Friday, October 31, 2008
A Year of Posts
A year ago, my wife was going to start her second year of participation with Nablopomo or National Blogging Post Month. I had opened the blog a few weeks earlier with accounts of InfoCamp but the challenge of posting every day, which instead has turned out to be a post for every day has turned out to be a definable and maybe even significant component of this last year.
I don't see an end in sight. I hope that my impressionistic musings of films, tunes, places and events will continue in this blogspace. Thanks to everyone who has checked in at some time during the past year. Peace Out.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:10 PM
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Thursday, October 30, 2008
Kay R. Marczynski, One of the Great Citizens of Clark College
Today's post is a tribute to Kay Marczynski. I encountered Kay at Clark when I was exploring ed degree transfer options at the school in the mid eighties. I would meet with her from time to time when she oversaw operations at the tutoring center. She was incredibly encouraging about my returning back to school after seven or eight years of languishing in the service sector. She clearly loved the college, English, and being involved in education. She was in the final stages of her Master's program at Reed and she made coming back to college as a working adult seem like a real possibility. She had this uncanny ability to proctor exams, while simultaneously juggling shift changing tutors and seemingly give me her full attention.
As I explored a degree and a certificate option at Clark, while considering transfer, Kay transitioned from tutoring center director to English instructor. I had staffed on the Phoenix literary magazine and Kay inquired about that experience and very much seemed to value my insights from that experience as she was planning to become the advisor in Fall 1988. I believe it was sometime during these years when there was a terrible fire at their home and in its aftermath, her husband Lynn was being treated at the hospital that I worked. I would bump into Kay from time to time as she came in for visits. I felt privileged to be able to show her some of the same kind of kindness and concern when she came to my workspace that she had in her interactions with me at Clark.
In the twenty two or so years I have been associated with Clark College, I have developed this belief that there are individuals who work there who are truly citizens of the college. They are more than employees and they fully believe in interacting and helping others as well as giving you the real deal about who they are and what they believe. Kay was truly one of these folks. It was truly sad to hear she died earlier this week.
I have more or less thought about Kay every time I finish a meal at a Chinese restaurant. She took me out for a lunch on my thirty third birthday. Of course there was a couple of cookies when the bill came. don't remember what the fortune was. But I do remember Kay watching me read the message and ask me "Did it preach at you?" Now, I hope that memory will be with me with every crumb that hits a table whenever I break open a fortune cookie.
Kay's Obituary at The Columbian
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:35 PM
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
There is No Such Thing As Too Much Jilly From Philly
Here is Jill Scott, one more once on the Buffet living her life like it's golden, exercising her freedom from an old Ellen clip. This woman is as one of her albums exclaims the Real Thing. I think Golden is probably the best song of this decade so far. And that her energy is the absolute bomb.
And here are a couple more versions. The real reason I am f these here is for the easy access when I need that extra lift. This tune NEVER fails to deliver. Have mercy Give thanks and praise.
This last version from a homecoming show in Philly positively explodes!
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:14 PM
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Lou Reed's Berlin Revisited
Berlin was one of Lou Reed's third solo album, a dark, moody concept album he released after the success of Walk on the Wild Side. In the winter of 2006, he performed it at St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in collaboration with his friends painter/filmmaker Julian Schnabel and musical reconstituting visionary Hal Wilner. Last spring the film Schnabel's film of those concerts made the rounds of the film festival circuit and now it has been released on DVD.
The result is a bit of a film and at times a pretty strong performance film. But what really makes it come alive is the level of performance by Reed and his band. The jams in these numbers really come alive. Reed stated in a recent Rolling Stone interview that his heart is in more free-form improvisational rock shows, and we get some glimpses of that in the DVD performance of Berlin. Guitarist Steve Hunter has been around for a long time on albums of Reed, Meatloaf, and Peter Gabriel and others. His solos and jams with Reed are absolutely stunning at times in this performance. Other long time collaborators of Reed's such as bassists Rob Wasserman and Fernando Saunders and drummer Tony Smith are kicking it hard.
Schnabel did the set design for the St Ann's show. There is projected film by his daughter of Emmanuelle Seigner as Caroline, one of the album's primary characters. Additionally there is some cool footage of floating furniture by Alejandro Garmendia and some great worsted paint-on-film abstractions which I always have a weakness for. This is no unplugged performance of a orchestrated album. The performance consists of a brass section and strings and the Brooklyn Youth Choir are on hand. As is soul singer extraordinaire Sharon Jones and transgendered singer Antony, whose affectations have always been a bit much for me, but I can see why he appeals to Reed and a lot of other folks. I'll stick to Jimmy Scott.
Lou's delivery of the title song reminded me of Chet Baker, behind the beat and phrasing it just his own way, individual and distinct. He takes charge of his material and the story he is going to tell us here right from the outset. But most importantly, one gets the feeling that this is not a re-creation of an album, but a vital performance of one of the significant touchstones in Reed's canon. They also took it on the road to Europe. He could have toured this show for a good long time. But in Rolling Stone he said "If you didn't see it then, you won't see it. But the DVD is really good."
It is pretty good with some moments exceptional. One of the best of these is the delta blues section of Oh, Jim ("when you are looking through they eyes of hate, woo woo") which has a kind of genuine looseness to it, especially in the guitar jams and when Reed shouts out to Sharon Jones to throw down a couple of solid Woo Woos before the song breaks back to the contemplative section where Carolyn asks "Oh Jim, why could you treat me this way." Then there is the climatic intensity of Sad Song. Schnabel intercuts shots of accompanying singers the brass, and all of the other stage happenings of full orchestral rock, which like the Berlin album is a product of the seventies. But the final word before the sound of flutes come in is Lou's guitar solo with just the right note and roughness to counter the angelic voices of the youth choir.
I have always believed that great artists sometimes possess the ability to have their fingers on the pulse of the world. In Rolling Stone interview Reed says, "Did you watch the VP debate? What [Palin] was saying was unthinkable. This is probably as dangerous a person as exists. You thought it couldn't get worse than Bush. Well, guess what?"
With less than a week to go prior to the election, the line from his Berlin album thirty four years ago feels very prophetic: "Men of good fortune often cause empires to fall." Let's just hope that the next week's election will not bring us another man of good fortune who could possibly seal that deal.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:31 PM
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Monday, October 27, 2008
Note on Season Two of Mad Men
I just got through watching the episode 13 second season finale of Mad Men. The tone of this season is different and I believe that part of that is because Matt Weiner and company cover a contrast and shift in time from the first one. This season begins on Valentine's Day 1962 and ends in late October at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The times were not so lush and filled with overload abandon during 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election timeframe territory of the first season.
It believe the second season is a little darker. It contains plot cul du sacs in about half of the episodes. These explorations show you some aspects of the characters, often Don's team at Creative. Sometimes they are expanded upon or referred to, but quite often they are never seen or mentioned again. There certainly were elements of this in Season One, but it seemed more pronounced in the second thirteen.
But if it is darker this time out it is a darker shade of gray, as in business suits and navigable ethical ground. I get frustrated with some of these characters: Don and Betsy Draper, Peggy Olsen, and, definitely, Roger Sterling and Pete Campbell. They can make me cringe and want to start playing with paperclips on my desk. Yet that should indeed be seen as a sign of a strong connection with these characters. As with the world of the Sopranos, where Weiner apprenticed, the denizens of Sterling Cooper fascinate, beguile.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:55 PM
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Sunday, October 26, 2008
Drumgasm
Gene Krupa Vs Lionel Hampton Vs Chico Hamilton
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:47 PM
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Saturday, October 25, 2008
Theban Blues
I didn't think I'd be interacting with Sophocles this weekend. But I found out that my best option for attending one of my colleague's classes this week was going to be on Antigone day. I actually read Antigone in this very same class twenty years ago and saw a production at the NW Service Center when some local theater company would coordinate one of the plays at pretty much the same time as the Greek Festival. Still they were very foggy fuzzy memories and I want to be on my toes tomorrow with at least a remote familiarity with the material.
Horray for Theatre in Video. If you are a Clark instructor or student, or have access to another subscribing library, this is very much worth checking into. I have plans to view many classic theater productions, many of which were the signature television productions such as the George C Scott production of Andersonville or Lee J Cobb in Death of a Salesman.
I would venture that more people in our modern era are most acquainted with the 1984 Don Larson BBC Thebes Cycle than any other production. The setting and costuming has mainly a 19th century noble feel to it. I found myself being captivated especially by the staging and near musical intonation in the performance of the chorus in Oedipus the King and Antigone. This bit of direction alone is worth watching these plays again. The chorus of Oedipus at Colonus are not as dynamic and their costumes look more like Conan Doyle/Horror movie village outerwear, but the production feature the stellar performance of Anthony Quayle as Oedipus. Other performances such as John Shrapnel's reoccurring role as Creon and Claire Bloom as Jocasta, notorious mother-wife in Oedipus the King.
A few weeks back I wrote about the 1984 BBC production of Oppenheimer. Here again, the acting and the fidelity to story transcend the studio presence and the state of video of the times. Yet the practice of layering a complex musical score almost at equal volume with the actor's speech gets quite distracting. This was a practice of the times. Fassbinder used it excessively in Berlin Alexanderplatz and I could probably think of some other examples as well. But such complaints are quite minor, this is quality stuff and it is quite a lovely experience to be able to watch and experience these plays.
I started with Antigone since the class I was going to observe would be discussing it. Antigone is the original heroine who is driven by a higher order and it is played here by Juliet Stevenson. Her sister cautions her from their lower station of women that her mission to bury her brother against decree is ill fated. "When you are powerless, wild gestures and heroic gestures are reserved for madmen." But she is in full effect in passion almost at a point of no return from the outset.
Creon's stubborn hubris, also another course to no return is filled with great lines. Some made me smile such as his line to Haemon "God help the lovesick fool that marries a dominating woman." But mostly his steadfastness lead me to feel a kind of cringing frustration such as when Teiresias in the classic execution by John Gielguld exclaims "Is there anything more stupid than a stupid man who can not see his own stupidity."
One great tragedy deserves another and another, so I dropped in on the other plays. Oedipus the king felt a bit like over treaded ground, the story is so a part of our culture, but still this director/translator and cast were able to make it feel like not all had been explored, the focus on one of its most endearing themes, fate vs.freewill.
But it is Oedipus at Colonus that most captured my attention. Freewill vs. fate was still on the lips of Oedipus during his wandering years, but it was the cultural clash, the political intrigue, and the insightful discussion about mortality and life's meaning that made it seem most contemporary. To what degree that was impacted by seeing material I had not encountered before, or seeing it third after the effects on Antigone or cause with Oedipus the King, regardless, it felt I had come to some kind of journey's end. And indeed I had through one of the great yarns of legacy known to man.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:49 PM
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Friday, October 24, 2008
Wall-E at my childhood theater
I decided to walk down to the Kiggins and see Wall-E in a screened presentation while I still could. The DVD and Blu-ray will be out in a couple of weeks just in time for holiday gifts and placating munchkins in TV lounges while the grownups engage in seasonal cheer. I don't know what it is about Disney or Disney/Pixar that brings out the cynic in me. But that was chilled somewhat because the fact of the matter is that about half of Wall-E is some of the coolest stuff I have ever seen in the movies.
Wall-E is the Omega droid both doing his work and collecting cultural artifacts from an Earth prior to obliteration. The first forty minutes reminds me of City Lights somehow. It is a classic silent film where you strike empathy with the droid and the strange bot from another planet. But it is the care and attention to making this world that is most impressive. The abandoned city scape in Wall-E is unlike a any abandoned post apocalyptic setting I have ever witnessed in the cinema or any other art form. I would have liked if they could have stayed there and not gone on their rescue mission.
I attended a session at Siggraph this summer where they talked about the careful approach in bringing the conventions of modern live action camerawork and lighting to this CG setting, even to replicating lens flare and other artifacts exclusive to filming in the real world. That level and care is so evident in the first two reels of Wall-E. The set pieces of Wall-E's curio collection, looking like a post nuclear version of antique nostalgia store, of the two droids roaming the planet during Louis Armstrong's recording La Vie en Rose impressed me of a time and place that I had never seen.
But then there was the second half of the film which leads me to a theory that computer generated CGI is better when it is hard light and edges vs. furry or round like the inhabitants of the space ship Axiom. With the exception of a lovely ballet where Wall-E is propelled by a fire extinguisher and a subplot parody of 2001, I found the second half of the film to be fairly superfluous. Why is there always this big surge of chase crash energy in one of these films towards its finale?
The gender of the characters was kind of an interesting departure. Wall-E does not come off as male to me, maybe because his trash compacting delivery was a little like birth in its motions. And Eve was not immediately recognizable as a feminine entity, just weird. It might have been too brave for them not to play love games with these bots, but that might have been more interesting. Maybe they would have just come off as gay and we couldn't have that with lead animations in a family pic could we?
Half a great picture is better than all of a good or ordinary one, so I didn't think the evening was a bust. How could it be when the music before the film was Pet Clark's Downtown, which reminded me of forty years ago or so and thereafter. And of how many Disney animated features I have seen in this room, including a revival of Fantasia, which had some sequences as bold and visually impressive (Tocatta and Fugue, Rite Of Spring, Night on Bald Mountain) as the first forty minutes of this latest success.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:48 PM
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Thursday, October 23, 2008
Meta Marco! A documentary on Italian director Ferreri
A bonus feature on the first disc in the recently released Marco Ferreri is a feature length film about the director called Marco Ferreri: The Director who Came from the Future is the subtitle, and a formidable one at that. It is explored by the various actors, directors, and screenwriters who were peer to his peers. There are multiple interpretations and expansions on this theme. Some of his films do have a futuristic theme, but he also early saw the future of the suburbs, and social trends such as feminism were featured in Ferreri's work a bit ahead of the curve. Although it is complicated by his own admission that he is 50% feminist and 50% misogynist.
One can dispute if he came from the future or not, but certainly that he had a sharp eye. A 1960 film, El Conchcito, was about priveleged elders in disability carts which we now call scooters. A motivating idea behind that film Ferreri is that "The fate of all westerners that they would not walk anymore." At another point in this film documentary directed by by Mario Canale Fererri states: "An Idea is never born, it is mixed. There is always a link with reality. Every reality has something that precedes it and something that comes from it"
The Director who Came from the Future focuses in on Ferreri's processes as well as accomplishments and bigger than life personality, mainly through dozens of interviews with his former collegaues and with the Italian media over the decades he worked as a director. From his latter years (he died in 1997) there is quite a lot of footage on the set on various productions. Interestingly enough, there is no exploration of his private or personal life except for a brief discussion of his parental roots.
Several of the folks in the film refer to Ferreri as an anarchic filmmaker. And it is perhaps this characteristic that reminds me, even with the very limited viewing I have done of his work, of Robert Altman, who was able to create decades of his individualistic, against-the-grain cinema with a lot of range, but always at least a little bit devoted to mixing it up, to being anarchistic. For instance, MASH is one of the most anarchic of movies in both its content and temprament.
Ferreri stood up to censors, at a time they were lively and had some power in Italy and in the European film community. He replied to Cannes Jury head Ingrid Bergman's distressed review of La Grande Boufee (aka Blowout) where she said it was a punch in the stomach with "Why not give people a punch in the stomach?" A telling detail is that one of Ferreri's first projects was with other noted second wave Italian directors (after Rosselinni and DeSica) to create a film version of a literary magazine with the likes of Antonioni. It was intriguing to me that his first effort in film was to address a new and unique format for the cinema outside of the traditional feature.
It is notable that the biggest of international stars from the sixties to the eighties were featured in Ferreri films. The stars of Le Grand Bouffe and Don't Touch the White Woman (Marcello Mastrioni Michel Piccoli, Philipe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi) were four of the biggest box office draws in the world when those films were made. Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Christopher Lambert, Claudia Cardinale, Ingrid Thulin, and Roberto Benigni were featured in his films at one point or another. But it was Rafael Azcona, screenwriter and collaborator first of the early Spanish films where he made his name. Ferreri in the film refers to the "grotesque humor of Azcana." And Azcana talked about how working with Ferreri was a joyful act in itself and getting paid was just a bonus in his eyes.
Ferreri made films in the US, Spain, and France. In the documentary he rants and rails against American film excesses, the nine-ten months it takes to get a film edited, the fact that there is no script shittier than an American script. At one point he talks about he doesn't expect perfection working for Italians adding that in America film is a job and a profession. One wonders what degree of seriousness intended when he says: "I'll go where the money is I take the money and I spit in the plate they give me."
The Director who Came from the Future convinced me to continue to work through the contents of the Ferreri box set along with anything else that comes along. He is a unique filmmaker that doesn't fit in necessarily and consistently with art house sensibilities that get foreign films in our theaters but he isn't exactly mainstream either.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:47 PM
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Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Dottie Got Spanked: Interesting Artifact of Todd Haynes
I have thought a lot about Todd Haynes in the past week since seeing him in discussion with Scott McDonald. Anyway, I think that he is now kind of the David Bowie of filmmaking. I could write a whole essay, hell, maybe even a whole thesis on that one.
My latest adventure with Haynes work, post discussion was a viewing of a 1993 (when "indie" was hot) short film commisioned for screening on PBS called Dottie Got Spanked. It is an aesthetically sharp doctored memoir of Stephen Gale, a six year old with a kind of drag queen fan fascination with Dottie Martin, a very smart knock off of Lucille Ball that Stephen draws obsessively (using Haynes drawings done mainly then, I believe) with harlot makeup.
In the film, Stephen wins a ticket to see Dottie live. Growing up, Todd Haynes saw a filming of a Lucy show (maybe the Mr Mooney ones) and gave her a booklet of his pictures, just like Stephen does. When he talks about it now, he recounts how the girlwoman imp was in real life a kind of general intensively overseeing every aspect of the production. I think this really must have been a formative experience for him.
But this is not the experience the film focuses in on. That, dear friends, is a prepubescent quasi-erotic obsession with spanking. This is not usually the kind of stuff you'd find in a short film for broadcast, even PBS. Mother and Father Gale don't believe in spanking. But it is all around him, takes a good gander at a classmate's rear who he heard was spanked, saw Dottie get spanked as a part of her show, sees another classmate get spanked on the playground and has a kind of erotic dream (I mean, he is six) where a strong man spanks him. That's a whole lot of spanking in a half hour film. In the extras and at the interview event, Haynes credits an essay by Freud as much an inspiration for the film as is his memoir of going to see Lucy. Not surprising because a Haynes film always seems to have a few big ideas running around in them.
What really comes through here is his craft. He created a world of a time I grew up also in the mid to late sixties. And it felt very genuine in the school buses, the clothes, and the tensions that come when being young and facing something new and unknown
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:50 PM
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Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Maxwell as Al Green
If it knocks me out, I put it on the Buffet if I can.
Certainly this is the case with this BET clip of Maxwell totally kicking it Al Green style. I don't really where to begin here except that at its peak moments it is kind of like hearing Al and Maxwell duetting together. Yes, I know its a soul singer miracle. Like Sam Cook's A Change is Going to Come. Or Otis always making Try A Little Tenderness fresh. Or the shout Bernadette that we lost of a great shouter (and passionate ballader too) Levi Stubbs. Give Thanks and Praise. And to Al "Max" Greenwell here also.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:20 PM
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Monday, October 20, 2008
Takin' a Break with Bjork and Beck
A highlight of Siggraph last summer for me was a 3D screening of Bjork's Wanderlust video. This YouTube clip only hints at how incredibly cool that was. When I raved about it one of the students who accompanied me on the trip only responded by "that was weird." But hey, that was the point. And compared to her husband Matthew Barney's work, this is pretty mainstream.
I've been finding myself listening to a lot of Beck lately. The quality of his output in the past 15 years or so is remarkably consistent in his and genre bending work. The Midnight Vultures era is especially appealing to me, because he makes Memphis style horns sounds even more authentic dynamic than the original.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:58 AM
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Sunday, October 19, 2008
Finding Love in a House of Smiles
I think there is one freedom we should have more than any other and that is the freedom and opportunity to love. The cinema has been dealing with that theme almost since its beginning. There are teen comedies and rebel stories about kids being misunderstood on one end of the continuum and stories about old people making sure they get it, i.e love, in all ways and forms -- on the other side.
La Casa del sorriso aka House of Smiles is a 1968 film by Marco Ferreri about the latter. A solid middle class woman and a professor with upper class affectations in a retirement facility are trying to find some peace and love despite family, staff and even a faux countess of a bed bound ex-wife in much further decline than our protagonists. This film is kind of trifle, but one with a bit of substance partly because of the great Ingrid Thulin, the daughter-in-law from Wild Strawberries and many other roles in the films of Ingmar Bergman. Dado Ruspoli, who plays her suitor is a real life blue blood who only acted upon occasion, such as in Godfather III, but he has more than enough presence to keep the role believable. His character plays Arab guitars, likes fine clothes and finds way to keep the senility and madness around him from making too much an impact on his psyche.
This film of Fererri's reminds me of one of Robert Altman's lighter films such as The Wedding or The Player He keeps his focus on the couple at love but is able to season it with just the right amount of absurdity with the world around them. Ferari uses both the tools and tradition of the Italian Neorealism where he received his formative film training and an imaginative sensibility that is closer to the world of another great Italian filmmaker, Fellini.
One of the first scenes in the courtship of these elders nods to this latter tradition. Love and excitement is coming to this woman and she just goes with it. The professor is taking her for a pedicab ride on the grounds, but they have to suffer the snotty indignities of the facility's. staff. Then you hear a rooster call almost as though another world is being entered. They pedicab over to some African drummers who let them into a secret passage to a old style slope back aluminum pull trailer painted like a watermelon. Once inside, the professor goes for it with a full on mojo attack like a teen. Ingrid shrieks, "No, no professor not in the watermelon."
Their love disrupts the order of the facility and this is threatening to both the staff and their peer patients. "Old people are not nice people. The lack of energy makes them mean." says one of the few friends of the couple in a way that summarizes much of the environment they encounter. There is a lot of broad comedy regarding Thulin's missing dentures that threatened to derail the film, but there is a genuine sweetness and a sense of cinematic that sustains it not to greatness, but to pleasant surprise.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:29 PM
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Saturday, October 18, 2008
Sirk du Soleil et Noir
Douglas Sirk melodramas have evaded me until recently. They were always kicking around on Channel 12, Lifetime, Turner Classic Movies. There were one or two revival possibilities earlier but I stayed away for four reasons. One was that they always were in big series and seemed a little daunting (and wasteful) to be spending that much time watching cheesy 1950s movies. The other three reasons were Universal Studios, Ross Hunter and Rock Hudson. I never even dipped into them after Todd Haynes Far From Heaven nor after reading and hearing that Fassbinder's style owed a huge debt to Sirk, an American director with deep German roots, forty years worth of life and career before he even came to America.
Actors have told Todd Haynes that melodramas were the easiest to perform because everything is on the surface. He also defined it as not being about people in charge of their lives. There is a sense of determined tumbling. Friends and family messing each other over is often key to the action in a Sirk melodrama. And there are consequences and one can expect climatic moments of impending tragedy.
I have seen two Sirk films in recent weeks and don't recall seeing any others except The Tarnished Angels, which Pam and I went to see spontaneously before a concert many years ago. The two I have seen recently are Written on the Wind and, at long last, All That Heaven Allows, the film that supplied the major influence for the stylistic remakism of Haynes' Far From Heaven.
Two recent discussions have got me zeroing in on the Sirk melodramas. One was a conversation between Elvis Mitchell and Quentin Tarantino. They talked about the absurdity and over the top nature of a Sirk movie. Scott McDonald talked about going to Sirk films in a theater when he was growing up. "They were so preposterous, I never took them seriously." His interview subject, Todd Haynes contrasted with his own experience, it had already been elevated to a college setting.
I'm not sure if my bunker is a college setting or not. What I do know is that I find a lot of pleasure in these films. I see now what happens with folks who have the shared experience of seeing these films, there is an emotional kind of experience that is immersive and engaged that sets them a part. As Tarantino and Mitchell stressed, why it works is because it is obvious it matters a lot to Sirk. When I laugh at a Sirk movie, it is not camp laughter as much as an the exclamation responding to Sirk details such as the deer at the mill in All the Heaven Allows or the boy on the drugstore rocking horse ride that Robert Stack rushes by after hearing fertility results from his doctor.
But it is his use of the camera shots that are judicious and meaningful to the story that have inspired the likes of Scorsese and Fassbinder, and, obviously, Haynes, in their filmmaking. And film semiotic types love Sirk. I like them because they can create a kind of gee whiz response and a sense of being in the moment, that is kind of rare to find in the movies.
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:57 PM
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Friday, October 17, 2008
W. and Oliver
He stands in center field alone. This reoccurring image and motif in Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic, W. is quite significant in many ways. Stone is a filmmaker whose image and most of this twenty films often have a sharp and pointed agenda. Salvador, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July and JFK are examples of his oeuvre which strongly deliver a perspective where one can easily define his grounding and perspective.
But although W. can be brutal to this abysmal President, who has left us with a badly damaged country and world at large, Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser also give their subject some breathing room as he stands in center field before new (and many of us hope very new) players take the field. It was a wise and strong choice that will give the film, I believe, life beyond the sensation of the film's initial release in the last month of the election. His approach here is closer to the Stone who told the story of Alexander the Great or Jim Morrison or even Nixon. He and Weiser seem more interested in showing a cautionary tale looking more like myth or fable than to hammer us with a Michael Moore-like agenda. There are some very pointed moments to be sure. The grandson of Prescott and son of George Herbert Walker is not treated with great sympathy, but he is not served up on a platter like a big thick steak either.
What keeps the film interesting is its structure and judicious choices of two or three reoccuring threads in George W.'s life. After the baseball field prologue, we see a cabinet meeting in where the axis of evil agenda is being cooked up. This scene is critical because it needs to strike the right tone in staging, dialogue and acting so that it doesn't quickly recede into SNL parody. And having great and good actors in what would at first seem ludicrous casting (Richard Dreyfus as Dick Cheney and Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfield, and Jeffery Wright as Colin Powell) of individuals famous in setting familar is what surprisingly helps pulls it off.
Josh Brolin is actually fairly convincing in a consistent way as George W. But it is James Cromwell as Poppy President Bush Sr. in scenes both together and apart from W. that gives the film a lot its strength. The theme of father and sons and their contrast in reigns of power was some of the most interesting stuff in Alexander. And so too is the case with W.. GHW's outrage at having to bail his son out of jail because of his antics as a Yale cheerleader and disgust at having to care of his listless screw up of a son after impregnating one of his conquests during his rooster years are great scenes. They are contrasted later by his muted pride of Junior gaining some success as baseball owner and his obvious disappointment that W. became what he wanted Jeb to achieve. And then later there is Poppy's confusion about the power of the religious right and his outrage in W.'s Iraq policy.
W. shows a great deal of George's problem is in the company he keeps. Toby Jones portrays Karl Rove as an absolute creepy weasel and Thandie Norton plays Condi Rice as a stammering harpie. This is still a Oliver Stone film afterall, and this is one of the most audacious of filmmakers who can't help himself with broad stroke or a broad sword on occasion. His brief and pointed parody of news anchors giving the account with a Fox News like bias reminds me of the controversial scene in Natural Born Killers where the action abruptly switched to a TV sitcom sketch featuring Rodney Dangerfield as abusive father of the Juliet Lewis character.
But there is still quite a lot of restraint here. George's relationship with god is thankfully not given the mystic Indian Doors treatment, but it is a point of prominence in the film as it is in the story of the W. in real life. When one of the cabinet meetings ends in prayer, Stone shows the President with a Dr. Strangelove lighting fixture halo over his head. But maybe the best commentary on this relationship is in the films credit sequence where Bob Dylan's With God On Our Side plays:
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.
And the very end of the credits shows a cross white on black that is antimated to the two interlocking Vs that consists of the film's logo in kind of the same way that Spike Lee's films end with "Nuff’said. sho’Nuff. by any means necessary." prior to the 40 acres and a Mule logo sledge hammered in a way familiar to the television of the era of my youth.
This film has served as a hyperlink for me to look at some more of Stone's work. I am now curious about World Trade Center and his interview with Castro. And maybe I should take another look at Wall Street, also written by Stanley Weiser which may even be more topical at this time than W.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:49 PM
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Thursday, October 16, 2008
Todd Haynes Interview Event II
The evening was entitled Todd Haynes as Avant-Garde Filmmaker. Scott McDonald is the author of several volumes called A Critical Cinema where he interviews avant garde/experimental filmmakers. When McDonald approached the Cinema Project to help him arrange an interview with Todd Haynes. They suggested the event be public and include excerpts from some of his work. McDonald started out by talking about a screening he attended nearly a year ago of Haynes' multi-layered film about Bob Dylan, He's Not Here and how it was a kind of nexus of experimental and mainstream film. Some folks left early, but most stayed for the experience which McDonald defined as an experimental film. Prior to Superstar, his telling of the Karen Carpenter story primary using Barbie Dolls and footage of the times, Haynes said his interests were heading on an academic path. He felt he would probably end up like his instructors who made experimental films and taught. But Superstar and his work with Apparatus Productions, a non-profit organization to assist independent filmmmakers he founded with Barry Ellsworth and his future producer Christine Vachon led him to want to experiment more with hat has become the cornerstone of his work that could be described as "experimental narrative."
Haynes modestly (and I believe incorrectly) says that he is not original in what he does. He says what he triea to do is employ and appropriate genre, style and cultural stimulus and recast and respond to these elements. He stated that experimental and avant garde film is usually the work of a single individual. What he found out is when you work with style and genre, it has needs for more than one person.
Superstar is not his first work. That is usually credited to a Rimbaud inspired film called Assassins, which Haynes described as being "truly a college thesis that I am now showing brazenly at film festivals. Assassins was not included on the evening's program, but Superstar was both as a kind of wallpaper when the audience arrived and one of the more elaborate montages in the film when Carpenter's life was unraveling. McDonald asked if he was inspired by Independent filmmaker Bruce Connor for this sequence and later an audience member asked similarly if the epilogue of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz played a role in the inspiration for these kinds of sequences. In both cases, Haynes said that was not the case, but he praised and acknowledged their work.
A lot of the evening's discussion revolved around filmmakers who have informed or influenced Haynes' work. There was the expected discussion of Douglas Sirk, whose All That Heaven Allows was the template for Far From Heaven. But there was also the discussion of Jean Genet's Chant d'Amour, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith, a influential independent filmmaker who also was the inspiration for one of the characters in Haynes' Velvet Goldmine
Haynes originally studied painting and has always thought of himself as a visual artist. He also has dabbled in music, which is a source of inspiration for him, specifically with Velvet Goldmine. Although the studied and was a practitioner of these other art forms, it was film that brought it all together for him.
Haynes' career has not been without legal and cultural challenges. Superstar saw about three years of freedom but after notoriety of a good review by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice led to legal action first by Matel and then by those associated directly with the Carpenters and their music. And his film Poison based on stories of Genet was embroiled in controversy because it had received funding from the NEA during the period of hysteria over the work of Karen Finley and others. He talked about a letter he has that was written by Robert Redford to NEA chair John Frohnmayer giving support to the work after it was recognized at the Sundance Film Festival.
Haynes is brilliant, but seems like the kind of fellow that would be easy to hang out with, especially to talk film with as McDonald did. Experimental and Avant Garde film is, like animation, not a primary interest of mine. But the rawness and visionary aspects of it, especially the "classical American Avant Garde" as Haynes called it of filmmakers like Brakhage becomes more interesting to me over time. I'm pleased there is an outlet to become more expressed to this kind of filmmaking with the Cinema Project in Portland. And to have such a premier event as the interview event with Haynes turned out to be an excellent incentive to begin that exploration anew.
Special shout out to Guthrie Straw and his excellent photos
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:39 PM
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Todd Haynes Interview Event I
This was one of those events that seems like it can only occur in Portland. This was an opening night session for a five day symposia created by a non-profit educational society dedicated to Critical Cinema. I'm glad they take care to define what Critical Cinema is in their materials. It is defined by this evening's host moderator Scott McDonald as those films and filmmakers that force the viewer "to question our psychological/social/political investment in the conventional."
Tonight was an interview between McDonald and with Todd Haynes. Haynes is one of the most interesting of American filmmakers. The approach to this evening's event was to look stress his work with kind of film making known most often as experimental or avant garde. The three features that most folks know him for: Safe, Far From Heaven, and He's Not There were discussed, especially in regards to their experimental content and influences. But his earlier works; Superstar, Dottie Gets Spanked, Poison and Velvet Goldmine, excerpted with illustrative clips, were the focus of the evening.
The evening began with Superstar playing as wallpaper when folks took their seats. Yes, this is the notorious graduate school film he did one summer that featured Barbie dolls and Barbie knock offs acting out the story of Karen Carpenter, anorexia and all.
Meet Autumn and Jeremy. They are the curators of an organization called Cinema Project which promotes experimental/critical cinema films with screenings. educational programs and events in the city of Portland. They have been doing this for five years and now have a new 80 seat mini theater in the Everyday Music building on Burnside across from the Crystal Ballroom. Tonight they were kicking off their five day Expanded Cinema symposia to a fairly full house at the Northwest Film Center's auditorium. I believe I will become a Cinema Project member sometime soon.
I will be creating additional posts about the content of the interview itself. I also hope to feature a Well-excecuted Buffet first, a guest photographer, the work of Pacific University student Guthrie Straw, who came into Portland with fifteen other Pacific film club students to attend this evening's event.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:34 PM
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Joan Osborne at the Aladdin
Joan Osborne is in her late forties, but I suspect there will always be something about her presence that will always be as timeless and hard to categorize. This has been the case since she was a breakthrough artist as a part of that post-post-post hippie and punk scene at New York's Wetlands Preserve of the early nineties to to her latest album, Little Wild One, a solid collection of songs that was released this fall. She is singer-songwriter, Anchorage Kentucky country siren, rock chick and soul diva who is always sounds like she brings notes up from somewhere below the diaphragm regardless if her note is packaged sweetly and angelic. Or rough and kind of nasty.
Her songs are easy to relate to because although they have heartbreak in them, they often have a kind of perspective of a earthy princess who is determined to make the object of affection or protection feel a little better in the cold world. Such as in the case of Breakfast in Bed:
She's hurt you again
I can tell
Oh, I know that look so well
Don't be shy
You've been here before
Pull your shoes off, lie down
And I will lock the door
What's not to love here?
Her albums can sometimes have a little too much gloss and production to them. But in concert and her new album Little Wild One it is obvious that she is at her best with her solid band collaborating with her as equal peers. Andrew Carillo knows how to put just the right amount of aquarium undersea in his guitar and the rock funk drumming of Aaron Comes always seems to have this very well determined connecting sensibility to it. The other band members bassist Richard Hammond and Keith Cotton are rarely call attention to themselves, but are a solid presence especially when a foundation of background vocals are needed from time to time.
And as far as accompanying vocals are concerned, opening act Matt Morris' duet on Cathedrals, one of the strongest songs on the new album, was truly exceptional. Morris' opening set was a bit of a sensation of its own. I didn't really get it but the boomer KINK crowd that really dug the son of country singer Gary Morris. To me he sounded more like the musical love child of two Kennys (Loggins and Rankin) and that isn't really my cup of Starbucks. But you got to give credit anytime an opener can put a crowd in a place where the room is real lively by the time the headliner comes out and his work with Joan on Cathedrals was very stunning.
Cathedrals probably comes closer to any of her tunes to One of Us, the god on the bus song that most of the world will only know her for. I'm reminded of John Hartford who gave music many contributions, especially his breakthrough bluegrass work, but was always associated with Gentle on My Mind. At least One of Us wasn't covered by the likes of Glen Campbell and Johnny Mathis. One shudders at the thought. But the point is it will always be her one big song and cultural phenomena, and this time she pulled it out a couple tunes before the end of the set and it still has a fine life. Although I think it was strengthened by her not tagging that Pope in Rome on the phone couplet at the end. That part always felt a little too Dr Seuss for me.
Her set was heavy with songs from the new album and the one before it. She kept the Deadheads at bay with Brokedown Palace and the long time fans acknowledged with the Ray Charles Spiderweb and St Theresea, but there was a derth of the soul diva covers I love, no Midnight Train, Smiling Faces or What Became of the Broken Hearted. But I'm not complaining, her set closer of Only You Know and I Know was the evening's great cover moment.
And then there was that bit of ecstacy in here performance of Ladder. Joan was kicking it, shredding it up on rhythm guitar while exclaiming she "is going to love you anyway...Today and Everyday."
Like I say, what's not to love?
Link: Awesome Streamed Concert from last September
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:39 PM
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Monday, October 13, 2008
Sarah vs. Safety Bear
Consider these lead paragraphs from the October 9 front page of the NY Times.
Palins Repeatedly Pressed Case Against Trooper
By Serge F. Kovaleski
ANCHORAGE -- The 2007 state fair was days away when Alaska's public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, took another call about one of his troopers, Michael Wooten. This time, the director of Gov. Sarah Palin's Anchorage office was on the line.
As Mr. Monegan recalls it, the aide said the governor had heard that Trooper Wooten was assigned to work the kickoff to the fair in late August. If so, Mr. Monegan should do something about it, because Ms. Palin was also planning to attend and did not want him nearby.
Somewhat bewildered, Mr. Monegan soon determined that Trooper Wooten had indeed volunteered for duty at the fairgrounds -- in full costume as "Safety Bear," the troopers' child-friendly mascot.
I've refrained from much political commentary on the buffet during these past two surreal months of peeling back layers of horrific mediocrity regarding America's best known hockey mom other than linking inspirational soul videos, but the imagery is too compelling and the story is too tempting to simply stand by.
Soundtrack suggestion: let's revise that depression era anthem from Disney's Three Little Pigs, wolf we fear not no longer. "Who's Afraid of the Safety Bear? Sarah Is. Sarah is." Maybe Wyclef Jean or Will I Am could throw down some fresh beats and give the tune a lively up tempo update.
Then there is the visual. I think there should be a rush short subject made for screenings before Oliver Stone's W of Sarah and the first dude being all fearful of the bear at the fair. "Todd, here he comes." No you can't shoot at him. We need to get him fired, not fire at him."
I don't know if it has changed much but the state fair was a pretty low rent affair when we went. The biggest memories for me was going into a non-refrigerated room where a giant cabbage was located and choking on the stench and Ed Bruce singing Momma Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys to a few hardcore listeners. No Safety Bear or Cruella De Gov around back in that day near as I can recall.
Ultimately props out to reporter Kovaleski. he found just the right lead for the story a day before the legislative panel was released. Any doubt in one's mind that there wasn't an abuse of power here disolved when I learned about Trooper Wooten just wanting to dress up in a big stinky bear suit and how that desire got the governor all concerned. Strange stuff indeed.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:39 PM
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Sunday, October 12, 2008
Ariel: Kaurismäki's Second Proletariat Trilogy Film
As he did in Shadows in Paradise, Aki Kaurismäki begins Ariel, the second film in the Proletariat Trilogy released by Criterion/Eclipse. with images men at work. It is a wonderful way of creating the exposition of the environment and his character's relationship. In Ariel, the sequence is especially dramatic. A steel staircase is climbed by minors who assemble to set off a remote blast. The next scene shows a rural valley filled with ice and snow with heavy equipment and men leaving work. A gate closes with a sign indicating that this is the site of a mine.
Kaurismäki's main character this time out is Taisto Kasurinen played by Turo Pajala who holds a physical resemblance and presence similar to that of Nick Cave charismatic enough to make a meter maid forget both a ticket and her job. Early in the film, Taisto's father commits suicide and leaves him with a white shark convertible similar to the kind Hunter Thompson describes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A component of Kaurismäki's humor and style is his play with incongruity: a white convertible in northern Finnish snowscape is quite a sight, especially when its top doesn't work.
Ariel is a classic country mouse comes to the city yarn, a white Finnish version of Stevie Wonder's Living for the City. Tosti's situation turns from abysmal to bleak to bleaker still. But Kaurismäki paints in just enough hope and whimsy so that the viewer would reject this tale entirely. Hope comes in the form of a sturdy red head, Imeli, played by Susanna Haavisto and her cute, but not on screen too long to be insipid son. Imeli works four or five jobs. It becomes almost sadly comic to see which one she will be at or describe next. Poor Tosti can't really find work at all. The glimmer of hope and light in this tale seems to be the hope in the bond between Imeli and Tosti. There is indeed a presence of Ariel (by name but not necessarily with angel wings) in this film. You may recall that Ariel is the name of the archangel of healing and fresh starts. I will say no more than that.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:44 AM
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Saturday, October 11, 2008
Salome Saturday
I have planned to go to some of the HD simulcasts of Metropolitan Opera performances this year because I enjoyed attending Peter Grimes and Tristan und Isolde last season. I have resigned myself to the fact I will probably never get there early for prime center or rear seats. This is one gray group of folks who get there quite a while prior to curtain time. Today I had to stop by the farmer's market to get some prime pears and apples so sat in four rows center with a bunch of gay couples and a few stray single latecomers like myself.
Richard Strauss' Salome and Elektra are one act emotional purgatives that feel like feature films in to me in terms of their length and execution. Interestingly enough, Salome was first produced in 1905. 1907 was the year for The Story of Kelly Gang, an Australian film cited as being the first feature length film. (To paraphrase Jon Stewart, "Wikipedia, I love you.") I have seen both Elektra and Salome in live productions and have memories of highly compressed emotional experiences with a dramatic structure that felt more modern in an opera. And I believe length and structure in these pieces similar to cinema were a part of why I came away with that impression.
Actually, my Portland Opera production of Salome was memorable because I took a date (her first opera) and I don't know what she made out of the corpse kissing (well, part of a corpse), dysfunctional family politics and burbling, gurgling and not very tuneful tone poemed score by Strauss. I wonder if things would have turned out differently if we had gone to a Mozart or Tales of Hoffmann. Well,regardless, things turned out well in my personal life. Far better than they did for Salome, to be sure.
Karita Mattila, the Salome in the Met production is not quite "a seventeen year old who can sing like like Isolde" as Strauss said this role ideally needs. She is a very accomplished singer and is an exceptionally physical Salome. At times he really can move like a teenager as in the moves she makes to seduce Narrabath in persuading him to let her see the man prophesying from the hole below, Jochannen aka John the Baptist. Late forties or not, Mattila posesses a kind of impish quality and a fluidity in her movement that give her character life. But she also switches to full on madwoman during the long soliloquy with Jochannen which ends with smeared blood on her chin looking a little like Courtney Love with all that lipstick during the Live Through This-Doll Parts era.
The Dance of the Seven Veils in this revival of a four year old production created by German Film director Jürgen Flimm is less a dance of veils, but a full on kind of history through stages of erotic dance. Mattila starts out in a kind of Dietrich drag with military overcoat, moves on with a nod of Marilyn and diamonds best friend male dancers, does a bit with a pole and lap dance dry humps step daddy Herod before going topless at the end. I might be missing a phase or two here because there is so much going on in those eight minutes. Madonna could have taken the entire dance number and inserted in her tour. Matilla has a well fit normal person's (as opposed to a movie starlet's body) and in a way this also gave the dance, as well as her entire interpretation of Salome another level of effectiveness, in my opinion.
The set and setting of the production are worth noting. Herod's palace contains a kind of a decadant Weimar Republic Great Gatsby party sensibility. The characters dressed mainly in designer wear generally stand on a glass and steel platform that gets more illuminated in the second half when King Herod is present. There is also a spiral staircase and a separate set of concentric circled stone steps to the right of the stage. Salome spends a fair amount of time on the scaffolding that overhangs the pit that Jochannen is held capture in. The section of spiritual commentary on Jochannen is made by a series of rabbis expressing their various points of view that are contrasted by two black preachers dressed in 1930s finery. They might sound to be s weirdly out of place, but the inhabitants of Herod's palace already have an overall multicultural eighties Benneton ad feel to them with servants dressed out of a middle-east flavored boutique you find in a university district. Somehow it all works.
HD operas cost more than twice a movie, but I find I really enjoy attending them. The broadcast direction was solid and put you in the center of the action. And the prologue (after HD Opera trailers--could kind of live without those) where Soprano Deborah Voigt comes knocking on Matila's door just prior to curtain was fun in a dopey kind of way. Matila is obviously distracted to have Q and A with a mike even with a peer. Before she makes her way down the hallway and on to the stage she answers Voigt's request for last thoughts before she goes on stage with "You know I always say before these parts, Let's Kick Ass." The audience on the other side of the continent loved that and laughed long and heartily. And 97 minutes later there was no question that she definitely did what she said she would.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:46 PM
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Friday, October 10, 2008
The Columbian at Crisis and Maybe in Twilight
Yes the news from Wall Street was bad last week, but for me, one of the heaviest news items of the week up came with this item from the AP.
VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) - The Columbian newspaper is being forced by money problems to move out of its new building in downtown Vancouver and back to its former offices.
Publisher Scott Campbell said Wednesday that The Columbian Publishing Co. needs to generate more revenue from the $30 million downtown building. The company plans to lease all the 118,000-square-foot building or sell it.
Campbell also said the company is trying to negotiate a new loan or will seek temporary Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors.The newspaper has been through two rounds of layoffs in the last 10 months.
I'm not the hugest fan of The Columbian, but I hate to see an important locally owned community institution in such danger of going away. True, their troubles are in part due to the changes of how the world utilizes traditional media. But it is obvious that Craig's List really can't be seen as significant a factor to their problem as is capitalistic hubris. Now it looks like the the City of Vancouver will purchase all or part of the building space for their office shortfall. Interesting. I guess this could be seen as our own local version of a public bailout.
It is too darned bad that Scott Campbell and others in control of the paper put the future of such an important institution in such an egregious way when it was obvious that there were already so many challenges as it was for keeping a paper economically healthy.
A couple years back Gregg Herrington head of the editorial board and a Clark College alumni wrote a compelling editorial. I believe it was absolutely essential in letting the local community know that the voices of criticism by faculty about the leadership of that college was justified. This article helped make a difference and showed a level of care in reporting and commentary that might have been missed by a paper owned by Gannett or Scrips Howard.
Further sad irony: the Columbian will reach a centennial milestone in a week or so that it should be celebrating. It became a daily paper on October 19 1908.
Meanwhile as the vans prepare for a three block move, let's take a look at some footage of the paper of different times. Back when it was the newspaper of Leland, Crombie, Rieger, Campbell's father and grandfather, and even my own father, who had his first major job there.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:32 PM
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Thursday, October 9, 2008
Art Spiegelman at the Bagdad
I had every hunch this was going to be a fine evening. Art Spiegelman came to the Bagdad theater to give a Powell's Books sponsored where he presented from his new book, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! It is a reissue of his early strips with information about his relationship wrapped around new material of autobiograhical material and musings about his art form and how it developed. I believe it is not an understatement that Spiegelman's Maus helped transformed comics and also made and indelible contribution to the literature of the holocaust.
In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud wrote that "I believe that this form can handle virtually anything we throw at it: any subjet, any physical medium, any style." At the Bagdad, Speigelman said that even if the rest of the world is not doing well, "comics are really doing good." McCloud also seems to be a kind of a presence for his new work in Breakdowns. Early in the lecture he talked about how it was a bit of his own version of McCloud's Understanding Comics. But, somewhat tongue in cheek, I believe, he called it "an un-understandable version of Understanding Comics."
But, of course, it was actually very understandable. And highly entertaining. There were many highlights during the evening such as his presentation of the American Heritage Dictionary definition of comics "a narrative sequence of cartoons" (compare with McCloud's "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer") with the pictorial example of a Nancy strip that appeared in the dictionary with his hilarious frame by frame analysis.
He called his new work in Breakdowns as "both a love letter and a suicide note to comics." I'm not sure exactly what that means from the presentation alone. I'll probably have to spend time with the book to know for sure, but the love letter part was pretty evident. Spiegelman talked about how comics shaped who he was and how it changed his world view. " Ever since I realized that comics were not a natural phenomena,that they were man made, I wanted to make them." He said comics were his window to the world and an America outside his household of Auschwitz survivors. They shaped his world view. He learned about ethics from Batman ("Was he a good guy or a bad guy?"), about sex from Betty and Veronica, feminism from Little Lulu, economics from Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck (as he claims Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson must have learned from them as well), and politics from Pogo.
And then there was Mad magazine. Speigelman said it "ruined" his life. Mad showed him that the media was lying and that we were being spun. Will Elder's complexly drawn satires showed him how to look closer at the frames. And it is obvious that the Mad aesthetic helped lead to his participation with Crumb and others in underground comics.
In talking about art and comics, he didn't lavish praise on Roy Lichtenstein's work, by any means. He resents Pop Art and its effects on comics mainly as a commentary by the abstract expressionists on how soulless the mass media is and their attempt to get back to the representational. "Lichtenstein didn't do any more for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup." But that still didn't keep Spiegelman away from an interest in art. During his development, he came to see paintings as being big comics panels.
One of the ideas he promoted throughout the evening was that comics work the way our brains do, for instance with, iconic imagery and short burst thought balloons. He informally cited a Scientific American article that his wife Francine Mouly found that stated that infants can identify the meaning of a smiley face icon before they do their mother's smiling face.
It was an evening filled with insights, asides, and a portrait of his own journey. To me some of the best moments were the McCloudesque analysis of a Jules Feifer cartoon and a tumbling layout structure first in a layout of a Batman strip, in a double page from his In the Shadow of the Towers, and a strip that I believe appeared in the early work reprinted in Breakdowns. The two examples of his were obviously designed to make the reader linger and spend time with the pages, which is quite justified to the kind of time that he puts into creating his work.
One of the best observatoins came towards the end of the evening. He talked about the need in American art and media for the simultaneous existence of both the vulgar and the genteel. It is template evident in the nineteenth century comics of the Yellow Kid and Nemo in Slumberland, of Whitman and Emerson, of whorehouse music orgins of jazz and the refinements of Gershwin and Rhapsody in Blue.
This evening with Spiegelman was one of the most observation and insight filled ninety minutes I can recall having in a long time. It reminded me in some ways of the lectures we attended of Maya Lin's. As with Lin, Spiegelman's unique experience, perspective and intelligence was evident in just about every statement made during the course of the evening.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:04 PM
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Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Hans Rosling Makes Data Dance
I covered much ground in one of my classes today. I had not intended to show Hans Rosling's TED talk from 2006, but the discussion we were having about information, data and how it can be best presented it merited a screening of it.
I post it here because I think the world can be just a little bit better if more and more folks can view all or most of the twenty minutes that I embed at this here buffet.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:35 PM
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Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Kaurismäki's Shadows in Paradise
I have found much pleasure in Criterion Eclipse box sets. The late Ozu, Raymond Bernard, and William Klein collections gave me excellent immersive access to films I would probably otherwise not see. I just took the first stage on another Criterion auteur voyage watching Shadows in Paradise, part of Finnish filmaker Aki Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy.
My only prior exposure to Kaurismäki's work was Leningrad Cowboys Go America which I remember as being quirky and amusing. There is definitely a relationship between Aki A Kaurismäki style and vision and that of Jim Jarmusch. In a Guardian interview Jarmusch said: "I love his films, I love the simplicity of them, I love the dry sense of humour of them, I love the bleakness. Here is a film-maker who uses limitations as a strength, and that's something I've tried to learn to do myself."
Aki Kaurismäki has a style that is so deceptively simple that it is easy to dismiss how good it really is at first blush. His characters have both a kind of oddness and normality of them. You recognize your friends and maybe yourself in them sometimes. The lead actress in Shadows in Paradise Kati Outinen made for a severe looking woman in uniform in her later years play very well. But in Shadows, she is freckled and looks like someone you went out with or thought about going out with before you were twenty five. Her character Ilona Rajamäki is just a regular girl cashier who helps bandage a bleeding garbage man and kind of falls in with him after that.
But falling in with is not necesarily "falling in love," at least not immediately. Kaurismäki actually has characters and events kind of falling around each other. Sometimes falling in place for his people, sometimes they fall out of place. Nikander the garbage man loses his partner to a heart attack as he planning to have an independent garbage hauling business. He meets his next partner in the drunk tank after a long mourning ending in blackout after partner no.1 died. See how this works?
But before he goes he shares his plans with Nikkander trying to get him interested in leaving the company as well. I found this scene funny, more of the kind of funny that makes you smile rather than cackle out loud
Coworker: I've got a slogan "Reliable garbage disposal since 1986"
Nikkande: But that's now
Co Worker: That's why it captures the eye. Pretty smart, isn't it?
Kaurismäki does much more than create funny, somewhat flat characters. He is a very able visual film artist. One of the opening shots consists of a door opening up and a fleet of garbage trucks going moving out for the day. In another scene shot from the interior, direct light iluminated each truck with golden light on it shot from an interior perspective.
There were elements in the film that reminded me not only of Jarmusch but also Wim Wenders, especially the Road movies that his company was named for. Like Wenders Kaurismäki is not timid in his use of music ranging from a very friendly jazz waltz that is kind of a main theme to European pop of the mid eighties to country sounding tunes. This film was quiet, humorous and looks at the human condition of ordinary working folk. I look forward to the other two films in the boxed set.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:32 AM
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Monday, October 6, 2008
Sigur Ros at the Schnitz 10.6.08
In concert, this band skillfully creates their own unique universe. An evening with Icelandic band Sigur Ros feels more like being transported into a sequence of lucid dreams than attending a concert. Jonsi Briggson's bowed guitar and haunting voice are the most evident means of entrance into their sonic sphere, but keys drum and bass are just as significant.
But additionally, it is by far one of the most interesting shows I have witnessed visually. Treated video transmissions, large Akari-like lamps, and synchronized strobes complement their music in a kind of seamless synchronicity. There are many breathtaking moments in a Sigur Ros show. They seem to take the approach in creating a certain amount of information overload in their concert presentation. A sing along section with the crowd gets transformed into a kind of lip sync with some vintage footage of school children. The band was dressed in 19th century tailored outfits (except for Orri the drummer whose outfit was reminiscent of John Fishman of Phish but with sloppy tanktop, not a dress) and move on the stage with a sense of grace and purpose.
Sigur Ros' compositions come essentially in two varietals. There are the spacey chamber music-like songs, sonic portraits, really, with that evoke atmosphere and, at times, a kind of unique melancholy. And then there are the big mostly joyous numbers that can be quite epic. As one would expect, a series of these concluded the show. First there were two new numbers from their new album Með suð í eyrum við spilum aka Gibberish That I Don’t Understand. or With A Buzz In Our Ears We Play Endlessly depending on the web source you consult. The First of these was Festival, starting off subdued and ending huge and majestic. Then there was Gobbledigook which featured martial drums played by members of the evening's opening band and an amazing storm of confetti.
But the big finale was their current signature closer from their 2002 album ( ) (yes, it is known as a set of parenthesis) The tunes on that album started out as being untitled but was later given the title as Pop Song. The performance of this tour de force in their film Heima is what motivated me to give this band a closer look. The force of its performances and the intricate structure of the tune somehow reminds me of the Who in their prime when they would close out their shows with Won't Get Fooled Again leaving their audience with no doubt that this band has given their all.
Reports I have read state the Fall 2008 tour is a departure for Sigur Ros because it doesn't feature the string or brass section. But the nine piece opening act, Parachutes, began the evening with musical colors that a four piece band can not provide yet they still were in musical stratosphere shared by the headliner. I'm thinking this was analogous to seeing the New Riders of the Sage open for the Grateful Dead back in the day. I didn't realize that it was a separate band because musically they were so similar. They are also from Iceland and feature guitarist Alex Somers, the boyfriend of Jonsi Birgisson.
I should have clued in that Parachutes was a separate unit because they sang in English. Not Icelandic. Nor Volensksa aka Hopelandic, a language that Sigur Ros has created for many of their tunes. As I say, this is a band who is concerned with creating their own universe and thankfully, shares it with great relish and great production values with the world at large.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:38 PM
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Sunday, October 5, 2008
La Strada di Primo Levi
Primo Levi's Journey is an ambitious and poetic piece of non fiction documentary and essay filmmaking. It retraces the journey of Italian Jewish chemist and writer Primo Levi and some fellow prisoners almost exactly sixty years after he was released from Aushwitz through Poland, Soviet satellite countries, Austria, Germany and ultimately to Italy.
Levi's second memoir The Promise provides the tone and roadmap for this work by filmmaker Davide Ferrario. Chris Cooper provides the narration which consists of readings from the book. Most of the film imagery seems to be concerned with the aftermath of the USSR with comparative or contrasting passages from Levi's book. The filmmakers visit with Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, Cherynobl, Soviet monuments and a Romanian factory. One of the most chilling sequences comes towards the end when Levi's account of the Auschwitz prisoners coming to Munich is contrasted with footage of a modern neo-Nazi rally.
Primo Levi's Journey has maybe too broad a canvas and too vast an agenda. The viewer feels rather overwhelmed with all of the post communist emphasis in the film. Levi provided the roadmap but the tour agenda is maintained by these ambitious filmmakers and one tries to figure out what the center of it all is while assailed with imagery that resembles a National Geographic feature story on modern Eastern Europe. It has taken a while to get this film back into its red envelope. It was a film not unmemorable or unimpressive, but not exactly satisfying.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:55 PM
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Saturday, October 4, 2008
Dolphin Dance
When I received the Blue Note Herbie Hancock box set from my lovely wife a few years ago, the first track I played was Dolphin Dance. This was, of course, after I tried singing it to her. I don't think she was impressed.
I have always loved this song. It flutters and dodges and grooves ever so lightly. It has a melody that is like good conversation--the kind that begins "Hey do you remember?" It has a kind of drama, but not like Hamlet or Greek tragedy or TV drama. Instead it is the kind that I asssociate with a breeze that comes well before the rain and moments of pause and reflection between major events.
I could not find a Herbie solo piano clip culled from a televsion show and posted on YouTube. I did find scores of pianists trying their hand at it. Apparently it has been the object of a fair amount of sampling in recent years. Interesting because it isn't excactly Knee Deep or One Nation Under a Groove.
This lovely Amhad Jamal version is one of those YouTube clips where the cover is put up as visual place holder. But embed it I will, because the world needs a little more of the peace and the sense that time can stand still that one can find in Dolphin Dance.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:43 AM
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Friday, October 3, 2008
Like Lazarus (or John McCain's "suspended" Campaign) PDX Jazz is back
From a Portland Jazz Festival Press Release dated October 1 2008
Alaska Airlines has agreed to a multi-year title sponsorship of the Portland Jazz Festival, providing the financial support necessary to revive the world-class festival, which had announced in early September that it was ceasing operations after five years.
You may recall the story here. On September 8 the board of directors of the Portland Jazz Festival suspended operations because Qwest pulled out their 100k corporate sponsorship. There was still over 500k in the budget, but the directors and board refused to compromise on what the festival should be: two weeks, dozens of events including high profile shows in hotel ballrooms and the Portland Performing Arts Center. Well Alaska Airlines apparently earned enough money with extra baggage charges and saved enough from no longer giving away meals to fill the gap and now we have ta-da, the Alaska Airlines Portland Jazz Festival (no kidding)
In a way that is probably a good choice, despite the creepy corporate renaming. The festival was really aimed at out of towners coming in to fill hotel rooms. Travel agency baron Sho Dozono played a part of the effort for reconstituting the festival. Townies have never really been catered to by PDX Jazz. There is no wrist band option for floating between venues or bundled ticket packages. Out of towners don't mind spending another twenty or thirty dollars for a late night show because they are burning up their cash already.
I hold mixed feelings about the festival. I think directors Sarah Bailen Smith and Bill Royston have accomplished something special with it, but at the same time, there is a kind of elitism to the programming and how to get to it. As I begged the question in a prior post, does a festival necessarily have to be "world class" by running two weeks and having a three quarter of million dollar budget? I wonder.
And I wonder also how it is going to perform this year. Sure February is a few months out, but no line up has been released except Pollstar listings for Diane Reeves on Valentine's Day and Terrence Blanchard the day before. The fest had been touted as having a BlueNote records 70th Anniversary theme, but the Blue Note Anniversary tour with Bill Charlap, Nicholas Payton and Ravi Coltrane is still slated to play in Portland at the Newmark a month earlier than the festival's dates.
It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. I look forward to checking out the calendar to see if they can create a weekend or two with entertainment opportunities that will equal that in NYC. Hopefully they will come up with great options. My PDX Jazz daydreams---Cassandra Wilson (more interesting than Reeves, for sure), give us a chance to see boppers like Moody and Konitz one more time, maybe some legends like Ahmad Jamal, Bobby Hutcherson. Or Cedar Walton? Or Hank Jones or George Coleman (for real!)? Or maybe give Portland an acid jazz evening with the likes of Roy Ayers or Incognito or Kyoto Jazz Massive. Maybe go Brazilian with Nasciemento or a tribute to Jobim with some world class musicians. Maybe go west coast with Bud Shank or Gerald Wilson or Jack Sheldon. Or what about Mulgrew Miller or Eric Alexander? Or Roscoe Mitchell? Or Steve Coleman? Or Pharoh Sanders? Or John Handy? Or Trombone Shorty and a bunch of NOLA folks...I could fill a screen or two with the names of folks I'd like to see in February without too much ornamentation and a reasonable ticket price. Royston and Bailen Smith might come through. We'll see.
I imagine I'll be checking back on the buffet with further observations after the lineup is announced.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:37 PM
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Thursday, October 2, 2008
Grand Content from Clemens Kogler and Others
I had just about given up on Stash 32. Stash is monthly nearly feature length compilation of state of art short films, motion graphics that has its editorial offices in Vancouver BC. I am a devotee, but this particular DVD, an overstock item that they were giving away at the Stash Siggraph booth. For some reason, issue 32 is itself overstock with flatulence seasoned with lots of cartoony violent stuff.
And then came Le Grand Content. This is PowerPoint poetry full of hard logic converging with the random or even absurd random. It is worth watching either here as a Youtube embedded link or the web site of its Austrian filmmaker Clemens Kogler partnering with Karo Szmit on this project..
My favorite part is when the narrator says "So you are sitting at home drinking beer, eating icecream and you feel gross. And you are sitting at home, but hey, you can also drink beer, gain confidence and step into a socially awkward moment and feeling... ." It is hard to put my finger on it, but there is a kind of natural poetic voice here that is hanging out in say, maybe Laurie Anderson's neighborhood.
The credits also indicates that the diagramming in the film was inspired by indexed.blogspot.com. I've checked out this site and it is hysterical. Jessica Hagy's index card vim diagrams, pie charts, line charts and histograms are sometimes featured in the NY Times and are also published in book form. Here's a sample:
Meanwhile, I wanted to note there are lots of other intriguing motion pieces on Kogler's website. One of my favorites is Arbeit 2.0 There are some similarities in form to Le Grand Content, and although the description claims it is untranslatable, its manic pace and rhythms with a high shrieking punctuation will catch your attention even if you have no familiarity with German Language.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:36 PM
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Wednesday, October 1, 2008
J. Waterston Oppenheimer
In 1980 I wasn't much of a PBS viewer. Rock and roll, night clubs and other distractions prevailed. And that is probably why I missed it the mini series biography of J Robert Oppenheimer by the BBC with Sam Waterston in the title role. Waterston was a presence in the early seventies. I recall him as lost soul son of Katherine Hepburn's Amanda Wingate in the first Glass Menagerie I ever saw one Sunday afternoon. And he made a fine Nick Carraway in an otherwise dreary Great Gatsby. And, of course, for the past decade and a half he is one of the significant anchors of the ubiquitous cable presence of Law and Order reruns. He is one of the reasons why, if you watch two minutes of an old Law and Order when channel surfing, you end up watching the rest of the show.
BBC productions that came to the US via PBS in the seventies and early eighties are kind of like the last man standing of television values from the first golden age of live productions that saw careers start for folks like John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet. They have a mix of film exteriors and studio interiors. Sometimes the technical production values, especially sound, are a bit inconsistent. But the viewer doesn't get hung up on this because the script and acting values are so excellent. In Oppenheimer there are probably two or three dozen historically based characters in a seven hour drama, but writer Peter Prince and director Barry Davis are able to weave them in and out of the story of Oppenheimer's life in a way you would more expect to see in a much less ambitious work.
The first episode focuses on Oppenheimer as pre WWII Berkeley professor among lively family, friends, and colleagues, many of whom have ties to communism, which was the cornerstone of the radical left responding to 1930s economics and european fascism by either flirting or engaging in the American communism movement. It introduces the two women who could prove to be a challenge in his life, the unstable Jean Talbot, and the often prickly Kitty, who he married. The main body of the mini series focuses on the Los Alamos years. During these episodes and the two post war hours we see a portrait of a highly intelligent, charismatic man navigating investigators, intense and sometimes prima donna scientists, military personnel and later politicians. Familiar names: Fermi, Teller, Stimson, General Leslie Groves come and go during the accounts of the development of the atomic bomb and the political fallout that occurred post war as Oppie's concerns about a post-bomb war manifest themselves.
The J Robert Oppenheimer that is revealed in this mini series is one who strives to do the right thing, although sometimes seduced by science, power and the agenda of others. The great performance of Waterston as Oppeheimer reveals his quirkiness, sense of wonder and can leave an impression on the viewer about what made this individual unique. And I am pleased we now have the BBC box set so that thousands of folks have a chance to experience the story of this unique and remarkable life.
I found myself highly absorbed in this production. You can't watch an historical story like this one without knowing the outcome, but there were moments where I hoped the bomb wouldn't go off or that Oppeneheimer would be exonerated from the kangaroo hearing he faced that basically charged him with treason. This is the kind of engagement that filmmakers hope for with their viewers, but probably don't often attain.