Stardom, pseudonyms and personae are the themes this issue, and we’ll hopeully be raking them over with some trained-up thesps in the podcast. Meanwhile, here’s the playlist. There’s Dietrich’s Blue Angel screen test (complete with possibly pre-planned tantrum), Talking Heads talking face transplants and Jarvis Cocker letting off some steam via an alias and a skeleton suit.
We’ll be talking about the slipperiness of ‘authenticity’, how much purchase the concept still seems to have in pop music and whether drama’s comparable – hence the cinematic griminess of the Ghostface track and the combatively unvarnished P.J. Harvey song about wanting to X Robert De Niro. Harvey’s ping-pong Body Mass Index has fuelled speculation that she takes rock’s self-destructive credo a lil’ bit too seriously, but her film work (not to mention all those lyrics about live burial and manslaughter) suggest she’s pretty good at pretending too. Tom Waits, meanwhile, has written a lot for the stage and is also a pretty decent actor – though it’s maybe kinder to sweep his role in Domino (wherein – seriously – he plays an itinerant preacher who appears out of a desert heat haze to parlay with Kiera Knightley’s mescaline-addled bounty hunter) under the carpet.
In terms of sheer screen presence neither Tom nor Polly can hold a candle, however, to Divine – whose life, work and (not insubstantial) body mass Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon have used to try and think through how ’selves’ come about. Certainly you may never be the same again once you’ve seen her/his rousing stab at You Think You’re a Man…
