I love the San Fernando Valley, don’t get me wrong; but every fall the Santa Ana winds kick up and with them, a couple of arsonists. The smoke has been so bad this weekend that today in my voice acting class, everybody got the same direction - better breath control, and don’t sound so much like Alec Baldwin. Listen to radio commercials about a month from now, and you’ll see what I mean.

What better way to pass the time then by staying indoors and watching a long-neglected cult film via Netflix? The film in this case is PRIVILEGE, Peter Watkins’ pseudo-documentary about a troubled pop star. It’s a little-known work, but people who have seen it tend to remember it. I for example, caught it once on TV over thirty years ago and haven’t been able to find it anywhere since, but I’ve wanted to. In fact, up until last year I couldn’t even have rented it if I wanted to. New Yorker Video got around to cleaning up five Peter Watkins movies and releasing them as a series.

Peter Watkins was a British television director in the late sixties who was quite ahead of his time. He made his reputation with THE WAR GAME, another faux documentary about London in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear blast. PRIVILEGE, shot in a similar fashion for theatrical release, covers some of the same territory. It takes place in 1970, which made it science-fiction in 1967. Teen idol Steven Shorter is as popular as all the Beatles rolled into one, and worshipped with a fervor that even the Beatles could only imagine. His ability to sell products based on an endorsement is so potent that there are Steven Shorter appliance stores. 

One of the entities putting that charisma to use is the “British Provisional Government”. By 1970 apparently the two party-system in England has given way to something a little more… efficient. So our popstar’s job is to channel the destructive energy of youth away from, say protest and politics. And Steven Shorter, increasingly, is realizing this and he doesn’t like it.

The style of PRIVILEGE is a lot like DON’T LOOK BACK, the long-unseen documentary about Bob Dylan. However, Watkins is said to have modeled the film on a more unlikely source: LONELY BOY, a half-hour Canadian documentary about Paul Anka. Steven Shorter IS Paul Anka, in a way. Beloved by pimply hormonal teenage girls; polite, clean-cut, good-looking enough to be an effective tabula rasa. And besides who would you rather have as the fresh face of fascism? Bob Dylan was so subversive he’d have spoiled the joke. 

The movie does overreach, but it’s noble overreaching. We see Shorter selling appliances, then next they call him in to do a commercial for apples because there is an apple glut, and then BANG! he’s called upon to simultaneously encourage christianity and blind conformity to an omnipresent government. It goes too far too quickly. Perhaps there just isn’t a slow enough pace to make that twist work, but it’d be great to see the movie remade as a mini-series. 

I hate to say it, but it would also be nice to see someone else as Steven Shorter. He’s played by Paul Jones, a non-actor who was the lead singer of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Jones has two notes as an actor - nervous tension and thinly veiled agony. I can’t help but think there needed to also be some sense that he loves his job so much that he can’t stop performing, even when he knows what an awful agenda he’s helping. But he does really nail the two big numbers, which are masterful satires of the excesses of pop. It’s only once he’s not singing that you start to question how the public would be devoted to such a dour guy. Part of the Beatles’ appeal was how much fun they seemed to be having at their press conferences after all. Being famous can be fun.

Whatever. PRIVILEGE is a rare gem, and flaws only serve to make gems even more fascinating. Be glad that you live in an age where you can rent it. That is, as soon as I return my copy, because I bet that’s the only one they have in stock.

-daniel k.

For his next directing effort, Steven Soderbergh is plotting a 3-D live-action rock ‘n’ roll musical about Cleopatra.

He is courting Catherine Zeta-Jones to play the Egyptian queen and Hugh Jackman to play her lover, Marc Antony.

The $30 million “Cleo” will be shopped for financing and distribution within the next two weeks. Greg Jacobs is producing with Casey Silver.

The music has been written by the indie rock band Guided by Voices, and the script is by James Greer, a former bass player for the band and an author.

While Soderbergh has recently done a spate of wildly different projects, this one will be his first full-blown musical.

I’m lining up starting this weekend - who’s with me?

-daniel k.

Dear American Citizen:

In most states, today is the deadline for voter registration. Take 3 minutes and register to vote TODAY.

Please visit loungethevote.com to register, and let’s lounge the vote.

If you’ve ALREADY registered to vote, then take those 3 minutes and visit shop.richardcheese.com and buy a bunch of my Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine CDs and T-Shirts, because the economic crisis is really messing with our merchandise sales and I’m going broke and running out of credit cards and I can’t pay the recording studio bills for our 3 new albums because I already owe my musicians a lot of money and good bongo players are super expensive and tuxedo dry cleaning isn’t free and I sure got charged a lot more than I expected at that “Gentleman’s Club” and now I can’t even afford the server bandwidth to finish typing thi

He’s a good American.

-daniel k.

What’s with Metallica and digital music? First they drag Napster to the ground and kick the hell out of it, and now their fans are complaining that iPods make their music TOO LOUD.

“Death Magnetic” is a flashpoint in a long-running music-industry fight. Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods… Some fans are complaining that “Death Magnetic” has a thin, brittle sound that’s the result of the band’s attempts in the studio to make it as loud as possible. “Sonically it is barely listenable,” reads one fan’s online critique. Thousands have signed an online petition urging the band to re-mix the album and release it again.

Sure it’s barely listenable sonically, but what about all the other ways?

Well, like all trends this one is a pendulum - it looks like the “make everything loud” trend is about to swing back. I’m sure Lars and the boys have another great unplugged album in ‘em.

-daniel k

This is why I’m not all that disappointed in the Los Angeles Opera’s presentation of THE FLY, which I saw last night at the fantastical Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Based on the 1986 movie by David Cronenberg, directed by Cronenberg himself, with a score by Howard Shore who wrote the original movie score and a libretto by David Henry Hwang, who wrote M. Butterfly, which Cronenberg made into a film. These are people who know much about film, but only Hwang appears to have any opera background. And as you might expect, it just doesn’t work.

I myself have little opera background; I don’t like the emotional stylization, the hugeness, the very sound of operatic voices. However, I have to assume that most of the people who were in the auditorium with me DO like opera, and far as I can see they didn’t much like THE FLY. 

Here’s a little background. You may recall that the Cronenberg version of THE FLY was a deeper, stranger, more romantic and frank retelling of the late fifties movie starring David Hedison and Vincent Price. The story of a scientist who has developed a system to transmit matter from one pod to another, and makes the fatal error of sending himself through without noticing that a fly has gotten in with him at the same time was a little silly in the fifties. You had a man with a fly head and one fly arm stumbling around, and a little fly with the head of a man. 

Cronenberg upped the ante - in his version, the teleportation results in no visible outward change at first. The scientist looks exactly the same, only he’s stronger, He has less need for sleep, more stamina. In fact, he’s just like a guy in the early stages of cocaine addiction. And just like with cocaine, soon the high starts to wear off and the bad changes begin. Only in this case it’s the fly DNA starting to take control of the scientist’s body, causing gradual deformation, illness and madness. 

It’s also your basic scientist meets girl, scientist scares girl away, scientist kidnaps girl and tries to genetically fuse with her story. And actually pretty romantic in surprising ways.

The story makes it to the opera stage relatively unscathed. The action is centered around scientist Seth Brundle’s lab, with occasional forays out to a pool hall or a party for physics geeks.  The libretto by Hwang makes the most of this adaptation. Yes it’s often a little stilted (if I remember correctly the first words sung in the show are “I am a Cop - I’ve been on the force fifteen years and I’ve never seen anything like this”) but there are flashes of humor and liberal quoting of memorable lines from the movie. 

What pulls the wings off this FLY is, I think, the music. Howard Shore seems to have undergone a transformation himself in 20 years, from lush classicist to modern atonal minimalist. He’s developed an allergy to melody. He’s like Stravinsky without the populist leanings. So the music is hard to listen to, it abhors climaxes, it eschews emotional involvement. It’s off-putting. My belief is that either Shore wants to do this kind of music nowadays and thought THE FLY opera would be a a good vehicle to pin it to, or Cronenberg felt that the rest of the show is so easy to grasp that the music needed to be exotic and difficult.

If that’s the case, it’s a huge miscalculation. The creative team behind this opera may not realize how strange, brainy and creepy the material really is. I can see the early, romantic parts of the show being musically lush, gradually getting more atonal as Brundle becomes less human. But the score never changes. Nothing sucks you in, and as a result about 5% of the audience didn’t even come back after intermission. Which is a shame because the best special effects are there.

Man, as I write this I’m listening to the film score. It would have made a FANTASTIC opera.

Well, the cast was just fine. Daniel Okulitch, the bass who plays Seth Brundle, was a little bland but considering that he had to sing opera, simulate intercourse on stage AND look good naked, I think the casting people worked a miracle. Ruxandra Donose was certainly up to the job as Veronica Quaife, the Geena Davis role. She had a couple of arias which she pulled off with flair and passion, neither of which seemed to be requirements of the score. The chorus was a good chorus. Whoever sang the part of the computer (several voices, monotone unison) did precise work as well.

So I’ll put it this way - glad I saw it, not clamoring for the soundtrack album.

-daniel k.