Monday, March 31, 2008

Ten and Two on the Five


Snow Flurries at the end of March on the west side of the mountains in the Pacific Northwest? It was a full and wet weekend of them.

Here is a picture my loyal co-pilot took on the way home.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:20 AM
(0) comments

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Muscular and American Rock 'n Roll with no Compromises



Bob Mould's music is powerful, straight forward and muscular rock and roll. There is a lot of agony and stuff of bad relationships in the lyrics and typically a good hook in most of his tunes. There certainly is a level of abandon to his guitar playing especially towards the end of his sets when the energy level has been notched up.

His is not music I tap into my typical regular rotations, but somehow I think Pam and I have seen more Mould live together than any other artist I can think of...I think we have caught five shows over the years in a variety of settings, either with his power trio, Sugar, solo, or even with a backliscreen projection with experimental visuals a few years back at the Aladdin in Portland. Pam liked that last one because we got home quite reasonably early.

We were able to watch Mould wrap up his current tour swing in support of the new album District Line. It was loud and passionate as we expected.

Here is a link to a solo concert streamrecently broadcast through NPR.

And here is a You Tube clip showing Bob's band at work.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:45 PM
(0) comments

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Crumb's Chambers at the Frye



The Frye Museum in Seattle is home to of all sorts of Romantic 19th century paintings. An exhibit of these paintings collected by the Fryes and another noted Seattle art collector of their contemporary, Horace Henry stood alongside in strange and vivid contrast with a retrospective of the world's most noted (and notorious) underground comic book artist, Robert Crumb. The paintings that were in the Frye and Henry exhibit next to Crumb could be looked upon as the sort of the representational remnants of a much well-ordered 19th century, one dipped in Romanticism, not one overwhelmed with impressionism and trappings of 20th century. I couldn't walk away without exploring some questions because of the vast contrast in the two galleries. William Adolphe Bouguereau's pictures of young peasant girls felt less honest and more exploitive than Crumb's blunt explorations of his inner freak.

The Crumb retrospective at the Frye was laid out chronologically. but we first entered the last chamber of the four in the Crumb exhibit, centered with the bizarre yoga position of the She Devil, probably modeled by wife Aline and this turned out to be quite rewarding. This last room of the exhibit consisted of examples of Crumb's work with Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, his portraiture of early American jazz and blues musicians, including an exceptionally well-drafted multi-page strip of bluesman Charlie Patton. And, as always, there were some explorations of his libido and carnal preferences but even probably more Henry Miller on psychoactives than usual.

Since the exhibit was a retrospective approach, there were plenty of examples of the kind of what made him most famous: Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat were there as were collaborations with other Zap! comic artists and later with his wife Aline. Comic art in a gallery setting takes time and close range to consume and appreciate. I found myself reading text but the deep blacks and famous Crumb cross-hatching would stand out so much more vividly than on print and take on a whole other level of impact. a video theatre of a Zap! comic collaboration with the likes of Spain and Speigelman and interview segments available via cell-phone helped give historical context, especially to the formative San Francisco years.

By the last room where we began our observation of Crumbit was quite apparent that a lot of folks who came in from the formal entrance had experienced enough of his twisted world and were glad to leave it, maybe to an even welcome return to sedate portraits and landscapes in the Frye/Henry overview.


I certainly enjoyed the Crumb show, organized and apparently first shown at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, a particularly edgy center for the arts. (Its show on makeshift devices that are made in prisons haunted me for days a couple years back--real heebie jeebie stuff, I assure you)

Yet, the ongoing benefit of the visit to the Frye, was in the Frye/Henry exhibit. It was the first time I had become aware, to my knowledge to Tonalism, brief off shoot of Impressionism predominant by landscape artists in California and elsewhere in the United States. There were just a couple of artists of this style represented, namely Georges Inness and Xavier Martinez, (one of his paintings to the right here) but both made a strong impression on me and this trend or movement of Tonalism is one I wish to expore further. With their emphasis on a particular tone or color, it seemed to me that they were trying to do something that felt like the 35mm predate of messing around with color film stock or various filters. Interesting how an ostensible visit to celebrate the shaking up of art and culture of the 20th century lead to a gateway to an aspect of the art of the 19th. I knew nothing about.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:30 PM
(0) comments

Friday, March 28, 2008

Standing Up through A Rear View Mirror


I encountered some good reviews and interesting press coverage of Steve Martin's memoir Born Standing Up when it came out in time for the holiday season, but didn't think much about it until it appeared on the library's new book shelf. Pam and I had a category of books called "unbooks" that were meta books about a TV show, odd or illegal enterprise, or were written by or about celebrities. The print is usually larger, there is a likelihood of copious illustrations and a couple of hundred pages is generally the max unless it is predominantly illustrations. I had kind of pigeon-holed Martin's look back at his "Wild and Crazy" times to be sitting near Cosby's Fatherhood or other lucky cash-ins by TV stars (Paul Riser, Roseanne, et al.)

But Born Standing Up was a well thought out look at the past, a nice surprise with some seemingly honest revelations, much as Bob Dylan's Chronicles Vol. 1 covered his life and career a few years back. It is the story of how he was seeking an original comedic voice and how fame "fell on me as a by-product." The best of his book is about how he seeks and attains this orignality, which coincided with a time when in the mid seventies, comedy eclipsed Rock and Roll as being the most significant youth megaforce in our culture. And subsequently Martin found himself in front of Aerosmith and Elton John sized audiences. The book also benefits from distance. In the "Beforehand" he talks about how his book feels more like biography than autobiography because it is about someone he used to know, but he has encountered a kind of affection about that person now several decades removed.

Some of his book is not surprising in the world of entertainment biography. He had an emotionally frozen relationship with his father and a mother who enabled it. There is admittedly a storied naturd to his life: ten he started an employment history at a newly opened Disneyland, first selling guide books and then working in the park's magic shops throughout his school years. This was followed by his first professional stage experience at Knott's Berry Farm and the main content of the book laid out in his opening sentences: "I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success."

There are some great stories and remembrances along the way. He writes about his experiences of writing for the Smothers Brothers, the experience of dating Dalton Trumbo's daughter, the importance of school friend John McEuen (of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Fame) and more importantly, John's brother Bill, who nurtured a good part of Martin's career.

I admit it, I read these kinds of volumes for the reflection of zetgeist and good bits of name dropping factoids, gossip even. But there is one little section that stuck to me. He wrote a girlfriend of his resolve to succeed when on a roadtrip to the east coast with a college friend's research project where they encountered Aaron Copland in a house full of men with black thongs(which was later not mentioned between the two, "because like trigonometry, we couldn't quite comprehend it") and later the Museum of Modern Art and the home of e.e. cummings. (Modern art a significant force in Martin's life and cummings an early hero) Anyway he wrote her that I have decided my act is going to go avant garde. It is the only way to do what I want. In modern voice, Martin then adds: "I'm not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make those pronouncements. Through the years, I have learned that there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration." And somehow, I find that inspiring indeed.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:56 PM
(0) comments

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Divas Singin' for Shelter


Renewed interest in Angelique Kidjo led me to this video with her and Joss Stone collaborating on The Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter. It isn't the greatest video or cover produced, but it shows off the styles of these two artists quite well, I think
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:39 AM
(0) comments

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

A Wait In Bruges


In Bruges is an irreverent, funny, and well- executed film. Two hitmen hide out in this medieval Belgian city, which now by virtue of being a title character in a film is now known to the world overnight. The world of In Bruges is a world brought to you post Sopranos and post-Pulp fiction. Hitmen Ray and Ken (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) deal with the mundane and absurd, fishes out of water waiting for their next move in Bruges after a botched job.

Carol Reed's The Third Man is definitely an inspiration on In Bruges. The city is definitely a character in MdDonagh's film as Vienna is in Reed's. And the third hitman in the story, Harry, (Ralph Fiennes) is always referred to but isn't a physical presence in the film until the last reels as was the case with Welles' Harry Lime.

Throw away lines get re-linked later into references and subplot in only the way as they would in a well-crafted play. I mentioned after seeing In Bruges that the film was like a play and was not surprised that the writer-director Martin McDonagh is a kind of 38 year old David Mamet of Ireland. His IMDB biography lists his favorite music is Nirvana, The Sex Pistols and The Pogues and that "his greatest influences are not in theatre but film. He cites Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Terrence Malick and Quentin Tarantino."

Martin McDonagh is also a first time feature director who has already one an Oscar. In a typical hyperlink investigation of the usual suspects, IMDB and Wikipedia, I found that the 2005 Academy Award for best live action short film. Six Shooter is included on the Magnolia collection of short Oscar winners which I had not watched yet, but did at my first available opportunity. Six Shooter mostly takes place on a train and also stars Brendan Gleeson as a very recent widower. What he encounters on that train home is a lot of the same edginess, absurdity, outrageous situations (with accents sometimes of blood and violence) and a kind of line of impropriety that would come from one who cites the likes of Lynch and Tarantino as his biggest influences. And it further solidifies the experience of In Bruges for me.

When one is operating in this territory, this time zone of questionable taste and to some degree barely recognizable mores and reality, (but very well crafted) the results will not be for everyone. Those who tend to visit the works of such artists know who they are. Admirers of the Coen brothers, will probably be down with McDonagh for instance. For others, who knows? A couple hours In Bruges with these characters and coincidences might be a trip worth taking.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:37 PM
(0) comments

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

A war criminal hunting, they will go


With the tight DVD release schedule and the movie studios continuing to pander to 14 year olds, there is an entire range of reasonably good films that end up getting their major access and exposure to their audiences when they are released on DVD. The Hunting Party came and went before I had a chance to see it.

A primary inspiration for this film is a October 2000 Esquire article about journalists from a Bosnia reporters reunion traveling for vacation on the Adriatic being mistaken as CIA looking for Radovan Karadžić. The film does not tell that story so much as use it as a premise for departure. To me it is a convergence of David O Russell's Three Kings and Oliver Stone's Salvador. Richard Gere is the update on Salavdor's James Woods and Terrence Wood takes the Jim Belushi cameraman role, more or less. The ambiguity of the modern political landscape provides the setting much like Three Kings. One of the key elements of the original article that made it to the screen is the concept of the reporters being identified as CIA being in the gray.

Or as the lieutenant colonel in the article said (paraphrased by a counterpart in the movie) said when multiple parties had presumed the journalists to be CIA: "...you should know is that I am with the Light Side. The guys on their way here, the ones taking over this operation, they're from the Dark Side." Another slow, meaningful look around the car. "You all are in what we call the Gray Zone."

Post-war Bosnia was indeed not a black and white issue for the world at large. As Scott Anderson explains in the Esquire article:" For years, NATO governments and the UN had been proclaiming that true peace could never come to Bosnia until fugitive war criminals like Karadzic were caught. At the same time, most had done absolutely nothing to bring that about, fearful of the unrest that might ensue and give the lie to the charade of peace and nation-rebuilding they had created."

And to this backdrop comes a somewhat independent spirited entertainment, and it is entertaining enough not to be dismissed although it teeters on Hollywood Cheese Whiz. What saves it besides the setting and improbable circumstance are a couple nice twists of plot and the likes of Terrence Howard, who I am very much enjoyed in the wacky Outkast speakeasy musical Idlewild and in the gritty southern pimp hop drama Hustle & Flow. I've read also that he does a fine job as Brick in the new Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Richard Gere's deadbeat journalist character wears a little thin. He is deadbeat but mainly because he is haunted by tragic events from the Bosnian war. Oh brother. And Jesse Eisenberg, who played the twerpy teenager in The Squid and the Whale as the network's Vice President in his first adult adventure is pretty grating and tiresome from the beginning. His presence threatens to turn it into "Old buddies and the newbie" movie with his role mainly an excuse for extrapolating the backstory of buddies Gere and Howard.

Yet The Hunting Party is worth one's time. The story moves along well and it is worth to giving writer-director Richard Shepard credit for trying something different with setting and set-up even though some tired conventions and stock characters sometimes threaten to cancel out some of the film's originality.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:00 AM
(0) comments

Monday, March 24, 2008

Aline and the Universal Need for More Love



Aline is a teenager living in a Long Island in the sixties. The only folks she has contact with are Jewish or Italian. Her mother Blabette (name fictionalized from Annette) is ranting at her about her sullenness, caused by her hearthrob Stuie's choice to go out with Trudy Klein, a perfect little blond.

Blabette: Why are you so miserable...Look how beautiful Trudy is!! What a nice boy Stuie is Too...

Aline: I hate their guts! They're stoopid asses!

Blabette: Oh Be quiet...You're just jealous...Why don't you go on a diet & put a smile on your face for a change.

Aline: I can't smile while our country is at war with Vietnam

Much is lost in this passage without the impossibly bright colors,(but you get the idea from the cover reproduction), the text in hand block capitals, and the characters not seen in profile extremis (the pointy cones of the contemporary lingerie quite predominant) Yet one can still see the real truth in that exchange of the teenage experience.

Need More Love is a feast, a celebration and a chance for an artist to claim her due. Aline is going to be forever best known as Robert Crumb's wife. And with that comes weirdness, perceptions of the odd, and a whole lot of baggage. "She stole him away to France!" "He only loves her for her butt, which he helped make famous" "She is a Yoko-like wench who he indulges to have her collaborate with in the likes of The New Yorker!"

The book is heavy and is on heavy stock. Its nearly 400 pages are a bit difficult to handle before falling asleep. What works here is that by using text, scrapbook images, reproductions of her comic work and other art work, an interview with her publisher and a couple brief messages from daughter Sophie and famous husband, something livelier and rather boundless appears than a routine memoir. Spend some time with Need More Love and a frank multi-faceted portrait appears, bluntly honest and ultimately a bit inspirational.

A roughly-hewn illustrated with confessional autobiographical content (e.g. Lynda Barry) is common these days, but back in the early days of underground comics and early feminist comics, Aline's work was highly unusual. It and her derriere caught the eye of R Crumb. The open marriage and artistic collaboration of the Crumbs is one of the central components to her story obviously. I found the excerpts from their Dirty Laundry comics among the most enjoyable in Need More Love.

Through bumpy childhood (was or wasn't father Arnie some kind of mobster), sex and drugathons of the late sixties and early seventies, celebrity wife to one of the quirkiest people on the planet, and domineering expatriate homemaker/artist, Aline comes out a winner. One of the last sections of the book is an interview with publisher Zaro Weil, where she truly comes out as a victorious fifty something more than a survivor, almost a kind of counter culture art moll version of Jane Fonda proud of her body, her family, and her accomplishments. Come 'on Aline! You Go Girl!
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:08 PM
(0) comments

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Soul Deep Sunday


I had a lot of tasks to do down here in the Bob bunker on Easter Sunday and I found the very best video wallpaper for accomplishing the task with VH1 Soul's broadcast of a BBC documentary called Soul Deep.

I came in on the the last twenty minutes or so of the first epsisode which featured the evolution of Atlantic records and Ray Charles up to What'd I Say closing out with absolutely fabulous footage of the Raylettes and the Ray Charles Orchestra with amazing performance with choreographed horn moves and the band seemingly pulling out all stops.

Part Two was entitled The Gospel Highway and primarily featured Sam Cooke. It was framed by recreated footage of that fateful night in the motel and early on showed the classic footage of Cassius Clay and Sam Cooke signaling that a change was gonna come for real. I found this episode intriguing because the story of Sam Cooke is the story I don't know much about that of the gospel highway. This is the holy road version of the chitlin circuit in the east and south where touring acts suffered Jim Crow injustice and were treated by high royalty by their fans. The Soul Deep filmmakers showed some exceptional footage by The Staple Singers, gospel highway contemporaries of Sam Cooke's. It was interesting also to see the story of RH Harris covered. He was the star of the Soul Stirrers who left for a solo career and was replaced by Sam Cooke.

In the episode, Gerald Early emphasized that Sam Cooke certainly was not the first black artist to sing pop music, but he was the first to be able to put "that soulful gospel quality into pop music." But Cooke was headed beyond just recording pop music at the time of his death by the motel proprietess. His recording of Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind with "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" yielded Cooke's response song and final classic A Change is Gonna Come which clearly implies not many more roads and damn soon. The episode ends with another bit of prophesy coming full circle, Aretha Franklin at the piano singing Cooke's first hit You Send Me.

The story of Motown through 1967 was the focus of episode three. There were a couple interesting things going on for me in this episode. One was the contrast between Chicago and Detroit music scenes. And the other was how Berry Gordy and Motown did not issue social material until after the 1968 riots, which also led to the migration of the company to Los Angeles. Love Child was the musical turning point and ends up the hour. I guess I had never considered how heavy those lyrics were.

Episode four was called Southern Soul and emphasized Otis Redding his great collaboration by Booker T and the MGs. The episode also told the story of the other Atlantic Stax/Volt folks such as Sam and Dave and, ov course, Aretha Franklin and how black and whites worked together to create great soul music in the deep south, triumphing on American charts, Monterey Pop, and European tours until their efforts were influenced greatly by the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.

I was going to quit there, but episode five was Ain't It Funky and followed James Brown from Cold Sweat (Pee Wee Ellis tells how it was based on Miles Davis' So What , a fact I did not know) up through the mid eighties collaboration of Afrika Bambatta with "Peace, unity, love and having fun." In between we saw James' fallout from I'm Black and I'm Proud, the funk of Sly and the Family Stone, and Bootsy Collins hooking up with George Clinton and P-Funk. This was one funk-filled hour, to be certain.

I passed on the hip hop to contemporary episode because most of my chores were completed and it would have seemed majorly anticlimatic after a full afternoon of soul pioneers. The website for the series indicates that a DVD is probably not in the works. That's a shame. Meanwhile, one hopes it will cycle again soon on VH1 Soul.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:14 PM
(0) comments

Saturday, March 22, 2008

HD Liebestod


Prelude: I enjoyed last week's HD broadcast from the Met of Peter Grimes so decided to reprise the experience with Tristan und Isolde.

Someday I will write at length how Wagner's work is to opera is similar to what the Grateful Dead is to rock 'n roll. Basically, there is an individuality, an impact and and scope to Wagner that by revolutionary audacity and uniqueness sets it a part. The same can be said of the Dead. The world of Wagner is cast from ancient tales and legends, the Dead from the Americana, music and legends of what Greil Marcus calls "The Old Weird America." I was thinking about this comparison on the way to the movie theater for the telecast and, even more so, when I spotted a derelict looking Dodge van in the parking lot with a "Thanks Jerry" bumper sticker.

I arrived a half hour before show time, and once again, the first twenty rows in the right side and center sections were totally full. The predominantly older audience for these telecasts has no problem it seems showing up at around 8 for a 9:30 morning curtain.

Act One Act one of Tristan und Isolde is not a hard one for me to endure. Basically you have two strong willed women singing at each other for most of it, and in this production, Deborah Voight and Michelle DeYoung are both appealing big boned women with big hair that looks like it was done by a quality rope maker with a medieval recipe. I'm sure another commentator has made the point that if Baranagne had served the death potion instead it would have been like Strauss' Elektra or Salome in terms of length. Instead she gave them a precursor to Ecstasy, which made things a lot messier and more complicated for a while.

Partly to deal with the issues of length and the unique staging of this production, the folks at the Met enlisted an intermittent multi-screen approach wrought with lots of video control board effects. At first it reminded me of the documentary of Woodstock. One technique that was especially cheesy was the center placement of a wide shot with a border, making it look like a post card and zooming (cheapest of all camera "moves") into it. This is the Met? It kind of came off like community access video at times.

Act Two Actually, in this act the video presentation worked best. This production is almost entirely backlit of movie light wattage behind a layer of seamless muslin . The second act consists primarily of the love duet between Tristan and Isolde. The surface of the action for the actors in the second and third act is a large diamond shape platform at a 20-30 degree angle with vertical lines. For their tryst the actors are blue and back lighted silhouettes singing one of the most famous and amazing duets in opera history. Reversed screen angles created some interesting converged compositions of the lines of the platform and the connected lovers as the split screens somewhat matched or contrasted against each other.

Of course King Marke and company come to spoil the love potion party. Although the king's long solo sequence is not as tedious as Wotan in act two of the Valkyrie it certainly is a kind of buzz kill, at least to the somewhat uninitiated.

Act ThreeTristan is stabbed in act two, but takes almost all of act three to die. And here is where another issue came in to play. This act, except for another King Marke bit and the big soprano blow out at the end belongs to Tristan. The performer for the telecast turned out to be a fellow by the name of Robert Dean Smith , one of the last minute substitutions that had to be issued for this stand of Tristan because of Ben Heppner's virus. It was interesting to see him being blocked backstage prior to the curtain being raised on the act. And Deborah Voight in her interview segment confessed to the lack of rehearsal with her Tristans on this run, although she had sung with Smith in the past. So with those conditions you have to give the guy some credit, but he looks like Will Ferrell's younger, stockier brother. In a Wagner opera not everything can be perfect, eh? I try to suspend my thoughts of Rob Burgandy, Ron's brother who anchored TV news in the seventies in Spokane or Wenatchee as I see Tristan unravel towards the final moments of his passionate life.

After the Curtain It felt great to see a Wagner opera after many years. I was far less familiar with Tristan und Isolde than other major works, so that was part of the adventure for me here. I listened to a recording for the week prior by the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Chor des Mitteldeutschen Rundfu (for real!), but one can never really feel prepared well enough for these demanding experiences, especially when you are as occasional a Wagnerite as I am.

Length in Wagner can be overstressed, basically Tristan is three full CDs long with bathroom breaks in between. It was kind of unfortunate that a great early spring day for us coincided with the broadcast, so I took a few minutes to avoid the commotion of hundreds of elders trying to negotiate their cars out of the parking lot and consume the afternoon with a stroll through Holladay Park with the big chord progressions of classic and tragic romance still echoing.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:59 PM
(0) comments

Friday, March 21, 2008

Back at the Beginning Again


Straight Ahead by Brian Auger and the Oblivion Express is an album I have loved for 33 years and still listen to quite regularly. Brian Auger was first a B3 player during the British Invasion years and then helped usher in the jazz rock era in the early seventies. Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry were in his early bands and folks who went on to play in Average White were in the seventies unit, the Oblivion Express.

Straight Ahead came out in 1975 and the personnel is a tight six piece: Brian on a variety of seventies keyboards, Jack Mills on guitar, and Barry Dean on Bass. But its the percussionists who make the difference: drummer Steve Ferrone, Mirza Al Sharif, and another fellow on congas. The album sounds different than anything Auger has produced or in many ways, any other record I have heard.

Side One is what makes this album endure. Opening track Beginning Again is an optimistic product of the times. A quote on the album infers that it was inspired by The Teachings of Don Juan and if you know the seventies you know I'm talking fraud guru and not latin lover here. The quote begins "Nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road." As the song says:

If you can face your fears and make your problems scatter
If you don't win today, It really doesn't matter
But Baby when you do, well brother I'll see you,
Back at the beginning

Also in this tune, Auger takes big fat chords striking and sustaining them like a gong over several measures with lightly executed vocals with tight harmony and cross-rhythms from the the percussionists keep the piece accelerated all the way to the fade away ending I don't think I'll ever tire of.


Then there is Auger's killer B3 work out of Wes Montgomery's Bumping on Sunset. Eleven minutes of the greatest kicking back behind the wheel with no particular place to go ever put on record. There is a version with some vocals on his webpage. that isn't the same but has so much of the same spirit. I especially like the cymbal crashes that sound like standing rain water going into the wheel wells and up onto the curb.

Auger is out there doing it still. His latest Oblivion Express is a family affair. A pick up bass player and his daughter Savannah on vocals and son Karma on drums. I saw them last summer and very much enjoyed their set. When Savannah said "Hit Me Daddy" before Brian launched into an exceptionally tasty solo, I realized that was indeed his daughter although those around me didn't catch the difference in inflection between Daaaady and Daddy. Oh well, you had to have been there.

Here's a bit of Auger and family...

posted by well-executed buffet at 9:16 PM
(0) comments

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Kind Induction at the Waldorf


Pam and I spent our dinners this week working our way through the VH1 telecast of the Rock N Roll Hall of fame. What set it apart from other award shows is that it was presented mostly uncut (with the exception for the cursing, mostly Madonna's as I recall) thus giving the viewer a sense of real time and being at this event with impossible to get tickets for the industry privileged.

The highlights were surprisingly many:

I very much liked the minimalist CSPAN approach to the telecast and wish it would be emulated further. The induction will be broadcast a few more times, hopefully in the same uninterrupted fashion.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:36 PM
(0) comments

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Pizza Bianca and other pleasures


I have a weakness for family run restaurants that serve pizza. It seems to me like money well spent. These come in three different categories, at least in my town. First, there is the place that is the institution. The food is not terribly special but may have nostalgic value and has hosted more little league teams than can be practically enumerated. Then there is the place you pay more for, maybe almost more than a pizza is worth, but you save that for more special occasions and when someone else (like your workplace) is paying. Then there are places in strip malls where the food is better than the nostalgic joint but maybe not as gourmet, but there is the added satisfaction that you are helping a person and their family AND they are helping you get a meal when life has gotten itself into extended mode. Which it is now, which is why I am writing about pizza at a pause in the grade crunch when can we shut this down for a couple weeks for spring break zone kind of week. I'm working my way through a book, a movie and a DVR broadcast and can't seem to get them to the end for my end notes.

So let me then celebrate the Pizza Bianca at Pizza Italiana off of Fourth Plain Blvd. and Stapleton Road. in the little strip cluster next to the Albertson's. They also serve Greek Food and I am hoping to try that some day, but it is always something I notice on the standup board after I have made my order, which almost always is a medium Pizza Bianca.

The Pizza Bianca seems to me just the right amount of mozzarella, chicken, oil, and garlic. I am not a major crust fascist so can't tell you how great it is or not, except that it certainly is better than the place I referred to earlier that hosts all of the little league parties. And the experience of the Bianca seems better than anything you can find at Godfather's Roundtable Hut.

Food is important during the last week of an academic quarter. Whenever I can I convert the final for my project based classes into potluck celebrations. I learned about the pleasures of this from when I collaborated with a Jewish radical women's studies professor from the east coast about a decade back. Having food on the last day seems to make it all worthwhile. Last year one of my students brought some baked salmon that the lab assistants in the building are still talking about today. And I have the great pleasure of having this fellow in my class that is wrapping up later this week. He tells me that there will be a reprise of this dish for the final of the current class, which, it so happens, is scheduled for noon. Even Better.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:35 PM
(0) comments

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Wurman's Curiosity


I was looking for some clips with Richard Saul Wurman and found this Charlie Rose interview broadcast three and half years ago, but the interview was probably earlier. He had just written one of his Understanding books. This time on healthcare.

Wurman has made millions on his curiosity and as Rose states his ability to analyze and simplify things so they can be understood by a wider audience. Wurman agrees "To assuage my curiosity and I'm not very smart so I make these books so I can understand the things that interest me."

Rose: Tell me what we will learn in this book"
Wurman: I can't tell you what you'll learn. I can tell you what I learned from doing it."


Wurman says the blessing of his life is the recognition of how ignorant he is and the desire to learn. "My expertise is in my inabilities." He lives on the charge of going to find the answer.

In his book, Wurman says we know more about how our cars run than how our bodies work. Why is this? He states its because we don't like things that are immeasurable, of which we don't have the exact answers.

Wurman's Information Anxiety 2 and LATCH model have been featured in my class for several years. I have been inspired by his embrace of curiosity, his dedication to finding patterns, and his vision of life as a conversation where we ask good questions.

The Wurman segment on this clip begins at 38 minutes. I am glad we live in a world where you don't have to wait up to 12:10 or 12:40 to see a 15 minute segment you might have some interest in. Shout out to YouTube and the ability to share.

posted by well-executed buffet at 9:51 PM
(0) comments

Monday, March 17, 2008

Colson Whitehead's New York



I'm here because I'm born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you." This is the first sentence from Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York, a collection of thirteen short sketches on New York locations (Port Authority, Broadway, Brooklyn Bridge) or conditions (Rain, Rush Hour). The voices in this book are intimate. The essays feel a bit like jazz solos in the way they set up, explore and extrapolate.

These portrait essays are indeed full of great riffs. "You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now." "Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our lady of Perpetual Subculture." Of Times Square he writes: "Simmer the idea of metropolis until it is reduced to a few blocks, sprinkle in a dash of hype and a tablespoon of woe. Add hubris to taste. Serving size: a lot."

This is a post 9/11 book that doesn't mention that event. It is filled with the internal monologue of how people cope with the city's environment and conditions. It isn't really poetry or jazz or memoir or impressionism, but it includes elements of all of those. Colson probably best defines what the book is on its final page: "Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world."
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:34 PM
(0) comments

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Killing Flies, Cursing, and Slinging Hash


Kenny Shopsin is a volatile, obnoxious restaurant owner in Greenwich Village. I Like Killing Flies is a documentary about him and his restaurant. He has hundreds of items on his menu and is notorious for throwing his customers out for rules of his like never allowing to seat five at a table.

The food is unique. Folks go in and order turkey sloppy joe salads, dishes like "the blisters on my sisters" of which a customer is not sure what it is. "There's a friction that's caused by putting the wrong food in the wrong place. And sometimes it works, but not always" says Shopsin. He and his wife would taste leftover food to see if anything was wrong with it. In the film, the place always seems to be full, mainly with regulars, but sometimes brave tourists, and noted New Yorkers. For instance, Calvin Trillin wrote a big piece about the diner in The New Yorker and appears briefly in the film.

Most of the interviews were done with a lavalier mike with two fingers to the side of the frame. The central drama or conflict (besides stream of vitriol expounded by Shopsin at every turn to his family, employee Jose and anyone else around) was that Shopsin needed to move his restaurant to another location after being embedded in his current location for decades.

Basically this little film is trifle, but an entertaining one, despite the fact it is pretty easy to get tired of Shopsin's rotten attitude towards darned near everybody and everything. Like Joe Gould's Secret, Killing Flies is another story of the unique folk who inhabit various corners of Manhattan.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:57 PM
(0) comments

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Peter Grimes: The view from row HD



The idea of spending a morning in a movie theater watching a satellite broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera sounded intriguing to me. I arrived ten minutes to curtain to find an auditorium three-fifths full that later turned out to look almost exactly like the Met's audience except not as well dressed. The next three and half hours were spent in the somber world of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes in a presentation format not television and not really movies. And certainly not like the experience of being Met itself unless you could roll around on the stage or soar on a crane whenever you wanted to.

The oddball in the fishing village; it is one of my favorite archetype tales and settings. You always someone exceptional fighting tradition, provincial pettiness, and there is always some element of man against nature in it too. Furthermore, Peter Grimes delves into the social-psychological. He is a tortured soul who will be drawn and quartered in a variety of fashions by those around him.

The Borough, the fishing village community where the action takes place in Grimes, is a major character in the opera. The chorus is one two groups of folks that get brutalized in the score of this opera. The other group are the flute players who open with a solo for almost every transition. The Met production doesn't stress the setting of a fishing village with boats and stuff. John Doyle (known for a stripped down revival of Sweeney Todd) instead has rolled the action into what is an absolutely creepy Victorian village of the damned with its residents living in a big three story storefront that reminds me at times of the joke wall in Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In except without the day-glo graffiti. Sock It To Peter Grimes.

It is a lowlight world as murky and grey as that comic on PyongYang the I blogged about earlier. And that was kind of an issue for the HD presentation. The only high lit scene in the whole thing was the very last scene. If I was having problems seeing around this dim set, I imagine a lot of the folks, most of which seemed least 15 years older than myself, were having issues with it too. But when the chorus' character would bloom out at its self-indignant pronouncements on Grimes or once or twice sing with reflection, you forgot you were in a theater of any kind.

I didn't get transformed like that by tenor Anthony Dean Griffey as Grimes. The acting wasn't there and his voice was maybe too pretty. I remember wishing that Phillip Seymour Hoffman was a great tenor. But I have to give Griffey credit, he is filling shoes once worn by Britten's partner, Peter Pears and then Jon Vickers, who made it his signature role for at least a decade. I saw Vickers do Grimes at the Seattle Opera about twenty five years ago. I still recall it as a powerful evening.

It seemed everyone in the theater pulled out a sandwich out of their bags or pockets at the intermission. I'll be sure to do that next time, I smelled a wisp of tunafish salad once or twice. At least, I don't think it was herring.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:42 PM
(0) comments

Friday, March 14, 2008

Quincy Turns 75


See this space soon for my story about meeting Quincy Jones at EMP on his book tour a few years back as well as some other thoughts about another one of the twentieth century's most important creatives.

Meanwhile, let's celebrate his birthday with this very cool track (a full buffet first...I think okay because it is way out of print) of a Q arrangement of Antonio Carlos Jobim's Children's Games from the soundtrack of Harold Robbins' The Adventurers. It begins with one of those big fat Quincy Ironside riffs, has some swinging latin percussion, features Q's trademark use of contrasting instruments (check out the sections where the winds and trombones playing back and forth to each other) and is very much a product of the late sixties with electric piano. This is Ray Brown's big band playing. Could that be Ray on electric bass? Maybe. It was 1969 or 70 and the world was full of people breaking out and making exceptions. You might have to listen to this two or three times to pick up on all that's going on here.

Children's Game

posted by well-executed buffet at 5:15 AM
(0) comments

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Geburtstag



Last year was one of those "milestone" birthdays. And this year big turns of the decades have been observed for others close in my family. So this year kind of feels, well, just about like it would if the planet made another orbit, which it did.

Thanks to lovely wife and all my friends and family, who might encounter these lines, for helping make my life a wonderful experience.

I really didn't intent to blather on in this way. I actually just wanted to write a bit of caption for one of my favorite pictures of all time. What's with my ears here?

posted by well-executed buffet at 9:38 PM
(0) comments

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Kerouac's Birthday



Kerouac could have been 86 today.

Over the years, I have concluded that his work is as polarizing as the bebop that inspires it. One will have either the equipment to decode and swing with that voice or they do not. Dorothy Parker clearly did not in her review of The Subterraneans. And one will never know unless they give it a try. My first encounter was 32 years ago reading The Dharma Bums ready to come home from college. The song took hold and I could see/hear the rhythms that also attracted me to bop and jazz. One will never know if it will work for them unless they try to listen.

Kerouac and the Beats did what Jim Morrison rants about on the Doors first album, first track. They broke on through. I for one am glad I sometimes take the time to circle back through that journey of theirs upon occasion.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:43 PM
(0) comments

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Frank and Steve


To spend some time with anyone who you can truthfully say made an impact in the last half of the twentieth century, especially in a creative field, it is probably worth being that room. And it is particularly satisfying if the subject of your time treats everyone to anecdote, insight, engagement, and they seem to glad to be there. Portland Arts and Lectures' on stage interview between Frank Rich and Stephen Sondheim delivered all of these elements.

The anecdotes were tasty. One involved Katherine Hepburn claiming to the directors of Coco that she couldn't rehearse past 3pm because Sondheim who lived next door was up all night pounding out the score of Company. He also told of two encounters, early in his career and late in Cole Porter's. He told how his childhood mentor Oscar Hammerstein gave him a picture towards the end of his life and inscribed it with "To Stevie, My Friend and Teacher." It seemed that a bottle of wine with Stephen would yield an entire evening's worth of colorful stories. Rich did his best to guide him towards and through some good tales.

His comments about art, musicals, and theater did not stay on a superficial level for very long. The topic of the Sweeney Todd movie came up, of course, and it gave Sondhei opportunity to talk about how film requires a strong narrative drive you don't necessarily need in the theater. Chicago worked because it was based on vignettes. The Tim Burton's recent film was "the most satisfactory version of a stage musical" was because it maintained the style, trying to pare it down to the essentials. He also talked about how some of his best known songs were written during the out of town rehearsal period, Comedy Tonight and Send In the Clowns. He talked about the advantage of writing songs for a show that is cast and being staged, of how you know what you are working with. But he was very careful to differentiate between writing a show for an actor or actress vs. an actor or actress in a particular role. For example, Gypsy was not necessarily written for Ethel Merman. It was written for Ethel Merman in the role of Mama Rose.

The evening was cozy. Both interviewer and interviewee seemed to enjoy themselves and the crowd was pretty much reverential. Rich and Sondheim did a similar kind of interview presentation six years ago at the Kennedy Center, now posted with a video stream. I haven't seen it all the way through, but I'm sure it didn't end like last night did with the crowd singing Happy Birthday for Sondheim's birthday. His 78th will be next week on March 22.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:52 PM
(0) comments

Monday, March 10, 2008

Kiefer hanging out with Rocco & the Boys


A few years back Keifer Sutherland spent his Christmas vacation in Europe acting as catalyst, roadie, celebrity tour manager and big fan for a band on his sideline record label. It was captured on HD video and is an intriguing document on many levels. I don't ever recall seeing a famous person dealing with mundane stuff like trying to find his cell phone. It is kind of refreshing. At one point, filmmaker Manu Boyer asks why he lets him film him in such uninhibited fashion doing such stunts as diving into a Christmas tree. "I'm not sure." Later he tells about a phone call to his mother that he made a few days earlier "Have fun but remember now you're 39." And in the next scene he is getting a tattoo.

The title of this film and the inscrption of Keifer's new tattoo (in Icelandic runes) is I Trust You To Kill Me
 It is also a song written and performed by the other key subject in the film, Rocco DeLuca, a very intense musician who plays electrified dobro. Rocco and his band, The Burden, pull out a kind of from the heart highly emotion-laden piedmont blues seasoned rock and roll. By the end of the film, I found myself liking this band a fair amount. There is a Ben Harper like audience for Rocco and the Burden out there, and Sutherland is out there trying to find their audience, first in Japan on a 24 promotional tour (on the bonus features of the DVD) and then to Europe during Christmas through New Years with the band.

We see the band in London with an audience who don't really respond to Rocco's music. Then there is a wild night in Dublin, where a 20 Euro cover has Sutherland worried that no one was going to show up, so arranges for a free show that turns out to be quite a success. And then to gigs in Iceland and Berlin.

There are some annoyances in the film, like falling back on the film crew waking folks up in their hotel rooms, but I Trust You to Kill Me moves along nicely and you get a sense that this is more than Keifer with a vanity project, it is something he believes in and, why not? We all have daydreams about the kind of autonomy financial well-being and recognition might bring us. And it is also rather nice to see that even one of the most recognized people in the world gets a little extended. He can always find his charger, but has no clue where cell phone, or his wallet might be.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:42 PM
(0) comments

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Recipes for Randomized Playlists


Yes. It was inevitable. The first spinoff of the Well Executed Buffet. Recipes for Random Playlists will appear as a series of posts in the buffet and will result in a spinoff blog or splog. This branch dedicated to sharing and analysis of what has worked and not with the science art form known as random playlists. In other words, what makes a good earbud or party mix.

Lillian's Party Mix
Setting: Dinner with family with catered everything at a hip location
Mission: To create a complementary buffet of the ears to go with the one for the tastebuds
Strategy: Standards, Bossa, Bossa with Standards, Vibraphone Jazz, Creed Taylor when he was good.

Contents
Antonio Carlos Jobim and Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim
The classic Carlos Jobim bossa novas on this one with the chairman, but he isn't hanging out at Carnival with Black Orpheus. This one is swinging to Rio while mixing drinks at the Capitol Tower. And for this setting Claus Ogerman strings actually kind of work.

Antonio Carlos Jobim
Stone Flower
The album known as most unique to itself in the Tom Jobim catalog. Lots of artists had departure records in the early seventies. This one paid off. Creed Taylor enlisted Deodato, Joe Farrell and Ron Carter. It truly is a timeless record

Classical Jazz Quartet
Only selections from the Bach and Rachmaninov. There will be no Nutcracker at Lillian's party even if it is played by Kenny Barron, Stefon Harris, Louis Hayes and, who else, Ron Carter.

Marian McPartland and Henry Mancini
Mancini solo piano doing the hits. A duet on Days of Wine and Roses is especially impressive. Marian plays stride while Hank invents new Mancini licks right before our ears. No spoken segments where she reminisces about the Hickory House.

Julie London
Only spare arrangements and strings incidental. No gleeclub sounding Mitch Miller choirs here please.

Freddie Hubbard
No long winded First Light or Red Clay jams at Lillian's party. Instead covers of the Godfather and Betcha By Golly Wow. And a Here's That Rainy Day done at a CTI Jazz Festival tour date with Stanley Turrentine, Hubert Laws, Hank Crawford, George Benson, and others, including, of course, Ron Carter.

Sammy Davis with Laurindo Almedia
Sammy Sings and Laurindo Plays
Its just the two of them solo. This one was the surprise of the night. For some reason this sounded great in the acoustics of a teacher's lunchroom. Sammy's voice is undeniably great on this record. Its almost enough to forget about him hugging Nixon.

The Jack Wilson Quartet featuring Roy Ayers
Ramblin'
This is very cool record. Ayers' phrasing and solos are terrific. Their versions of Stolen Moments and The Sidewinder are swell. But what makes it an incredible mid-sixties milestone is the three part suite of the soundtrack to The Sandpiper including a great lead by Ayers on, what else, The Shadow of Your Smile.

I thought the mix turned out good. I had it Ipod and, but the IPod jack didn't work. Plan B. The CD five disc changer more or less worked after I checked it for Christmas music. CDs prevailed this time.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:32 PM
(0) comments

Saturday, March 8, 2008

New Camera Trial Run


A most full day. Family and preparations for a significant gathering.

Today there are no written observations. Instead, I offer up
a link to my first Flick'r set, the first time out with a digital camera I received for my birthday.

Peace.

posted by well-executed buffet at 10:22 AM
(0) comments

Friday, March 7, 2008

Lives After The Fire


A good thing about DVDs, Netflix, and cable, is that they can give a mid-budget, high and/or well-intented and executed dramas a second life outside of their initial run. Things We Lost In The Fire is the story of navigating sudden widowhood. Halle Barry is left with two adorable moppets, and a beautiful house. But she chooses also to involve her husband's junkie best friend (Benicio Del Toro) into her landscape of grief. Why did she do this? To get closer to that part of her husband (David Duchovny) that she couldn't be a part of?

Danish Suzanne Bier has directed a dozen films, but this is her first production in the US. She is not afraid of the extreme closeup. There must be at least a dozen or so times that the frame is filled with nothing but eyeball, lips or fingers. She also uses a lot of mise en scene master shots, especially in the NA meeting sequences to show addicts trying to cope with their addictions and transitions. There is a confidence and competence in her direction that is one of the elements that keeps this film from being a grittier version of a Lifetime movie. (Of which there is actually a joke included in the film)

Another big asset is the film is the acting. Particularly Del Toro who is introduced in a scene where the bald goofy stock character neighbor bums a cigarette from him and then throws it away when he is given the stink eye from his wife. Benicio bends down and scoops up what's left of the smoke in a junkie sweep that speaks loads about the character, his discomfort with his setting and situation.

I could do some trashing about a flaw here or some phoniness there, but it would detract from the best way to interact with this film, which is to just ride with it because there is some exceptional acting, especially from Del Toro and some great moments of emotional truth of lives that have fallen off the tracks and are looking to get back en route beyond loss and accept the good in the process. There are certainly lamer ways to spend a couple hours and I'm not just talking about movies on Lifetime.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:35 PM
(0) comments

Thursday, March 6, 2008

King Solomon's Soul Mines


There is a great little BBC documentary on Solomon Burke called Solomon Burke: Everybody Needs Somebody. Most of the world doesn't know a whole a lot about Burke. He is undeniably one of the world's great Soulmen. I saw him at Waterfront Blues in 2001, the same year he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I recall being quite impressed with Burke's stage show, a man with big girth who took full control. I recall a fair amount of instrumentation, some great women back up singers and of course, his cape and throne. But mostly there is the voice, clear, forceful and full of what we call soul, as only can come from those who were best in God's gospel who came on over and talked about other forms of love as well.

What follows are some random notes about Burke, sourced and inspired primarily by my screening of the BBC documentary
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:04 PM
(0) comments

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Neither Pipe Nor Graphic Design Nor Website


Tyler Sticka is a young, accomplished and highly energetic interactive designer, illustrator and web designer. He gave a presentation called "This is Not a Graphic Design" that was almost overbrimming at DevGroup NW, a user group for the web, graphic, and interactive community that Brad Smith has organized and maintained for over a decade now.

In a little over an hour, Sticka gave an expansive view of why web design is not art nor graphic design. But, fret not, realizing that gives the web practitioner new opportunities and power. He worked through the possibilities that one has by paying attention to web safe fonts, formats, conventions, and accessibilty, having parenthetic discussion on each at a rapid pace.

But most significant for me was that he used this as an opportunity, not just to talk about basic web trends, but some really big ideas, as could be evidenced by his allusion to using Rene Margritte's painting The Treachery of Images with its famous "This is not a Pipe" captioning. In the digital world, that proclamation even engages more discussion. Or as Sticka pointed out during his presentation. This is a digital scan of an image in an acrobat document of a painting of a pipe that is not a pipe. More than a word or mind game, this description for me is another reminder of our world of digital artiface.

Additionally, Sticka talked about the nature of Apollonian vs. Dionysian art, the model inspired by Nietzsche as a way to contrast the controlled and formal vs, the dynamic changing. He also talked about how photography took the role in art as the representational and gave opportunity for all of the great movements and discussion in art: impressionism, cubism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism, and pop art.

It was great to see this young dynamo go for it, giving his world view of art and design and web with rapid fire delivery. I am grateful for his reference to social design interactive designer Joshua Porter whose site I checked out after the lecture. Porter's Five Principles to Live By will likely be shared with my students on numerous occasions in the future. This is obviously someone who dines at the same table as Sticka.

And I kind of think Sticka and I also are likely to head back for seconds or thirds at the buffet. Check out this excerpt from his News and Archives section at his website where he discusses Sergio Aargones and departs into some additional musings:

"What do cartooning and animation in visual entertainment, modernism in art and design and rock and roll in music all have in common? All three respect a conversational view of art and communication."..."Conversational artworks are those possessing enough elements to interest, inform and/or enlighten the viewer, but with enough mystique that the audience might impart their own experiences and insight."

One more note about the evening in the Cascade campus of Portland Community College's new lovely auditorium. At about 7:15 it was announced we would be interrupted for an active shooter lock down drill. My first! The lights went down and a three or four descending note alarm softly repeated itself for several minutes while a slide of a woman in full shrieking mode fretting over browser standards (from Sticka's presentation) still stayed on the screen. One of the students who accompanied me described the alarm tone as being somewhat soft and soothing but annoying. It seemed interminable. After it was over Sticka resumed his speech by remarking shooters have a longer attention span than he did.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:05 PM
(0) comments

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

A Wild Clear Vision


A binary of art, especially film, is that there is that which not only connects but stays to linger with the recipient, and that which does not. Then there is the added mystery of what connects with some receivers and not others. And lastly, there are the issues of form and content. How something is being told, performed or presented can be a major factor on what sticks to the recipient.

All of this is what is floating with me after viewing Sean Penn's Into the Wild. This is a film that has connected with a lot of viewers, critics included. And I was a bit surprised to the degree I became attached to it. I don't think it has as much to do with the story of the rejection of parents and society and the naive promise that this young man's destiny lies in the wildest of the wild. That content is of interest, and I now look forward to my Christmas gift Krackauer's book. But what impressed me most here is the structure and form of the narrative and vision that Penn applies to the story.

It is not simply flash back and flash forward. I see Penn taking Chris McCandless' life and holding it up like a serpent before slicing it up into chunks of narrative to show measure of this young man and how he ended up as he did. He builds it with a series of prologues, five named chapters each of which is linked thematically with the narrative of his time deep north living in a now famous abandoned bus. There are too many montages with Eddie Vedder music along the way for my taste, and the helicopter and crane shots become a bit conscious of themselves. But it is impressive to witness such a clear even audacious artist's vision, especially in this day of megasameness, a world McCandless was retreating from.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:01 AM
(0) comments

Monday, March 3, 2008

Paul Auster and an Inner Life on film



The Inner Life of Martin Frost is obviously a personal project for author (and filmmaker) Paul Auster meditating on the possibility of muse and the nature of art and inspiration. The setup: a writer alone in the refuge of a friend's house wakes up with a beautiful foreign woman who has great teeth. From the very beginning her "reality" seems a bit questionable, but Martin, of course, falls in love with her anyway.

I've read a little bit of Auster and loved Smoke and Blue in the Face a few years back. Martin Frost has a kind of simplicity and spareness with four actors but feels too far stretched for a full ninety minutes. The second half has a bunch of flashback sequences and Eeek! a montage of lots of images of blue skies and tree tops, the stuff of student filmmakers.

Auster isn't afraid of being a bit unorthodox and plays with form a bit. There is a great little voice over segment where he illustrates the structure and trajectory of stories with a line drawn animation. There is another where the manual typewriter Martin uses is suspended in space. And Martin's (David Thewlis) encounters with Claire, his muse, played by Irène Jacob, in the second half are handled with a lovely startling tone that brings the viewer to attention.

Michael Imperioli who played Christopher in the Sopranos plays Jim Fortunato, the local handyman with some of the same goofy infectiousness he gave his mobster character when pursuing his Hollywood dream. Auster's daughter Sophie, also shows up towards the end of the film and gets a chance to display her fine singing.

The world sometimes needs pleasant little movies that don't seek to change anything or get too majorly ambitious in approach. I know some folks that would hate Martin Frost and point to its awkwardness, but it is better than most alternatives to be found with a remote. I can see it popping up on IFC, Sundance and on late night premium cable networks for years to come.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:23 PM
(0) comments

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Schroeder's Fog of Verges


I am trying to find a word for the experience of being both simultaneously fascinated and unsettled because that is my response to Barbet Schroeder's documentary, Terror's Advocate. The subject is Jacques Verges, a lawyer who has represented terrorists and those charged with crimes against humanity for fifty years. "I'd even represent George Bush, if he pleaded guilty."

One acquires a kind of emotional memory when exposed to more unique films. The emotion I had here with Terror's Advocate is much like I had during Errol Morris and his film on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. The familiar feelings similar are due, I believe because both filmmakers had an exclusive, a scoop with lengthy interviews with significant historical figures. In Fog of War, there was a sense that this was about as confessional and intimate as we could expect this controversial figure to be. It had the framework of the "eleven lessons" to keep things from becoming too unwieldy.

Schroeder's film on Verges does become a bit unwieldy and its subject more evasive than McNamara. There is so much here, it should probably have been a mini series instead. And unlike Fog of War, Terror's Advocate devotes a quarter to a third of its screen time to interviews with associates, historians, etc. which help to expand and balance the obvious spin and evasiveness that Verges puts on his life and work.

It focuses in on three major aspects of his life. First, is the Algerian revolution and the trials associated with it. He defended and later married Djamila Bouhired, one of the cafe bombers in Algiers immortalized in the Pontecorvo film and later a political martyr, thanks to Verges' publicity campaign. A second portion of the film deals with Verges' disappearance during most of the seventies and speculation associated with it: Was he in deep with the Khmer Rogue with his school pal Pol Pot? Was he associating with Waddi Haddad and other founders of the Palestinian movement? Or the Nazis associated with Palestinian movement ? Or just trying to avoid being killed Congolese for his association with Patrice Lumumba's alledged assasins? What kind of life has this guy led?

The third part of the film continues to illustrate his defense and association with the Carlos the Jackal, Iranian terrorists, and others til it rolls to a halt after nearly two and half hours. The latter third of the film does seem to get bogged down by a new variety of talking heads expanding and countering Verges' account of things.

A Buffet premise is that non-fiction film can have a special impact to make a viewer think and see differently about the world. Schroeder and Verges have done just that. It would be intriguing to view Terror's Advocate or hear feedback from someone who lived in Europe during part of Verges' career. I can't think of an American counterpart in the courts who was so ubiquitous with such a long and significant period of history--F. Lee Bailey, William Kunstler?
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:49 PM
(0) comments

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Milos Forman Presents History in Goyavision


I know the buffet seems to be quite full of film commentary lately, but there have been lots of very intriguing titles released recently and so we return to the view from the futon..

One of the premises that comes up in this blog is that troubled uneven art by talented and even great artists are still generally worth observing and interacting with. In fact, I maintain one would be hard pressed to see anything near the merit of a film like Goya's Ghost on a commercial television network. Just to see the lighting and recreations of Goya's paintings is probably worth the time.

This is a film with problems. Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgard) is not presented as tortured soul, but as painter of kings who is not compromising to his subjects, his art, or to the fact he has made a decent life for himself. The audience doesn't get too close to him. The real character in this film is the duplicitous and vain Brother Lorenzo, played by Javier Bardem, a priest of the inquisition later turns into a promoter of the French Enlightenment in the way that somehow reminds me of Art Alexakis' conversion from quasi country to marketable alternative grunge after Kurt Cobain broke on through (whatever the party calls for.) Ines, played by Natalie Portman portrays Goya's muse, is the third party in this tale, tortured by the inquistion, raped by Lorenzo and in final acts looking like Fantine from Les Miserables looking for Cosette. In fact, Ines is looking for her daughter Alicia, who Portman also plays. Goya is called upon by the others to fix, to introduce, to make things happen, partly because he is comfortable both as painter of kings and among the Spanish rabble.

The film presents both inquisition era and Napoleonic Spain and shows both to be horrific. It is also interesting to see how Goya's deafness is portrayed with signed interpreter, especially at significant meetings. Forman always intends to give the audience an experience and frankly, I recall Amadeus being a little loose and messy in some ways as well. I'll take messy and not quite on the mark over mundane and routine any day if an artist is trying to do something and their aim is high and effort seemingly sincere.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:25 PM
(0) comments