There wasn’t enough room in my recent Twist of Faith review to accommodate ramblings about Weezer, sexy cantors, Toni Braxton’s A Star is Born moment, and whether my great-grandmother abandoned Orthodox Judaism to spend less time in the kitchen. We can do that here instead.
- Oh, how I longed to reference the sexy cantor episode of The Nanny while discussing Twist of Faith. Having already done so at least once in a previous review, I grudgingly abstained. Incidentally, it’s slightly mortifying to realize that as I age, The Nanny has become one of my most beloved cultural touchstones. It is, after all, a truly terrible sitcom (remember the ping-pong scene?!), but that’s also why it’s wonderful.
- Toni Braxton, for all her limitations as an actress, knows how to bring the drama — “Un-Break My Heart” was one of the most theatrical chart-toppers of the ’90s. Near the end of its equally overwrought music video, Braxton paid homage to Barbra Streisand circa A Star is Born and was as gorgeous and commanding as she’s ever been onscreen. Lifetime should’ve cast her in a kooky, disastrous reimagining of a Streisand vehicle years ago, but suitable options have dwindled as she approaches 60. The Mirror Has Two Faces might be all we have left.
- It is family lore that one set of my great-grandparents stopped practicing Orthodox Judaism (and moved to a Reform synagogue) after my great-grandma announced she was sick of washing so many dishes. Obviously there’s more to the story than that, but part of me wants to believe it really was as simple as Grams waving her hand in irritation and saying “Feh! Enough with the dishes!”
- Weezer. There’s no elegant way to do this within a bullet point list, so let’s unshackle ourselves from this format and continue the discussion in paragraphs below.
I waffled about whether to include a very special “…But wait, there’s more!” feature at the end of the Twist of Faith review. The purpose would’ve been to link to Weezer’s cover of “Unbreak My Heart” (now missing its original hyphen), but doing so without launching into an impassioned Weezer rant would’ve been difficult. Few bands are more of an instant turnoff to women of a certain age than Weezer, but I’m not sure how I would’ve survived my teens and twenties without The Blue Album and Pinkerton.
If you asked me to describe what high-functioning autism is like, I would — half-jokingly, but also in total sincerity — refer you to those albums, full as they are of frustration, aggression, self-loathing, loneliness, biting humor, and a desperation to be understood even as something about you seems to push everyone away. The commercial and critical failure of Pinkerton has always touched me as much as its music: frontman Rivers Cuomo wrote it while undergoing a series of painful procedures to lengthen one of his legs, and his physical and emotional suffering couldn’t be more palpable. The unusual vulnerability of his lyrics was repaid with widespread derision that permanently altered the course of Cuomo’s, and Weezer’s, careers.
There would be no more songs like “Across the Sea,” which influenced my own writing as deeply as anything produced by my favorite novelists and playwrights. Cuomo resolved to play it safe afterward, resulting in decades of boring singles like “Hash Pipe” and “Pork and Beans.” Every now and then, Weezer does something that makes me smile — from their “No Scrubs” cover to performing “Take On Me” on Good Morning America while looking like a bunch of over the hill dads. But none of it’s ever as revealing or beautiful as “Only in Dreams,” the eight-minute opus that closes The Blue Album in spectacularly moving fashion.
The lyrics are standard Blue Album fare: an insecure Cuomo, alternately gentle and abrasive, ruminates on the ephemeral nature of connection and inspiration. The tension of its sinewy instrumentation — crunching (and then soaring) guitars, relentless drums and a rumbling bassline that rattles your heart — builds and builds until the 4:50 mark, when it begins its three-minute ascent to the heavens. Every time you think release is finally near, Weezer keeps pushing; the crescendo is transcendent. If I’m ever on my deathbed and lucid enough to know what’s happening, there’s nothing I’d rather die to than the final three minutes of “Only in Dreams,” when the geek who can’t make eye contact and struggles to express himself shows you what’s in his soul and it’s as sublime as the Hubble Space Telescope’s images of the cosmos.