Sweet had enlisted New York punk guitar legends Richard Lloyd of Television and the late Bob Quine, the Void-Oids’ and Lou Reed cohort, who provided their patented crunchy blues leads and gnarled arpeggios, respectively, to an album of Rubber Soul-like wistful love songs as played by Crazy Horse, recorded in the wake of the singer/songwriter’s breakup with a girlfriend and subsequent meeting of his wife-to-be.
“Divine Intervention” and “Girlfriend” establish the palette, the latter mixing and matching Greg Leisz’s bluesy lap steel guitar, ’60s-styled, high-pitched harmonies and Quine’s jagged, gnarled Velvets riffs. The only thing more amazing than realizing how an album this smart could be a commercial success back then is the prescience of “Holy War,” written at the time of the Kuwait invasion, but uncannily relevant today. Then again, so is the rest of Girlfriend, some 15 years after the fact, an album that prefigured musical styles from alt-roots to emo, and sounds just as vital today.
Little Manhattan
It’s not surprising to learn this sleeper’s first-time director, screenwriter Mark Levin, was once a co-producer for TV’s The Wonder Years, because his idealized, first-person ode to first love in New York City is an adolescent version of Annie Hall meets Madeleine, as affecting but never too cloying leads Josh Hutcherson and Charlie Ray play the Woody Allen-Diane Keaton parts by meeting cute at karate class, only hinting at the neuroses bound to come.
The film’s Upper West Side turf is lovingly portrayed as a danger-free playground bounded by Central and Riverside Parks, as Hutcherson’s Gabe traverses the not-so-mean streets via Razor scooter, an animated overlaid map defining his universe. Our hero’s lessons in amour are a little too neatly underscored by his estranged-but-still-living-under-the-same-roof parents — Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon and The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford — but the depiction of class distinctions in the otherwise melting pot of Manhattan is a far more sophisticated theme than its kid-film veneer would have you believe.
A fun little DVD to rent that you can watch without embarrassment alongside either your children or even just your significant other. It's sunny, modest optimism and belief in the power of romance captures the allure of the Apple as a collection of small neighborhoods exhibiting their own rituals and social castes better than films with a lot more pretension.
Andrew “Dice” Clay
Just as satellite radio has enabled Howard Stern second banana Artie Lange to come into his own, it’s also resurrected the career of the defrocked funny man, who climbed to the top of the comedy world in the late ’80s and early ’90s with his raunchy nursery rhymes and cartoon misogyny, which got him a lifetime ban from MTV (for using obscenity on their New Year’s Eve show) and had both Nora Dunn and Sinead O’Connor famously boycotting his May 1990 stint guest-hosting Saturday Night Live.
Article comments
1 - Philip Chubak
I was at the concert! David was absolutely fantastic. It was the best show I'd seen since the Wall. But, you obviously don't know what you are talking about. The creative genius behind PF has been, is, and will always be Roger Waters. So you ask which one's pink, well of course it's Roger. By the commment about the concert settling the issue of which one's pink, you have demonstrated that you have not appreciated the real quality of PF and what has brought it to life. The wall would not have existed without Waters. And if you review the credits before the Wall, you'll see that the great majority of songs that amounted to something were written by Roger. The genius of PF is not just the music. It's as much the lyrics. And with Waters, the band is just another band that gets it's highs by borrowing the stuff that was Pink Floyd.
2 - Philip Chubak
Correction. In the last sentence I meant "without Waters" not with. Great apologies.