About Author: Hilton Als

Posts by Hilton Als

1

I Can’t Help It

By
Hilton Als
– November 6, 2012

But every time I vote, I start to cry, and it suddenly occurred to me that the voting booths reminded me of glory holes, and I missed our old friends again. Of course the tears commemorate things that go way back in my family’s case–immigration, hope, etc–but wasn’t hope at least one aspect of the glory hole experience as well? As I left the voting both–I was the fifth one to post my ballot in my ‘hood, so to speak–I raised my fist and said, “Have a glorious day!” The only difference between that salutation and the past was the time of day. But DO have a glorious day. And night.

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Thelonious Monk: Born: October 10

By
Hilton Als
– October 11, 2012

Happy Birthday, Thelonious! I wouldn’t have known had I not become a fan of radio station WKCR, out of Columbia University, a station I maybe first heard at Sharifa’s place the other day as we talked about her almost here baby and mid-wifery over mint tea, it’s always so odd to talk about the future when it’s staring you in the face, a thing men cannot share since we don’t house the future, only move towards it. In any case, it was nice to see and hear Sharifa, her speech is Texas, it just lumbers along with a few jokes, and she asked me if the gongs and cymbals I heard in some unidentifiable music playing on the radio bothered me, and I said, no, no, I liked it, it actually added (I did not say) to the baby expectation and joy, wondering which bed she’d have her baby in, and then her baby himself, laying around and then toddling around and then running around, the baby as a world of cymbals and gongs in one presence! But for now the gongs were on the radio, specifically WKCR, and it’s the station I tune into during the day while I’m working now, it’s like having Sharifa near me, Sharifa and her little baby crashing cymbals of gurgling and laughter in the other room as I type, hoping the writing will get better but wanting them to stay just the same, perfect. In any case, there was Thelonious, how old would he have been had he not died in 1987, he wasn’t even seventy when he died, and I hope Sharifa and her baby live forever in a world of Elizabeth Bishop rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! In the old days the late Veronica Geng used to come to my little apartment for lunch, Ian Frazier introduced us, she was interested in writing about Ron Vawter, now also dead, and once she saw my blue box of Thelonious Blue Note recordings and Veronica said: He’s the greatest artist of the twentieth century! And Darryl was here that afternoon, I made a curry but burned it, I admired Veronica so, that afternoon we walked down to City Hall, and she talked about the writing she wanted to do, the writing I wanted to do, and we walked–where? It was all rainbow that afternoon, that little, funny woman by my side with that laugh–it went up! like a rainbow–and it’s so hard to imagine that I have that effect on the kids I meet now but I do and sometimes they’re shy of my effect on them and I don’t hear from them for a while but I don’t think I did that with Veronica, learning from people has always been the healthiest part of myself, I’m greedy about that, Valda was, too, people were our university. I wrote to Veronica later in the summer when she was in her little house…upstate? She wrote to me about blueberries, and the preserves she was making and would bring me back but then things got sad, she didn’t like me writing for someone she felt injured by, she never gave me the jam, and then she was sick and died, but nothing can take away the sound of her laughter going up! and Darryl not understanding why she had to leave at all. Happy Birthday, Thelonious. It’s hard to say how much more music you would have produced had you lived, or if you would have loved more people had you lived, but just know the Thank you! is always there, and that it’s filled with rainbow! rainbow! rainbow! And guess what, Thelonious? Just as I was laying down with a pad and pencil to start continue the work of the day, I received a text from Sharifa. It read, in part: “Emanuel…is BORN!” And on your day. Sometimes things are no less than right, and there are rainbows, and as Tennessee’s Blanche had it: “Sometimes there is God so quickly.” Time to watch over us, Thelonious, as we endeavor to make some music out of that.

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At the Public

By
Hilton Als
– October 8, 2012

Like jazz musicians, theatre people tend to live at night. So, it was especially touching to find so many great actors, directors, writers, and producers up and at ’em by 10 a.m. yesterday morning to celebrate and honor the completion of the Public Theatre’s forty million dollar revitalization program. Plans to give the 158 year old building on Lafayette Street, near Astor Place, a makeover began seven years ago, under the stewardship of the Public’s Executive Director, Oskar Eustis, and took three years to complete–a relatively rapid transformation given that, “We wouldn’t know what we’d find when we opened the walls,” Eustis said, laughing. Before the city leased the building to Joe Papp for one dollar, the Public had been, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city’s first public library, and then, a way station for Jewish immigrants. Taking occupancy in 1967, Papp and company put on “Hair,” and the rest followed: 1975’s “for colored girls…,” Meryl Streep and John Cazale in the 1976 production of “Measure for Measure,” and, the same year, Richard Foreman’s legendary direction of “The Threepenny Opera,” starring Raul Julia and Ellen Greene, 1980’s “Pirates of Penzance,” with Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Kline, not to mention “A Chorus Line,” Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Venus,” directed by Richard Foreman, Rosie Perez in “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” and on and on. In a way, yesterday’s event was just part of the continuum. Walking up the black granite steps to the theatre’s airy new lobby, one’s eye traveled to what one hadn’t seen previously, as well as what hadn’t existed before. Central to the lobby is a site specific instillation by Ben Rubin called “Shakespeare Machine.” The geometric scultpure acts as a kind of chandelier, which features 37 LED display screens with fragments from Shakespeare’s plays. The building’s designers, Ennead Architects, had cleared away the plaster from the central space to reveal beautiful archways, and the always hard to find box office was centrally located. Large letters had been stenciled into the white walls, giving clearer directives to the first floor theatres, and the bathrooms–for years now, just a series of funky stalls–had been replaced to maximize privacy and contemplation, which was essential if you wanted to take a break from events like the hours long “Gatz.” But back to the event, which kicks off eight weeks of celebration. (http://www.publictheater.org/content/view/267) The vigorous Patrick Willingham, the Public’s Executive Director, introduced Mayor Bloomberg, who made a couple of puns using Shakespeare’s text, but not before Luis A. Ubinas, the fifty year old head of the Ford Foundation, told a touching story about how, as a kid growing up, he and a friend had stumbled into the lobby of the Public, where they met Joe Papp himself. The late producer talked to the boys for a while, and told them they could stick around–the place was his.
Thirty-five years later, Ubinas helped expand on Papp’s dream. Taking the stage after Bloomberg, and Eustis, who stressed how the American theatre could be, and should be, a democratic forum, one where people from all economic backgrounds could converge, were a number of stars and associates and family members connected to the Public, who, in addition to several public officials, read a line or two from Shakespeare, commemorating the theatre’s past and present and future. They included:

Gail Papp:
I have lived
To see inherited my very wishes,
And the buildings of my fancy
(Coriolanus II.I.132-134)

Richard Foreman:
You shall find a benefit in this change
(Antony and Cleopatra V.2.127-28)

Liev Schreiber:
Do you hear,
let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief
chronicles of the time. After your death you were better
have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
(Hamlet II.2.486-9)

Kate Levin:
There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple;
If the ill spirit have so fair a house,
Good things will strive to dwell in’t
(The Tempest I.2.457-9)

Jim Polshek, architect:
When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model;
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then must we rate the cost of the erection.
(Henry IV 1.3.42-45)

David Rockwell:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
(Henry V 1.Prologue.1-2)

Diana Son:
The most peerless piece of earth, I think, that e’er the sun shone bright on.
(Winter’s Tale V.1.2939-2940)

Colman Domingo:
‘Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t.
(Winter’s Tale III.3.138-139)

Vanessa Redgrave:
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
(As You Like It II.1.12-17)

Suzan Lori Parks:
Nice customs curtsy to great kings.
You and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion:
We are the makers of manners.
(Henry V V.2.268-271)

Stew:
My story being done
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs;
She swore in faith twas strange, twas passing strange.
(Othello 1.3.158-60)

Amara Granderson, 16, and Amari Rose Leigh, 14, former participants in The Public’s A Midsummer Day’s Camp, a summer conservatory-style acting program developed for teens:
Merrily, merrily shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough
(The Tempest V.1.99-100)

Christine Quinn:
All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown,
Whate’er the course, the end is the renown
(All’s Well IV.4.41-42)

David Henry Hwang:
Let’s lack no discipline, make no delay,
For lords, tomorrow is a busy day.
(Richard III V.3.17-18)

Oskar Eustis:
I can no other answer make but thanks,
And thanks; and ever thanks.
(Twelfth Night III.3.1503-1504

Indeed, the most tear inducing performances were those of Levin and others who work behind the scenes. Like kids who had put extra shine on their Sunday school or synagogue shoes, they climbed onto the temporary stage in the lobby with a degree of pride and accomplishment that emphasized the hope that seeped out of the walls. Following Eustis’ valedictory gratitude, several casts from “Hair,” who had been standing on a balcony looking down on the proceedings, sang “Let the Sun Shine,” with conviction and force. At the close of their set, one observed Redgrave, tall and bespectacled, bending forward just a little as she chatted amiably with Granderson and Leigh. It was actor talk: about the speeches they’d read, how they’d come off, the difficulties. And as the performers, encompassing so much past and so much future, compared notes, Lafayette Street continued to wake up to its various street players, who were just starting their day.

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Sarah Polley’s Mother

By
Hilton Als
– October 6, 2012


Dear X: You have been much on my mind, I’m terribly sorry I couldn’t make the birthday party, but it would have involved getting my head around another event in order to be present to you and Y, and I just didn’t think I would manage it in time. I didn’t do anything to “replace,” the situation, I think I just went home, praying that the work I have to get done got done, and I was free to have a drink with you…some time. But that time will come and everything will be in rightness again, and you will see how much I care about you, and how many times I think of how I met you, with your father, who you just learned was your father, and his immense pride in you, and how amazing it was, to see the physical similarities. I never asked why this was all kept a secret — every mother has her reasons — and I don’t think I would even ask you now had I not just watched Sarah Polley’s utterly extraordinary documentary about her late mother, Diane, a sometimes actress who suffered a devastating loss after her first marriage went awry: she lost custody of her first two children, who were raised by their father. After she fell in love with, and married Sarah Polley’s father, Michael, a romantic looking, very good British-born amateur actor whose shyness prevented him from living life on the stage (he became an insurance salesman) Diane had three children with him, Sarah being the last. Diane died, eventually, of cancer. It was revealed after her death that Sarah’s father wasn’t her biological father, that Sarah was the product of a love affair Diane had had when she was in rep, in Montreal (the Polleys lived in Toronto) with a young man named Harry, a shy filmmaker who was besotted by Diane’s presence on and off the stage. Diane was just over forty when she learned she was pregnant, and thought she would terminate the pregnancy for fear of a damaged child, but, on her way to the abortionist, she changed her mind, and Sarah was born, without whose critical, loving eye, we would not be watching the movie we we’re watching. All that said, Polley isn’t so much interested in chronology as a series of questions — proposals? — about the nature of truth, and the truth and imagination secrets can and do feed. As is often the case with children who feel they’ve been left, Sarah’s eldest brother and sister have different reactions to their mother’s affair; Sarah’s sister is besotted by her cast out Mum; she’s grateful that Diane was eventually loved, while her brother is angered anew by what he perceives as Diane’s recklessness; at the very least, he says, Diane’s pregnancy was a cautionary tale about how you should use birth control, particularly if you’re having an affair. (One gets the sense that this young man felt his mother left him three times, not only after her first marriage dissolved, but when she started a new family, and then died.) Polley let’s all her siblings and both fathers have their say — indeed, she is at pains to let them write their own familial tales; her siblings beautiful faces — they all have Diane’s eyes — are alternately and variously wide with humor and anger and tears as they talk about this ultimately unknown quantity: Mum. And it’s a measure of Polley’s power as a filmmaker that by allowing her “witnesses,” to have their say, she gets what she needs: a movie about layering, the truth dressed up as fiction, or fiction dressed up as the truth. It’s very odd, but it didn’t occur to me until the film was nearly over that the figures in the home movies were actors; they bore such an extraordinary emotional resemblance to the real life characters that the “real” people were discussing on screen, and off. I was so wrapped up in the various revelations–and the revelation that comes at the end of the piece — I almost forgot the various levels Polley was working on as a filmmaker. She’s very interested in the art that goes into artifice. (The opening of the movie in particular plays, through the use of ingenious camera angles and voice, with perspective in an intellectually and visually satisfying way, thus raising the stakes on the film’s various themes, and so on.) Polley was raised amidst fakery. The Dad who raised her was an actor. The Dad who is her biological father was a filmmaker. Diane performed. All of these elements went into Sarah Polley performing and directing — I very much liked her Alice Munro adaptation, 2006’s “Away From Her,” starring Julie Christie, another film about things not being what they seem — but how much of Polley the actress and director was nurture, and how much was destiny? As this film goes along, you see, in Diane’s “fake” face, and in the faces of both her lovers, a certain reluctance about performing (Polley films the mother who’s performing her mother through lots of doors, and as she’s putting on a coat, or walking away from the camera) or achieving greatly in the film world, that Polley cracks open with the clarity of her ambivalence: she would be seen, but she wanted to control it. That’s where her Diane DNA kicks in. Diane wanted the world to know who she was, even as she removed herself from it, performing the greatest role their is: mother. I can’t imagine what Polley went through to bring us this story, but how marvelous is it that Michael and Harry are there to largely not say what their relationship was to the largely unknowable woman who haunts the movie screens in their respective minds? This is the kind of filmmaking and writing that interests me: art that doesn’t pretend to objectivity, and so gets at a greater truth, beginning with how the women of Diane’s generation didn’t talk about their personal history and dreams so much as they kept moving ahead, hoping that they could keep skipping over their traces until the hard work of responsibility and romance paid off, and something like a better hope came along.

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George Michael

By
Hilton Als
– July 1, 2012


I don’t know much about George Michael, but I do know that some artists do their best work in a repressive enviornment, one where their talent for metaphor is more interesting than their talent for–-specious word–truth, or confession. For gay singer/songwriters like Michael, who initially became pop sensations on the teen music scene during the early nineteen-eighties, heterosexuality, then as now, equaled dollars. And Michael wanted to work the market. As the lead singer for Wham!, the Anglo-Greek artist not only attracted notice because he had a voice, but a sense, I am sure, that teenage girls like to identify with the boys they want as much as they want to be taken over by them. Dressed in his oversized T-shirt (as if covering up a pubescent chest), genderless shorts, and thick roller-skater socks, Michael also sported a blonde-tipped quiff, and a little make up, but nothing too extreme: he would never dream of upstaging his female fans’ fantasies about their own prettiness–a prettiness that would, presumably, attract Michael’s notice. In that Boy George dominated era of white English soul singers, Wham!, was distinctive because its unrelenting pop sound was not tinged with ska or reggae, the “third world” musical influences that Boy George and Culture Club exploited early on. Instead, Wham! was just aggressively upbeat, like the promise of a marriage that would never go wrong. But by the time Wham! disbanded in 1986, Michael began to find ways to talk about his love of soul music, and of men, and the difference all blue-eyed soul singers feel, I am sure, given their music’s source. In 1987, when he was only twenty-three, Michael released his first excellent solo album, “Faith.” With it came a new look. Casting off his formerly genderless drag, Michael exposed his chest hair, too neatly trimmed facial hair, and a vague Freddie Mercury-like air of queerness. But Michael didn’t talk much about his personal life then. Besides, pop stars of his magnitude usually project a very particular idea: that they can be had by anyone, and should be. A year before “Faith,” was released, Michael made a smart business decision: to perform a duet with Aretha Franklin, one of his idols. Actually, that was a smart business decision on both Michael and ReRe’s part: her brand would legitimize his white soul sound, and he would usher her into a new era of music-making. (Part of Franklin’s longevity has to do less with the quality of her music than her understanding of how the music business works, and her cold attitude toward maintaining her position in it. During the hours leading up to Whitney Houston’s memorial service in New Jersey, for instance, Franklin, who was then performing and New York, and was considered a family member, issued a statement that she couldn’t make Houston’s memorial, as she originally intended, because she was having a problem with her feet. Or legs. Or something. In any case, it was only a matter of days after Houston was laid to rest that Franklin revealed she was working on new music with her former mentor, Clive Davis, who, of course, she had known and worked with before he even steered Whitney to great commercial success.) The Michael-Franklin duet title said it all, from a business point of view: “Knew You Were Waiting (For Me).” The song had something of the old Wham! bounciness, but the black vocal style Michael loved growing up was at the forefront of the piece; it didn’t have to be flattened out, Wham! style, since Aretha was the great popularizer of that sound. (“Knew You Were Waiting,” ended up being Franklin’s first and only number one hit in the UK.) I wouldn’t have remembered the particulars of “Faith”–I lost track of Michael’s carer during his protracted legal battle with Sony, which began after the release of his utterly brilliant 1990 album, “Listen Without Prejudice, Vol I,” a record I call hermit pop, the I’m-too-famous-to-leave-the-studio-which-is-my-only-friend stage of musical success, viz Brian Wilson, Kate Bush, Sly Stone–except that when “One More Try,” plays on the radio I keep near my bedside, it wrecks me. I didn’t know the lyrics, and didn’t know the song title, until I thought to Google both. The song is about mentorship, and how Michael’s former “teacher,” his guidance, and all that implies, lead to a broken heart, and fear, which is to say love and it’s offshoot: vulnerability. The song is Michael’s confession; he’s addressing another teacher standing in the wings. Michael doesn’t identify his first teacher or the one’s he’s talking to as men but, given that there’s also a song on “Faith” called “Father Figure,” I’ll let my interpretation stand. In any case, I know of no other soul song like “One More Try,” wherein the complications and richness of an older man/younger man dynamic is talked about more truthfully, despite the gender curtain. We begin with the sound of a lament: a synthesizer warbling in the background as a slow drum beat eventually provides support for Michael’s big, round voice, which is tinged with a world weariness he has yet to earn, but he feels that way anyway. Michael says he’s tired of “danger, and people on the street” (cruising?) He doesn’t want to go back out there, he wants to be with a mentor, a “teacher,” who loves and protects him, just as his previous teacher did. But that previous mentor left him. Given the power of Michael’s voice and artistry, one wonders if his previous protector abandoned him because he knew Michael would surpass him in the world. And yet Michael still longs for his former teacher’s approval, which accounts for the terrible, terrible ache in his voice. Could this new man be any different? Michael doesn’t want to be hurt. “I don’t want to learn to hold you, touch you, and think that you’re mine…There ain’t no joy for an uptown boy, who’s teacher has told him goodbye?” Will his new teacher help define who he is, and help him figure out what to do, how to live, to love? Who will be his elder now? Henry James tried to say us as much in parts of “The Pupil.” Still, the world would not let Michael’s metaphors alone. In recent years there have been the tea room photographs, the drug arrests, the break ups, all of which prompted Michael’s various bald confessions about his sexuality, his isolation, and so on. But none of this is nearly as interesting as his early work in the studio. In 2011, the black recording artist, Beverly Knight, recorded a version of “One More Try,” that Michael sanctioned, but the record makes no emotional sense: Knight treats the piece like a song, whereas Michael sings “One More Try,” as though his life and his various fantastic complications–the white gay boy in love with black music, the music nerd passing himself off as a sexpot, the student of soul too porous for this common world–depended on it.

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Fiona Apple

By
Hilton Als
– June 29, 2012

Some people stay open to experience, despite the slings and arrows of life’s always outrageous misfortunes. To be a pretnaturally hopeful person is to generally stand apart from one’s more mundane friends and family, among whom complaint too often passes as conversation. Can happiness be a permanent point of view? Can a wish?  Several days ago, I spent time with a young man I had not seen in a while, largely because I felt he was so shut down, and critical of bodies not his own. But he turned up during Gay Pride weekend, and I was seeing a number of people I had not seen in a long time.  It was a wonderful weekend to walk around New York’s lower West side, and to learn about any number of things, including fashion. The best fashion is always devised by those who cannot afford it. And among the hordes of young people of color who promenaded up and down Christopher Street and its environs (there were more men than women) on those sultry nights, one noticed a particular trend among the girls: head ties that ended in a little bow at the top of the head, like sweet rabbit ears. When I asked a young friend who works in retail about it, she said that it was in homage to Whitney Houston, and one of her “I Want to Dance With Somebody” video looks. In addition, I loved the ripped tights worn with raggedy tutus I saw a number of girls and some boys sporting that gave the parade a distressed carnival atmosphere. But back to that other young man and his various criticisms. During the course of his visit–he’s in his mid-thirties–he talked about how much he loathed his body, that it had always been this way, and, as he talked, I realized that he had come around to tell me who he was after having spent a fair amount of time attacking me for having given him–anything. His viciousness was at least in part an outgrowth of his self loathing, and the whole time I had weathered his various cruelties, and watched his friends do so as well, he was more or less talking about himself. A very wise lady friend who spent much of her time giving to others what she’d destroy if you made her a gift of it, once said that my particular tragedy was that I felt people were actually talking to me, when they were generally talking about themselves. And in recent months, a wise doctor I see for twice monthly chats told me that, for the most part, people are talking out of their own tiny reality; conversation was not some shared exchange. That was my fantasy. While listening to Fiona Apple’s uncommon new album, “The Idler Wheel is…,” I was struck anew by what Apple expresses better than any of her contemporaries: jaundiced hope, and the fact that cynicism can exist side by side with wishes. Who would Apple be without her brilliant fetishization of disappointment?  The record opens with a lullaby, and in short order we hear Apple’s always distinctive use of percussion–drums in particular, and the piano as a drum-like instrument. Then there is Apple’s voice, which strikes me less as a “pure” singer’s voice than a spoken word artist’s–limited but resonant, Apple’s sound is not the direct result of having powerful lungs, but a mouth that relishes fucking with words. She gnaws them like bones, trying to get the marrow of her meaning out. (In this she is like other powerful but limited female singers, such as Lotte Lenya and Abby Lincoln: actors who projected musical feeling.) In a sense, the first song, called “Every Single Night,” Is a lullaby, or an ode–to Fiona herself, and to her insomnia. “Every single night I endure the flight/Of little whims of white flame/Butterflies in my brain/These ideas of mind percolate the mind/Trickle down the spine/From the belling swelling to a blaze.” The ideas that begin to percolate in the listener’s brain have to do with what a torture consciousness can be to an artist with a conscious, which is to say an artist like Apple. As she lays awake, numb to solace, Apple sees her body, and it’s interiority, and it is a wonderland of waste and anger and hope. “That’s where the pain comes in,” begins the next verse. “Like a second skeleton/Trying to fit beneath the skin/I can’t get the feelings in..And I say to her/Why’d I say it to her/What does she think of me/That I’m not what I ought to be.” Apple has a double. There’s the Fiona who lives inside her body, and then there’s “her,” the Apple of no one’s eye who fights for her unhappiness as hard as Fiona seems to fight for belief. The various dichotomies thus established, Apple moves on, primarily to the album’s second great theme: her existential isolation. Apple is as alone as she wants to be. Does she love it, though? Can she change her mind about how right it feels for her to be in her room, alone? O.K., she’ll try a person, and maybe kiss them, but will the kiss be as nourishing as her spooky but fun isolation? (Fun because she can make music.) She’s a realist who dreams of something different than the discomfort that visits her when she’s in close proximity to love, and it’s various unknown possibilities. Not that she doesn’t know how she feels–she begs one former lover in the unbelievably beautiful song, “Jonathan,” the most powerful and witty track on the album, to ignore her as she “calculates and calibrates”–but it’s a pity that the Other feels something for her various others. (This was the subject of her unforgettable “Fast As You Can,” from her 1999 album, “When the Pawn…” In the brilliant video by Apple’s former lover, Paul Thomas Anderson, the best of her career, the filmmaker encourages the singer to be a film actress, and she expertly collaborates with the camera. ) But who can blame her male subjects for falling for her? She articulates what it is like to be prescient about how things don’t change, and will change, but only if we change. Can we? Apple’s emotional radicalism separates her from that which a number of female singer/songwriters ask for again and again: to be saved by a lover. Instead, Apple turns to her dissatisfied double for approval, that same skeleton that won’t let her sleep, but maybe that’s all she has. Apple will and will not save herself, and how fascinating is that imbalance to watch, let alone listen to? She is a great writer who is a young Dylan’s equal in terms of building character and a persona through dense, picturesque lyrics. But unlike Dylan, Apple has yet to move into the world at large, and report on other lives, other stories. But that’s OK for now. She’s smart enough to move past her own story eventually, and include other aspects of the world in her work the better to enhance it, and make it grow. It’s lovely to imagine what she would make of hope in those Gay Pride streets, say, mixed in with someone else’s confessions about gay self-loathing, all the while keeping her eye on those Whitney Houston rabbit ears wilting in the first rush of summer.

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