When a woman in her early twenties asks a ninety-year-old man to fuck her, there's usually an oil fortune involved - unless, of course, the ninety-year-old man is author Ray Bradbury. Rachel Bloom's poppy ode to the sci-fi master, "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury," has garnered a million hits on the Internet in less than a week.
UCB Comedy Blog: Tell us a little bit about the process of making "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury."
Rachel Bloom:I was sitting at home about two years ago during the summer between my junior and senior years of college, and I was re-reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I was going through a weird sadness/lull on the boy front, and I kept thinking, "Man, Ray Bradbury is so smart...he'd be the ideal boyfriend." I thought it would be funny to do a passionate love song about Ray Bradbury. Then, I thought it would be even funnier to do like, a sexy pop song about Ray Bradbury. So, I sat down at my parents' piano and came up with the essential structure in about an hour. 2 years later, I revisited the song and refined it.
We shot the video at St. Cecilia's, an old Catholic school in Brooklyn. (...) I produced the video myself - I did all the casting, found the crew, and asked my friends to direct/DP. It was a lot of work, a lot of e-mails going back and forth for a few weeks. I will say that you don't have to be a genius to put together a good film shoot - it's just a lot of work.
UCBCB: The video was obviously influenced by one of the greatest TRL videos ever - "Hit Me Baby, One More Time." When you were a kid, did you ever dream about being in one of those '90s pop videos?
RB:The weird thing about me as a kid is that I outwardly wanted to be against the establishment, but secretly wanted to be a part of it. I was made fun of a lot right around the time "Baby One More Time" came out, so although I publicly railed against these pretty popular people and their awesome clothes, I privately danced to the song like a fiend alone in my room. I resented the fact I wasn't cool or pretty enough to be a Britney Spears fan, but couldn't deny that I was a Britney Spears fan. I always openly loved 'N Sync, though. Ah, to be 12 and full of contradictions.
UCBCB: If you were doing a whole literary fuckfest, what other authors would be on your list?
RB:I would fuck Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and J.K. Rowling. Those are the top of my orgy list. (daqui)
“It’s been a long time comin’, but —” So said Barack Obama in the first moments of his victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago on election night, calling on Sam Cooke along with the other familiars — Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. — he invisibly but unmistakably gathered to his side. “If you ever hear me sing ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’”, Rod Stewart once said of Cooke’s song, released in late December 1964, just after Cooke was shot to death outside a motel in Watts, in Los Angeles, “you’ll know my career will be over” — because, Stewart seemed to imply, he would not be able to look an audience in the face after failing to live up to the song. But Obama had more confidence — or, because he was perhaps testifying that, not four years old when “A Change Is Gonna Come” first aired on the radio, he had lived out his life under the shadow of the song, had carried it with him like a manifesto, Obama was asserting that he could not only sing the song, in his own way, in his own cadence, but rewrite it. “But I know, a change gone come”, Cooke sang. “Change has come to America”, Obama said. Did he really do that? Did Sam Cooke really do that? For Obama it was not his last song, but his first song.
I wasn’t in Chicago that night. I was in Minneapolis, in Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, in the audience, as Bob Dylan played for the first time on the campus of his erstwhile alma mater. The second song was “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, from the year before “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song I’ve never liked. It always seemed as if it were written by the times, which is to say it felt like a manifesto written by a committee, or commissioned by one. But on this night so much history was loaded into the song it was impossible not to be sucked into its gravity. Dylan paced the song with space between the words, the rhythm the steps of someone making his way through an empty mansion with both care and dread. It was as if the song, or the history it carried, was moving in slow motion, carrying — as Obama would say later in the night of a 106-year-old voter named Ann Nixon Cooper, “born just a generation past slavery” — not only the history the song was made to celebrate — “She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people ‘we shall overcome’” — but the history that remained to be made: the history that the song and those present to hear it would witness as it and they had witnessed what had come before. But it was more than that.
As Dylan took all of the triumphalism out of the song, the cheering, the defiance, all of the easy ride the song had promised when it first appeared, he turned it into a kind of dirge. He divided history in two: the time the song had, now, outlasted, and the time that would, now, test it. As a dirge the song became a warning: in the past, the people listening had or had not made the history the song spoke for, but now they would have to make it, or fail the song just as Rod Stewart believed he would fail “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The last song of the night was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” another song I’ve never liked, another song that, this night, for me rang a bell it never had before. “I was born in 1941”, Dylan said just before he began the number. “That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are going to change now”. I only caught the last line; when the song ended, everyone crowded into the Northrop lobby, under a giant television screen tuned to CNN. It was ten o’clock, just as the polls closed in California, just as the announcer over our heads announced that Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States. Dylan had not gone a minute past where he knew the show had to end.
Fans just getting out of the Bob Dylan concert at the University of Minnesota break out a dance party upon hearing the news that Obama clinched the presidency
What happened then, all over the country, and all over the world—people shouting through their tears — is not unrelated to the way Obama was able to call up “A Change Is Gonna Come” as he spoke that night. It is not unrelated to the sense of authority that has surrounded Obama since. Almost always, when someone is elected president of the United States, whether it is someone you supported or someone you opposed, it takes a long time before the attachment of the word president to that person’s name begins to sound even remotely real, and with Obama that was not true on election night and it has not been true since. That is, I think because of the way he speaks — a manner for which the world eloquence is merely pretty, and hollow. It’s the ability to speak of complex things to large numbers of people in a way that neither compromises the complexity of what the speaker means to say nor insults the intelligence of those who are listening — to speak in a manner that itself attunes those who are listening to their own complexity. I am thinking of Obama’s speech on race, from March 18 of last year, when controversy over statements and sermons by his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, threatened to derail his campaign — a thirty-seven minute address that gathered listeners as if around a campfire — but I am also thinking of a scene from John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln as described in Short Letter, Long Farewell, a novel published by Peter Handke in 1972. The narrator, a young Austrian in America, goes to a theater. Lincoln, played by Henry Fonda, has agreed to defend two brothers accused of murder; a drunken mob arrives at the jail to lynch them, and Lincoln faces it down. He talks; he captures the drunks, the narrator says in wonder and awe, not missing the flicker of an eyelash, the turn of a vowel, “by softly reminding them of themselves, of what they were, what they could be, and what they had forgotten. This scene — Lincoln on the wooden steps of the jailhouse, with his hand on the battering ram — embodied every possibility of human behavior. In the end not only the drunks, but also the actors playing the drunks, were listening intently to Lincoln, and when he had finished they dispersed, changed forever. All around me in the theater I felt the audience breathing differently and coming to life again”. That is what eloquence is too weak a word for: speech that is not only about democracy, but that is itself democratic.
In The Human Stain, published in 2000, Philip Roth tells the story one Coleman Silk, a seventy-two year-old man from an African-American family from Philadelphia who has passed as a Jew — that is, as a white man — his entire adult life. Reading the novel now, one can hardly avoid imagining Barack Obama into its pages, not because he ever passed or ever could, but because as an African-America he seems to have invented himself as absolutely as does Coleman Silk. “What do we really know about this man?” John McCain asked throughout the fall campaign, and even without the innuendo — was he a Muslim, a communist, somehow a terrorist? — the question hit home because it was about something real. Obama’s very ease in his own skin, his apparent immunity from slurs and lies — like Jackie Robinson in his ability to trust in his own gifts and never betray his own rage at the slurs and lies that by election day had at Republican rallies become a torrent of hate, with crowds shouting “Traitor!” and “Kill him!” at the mention of his name — spoke for, as Roth wrote of Coleman Silk, “the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness”. Obama seems like his own creation: that is the source of his aura, the sense of self-command that draws people to him, and it is at least partly the sense that he is not quite real, not quite human, that terrifies, or sickens, others. The self-made American embodies America, a nation that was itself made up — “Everyday”, Roth wrote, “you woke up to be what you had made yourself” — but the self-made American is also a kind of Frankenstein.
The banner headline on the front pages of the New York Times the day after the election was queer in its affirmation of what the election had been about: RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN HEAVY TURNOUT. As a self-invented American, one who could claim the history of the Civil Rights movement, as in his litany of place names from Montgomery to Atlanta, without excluding anyone from that history, Obama did not run as someone who had set himself against a “racial barrier.” A particular individual set himself a goal and achieved it; America was not less racist the day after the election than it was the day before it. But perhaps what was wrong about the headline was that it spoke in terms that were too narrow, too small, too merely functional for what had actually occurred. The country may not have changed, but its history did. It rewrote itself. For as a friend said, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Bob Dylan’s last word on election night, was not just “Blowin’ in the Wind”. It was also the song Dylan has long said he “took it off”, “a spiritual”, a song that dates to the Civil War, a song Lincoln might have heard, but not likely ever sang, as, one night in Greenwich Village, in a performance of an empathy so great is might better be called transubstantiation, a Jew in 1962 turning himself into a African-American in 1862, Bob Dylan did: “No More Auction Block”.
(2009)
28 January 2007
NADA EM LUGAR NENHUM
"Foi um acontecimento. Definiu aquele Verão, mas, como as revoltas [dos guetos negros] de Watts, também o interrompeu — do mesmo modo que, daí em diante, essa canção interromperia tudo aquilo que pudesse estar a acontecer no instante em que começasse a ser tocada. Foi um incidente que teve lugar num estúdio de gravação e foi lançado para o mundo com a intenção de não deixar o mundo exactamente igual. Isto não é o mesmo que mudar o mundo, o que implica um modo pelo qual se desejaria que o mundo mudasse. É mais como traçar uma linha para ver o que poderá acontecer: ver quem a canção revelaria de um ou do outro lado da linha e quem a poderia pisar. Dessa forma, a canção enquanto acontecimento transformou os seus ouvintes em testemunhas. Aos ouvintes-enquanto-testemunhas caberia fazer sentido do que viam e escutavam na canção (...); transportar o acontecimento com eles ou tentar deixá-lo para trás, como desejassem ou como pudessem, porque a reacção a um acontecimento não é algo que se seja inteiramente livre de escolher".
É Greil Marcus quem escreve e refere-se àquele momento ocorrido há quarenta anos, entre 15 e 16 de Junho de 1965, no estúdio A da Columbia Records, em Nova Iorque, quando, acompanhado por Mike Bloomfield (guitarra), Bobby Gregg (bateria), Paul Griffin (piano), Al Kooper (orgão), Bruce Langhorne (pandeireta) e Joe Macho Jr (baixo), Bob Dylan gravou os seis minutos e seis segundos de "Like A Rolling Stone" e, ao fazê-lo, inventou o rock'n'roll moderno tal como o conhecemos. Só a 20 de Julho desse ano — data em que o single foi editado, com a canção esquartejada em duas, nos lados A e B — o mundo se daria conta do abanão que acabara de sofrer e, cinco dias depois, no Newport Folk Festival, acompanhado pela Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Dylan consumaria o gesto: as águas ficariam definitivamente divididas entre a velha guarda folk "esquerdista" que nunca realmente entendera o significado de "The Times They Are A Changing" (e que o vaiou em fúria) e todos aqueles que se aperceberam de como, dali em diante, a cultura popular norte-americana (isto é, mundial) abrira irreversivelmente um novo ciclo.
Já antes, em Invisible Republic (1997), Greil Marcus caracterizara a ebulição criativa de Dylan que daria origem às Basement Tapes gravadas com a Band como "uma das mais intensas irupções do modernismo no século XX", associando-o a Joyce, Eliot ou Yeats. Agora, nas quase trezentas páginas do recém publicado Like A Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan At The Crossroads (ed. PublicAffairs), não hesita em colocar no mesmo plano os dezasseis minutos de "Highlands" (do álbum Time Out Of Mind, 1997) e a trilogia de Philip Roth, Pastoral Americana, Casei Com Um Comunista e A Mancha Humana. Sim, porque Marcus — um dos muito raros "scholars" da cultura pop que não se circunscreve ao "biografismo" mas toma cada assunto como mero pretexto para a mais larga e fascinada especulação — escreve como Altman ou Paul Thomas Anderson filmam: se, em Mystery Train (1975), onde pintava um imenso painel da América a partir das músicas de Presley, Robert Johnson, Randy Newman, The Band e Sly Stone, confessava que "já não era capaz de ruminar sobre Elvis sem pensar em Herman Melville" e, em Lipstick Traces (1989), traçava a genealogia do punk recorrendo aos surrealistas, dadaístas, situacionistas e aos heréticos medievais da Irmandade do Livre Espírito, também, desta vez, o instante fundador de "Like A Rolling Stone" é apenas uma via de acesso, por exemplo, ao Highway 61 — Highway 61 Revisited, o álbum onde "Like A Rolling Stone" figuraria, seria editado pouco depois, a 30 de Agosto de 65 — que percorre os EUA, do Golfo do México à fronteira canadiana, atravessando o delta do Mississipi, local "sagrado" de passagem, vida ou morte de Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, Son House, Elvis ou Martin Luther King: "O Highway 61 corporiza uma América tão mítica e real como aquela América construída em Paris a partir de velhos discos de blues e jazz pelos expatriados sul-americanos do romance de Julio Cortazar de 1963, Rayuela —, um romance no qual, como numa autoestrada, podemos entrar onde queremos".
Porta aberta também para a bizarra história de Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester, viúva do inventor da espingarda Winchester que, muito naturalmente, desaguará numa sessão do concurso televisivo "American Idol" onde um patético desfile de imitadores reproduz os estereótipos "dylanianos" tal como a grosseira percepção do "público" os reteve. Ou ainda para a versão de "Go West", dos Village People, pelos Pet Shop Boys (sim, sim, e faz todo o sentido). Todas, afinal, em "Like A Rolling Stone", desencadeadas por aquele coice inicial da bateria de Bobby Gregg ("um disparo que não acontece no terceiro acto mas mal o pano sobe"), pela irada descarga de vómito verbal ("há bombas a rebentar por todo o lado e cada bomba é uma palavra: 'DIDN'T', 'STEAL', 'USED', 'INVISIBLE', fazem parte da história mas, pela forma como são cantadas — declamadas, marteladas, atiradas do cimo da montanha para rebentarem aos pés da multidão —, cada palavra é também a própria história"), pela assombrada atmosfera sonora ("Enquanto som, a canção é uma caverna. Entramos às escuras; a pouca luz que existe desenha sombras incertas nas paredes que, à medida que as observamos, parecem mover-se ritmadamente. Começa a parecer-nos que podemos adivinhar que flash se seguirá ao anterior. Mas, quanto mais olhamos, mais vemos e menos fixo tudo nos parece"). Um ano depois, em conversa com o crítico de jazz, Nat Hentoff, Bob Dylan diria: "As minhas canções antigas, para dizer o mínimo, eram acerca de coisa nenhuma. As novas são sobre o mesmo — apenas observadas no interior de algo maior, chamado, talvez, lugar nenhum". (2005)