song and Columbia Records refused to promote it. According to John Hammond, the legendary producer and Cash champion who worked at Columbia, executives at the label just didn’t think it had commercial potential. Billboard, the music industry trade magazine, wouldn't review it, even though Cash was at the height of his fame, and had just scored another No. 1 country single with "Understand Your Man" and No. 1 country album with "I Walk the Line."
One editor of a country music magazine demanded that Cash resign from the Country Music Association because "you and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists and country DJs." Johnny Western, a DJ, singer and actor who for many years was part of Cash's road show, recalls a conversation with "a very popular and powerful DJ." According to Western, the DJ was "connected to many of the music associations and other influential recording industry groups. He had always been incredibly supportive of John." Western and the DJ started discussing Cash's new album and the "Ira Hayes" single. "He asked me why John did this record. I told him that John and all of us had a great feeling for the American Indian cause. He responded that he felt that the music, in his mind, was un-American and that he would never play the record on air and had strongly advised other DJs and radio stations to do the same. Just ignore it until John came back to his senses, is what he told me."
"When John was attacked for 'Ira Hayes' and then 'Bitter Tears,'" explains Marshall Grant, "it just ripped him apart. Hayes was forced to drink by the abuse and treatment of white people who used and abandoned him. To us, it meant Hayes was being tortured and that's the story we told and it's true."
When "Bitter Tears" and its single did not get the attention he felt they deserved, Cash insisted on having the last word. He composed a letter to the entire record industry and placed it in Billboard as a full-page ad on Aug. 22, 1964.
"D.J.'s -- station managers -- owners, etc.," demanded Cash, "Where are your guts?" He referred to his own supposed half Cherokee and Mohawk heritage and spoke of the record as unvarnished truth. "These lyrics take us back to the truth ... you're right! Teenage girls and Beatle record buyers don't want to hear this sad story of Ira Hayes ... This song is not of an unsung hero." Cash slammed the record industry for its cowardice, "Regardless of the trade charts -- the categorizing, classifying and restrictions of air play, this not a country song, not as it is being sold. It is a fine reason though for the gutless [Cash's emphasis] to give it a thumbs down."
Cash demanded that the industry explain its resistance to his single. "I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of Ira Hayes. Just one question: WHY???" And then Cash answered for them. "'Ira Hayes' is strong medicine ... So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham and Vietnam."
As Cash later explained, "I talked about them wanting to wallow in meaninglessness and their lack of vision for our music. Predictably enough, it got me off the air in more places than it got me on." In reality, however, as Cash noted in his letter, "Ira Hayes" was already outselling many country hits. Ultimately, thanks in part to aggressive promotion by Cash, who personally promoted the song to disc jockeys he knew, "Ira Hayes" reached No. 3 on the country singles charts, and "Bitter Tears" peaked at 2 on the album charts.
Later, long after "Bitter Tears," and after he'd won his battle with drugs, Cash would dial back his claims of Indian ancestry. But he never wavered from his support for the Native cause. He went on to perform benefit shows on reservations -- including the Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee in 1968, five years before the armed standoff there between the FBI and the American Indian Movement -- to help raise money for schools, hospitals and other critical resources denied by the government. In 1980, Cash told a reporter: "We went to Wounded Knee before Wounded Knee II [the 1973 standoff] to do a show to raise money to build a school on the Rosebud Indian Reservation" and do a movie for "Public Broadcasting System called 'Trail of Tears.'" He joined with fellow musicians Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Robbie Robertson to call for the release of jailed AIM leader Leonard Peltier.
Since Cash first recorded "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" in 1964, many musicians have recorded their own versions. Kris Kristofferson is one of those musicians. He summed up the spirit behind Cash's now nearly forgotten protest album in his eulogy for Cash, who died in 2003. Cash, he said, was a "holy terror ... a dark and dangerous force of nature that also stood for mercy and justice for his fellow human beings." Four years before his famous concert at Folsom Prison, four years before the American Indian Movement formed, and at the pinnacle of his commercial success, Cash insisted on producing an uncommercial, deeply personal protest record that was a close as he could come to truth. He would always cherish it. "I'm still particularly proud of 'Bitter Tears,'" Cash would say near the end of his life, while talking about the topical music he recorded in the 1960s. "Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don't see much reason to change my position today. The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we're not making any moves to make things right. There's still plenty of darkness to carry off."
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Antonino D'Ambrosio is the author of "A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears."
Porter Wagoner is one of country music's living legends. But he's almost as well known for serving up some of the most cheese-slathered corn ever to come out of Nashville as he is for his catalog of classic country hits and his influential 1960s TV show, "The Porter Wagoner Show," which helped launch Dolly Parton's career. Taken from his new album, "Wagonmaster," "Committed to Parkview" lives on the line between the best and the worst of what Wagoner has to offer. Written and originally performed by Johnny Cash -- no stranger to schmaltz himself -- the song is a first-person account of life inside a mental institution. The whole thing has a slight whiff of gimmickry about it, but you can't deny the weary sadness the 79-year-old Wagoner gives to lines like "My days are kinda foggy/ My nights are dreamy too/ They're taking good care of me/ While I'm committed to Parkview."
-- David Marchese
The Song of the Day is also available as a podcast. (Subscribe: iTunes or RSS)
Johnny Cash, "American Recordings V: A Hundred Highways"
Less than two months after the arrival of "Personal File," the flood of Johnny Cash material continues unabated with "American V: A Hundred Highways." This new album contains the last music Cash recorded before he died. Not surprisingly, it makes for a heavy listen.
The album is such heavy going that critics have no choice but to focus on the its melancholy gravitas, but they've turned out a largely favorable batch of reviews. The Village Voice's review, grandly titled "The New Johnny Cash Album Will Tear Your Soul Apart," refers to "American V" as "one of the most depressing albums" the critic has "ever heard." Rolling Stone (rating: 4 stars) follows suit, writing that the album "feels like a deathbed benediction."
The album may not be easy listening, but it has its rewards. The Pitchfork review (rating: 7.8/10) gives some indication as to why: "[The album] is a satisfying and often moving final chapter to Cash's life and career, one that rejects self-pity and remorse in favor of hopefulness and even celebration." The L.A. Times also spotlights some of the album's lighter moments, but noted that even the levity was the result of "a man smiling in the face of death."
In the end, PopMatters (rating: 7/10) explicates what many other reviewers only imply, writing that "it's impossible to listen to this record without placing it in the context of its creation," and that as such, the album "stands as a fitting, gentle coda, a farewell from a major talent."
TV on the Radio, "Return to Cookie Mountain"
TV on the Radio made a bit of a splash in the indie-rock community with the release of their debut album, "Young Liars," in 2003. The next year's "Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes" made enough of an impression that the band was picked up by Interscope, the label on which the Brooklyn, N.Y., act has just released the highly praised, if unfortunately titled, "Return to Cookie Mountain."
The band has been lauded for the intelligence of its music, which draws on influences from art rock to doo wop. As the Guardian (rating: 4 stars) puts it: "'Return to Cookie Mountain' is largely a delight -- an experimental album with a pop heart that avoids self-indulgence." The band's eclecticism was also praised in a Rolling Stone feature, which described "Cookie Mountain" as being evocative of both "My Bloody Valentine's noisy dream pop and Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On,' with songs that effuse pastoral beauty as they take off into uncharted territory."
The online response has been even more positive, with Drowned in Sound (rating: 9/10) attributing a zeitgeist-capturing power to the album, breathlessly calling it "a party soundtrack for a fucked-up generation and an opus that inhabits the midpoint between scarcely conjoining circles of eclecticism and enjoyability whilst maintaining consistency throughout."
Not bad for a band the Observer Music Monthly (rating: 4 stars) singled out as being "one of the few groups who could toss a word like 'unconjoined' into their lyrics without sounding like tossers."
-- David Marchese
There's no way to make a true biopic of a figure as extraordinary and as complex as Johnny Cash: No picture is big enough to hold him. The best you can do is to make a movie about an idea of Johnny Cash, to select a few angles of the man and amplify them into a suitably mighty sound. That's what James Mangold has done in his deeply passionate "Walk the Line," which examines the legend of Cash through the lens of his slow-burning, long-lasting relationship with June Carter, whom he married in the late '60s after having known her -- and performed with her -- for more than 10 years.
Writer-director Mangold, his co-screenwriter Gill Dennis, and his two lead actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, have captured the sturdy practicality of that love affair: This isn't so much a love story as that of a man grabbing at the last thing he believes he has to live for. Is that last thing the love of God or the love of a woman? Or, as "Walk the Line" suggests, is it both, the two so chronically intertwined that not even Cash himself could tell them apart? If "Walk the Line" isn't the full story of Johnny Cash, it's at least a crucial corner of it, a way of coaxing a legend down to a human scale, without shrinking that legend away to nothingness.
Mangold opens "Walk the Line" in 1968, with a tracking shot of the grounds of Folsom Prison. But the sound we hear is far more significant than the visuals are: It's the thrum of a bass line coming from someplace behind concrete walls, muffled but determined -- a sound that heralds the impending arrival of some Swiftian giant. We don't see the crowd of prisoners waiting for Johnny Cash, but we do see the man himself, frozen for a few moments, or many, before going onstage, even though his band has already started riffing impatiently as they wait for him. Cash -- or rather, Phoenix as a dream version of Cash -- is using the prison workshop as his green room, and we see him casually testing the sharpness of a circular saw with his thumb. A few scenes later, we learn that he lost his beloved older brother, Jack, to an accident caused by a saw like that. It's an obvious dramatic segue until you consider the subtext of the images. In this movie, Cash's personal demons show up not as abstract nightmares but in the cold shape of metal, a mirror of the concrete images that figure so prominently in his songs: chugging trains with their whistles blowing, the rhythmic slap of a shoeshine boy's cloth, and, in a song written by the woman who would one day become his wife, the ring of fire that's shorthand for the crazy perilousness of love.
From that beginning, "Walk the Line" wends back through Cash's Arkansas childhood and then fast-forwards to his stint in the Air Force and his marriage to Vivian Liberto (played with sympathetic desperation by the always-wonderful Ginnifer Goodwin). From there, the picture hopscotches across the high and low points of the first 15 years of Cash's career, from his first Sun recording with Sam Phillips, to the day in 1968 when he finally persuaded June Carter, his longtime friend and touring partner, to marry him: He proposed to her onstage, which is where the two of them had done much, though not all, of their living.
And that right there is the key to "Walk the Line": The movie addresses, as it needs to, how close Cash came to self-destruction via booze and pills, how he messed up his first marriage, how deeply he was attracted to June from the day he met her (according to the lore, they were playing on the same bill and she got her dress tangled in his guitar strings), although she wouldn't agree to become his wife until many years later, and not until he'd cleaned up his act. But Mangold and his performers understand that life is what songs are made of: The picture captures the joy Carter and Cash took in performing, separately but especially together, and if "Walk the Line" is "only" a love story, it's one that doesn't deny the power of the connections that people can forge through music. What's more, Cash's career began around the same time Elvis' did, but he outlasted Elvis by nearly 30 years. Carter couldn't fix Cash's problems for him -- he had to do the work himself -- but as Cash himself attested, she wasn't one to suffer foolish, destructive behavior. Would he have survived that long if there'd been no tough, sensible June Carter waiting for him to fly right?
Maybe the only way to play Cash adequately is to be, on the surface, all wrong for the part. Phoenix, with his narrow shoulders and lithe build, is the wrong body type to play Cash -- even the young Cash. And he bravely sings Cash's songs himself, in a voice that gamely struts the territory and yet has one crucial, unforgivable drawback: It just isn't Cash's.
But this is a remarkable performance, not because Phoenix pulls off, or even attempts, an approximation of Cash but because he manages to embody the spirit of Cash. Watching Phoenix's Cash perform onstage -- strung-out, his pupils like pin dots -- is both horrifying and exhilarating: Phoenix forces us to confront the notion that unhealthy, unbalanced people can sometimes make incredible art. But in other moments -- for instance, when he speaks to June in his soft, nervous drawl -- he shows us a Cash that we've never seen before, possibly a Cash that didn't really exist. But that's not the point. Phoenix seems to be channeling a private tenderness in Cash that, unless we knew him personally, we couldn't possibly have seen. And yet, listening to songs like "Give My Love to Rose" or "I Walk the Line," we have no doubt that tenderness was real. Phoenix puts it into a concrete, believable framework.
With her teased hair and pleasant whipped-butter voice (like Phoenix, she does her own singing in the role), Witherspoon's Carter meets Phoenix's Cash in an impressionistic middle ground that seems to bear some resemblance to reality, without feeling like a desperate attempt to re-create it. Her performance works beautifully. Witherspoon has taken far too many roles that allow her to coast on her tart cuteness; this is the first one she's had in years that seems to have genuinely challenged her. What makes her June Carter so moving is the way she holds herself apart from Cash rather than letting herself fall for him: She stands up to his nonsense on tiptoe, and in a crinoline -- there's never a minute when we're not aware of how grounded she is.
As off-kilter and intriguing as these two performances are, "Walk the Line" is still a basic, meat-and-twos biopic, along the lines of "Sweet Dreams" and "Coal Miner's Daughter," and I suspect many Cash fans (as well as that small percentage of the population that's bafflingly indifferent to him) will think it's too conventional. But I think its conventionality is part of its power. Late in the movie, Mangold shows us how Cash, after kicking his drug habit, reconnected with Christianity: We see him going to church with June. She tells him, in a line so unvarnished and raw it avoids dull churchiness, "God has given you a second chance."
And almost immediately, Mangold cuts to a scene in which Cash pores over his many fan letters and notices that a large number of them are from incarcerated criminals who love, and relate to, his music. He realizes these are the people he wants to serve. When he approaches a record executive with the idea he's come up with -- making a live recording at Folsom Prison -- the exec tries to talk him out of it: "Your fans are church folk, John -- Christians. They don't want to hear you singing to a bunch of prisoners to cheer them up."
But Cash's brand of Christianity, the polar opposite of religious conservatism, was based on the necessity of embracing even those the Lord seems to have forgotten. And "Walk the Line" is an accomplishment for the way it captures that angle of Cash's life alone. This is a democratic and accessible picture. Just as Cash did, it sings for everyone.
Morning Briefing:
All the news that fits on talk TV: It was a New York Times double feature of sorts Thursday night on TV's two biggest talk shows. First, Judith Miller was on "Larry King Live" to discuss leaving the Times and -- to a limited degree -- to talk about her role in the Valerie Plame affair (see it: QuickTime or Windows Media). She said she wouldn't have done anything differently -- in fact, her entire performance was oddly blasé -- and also had some words for ex-colleague Maureen Dowd, who took Miller down in a recent column: "You don't trash colleagues, and you don't trash the institution you're working for," Miller said, adding later that she couldn't remember "a single columnist who ever attacked a colleague." (She also pointed King's viewers to the responses she's posted to her various attackers on her Web site.) A few hours later, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was on "Charlie Rose" to talk about many of the same issues, and also came across rather flat -- saying that "morale is just great" at the paper and the Miller affair was "a rather small bore issue in the big scheme of things" seemed forced (watch it: Windows Media). He also went out of his way to stand behind Miller's work and reporting: "I don't believe Judy was running amok, and I mean that sincerely." (Editor & Publisher, Crooks and Liars)
Walking out on "Walk the Line": Kathy Cash, daughter of the legendary Johnny Cash, was so put off watching the biopic on her dad that she walked out not once, not twice, but five times during a family screening of "Walk the Line." She said she was upset with how the film showed her mother, Vivian Liberto Distin, who was Johnny Cash's first wife. "My mom was basically a nonentity in the entire film except for the mad little psycho who hated his career," said Cash. "That's not true. She loved his career and was proud of him until he started taking drugs and stopped coming home." (Yahoo! News)
The Tom Cruise Superfan: Niki Yan, the Chinese woman who wrote "My Love for You, Tom Cruise -- A Desperate Chinese Girl's Confession," has had all her fan fantasies come true after getting to meet Cruise in person -- and luckily E! was there to cover the blessed event! Yan should be thanking her lucky stars that she made it from a little village in China all the way to a soundstage. After Cruise asked her if it had been difficult to get permission, Yan answered, "Well, I told them that I want to see Tom Cruise, so they let me in!" Cruise laughed: "Now you are on the set of 'Mission Impossible 3'!"
Perhaps Cruise's people should have done some more background work on Yan, though -- if the title of her book wasn't a dead giveaway, her Web site makes her out to be downright stalkerish:
"Ok, Folks, here are the reasons why I am perfect MS CRUISE:
1. I am pathetic.
2. I can jump up and down on the couch just like him, I can even do better, I can pouch and kick on a soft couch, like female Bruce Lee wants to kick your ass.
3. I already went to the court got my name changed, Niki Cruise is official now.
4. I want to have a dozen Little Toms and Nikis. So I can make them a football team, for Tom's sake."
(via Radar Online)
Also:
For an article titled "The Weird Story of How Tom Really Won Katie," this piece from Star magazine is actually one of the most normal-sounding accounts of the whole TomKat adventure we've yet read -- in fact, strip out the Scientology and celebrity, and it sounds just like a regular boy and girl falling in love, against the wishes of her parents ... We may finally know the real reason Paris Hilton was able to hold on to the $5 million engagement ring given to her by Greek heir Paris Latsis: She didn't. According to a source, says Page Six, the flashy ring Hilton has been sporting -- and claiming as her pricey gift -- was a cheap bauble she bought herself. "It's a cubic zirconia. The ring Paris [Latsis] gave her was a much smaller one [from Cartier]. She lied to Us Weekly about it and everyone picked it up" ... For your viewing pleasure: Ali G beat-boxing along as two women sing "We Shall Overcome" at an antiabortion rally ... Given his sparkling public persona, who would have thought that Russell Crowe would be the type to get into public shouting matches with his wife? The two reportedly got into a very nasty spat while out to dinner with director Ridley Scott and his wife at the Wolseley in London, though no phones were thrown ... 50 Cent's movie "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" got yanked from a Pennsylvania movie theater yesterday after a man was shot and killed following a screening, even though officials for the theater admitted they don't know if the film played any role in the shooting.
Money Quote:
Geraldo Rivera insists Michael Jackson is just a regular guy once you get to know him: "He's a lot more normal in person. And more normal as a dad than you would ever, ever expect. He's really just a normal person once you get past the packaging." (Steppin' Out magazine via N.Y. Daily News)
Turn On:
TBS presents a digitally remastered version of "The Wizard of Oz" (9 p.m. EDT), catch Madonna's performance -- recorded last week but now airing in the U.S. -- at the "Europe Music Awards" (MTV, 9 p.m. EDT), and see what creepiness director Tobe Hooper, the man behind "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "Poltergeist," can cook up in the new installment of "Masters of Horror" (Showtime, 10 p.m. EDT).
-- Scott Lamb
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[Read "'Star Trek's' New Moral Frontier," by Sumana Harihareswara.]
I live in Ithaca, N.Y. -- home of liberals, hippies, gays, and a cable company that refuses to carry a UPN station. I have seen one or two episodes of "Enterprise" via a friend who has satellite TV. While he likes the series, I have never been impressed with what I saw.
"Star Trek" fans like continuity. We get into big debates with each other over why Klingons in the new shows have ridges on their foreheads and the original Klingons don't. We get into arguments about how Zefram Cochrane appeared in the film "First Contact" vs. how he appeared in the original series episode "Metamorphosis." And some of us -- like me -- hang our heads and sigh when we see "Enterprise" completely ignore continuity in order to make "entertaining television." (Case in point: The series premiere, "Broken Arrow," featured a Klingon on Earth -- years before first contact was said to have happened.)
I know that the previous paragraph reads like a geek wrote it. Well, I am a geek. "Trek" fans are geeks. "Enterprise" doesn't deserve the support of geeks. I don't miss it at all.
-- Joseph Prisco
I enjoyed Sumana Harihareswara's piece on "Star Trek Enterprise." Harihareswara thinks a bit more of the show than I do, but I found the season ender (with the Xindi attack) moving and provocative. However, I think the historical parallels between that and 9/11 are more complex and interesting than portrayed in the article, and I hope the producers of the show follow up on that complexity. While from the point of view of Earth the attack was terror, from the point of view of the Xindi, who see humans destroying them in the future, it was preemptive war. Now that's an interesting parallel.
-- Steve Hicken
Great article by Sumana Harihareswara on the season premiere of "Enterprise." It was intelligent, well written, lively and decidedly un-nerdy. It's refreshing to see that a "Star Trek" fan obviously does have a life. Strangely enough, I was going to go to a yoga class tonight, thinking that I myself needed to get out of the house and get a life, and her article changed my mind. An evening watching a sci-fi show where the characters are morally challenged and the stories are messy and ambiguous sounds like too much fun to pass up.
The problems she pointed out with the earlier "Star Trek" franchises were right on the mark. Somewhere along the way I went from being proud of being a "Star Trek" fan to being just plain embarrassed. The shows got more and more routine and condescending. If only the producers of shows like these would listen more to writers like Sumana Harihareswara. Keep up the good work.
-- C. Lim
[Read "Blood, Guts, Death, Mayhem and Nudity," by Daniel Kraus.]
I am so fucking tired of the assumption that the audience for horror movies, or for all movies that are not centered around a gaggingly sweet romance complicated by stupid and repetitive misunderstandings, is male. Women go to the movies; we are not always taken there by some randy young thing eager for a grope in the dark. And guess what? When we do go to the movies on dates with a guy we have as much, if not more, input as to what movie will be watched as he does.
I have been a horror fan since conception. I've been reading Stephen King since I was 8. Like most horror fans I have been disappointed in the schlock that has been featured in the cineplexes for most of my life. And yes, I do believe that nudity is elemental in your basic horror flick. But what, may I ask, is so fucking sacred about dick?
-- Wahrena Pfeister
Apparently Daniel Kraus doesn't get out much. In the opening paragraph, he describes the film "Evil Dead" as "85 of the most stomach-churning minutes in motion picture history." Perhaps he is exaggerating for effect, but if he really believes that line, I can't begin to take seriously any claims he makes about the film he is covering. "Evil Dead" was a low-budget horror film with marginal effects and only an average amount of gore or suspense, compared to other low-budget horror films. What made it memorable was the creative directorial talents of Sam Raimi, and the emerging skills of physical comedian/character actor Bruce Campbell. To suggest otherwise only demonstrates the author's ignorance and/or distaste for the genre.
-- Jeremy Lassen
From Daniel Kraus' interview with Eli Roth, I get the impression that Roth had no problem finding male actors who were willing to do nudity. So, if I go see "Cabin Fever" I'll be seeing lots of penises, right?
-- Paula Barr
[Read "Johnny Cash, 1932-2003," by Stephanie Zacharek.]
I woke up this morning to the news that Johnny Cash -- one of the only musician heroes I have as an adult -- had died. The clock radio came on at roughly 10 minutes after 6. Bob Edwards was saying: "Two celebrities died today..."
My first thought was, oh my God, it's finally happened. Johnny Cash is dead. And sure enough, in three seconds Bob Edwards would prove me right.
All day, I've been trying to articulate to people just what it is I love about Johnny Cash and his music. Stephanie Zacharek was able to put into words what I'd only felt before. It's his humanity -- his willing to forgive and sympathize with even the worst people -- that makes his music so resonating and honest, even when he didn't write the songs himself.
-- Jeff Barrus
Thanks so much to Stephanie Zacharek for her beautiful, moving tribute to one of the century's best and most amazing musicians. Her last two sentences expressed exactly what I've been feeling since I heard the news of Cash's death this morning. I'm so glad that she was able to put into words what's been creeping through my mind all day.
-- Alice Stanulis
Johnny Cash's death leaves a hole in the world. I think his music lasted not so much because of the protest songs as because of the intensely personal connection anyone who listened to him felt. Johnny Cash was angry and sad and hopeful and loving and sorry and ashamed, and not afraid to show us all of that. He didn't lead the kind of rock 'n' roll/country music ministry that we usually expect of icons; he seemed more interested in battling his personal demons for our incidental benefit.
What W.H. Auden wrote about Yeats seems to apply:
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself.
God grant him that peace.
-- Ellen Lamb
Thanks, I guess, for the story on Johnny Cash. The writer and the story were fine, but I find it hard to swallow that a man you justly describe as one of the founders of modern country music and rock 'n' roll doesn't rate being the subject of your lead story -- particularly in light of how that same space is being taken up lately by more popular-culture pieces. I think cartoon figure Tucker Carlson could have waited a couple of days -- and if not, it wouldn't have been a great loss to have never seen his story.
-- John Grooms
When I heard the news about Johnny Cash's death I blurted out, "Oh, no!" and I don't do that often, confronted with the demise of a celebrity. Of all the tributes I've come across online, Zacharek's was best. Thanks.
-- Daryl Haney
I knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming, at least those of us who kept up with him. But he held on, determined to keep reaching out to new generations of music fans. I remember thinking to myself a few years ago: "What's it going to be like on the day that he passes away? Will there be long strings of limousines like the ones that followed Elvis Presley's hearse?" Well, the day came Sept. 12, 2003. I got to work that morning, where I logged on to a news site and found out. I wasn't surprised but, still, my breath caught. My heart skipped a beat. It had happened. It poured down rain most of the day and he was all I could think about. He was one of the biggest influences in my musical career and in keeping my faith in humans to speak out against injustice, not in a clichéd, flag-waving way but in a thoughtful, storytelling, front-porch way. Being a fellow Southerner, he felt like part of my family. My grandfather taught me how to play my first Cash song: "I Walk the Line."
Johnny Cash, a Bodhisattva in my book, was finished with his work here on earth. Thank you, J.C., for a job well done.
-- Brian Johnson
If you took every note that Johnny Cash didn't quite hit and laid them end-to-end, they'd probably reach clear around the world. And so what? His was one of the greatest voices of both country and rock 'n' roll (he's one of the few artists to be elected to both halls of fame), a voice that was beautifully suited to heart-wrenching romantic ballads but that was just as often, or perhaps more often, used to speak up for the downtrodden and the forgotten -- or for anyone who may have simply made a mistake in life. Low and dark, devoid of cream and especially sugar, Cash's voice was the sound of black coffee, a sound you didn't know you needed until you got that first sip. And by then you were hooked.
Cash, 71, died Friday as the result of complications from diabetes; his health had been precarious for years, although it rarely stopped him from working. (His fourth collaboration with producer Rick Rubin, "American IV: The Man Comes Around," was released last November.) Many of us have long been preparing for the death of Johnny Cash, but I suspect most of us aren't finding the reality of it easy to take. And there are many of us out there, of all ages: Cash got his start around the same time Elvis Presley did (and, like Elvis, got his big break through Sam Phillips' Sun Studios). But his career outlasted Elvis' by more than 25 years. His fan base spanned hipster punks and old-time rockers who hadn't bought many new records since 1966. I remember seeing Cash perform live around six years ago, at a rock club in Boston -- in the middle of a snowstorm, no less.
Making our way home, still blissed-out from the show, my husband and I ran into a neighbor of ours, a rather taciturn-looking guy in his late 50s -- who still sported the remnants of 1950s greaser hair -- out in his yard supervising the nightly jaunt of his elderly blind poodle. It was snowing like heck; our neighbor, who'd always been cordial but never exactly friendly, asked us what on earth had brought us out on a night like that. When we told him, his face lit up. Was it a good show? he wanted to know. How did Cash look, how did he sound? The subtext of his questions bubbled up to the foreground: Of course Johnny Cash was worth braving a godawful snowstorm for.
Cash wrapped a world of subjects in that big bear hide of a voice. His love songs could be mournful or witty or both, and many of them were steeped in a deep consciousness of mortality, direct descendants of old English and Scottish ballads about dead sweethearts and infants. "I Still Miss Someone" outlines the shape of the hole left behind by a lover who doesn't care anymore. "I Walk the Line" quivers with restraint -- it's the sound of a very bad boy on his best behavior (and probably not for long, but he sure is trying). "Ring of Fire," which was written by his wife and colleague, June Carter Cash (who died in May), and Merle Kilgore, is one of the most hard-nosed songs about falling in love ever written or sung.
Songs like "Tennessee Flat-Top Box," "Five Feet High and Rising" and "Pickin' Time" are stunning evocations of rural (and often impoverished) life. Cash was a prolific songwriter, but he loved a great song, period, covering the work of Kris Kristofferson, the Rolling Stones, Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Nick Lowe and Bob Dylan (who cites Cash as an essential influence), among others.
But Cash's most lasting contribution may be his rough-and-ready sense of social justice. He wasn't political in the strictest sense of the word. But when something in the world struck him as unfair or wrong, he spoke up with an urgency unmatched by nearly any other artist. His "Singin' in Viet Nam Talkin' Blues" is a rambling account of the trip he and June took there in the late '60s to perform for the troops; the song is rambling not because Cash's thoughts are unorganized, but because even as he's telling us the story of what he and June saw there, he still can't make sense of it -- there is no sense to be made. In "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" (written by Peter LaFarge), he tells, with unvarnished bitterness, the story of a whisky-drinking Marine, a Native American who helped raise the American flag at Iwo Jima, only to return home to a country that couldn't care less whether he lived or died.
And although Cash's signature tune, "Man in Black," isn't technically a protest song, it's still one of the greatest protest songs ever written, a song written and sung in pure anger and defiance. We often sentimentalize the American folk music of the '60s, hailing it as a generation's plea for change, even as we conveniently forget how preachy and finger-pointing most of it was. Cash, perhaps our greatest protest singer (as well as one of our greatest folk singers, although we don't often think of him that way), was never sanctimonious. Instead of just moaning about the troubles of the world, he decided to bear responsibility for them by making a symbolic sartorial gesture, one he stuck to until the end of his life: "I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back/ 'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black."
Cash was a religious man, a staunch Christian. But I think you get the best sense of that not from his heartfelt recordings of gospel songs like "Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)" and "(There'll Be) Peace in the Valley (for Me)," but from the songs he recorded live at Folsom Prison in 1968.
Consider the moment -- a famous one, and one that's both exhilarating and chilling, whether you've heard it once or 100 times -- when Cash sings, in "Folsom Prison Blues," "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."
A great wave of cheering rolls forth from the audience, all of them convicted criminals. And although we can't know for sure exactly why they cheer -- and each of them may be cheering for a different reason -- we can make a few pretty good guesses: First of all, the line is grimly funny. Second, some of them may have actually done the same thing themselves, for approximately the same reason -- not a pretty truth, but there it is.
But I wonder if some of them didn't cheer for this reason: Here was a man who freely stood before them, singing in the voice of a character who had committed a crime that was probably colder, and worse, than any of the things they themselves had done. Cash's message wasn't "I'm better than you are." It was "I'm lowlier than you are" -- and with this, he handed them back some of their dignity. Cash sang in defense of the poor, the downtrodden, the unjustly punished. But he also sang in defense of the humanity of murderers. For that fact alone, I hope that the God Johnny Cash so believed in is right there to greet him. If anyone deserves to find peace in the valley, he does.
Open Salon Review- This Is It: The IMAX Experience (2009)
Famous Fights that Never Happened - Cash vs. Sinatra
Who or What?