Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Marketplace and Subsidy


Near the conclusion of the post-screening event for the feature version of Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense Portland Jazz Festival director and founder Bill Royston repeated the following phrase like some kind of mantra for the survival of events like his and the future of public arts in general: "marketplace or subsidy."

Royston said the festival receives a small state subsidy, but could not survive without marketplace funding. When Qwest pulled out as sponsor in late 2008, the festival was shuttered until Alaska Airlines came to rescue. I have sometimes expressed some of my concerns, frustrations even, about PDX Jazz, but Royston has made some great contributions to this community with the festival. And if for last year's amazing afternoon with Bobby Hutcherson and Lou Donaldson alone, he deserves great ovation.

I've been thinking a lot about a Recent New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman about European Museums moving towards private funding. The traditional European attitude towards art preservation of the arts is something that the US has a hard time comprehending, just as they do the concept of how many European countries deal with healthcare and other social services.

I love art museums when they are populated by the few, but always feel a bit funny that too much of that could lead to their demise. I will always remember Pam and I finally making it to the final week of the Clement Greenburg collection's first showing at the Portland Art Museum on September 13 2001 when there was still a lack of normalcy in the activities of the world and pretty much no patrons besides ourselves. But in recent weeks I have been dropping into the museum more frequently and have found that you don't need a world crisis to time a quiet visit among the collections.

I appreciate Kimmelman's description of this phenomena:

Here in Berlin I often escape for an hour or two to the Gemäldegalerie, this city’s museum of old master paintings, one of the best in the world. But because it’s off the beaten tourist path, and because this is Germany and not France, it is nearly always empty. In room after room of Giotto and Raphael, Titian and Rembrandt, Dürer and Holbein I find myself alone, save for the sandal-clad guards spending quiet days of monkish solitude, sharing what I have come over the years to think of as my private Filippo Lippi, my personal Vermeer, my own Chardins and Watteaus.

It is a glorious gift, and I am grateful to a public financing system that in this particular case is not yet in thrall to, or is proudly resisting, the marketing strategies that have turned the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London into the equivalents of Wal-Marts on Black Friday...

It is a huge issue and neither subsidy or marketplace sponsorship are the answer. Curators and directors will need to continue to find the right balance. And most importantly, we the public, need to help support wherever we can as well as costs get ever tighter for those trying to make our communities and worlds just a little bit richer.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:57 PM
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Monday, February 1, 2010

Grammys 2010: A Late Wait for Any Master's Voice


The Stephen Colbert monologue was entertaining, but there was nothing of interest until the final half hour of the show with the exception of the Zack Brown Band doing their number with Leon Russell.

Send the kids to bed at 11 and on comes Dave Matthews, Maxwell and Roberta Flack doing Where is the Love, and Jeff Beck's super How High The Moon tribute to Les Paul. Actually I didn't stay up to 11 because we DVRd it so I could quickly speed through the five thousandth Michael Jackson tribute, Pink in the aerial cage, Beyonce, Haiti pleas, lots of unlistenable rap and Taylor Swift caterwalling with Stevie Nicks. The Grammys were always a mixed bag, but I don't ever recall a year where most any performance of any merit was stacked up at the last half hour.

Either I'm getting old for most of this or pop music is getting much worse. Or most likely, both of these statements are true.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:40 PM
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Sunday, January 31, 2010

Icons In The Here and Now


Icons Among Us: Jazz In The Present Tense is a significant film achievement in regards of presenting and investigating the nature of jazz. In fact I would say there are only two other films it has as peers: Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer Day and Ken Burns' Jazz. On one level it is a kind of a answer record to Burns' film, which focuses on historical figures of the past hundred years with a deep take on the social impacts of the music. "Cool Enough" says this new film, but, guess what? There is history and joyfoul sound being made in the here and now out there now.

The version of the Icons Among Us that was brought to Portland as part of the NW Film Center's was a feature version of a four hour television series that appeared on The Documentary Channel. Producer John Comerford accompanied the at the screening event for a Q & A that also featured Portland Jazz Festival Director Bill Royston. The feature endeavors to encapsulate the series. I'm a director's cut kind of guy who believes in the powers of cinema immersion so I would have preferred the full meal deal, but a solid hour and a half proved to be a heck of serving of this project that was sculpted out of 130 hours of interviews and 30 hours of performance footage.

No one can repeat Jazz On A Summer Day (Or Burns' Jazz, for that matter). The footage of Esperanza Spalding's performance at a recent JVC Concert showed us what a performance of a modern Newport Jazz Festival now, But the real resemblance is in the care that the directors of Icons take to get the viewer quickly into the essence of the performances that are included in this film around the world in sessions and rehearsals, in clubs and festivals. Comerford mentioned that this footage was shot in Super 16mm. They didn't have to do it that way but the fact they did for the aesthetic quality that film has to offer indicates just how much love and care went into this film with a big story to tell. Afterall, you better have the scale, resources and time to time and resources if a film is going to answer the likes of Burn's Jazz.

And scope is certainly a factor in telling this story of this music, which to me is described in two sections of interview in the film. In one, guitarist Bill Frisell talks about how "jazz is infinite." Another that frames the film is veteran trumpeter and composer Terrence Blanchard's observation that there is a quiet revolution going on with amazing players and diverse interpretations of what the music. If it is a revolution, it is coming from all kinds of fronts like one recalls from map animations in war documentaries. Icons shows us what came out of the eighties Young Lion's era, a taste of the European jazz scene, an excursion into the loft jazz and hippie jamband scenes, and somehow, it all kind of seems to rightly find its way back to New Orleans.

There are dozens of artists included here. But the big discovery for me was the DaKah Hip Hop Orchestra. Talk about scope and scale! This is a full fledged symphonic orchestra converging with turntable artists, rappers, soulful vocals, and all kinds of joy and surprise. Geoff "Double G" Gallegos pushes musical definitions and boundaries with a sense of proportion that reminds me of Don Ellis during the Tears of Joy period.

Icons is a film of ideas and observations from a wide range of articulate musicians and commentators. We look at the diversity of the music, but also in areas like the economics that are involved with the music. Much of the running time in the film is occupied with trying to define what jazz is and means in our current times. A thread of ideas has Seattle writer Paul de Barros sharing his concern that the music doesn't play a cultural role the way it did in the fifties and sixties. He talks about how artists like Bill Frisell can make fine music, but "How do we get it (jazz) back into the culture."

I understand de Barros point, but I counter that this music, which I believe will always have an audience that is comparatively smaller than the mainstream (as parallel, think about those who are practitioners of Macintosh computing as compared to the Windows world.) I believe the film points out some of the rewards that can be found in seeking out musical experiences. And, in actuality, one sometimes doesn't need to look to far for these rewards. For instance, the Portland Jazz Festival mirrors much of the kind of vision the film's directors captured here. During the follow up to the screening, the festival's director responded when asked by Comerford his initial impressions of the film: "I feel like the last 25 years of my life have been legitimized."
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:35 PM
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Saturday, January 30, 2010

Exodus 77: A Film Essay


Sometimes a structural idea or dichotomy for a work is better than its final outcome. Yet that is not to say it is wholly unsuccessful, especially if it provokes thought I believe this is the case with Exodus 77, a film that takes a unique approach to the life, times and influence of Bob Marley. This is another episode of the BBC Arena series that the NW Film Center has brought in as part of its most recent Reel Music Festival.

The film is framed by two significant dates and events in the life of Bob Marley: December 3 1976 when he is attacked in a attempted assassination attempt and April 22 1977 when he gets arch political Michael Manley and Edward Seaga to join hands before 100,00 in a concert known as One Love Peace. What happens in between is 1977, the Marley's year of exodus to and exile in England.

During that year he records and releases Exodus. It still stands as probably Marley's strongest album and in Wall's film is portrayed as the work that raises him to a cultural figure and even a kind of prophet. Just as Arena did with The Agony and Ecstacy of Phil Spector a few years later, it integrates and mixes up a few key elements to reflect on its subject. In this case the elements are newsreel footage, unidentified commentary from a wide range of Brits and Jamaicans who talk about the impact that Marley had on their lives, concert and interview footage of Marley, and, unfortunately, some footage which feels interminable of the dedication of a plaque at a home that Marley lived during his first extended London stay in 1972. (Little kids reading essays about Bob Marley? Aaagh!)

The really cool structural idea that almost works is using each track of the Exodus album to represent a month in 1977. Against each track we see Jimmmy Carter's first year in office, lots of activities connected to the Silver Jubilee Celebration of Queen Elizabeth and the death of Elvis among other events set against Marley's tunes. So what if Exodus only had ten tracks. No problem--throw in Punky Reggae Party against the footage of punks on King's Road (77 was a huge year for Punk) and if one plays Natural Mystic the first track again, there is a full year represented.

I believe that if it had been tightened up to an hour instead of its ninety minute run time, it could have been a lot more successful, but I love the almost audacious structure of this thing. I walked away thinking about what a year, what an album, and what a life. And that is success enough.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:42 PM
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Friday, January 29, 2010

Retaking Silent Films Back


The NW Film Center presented an evening of silent film with a seven piece orchestra known as Retake Productions. Retake's instrumentation consists of cello, violin, and two electric guitars on the audience left side of the screen, trumpet, acoustic bass and drums on the right. The result sitting in the middle of the Whitsell Auditorium was a kind of natural stereo accompanying two classic shorts from 1929 and excerpts of two important features of the silent era.



Lots of folks never got past the sliced eye shock of the opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou. Eighty years later, this collaboration of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali can still beguile and stun. I believe it can only be described as the regurgitation of dream imagery. It is that and as filmmaker Guy Maddin (who also utilizes quite arresting images in his own films) points out, Bunuel and the surrealists were clearly very horny. And there is much evidence of this in Andalou and not just obviously in the groping scene. The Retake musicians provided a musical that complemented this unique eternal oddball rollercoaster. I am glad I was fairly familiar with the film or I may have felt a bit more overwhelmed at trying to absorb music and image. Guitarist/co-founder of Retake Kyle Williams said to the crowd at the film's conclusion: "I hope that didn't make any sense." In other words, they get it.

Regen by Joris Ivens has been one of my favorite film essays ever since I saw it over thirty years ago in the same building that the Retake performance was held. This collection of images of a constructed rainstorm in Amsterdam has obvious appeal and linkage for me as a native Northwesterner as Williams said it does for him. Of the four films in performance, I liked this Retake treatment the most, probably because I love this film and certain fine images in it. Williams and his musical partner drummer Adam Fuderer thankfully don't "Mickey Mouse" with their soundtrack treatments but strive again, I believe for that right set of balance.

The showing of the first ten minutes of Earth reminded me of my college studies in film theory that clearly illustrated how Soviet filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko built his film piece by piece in a constructive way as one would create a house where his much better known contemporary Sergei Eisenstein would assault the viewer with montage imagery. The sampling from the Dovzhenko film showed that the Retake folks could create more than mood for abstract imagery but also play to support story. The opening sequence shows a grandfather's last moments on earth with both dignity and humor. The audience responded well for this.

The final piece was a mid section of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North. You can listen to the Retake soundtrack here. It is worth checking out even without Flaherty's images. I especially like the nice interplay between the string trio and the two electric guitars on the track Fishing on the Thin Edge. The igloo building section was the centerpiece of the section shown at Reel Music, it is focused more on drums and guitar great for evoking the images of work intercut with Nanook's son playing.


I wish we could have seen this group play to the entirety of Nanook and Earth. I applaud and appreciate the ambition and ingenuity of Williams, Fuderer, and company for taking on such a task. I hope I have opportunity soon to see them present their scores to those films in full as well as other silent films. I think their instincts are good here working on creating a sound that is both contemporary and traditional. I hope they will continue this work and hope to check out Williams and Fuderer's other project, The Murder Trio.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:02 PM
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Thursday, January 28, 2010

Zaire 74 Revisited One More Time



When We Were Kings, Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford 1996 documentary of the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 world heavyweight prize fight in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman is one of the most entertaining and successful non-fiction films of all time. It one the Oscar and is such a definitive film about Ali, that it makes other films about him, Michael Mann's Ali, the odd Nation of Islam funded The Greatest where Ali played himself, as well as documentaries AKA A.k.a. Cassius Clay, and even Muhammad Ali The Greatest by the great William Klein pale by comparison.

Soul Power, which has come out 13 years after When We Were Kings is much closer to the film about the Zaire 74 music festival created and promoted by American record producer Stewart Levine and African pop music legend Hugh Masekela which was set up as a corollary event to the fight that Gast was hired to Documentary film producer and editor on Kings Jeffrey Levy-Hinte directed this film reconstituting the footage into a film that features some great Ali moments, and overlaps with some of the ground covered in Kings but this is clearly a film focused on the Zaire Festival. The rumble is almost a sidebar to the content of the filim in much the same way the festival was a sidebar in the now legendary Kings.

Before HD cameras, steadicams, gyro stabilized cranes, and digital technology, concert documentaries, (and non-fiction films, in general) were almost heroic accomplishments created with 16mm handheld Eclairs and Arriflexes. Levy-Hinte is able to assemble this film well after the passage of so many films partly because the cinematographers who worked on it are legends and superstars in their own right: Albert Maysles, one of the main practitioners of sixties cinema verite; Kevin Keating, cameraman for the Oscar-winning Harlan County, USA; Paul Goldsmith who is responsible for the stunning concert footage in Dylan's Renaldo and Clara; and Roderick Young who was one of the shooters on Wattstax.

There are no talking heads giving retrospective commentary on the event like the roles that Norman Mailer and George Plimpton played in Kings. Instead Levy-Hinte has taken the Woodstock/Wattstax approach of showing the event unfold without narration from its chaotic origins, through its "show must go on" moments after the fight has been postponed due to George Foreman's cut eye, through a sampling of the performances leading up to a climatic showing by Soul Brother No. 1, the Godfather himself, James Brown complete with midlife crisis mustache a JB dog collar and a one of a kind jumpsuit.

Soul Power is ultimately cultural and historical document. These artists coming and sharing the stage with a variety of acts from Zaire and elsewhere in Africa. Besides Brown, Bill Withers, The Spinners, BB King, The Crusaders, Fania All-stars (Celia Cruz and a veritable who's who of seventies salsa) are all captured with footage that is like lightning in a bottle, but one wishes there could have been oh, so much in the film stock that Levy-Hinte had to work with.

But no matter, this is a solid document of what was a significant and important musical event. I see it as the forerunner of Womad and what we now categorize as world music. These American musicians are clearly pumped up to be participating in this. And the adoration of the Africans is truly evident. One of my favorite moments are the very young teens of Sister Sledge trying to show the African dancers in Tabu Ley Rochereau's group how to do the bump.

If nothing more, Soul Power is great to watch for the backstage stuff and the fashions of the time. Who ever thought that plaid suits were a good idea? It boggles the mind.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:04 PM
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Patti Smith Book Event at Bagdad PDX 1.26.09



If Patti Smith were a part of the Sesame Street universe, she would be brought to you by the letter R. R for Rimbaud, Rock 'n Roll, Romance, Revolution. And at her book event appearance one could add Remembrances of Robert.

Patti is on book tour supporting Just Kids, her well-received memoir of the late sixties and early seventies of the New York scene and her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I have read a couple commentaries where folks have favorably compared it to Dylan's Chronicles Vol. 1. From excerpts heard at her book event appearance at Portland's Bagdad Theatre, that seems appropriate. Both have an uncanny level of detail that make one feel that the events they are describing took place not decades ago, but very recently.

I appreciate and admire Patti Smith because of the unflinching and high principled way she lives and perceives the world. It is still kind of hard to forgive her for supporting Ralph Nader, but I appreciate and understand it. After the Bagdad appearance I watched James Crump's film Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe which focused on Mapplethrope's relationship with museum curator and photography collector. Many of the talking heads in this film focus on the darker side of this strange, symbiotic connection between these two. But Patti's contributions to the profile were filled with a kind of romanticism about how all three of them would go out to "grease the night," to quote a line of hers.

Patti Smith is a survivor and this has become a very important part of her art how she wears it as her public persona. The lines from Elegie: "And my skin emits a ray, but I think it's sad, it's much too bad That our friends can't be with us today." is a place she has had to revisit with the deaths of Mapplethorpe, two members of her original band, her husband, her brother, and giants like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg who influenced and informed her art.



There is always a wonderful kind of playfulness to Patti Smith in public appearance. Before she began her presentation a loud and persistent discussion going on somewhere in the building. "Tell that broad to...like talk somewhere else." She began by saying there are no rule for the evening so folks don't have to be worried how to respond after she reads pieces. "Uh, like am I supposed to clap?" She began the evening by answering the three questions she has been answering routinely on the interview circuit:

What are you listening to?
The Decemberists, Glenn Gould and Sinead O' Connor

What are you reading?
"Everything by Roberto Bolano." She Talked about carrying around 2666, Bolano's 900 page tome and now finished with the book feels like something is missing in her life.

What movies do you like, Patti?
She said she liked Dr Parmassus Sherlock Holmes she liked Robert Downey Jr and is anticipating Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. "Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter...aaaah"


She also talked about spending the day signing 819 books. She added that it made her really happy to know that each one was going to be in someone's hands that evening. There is an old world dinginess about the Bagdad, which is now used as a McMenniman's brewpub theater and utilized by Powell's more often for larger scale events. She got the Powell's guy (who she commented on his appearance favorably) to help her out with the light on end table arrangement they had. When he adjusted it to the best that could be expected, , "Only the finest in Portland." she quipped She read two or three segments from Just Kids On this time out, there seemed to be more Jersey street-wise and vernacular than usual in her delivery. It seemed appropriate with her tales of poaching a copy of Rimbaud from a book stall, her getting Mapplethorpe to pose as her boyfriend to get her out of a date from hell with an unnamed science fiction writer, or her first encounter with Allen Ginsberg where he mistook her for a boy.



I've generally come to dread Q & A sessions from the public at book events and celebrity appearances. These can be especially dreadful with someone like Patti Smith where they feel more inclined to want to publicly testify how important the artist is to them than pose any kind of reasonable or justifiable question. The first questioner was a woman who rambled with a bunch of half digested stuff she apparently gleaned from Smith's recent Terry Gross interview. In the midst of this dribble Patti asked her if she was on pills. Yet Patti was able to turn this mess into an opportunity to update us on her kids. Pam and I did not realize her son Jackson was married to Meg White. How cool is that ? If they have kids, they might be third generation rock and rollers. As one responds to a wall on Facebook, I say "I like this."

The other cool moment that came out of the pill lady's question was Patti's anecdote about how at the body viewing of the funeral home internment of her brother Todd, the family broke into hysterics due to the appearance that his hands placed under a sheet at his waist could be interpreted as arousal. Patti, who has experienced grief (and high-profile grief) than most of us imparted this advice: "Never in your grief be afraid to laugh and smile. Why not when they go off to their next adventure?" As for being still among the living she later talked about how she always loved Jimi Hendrix's line, "Horray, I woke from yesterday"

Patti closed out the evening with some poems and additional readings from Just Kids, but also pulled out the acoustic guitar for four songs, Grateful, written in tribute to Jerry Garcia, my favorite post-1979 Smith song, Beneath the Southern Cross, My Blakean Year, which began with a spontaneous improvisation of why she loved Portland (HP Lovecraft film festival and Powell's, of course) and, for a finale, brought up Peter Buck, formerly of REM for a version of People Have the Power.

But, of course the final word of the evening was about Mapplethorpe. Just Kids was the result of a promise Smith made to him to tell their story. "Not Everything is in the book, but what's in there is true."
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:16 PM
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Images From A Morning Walk








This is a tribute to the women dockworkers of WWII located about a half mile or so from where they did their thing. It is also important to note that this sculpture is the work of a group of local artists: Women who Weld.

posted by well-executed buffet at 11:22 PM
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Monday, January 25, 2010

Powerland





When I was little, the electric company had a history program on the radio called "Pacific Powerland" I went home from lunch every day and settled at the kitchen table, with a melted Velveeta Cheese sandwich and a bowl of Campbell's soup, and listened. I was far too young to understand the irony at work, listening only for the sonorous tones in the voice of Nelson Olmsted. I cherished the corny jokes, the dramas in his stories of the old Northwest, which seemed so far away and gone.
--From Stepping Westward by Sallie Tisdale.

When I read this about 13 or so years ago, I got pretty excited. I thought I was the only one who had a strong memory of these broadcasts. I remember them from the backseat of my parent's Impala on those nights when we would pick my father up from work or otherwise all be in the car together in the early evening. I think we paid special attention to them because My Dad's friend Clint Gruber, who was also the director of OMSI would introduce Nelson Olmstead and give the commercial plug for Pacific Power and Light.

I've been contemplating why I've always felt a kind of kinship for hydro electric power and lately enjoy photographing and studying the aesthetics of transmission towers and substations. Somehow part of that seems to be tied into these old radio shows. Here is a sample of one of these from a guy whose selling them at a website called otrcat.com.

OtrcatPacificPowerlandSample

And also, here is an embed from archive.org where you can listen to ten of these broadcasts.




posted by well-executed buffet at 11:48 PM
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Sunday, January 24, 2010

Herb Alpert & Lani Hall: 1.24.09





This was a surprisingly fine evening of music. Herb Alpert sold 72 million Tijuana Brass records and ran one of the most successful independent record labels in history Now he has resurfaced in the public eye with his wife Lani Hall (the signature and siren voice of Sergio Brasil 66) with a show of American standards and Brazilian music accompanied by a really able jazz trio of Bill Cantos, Hussain Jiffry and Michael Shapiro.

The right crowd and the right vibe at the Aladdin Theater can be a heckuva love fest. And the Herb and Lani show was certainly one of those evenings. It appeared to be close to a sell out filled with lots of baby boomers and the generation that spawned them. For certain, it was a room of very appreciative folks.

At 74, Alpert still has that singular voice on the trumpet. When he responded to journalist Tony Sachs remark that he doesn't sound like anyone else, Herb replied: "That's what Miles [Davis] said - he said, "You hear three notes and you know it's Herb Alpert," which is quite a compliment. I think I have my own language and way of approaching it." Here's Sachs review from a show last Spring

The quality of the arrangements of the standards and their execution was enough to make you forget exactly who was playing but we were reminded when Herb ended his first vocal feature of My Fair Lady's I've Grown Accustomed To Your Face with a quote from "This Guy's In Love With You." I turned into a black church lady at that point as did most of the crowd. "Hey, More of that!" And for the next few minutes he delivered with the 70s hit Rise and a truncated mash up medley of TJB favorites like Lonely Bull, Spanish Flea, Taste of Honey and so forth. That room got real bouncy and happy in a flash. As it did later when Lani did Night and Day. I would have loved a Look of Love too, but have no complaints for that evening at all.

I grew up with Herb and TJB. My folks played the heck out of their Tijuana Brass Vol. 2 album. I remember my Dad putting it on whenever we had tacos for dinner. I pretty clearly recall their Singer sewing machine sponsored specials including the one where Herb introduced This Guy's In Love With You (he sings! but most importantly with a normal person's singing voice) Many of the Herb Alpert albums still stand as great records worth revisiting. In 2005, Shout Factory reissued the whole catalog (available at emusic) as well as a collection of rarities.

But the live album, Anything Goes, recorded during earlier stages of their current project is pretty fine too. Their version of Besame Mucho is even nominated for a Grammy. One gets the sense that Herb and Lani are doing this because they truly want to.

A lot of the other folks and myself had a reaction during the evening a bit like Nelson did on the Simpsons when Bart and friends went to Branson and saw Andy Williams. Boomer bliss, I guess, of an earlier time when the music industry, media, and radio are far less complex than they are now, but at the same time, a fine evening of music that stands on its own.




posted by well-executed buffet at 11:59 PM
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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Hands Over The City


Hands Over The City is a 1963 film directed by by Francesco Rosi that was reissued on DVD by Criterion a few years ago. It features Rod Steiger as a corrupt city commissioner who is engaged in shady real estate development. This movie was a great surprise to me and feels very contemporaneous in this era of economic gulch that the greed of wall street has incurred on us all. Stylistically, it has the same kind of post-neo realist feel of fifties or sixties Visconti or Antonioni, and reminds me much of another one of my favorites, Bertolucci's Before the Revolution.

But more than a stylistic resemblance and the early sixties zeitgeist of those films, Hands Over The City is worthy to sit on the same bookshelf or festival program with Pontecorvo's Battle Of Algiers or Z by Costa Gavras. This is a bleak look at corruption and those who perpetrate it, but as critic Stuart Klawans points out it is quite an exhilarating piece of film making as well.

Rossi is brilliant in how he tells his tale. There is a prologue where we see the developers scheme and put themselves above city codes to create a scheme where profits are likely to be astronomical. A montage of contemporary urban landscape of Naples accompanies the title and then we see documentary-like sequence of a building collapse in a lower class neighborhood that is unflinching in its approach.

I'm fascinated like probably many Americans are in European politics with their multiple parties and coalition deal making. A book I'm reading now about Konrad Andenhauer, maybe the most important 20th century figure in German politics is filled with machinations and wheeling dealing. The city council in Hands felt a bit similar to postwar Cologne.

According to Klawans' essay for Criterion, Rossi actually featured the real city council of Naples., "playing themselves, in their own chamber, lift up their arms in protest to cry, "Our hands are clean!"—a bit of acting that they must have performed twice, so that Rosi could film it in long shot from the front, and then cut to a closer, more emphatic view from behind."

The way Rosi handles transitions and set ups in scenes in this film contributes to it having a unique documentary like style. He'll take his time to show context. We are shown a minute of a physician /city council member making his rounds with his pediatric patients before a direct connection occurs with the story.

I almost feel like a new term needs to be made up to describe this film, Battle for Algiers and some others. Docudrama doesn't feel right for it at all. Maybe something more like "realistic fusion" or Trusion, perhaps? Whatever it is. The good news is that there are a number of other Rosi films available on DVD that I look forward to investigating as well.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:42 PM
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Friday, January 22, 2010

Keaton



The greatest of all of the silent ones: Buster Keaton. What an acrobat! What an athlete he was! There is something which moves me very deeply just looking at him for two seconds. You see a tragic man and you see how he is exposed to the obstacles of the world and you see how funny he is. He moves my heart more than anyone else in the silent era.
--Werner Herzog with Elvis Mitchell on The Treatment 12.2.09


The above remark by Werner Herzog was one of my motivations for seeing a screening of three Buster Keaton films from the early twenties when they were screened at the NW Film Center. Other motivating factors were a rainstorm, rush hour traffic, my new Silver Screen pass, and a need to spend a few hours in town before meeting up with some friends at a concert.

Additionally, I was interested to hear the soundtracks that were prepared for these films by Bill Frisell. Bad canned music, especially honky tonk style piano usually can pull me out of films from the silent era. When viewing silent films at home, I'll give the accompanying track about 5 minutes. If it starts to drive me batty, I'll find something on my CD jukebox to replace it quickly. The Frisell soundtracks with Joey Baron (drums) and Kermit Driscoll were sometimes spirited and plucky but would sometimes also lapse into the undersea aquarium guitar that is a kind of signature for that jazz artist. I think his score worked best with the short feature Go West, which featured a theme that, to my ears, sounded a whole lot like The Pretender's song 2000 Miles

I've never been terribly huge on silent comedies until fairly recently. In the last few months I have become a big admirer of the earlier work of Ernst Lubitsch. His work at Babelsburg Studios in the Wiemar Berlin twenties before coming to the United States were either epics or comedies, and my favorite of these, which I need to view again soon and do a post is Wildcat, truly an epic comedy, with the amazing Pola Negri.

Part of the great joy in appreciating physical comedy is to watch it in a crowd. When Pam and I saw Matt Groening speak a few years ago, he showed the Homer Simpson's jump over Springfield gulch and the gym at Evergreen responded with a kind of pandemonium. When we see that episode or a clip of it even, Pam and I can't help but laugh. Even talking about it makes us smile.

There were moments in the screening of Keaton's One Week, The High Sign, and Go West that were almost as joyful as Homer's freefall into Springfield Gulch. The key to Keaton's comedy is a battle with the laws of physics. The affordances of solid surfaces may turn out to be passage ways or trap doors. In The High Sign, guns are shot and bullets find unexpected trajectories. And in Go West, his adoration for a cow crosses the borderline of absurdity.

But most of all, Keaton, like many great comedians is a master of timing. I don't think it gets much better than the scene from One Week where the train is going to apparently run into the ill-fitted newlywed home that is being moved to its appropriate lot with the help of a couple barrels. Please move your scrubber to the 3:17 mark to witness a truly hysterical moment in film. Maybe almost as good as Homer's skateboard jump.



posted by well-executed buffet at 11:38 PM
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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Re-encountering Shuggie


My current favorite rediscovery of the 2001 reissue that David Byrne's Luaka Bop label put out of Shuggie Otis' 1974 album Information Inspiration. It is an album worth befriending, full of surprises at almost every listen. It is funky without being heavy. It has tinges of psychedelia without being spacey. It feels both simultaneously timeless yet rooted in a early seventies groove.

The one anchor of Otis' work that most folks know about is his composition Strawberry Letter 23. It became a big hit for the Brothers Johnson, produced by Quincy Jones, who according to the Shuggie Wikipedia entry offered to work with Shuggie. The lyrics of Strawberry Letter, like a lot of other Otis' tunes features slinky lyrics filled with non-sequiturs and lush bright day dream imagery of time and space similar to Robert Hunter's China Cat Sunflower. Here's a sample:


Hello my love, I heard a kiss from you
Red magic satin playing near, too
All through the morning rain I gaze, the sun doesn't shine
Rainbows and waterfalls run through my mind


Shuggie Otis was a child prodigy and was featured even before his teens in his father Johnny's R&B review. Unfortunately, his two or three solo albums didn't find a large audience and he has become a kind of footnote to the funk and soul of the seventies. There is an energy to Inspriation Information that is reminiscent of Prince's pre-Purple Rain period or even the Music of My Mind/Talking Book period of Stevie Wonder. Like Prince, he would sometimes come up with strange phonetic spellings for his tunes. Probably most notable of these is Aht Uh Mi Hed which I include here on one of those audio YouTube clips accompanied with various images of the artist.



In a Luaka Bop sponsored roundtable discussion among several late-90s early 2000s hipster artists, Tim Gane of Stereolab said of the album It's almost like a new style of music that could've developed but never did. And that's the problem. It never developed past this record." And one of the most bittersweet things about digging into this record is knowing that this is it. It would be nice to be able to fill up an eight hour playlist with Shuggie's lovely grooves, but it was not meant to be. You can listen to a radio interview from last October posted on YouTube and hearing it you hope that the 56 year old legend can get his new project Novemberin' out and that it will gain some public attention, but that dream may prove to be as elusive and ephemeral as the Strawberry letter's rainbows and waterfalls.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:02 PM
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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Steve Earle at the Aladdin 1.19.09


I first saw Steve Earle fifteen years ago. He had returned to recording and touring on the other side of his well-publicized (by 1995 standards) troubles with heroin and legal system. He had an all star bluegrass band with him with Peter Rowan, Norman Blake, Roy Huskey, Jr and they were supporting an album Train 'a Comin' with covers of By The Rivers of Babylon and I'm Looking Through You that still sound great. The most memorable moment was Ellis Unit One the song he had contributed for Dead Man Walking, which had not been released yet. This moment felt like the Steve Earle I had been impressed with for the seven or years prior.

Earle's first three albums Studio albums Guitar Town, Exit 0, and Copperhead Road were a breath from 1985-88 were a breath of fresh air from the MTV-centric, drum machine, neon dayglow stuff that seemed to overstock Tower Records (remember them?) back in that era. I saw him as a kind of new generation Texas outlaw with a lot of the same kind of drama and intensity that Bruce Springsteen had before he filled stadiums with Born in the USA. Copperhead Road has always impressed me as a huge cinematic anthem that stands next to the best of Boss Springsteen's work.

I admit, however, that Earle's music and provocative world commentary have been out of my rotation for sometime. I recall a wonderful sundown set with the Del McCoury band in support of a bluegrass project they did called The Mountain. The collaboration reportedly did not last long because of Earle's continued and unrepentant use of colorful language. In the last decade he has produced seven or eight albums and been the subject of a documentary film, and is now settled in Greenwich with Shelby Lynn's sister, singer-songwriter Allison Moorer (Check out her hot version of Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot) married for the seventh time at 55 expecting their first child together in March.

A friend and former student of mine called me to ask if I was interested in taking up an extra ticket to one of Earle's quickly sold out shows at the Aladdin this week. Why not? For certain, I knew it would not be a lacklaster event. Earle played for almost two hours with a well-structured set that integrated his catalog with the songs of Townes Van Sant, a hard living artist who served as idol, mentor and teacher to Earle. Townes even tried to intervene during Earle's decline. "Imagine. I got a temperance lecture from Townes Van Zandt ."

When Earle takes a show on the road it is a good solid presentation. He has presented his current Townes acoustic show without any other accompaniment with a lot of standard bits, but as he told his audience. "If you come back tomorrow you are going to see pretty much the same show...I don't know if it will be any better but it should be as good."

It was a brilliant evening. I now hand over my reportage to a professional who recounts some of the best stories of the evening.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:36 PM
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

George Clinton at Crystal Ballroom 1.18.10





George Clinton used to come through Portland about every nine months or year or so, but this time he returned after being here last August. No complaints from me. I try to be in the house every time the mothership lands. Things weren't overwhelmingly crowded like his shows have sometimes been in the past. And even though it was pretty easy to move around on the floor (Over 21 show without the legal barrier between ages and cardless, thank goodnes) I still decided to check out the balcony and it was a nice way to catch one of his shows for a change.



Tonight was the standard George opening to Cosmic Slop about a half hour or so into the show after a big helping of Gary Shider and Belita Woods (I call her helium woman or the mother of Alvin and the Chipmunks) warming things up. George's entrances like those of Sun Ra, when he was on this cosmic plane, is usually one of the best parts of the show. No kid's bed sheet this time. With his downy vest, purple wig and shades he looked a bit like an eccentric divorcee who had been hanging out in a ski area lounge. Apres ski with PFunk, anyone?




My favorite ingrediant of the PFunk sound is the cluster tight vocal harmonies. I've been to PFunk shows without the horns but you can't have a true George PFunk show without a group of folks singing how you can't get over it, can't get around it. Remember, this whole mess began with George as a barber in New Jersey leading a doo-wop group called the Parliaments.




Kendra Foster continues to be one of my favorites in the more recent configurations of the PFunk Mob. She has star time presence and I am a little surprised that she is still touring regularly with the mothership pulling out Bounce to This a tune I described back in September as "a very slinky duet with George that takes you to a really nice happy place and reassures you that this S--t ain't over!" This lady has star time presence, to be sure.




George Clinton shows of recent years do not seem to have the kind of rambling anarchy they used to have. At this last Crystal show, they barely got through the One Nation Under A Groove re-entry after Maggot Brain and it all was over in less than three hours. I wonder if I'll ever see another show where things went on for a couple hours after last call. No matter. Clinton shows remain unique, one of a kind experiences coming from the legacy of the man I consider to be the last of the great AFrican American bandleaders, right up there with Ra, Mingus and Ellington.




There are a few prominent PFunk players whose absence would be quite conspicuous. Gary "diaper man" Shider is a very important ingrediant in the mix, as is Michael "Kid Funkadellic" Hampton. Hampton was heir to Eddie Hazel and he still comes out every night to lay down the the swirling and shimmering guitar feature known as Maggot Brain. Free you Mind and your ass will follow indeed.




It really isn't fair to review a singular Pfunk show. Every evening is another component of a continuum of funk. I hope the ship will touch down again in my coordinates in another few months.
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:14 AM
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Monday, January 18, 2010

Trinity Makeover


I've written in this webspace before how the free standing chime tower of Trinity Luthern Church on 39th and Columbia (right across from the former TP Market) has evolved into being one of my favorite of neighborhood landmarks. It seems that the 50 year old tower has been going over some repairs and a bit of a makeover. Long may it ring and do that clarion thing.








posted by well-executed buffet at 9:20 PM
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Sunday, January 17, 2010

Bill Cosby in PDX: 1-16-09


The Cosby I dug growing up was well before Huxtables and hucksterism for Kodak and Jello. I kind of left the bus when the Fat Albert television show came out. And to me the Cosby television shows I connected with were I Spy and the one about Coach Chet Kincaid.


And, of course, there were the albums: Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow...Right!, I Started Out as a Child, Why Is There Air? and Wonderfulness all were pretty regular staples around our house. I can still remember a bunch of his Chickenheart routine. Back when it was not unusual for my family to drive half way across a state to go skiing, my brother would reenact Cosby routines, not just verbatim, but ver-inflection.

In the midst of a dreadful wet weekend, my mother and I entered what appeared to be a capacity filled Schnitzer to watch this 72 year old self-described storyteller give his patented observations on age, marriage, with all kinds of inter-weavings, wanderings and cul-du-sacs during a two hour excursion that could only be lead by Billy of Philly.

His concert performances resemble the same kind of format and delivery of his 1983 concert film, Bill Cosby: Himself, from which at Portland featured at least one of its routines, the piece on dentists to close out the evening. Early in the show he talked about how reviews of his shows try to imply that he is old and kind of losing it. He says he has sat down to tell his stories for many years now and defends the sometimes non-linear nature of presenting his material. "It has nothing to do with me growing old."

He wore a blue sweatshirt with three or four inch white letters that said "Hello Friend" and also had a towel inscribed with that greeting that was often said by his son, Ennis. Later through online surfing I discovered that 1.16.10 was the 13th anniversary of Ennis' murder. He said nothing about it. Bill was there to work, to tell his stories and trigger some laughter on a rainy day.

The content of the Saturday afternoon show revolved around marriage: "When your wife asks you if you are are her best friend, there is no good way to answer that...Your Wife is not your best friend, she is your wife." That theme for the day seemed appropriate at a performance that began with a request for the wife of an old friend of his to come up on stage. She was Eileen Jansen, widow of NY Giants pitching great Larry Jansen who died last October at 89, just a few months away from his 70th anniversary with Eileen. He asked Mrs. Jansen what the secret of their long marriage was (he could have also asked about their raising of ten children!) and she said it was to take it step by step. Cosby said that was pretty much the message he was going to deliver that day as well. And he went ahead and did so in that style that is all his own.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:57 PM
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Saturday, January 16, 2010

China Design Now!




In its closing days, I was able to squeeze in a couple of visits to China Design Now, an exhibit of architecture, design and fashion at the Portland Art Museum. I wish I had visited earlier and more frequently becasue there was an awful lot to absorb in the three rooms dedicated to the show. I had a sense of being exposed to an alternative universe. There is much of what we see daily in our world on this side of the planet, but it comes off so much differently, with a kind of twist.


For instance, forget about Hello Kitty. A designer in China has come up with Hi Panda, bears that are slightly twisted and a little bit sinister. The room dedicated to Shenzhen and the graphics community associated with that city was filled with all kinds of posters, CD covers, pop collectibles and so forth that were simultaneously familiar and very foreign. This was also true of the rock n roll concert footage and the animation that was playing.


The showcase of Beijing architecture featured structures built for the Olympics, but I found myself impressed with the angular conversion of the China Central Television building. The intensity of the building projects reminded me as well of the kind of activity that was taking place in Berlin at the end of last century.


I'm not entirely sure how to process all of the sights in this exhibit except perhaps to conclude that China truly is a work in progress and that within the next decades, the west is going to continue to see itself interpreted through another lens of creativity and culture.



I have always believed that magazine covers en masse provide an interesting mirror on culture. Certainly they provided quite a contrast of east meets west when coming down this staircase.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:26 PM
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Friday, January 15, 2010

Reel Music 7.15.09


One of the best moments of the Portland art, music, and film lovers year is the day they get to peruse the Jan-Feb NW Film Center calendar. There is much snow coming down in the nearby mountains which can likely mean the lower Pacific NW is getting soaked big time. I don't mind too much. 40 degrees is okay, although as Pam and I were discussing it is plenty cold enough to be cold and wet.

So it was with much pleasure to give up my wet coat at the counter for first taking another look at the China Now! design show and then three recent British television documentaries on music. My desire was to see the two on fifties jazz but they were going to be preceded by a film about Phil Spector. Watching Phil definitely sounded better than waiting outside or at a coffee shop, etc. And besides the museum was going to begin to close within the hour.

The Agony and Ecstacy of Phil Spector is one of the most fascinating and inventively well executed non-fiction films I have ever seen. It combines these elements

So basically diretor Vikram Jayanti gives us a mashup with four well defined provacative elements. It is almost like watching a McLuahn lecture or demonstration. Hearing John Lennon's Imagine songs or the full-fledged teen operas of Spector's prime set against the trial footage

The film is unforgettable in the way that Grey Gardens or David Lynch films are unforgettable and relentlessly unforgiving. I doubt I would have been watched it at one sitting in my home or at my computer.

Thank goodnes the second half of the evening was a distinct change of pace. Both Cool and 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz were certainly treats for lovers of 50s jazz and they took different approaches to how jazz pioneers addressed life after bebop.

Cool focused on the music with only a couple of voice over interviews by musicians, most notably Dizzy Gillespie. Director Anthony Wall effectively blended stock footage of New York, Los Angeles, and Brazil with some very generous helpings TV studio performances by folks like Art Farmer, Gerry Mulligan, MJQ, and Antonio Carlos Jobim. One of the key threads in the film was to show how some of the primary participants in what has now become known as the Birth of the Cool sessions (Miles Davis, John Lewis, and Gerry Mulligan) went on to develop some of the elements of those sessions into their own musical projects and transformed the bop trends in jazz. The film shows also how the cool sensibilities in the music shifted in geographically with the west coast scene with the likes of Chet Baker and Dave Brubeck and, later, what Brazil brought to the mix, mainly through the music of Jobim. One of the last performances in the film was a Stan Getz interpretation of a Jobim tune and it was wonderfully cool indeed.

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz was the most traditional of the films shown that night. It focused on four albums released that year, again by post-bop explorers which made an unprecedented impact on jazz and American culture. The four, which are likely be be found in any serious jazz collection are Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Mingus Ah Um and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz To Come. It seemed strange to watch a nonfiction film with conventional narration and structure after three hours of more innovative approach to subject. What made 1959 were the distinct contrasts in the music on these four albums. Kind of Blue is all about mood and fabulous playing. Time Out was both simultaneously accessible and innovative. Mingus Ah Um was filed with bold, audacious musical statements. And the free jazz of the Coleman album was really unlike anything that hit the scene before. "Its still a divisive album and that's not a bad thing" said one of the commentators in the film.

The rain had subsided by eleven or so when the films were over. I drove home without the radio on, just as is my custom after a good concert, with my mind full of music and thoughts of its impact on culture of the latter half of the last century. I felt as though I had been on a kind of journey over the course of the evening.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:59 PM
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Thursday, January 14, 2010

Teddy P. 1950-2010


Teddy P.
The Teddy Bear.
The men's threat and the ladies' pet,
Singing his way into your heart and soul.

Radio ad from circa 1980 advertising a ladies only show at the Portland Paramount (pre-Schnitzer Hall era)

Teddy Pendergrass, along with Eddie Levert of the OJays, was the roaring lion of the Gamble and Huff grand symphonic soul machine of the seventies. His seductive balladry of the late seventies and early eighties was definitely impressive, but as the lead for Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, he was a unique force of nature.

‘Cause early one morning I got me a paper, huh
I sat down on my living room floor
Opened it up [Opened it up], opened it up [Opened it up]
Guess, what I saw, huh?
Saw the President of the United States, huh
The man said he was gonna give it up
He’s giving us high hopes
But he still turned around and left all us poor folks behind
They say they got another man to take his place
But I don’t think they need to satisfy the human race

Remember that quote in the eighties about Chuck D being the CNN for the ghetto, Well TP was delivering the news on the Gamble and Huff Love Train long before.

Teddy was at the top of his game with Love TKO, Turn Out the Lights, The Whole World is Laughing At Me as a love god personna when failed brakes led to accident and paralysis in 1982. His return to a public appearance with Ashford and Simpson at 1985's Live Aid stands as the most moving and authentic moment of that overbloated event.


Teddy will be remembered as one of the greatest of soul men. I love this clip of a busker outside of a NYC subway giving it up big time on Don't Leave Me This Way. Don't miss his microhone stand moves.



And, finally, despite the lip synching on Soul Train, this clip of Teddy back in 75 with Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes illustrates him truly as a class act.


posted by well-executed buffet at 9:32 PM
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

36 Hours: Old War meets Cold War


If I ever get a chance to participate in a Q and A at an appearance with the Q, Quentin Tarantino, I would want to ask him if he had seen 36 Hours, a 1965 film directed by George Seaton starring James Garner and Eva Marie Saint and whether or not the film had perhaps any influence on Inglourious Basterds. I would ask because it also plays, as Basterds does, with the idea of an alternative WWII history.

What makes it stand out more is that 36 Hours is a WWII movie from the sixties (and gosh there were a lot of those) that merged the cold war notions of inner space, ailientation, constructed reality, and psychological warfare. In 36 Hours there are strains of Seconds, Manchurian Candidate, and The Prisoner television show.

It takes as its inspiration, this short story by Roald Dahl called Beware of the Dog. An American intelligence officer Jefferson Pike played by Garner is captured by Germans on the eve of D Day and is put into a staged environment supposedly set six years after the war. Here he encounters Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor, who BTW, played Churchill in Basterds), a German psychologist who was raised in the US who at first convinces him he has been struggling with amnesia for the past half decade. Also on hand are Anna Hedler (Saint), a concentration cam internee posing as Garner's nurse and supposed wife (married to her supposedly during the amnesia years) and the watchful SS officer played by Otto Schack in a very memorable performance.

Seaton, who is probably known for Miracle on 34th Street, Teacher's Pet, and Airport, crafted a fine little film here. The plot points are tight and engaging. It also features crisp black and white wide screen photography in an MGM production that gives the film a strong timeless quality.


But also notable besides the convergence of cold war psychological warfare in a WWII story, 36 Hours also features a small role for John Banner which predates his Schultz on Hogan's Heroes.

So ultimately personal discovery of this film is a kind of encountering a boomer's nostalgic paradise with its trickery plot, the cool of Jim Garner, icons like Eva Marie Saint and Rod Taylor. And Sergeant Shultz, even.


posted by well-executed buffet at 11:08 PM
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Sissi Trilogy


If the weather had been lousy during my Christmas visit to the little hamlet in Northern California where my wife's relations live, I might have been able to share the Sissi films with three lovely young lasses who I believe would have become captivated by them as much of Europe has for over fifty years. Sissi and its two sequels were produced between 1956-59 by Austrian director Ernst Marischka starring a young and vibrant Romy Schneider as Elisabeth of Bavaria, the nineteenth century Empress of Austria.

The Sissi trilogy is renown in continental Europe, still shown on television every Christmas season like Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life is in the US. This post and others and my hope someday to watch them someday with the young women on the Klamath is maybe my small part to try to get the rest of the world to recognize how terrific they are.

My theory on why they have not connected in the US is that International cinematic imports of the fifties and sixties were films of higher artistic ambition. Sissi is certainly not Open City or Seventh Seal or Rules of the Game. If you were to look to imports of the era, it would probably be closer to Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes.

The Sissis are not high art, but definitely fine entertainment. Ernst Marischka's vision in these films reminds me a lot of John Ford,(who was his contemporary) when he is at his best. He takes an historical subject and gives the viewer a romanticized version of it, but it also resonates with a personal story. To my sensibility the Sissi films resemble the world of Ford had Jesse James, Wyatt Earp or the early American settlers of Drums Along the Mohawk. Both filmmakers had roots in silents. Like Ford he takes time out to show the environment. With the assistance of rich colors in postwar Agfa film stock he immortalizes Bad Ischl in Austria or Possenhofen in Bavaria in a way that Ford has a cinematic relationship with Monument Valley and much of the American west.

Also like Ford, Marischka takes time for pagentry. Each of the three films end in huge majestic rituals, a royal wedding, a coronation for a new kingddom -- Hungary, and an audience with the pope. He takes his time with these events with little or no dialog sweeping the viewer up in the spectacle of it all. It is interesting to note that Marischka and his brother (also a film director) are also famous as librettists for several operettas

The grand spectacle and lovely scenery are of course secondary to the story. The Sissi films work because they are all about conflict: cultural, generational, and between personal desire and duty. Elisabeth was an accidental Empress in a way and her youth and unbridled exuberance was in constant collision course with her mother-in-law, Princess Sophie. In the films, Vilma Degischer plays her as a cold-blooded Austrian wench who has no patience for the earthy Bavarian ways of Sophie and her father, Duke Max.


I can understand why user comments and chat roooms are filled with testimonials by folks who have seen these films many times. There is something very satisfying and lovely about them. It was one of those moments in cinematic history where all of the stars are aligned and it is effortless for the viewer to enter another world with a heroine who doesn't take much guff. Neither did Scarlet O'Hara, but I'm sure not interested in seeing Gone With The Wind as I would the Sissi trilogy.

The true life of Sophie was apparently not the storybook tale we see on screen. But then again, Faye Dunaway was never really a whole lot like Bonnie Parker. According to her Wikipedia entry, historian Brigette Hamann "portrayed her as a bitter, unhappy woman full of self-loathing and various emotional and mental disorders." But like they say in another movie, this is a situation where it is better to print the legend.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:27 PM
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Monday, January 11, 2010

Maria and Marcello on a White Night


Le notti bianche is a 1957 film directed by Luchino Visconti starring Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell and Jean Marais. It has a big set , few characters and takes it time to deal with the affairs of the heart. Based on a story by Dostoevsky that I am not familiar with. There is something fundamentally operatic about this film, this story and its staging. It covers the ground of men and women universal on a wide but finite canvas of street, light and fog.


In fact, atmosphere comes well before character for the first third or so of this film. Visconti blends the studio artifice with Italian neo-realist sensibilities of the time. But once the characters and situation get fully established , I as a viewer felt a part of something special. There is something here that reminds me a of a chaste version of Last Tango in Paris here or even a postwar Italian version of Brief Encounter. In my mind, these films are somehow linked and connected to Le notti bianche, it is connected to the way that Visconti obviously has empathy with his characters.

Marcello plays the opposite of his La Dolce Vita and 8 & 1/2 macho with out a heart character. He is a tender everyman, a clerk of mild sensibilities that is drawn to the pining madness of Natalia, played by Schell, a woman whose heart was broken by a a furtive affair of sorts with a mysterious border who lived for a time with her and her blind Slavic grandmother.

The time of the film does not feel at all set until Schell and Mastroianni find themselves dancing in a rock n' roll dive and Visconti lets the camera take its sweet time on wild youth and abandon. It goes on for t he entire length of a Bill Haley and a Comets song, which near its climax has Marcello stepping out like Chaplin meets St Vitus. But Le notti bianche is essentially a film of quiet times of potential lovers hung back by the ghosts of one of their pasts. It so very well defines the experience of one who loves one who loves another, a fundamental anquish of the heart, but as one of Visconti's collaborators on the Criterion DVD points out in the extras, it also has a very hopeful, even utopian message at its core and conclusion. But I believe most importantly it has Maria Schell, her laugh and smile.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:01 PM
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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Neighborhood Stroll





I remember that my grandfather had one of these underground garbage cans. I also remember them at cemeteries. At one point I thought it would be cool for my folks to have one as well.


You can almost hear the bull horn. "Get back behind the double line"


posted by well-executed buffet at 11:32 PM
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Saturday, January 9, 2010

American Lives Moving Into Unlikely Places


I encountered an intriguing juxtaposition between two non-fiction documentaries I saw back to back. One was on Al Franken: God Spoke covering the years from the Bill O'Reily shoutdown to when he committed to running against Coleman to take Wellstone's seat back. The other film was a portrait of guru Baba Ram Dass several years after his debilitating stroke in 1997.

I can hardly think of anyone else who had such transformational journey in their life.
Al Franken went from scruffy haired wise ass comedian to a US Senator who cut off Joe Lieberman's time rambling. Richard Alpert was the son of a Boston financier who became a cultural pariah with his association with Timothy Leary He returned from India as guru and teacher, and now is showing the world how to have a life of grace beyond the results of catastrophic health issues and aging.

There are some interesting comparisons in these lives. They both come from middle class or upper class Jewish backgrounds. They both engaged in the use of substances during their individual Zeitgeists. And I bet when they were in the midst of their career as Saturday Night Live comedian or Harvard professor, they would have looked at you dumbfounded if you told them they would be known as Baba or Senator.

If you love Franken, you should look at Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus' Al Franken: God Spoke. The footage at the 2004 Republican convention is especially good, going nose to nose with Sean Hannity. But even better was the Newsweek party that Lally Weymouth (Kaherine Graham's daughter) somehow allowed him to attend. Maybe she figured that with caneras Al couldn't do too much damage. But he did end up doing his Kissinger impersonation to Ol' Henry himself. We get to see his wife Franni on the sidelines as this unlikely American story unfolds. She wakes up Al on Election day 2004. He was very slow moving and, although still believing that Kerry could win, but maybe feeling a bit of harbinger of doom perhaps?

I first encountered Ram Dass when I was cleaning movie theaters during the summer of ET. He stopped by the KBOO studios late one night and took the radio audience into a meditation journeying exercise. I took a break for it, the boogie suitcase filling a 800 seat auditorium, just Ram Dass and me. I read his books afterwards and went to a two day workshop retreat at Portland's Masonic temple maybe three or four years before he had his stroke. I don't take the Hindu stuff down full and straight, but he was one of the most engaging, fascinating speakers I have ever heard. He explores ideas and thoughts open and in a deep intelligent fashion. Maybe Barry Lopez is an equal in terms of how they present their thoughts from germination to a kind of bloom.

But still, there was something tight and stodgy about him during that workshop. And my conclusion from Ram Dass, Fierce Grace is that the Ram Das who "got stroked" as he put it more resembles the vintage footage in the movie of the early seventies guru whose father's country property and three hole golf course was filled with pilgriming hippies all dancing Hare Krishna. Lemle captures Ram Das 2001 with a gleam in his eye that is similar to those earlier days.

Both Al and Richard aka Ram Das found their lives enter unexpected acts and development roughly around he time the century changes. But then again Alpert always taught, and Franken never seemed to have much of a problem speaking his mind.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:39 PM
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Friday, January 8, 2010

Orson Welles' The Trial


When I was in late teens and early twenties, I'm so glad that I established a kind of connection or receivership with artists whose work is indeed worth revisiting for a lifetime. Orson's interviews on talk shows always intrigued me as a kid. I always thought of him as worldly, erudite and kind of cool for screwing up the entire country with that War of the Worlds, the ultimate punk of media virus.

I'm not fully certain of details, but I believe that Welles' 1962 film, The Trial lost its international copyright because it showed up on every shaky late night network as filler in the days before infomercials. Also, everytime I browsed a budget bin for VCR tapes it always seemed to have another cover.

I like film that is singular and unique. It doesn't matter if it has some major issues and problems. The Trial is very aptly described by PI film crtic William Arnold as being "flawed but unforgettable." Welles' visual aesthetic for controlled environment is very much on display here. The low angle and tracking shots from Kane, Ambersons, and Touch of Evil refined, which, by definition, seems like an impossibility.

The military and the monetary, as Gil Scott called them out, go well together. This is not often the case for the artistic and the commercial. Twenty five or thirty years ago I was more defensive and romantic about the Orson Welles saga of scavenging for the film from all kinds of flaky assemblages of Eurotrash currency. Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful for The Trial, Mr. Avakian, Chimes of Midnight, Othello, and what's left of Don Quixote. You do have to admit that none of these films was served by fine techncial standards. It is a kind of wonder that any of them were made at all.

Scale ultimatley is what helps make The Trial such and extraordinary experience. Despite the poor dubbing, despite relentlessness of Anthony Perkins' delivery. The ginormous office of Joseph K.'s was filmed in Yugoslavia. Much of the rest was filmed in the train station in Paris that later became Musée d'Orsay.

Besides photography, edgy euro vibes, and sometimes awesome wide shots, there is some great acting by Jean Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Welles himself. Akim Tamrioff if a little too over the top for my taste, and just plain exasperating in an overlong sequence with psychosexual overtones involving Schneider, Welles, and Perkins. But moments of wonder both visual and in language come up very routinely. Welles is from radio and the he raises to the challenge in delivering text which takes characters in culdusacs as well as up and down ladders and through corridors of large places.

I first encountered The Trial as television on a rainy afternoon. I most recently saw it as anecdote to The Informers, a pretty vile Brett Easton Ellis adaptation that felt like Harold Robbins with near total depravity and a B list with the likes of Billy Bob Thornton, Chris Isaak, and Kim Bassinger. It was enough to make me want to be less adventurous in selecing contemporary titles for the red envelope queue. Anyway, I watched it streamed from Netflix. I'll take flawed and unforgettable over exploitative and miserable anyday.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 PM
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Thursday, January 7, 2010

2010 So far


Practically a week into the near year and it has been a good one so far.


I've known Kevin Williams for almost thirty years. It was great to kick off the New Year with him. I wish him all the best in 2010




I somehow feel that young Ian will be less tentative as years pass by and the jam sessions will continue. The chords may not have be write but he had his one and three down.




I'm not sure what's going on here. A headless Diogenes guarding some garbage? Strange times in the Lincoln hood.




This is what my life is going to look a lot like in the next few months. In the foreground is my laptop, Antoine Doinel, hence the screenshot from Truffaut's first, and probably best, feature film. Antoine and I are visiting branch libraries in our region, partly because they have the most dependable public WIFI connections I have found. We are here at the North Portland branch. I used to stop in here and read for a couple of hours before I went to my job about 18 or so years ago. This room contains memories of reading Hardy, James, and Joyce. I am now endeavoring to use this space for updating my web publishing skills.



Yes, so far I like the look of 2010.


posted by well-executed buffet at 11:56 PM
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Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Christopher Hitchens at PAL 1.5.09


Every year or so at Portland Arts and Lectures, they bring in a presenter who represents something bigger than simply being a writer or author of books, they are individuals who are tightly associated with big ideas to the degree that they are the big idea or at least the public face of that idea. A few years back Frank Rich was featured. He is more than a former drama critic and current editorial writer for the New York Times. Instead, he who uncovered the stagecraft of the manufactured Bush II foreign policy. Michael Pollan was here last year, but not really as a journalist who covers food but rather as the voice for food and reason.

So also was the case with Christopher Hitchens. There seemed something apt about having only his surname on the ends of the sign at the Schnitz. Christopher Hitchens is the author of many books, a writer for Vanity Fair, and a long time columnist for The Nation. Hitchens is the voice of atheism as Pollan is the voice for food in the media and our current culture. Partly because of it bold and audacious title Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything will likely be associated with the sixty year old journalist for years to come.

He began the evening with descriptions of the Danish Cartoonist who was attacked on New Year's Eve and the psychiatrist who attacked his fellow soldiers at Ft Hood without mentioning the motivation of the attackers or the statements the psychiatrist made when opening fire. When religion was added to these narrative, both tales change quite dramatically. This consideration of religious relativism made a huge difference indeed. Welcome to an evening of big idea. As he says in his book that organized religion is "the main source of hatred in the world."the main source of hatred in the world, violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

Hitchens gets his message across because he is consistent and looks at the big picture, clearly talking about the concerns involving organized religion, its duplicity in message and contradiction in actions "If you haven't gotten my point, I have a feeling you are not going to get it." He's obviously very ready to put it on the line. "I'll debate anyone" he said when asked if he would debate popular religious scholar Karen Armstrong.

Yet is obvious that he more than a British journalist with a quick quip and a controversial best seller. When particular topics came up he showed passion and intensity, whether it was the lack of justice and cover up by the Catholic Church with abusive priests, the "fraud" of Mormanism, and fall out from evangelical Christian leaders fanning flames of intolerance on homosexuality in Uganda. A question about his lapel pin lead to impassioned statements about the need for a Kurdish homeland.

The evening was certainly a departure from a more typical evening at Portland Arts and Lectures where an author talks about influences and creative processes. The evening moved quickly and one gets the feeling that Hitchens could have gone on for a very long time at the same level of energy if PAL director Andrew Proctor had not finally been able to get him to leave the stage at a bit after nine.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:59 PM
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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Precious on the Precipice


Since October I browsed the images in the October feature in the NY Times magazine on Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire Soon came the glowing press and a few remarks quickly exchanged by some folks who saw it. I felt obliged, almost to see it because it was playing in the Downtown Vancouver Cineplex, on C Street next to the future site of our new library (horray for bonds that passed before the deal went down with real estate and Wall Street.)

Before it landed in town, I was initially resistant to going to see it. The story of a 350 pound inter city illiterate twice impregnated by incest looked too dark, stark and intense, especially for late fall and winter. Furthermore, it had this thing that Sling Blade going for it because of the number of folks acting in it that weren known for other arts and entertainment pursuits. Precious features comedian and talk show host Mo'ique, Mariah Carey, and Lenny Kravitz.

This casting reflects the direction of Lee Daniels quite well. Daniels was the producer for Monster's Ball with Billy Bob Thornton and the Oscar winning performance of Halle Barry. Monster's wasn't directed by Daniels, and the fifty year old is kicking it hard as a director now. After this post, I am going look up Shadowboxer with Helen Mirren, Cuba Gooding Jr., Macy Gray, and, in her first Daniels film, Mo'nique.

Daniels knows how much to push and when to give an audience hope. I'm not going to forget this film. It is the work of a filmmaker in control. He has a wonderful ability to deal with truthful moments. Gabourey Sidibe voice over performance is almost as good as her full flesh moments in the film. He is truly a chef, knowing how to cool it down with some very French New Wave meets Spike Lee and Vincente Minelli fantasy sequences. They are thankfully short and very well executed.

Daniels is going to go down in history as one of the best directors of women in the movies. In a video feature on the online version of the Hershberger article he talks about his desire to be involved in entertainment came in Sweet Charity, especially when Paula Kelley kicks higher than Shirley McClaine and Chita Rivera. I don't recall another prominent gay African American director besides Daniels. Hershberger accurately describes the experience of a Daniels movie with "his films combine street-smart bravado with an art-house sensibility."

Precious has the ability to change and take root but mainly because of some folks: social workers, teachers, even a nurse; just folks caring and doing their jobs. You even forget it is Mariah or Lenny it is executed so well. This film has a message universal of all race and culture for all humans. It is a story that kind of belongs to all of us. "We are all Precious" says Daniels.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:45 PM
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Monday, January 4, 2010

This Was Radio Joe:
Your Punk Rock Warlord Satellite


A few weeks ago, I got through reading Nina Simone's surprisingly good autobiography (one of those "with" or "as told to" kind of affairs), I Put A Spell On You. I didn't realize that her entire childhood was in preparation for a career in classical music. At a pivotal time she was denied entrance into Philadelphia's Curtis Institute and ended up playing a summer in an Atlantic City dive where she honed her act that was a kind of convergence of jazz, artsong, emblazoned by the black church and of course, classical sensibilities all centered around that unique deep alto voice of hers. Additionally, she became one of the most important artists involved and associated with the Black Power movement of the sixties.

But the thing that always amazes me about Simone is the way she can form shift any song she chose to sing. In her hands, George Harrison's Isn't It A Pity becomes a simultaneous prayer, benediction and commentary on the human condition. She weaves around lyric and melody of a tune by another Beatle, John Lennon's Revolution like a bee playing a fugue in a summer garden. Listening to her version of Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb Blues is like watching steam come from your breath on a cold autumn morning giving you the illusion of time and life being put on pause for a little while. Hall and Oates' Rich Girl is not a whiney ass rant by a couple of white guys, but a full on lecture laid out from one sister girlfriend to another.

I knew from comments included in Julian Temple's documentary The Future is Unwritten that no less than Joe Strummer was an admirer of Simone as well. He apparently had regularly included her in his BBC World radio program London Calling. Somehow it is easy for me to imagine Joe putting together a mix tape of Simone including Duke Ellington covers, spirtuals, black power era anthems, and her pop song deconstructions and digging it all as a seamless genre blended snapshot.

So somehow, Nina's autobiography and a lengthy pre-holiday season indulgence in listening to her work lead me to wonder if Strummer's shows were archived somewhere on the Internet and indeed it didn't take much of a Google assault to locate them. There seems to be a fairly thorough directory of them at this location with varying degrees of quality and packaging. The strangest recast of these are the American podcast versions that are also available for free on ITunes. An exceptional amount of time is spent on those schooling us Yankee Americans about the musical and social contributions of Joe Strummer. You can find links and much backstory about these broadcasts in their online manifestations at this entry at radioclashblog.com. Additionally, one can find streamed versions at the Public Radio Exchange of PRX.


Unfortunately, his hours spent as DJ were pretty limited so one grows melancholy realizing this. Still, as one of the intro announcers said when BBC rebroadcast these several years after Strummer's death they do give us insight into the mind of Strummer and that's pretty cool. The programs are a joyful blend of rockabilly, British invasion, soul, roots reggae, and a borderless world beat groove laid down by this diplomat's son and self-described punk rock warlord. Sometimes Joe cranks through the excerpts dozen or so songs in a half hour and at other times he lets an exotic African groove take over for a while.

And of course, once in a while Nina Simone drifts into the London Calling mix, as well, seemingly at home in this eclectic world.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:02 PM
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