17 Mar 2008

The Carpenters remembered

How will The Carpenters be remembered in fifty years when their contemporaries are mostly gone? My guess is that they will be patron saints of the Scientologists, Raëlians and other UFO religions in eternal gratitude for their cover of the paen to World Contact Day: Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. (The original groovy recording was by Klaatu featuring the groovy Mellotron.)
As for Karen Carpenter, Todd Haynes' banned masterpiece Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story will forever be considered the definitive account of her life and death, despite of (and because of) her brother's attempts at eradication; in contrast, the E! True Hollywood Story scarcely bears mention. The film is no longer in official circulation, but can be intermittently viewed online or purchased as part of a collection of illegal art (it sits proudly on my shelf).

2 comments:

Scott said...

I loved Karen Carpenter. She was awesome.

Unknown said...

Karen Carpenter had such a rich and knowing voice with a complexity that really draws you in. I really liked the Todd Haynes film because of the sympathy of it – he really takes you inside the experience of a person in extremis (as he also did in Safe). He explored the family dynamic that is so common in anorexia which no estate-sanctioned biography could; the official sources just exploited and blamed her for her predicament without exploring why it happened.