MEDIA COOL

MEDIA COOL

This Month’s Media Cool was written by Richard Riegel, Bill Holdship, Karen Schlosberg and Richard C. Walls

BOB DYLAN IN CONCERT (HBO)

This concert, filmed in February 1986 during Dylan’s tour of Australia with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, was probably ultimately as uneven as most other Dylan product of the past few years. But set into the video wasteland TV rock is rapidly becoming, Dylan’s unadorned concert was rather bracing stuff. This show included both enough ’60s classics and enough ’80s would-be psalms that all Dylan factions but the testy author of these songs should’ve been happy. But old Zimrny glided through the show on the living ambience of his twin antique sources, old bluesmen and the Old Testament. Nothing less was revealed. Thanks to director Gillian Armstrong for not employing today’s fashionable quick cuts: you could stare at Dylan’s face for an hour and still not know if he was smiling or grimacing. R.R.

FARM AID II (VH-1)

it’s still a noble cause, but from an entertainment standpoint, this was a major disappointment. Lacking the excitement and (especially) controversial feel of the first, there were no surprises whatsoever. VH-1 didn’t know what it was doing, and the non-stop snaius were embarrassing. A lot of emphasis was on the new-breed American bands, but almost none of them seemed comfortable in a stadium. (And would someone please tell Green On Red that they’re a bad joke?) The Vince Neil/Jon Bon Jovi “supergroup” was pathetic. The unintentionally hilarious highlight was Rick James’s “farm” song and comment about smashing Reagan’s “wrinkled old face.” The pnly real highlight was Mellencamp bitching aboyt the government sending $100 million to aid the Contras. The show needed more of this kind of stuff, but, not wanting to offend anyone, ended up bland, bland, bland. B.H.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood (Houghton Mifflin Co.) A must for dystopia buffs. In the near future, Fundamentalist rightwingers have taken over the U.S., via a violent revolution, and set up the theocratic Republic of Gilead, in this new holy land, “traditional values” prevail with a vengeance, particularly regarding women who are assigned ^ by law specific household functions. It’s a Falwellian wet dream told in the first person by a “Handmaid,” a woman whose role is to bear children for a ruling class family (but not to raise them—apparently there’s a biblical precedent for this). What gives the novel an ironic undertone is how the reigning attitudes of Gilead can be traced back not just to the usual suspects, but to certain tendencies in the Women’s Movement (cf. the strange alliance a few years back between the religious right and feminists in the attempted forging of an anti-porn law). Of course, it can’t happen here, but it makes for a whopping yarn. R.C.W

COCAINE

(Everywhere)

It’s a killer.

B.H.

THE VAMPIRE LESTAT

Anne Rice

(Knopf)

In her sequel to the celebrated Interview With A Vampire, Anne Rice continues her allegorical explanation of Good and Evil, using the vampire legend to play out her poetic, absorbing and almost hypnotic story. The fairly simple narrative device used in Interview... is now ingeniously twisted and turned in on itself, making it a book-within-a-book (or a fiction-within-a-fiction); the main characters’ (the vampires Lestat and Louis) roles have likewise been twisted: Lestat is the protagonist, far from the illmannered beast Louis described in the first book. The Vampire Lestat is not as Gothic in its haunting eroticism or sensual violence as Interview...though it aims higher in its complex and texured storyline. And in its success, it becomes an exception to the rule about sequels: it’s better than the first. At the end, we’re left not only wanting more but in suspense, with the promise of another volume to follow. Hopefully, it won’t be another nine years in the making. K.S.

This Month In TV History

WITH DR. OLDIE

STAR TREK (Nickelodeon)

You couldn’t quite say that this half-hour animated version of the cult-fave TV show boldly goes where no cartoon has gone before, but the animation allows for a creative freedom that preSpielberg/Lucas special effects budgets wouldn’t allow on the small screen (and probably didn’t even exist back in the mid’60s). The crew of the starship Enterprise can now include an E.T.-like alien (sorry about that, Mr. Chekov) and visit infinitely stranger planets with a more diverse and imaginative variety of flora and fauna, including a trip to Spock’s past on Vulcan. Given the two-dimensional drawbacks of the modern, cheaply-made animation—the real-life actors were actually sometimes just as wooden—the cartoon version is in some ways superior. It has an impressive assortment of writers, including several sci-fi and Trek vets, and a surprisingly good sense of humor. K.S.