Monday, December 31, 2007

A Non-fiction New Years Eve


It wasn't planned, but of the stuff I have laying around is lots of non fiction film laying around so a theme kind of developed to this New Years.

Good Night and Good Luck
It felt like a white collar western. Actually more like a Star Trek movie where the forces of good had to deal with the intellectual evil. Joe McCarthy equals evil tyrannical creepy and a threat to democracy. CBS News equals righteous and the only ones that can make the necessary adjustment to society.

But at the end both the Murrow gang and McCarthy both got eaten. McCarthy by the senate process that Murrow's programs awoke. Murrow by the conflict of servicejournalism and commercial reality.

I will see Clooney's films in the future. I very much appreciate the way he would let the camera linger for a few beats longer on the screen than the tempo we are used to. It gives the audience a chance to think about what they just saw. The other admirable technical achievement is the brilliant way they integrated telecine newsreel with black and white. If I was writing an ad copy blurb for this I would say "Liberal and Moving"

Factory Girl
Edie Sedgwick. The look is there. Depictions of some of the factory's beautiful people such as Gerrard Malanga are great to look at.

I think I am really stretching the concept of a non-fiction New Years with this one.
It only feels true or authentic up to a point. Ultimately, Factory Girl has the same indy film problem that This is England suffered from. Things are darned interesting until the central conflict of the film shows up with nearly half the running time left to go. In this case, it is the arrival "the musician" aka Billy Quinn aka Bobby Dylan. Hayden Christiansen as Musician/Billy/Dylan? would probably have gotten his ass kicked by most any of the Dylans in He's Not There, maybe even the little black kid.

In the film, Warhol freaks out when his It girl gets anywhere near a headline with her and its all downhill for Edie after that. The infamous sex scenes are probably some of the finest seventies style sex with actors, but it doesn't convince me that these two lame-os actually had a relationship despite what the Edie character keeps babbling. Ultimately, it is for the sex and the defamation lawsuit that Dylan threatened that this creepy Harvey Weinstein studioed biomess will be noted for.

Tokyo Ga
This turned out to be a most excellent solution for the last film of the year. It was one of Wim Wenders' essay films from the eighties, a meditation on on Ozu and Japan. It is a visual song to Ozu and to 1983 Tokyo.

One of my favorite moments is where he compares two shots of the same bar district that plays a prominent role in the world of Ozu. He shows a shot then reshows it again with the 50mm, the focal length of Ozu and he was right it became Ozu's world.
The magic of that lens, the mini tripods that were built by the man who was first Ozu's assistant who later became his cameraman, Yuhara Atsuta.

The imagery is often hypnotic, particularly the static shots that featured multiple forms of transportation and anything shot inside a car. Golf stadiums, pinchinko parlors, early video game archives, cemetaries, wax food model factories, and parks full of retro (DAs and bobby sox) rock and roll youths being American in the rain on a Sunday are all shown by Wenders (who was also the sound man using his Sony Walkman) and cameraman Ed Lachman. In this film, Wenders creates a wonderful homage to Ozu, but more so, you see an awed German artist at nearly forty acting as a kind of visual Toqueville looking for clues of understanding this bright and shiny city in a country of fellow lost and fallen, nearly a full lifetime of his ago.

Here is a lift of two of the best sequences in the film of Tokyo involving their famous and famously noisy pinchinko parlors:

posted by well-executed buffet at 11:00 PM
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Sunday, December 30, 2007

Dedicated to PDR on her Birthday




Here is the birthday girl giving Shadow some tips on how to best be a passenger

Thanks Pam. For being all a partner, fellow traveler and best friend one ever could have.

'Nuff Said...

Your Husband

posted by well-executed buffet at 8:20 PM
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Saturday, December 29, 2007

Not So Vanished in the Haze



Like a lot of folks this Christmas, I received a copy of the new reissue The Beatles' Help! under the tree. Help was made was at the end of their 2.0 era (Hamburg & Bar Band is version 1.0, Beatlemania is 2.0, Revolver/Rubber Soul 2.5, Peppers to White Album = 3.0, Yoko, egos, decline & fall is 4.0) and there was obviously wisps of fun and freedom in the air.

I know there are a lot of Hard Day's Night purists out there, but that film had a lot of the kitchen sink and less of the British New Wave in it. Help! for better, probably worse, was the template for the Monkees and the gawdawful Beatles cartoon show. and probably also the inspiration for a lot of the first era of MTV music videos.

My first encounters with Help! were when NBC would show it with the note that it was edited for television. How could this be? Years later at UA package screenings when they would run Hard Day's Night, Help!, Yellow Submarine, and (you really have to be in the right mood for it) Let It Be did I find the edit. It is one of Help!'s most inspired moments. It occurs a half hour into the film during a scene of exposition where Ahme, "I am not what I seem", connects as a cuddly puppy interest for dreamy Paul and when she still appears to be Clang's priestess/assistant. An Announcer and title come on explaining that it is "End of Part One. Intermission" followed by a shot of just a few seconds of the Beatles jumping around a meadow, Titles and narration again" End of Intermission. Part three" a slide stating there was part three which is a short shot of the dismissed sister of Ahme having the sacrificial red being scrubbed off of her while her very British Mum gives her hell about going to the temple and then fanfare, a slide and announcement for Part three and back to the film.

My brother and I were a bit ecstatic. It was something we had never seen in a film we had watched at least three times. But looking back now, I think what I liked about it was the blatant mucking around with form and expected notions of what was likely and expected. I still remember the first time I saw Duck Amuck, with Daffy being terrorized at the artist level by Bugs. And I am pretty sure it was before I was in first grade.


There were probably some folks from or who had ties with former British colonies that probably weren't too pleased with the broad humor of eastern cult of Kaili, but I for one think Leo McKern is damned funny as Swami Clang, the bumbling religious leader who seeks the ring on Ringo's finger. (one of the dumbest premises ever for a movie, okay, I'll agree with that) This is not high minded stuff. But I loved it when I was 12 and I like it now with very minor apologies.

Here, then, somewhat randomly, are a few notes of non-guilty guilty pleasures of the romp of 1965. You can come by the buffet for a cocktail and we'll review some more if you wish to go into further depth at Late Boomer Middle School...


If you when you saw Help! the first times, you will probably know exactly what I am talking about in this post. There is an energy and a lack of complication to the world and entertainment and silliness is just okay alright and then some. Now if you will excuse me, I need to go check out the extras disk and read the essays in the book that will surely help me find ways to justify my joy.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:11 PM
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Friday, December 28, 2007

Paris Je T'Aime Redux


I just got through with my second viewing of Paris Je T'Aime and I enoyed it even more than I did in a theatrical screening last summer. Anthology films with contributions from multiple directors usually consist of three or four one to two reelers. Spirits of the Dead, New York Stories and Boccacico 70 come to mind. There usually seems to be one or two very memorable, and a couple forgotten almost directly after viewing. The Scorsese short with Nick Nolte in New York Stories is very memorable to me as is Fellini's Toby Damnit in Spirits of the Dead, but I'll be darned if I remember any of the other sections of those films even though there were contributions by the likes of Louis Malle or Francis Ford Copolla.

Paris, Je T'aime lays out 18 films at five minutes with the theme of love and relationships in each with a different director and a two day shooting schedule for each. As Christopher Doyle, who directed one of the wildest films (Barbet Schroeder as a beauty supply salesman in a most surreal Chinatown Porte de Choisy) says in the extras featurette on the film "Five minutes could be the rest of your life." Somehow the ground rules for this omnibus, alhough a real role of the dice, comes out with a very high average of good to really good or even great films. This is kind of amazing, but so too is the variety of directors, actors and approaches to this challenge.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:29 PM
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Thursday, December 27, 2007

I Was A Preteen Skinhead



If you are watching cable and see that "This is England" is going to come on next, do yourself a favor and watch the credits. It consists of a montage of early 1983 England edited marvelously to Toots and Mayall's burning track "54-46 is my Number." Margaret Thatcher, Frogger, Rubik's Cube, Aerobics, BMX biking, CD pressing, Falklands and street riots. Wow! I was ready for a richly detailed film experience of a crazy and complex time.

And the first half or so is really solid. Shaun, a twelve year old who recently lost his father in the Falklands conflict is having a tough time growing up. His mother is kind of a television zombie with a big hair eighties perm. Kids are hassling him right and left. He can't even get a few minutes of solace with a comic book in a corner shop. So he ends up with some quasi-skinhead types who are really more a collection of disenfranchised youth. There is a Goth chick named Smell and a Jamaican named Milk, a heavy set kid call Gadget who takes a load of crap from everyone and Woody, the group's leader and keeps an eye out for young Shaun, giving him a sense of belonging and place. Alcohol and drug abuse, air rifles, and vandalism in funny clothes are about the extreme of it all for this group, until Banjo and Combo, come into the group's dynamic. This is when "This is England" moves from document and observer of the times into an overly earnest affair with a very obnoxious piano swell soundtrack to let the audience know there is an important moment in the film underway.

Combo was the alpha dog of the group before he went to prison. Shaun, who joins Combo who leads instead of Woody in hate crimes, National Front activities, and racist graffiti when the spit line is drawn, is there because Combo is able to play to his sense of anger about the uselessness of his father's death towards the Thatcher agenda in the Falklands. He can't win back Lol, a one night stand prior to prison, who is now Woody's girlfriend and this puts him into a kind of psychotic tail spin again with plunky piano music overloading a particularly vicious scene.

Thomas Turgoose is one of those really natural performances you don't forget by young actors and Joseph Gilgun is good as the charismatic Woody. But ultimately this is another case of an independent film that hammers you over the head with its message and uses fucked up violence and ugliness as a kind of climax that masks the fact there isn't enough solid matter in the structure of the film to begin with...but if you get a chance to stumble into the film's credit sequence and first third, you'll find it worth checking out.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:58 PM
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Ozu's End of Summer: It's Just a Family Affair


"The Kohayagawa family is complicated indeed" says the company manager of this roguish family of independent saki brewers. The patriarch of this is a aging hedonistic rounder with his daughter and a love of his life from decades past. The uncle is trying to arrange a marriage for his widowed sister with the finesse of a part-time bumbling pimp. And high strung seems to mild to describe another of the senior Kohayagawa's daughters especially when her philandering father is concerned.

This film described above seems closer to Robert Altman or Wes Anderson territory than the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu. "End of Summer" is his next to last film. It is filled with characters reassuring themselves they have or should have no regrets. And the last act is a meditation on mortality ending with a funeral procession over a footbridge and crows gathering. It feels like a closing work of an artist near the end, similar to tone of Ingmar Bergman's last film Sarraband.

Ozu uses establishing shots before major dialog sequences as he did in his other films, but a couple of the images show here weigh out more editorially. He shows a contrast of modern Japan, a temple and an office building in the same shot or another with a temple and a building with a TV antenna in the shot. And the Kohayagwawa's daughter from the "secret" family is a crass, materialistic shrew in pursuit of American men and a mink stoll.

This film is much more than a trifle. You can't help but be charmed by Ganjiro Nakamura's as the fun loving patriarch. His zest and love of life are fun to watch as is its response to the rest of the family. He keeps the pace up high, even as the family shakes their heads and uptight daughter openly wishes out loud that he would act his age. Towards his end he bets on bicycle races, tears up the ticket, and is ready for the next joy. I'm believing this is the message Ozu wants to leave us with here with last words from the character, not waxing profound, but asking "Is this it, is this really it?
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:51 AM
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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Ozu's Late Autumn: Youth, Love and Happiness


Late Autumn, Yasujiro Ozu's 1960 film doesn't begin with a shot of a train as several of his later films do, but with a radio tower surrounded by trees. (A comment that there is something in the air or airwaves--Change, perhaps?) and action quickly shifts to the interior of a temple. Inside preparations are under way for a memorial service for an old Miwa, whose businessman. Old friends have come and the family, most importantly, Miwa's widow and only daughter have arrived. During the ceremony, another old friend arrives, Mamiya, portrayed by Shin Saburi, who reminds me of Mishima in his non-historic Kurosawa roles or even a Breezy and Network era William Holden.

First surprise in this film is how the post memorial drink gathering where the three old school friends, all successful now in business or education, Miwa's widow, Akiko, and daughter, Ayako. They are quite striking together (Kind of like a nonsinging, Japanese version of the Judds), the impact they have on Miwa's old friends is a kind of mutual infatuation for two of them, Taguchi and Mamiya, feelings are further muddied because they were both infatuated with Akiko, back in the day.

Mamiya, primarily works (first with Akiko) on trying to get young Ayako married. The young in modern Japan are moving towards finding their mate by means of heart and infatuation, not old school arranged marriages. The issue is further complicated because Ayako obviously enjoys living with her mother and feels an obligation to her father's memory, although the relationship with Goto, who was a Mamiya set up, seems to be evolving quite nicely. A third friend of the late Miwa's college professor Hirayama, a widower, is looked upon by the three as an alternative to marry mother Akiko, thus leading the way.

Everything turned into a big fat mess when Mamiya promotes the idea of Hirayama getting married Ayaka to, without Akiko who is totally in the dark about plans to become Mrs. Hirayama. Ayako's friend Yuriko in a spritely assertive and engaging way takes all three of Miwa's friends to task. Her determination to make things right and her trickery to lead the three to eat and drink in her mother's restaurant leads one of them to admit "We're no match for the girls these days. They are really something"

Ozu seems to celebrate these young women of the late fifties and early sixties. They have freewill and strong will. They back into traditional restaurants out of their high heels most assuredly. They are a sign of changing times like the English that appears on signs and advertisements in his Tokyo.

Things work out halfway to the expectations of the late Miwa's friends At the end resolution, they treat the meddling and plotting as a kind of fun lark. Towards the end of the film Mamiya concludes with a line that rings true for this study by Ozu and the spirit of his films in general: "You know it's people who complicate life. Life itself is surprisingly simple."
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:55 PM
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Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Ozu's Equinox Flower: The Kids are Alright


There is a storm warning at the train station at the beginning of Equinox Flower where two station maintanance workers chat about the physical charactaristics of arriving brides. The storm depicted in this film is generational. Hirayama, the executive director of Daiwa Trading is able to see that young people must make choices for their mates vs. the tradition of arranged marriage. In the early stages of the film he gives a speech at a wedding for the daughter of a colleague about couples coming together through infatuation and affection vs. the arranged marriage of his era. He says he envies their opportunity at this current time and age. He later is able to freely give advice to the daughter of a family acquaintance

But it is a different story at home. He has a very hard time when his own daughter is concerned. And this is the center of the personal journey of this Ozu film. He even seems to admire the decisions that young people are able to make, but can't make that change for himself in the case of his oldest daughter Setsuko. At the one third point of the film, Taniguchi a young salaried worker comes in with a request for permission to marry Setsuko, the tempest has arrived in full.

Setsuko's question: "Can't I find my own happiness?" is a key one. Hirayama talks about his concerns of ruining her future, but it is his own King Lear patriarchal pride, control of his daughter, and desire to keep the old ways that keep him down. He responds to the situation at first by trying to keep her captive. He has strong hope that Setsuko won't run away to have her own life co-habitating with her boyfriend similar to the daughter of Mikami, who works in a dive bar called the Luna, of whom he has no problem dispensing reasonable advice or acting as a go-between, but he won't respond to logic, trickery, or pleas of his wife, or peer executives who face or have faced similar conditions.

Like John Ford, Frank Capra, and other filmmakers who work on fairly wide canvases. Ozu's films contain subplots with broad character actors who provide and comic relief. In Winter Equinox, one of the most entertaining is Kondo, who turns out to be a regular in the Luna, although he is trying to keep this aspect of his life away from Hirayama. It is all a part of the world of the youth that the executive is having a hard time understanding. He talks a good game, but ultimately it is a Japanese version of the Thin man's ballad (Something is happening and you don't know what it is do you Mr. Hirayma?")

This is the first Ozu film I have seen in color. It is also a joy to see this one in color with greens and salmons and oranges in interior and costuming, feeling authentic of the late fifties in Japan, Color is also key to the neon lights, advertising signs, and consumer products like orange soda that begin to creep into the environment.

Hirayama begrudgingly goes to the wedding, (which surprisingly is never shown) but still cannot fully agree and support with his daughter's decision. Yukiko, Setsuko's friend who earlier tried to trick him into agreeing to the marraige, apparently gets him to understand how inconsistent he has been in his advice and cajoles him into visiting his daughter and new son-in-law in Hiroshima where he has been transferred after Yukio and mother hassle him about not smiling (not even a grin) at Setsuko's wedding.

The film ends with Hirayama on a train sending a telegram to Setsuko and Taniguci of his arrival. The last shot is of a low angle with the train passing and disappearing into the forward distance. Low angle shots with a frame in the center, with a kind of frame in the center, usually in a home or restaurant with a layer or layers of action taking place towards vanishing point are, like the exterior environmental establishing shot, a key component of Ozu's visual language and vocabularly. His natural interactive dialog with moments of pause, trivia, and non sequitor references upon occasion as well as low camera placement give the viewer a sense of participation and observer of the world of relationships and changes that inhabit Ozu's worlds.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:26 PM
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Monday, December 24, 2007

Ozu's Tokyo Twilight: Akiko's Dilemma


Ozu takes some time and gave the viewer some options before laying out who is the primary protagonist and conflict in his 1957 film Tokyo Twilight. We first see banker Sujiyama at a bar reconnecting with an old proprietress he once knew. Through conversation we hear about drinking exploits of Professor Numata, of whom Sujiyama asks follows up questions. Later it turns out that Numata is his son-in-law who his daughter and and grandaughter are now staying with him as refuge from a troubled marraige. This does not turn out to the the central component of this drama.

The viewer wonders if the plot will involve the somewhat suspicious and comic activities of an Sujiyama's sister who seems good at getting cash from her brother and is promoting to get his daughter Akiko, who we have seen briefly. She also mentions that Akiko has come to her for a 5k yen loan a few days back.

Although it doesn't come out immediately and directly, Akiko turns out to be at the central component of Tokyo Twilight. She is the classic girl from the good side of the tracks in trouble, who never got the love of a mother. Akiko and her woes becomes the hub of all of other aspects of this tale of the Sujiyama family and its disconnected love and affections. Characters in this film note cold weather and the winter throughout. It is clear that what they seek most is love.

As I explore the titles in the Late Ozu Criterion/Eclipse Collection, I am impressed by a shot he uses for major impact. His female figures sitting and hunching forward shown from the rear or at 3/4 generally at a key dramatic point in the story. It gives the impact of still or painting and a kind of key punctuation.

Tokyo Twilight also gives us some glimpses into the seedier side of the city, made even more so in contrast by the presence of Akiko, who is not a part of it. There are a couple of times where the usually well chosen and balanced choices of the soundtrack get overwhelmed by a clattering and now outdated musical selection that needed to be mixed away, but it would take a lot more artifice and miscue for Ozu to loose the power of what he does best as a poet on the psychology of the human condition.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:33 PM
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Sunday, December 23, 2007

The Buffet comes to the river for Holiday


Holiday trips to my wife's family, the Pamily, as I call it. Are in this lovely semi-remote location that when you look at a map is basically an outpost along a river in a sea of US Forest Service holdings in Northern California. The elevation is low at the destination so there is no issue of snow, just wet cold, which as native Western Washingtonian, is not really a reach.

It is a lovely kind of remote. An hour and a half to the full slate of amenities we associate as being civilization these days such as 7-11s, multiplexes, and Bed Bath and Beyonds (the latter a true curiosity to me, how did it come to pass that there three of these stores within ten miles of my house)

Anyway, between the wonderful family meals and great cycling of stories from relations (so fortunate to have married into a family of story tellers and story readers) I kind of play desert island, bringing gear to read, listen to, and watch. Discretely (more discrete than the portions I tend to consume of fine family dining and treats during these holidays) I bring bags of riches to consume. It is the well-executed buffet on the road in To go mode. Here is this week's menu:

Bill Evans The Complete Fantasy Recordings An emusic download of nine albums I didn't even really know I had on my laptop til about an hour ago. Sure it was later in his career, recorded in the early seventies, but I am surely a seventies guy, and that was the era that jazz began to play a serious role in my personal sensibilities, so it is quite a treat. I recall that Evans ventured into the electronic base and piano during this period so am looking forward to working my way with him through these years.

Edmund Wilson Literary Essays and Reviews 1920s and 30s This was a last minute grab from Clark's Cannell Library, one of those beautiful and fine Library of America volumes that are an elegant privilege to handle with acid free paper, complete with ribboned bookmark that when I play with it reading on the in-laws' couch fascinates Friendly the cat. The essays were written at a time before modern media took hold and when American letters really mattered. It is a joy to read the first published review of Hemmingway and contemporary responses to work by Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, Eugene O'Neil, and Ezra Pound.

Late Ozu: the Eclipse Collection Five Yasujiro Ozu films from the fifites and sixties. These are lovely explorations of the nature of family and human nature, in general. And just the kind of thing worth immersing yourself in between walks and talks and meals. The stories of Ozu's protagonists could fit right in with the tales of friends and family that are recounted post-fine dinners here during the holiday.

And, of course, I brought some materials related to a class I teach once a year which I will *try* to fit in between probing the work of Evans, Wilson, and Ozu, but I am taking liberty to relegate them to side dish status for the next few days. It looks like the weather will break and I also want some chances to move outside in this lovely place.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:31 PM
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Saturday, December 22, 2007

Ozu's Early Spring: Sugi and the Goldfish


It would be an almost criminal offense to simply summarize
Yasujiro Ozu's film Early Spring (1956) as being a story of Sugiyama a postwar Japanese salaried worker who has an affair. I have only seen Early Spring and Tokyo Story but I so far feel that Ozu's films are very much journeys, trips into a world that observes aspects of the human condition.

The journey of Early Spring is framed at both beginning and end with trains. The first a modern commuter train, one who brings a third of a million people into the business sector of Tokyo every day. The ones at the end are prewar steam trains in Mitsuishi a rural mountain industrial area for the Iowa Fire Brick Factory, protagonist Sugiyama's employer.

Early Spring's structure is a musical one where each sequence is usually begun with a well framed environmetal and where there is some often some kind of sound underlying each interaction with the characters: street noises, typewriters, the clatter of Mah Jong pieces.

Eny and jealousy fill the dialog of the characters. Salaried workers envy the self employed and visa versa, Sugi's wife, unable to get out of her own head, envies the status of other women she encounters and is naturally and reflexively jealous of her husband's actions, The motivation of Suji's meddling neighbors into his affairs has to some degree jealousy at the source of their motivation. And isn't the motivation of an affair the desire and envy to see if grass is greener on the other side?

Sujiyama's affair within the first third of the film with Goldfish (a nicknamed derived by the other neighbors and commuting workers because of her big eyes, affectionate manner and because they say she is best seen from afar), is quick and mechanical but is central to the rest of the film It flirtation on a Sunday hike with the other commuter/neighbors, is followed up by a lunch, a later Goldfish's seduction in a traditional paper walled roomed restaurant first terminated by Sugi's pressing the buzzer to page the waitress, but consumated quickly later at what looks to be a no-tell hotel. Goldfish and Masako, Sugi's wife, are not weak pushover characters.

Seasons and life's dreams in this film, as in life, are ephemeral. Miuri, a former fellow of Sujis who is dying of a terminal disease fell ill in early May and he has been sick for 100 days. Sujiyama and his wife have lost a son and have yet found their next season together. Sugi is no longer young. The discussion under the bridge with a father figure about his mistake and moving forward with a team of rowers, youth passing by just prior to his departure to Mitsuishi. Masako follows Sugi where they mutually and openly apologize to one another. Will life for Sujiyama and Masuko be an empty dream as it was for the soon to be retired salary man drinker in the bar near the film? There is a sense of renewal and hope one feels for them as they watch the trains which betrays such a path for their future.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:29 PM
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Friday, December 21, 2007

My Bone with Atonement



Atonement is the leading Oscar bait this Christmas season from what I can tell. This is not a review as much as it is a bone I am picking with the film. Basically, it didn't go far enough.

There are two marvelous mini-Rashomon sequences, a jaw-dropping tracking shot at the battle of Dunkirk and a very intriguing last reel ending with one of the finest actresses of the past half century. But this is not enough.

The two flash forward sequences that are first shown through the eyes of a 13 year old girl are strong and able achievements in form, but then comes long trod of narrative until we get to the super Touch of Evil like tracking shot. And then guess what? More plot about characters I actually cared less for by the film's end.

But is this time wasted? No. A couple of monster cinematic moments are worth an afternoon, especially when these were executed as well as they were here. But one wishes the screenwriters and directors here would have pushed a little harder, tried some more experimentations with tone and form. Part of the problem might have been the setting and caste of the characters. It is hard for me to empathize or care much about the English upper class, even if it was circumstances that put them in the crummy situations they find themselves in. Looking forward to my next connection with holiday movie pre-Oscar season and hope more stays in flight.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:45 PM
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Thursday, December 20, 2007

Czech Dreamin' On Such a Capitalist Day


I can't really remember a film with two introductions and a prologue until Czech Dream. This DVD starts out with an introduction by filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me) shopping in a grocery store. He kind of comes off a little like a left wing version of Walt Disney on Wonderful World of Advocacy Film: International Edition as he gives a brief summary of the film. Then the credits and prologue: three provocative montages of Czech life in the past thirty years: 1972 food lines, 1989 liberation riots, and mob scenes outside the opening of a electronics store in 2002. The second introduction is a static shot in a open field where two shaggy Czech film students (Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda) introduce themselves and explain what we are going to see, how they pull off a large scale on the population of the Czech Republic.

Their stunt is to promote an opening of a megastore, or hypermarket as it comes out in translation. But the store doesn't exist. It is just a storefront in an open field. Klusak and Remuda don't tell you what their point is in doing this, they want the audience to figure that out for themselves.

They first make over themselves: there are before and after corporate photo sessions and reporting to a Hugo Boss in their underwear where after a ten second spot, the Hugo girls get them looking very executive. There are some sad interviews with Czech consumers where they use words like oneness, love and harmony to explain the feelings they get when shopping at a hypermarket.

Then the advertising juggernaut is put into full effect. The advertising team they work with has their limits on the project. They don't want to include "On opening day you won't go away open handed." The filmmakers try to make the case that folks who show up will come away with an experience, but the advertising agency folks aren't buying it. "We don't lie in advertising. Its surprising but we don't." one exclaims just before the meeting breaks up. Later some focus group coordinators get very defensive about their role.

A large structure in a field is somehow quite cinematic, Fellini's 8 1/2 comes to mind as do concert films. And, shit, there is, of course, Field of Dreams. So it would be easy to summarize this film as "Vit and Filip didn't build it and they came anyway." And that is pretty much what happens. It is seduction by wacky ads, goading messages, and children's choir promising the harmony, love and oneness that the first focus group was blathering about earlier. I think McLuhan would have loved this film. The medium of advertising was the message and therefore, the Czech Dream.

In final analysis, was this a simply mean trick played on a public who wants to believe or did the means justify this as a forum for for commentary? That will depend on the individual viewer. Several Rotten Tomatoes critics took the latter conclusion. I maintain there is enough craft in how the message was executed and the question many of the potential Czech Dream customers had was justified---If the ministry of culture is paying for the advertising dollars in a grant for this film reality show, as it is described in the credits, then why is the state spening outrageous amounts for advertising to get Czech citizens to vote for inclusion into the European Union?

In "He's Not Here" at least one of the Dylan's complained about being pigeon-holed by "finger pointing songs" of the Hattie Carroll, Davey Moore variety. I see films by Kit and Filip, Michael Moore, Spurlock, and Al Gore's Powerpoint as their equivalent: Stir it up cinema. They should not carry the full definition of documentary filmmaking anymore than those Dylan songs defined what folks music was in the early sixties, but in a time when serious non-fiction (the Tipping Point, give me a break) is not likely to see a Silent Spring or Guns of August (Blowin' in the Wind contemporaries) I am pleased to be able to find these films and know there are many of thinking folk not of my generation finding them too!
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:42 PM
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Tender Ears that Changed the World


Yesterday's viewings of "Atlantic Records: The House that Ahmet Built" and Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" have me again realizing how the enthusiasm for Jazz and other African American based musics by the likes John Hammond, Alfred Lion, Bob Weinstock and Ertegum brothers changed the world. Critics can pontificate and help popularize. But these folks gave the world access to some of the most important and influential artists in the world.

They were fans first and their joy for the music was early and deep. There are stories of them all getting very close and even evangelizing the music early on. Hammond heard Billie Holiday when he was in his teens in 1927, moved to Greenwich when he was 21 and promoted the ground-breaking Spiritual to Swing Concerts at Carnegie Hall in the Decembers of 1938 and 39. German immigrant Alfred Lion, who also caught the jazz bug as a teenager ten years earlier when he was in Berlin and saw Sam Wooding's Orchestra was at one of the Spritual to Swing Concerts. It inspired him to begin a record label, BlueNote Records.

Bob Weinstock was 15 years old when he started a mail order record business out of his house and made his first recordings with Lennie Tristano when he was 20. Soon after he founded Prestige records. Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun fell in love with jazz when they grew up in Turkish embassies around the world and promoted mixed race jazz concerts in Washington DC at the Turkish Embassy, an event that could not have been held in the South otherwise. Ahmet formed Atlantic records in 1947 with a loan from his dentist and Nesuhi produced Atlantic sides by Coltrane, Mingus, Ornette Coleman.

Our world was changed because of adolescent passions for the sounds that were coming out of the likes of Harlem and Kansas City. I guess it is getting close to Christmas so its okay to get a little George Bailey on y'all. No Columbia jazz as we knew it? No BlueNote with Blakey cymbals crashing? No Prestige---imagine a world without the classic sides of Miles and Coltrane? No jazz and blues and Ray Charles on Atlantic? The world would have indeed been duller greyer and not as rich. And I don't know what conclusion I should draw here besides a soulful shoutout: Praise be to the lights inside the messengers who as conduits brought the artists and their works!
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:02 AM
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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

I'm not There: Cinema Scaled to Myth and Legend



Todd Haynes' meditative exploration of Bob Dylan is nothing less than an epic media poem that creates its own language and rules to tell its tales. It brings one to a discussion of the definition of truth. Biographical truth or rather biopicgraphical truth could not be up to the task of a film regarding Dylan. And biographical & autobiographical were covered quite well in recent years with the exhibit that the Experience Music sponsored, Dylan's first volume of memoirs, and, of course, the wonderful "No Direction Home" by Martin Scorsese covered his story from that perspective quite well.

So what kinds of truth is Haynes trying to get at here? Emotional truth is a term bandied about in How Robert Sullivan's NYTIMES magazine profile in October Perhaps this is why I felt the experience was much like a Fassbinder film when I reflected on it during my walk home. Haynes is another director god in his machine pulling levers and using film language (remember his degree is in semiotics) in visual quotation (the dream traffic sequence from Fellini's 8 1/2, or, my favorite, the wheelchaired people from Lester's Petulia, riding in an elevator.) Sullivan also mentions how the sequence in the old wild west time of Riddle is a world like the seventies westerns it is emulating.

There is a fork in the road in the film early on, or actually, a fork in the train tracks, in a box car. It comes down to whether or not the viewer is willing to have a 12 year old African American boy portray Woody Guthrie. Not the languishing late fifties Woody Guthrie with Huntington's Chorea at a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, but this black youngster playing the Woody Guthrie that Robert Zimmerman played when he played Bob Dylan playing Woody Guthrie. If you look at the screen and say to yourself "Okay Todd, take me away" you will love this film. But if you don't take that ticket, I don't know what you will think of "He's Not There" Your reaction might just be to laugh, like when the 250 pound African American woman in the juror box in Woody Allen's Bananas claims to be J. Edgar Hoover in disguise. But if you are that literal, you probably wouldn't have come to see "He's not There." And I'm thinking that ultimately the audience will turn out to be kind of limited anyway. The 1pm Tuesday show I went to had one other fellow in attendance wearing motorcycle leathers, a Harley Davidson ball cap, and was carrying a paperback.

Would He's Not There play to a non-Dylan fan or someone who really doesn't know his story? Does emotional truth need to be bought into to for one to have a frame of reference for it to be truly effective? I don't know, because I am a sucker for the allusions and choices that Haynes makes and the way he intercuts any two or three of his Dylans to make its own cinematic music. I also know and love the Dylan story. I even saw a version of Renaldo and Clara in a theater back in the seventies. So take my words as someone who has been on the train (but never before with young black Woody) for some time.

And I kind of dig the way that the studio put out a brochure that serves as an official guide to the film kind of like publishing their own Cliff's Notes. I thought that a blog entry from Kevin C. Murphy's Ghost in the Machine blog (If content and spirit addressing was a web/Internet convention, the Well-executed buffet might be a neighbor) did as well a job dealing with characters and structure.

Another web find: Todd Haynes has an infectious energy when he is talking about his films. See the two IFC clips below.



posted by well-executed buffet at 9:03 PM
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Monday, December 17, 2007

Back in My Little Town


I want to share this great link of film clips of Vancouver , Washington in the 1940s.

Alcoa! Kiggins! The Columbian! Shumway Jr. High! All here and in living color.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:01 PM
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Sunday, December 16, 2007

Rock, Cup, Brain: A Kentridge Experience


Today was the last day for an exhibit of William Kentridge's work at Lewis and Clark College's Hoffman Gallery. A review of the show in Portland Art piqued my interest. I also had heard his name at numerous times, often connected with animation and was impressed with reproductions of his charcoal drawings. The Hoffman show consisted of a number of charcoal drawings that are a part of his film from his animated film of 1997, Weighing and Wanting.

I was not prepared for what the distinct,strange, and disturbing world that lives in Kentridge's animation. Weighing and Wanting's charcoal drawings take on a metamorphisis, shift change, drift, and make connections in strange and unusual ways. Things get reduced and erased. Lines overlap and score objects. Lap dissolves propel the viewer through a gallery of a mind's objects.

I spent nearly about a half hour watching repeat viewings of Weighing and Wanting, almost until it took me into a kind of pre-REM bedtime state. Then I returned to the outer gallery for a closer look at the ten or so images hanging in the outer gallery that appear in the film. The single panel of explication and the gallery essay were helpful. Both pointed out that the bulky bald post-middle age industrial executive-looking Gorbachev-reminiscent fellow in the film is a reoccurring character in Kentridge's work named Soho Eckstein. In this particular time-based Kentridge gallery, he has a MRI brainscan and works through all kinds of reminiscences as he studies the exterior interior of a big rock he collects on his property, listens to his coffee cup like a telephone, puts his head into a lap of a reappearing naked woman who gets overlaid and kind of transformed into large towers associated with the mines.

Images of objects become leitmotifs and they return in little sequences of relationships that create action. For instance, a teeter tottering empty scale later holds both rock and cup that Soho has been interacting with. Or grey line animations brain scans intercut to create montage illusion of Soho and the naked woman come together and face each other. And then there is the cup, that is broken in a sequence of redlines and descriptive violence, which comes back whole at the end of the film.

If the two words in the title of this film were dissolved or overlapped together in the same way as objects in the film, they kind of make the word wait (weigh+want=wait). What might Soho be waiting for? An opportunity to create patterns for meaning? Test results from his MRI? Or for more memories he finds in the center of his rock?

I believe there are probably few things in Kentridge's work that are ever clearly and directly comprehensible, which may be why I was drawn to watch the piece for almost an hour yesterday and why there just doesn't seem to be enough commentatary, critique and interview on this intriguing artist.


posted by well-executed buffet at 5:18 PM
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Saturday, December 15, 2007

Cynical Shopping


I just received Stash 38, Stash DV magazine's November 07 collection of international motion graphics, commercials, short films, etc. I decided to watch it until I found something that really impressed me. Hifana, who I am kind of gathering is sort of a Japanese Daft Punk had a video called Connect. It is pretty darned cool and resonates with at least some of my attitude of Christmas related consumer spending. The opening shots by line and light take you into another world. And the very Beckish slide guitar meets techno riddim track is swell too!


posted by well-executed buffet at 8:05 AM
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Friday, December 14, 2007

Katja and Mouse


With the exception of two or three set-up sequences, Interview is essentially a one act psychological sparing match between a reporter in the process of a reporter on the decline and a glossed out mainstream media starlet. Steve Buscemi (who also adapted and directed) plays Pierre the reporter and Siena Miller is Katja, who is kind of like watching a walking jeans ad at times.

Tight one act two or three actor films are drama nerd paradise when done correctly if less they are interesting exercises. Interview, My Dinner with Andre, Inserts, and Two Girls and A Guy are memorable because of their tightrope walk if nothing more. I didn't connect that extensively with the overall content and execution of Interview but it hyperlinked me to three areas of observation:

Real-time cinema in the HD DV era
Interview covers some of the same ground that Mike Figgis (Hotel and Timecode), Soderbergh (Full Frontal and Bubble), (Nine Lives) and Alexander Sukorov (Russian Ark) have been working with. Most of the films listed above are the sons and daughters of Hitchcock's Rope, actively, mucking with the cinematic ability to record real time. There are one noticeable jump cuts out of the illusion of real time in this film. Buscemi doesn't take time for the characters to set up a video camera for one of the confession sequences in the film. But for this film, they don't rely on a single camera, but with three cameras with stable and agile video operators. It was the same crew that worked on the original with director Theo Van Gogh. And I can see where it has the potential for a kind of intimacy and truth that might be more immediate and intense than traditional master-closeup-mediumshot-reaction-cutaway methodology of 'ol Hollywood. Think about it---the reaction shot is now a part of the master, or at least of its same performance.

Meeting Theo
Before seeing this film, about all I knew of Theo Van Gogh was that he was murdered a couple years back. Interview intrigues me to check out more. My red envelope crack dealer only has a couple of his titles for now, but I imagine the cable indy twins (IFC and Sundance) have been all over this for a while. There was some interesting stuff going on in that loft between Pierre and Katja, and how it got there is peaking my interest. The Buscemi Interview is one of three remakes by American directors that Van Gogh's former colleagues are spearheading.

Hooray for our side
It is quite cool to see former fireman Buscemi (Fargo's funny looking one) direct and act in this is one more victory for the extraordinary ordinary looking actors who are in the mainstream. Bravo for John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Buscemi, and Jack Black! I think it is great that it is great that theaters and media ink can be filled with folks who aren't Cruise-Affblech-Clooney and others with male beauty carved and unreal except for an exceptional minority.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:09 PM
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Thursday, December 13, 2007

Of Face and Type


Helvetica, the film by Gary Hustwit did its job well. It covers the history, ubiquity and cultural impact and cultural impact of the Helvetica typeface in a way the faithful typography indoctrinated and the general public can enjoy and think about. Here's a great interview with the filmmaker.


This film consists of eighty minutes of interviews with western type and graphic designers and numerous type montages of signs and publications. The top tier Type designers in the film are overall a passionate group with lots of lucid insight. Helvetica (the film), at least for this viewer, is going to require some repeat trips to the buffet to absorb all of what it has to offer. In other words, one of my sets of red envelope and sleeve is going to staying here for a few days. More comments about it coming to this blog? Perhaps so.

Coolest factoid from viewing one: Helvetica was invented in 1957. This is the same year I came to the buffet and the same year as Sputnik's launch. What a year!
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:45 AM
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Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Chewing with Bazin




I'm not hung up on Andre Bazin as a critical force of the post-WWII or the godfather of the New Wave or how he changed the face of criticism or birthed the autuer theory, although all of those things are notable in his 40 years between 1918 and 1958. When I come across a collection of his work like Bazin At Work edited by Bert Cardullo, as I used to with "What Is Cinema?" (The French title of those volumes sounds so much better not so elementary and simplistic "Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?" which I also believe was not his title since they were published posthumously) I scan the pages and find these passages that seem to have a poetic and solid truth formulated from the perspective of viewer, not theoretician.

Statements like "The fantastic in the cinema is possible only because of the irresistible realism of the photographic image." in an essay that explores the use of superimpositions in films with fantasy elements make one want to take pause and consideration of these words. Something to chew on.

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The Ontology of the Photographic Image on the other hand is the first (and perhaps last) encounter that many folks have with Bazin. This is Bazin the theorist writing. It is a well enough thought provoking essay. It begins with "If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation."

But I rather prefer Bazin the moviegoer:

Bazin must be considered to be one of the many patron saints of the well-executed buffet.

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posted by well-executed buffet at 12:05 PM
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Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Treasures Captured and Restored


Film Preservation is to me one of the noblest of all enterprises. The specifics of the National Film Preservation Foundation were unknown to me until beginning to work my way through the first disk of the anthology they released in 2000, "Treasures from the American Film Archives." An impressive aspect of the first anthology is how much diversity of film, history, and culture it contains. It is a collaboration of 18 different film archives in the United States including the University of Fairbanks, the National Center for Jewish Film and some of the Smithsonian museums.

My eyes are opened. I always thought of most film preservation efforts in the U.S. as being a kind of limited top down effort from the AFI running those ads on Turner Classic Movies with some scattered efforts from probably the Library of Congress. The NPFP was commissioned by Congress and is impressively doing work all over the country with a variety of initiatives including focusing on silent film, federal and partnered grants, and a focus on preserving visionary avant garde works of independent filmmakers.

I don't think they could have found a better word than TREASURES to describe the contents of these anthologies. Discovering these anthologies is a lot like falling for a jazz artist you didn't know about earlier and finding a row and half of three decades of work in a record shop. I am only 2/3 the way through the first of disk and their are 11 more that have been released in NPFP anthologies, impressions of which will likely be recorded on this here (trying to be) well-executed buffet.

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posted by well-executed buffet at 6:26 AM
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Monday, December 10, 2007

Ethiopians in a Strange Land


Journey to Lasta is probably the first and only film most of us will ever see about expatriate Ethiopian musicians in Los Angeles. And there is always room at the buffet for these kinds of unique efforts. The fact that the film exists and tries to tell a story of three folks "trying to get over" (as Mayfield wailed in Superfly) with their music to some kind of world beat festival was worth a try. I want to embrace any film that has the promise of showing me a subculture and/or turn me on to a musical experience I never had before. I loved the way that the characters seamlessly between English and (probably) Amharic it made me question if it was even set in the US. But I never felt I knew much about these folks.

The issue I think in part is the fundamental problem of how to illustrate emotions like alienation and ennui on the screen. The nature of cinema is to engage, not disenfranchise. I sensed the same problem in an independent film, Police Beat by Seattlites Robinson Devor and Charles Mudede. The lead character, also an African immigrant, became more and more disconnected from reenactments of actual police incidents and more the outsider as he was unable to connect with his out of town lover leaving the audience feeling ???

This was the same kind of reaction in Journey to Lasta I received when watching the bass player non-communicating with his girlfriend, the drummer suffering through baby sitting, or the bands manager manipulating the group out of the last bit of dignities they had left.

Of course, there are usually upbeat endings about musicians following their dreams. But this one took a long time to get to leaving the viewer with respect for their convoluted journey, and a sense of relief that they finally got there. But I didn't feel I watched them do this on their own, it took all kinds of script conventions. As audience, I wasn't as an engaged component of their quest as should be the case in these kinds of tales.

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posted by well-executed buffet at 7:02 AM
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Sunday, December 9, 2007

Blacksmithing in 1893



This film is 114 years old. It portrays men at work with a pause that refreshes. I came across Edison's Blacksmithing Scene in the Treasures from American Film Archives anthology, and felt inclined to share it with you all.

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posted by well-executed buffet at 8:25 PM
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Saturday, December 8, 2007

A Silent Doll




The Doll is a 1919 short feature directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It accompanied the disk that included "Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin" a feature documentary I discussed here in the buffet a couple days ago.

Another great aspect of the consumer DVD revolution is that it gives folks opportunities to check out great film work in the first eras of the development of the film medium.

Sure, it is easy to find the acting overwrought and artificial or the technical aspects artificial in pre-1930s cinema. But the rewards are great once finds ways to become more engaged. I sometimes will watch silent film on computers because I find that it will give on a bit more intimate experience. Soundtrack substitution is also useful. Folks who reissue silents don't always take care or creativity to come up with something that works. And lastly, things sometimes just move too darn slowly with fixed camera and stage like exposition, especially after you understand the characters and action being played out. The solution? Judicious use of the 2x or greater for when things feel slow. I always try to know where the remote is to hit the double arrow button from time to time.

The Doll has lots of wonderful moments and is very funny in places. Not roll over and clutch your midsection kind of laughter, but I found myself in lots of involuntary bursts of Ha! or even Ha! Ha! And lets face it there is lots of entertainment that is supposed to solicit that kind of response here 90 years later that fails.

Lubitsch targets aristocrats, duplicitous monks, and anyone or anything else he finds disingenuous. Baron Chantrelle is concerned about preserving his family's aristocratic dynasty, but nephew Lancelot is fearful of marriage and women. A town decree brings out 40 women who chase Lancelot through the street in a sort of medieval village version of A Hard Day's Night until he is finds refuge in a monastery occupied by greedy monks who all look kind of like Curly Joe of the Three Stooges. When a personal ad is located by the monks requesting Lancelot to return for a 300,000 franc dowry they urge Lancelot to marry. But he clearly states he does not want to marry a woman.

The Monks then show him an advertisement of Hilarius Giluermund, the world famous dollmaker: "Offered to bachelors, widowers and misogynists! I have succeeded with the help of a mechanism I built, in constructing a human-like doll who can walk, dance and sing by pushing different buttons. Hmmm interesting the monks knew about this. Lancelot agrees to check things out, but is concerned: "Only if it doesn't hurt." the intertitle reads.

Well, through plot and circumstance, Lancelot ends up, not with a doll, but Ossi, the daughter that Hilarius model for his life like doll. The doll is played by Ossi Oswalda a comic actress that the Lubitsch in Berlin documentary held a Mary Pickford like status.

The world of the doll is filled with creative touches. The large showroom that the less respectable dolls dance in has twin stages an arched entry way and zig zag triangles that make it unique and memorable. Another dancing scene with Ossi as the doll and monks is also a lot of fun.

The Doll is a trifle. But one can't be impressed by its craft, sense of whimsy, and its ability with its men in a horse suit and trees of triangular plywood to create a kind of world of its own with limited means, just as the expressionist films of Lubitsch's countrymen did for the darker side of human nature in the next few years.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:11 PM
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Friday, December 7, 2007

The Other Side of Bob Dylan's Mirror


I remember reading comments in the past about Murray Lerner's documentary Festival! I saw it a couple years back and enjoyed the energy he captured at the grand daddy of modern festival. I am even more pleased with his recent The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival.

I guess the model for this release are a couple films by another great documentary chronicler of Dylan, DA Pennebakerwith his single artist performances from Monterey Pop: Shake! Otis at Monterey and Jimi Plays Monterey. In Lerner's new DVD and these films of Pennebaker's, the filmmakers perform the video music equivalent of a key rule in algebra here; they isolate the variable.

It would be easy to classify this collection as the DVD equivalent of a record album and it is rather. But Lerner's straight forward presentation style with smart choices in editing creates a film that needs to be recognized on its own terms, not just as a collection of performance clips. This really becomes clear when one watches the DVD's extra, a recent interview of Lerner.

In the extra, Murray Lerner begins with a perceptive remarks about the relationship of film and modern poetry, and Sergei Eisenstein. As mentioned, there are folks out there who have unfortunately dismissed Lerner. Hopefully, this release and especially the interview will give lots of folks like myself the chance to discover a very creative individual who gives lots of great insights and memories of the time, and more notably,he takes this time as opportunity to share his philosophy and theories of film and music. What we know now as the sixties zeitgeist was recognized early by Lerner and his fascination on what what Dylan and others were doing at the time is central to his filmmaking craft in this film as well as Festival. I now look forward to Electric Miles and another screeing of his Isle of Wight film.

Space and time limit the comments of all of the performances and fine documentary film craft that are in Other Side of the Mirror, but here are few I have to note:

There have been a lot of strange and dubious releases in recent years in the wake of Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home. Including , but Mirror is the real deal, an authorized Columbia CBS video release with what really matters, primary source performances interpreted quite well by solid filmmaking.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:58 PM
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Thursday, December 6, 2007

Goodbye Hoof



The buffet is lit by candles tonight in honor of the life of Greg Hoofnagle. Greg and I were in some of the same classes over 30 years ago at Western Washington University when he was a rising star in the journalism department, although we didn't know each other or later realized we were there until we talked about it 20 years later.

We recalled a most memorable class with Tom Robbins as guest speaker, shortly after Cowgirls was released in paper where he begged a beer from the audience and drew hisses from the hardcore feminists in the audience even though he carefully tried to explain the the difference between sex and sexism, it made no difference, they did'nt want to hear his description of what it was like for a guy to have an erection in a field when he thought about his girlfriend. It was astonishing how, even though we didn't know each other, I remember who he was (Western Front editors had a pretty high profile on campus) and how we shared other vibrant memories of those times, like the war that went on in dorms in the Fall of 1975 where residents voted their lifestyle preference by putting a cross or a cannabis leaf in their windows. It was a heck of a colorful tic-tac-toe on those buildings overlooking Bellingham Bay or High St. that season. Maybe we remembered it so well because it was the kind of thing that one best appreciated as an outsider, not as one or the other side trying to outdo each other.

It was an honor to have Greg in my classes at Clark College. He took on new computer applications with a zeal and intensity that makes it a real pleasure to be in an educational institution helping others gain access to digital tools and what they can do for them. It was a privilege to have been his faculty sponsor for the Washington Award for Vocational Excellence. The WAVE scholarship is a highly competitive, funded by legislative fiat and paid for two years of tuition. Greg couldn't attend the luncheon with state officials in attendance where he was recognized because he had a more important personal duty: he had to help care for an urgency situation involving his grandmother. Family and friends play an important role in our lives, but maybe even more so for Greg.

In 2003 and four, it was excellent to watch him take his vibrant, energetic work ethic and intellectual intensity to challenge and raise the bar up at Washington State University Vancouver's Digital Technology and Culture program where he finally earned the bachelor's degree he began so many years earlier before a period in his life where he didn't make the best of choices.

And it was very exciting to have watched him turn his life to another new level in the last year after recovering from catastrophic health episodes. His legacy will be memories of many, many folks who will recall his positivity, high energy, and the intelligent sharpness he brought to his life and endeavors. Goodbye, Hoof. You inspired a lot of us.

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posted by well-executed buffet at 8:19 PM
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Meeting the "Other" Lubitsch


Living life as if it was a full buffet in a well-executed manner means poking at things that might be interesting.

Kino released a boxset of pre-Hollywood films of Ernst Lubitsch. One of the offerings is a documentary about Lubitsch's life in Berlin prior to coming to Hollywood and bringing a level of quality of class and entertainment that was definitely iconic. Lubitsch were his high profile films of the late thirties and forties--films like Heaven Can Wait and To Be or Not To Be.

I dug into the screening of the documentary "Lubitsch in Berlin" figuring it was going to be one of your average DVD box set extras, but found it to be exceptionally engaging. I had assumed Lubitsch to have been a refugee to the US due to Nazism, but Lubitsch came to the US in 1922 after already creating quite a body of work in Max Rheinhardt's theater, acting and then directing silent films, both comedy and epic.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:53 AM
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Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Hail Antonia!


Music and movies are most universal and international of currencies and expresion.
Antonia is about a group of four Brasilian woman hip hop background singers who glimpse the fancy of creating a group of their own.

The details of their lives are revealed to the story in a naturalistic progressive disclosure. Each of the women have an individual and contrasting personality. It is the level of detail that draws one into the experience of Antonia. The sisterhood solidarity and dream of these women built up over their lifetimes in the early scenes of the is worn down by their essentially worthless menfolk and the tough Brasiliana streets and men folk. But plot doesn't matter a whole lot in a film like this: music, personality and experience do as they did in Black Orpheus or The Harder they Come. Antonia doesn't necessarily sit on the same level of those films but carries you into its own world with zest and vibrancy. Also, the rap and hip hop in the film sound great in Portuguese.

posted by well-executed buffet at 5:25 PM
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Waiting for Ornette






Today was a strange day. The weather had two casts and tempos: wind and rain or more wind and rain. Where is my cell phone? It disappeared somewhere mid-day between the gradeathon and the meeting I was not looking forward to. Phil and Friends had apparently sold out before I could even contemplate getting tickets for their two night run at the Crystal billed as a 40th Anniversary of the famous shows that took place in Feb 2008. I'm not sure I would have jumped at back to back Monday and Tuesday night shows, but I would have liked the chance to have considered it. Even a trip to the grocery store on the way home seemed to be embroiled with complication.

At home finally, I decided to burn through the new Rolling Stone while I ate. The latest issue features current fossilized versions of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant on the cover. The coverage of Iowa demos was interesting (What if Hillary comes in third on caucus night? It could happen.), but the evening and day turned around when I read a well done profile of Ornette Coleman by Scott Spenser. Spenser gets great credit for taking on the task of explaining this man and his music to somewhat mainstream America. "Coleman's great affront to the jazz establishment was to base his improvisations not on the chords of the song, but the melody and then not on the actual notes of the melody, but how the melody makes you feel."

Many years ago the great Portland weekend KBOO volunteer DJ, George Page would rail on about how he never had much affection for "yang music." Typically, my tastes are more towards hard bop than the free yangy stuff. In most circumstances, I'll pick out George Coleman and Harold Mabern before innovative saints like Ornette or Albert Ayler or even Rollins and Coltrane. I considered going to see Ornette during the Prime Time era, but the music seemed like a battle zone whenever I heard it and the collaborations with Jerry Garcia never really took off for me. Yet in about ten weeks, I'll be going to the opening weekend of the Portland Jazz festival weekend that begins with Ornette and ends with Cecil Taylor. This programming is inspired and one could only get such a dosage by living in NY with lots of spare time, ready cash and the stars to be lined up ever so correctly.

I'm now playing Coleman's Sound Grammar, which won the Pulitzer last year. I listened to it a couple times prior, but its spare dual basses and Ornette's son Denardo's drumming seemed too spare, not the first choice for Ipods and Spring walks home. But somehow they fare better for rain logged Mondays. These tunes are mostly all the blues underscored and countered by the bass players with kickouts of splintered percussion punctuation in just the right burst by Denardo. I'm not sure that I ever found the rhythm of the day, but Ornette's songs are working now well enough instead. And a good time and space for beginning to dip into the sounds and spaces of this master on the edges who I will have the privilege to see at work in February. Yet as this journey begins I need to keep in mind a comment Spencer's friend once made to him: "Ornette doesn't reward casual listening--and if you don't believe me, ask my neighbors."
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:01 AM
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Monday, December 3, 2007

Velvet (from Victoria)


House music always confused me because there was nothing soulful or funky about it unless you had the sort of cross-over acid jazz stuff from the late eighties and early nineties (Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai) that gave it some hooks, some riddim, and hopefully, some soul. I like Velvet from Victoria, BC because they take the pulse, some beats and the happy hedonism of house and apply the stuff of jazz, improv, soul and groove onto it to come up with a sweet and infectious sound that is unique.

Velvet is a band of eight musicians, still without a web page, that has reportedly been the best thing to take place in Victoria, BC on Sunday nights, where they are famous for a standing gig at a place called Steamer's. Descriptions of their sound seem very accurate in a Whistler, BC news magazine
preview of a concert in Whistler for their Film festival last night. Author Nicole Fitzgerald calls it "organic live dance music, produced by vocals and instrumentals, as opposed to turntables, attracts an artistic crowd as funky and groovy as the music thy produced. The largely improvised show draws from the finest elements of funk, soul, electronica, jazz, and rock 'n roll to create an electro groove entirely their own." In another infotainment preview article for the band's twelfth anniversary shows in Victoria, Kuba Oms talks about how the band has "“Over the last five or six years we’ve been honing this sort of dubby acid blues rock thing over the beats" again showing the mix and diversity of these folks. Additionally, Kuba seems to able to do a singer songwriter deal as well. Even though the example here could possibly seem a bit precious, you can't deny the passion this man kicks out.



I stumbled across Velvet this weekend when I was laterally browsing emusic for something new and substantial in using up my monthly downloads. I sampled through their three collections recorded at live gigs in the early to mid double 0s at Streamer's and I became hooked in a hurry becoming a near instant fan. Kuba Oms has a determination and confidence in his vocal delivery during a Velvet jam that reminds me of another great Canadian vocalist, Burton Cummings of The Guess Who. Their sound makes them kind of a natural for a side stage at Sasquatch or a berth at High Sierra Music Festival. CD Baby has a page with one of their Victoria concerts with some nice sized sample streams There is something very liberating about a dance music that strips togehter all kinds of lovely strands and strains from the world of rhythm with mindful spirit.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:01 AM
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Sunday, December 2, 2007

Wilberforce of Nature


If I saw Amazing Gracewhen I was between 13 and 15 years old, it could have been a favorite of mine. Historical, earnest, and socially conscious to the nth degree, Wilburforce's principled sensitivity would have resonated like a new Beatles record with me.

Will Wilberforce sounds like a name for 1950s TV wrestler, but he turns out to be an 18th Century abolitionist whose major conflicts in the film are whether or not he can get he can get anti-slavery bill through Parliament before his colitis and a kind of traumatric stress related to dealing with this issue for too many years gets to him first. Michael Apted, a hero of mine forever for the 7 Up series, but his features are a mixed bag, still he has left a well crafted body of work (Coal Miner's Daughter, Thunderheart, Nell, a James Bond flim) to at least check in with him here.

This film provides a service then for 7th through 9th graders who can still tolerate a screen hero who an artist,activist, and golden child of god without cynicism. And no matter And why not? Maybe it will help provide some folks with the opportunity to have more of an Obama-like and less of a Rudy Von Bush one.

So what about the rest of us? It all depends on your weakness or tolerance of historical liberal cheese platters. I try to be strong and walk away, but get hoovered into it anyway. I guess I stil have my adolescent who still is impacted by getting much Crosby, Stills, and Nash before the Young kicked in fully. You know, Graham Nash catterwalling about if you believe in justice and going to Chicago and all that. Otherwise, it is easy to get cynical and impatient with this one, partly because it feels like a noble movement instead of an entertainment. Evidence this with the way the official movie website pushes related products or the film's extras that include a tour by abolitionist 15 year old Zach Hunter More evidence of my theory of the film's target and best demographic audience, intentional or not.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:27 AM
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Saturday, December 1, 2007

If the world had Souled out


One of the flaws of modern society is that they don't put Soul and Rhythm and Blues music in a special top-drawer holy place.---Yes, there is the question if such a place lives in our world anywhere, but that's a problem to explore another time.
The bandwidth span we need for folks to get real with is from Louis Armstrong to Jill Scot, most of the last hundred years. The testament that begins with Sam Cook, should be considered most prominently.

Consider Chuck Brown. The "Feel Like Bustin' Loose" man from DC. and Godfather of GoGo has the ability to make one feel remarkably awake and alive. Why is this pitiful world satisfied with him doing regional gigs only? Why isn't he at Bumbershoot, the Warfield, the Wiltern, the Moore and the Crystal Ballroom with the same routine frequency as George Clinton and his busses of funky folk. And for that matter, shouldn't George be giving six hour mini-Wattstaxxes in stadiums one for every region in the country?

I ponder an alternative cultural universe where in 1970s, Leon Russell and Joe Cocker's Mad Dog and Englishmen review didn't implode in a post-Woodstock wake, but continued to infuse the mainstream pop world with R&B with entire waves to follow. What if tight horns, gravelly and sweet soul vocals, and music truer to Memphis had turned out to spring forth and replace the sort of cultural influence that say, Led Zeppelin had. The world would be a better place, I say. As George Clinton used to say Funk not only has the power to move, but to remove.

Ultimately, you won't get logic from a disciple of Soul and Rhythm and Blues. Certainly not from someone who read the latest mainstream media report on the St John Coltrane Church and concluded it made more sense than many or most varieties of faith that millions participate in.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:02 PM
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