If I ever run for office, and someone asks the drug-use question, I can honestly say I didn’t inhale. While pop-music critics are a Dionysian lot, snorting coke off groupies’ breasts, film critics are prim, fussbudget types. There were a lot of people laughing at the stoner humor in Pineapple Express. Me, I rolled my own. My bliss started with the opening credits: The film is a Columbia release, and to get the ’70s vibe under way, the opening credits are in the same exact font the studio used for its comedies in the shag-carpet days. “Man, this is gonna be some good shit,” I thought.

And I was right. There is some good shit in Pineapple Express. But there’s some bad shit too. Plus some bat shit toward the end, though the best shit comes after the bad shit, when three of its characters are just sort of chewing the fat the morning after some heavy shit has gone down.

The film comes to us from producer Judd Apatow, whose modest mom-and-pop comedy outfit became a factory after last summer’s Knocked Up and Superbad, both of which were $100 million hits, now churning out new yuks every quarter. Pineapple Express’s star, Seth Rogen, cowrote the script, which I suspect was merely a list of suggestions as he and James Franco, tending to his long-dormant funny bone, headed to the set and started making shit up. The best scenes in the movie, which pit Rogen’s maturity-challenged process server and Franco’s puppyish pot dealer against a bunch of heavies looking for some really great shit cultivated by the government, have the smell of improvisation to them.

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From a place apart
Morpheus, God of dreams, awakes

The artist Robert Mapplethorpe died from complications of AIDS in 1989. According to his great friend, Patti Smith, “His mortal suffering was so profound that I wept through much of his illness. After his death, I wanted to give him something other than tears, so I wrote The Coral Sea.” Her epic poem was published in book form in 1996.

Smith attempted public readings of the piece, but found that she was unable to sustain a reading of the entire thing. It wasn’t until she teamed up with Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine) for a pair of concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in 2005 and 2006 that the true nature of her amazing achievement revealed itself.

The Coral Sea, a two-disc set released on the artists’ own PASK label, is a record of those two monumental performances. The concerts featured Smith reading her work, accompanied by Shields on guitars and effects. It is unlike anything that I have ever heard.

Art, not nature moved him
Nature, he had boasted, was meant to be redesigned
Opened and folded like a fan

The poem tells the story of Mapplethorpe, referred to variously as the sleeper, the traveller, or simply, ‘M’, as he makes his heroic journey to the next world. In this case the voyage will take him to the Solomon Islands so that he might see the Southern Cross, which his beloved uncle had described to him, before he dies. He journeys aboard a ship through uncharted waters, experiencing the stages of death, from pain and defiance, to revelation and acceptance. (more…)