Watching the defective

Tony Shalhoub plays a brilliant San Francisco detective (with a morbid fear of dairy products) in USA's agreeable old-school puzzler "Monk."

By Carina Chocano

Topics:Monk, Television

When TV detectives feel stressed, as they so often do these days, they reach for the usual palliatives: a cigarette, a bottle, a perpetrator’s face. We’re given to understand that it’s a profession that requires some serious discharge of steam, but that while the job may eventually get in the way of the habits, the habits rarely get in the way of the job.

On ABC’s late, great “The Job,” Denis Leary’s McNeil had a pain-pill habit to go with his chain-smoking and binge-drinking. On “The Shield,” Michael Chiklis’ cop-killing cop Mackey likes to relax with his clenched fists. On “NYPD Blue,” Dennis Franz (still) plays the rage-o-holic Sipowicz, erstwhile alky and patron of hookers. What we hardly ever see is an overtaxed detective reacting to vocational stress by developing a morbid fear of milk, which is just what happens to the title character of “Monk,” a new USA Networks series premiering Friday.

Tony Shalhoub plays Adrian Monk, a former star detective on the San Francisco Police Department who loses his badge after the unsolved murder of his wife brings on a bad case of OCD, further compounded by an abnormal fear of germs, heights, the dark, crowds and the aforementioned dairy product. Trying to inch his way back onto the force, Monk does some private consulting on difficult cases, but devotes most of his time to obsessing about whether he left the oven on.

At the very least, this is an ingenious premise for a stale genre. After all, detectives are paid to notice things that other people don’t, like throw pillows that are slightly, maddeningly out of place. It takes a special kind of mind to recreate an event from barely-perceptible clues left behind at a crime scene, and in Monk’s case, the stress of the job, combined with a traumatic and frustrating event (the unsolved murder of his wife), stretches those traits to the limit.

Monk is a guy who can’t see the forest for the trees, but luckily for him, detective work is all about the little things. His affliction is problematically double-sided, however: The same obsessive attention to detail that helps him focus on minutiae and stay there until he uncovers some hidden meaning can just as easily distract him from the problem at hand.

“Monk” kicks off with a two-hour movie concerning an assassination attempt on a San Francisco mayoral candidate. When the candidate’s bodyguard is killed during the shooting, the current mayor asks that Monk be brought onto the case. Monk’s former boss, Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine), reluctantly engages his services and spends the rest of the episode careening between hair-pulling frustration at Monk’s idiot-savant shenanigans and gnawing jealousy of his uncanny powers of observation.

Monk’s assistant/nurse, Sharona (Bitty Schram), acts as his baby sitter on crime scenes, prying him away from desk lamps (which he pokes at obsessively) and trying to keep him focused on the problem at hand. Their relationship is a refreshing twist on the good cop/bad cop (or new cop/old cop, male cop/female cop, old cop/young cop, loose-cannon cop/methodical-tortoise cop) routine; not only because Sharona is not a cop, but because she is in effect his surrogate mother and voice of reason. At a crime scene in Santa Clara, some 40 miles from his apartment, he is convinced he can smell the gas seeping from his oven. “Pull yourself together, concentrate and be brilliant,” Sharona snaps. Clearly, Monk’s own motivational pep talks to himself (“You can’t sweat the small stuff. Just go with the flow”) aren’t cutting it.

Over the course of the past decade or so, Woody Allen has all but spoiled neuroticism as an endearing character trait, but the preternaturally lovable Shalhoub — a veteran of numerous Hollywood character roles — revives and redeems the tired archetype. Intelligent, intense and (hyper)sensitive, Shalhoub is quietly winning as a guy trying to do the job he was born to do in a world that seems dead set on driving him bonkers. Shalhoub and Schram play well off each other, especially in those scenes in which his craziness cuts in on her personal life. (Monk drops in on Sharona during a first date, and after a few minutes of listening to her date describe his illustrious job and educational background, Monk abruptly announces that the guy is lying. On their way out, she angrily reprimands him, “Everyone embellishes their résumé!”)

The other characters in “Monk,” however, are not as well developed. It’s hard to buy Stottlemeyer as the head of a major metropolitan police department, for instance, when he keeps offhandedly dismissing clues as if he were waving away flies. And watching him play an irate Ricky to Shalhoub’s inspired-but-bumbling Lucy could get old. It’s enough to make you wonder how any crime-solving got done at all while Monk was exiled.

As on most episodic cop shows, the resolution is a trifle too neat and the hero a tad too superior to the people around him for “Monk” to feel like much more than a throwback to old-school puzzle mysteries, where every crime is masterminded and every criminal would have gotten away with it if not for that meddling oddball genius. Most disappointing is the standard “I confess!” ending, in which the cornered criminal spills not only the beans, but his motives, his missteps and his innermost feelings about it all. But for anyone who can’t relate to the terse, jargon-infused mumblings of most modern cop dramas, “Monk” is a welcome return to the “Columbo”-style sleuth, the kind of guy who lacks the interpersonal skills to slam drooling sickos against precinct walls, but can deduce what kind of cigarette a murderer was smoking with a quick sniff of a curtain.

: Carina Chocano writes about TV for Salon. She is the author of "Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid?" (Villard). More Carina Chocano

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The barefoot art of war

Thousands of Buddhist monks have hit the streets in Myanmar, deploying some shrewd political jujitsu against the corrupt, iron-fisted junta.

Topics:Religion, Monk, Thailand

Thousands of Buddhist monks are leading massive protests through the streets of Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city. They carry no weapons and wear only their brick-red and saffron-colored robes, but their most powerful weapon is the reverence in which they are held throughout the country.

Their heads are shaven and they march barefoot and silent. The city of Yangon (formerly Rangoon) seems to be dominated by the Buddhist monks these days. They have been marching repeatedly through the streets for a week — and their marches are getting bigger by the day.

The population has begun openly showing its support too. Tens of thousands of people have reportedly joined the march of the monks. Other spectators form human chains or simply applaud. Brave-hearted monks are holding passionate speeches by Sule Pagoda in downtown Yangon. They speak of the suffering and the desperate poverty of Myanmar’s 50 million inhabitants — and call for the overthrow of the junta that seized power in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) in 1962. The regime’s policies have effectively laid waste to what was once Southeast Asia’s richest country.

By night the junta has been demonstrating its full might. Military trucks have been patrolling the streets of Yangon after nightfall, with heavily armed marines equipped with assault rifles standing on the bed of each truck. They are guarding every strategic location in this city of 5 million.

Uniformed officers and plainclothes intelligence agents have formed an especially tight cordon around Shwedagon Pagoda. The country’s most important sacred site — a tower 98 meters (322 feet) high and adorned with 1,100 diamonds, more than 1,300 precious stones and 13,153 gold plates — has great symbolic value. It was from here that democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate currently under house arrest, once led another mass movement for the overthrow of the junta. That first attempt at protest ended on Sept. 19, 1988, when the soldiers of the regime simply mowed down thousands of peaceful demonstrators. The coming days will tell whether there will be a repeat of those grim scenes.

What is certain is that the regime, which ironically calls itself the State Peace and Development Council, will not relinquish its power peacefully. Naypyidaw — the new administrative capital, in the highlands 322 kilometers (200 miles) away from Yangon — already issued orders to soldiers and intelligence agents on Sept. 8 to end the protests forcefully if necessary. In Myanmar’s second-largest city of Mandalay, the regime’s henchmen have even distributed machetes to the Union Solidarity and Development Association — a band of thugs that takes care of the junta’s dirty work in times of crisis. The evacuation of hospitals in Yangon is another sign that the junta intends to crush the demonstrations soon.

But that will likely not be so easy this time. The opposition movement has learned from the long period of repression it has suffered under the junta. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party is still the driving force behind the movement. On Saturday the marches passed the house where she is being detained, and she greeted them at the gates. Her first public appearance in four years.

The NLD won about 80 percent of the seats in parliament during elections in May 1990, but the military prevented it from taking power. Student leaders from the bloodily repressed popular uprisings of 1988 who have since been released from prison regrouped this spring, forming the underground movement “Generation 88.”

And it seems the people’s patience is at an end. The junta is making billions out of the country’s natural resources and living in the lap of luxury even as galloping inflation causes severe poverty for most of the population. A third of all children in Myanmar suffer from malnutrition.

When the junta sharply raised fuel prices by as much as 500 percent in mid-August it seemed a line had been crossed. First, small groups of three, four or five students and dissidents took to the streets. The junta brutally ordered all resistance to be crushed and all protesters to be arrested. But then, in early September, the monks joined the protests — a decision that is increasingly putting the junta under pressure.

For not only is Myanmar a profoundly Buddhist country, but the ruling generals are also extremely superstitious. If an overly harsh clampdown on the protests by the security forces were to lead to the death of any monks, the generals would feel they had incurred the wrath of the gods. The monks are fully aware of this strength.

A newly formed underground group, the Young Monks’ Union, has for days been calling on citizens in all parts of the country to join their protest. The monks have opted for a clever tactic: Their faith requires them to beg for their daily food every morning. But for days, they have refused to accept alms from members of the military or their relatives. This is one of the movement’s most powerful weapons. Such a decision is tantamount to a kind of excommunication in the Buddhist country. The monks apparently want to pressure the lower ranks of the military to break away from the junta leadership.

And the monks are getting increasingly brave. On Saturday, for the first time, more than 10,000 of them took to the streets of Mandalay and by Monday the anti-government protests in Yangon had reportedly swelled to up to 100,000 people. The monks are no longer just asking for a retraction of the fuel price hike. They are calling for the overthrow of the despised junta. Demonstrations have also been announced in other parts of the country.

Does this mean the junta’s fate is sealed? Former student leader Aung Zaw, who now publishes the Myanmar exile magazine Irrawaddy in Thailand, has his doubts. “The junta still has plenty of bullets, and it will use them,” he said when contacted by telephone. Underground dissidents in Yangon disagree. They say that people still have plenty of hunger and this time they won’t back down.

This article has been provided by Der Spiegel through a special arrangement with Salon. For more from Europe’s most-read newsmagazine, please visit Spiegel Online or subscribe to the daily newsletter.

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Buddhist abbot is disrobed

A senior monk in Thailand, dressed as a military man, binges on sex.

By Jack Boulware

Topics:Sex, Monk, Love and Sex

One expects a Buddhist monk’s life to be simple, following a spiritual path of celibacy, abstinence and voluntary poverty.

It was, instead, very complex for one member of the Suphan Buri temple in Thailand, who was arrested last week for living out his hooker-filled fantasy as a Mercedes-driving colonel in the military’s special forces.

After an undercover TV crew videotaped the senior monk, an abbot, entertaining two women at a suburban house, police arrested him and discovered that the 43-year-old abbot, Phra Khru Thammathornwanchai Thawaro, was actually living a very unmonklike existence. Inside the house, officials found porn videos and books, condoms, lingerie, whiskey and the uniform of an army colonel, complete with a red beret, combat fatigues and a toupee. The uniform bore the insignia of the Special Warfare Command and the Army Signals Department.

: Jack Boulware is a writer in San Francisco and author of "San Francisco Bizarro" and "Sex American Style." More Jack Boulware

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Two women and a monk

On an innocent afternoon in Kumbum Monastery, we choked down yak cheese and learned about Paradise.

By Shanti Menon

Topics:China, Monk, Asia

Kelly and I perched uncomfortably on the monk’s bed, beneath a calendar depicting a deep-blue swimming pool fringed with palm trees. The monk had been absent for quite some time. Through the flimsy curtains, which were drawn across a small window at the head of the bed, we could make out the faces of young monks staring in at us. Finally the monk reappeared. “You like rice?” he asked. We said yes.

Kumbum Monastery lies curled up in the hills outside Xining, on the border of the Tibetan plateau in central China. Kelly and I had peeled ourselves out of a minibus that morning, trying to look inconspicuous as we poked about the monastery grounds.

Kumbum is practically a self-contained city, with temples, halls and living quarters spread out over 400,000 square meters of hilltop. The population consists of half magenta-robed, bare-headed monks and half khaki-covered, broad-brimmed-hat-wearing tourists. Most of the monastery’s visitors are Chinese, so the monks, like most Xining residents, were amazed at the sight of foreigners. As we wandered through the monastery grounds, shorn heads periodically poked out of random windows, like monkish Jack-in-the-boxes, calling out “Hello!” or, if they wanted to show off a bit, “Good afternoon!”

A youngish monk from Mongolia, who spoke a bit of English, took a shine to Kelly and decided to show us around the monastery. His guided tour provided the following information: “This — Tibetan book” (pronounced “boo-ha”). “This Dalai Lama. This Panchen Lama. This — Buddha.” The answer to most of our questions somehow turned out to be “Six.”

Still, this was a good deal more information than we would have garnered from the signs posted at each site, which were entirely in Chinese. One particularly beautiful wooden structure, we learned, was the house where the Dalai Lama stayed when he came to visit. Our guide’s own house, as he explained to us a little sadly, was not quite so large.

The sun beat down on the exposed hilltop, and after we had seen our umpteenth boo-ha, Buddha and Lama, our monk — who did not have a particularly ascetic build — was sweating. I was wondering if he expected some form of payment for his services before we took our leave, but then he swiped his forehead with a corner of his magenta robe and asked us if we would like to see his house. Normally I do not accept such offers from strange gentlemen, but since he was a monk and all, we graciously agreed to accompany him home.

The monk’s living quarters consisted mainly of one small room, dominated by a hard, high platform which must have been a bed. I found the lack of fluffy pillows and a soft mattress reassuring — it made the presence of two women on a monk’s bed only mildly inappropriate. Tired-looking, nameless paperback books lined the shelves above our heads. The adjoining room, which had a stove in it, was shared with another monk.

Our monk’s name was Odzer, but his English name, which he wrote out for us very carefully on a scrap of paper, was “JIMES.” Odzer told us that he came to the monastery from Mongolia when he was 13, or possibly 6, I’m not too sure. Entering a monastery seemed to be much like entering college, except students learn Tibetan, no girls are around and there are very few parties.

Odzer’s friend came to visit. He, too, was a monk but came dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Despite his minimal English and our non-existent Chinese, we held a mildly successful conversation in which we managed to explain where we were from, and also ascertained that Odzer’s friend enjoyed boxing.

Odzer took out a bowl of some sort of grain, and asked
us if we would like to try Mongolian food. He added
hot water from a thermos, then a heap of white powder
from a plastic bag, and finally what I felt was an
overly generous portion of yak butter. The dish turned
out to be delicious, something like an extremely
crunchy version of Rice Krispies. Unfortunately, Odzer
insisted that we accompany this dish, called “ahm,” with some
yak cheese — a slab of hard, gray matter that could
be partitioned only with a hammer. I almost broke my
teeth on the stuff, while Kelly sturdily insisted to
our host that it tasted like Parmesan — an optimistic
comparison, and probably a meaningless one for Odzer,
who laughed nervously.

Next he asked us if we would like to try Tibetan food — tsampa — which I recognized as the name of a
Tibetan restaurant on East Ninth Street in New York. I
was envisioning a dream of a dish, a feather-light
dumpling or a sweet ambrosia whose name alone could
carry a trendy dining establishment. Tsampa, we
discovered, was in fact a ball of raw barley flour
mixed with hot water and yak butter. We were supposed
to take a bite out of the ball, which was the
approximate size and weight of a shot put, then
wash it down with a gulp of hot water. Odzer offered
to add some yak butter to our water, but we demurred.
“This no Mongolian food,” said Odzer, as if this was
somehow to his credit. “Tibetan monk eat. No
Mongolian.”

Young monks, eight years old or so, kept peering into the
window to catch a glimpse of the foreigners, or
perhaps to see someone act like they were enjoying
eating tsampa. If we caught them looking, they giggled
and ran away. If we didn’t catch them looking, they
would yell “Hello!” until we noticed them, and then
giggle and run away. We chatted haltingly with Odzer,
who frequently left the room when he couldn’t find the
word he wanted, and then re-entered after a brief
absence so we could restart the conversation at
another less sticky point. His absences also gave us a
chance to store uneaten chunks of tsampa in our
pockets.

At last the rice appeared, along with a plate of tofu
and some unfamiliar mixed vegetables, including a
fleshy, zucchini-like gourd and several leafy greens.
Odzer insisted he was not a good cook, but his was one
of the best meals I had in China. We sat and ate in
silence, while a teenage monk practiced his prayers
outside, occasionally interrupting his droning with
what must have been a muttered Tibetan curse, and
starting again.

After lunch Odzer took us on a hike around the hilly
perimeter of the monastery. We passed by an elderly
woman, poorly dressed, prostrating herself on the
ground. She wore pads on her knees and an additional
pair around her hands, like fingerless mittens. She
took a step, dove down into push-up position, extended
her arms all the way forward, slid up onto her knees
and then stood again. Odzer explained that these
pilgrims travel the entire hilltop circuit in this
manner, chanting prayers all the while. It took us,
walking fairly rapidly, almost an hour to complete the
trip, during which time we encountered four more
elderly pilgrims, all women, performing the same
penance. The monks merely make a point of stopping at
all the altars.

In the evening we helped Odzer with his English
homework. He wrote notes in the margins of his
textbook in Mongolian, a curling, vertical script.
Odzer spoke Chinese and Tibetan as well. Three times
a week, Odzer told us, he takes English lessons from
an American man in Xining. Odzer was very curious
about America. He had heard of New York City, but not
Texas, though he seemed amused by our rendition of
cowboys and Indians. He copied down our addresses and
we took his. Odzer knew a monk who had been to Canada
and he very much wanted to go there.

“Why?” we asked. “Why do you want to go to Canada?”

Usually Odzer was very shy about answering “Why” questions, and left the
room in embarrassment. But this time he did not
hesitate. “Because,” he said, “it’s like Paradise.”

: Shanti Menon worked as a reporter at Discover magazine for five years, then left last summer. She has been traveling and writing in Asia ever since. More Shanti Menon

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Monkish secrets

A plain-spoken man of the cloth tells how he keeps himself from getting busy.

By Virginia Vitzthum

Topics:Religion, Sex, Abstinence, Catholicism, Monk, Love and Sex

I went to the monastery to find out how, not why. I already knew that the monk’s vow of chastity was the brainchild of the same body-hating dualists who brought you the virgin birth. I wanted to hear about the methods and tricks: hair shirts and self-flagellation and monk-to-monk pep talks. Brother John spoke openly with me about his celibacy, but the closest he came to a purity tip was the revelation that the monks generally wear underwear and long pants under their brown robes. What he did reveal is that his “how” can’t be extricated from his “why.” His why is his how.

Brother John has internalized the church’s teaching about sex so completely that his lust ebbed to almost nothing over the years. He’s like a vegetarian who gets sick if he eats meat. He says he last masturbated when he was 14, and he has never had sex with another person. I believe him. A greater challenge than conquering lust, he says, is to provide humane counseling, part of the order’s mission, to people whose problems include the carnal. At 38, Brother John is the youngest of the 30 or so brothers living there, and he sees all kinds of couples, including some gay men and at least one pair of S/M practitioners. (Brother John is not his real name, and he asked that the order and monastery not be identified either.)

On the hot Saturday of our interview, the formal gardens around the monastery are silent except for the bees cruising the huge red, purple and yellow blossoms. It’s even quieter inside the high-ceilinged, un-air-conditioned building, and 20 degrees colder. Brother John escorts me to a plain, square parlor dominated by a portrait of the Virgin Mary where he’s set up a tray of vending machine snacks.

He tells me I’m lucky I stumbled upon him on my first visit. “Most of the brothers wouldn’t even be in a room alone with you, you know,” he says, mock-confidentially lowering his voice. Brother John loves dishing to reporters; he recently was profiled in a local magazine as the wired monk. (It only takes a cell phone and Internet access to put a monk at the technical vanguard of his broom-and-wooden-bowl brethren.) “I found the article on Salon about your, um, experiment,” he continues casually. He pauses dramatically, milking my discomfort before intoning with some glee: “I pray for your boyfriend.”

Brother John likes to tease and to shock. He says his boyhood was chaste but heterosexual, though I would have pegged him as gay. He reminds me of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady when he buries something catty in “who, me?” disingenuousness. On the general topic of how monks and priests master their desire, for example, Brother John says, “I’ve heard professors say that the religious people with the most degrees have the highest sexual urges.” He adds quickly, “Now, I have no way of knowing that, of course.”

He says his own torment-free chastity is rooted in his upbringing in a small Illinois town. His description of it makes the no-dancing town in “Footloose” look like Bangkok: Nobody smoke, drank or had sex because of “positive peer pressure.” The kids sound like some do-gooder Mafia in Brother John’s example: “Someone in my sister’s class was dating a boy from another town who was bad and we feared they would have sex. The popular girls of the school would surround her and get her to appreciate herself more and get her involved in other activities.”

Brother John says he fell in love with several girls in high school but never moved passed kissing, because touching a girl’s breast, he explains, “would be a trespass.” He and the other boys did their kissing in their cars. Did your feelings ever manifest themselves, uh, physically, I ask delicately. “You mean popping woodies?” Brother John barks in his cut-to-the-chase voice. “Oh sure. But that would be a sign that you needed to step back from the relationship.”

Brother John says his father made him feel guiltier about masturbation than his priest, though both warned him it could become a habit. He stopped when he was 14, “once I understood it was a sin. Remember, God hears all and sees all, and that’s enough for teenagers in a little town.” His erections dwindled over the years to less than once a month.

The little town sold no pornographic magazines, books or movies, he says. He came to seminary in the big city when he was 19 and was shocked to see naked women splayed on video boxes and magazines in the stores. His distaste for such displays and what he’s heard in counseling sessions have shaped his philosophy of what he calls “dog.”

“Dog,” Brother John explains, drawing out the word contemptuously, is his word for sex without love. “Dog is very shallow, short-lived, it’s akin to the drug addict needing that shot of heroin.” He believes that dog is always exploitative, and it’s generally the woman who gets abused. “The women who come in here say, ‘That’s it? That’s all? Just slam, bam thank you ma’am?’ They want more than temporal feelings. After their heart rate goes back down, they think, ‘What is this relationship?’”

Brother John brings up his cousin with the bisexual girlfriend several times in disgust. The affair does sound crazy enough to be featured on Jerry Springer, but Brother John is most angered by how quickly they hopped in bed. “He knew what the inside of her vagina looked like before he knew her last name,” he hisses. “That’s sad. That’s just dog sex. That’s just release. That’s just using each other and that’s disrespectful of both parties.”

When I ask if masturbation is dog, he pauses, seeming to be stumped. “No,” he concludes, “because that’s not using someone. Dog is you don’t care how that person feels.” He says he doesn’t fantasize because that’s a sin of thought and that he sees representations of naked people soul-first, not through the fog of sex. “As people get older, they can appreciate a beautiful form without that dog, they can see to the core of someone.” Brother John offers the unexpected example of the nude photo of JFK Jr. that ran in George in 1997. “It had a spiritual dimension to it that far outplayed the physical. It had an innocence.”

Brother John doesn’t object to sex as part of a loving relationship, but he’s clearly more enthusiastic about those who can love on a higher plane. “I love to see old people, like my mom and dad’s age, come together and get married. They’re fat and flabby, but they’re human, they love each other. And the sex is nil!” he assumes happily. “It’s beautiful and pure and as innocent as a child.”

But even romantic, committed love can lead to low self-esteem. “I believe there’s an integrity and dignity right there next to your heart,” Brother John says, pointing distractingly at my chest, “and that was given to you by God. A lot of us turn that over to someone that we love and then when they tell us we’re a piece of shit, we believe them. We need to take that back, because it’s not theirs, it’s God’s. Some people, usually women, come to counseling saying, ‘I can’t live without him.’ I say, ‘Yes you can. Needing him makes you dependent, not independent.’”

That need seems almost as distasteful to Brother John as dog. “Being a married person wouldn’t allow me to touch as many lives as I have,” he says, echoing not only the church, but Karl Marx and all the others who blame nuclear families for draining away what people could give to the world. I ask if he feels married to God, and he looks shocked. “Well, no, for one thing, that would be being married to a man.” He clearly prefers the light bonds of obligation to his flock and his strong tie to God over the snarled net of family.

The monks’ three basic vows are poverty, chastity and obedience. Most of us out here in the worldly world (including the ones who gaped at that picture of JFK Jr. with dog appreciation) assume those must be onerous restrictions. But at least one of the brothers is laughing back at us through the looking glass. “Celibacy is very freeing,” says Brother John, “the most liberating thing I can think of.”

: Virginia Vitzthum is a writer living in New York. More Virginia Vitzthum

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Rasputina

By Sam Hurwitt

Topics:Monk, Music, New Orleans

“What becomes a legend most?” Melora Creager muses in “The Olde HeadBoard,” the booty-shaking baroque ‘n’ roll track that opens Rasputina’s sophomore album. If the Brooklyn “ladies’ cello society” is to achieve iconic status, it’s doing the most becoming thing already, draining the same vein it opened in 1996 with “Thanks for the Ether.” Comprising three cellists decked out in Victorian corsets and lace and their pet drummer, Rasputina concocts such rich, nuanced chamber rock that it’s a wonder boys ever bothered with that guitar nonsense at all.

Creager and cello-mates Julia Kent and Agniezska Rybska, abetted by skin-pounder/programmer Chris Vrenna, construct lush harmonies and intricate interweavings of sawed and moaning strings, veering from the pounding power chords and sampled stadium roar of “Leech Wife” to a narcotic string-plunking cover of the Lesley Gore hit “You Don’t Own Me.” Creager’s girlish vibrato wafts trippingly over an elegant ballroom melody of the delicate “Rose K.” As did the band’s first CD, “Forest” includes a few surrealistic spoken-word numbers. In a childlike voice, Creager details grotesque exorcism treatments over mannered, courtly strings on “Christian Soldiers” and rambles distorted over jerky cello moans and programmed machine noises on “Dwarf Star.” “Diamond Mind” is a Fran Drescher-voiced torrent of avarice.

The disc sags in the middle, weighed down by the bombastic “TrenchMouth” and maudlin ethereal trifles “Sign of the Zodiac” and “Herb Girls of Birkenau.” Only Creager’s blasi intonation saves “MayFly” from fluttering into Enya territory. But if there’s a sophomore slump evident, it’s a small one indeed. And after all, as Creager warbles in the title track, “The scene is not what it used to be/The scene is never what it used to be.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Dr. John
ANUTHA ZONE | VIRGIN/POINTBLANK
HEAR IT BUY IT –>

–>BY SETH MNOOKIN | Spiritualized. Paul Weller. Primal Scream. Supergrass.
Not exactly the first ingredients that come to mind when adding flavor to a steaming pot of psychedelic, Professor Longhair-style, voodoo gris-gris gumbo. So what’re they doing on Dr. John’s new effort, “Anutha Zone”? Is he making a growling plea for relevance?

Well, no. Maybe the good doctor just wanted to show the young Brits how they do it, N’awlins style. And on tracks aptly titled “Ki Ya Gris Gris,” “I Like Ki Yoka” and “Sweet Home New Orleans,” he does exactly that. “Anutha Zone” is a glorious, thick, funky, languid collection, showing once again that three decades after he confounded hippies and roots-freaks alike, there is only one Mac Rebannack.

From the brief but soulful, teasing “Zonata,” the solo piano piece that starts the album, to the rolling bass, pedal-steel guitar, emphatic organ lines and sly, trademark growling delivery that run throughout the album, “Anutha Zone” is a delicious mixture of wink-wink humor, ass-shaking horn sections and Dr. John’s peculiar brand of social commentary. Conjuring the voodoo gods, Dr. John sounds as strong and as committed to the murky, shudderingly soulful, slowed-down funk of New Orleans as ever. Praise Kiwa Kiya, indeed.

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MC Lyte
SEVEN AND SEVEN | ELEKTRA/EASTWEST RECORDS
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BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS | In an era when Brandy and Monica’s cuddly single “The Boy Is Mine” counts as a savage catfight, does an ornery soul like MC Lyte’s still have a place in pop? In the best moments on her new album, “Seven and Seven” — songs like “Too Fly” and “Want What I Got” — Lyte cracks jokes, snaps skulls and laughs off the competition like it’s 1989. You get the feeling that if she decided the boy were hers, there wouldn’t even be a debate.

Guest producer Missy Elliott plays half-speed double-dutch with the drums, stretching junglist rhythms into long, funky exhalations, and Lyte’s voice, a Brooklyn growl that remains as scratchy and vibrant as an old-school bass line, bobs and weaves through the spaces. But Lyte really needs somebody like Missy in her corner — Elliott only contributes to four tracks, and the rest of “Seven and Seven” (save a couple memorably crude rhymes, like the one about the erotic potential of Twister) is catchy, but never compelling. It’s an attempt at party-friendly jiggy-ness so forced it feels court-mandated.

Lyte can deliver a throwaway line like “How simple did it seem/to smudge my Maybelline?” with a calm confidence that makes Rakim sound like Don Knotts. But even she can’t redeem reheated disco like “Party Goin’ On” or the post-Puffy cheese slice “Put It on You.” Her badass presence becomes a liability — as she strains for another “Cold Rock a Party,” you can hear all that power going to waste.

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Silkworm
BLUEBLOOD | TOUCH & GO
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BY ANDREW HAMLIN | Distill down the murky, fuming spirits the Rolling Stones played with on “Exile on Main Street”; leave in the rooster-proud boogie-choogle guitar riffs; replace Charlie Watts’ spritely and soulful percussion with Mike Dahlquist’s sense of attacking cymbals and toms as though each beat was the last waking breath of a brokenhearted drunk falling asleep in a Dumpster; twist the bass guitar (courtesy head honcho Tim Midgett, who also plays “baritone and regular guitar”) into a rubbery burble. That’s the sound of Silkworm’s latest record. Midgett sings ragged and artless in the accepted indie style, but an endearing half-resigned, half-yearning melancholy is all he needs to put the wry words across (and unlike “Exile,” this paean to dissipation comes with a lyric sheet). In “Said It Too Late” a girl congratulates the singer on his soulfulness; “That’s just the blues I heard from the English dudes,” he confesses, though not to her. “Beyond Repair” touches a stained hand to the Beach Boys too, concluding with this homage/mission statement: “Love, sister, is just a kiss away/when it exists it just comes one day/Until then, sit on your hands and wait.”

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Randy Scruggs
CROWN OF JEWELS | REPRISE
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BY JOHN MILWARD | Randy Scruggs is one of the hidden masters of contemporary Nashville. The son of banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs, he cut his teeth playing guitar in his father’s band before becoming a prominent session player and producer. Scruggs played on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s seminal 1972 collection, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a folksy round robin that introduced the rock community to such country, folk and bluegrass luminaries as Merle Travis, Doc Watson and Maybelle Carter. Scruggs himself produced 1989′s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two,” which expanded the pickin’ party to include such contemporary voices as John Hiatt, Rosanne Cash and John Prine.

“Crown of Jewels” is Scruggs’ first solo album, but with a guest list nearly as long as that of the “Circle” collections, it’s a work that similarly argues that a gifted musician best shines in the company of equally talented peers. The result, however, is that the collection reflects Scruggs’ tastes and talents as a producer more than it establishes his own artistic stamp. His collaboration with Mary Chapin Carpenter, “It’s Only Love,” softens Carpenter’s typically frosty presentation, and if recruiting Travis Tritt to sing a sweetly rocking rendition of the old Pure Prairie League hit “Aime” seems like a rather transparent commercial ploy, the pairing of Emmylou Harris and Iris DeMent to harmonize on the traditional “Wildwood Flower” is simply sublime.

The true riches in “Crown of Jewels” are found in the unassuming virtuosity of the players. The album opens with Scruggs and Vince Gill trading guitar lines on “A Soldier’s Joy,” and soars on “Travel On,” a Southern-rock instrumental in which Scruggs’ electric lead tangles with Lee Roy Parnell’s slide guitar and Bruce Hornsby’s piano. It ends with Scruggs playing a lovely solo guitar arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” Clearly, Scruggs is not one to make radical, groundbreaking music. Instead, he seeks new ground by finding new ways to make his traditionalist strings sing.

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Geri Allen
THE GATHERING | VERVE
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BY J. POET | Pianist Geri Allen is as familiar with funk and the blues as she is with free-flowing hard bop, and on “The Gathering” she gets a chance to showcase her diverse playing and compositional expertise. On “Light Matter,” Allen, along with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Lenny White, explores a whole palette of textures, time signatures and colors, as if presenting a musical explanation of the way light travels through the universe, while the soothing synthesizer lullaby “Baby’s Breath” showcases the subtle side of Allen’s phrasing and control.

Allen’s risumi includes work with Dewey Redman, Ornette Coleman and Me’shell N’degeocello. This set includes duos, trios and small band configurations, and features stellar players like ex-Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid, who brings a flamencolike flair to his work on “Ray,” a meditation for piano, guitar and sparse percussion, and trombone player Robin Eubanks, featured on the title track, a piece that follows black music from West Africa to the bright lights of Broadway. Like Monk and Coltrane, Allen has a unique ability to use avant-garde ideas in a manner that makes them accessible, without robbing them of their power to impress and inspire.