Wednesday, December 31, 2008
DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation
Paul D. Miller is DJ Spooky. He has two books published by MIT Press. This is not an accomplishment that you would likely associate with a trip hop electronica artist. i recently viewed Rebirth of a Nation, He describes this presentation as "a DJ mix applied to cinema."
I was cautious when I started to view this DVD, which was a version of a project that Miller/Spooky has presented in concert throughout the world. I had the impression that an African American man would be likely to only try to see and underscore the racism that is at the heart and core of this landmark film. Birth of the Nation, like Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will is a major cinematic achievement, but one that will be forever connected with extreme and exceptional racial and political baggage.
Miller approaches his topic as both and artist and a scholar. This is particularly apparent in his voice over commentary. his score spans quite a variety of sounds and resources uses electronic beats, blues harmonica and I believe is most effective when he uses the Kronos Quartet against a very solid and steady percussion line.
The first half of the film is the tale of a northern and a southern family during the Civil War. We see moments of family life and some battle sequences which are still impressive. Abraham Lincoln is set up as a protector of the South after the war ends. It concludes with a very detailed reenactment of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. In the comments discusses how Griffith sets up his drama as reality. And in the second half where the postwar south is seen as occupied and controlled by blacks in a kind of ignoble form of self-centered anarchy that can only be resolved by the rise of the Klu Klux Klan. What Miller calls the "subtle manipulation of realism" is something he believes is still with us in our era of Katrina and Iraq.
Miller aka DJ Spooky aka the Subliminal Kid is aspirational in his remix. This is not a project whose object is deep anger and condemnation of Griffith. Instead, he has created a forum to understand media and its impact on us. He believes that this understanding can lead to another world and of key importance is understanding and breaking the cycle of history. Anyone who watches his remix, particularly in listening to the written commentary for the Encore cable network presentation and his extemporaneous remarks on the DVD, will come away feeling less distance in the 90 some years since Birth of the Nation was rolled out as a kind of template for the feature film, the historical drama, and film entertainment as political propaganda.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:24 AM
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Tuesday, December 30, 2008
I Remember Freddie
Freddie Hubbard's was one of the finest of hard bop trumpet players, but music has plenty of those, even several like Hubbard who "came up" as a jazz messenger for Art Blakey. And his straight jazz albums with Herbie Hancock during the Maiden Voyage/Cantaloupe Island period are still vital and substantial.
To me the best of Hubbard's contributions to music, art, and pop culture came primarily through two albums for Creed Taylor International or CTI records in the early seventies. Both featured long wonderful excursions that were the title tunes for these records: Red Clay and First Light. Red Clay will always be one of the funkiest and slinkiest of tunes performed by the quartet of Hubbard, Lenny White, Joe Henderson, Ron Carter, and Herbie Hancock. Hancock's Fender Rhodes electric work brings a bigger fullness to the quintet sound. Bigger, broader and more expansive was First Light, Hancock's flugelhorn matching and cutting through the swirling strings and held together by Jack DeJohnette's drumming and Carter's steady base line.
There are some other Hubbard performances from that era, Straight Life, Sky Dive in particular that are equal to Red Clay and First Light. As is his lovely execution of the melody line in Milt Jackson's Little Sunflower, also featuring Hancock. But things got pretty darned weak and kind of lame when he went to Columbia Records in the mid-seventies. Liquid Love and Windjammer did not have the juice and execution as the prime time CTIs.
Trumpet players are often the brashest of all jazz players and personalities. Their lives lived as hard sometimes as their high note range and visibility on the band stand. I have heard that he had substance abuse issues, an occupational hazard it seems of jazz men and horn players in particular. In recent years I pulled down all of the live Hubbard available at emusic and they show a seasoned determined jazz man, still taking audiences on 20 minute First Light and Red Clay excursions, but also laying down hard bop tunes like Byrdlike and interpreting ballads like 'Round Midnight with exquisite passion and loveliness. I also appreciate his VSOP work with Hancock and other alumni from the pre-electric Miles quintet of the sixties. These sessions give one pause in what more work would have been like with Carter, Tony Williams, Hancock and Wayne Shorter if Miles had traveled a straighter more tradtionalist path
Freddie Hubbard died this week of complications from a major heart attack suffered in November. When I heard of his passing I realized I could sing some major lick sequences from some of the solos I've enjoyed most over the years. Here is a postcard from those times--Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White and Airto kicking it hard on a version of Straight Life.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:44 AM
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Monday, December 29, 2008
Baselitz gets the Seven Up treatment
Our Netflix Queue is kind of cabinet of curiosities. One of the most curious and fascinating things in it I viewed recently was a disc with two different interviews with Heinz Peter Schwerfel that were filmed more than fifteen years a part from each other.
As in Michael Apted's Seven Up films the juxtaposition of these two short films from 1987 and 2004 illustrate films amazing power to capture an individual in one era or stage of their life and to get a sense of time travel when it is presented in a comparative setting.
In 1987, Baselitz is a fifty year old man with a cigar, a beard, who is spending his nights in the years just prior to Berlin Wall falling and reunification painting dark expressionist visions of the human condition at night as a self described sort of self described assassin/murderer who sorts out his kill in the morning. His images are sort of Bosch meets Expressionism, eating oranges upside down created from hard fast uncompromising brush strokes.
The then contemporary images featured in the 2004 film are not nearly as dark and stark as the 1987 ones. His palette has gotten lighter, light blues, pinks and lots of white left on the canvases. More importantly, Baselitz, now moving towards seventy is no longer a defiant figure with beard and cigar. It is evident that his output is still prodigious and many of his figures still hang upside down in limbo, but he seems not to be engaged in a kind of sensory assault on the viewer.
Schwerfel's Baselitz films are exceptionally well crafted. There are some lovely moments of moving camera, especially when it passes through several galleries in a major German museum with a comment by Baselitz about the tradition of ugliness in German art, to where the shot ends on a balcony overlooking a retrospective of Baselitz's work.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 AM
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Sunday, December 28, 2008
A Valkyrie Without Wings
Bryan Singer's Valkyrie is not a bad film, but it is strange to see Tom Cruise Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg lead the attack and plotting to assassinate Adolph Hitler at his Wolf's Lair retreat in 1945 along with a bunch of tony A-List British actors playing German generals looking to try to help end what has become inevitable, i.e. Germany's loss of the war. Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Eddie Izzard, and Terrence Stamp are among the actors playing these officers.
At the heart of the snowstorm last week, I watched Daryl Zanuck's The Longest Day on hulu.com. Location black and white footage from the early sixties has become one of my favorite visual styles lately, and the integration of actual footage with some pretty elaborate stagings is executed quite well in this uber production. The Nazi generals were bumbler and fumblers, but they were actual Germans and they looked great with scars and pock marks. Valkyrie's officers felt like they were doing this as a moonlight job from their various gigs at Convent Garden. Not convincing.
It is a procedural of a relatively recent history, as the pretty successful Downfall with Bruno Ganz as Hitler was a few years back. Downfall was engrossing and engaging. With Valkyrie the fact they actually filmed it in true locations like the Bendlerblock was not a realistic experience. It felt like the whole thing was taking place with plastic soldiers in an aquarium. I don't have any positive or negative things to say about Tom Cruise's performance, but I sigh when I think about how vital and true his performances could feel a couple decades past, particularly when he played Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:20 AM
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Saturday, December 27, 2008
The Spirit in the Slush
The temperature rose but the rains hadn't really come yet. My chains were still on the car, major roads were clearing up but side streets without chains on a non-four wheel drive were an still an invitation to getting stuck. So I layered up, put on my boots and walked downtown to go see two films that opened a couple of days earlier.
I knew going in that The Spirit and Valkyrie were likely more event movie product for the holiday dollars, not necessarily substantial cinematic achievement. And will always be a part of a colorful story about avoiding ice on the sidewalk and actually having to walk in the street with crazy freshly liberated housebound drivers.
This Google Web search will eisner grave roll over movie returned about 3,690 hits. This blog will put it one step closer to 37k. I have nothing against Frank Miller's visual style, they just need a different director than Dr. Dark Knight thank you very much.
There is a lot more to enjoy here than in Sin City, that's to be sure. But this one reminds me of that Style Council song about a man of great promise gone down. I wasn't really annoyed that Miller did not give you a true moment outside of a highly composited and expressionistic view of the world. Eisner praised Miller's expressionistic style in the book length interview conversations I wrote here about recently. But I'm not sure that impressionism in only three colors--black, red, and white with the occasional sepia thrown in.
Gabriel Macht as the Spirit is kind of cool. The Octopus aka Sam Jackson is real nasty, but in this overprocessed environment he looks more like a well rendered video game character in this dark city. There are also these creepy mutant henchmen with various names on their shirts with names ending in os: Logos, Pathos et al. This gets pretty ridiculous after a while.
But the pleasures of this film are mostly the Spirit's encounters with three women characters. Their names describe their characters perfectly. Scarlett Johansson plays Silken Floss. My favorite name, however, is Sand Serif (Eva Mendes) The whole kind of smarmy James Bond thing kind of began here. There is saucy and sassy interchanges between the two of them and also the good girl character, a Doctor who is hot for crimefighter.
Francis Ford Coppola's Rumblefish and maybe some of the earlier David Lynch are nearest neighbors with Miller's stark synthesized world. This monotheistic style might be too much for a single tale feature length movie drama. It was simultaneously sucky and interesting at points.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:47 PM
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Friday, December 26, 2008
A Spectacle with Elvis and his Friends
Elvis Costello is more than a new wave icon. He has so much more music in his soul beyond Pump It Up and Alison. And for years it seemed he would surface wherever there was a rich tradition of music. He could show up on the Nashville Network, pulling out songs from memory that George Jones would forget. Or do Louvin Brothers or Gram Parsons tunes with Emmylou Harris.
His inquiring enthusiasm for music, mostly American roots and rock, but a wider swath to be sure, has now been made available in an ambitious talk and music program produced by Elton John and his asssociates called Spectacle: Elvis Costello with... This is kind of like a haven delivered by a television show, which is a very rare thing. Elvis, the world's greatest Swiss Army knife of pop music focusing on music with A list musicians and cultural figures. There is much music on this show Elvis covers and then performs with his guests between literate and even, sometimes, insightful interview sections.
The first five episodes with Elton John, Lou Reed, Bill Clinton, James Taylor, and Tony Bennett have been aired and all have memorable insights and performances. Sundance airs them on Weds. nights and they have been featured as On Demand offerings through Comcast.
The episode with series producer Elton John was one of the best. It was essentially a workshop covering his influences and poking at some depth why Leon Russell, Laura Nyro in particular were important influences on the early stages of his career. It also featured the piano man's stories of being a pick up band for 1970s UK tours of Billy Stewart and Patti La Belle. And Elvis and Elton chatted for a time about changing their British civilian identities Declan and Reginald into Elvis and Elton.
But one of the main order of business in the Elvis Elton episode was their mutual tribute to a very obscure American singer-songwriter, David Ackles. Ackles shared a bill with Elton during his introductory years in America. He recorded four albums and his style reminds me of Gordan Lightfoot, pre-full on pop star Neil Diamond converged with the early John Cale solo years with a Brecht/Weil art song sensiblity thrown in. Both Elvis and Elton have been on record in the past declaring their admiration for Ackles work, but in performing Ackles' Down River together as the climax of their Spectacle episode.
Elvis hosts Bill Clinton on another episode and he talks about his relationship with music the same way he did with movies when he was interviewed by Roger Ebert years ago. Ever since the 92 electon, I have kind of defended Clinton's musician sensibilities as an important component of his character (or some would say non-character) He doesn't play his saxophone here, but talks about his collection including a Adolphe Sax original with a sparkle and reverence that shows his passion for music.
There are indeed pleasures in every episode. Lou Reed and Elvis shread the stage with an exceptionally powerful performance of Twilight's Last Gleaming. And Lou shows the secret chord of Sweet Jane that is missing from most of the cover versions. Mrs. Elvis, Diana Krall, gets called out of the audience by Tony Bennett to do a very lively version of I've got the World on A String. In another episode, James Taylor and Elvis channel the Everly Brothers with Cryin' in the Rain.
The last seven episodes seem quite promising especially Herbie Hancock and Smokey Robinson. The series has some formatting issues that are annoying, the summary bumpers and Sundance infomercials, and cutaways to celebrity and quasi-celebrities in the audience. But Elvis' simultaneous role as uberfan, talkshow moderator and musical artist is pretty darned impressive and at its best, puts brings closer to the music and its artists with intimacy, intelligence and care. Here's hoping that Uncle Elton will find this to be a fine venture to continue and it will be around for years to come with the same vitality.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:20 PM
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Thursday, December 25, 2008
Miller and Eisner before The Spirit movie
The bringing of The Spirit, one of the coolest and off centered of all comics excurisions, to the screen will be more of an event to me than all of the recent years of Spidey, XMen, Dark Knight, Hell Boy and Iron Man,(although this last one I mention has a lot of quirkiness to make it somewhat endearing.) The Spirit was a comic book supplement that came with the Sunday papers during twelve years of the forties and early fifites. In form, execution, and content it was a bit of gene splice between the Milton Caniff/Hal Foster/Al Capp sunday comic stips and the superhero comic books. Will Eisner created a comics noir with adventure, a sense of comedy at times, and relished with explorations of mortality and good vs. evil. The Spirit wore a goofy mask, loved a lot of women, was more durable than most human models, and fought crime. Any questions?
Before I go to the movie, I wanted to get myself in the zone. I don't own any reprints of the Spirit any longer. Ironically, I traded them in years ago for a two book set of Art Spiegelman's Maus. Ironic because Will Eisner's A Contract with God was a canguard publication that helped inspire Spiegelman to create Maus in the format we call graphic novels, although Spiegelman and many of his peers don't use that term.
What I did have at my disposal was a book length collection of conversations produced by Dark Horse between Eisner and Frank Miller, the artist who turned Batman into a Dark Knight and pushed comics into crime and historical genre in recent years. Eisner is around 87 in these discussions, which took place apparently not too many months before he died. Miller's Sin City film left me pretty cold so I wanted to find a way to prepare for the Spirit, which Miller wrote and directed, that wouldn't bias me against the enterprise at the start.
The conversations in Frank Miller/Will Eisner are more engaging and lively than I had expected. Eisner started in comics before they began, ran a shop that sold stories to comics before the war, began The Spirit, created educational comics during the war at the Pentagon, resumed duties as the primary author of The Spirit (but trained folks like Jules Feifer along the way), continued to be in the info graphics comics training business for many years. And then at age 60, wrote the book that is considered the beginning of the graphic novel movement. And for the last 28 or so years of his book published many more long form comics with stories of New York primarily. He also taught and published two volumes that along with Scott McCloud's books serve as the foundation and key literature for volumes about comics and how they work.
Miller will make a statement about the business and practices of commercial comics and Eisner will counter or make him defend it. You can tell that Eisner loved a good exchange and had a razor-sharp memory filled with details from his past and the history of his life with comics.
Two and a half hours of Brazilian television documentary series on Eisner released in 1999 was even more insightful. Will Eisner Profession Cartoonist featured three episodes filled with rough animations of his work along with lots of interview material with Eisner and those he influenced around the world. Brazilian and French comic book artists have the same geeky kind of intensity about them that they do in the US. Art Speigelman in one part talks about how Eisner's output of a page a day and nearly a book a year dwarves that of men half or a third his age.
There is one moment in the last episode of the documentary, called Master Class, that impressed me most fron any exchange between Miller and Eisner in the book or any other element of the television mini series on him. This is a scene where we see Eisner at work applying the brush work to a page he was inking. I look at his work differently after watching him apply the small number four brush with repetitive strokes, in a clear and determined way.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:09 PM
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Wednesday, December 24, 2008
08 Storm Dispatch
Tuesday was a day for chaining up the Honda and discovering the Winter Wonderland. Here I am wearing my knock off of an old Hawaiian Islanders hat in an attempt to be optimistic.
I ended up driving and doing errands for a good part of the day. And it really wasn't bad at all. As the day transpired I saw more and more idiocy. Kids in cars without traction devices, Four Wheel drive trucks with bald tires who didn't have a clue and that kind of thing.
What does winter reveal? For me it reveals that Highway 99 in greater Hazel Dell, Washington really hasn't changed that much since Harvey "Pop" Johnson built his Steakburger/Golf A Rama complex back in 1962. Steakburger hamburgers are grilled to order, feature barbecue sauce unless you ask for it to be held and come in a brown paper lunch bag without any adornment. They also can be quite messy, especially the Double and (no I haven't ever had one)Triple burgers.
The Johnson family is trying to hang on to their traditional amusement for family fun in much the same way the family who owns the Enchanted Forest does. I'd like to support them more, but a steady diet of Steakburgers, onion rings, shakes and fries is the last thing I need. Maybe instead I should revisit their little golf course, but minature golf will never be the same since I saw the Simpsons episode where Homer and Marge got it on in one of the features, the windmill, I think.
The score card boxes remind me of one more Steakburger Golf A Rama story. When I was eight or nine, I was a part of a birthday party of a classmate. I knew nothing of golf and figured I found a sport I could do because I had the highest score. I was very deflated to find out that the results were just the opposite.
Merry Christmas Eve To All!
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:05 PM
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Lee Miller and her Extraordinary Lives
Frida Kahlo brought me to Lee Miller. My exposure to this most intriguing model, muse, photographer, photojournalist, journalist, socialite and gourmet chef was literally off to the side and behind the Frida Kahlo exhibit that had hundreds waiting in line. Kahlo was intensely comprehensive overcrowded and like wrapped up in a creepy womb presentation that was a relief when it was over.
The Art Of Lee Miller exhibition in Philadelphia served as my introduction and was totally amazing thing. The portrait photography was on peer with Phillipe Halsman, Karsh, Arnold Newman. Then there was this photojournalism peer of Capa and Bourke-White. And then there are all the nudes surrealist or otherwise. And what about that picture of her taking a bath in Hitler's Munich home?
I hope you get a chance to check out this woman and her art and story before the movies gets hold of it. There are apparently an indie crapful on Lee Miler scripts out there including a project that David Hare of The Hours had announced five years ago.
Carolyn Burke's Lee Miller, A Life will likely stand as the standard popular biography.
Some sections such as her tour as photojournalist and journalist during the blitz, the liberation of France, Germany and the early days of Soviet organization of the East. She spent a lot of time in the camps during the liberation and this impacted her greatly. A lot of hard drinking ensued during the years she was Lady Penrose still orbiting around folks like Man Ray, Picasso, Ernst and others. But she also had friends and teachers like James Beard who helped her become an accomplished gourmet cook by all accounts with a wild and creative streak, as was her character.
And then there were the years she lived in Cairo with Aziz Eloui Bey, a player of all commerce Egyption. And earlier a love affair modeling apprenticeship with Man Ray. She was muse number two after Kiki. She is also the co-discoverer of solarization. What a life!
But one that certainly wasn't easy. I don't feel right revealing any of the more personal aspects of her life almost because Burke's book took me in like a novel, big romantic where I even picked a character out for myself, if its cool to do that with real people. His name is Dave Scherman. He was life magazine writer photographer up for a true collaboration with another creative, as well as an exotic amazing woman even. They split ways after the war. Lee back on her way to become the Lady for future Sir Rupert Penrose and Scherman to return many more years of photojournalism and authoring books.
This was a great book for being in a snow drift as many of us have been.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:31 PM
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Monday, December 22, 2008
More Herzog
If you are a regular visitor to the buffet you know there is Herzog tracking going on. And to that end there was another recent release of three Herzog shorts from the eighties consisting of The Dark Glow of the Mountains ,Ballad of the Little Soldier and Precautions Against Fanatics released recently.
The Dark Glow of the Mountains
I'm really not a fan of climbing movies. They tend to really make me nervous and some of the macho oxygen creators or misinformed entitle delusion gentry in either fiction or non fiction, And as far as tragedy climbing movies. Sweet Mama Gert, No!
But Dark Glow is something special. Rheinhold Meser, a bare bones alpine-style climber is making an attempt for Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II as a part of the same climb. These are also known as K4 and K5 and are also known as the 11th and 13th highest peaks on earth. This is Kashmir, the China Pakistan border in 1985.
A weakness of the film in this release is that Herzog does not narrate it. But the soundtrack's commentary are certainly his world What goes inside what is the fascination that drives them to climb. And what about two peaks? This makes for good drama, as are the interviews, which are insightful and can be quite emotional.
Herzog and his crew make it as far as base camp with the porters. And Herzog doesn't fail to find opportunities to catch these men at work with the same dignity he shows in films like Acquire or Fitzcaraldo. And here there are some stunning views of the Himalyas. The Germans don't get enough credit for their film stock. By the intensity of the orange tents against the snow and sky of Himalayas.
Ballad of the Little Soldieris where Herzog captures heartbreaking images of indigenous guerilla child soldiers in 1980s Nicaragua.
In the narration department, this second film of the trio does not disappoint. Early on Werner comments in his inimitable sonorous way that: "This area is a combat zone. It took us three Weeks on foot through jungles and swamps, constantly behind enemny lines to reach a little settlement with our cameras."
It begins with a chilling three minute sequence of a adorable Mesquite indian youngster singing to a cassette while jungle khaki clad he holds a rifle. After he sings his heart out the song, only fumbling lyrics once he smiles. Just like kids who perform all over the living rooms of America when company comes.
Somoza raided their villages, they went with the Sandinista/CIA connection first, but then were horifically slaughtered by the Sandinistas. Herzog says this is of historical significance was the first time since the European conquest of Latin America where an Indian Tribe has taken to armed reistance,
As in The Dark Glow of the Mountains he is interested in finding why pre teen children are taking up arms. Their reasons are tragic, many of these boys saw their parents murdered.
In its capture of this moment of history, this film seems somehow like it could be a coil creating a map to our current world.
Precautions Against Fanatics Thank goodness for this bit of 1969 whimsy to end this program. It reminds me quite a lot of early films by Herzog's friend, Erroll Morris. The one armed Bavarian that keeps yelling Out with him! is an absolute classic. Gosh I wish this was on YouTube.
These three are motivating me to...you guessed it..more Herzog. There are worst ways to spend a snow day.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:33 PM
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Sunday, December 21, 2008
Pharell Williams and N.E.R.D Just Frontin
Pharrell Williams and N.E.R.D. is for me the perfect fusion of Beck, Prince, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, PFunk and the cooler aspects of Snoop Dog street cred. Williams is exceptionally charismatic and can work a crowd like nobody's business, as in this encore to a show.
This certainly is not the N.E.R.D. I heard on records. Some of their stuff can get pretty ridiculous and some of it verges on Zappa Turtles party time, but maybe more 200 Motels than mud shark. They make great headphone music and here they party down.
Frontin' is part of this eight minute set. It is a song of pure soul joy, just as Jill Scott's Golden is. It is worth watching til the end. Pharrell gets adult and then says "You Know Where We Are From though, Right?." And then the band makes a special sign from a popular television show that began with a run, 1966-69. And they chant the name of the show til the end.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:47 PM
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Saturday, December 20, 2008
A Man On Wire: Phillipe Petit
On August 7 1974, Phillipe Petit walked a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Earlier this year a documentary about this feat, Man on Wire was released and has received a fair amount of attention, consistently enough in the press and online that I decided to take a look at it.
A couple of years back we saw N.Scott Momaday speak at a forum that commemorated the Lewis and Clark expedition. He clearly made the comment that we should consider their feat as two individuals to traverse and explore the entire as something signifcant and something to be recognized. I feel somewhat the same way about Petitt. Or as one of his collaborators says in the film, "You can not take away what happened."
His motivation for this began when he saw images of the World Trade Center when he was in a dentist's office in 1968. It became a calling to him. After successfully making eight passes between the 45 minutes between the two tours, he was stunned that the question folks were asking them. "I have just done something magnificent and mysterious and you ask why?"
James Marsh's film relies greatly on interviews from the Petit's crew on the planning and execution of the task as well as reenactments that get a little bit cheesy at times. There were still vacant floors and construction in August 1974 when his achievement took place. I'm not certain that it could have happened with the buildings fully completed.
There is a scene in the film is when his girlfriend Annie Allix is talking about how on what became an earlier prepatory trip, Phillipe stayed up all night watching police dramas, especially those involving bank robberies. And Man on Wire has the tone and structure of a heist movie as AO Scott pointed out in his NY Times review Would this act have been as impressive if it was authorized despite the danger involved? Probably not. Part of Petit's art with the walk between the towers as well as between the towers of Notre Dame or the Sydney Harbor bridge is that the act miraculously appears.
There is, of course, a poignancy in any kind of presentation where World Trade Center Towers are involved. To his credit, Marsh makes this reference early on and does not belabor it terribly. Yet the focus of this filmmaker is not on 9.11.01, but 8.7.74 in which someone accomplished a dream and it is an accomplishment that really not even the tragedy that happened a couple decades and a half can dissolve, especially when the individual who accomplished his dream still recounts it with enthusiastic intensity as a man of sixty.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:48 PM
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Friday, December 19, 2008
Peter Beard, Not One Of Us
Peter Beard is an aristrocratic anthro quasi-mystic photographer, pop culture figure and jetsetter. He is the subject of a documentary film directed by Guillaume Bonn & Jean-Claude Luyat, Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond that came out a couple of years ago that I had a screener for but didn't get around to watching until our current snowbound extravaganza.
His online biographies don't mention his parents really because they don't have to. His great grandfather was James J. Hill the railroad magnate. His grandfather was
Pierre Lorillard IV who brought the world Kents and Old Golds. Great-grandfather messed around with art, grandfather was big on horses. This fourth generation after Hill is famous for dabbling in issues and imagery of Africa, high fashion photography and having famous friends.
One of these early on, was Karen Blixen (aka Isaak Dineson) who wrote Out of Africa about her experiences on a farm next to some land that Beard later purchased and used as his basis for much of his African activities. He also had a lengthy relationship with Frances Bacon who used Beard as a portrait subject.
I remember his images of elephants on the cover of Life magazine back in the sixties. In 1996 he was mauled by an elephant that crushed a hip and, if the implication of the Scrapbooks video is correct, moved him on a track towards becoming a family man on Montauk.
His photography of natural wonders in Kenya is impressive enough on its own. I sure don't respond to any of the rest of his work. His collages seem crafty and pompous. He kept his jetset meddle alive for years after the Stones/Bowie/Warhol party was over by taking high end fashion and nude models and placing them among Massai or other native people in Kenya. That just feels exploitative to me. As is his practice of having Africans paint imagery on the frames on his his prints a process he calls "authenticating it with the African whatever it is. It isn't illustration." Then there is his practice of painting with blood, sometimes his own.
I spent seventy five minutes getting annoyed by this guy in this video. I hate the way that practically everything that comes out of his mouth seems to come from special mountain top. His life comes off as a kind of privileged mixtape without a individual enough center to make most anything that surrounds him feel original at all.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:34 PM
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Thursday, December 18, 2008
Sunrise and Soul
I watched the new issue of FW Murnau's Sunrise that is a part of the Murnau, Borzage and Fox tribute box set. But I didn't really want to go with the score chosen. I believe in trying new juxtapositions. Sunrise has big eternal themes of temptation, love and redemption. So I thought I would try Victim of the Joke? An Opera the 1971 concept album by Isaac Hayes' writing parter, David Porter which promised to approach big themes as well.
Sunrise uses a structure of a fable. There is a man and a woman and the woman from the city who has cast a spell over the symbol of man George O'Brien to come close to killing his woman. The woman catches on and flees to the city with the man in pursuit. Then comes the part of this film that has always bugged me. She takes him back even though it should be apparent that she was very close to wearing an oar on the side of her head.
But with Murnau's uncompromising imagery, we suspend our disbelief. Part of this he does by encapsulating the distances. The trolly ride from country to city is one of the greatest sequences in all of film. I believe the documentary stated it was built between the sets. Even more effective is the city woman's proximity to the Man and Woman's with her cigarette smoke creating a trailing path between the two.
Victim of the Joke? An Operar is no Sunrise but it makes for a pretty good contrapuntal soundtrack. It contains eight tunes with an interlocking sketch about David, a guy who gets hooked up with a woman who, well has connections to Bush, who sounds like a bit of badass but he still needs four other guys to beat him up. There is 9.5 minute super production of I’m Afraid the Masquerade is Over which has a lot of the same kinds of flourishes and coloring that Isaac Hayes Hot Buttered Soul era. The world appaently did not embrace Victim of the Joke? An Opera It was released a year later as the opening track " If I Give It Up, I Want It Back" although at least one web commentator feels it might have been the other way around with it preceding the "opera" release.
You can go the Victim of the Joke emusic preview page and listen to sound bite maybe even while viewing the Sunrise street car scene posted below
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:36 PM
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Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Buffalo Bill and the Indians on hulu.com
Watching Hulu on a home computer is a little like watching AMC on a plane. The trip is that there are is a single 15-30 second commercial with a countdown in the corner about every twenty minutes or so. It is a little like having a film screening with one projector only.
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson is the only major film of Altman's seventies period I had never seen. Horray for hulu.com, it gave me that chance after 34 years or so.
I like Buffalo Bill and the Indians. It has all the things I love about Altman films of that time: The use of long lenses, overlapping sounds, and loads of great characters and actors milling about sometimes saying humorous things. In some ways it is a kind of upbeat follow-up to my favorite of all Altman films, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Is it purely coincidental that both of these were filmed on location (BC coast for McCabe, Alberta for Buffalo Bill. Both of these films are also enhanced by some innovative color work done by Alpha Cine Labs of Seattle. The colors due to an alchemy of underexposure and flash processing in McCabe are unforgettable, as is anything shot in directional sunlight in Buffalo Bill.
This bicentennial follow up to Nashville died within days at the theater. I couldn't get to it quick enough and never really had a second chance until Hulu. Maybe 1976 wasn't ready for more Altman cynicism. It is a rather strange film though. This film has three of the greatest sounding male voices in the history of screen acting: Kevin McCarthy, Paul Newman, and Burt Lancaster. He counters these with pipsqueaks Joel Grey as the emcee and Harvey Keitel playing to ultimate toady snivel nephew to his uncle Bill Cody. Keitel can really deliver some comeday, believe it or not.
The plot is mush, but who cares. Sitting Bull is added to the wild west show and is clear on participating on his own terms, much to the consternation of the yellow haired ego legend star. Later Pat McCormick as Grover Cleveland who Sitting Bull dreams about comes to see a show. The real show are the extended sequences of the performances themselves, especially the ones with Geraldine Chaplin as Annie Oakley.
And any scene with Lancaster who plays Ned Buntline, the dime novelist who created the media image of Buffalo Bill. Buntline says great stuff like as in a hypothetical conversation with Bill says "Any young fellow like yourself who is out to set the world on fire shouldn't forget where he got the match from." As he lights his cigar. Or another time when he says: "Rock isn't a rock when its turned to gravel." Which reminds me of my favorite line from McCabe and Mrs. Miller. "If a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass so much."
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:52 PM
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Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Yonder as Obama opener 8.28.08
All things come around Yonder! One of the biggest disappointments of the convention season was that CSPAN let me down. And to think I unofficially and secretly adopted Brian Lamb as an uncle after I met him. Holidays would be cool with a dude like that telling stories about when he worked as a military press coordinator for the Johnson administration. Yonder Mountain String Band was scheduled as the very first act at the coronation at Invesco Field on 8.28.08.
Anyway, I'm not sure if it was poor editorial decisions, DVR operator error or a combination of both. But Lincoln Heights Yonder party before Stevie, fireworks and all that was not to be. Until now, until I found that the outstanding netizens associated with archive.org came through once again. This is a great sounding take. I think it is a matrix tape. It sure sounds like a board but at one you hear some woman ask for passage in the crowd.
Yonder's set is a very solid one. They resisted broad strokes and covers and relied on their music for a four song set. YMSB is now a footnote of something genuine happening at an historic occasion that was highly staged. I listen to it with memories of at least a dozen Yonder sets from late night High Sierra to the after party at the River City Bluegrass party or the time they played the Schnitz on Halloween and they were all dressed up in various religious outfits. (Jeff was a priest, somebody else was the nun, but I know it wasn't the drummer hahaha)
But be sure also to check out the voice of the DNC announcing "The American progressive bluegrass group, Yonder Mountain String Band." It was an historical day indeed
The whole thing is a less than nineteen minutes long, but if you must jump to the must-hear tune it is track three. Jeff Austin is past the whole footnote thing and is going for a passage in a chapter, at least. The tune is called New Horizons and smokes up the sky long before the fireworks.
Yonder is a group as good as groups can get practically. Especially when applied to the model of the mystery of the thing as Alan Light, the New York Times reviewer for the new Clash book when he says "Somehow, every once in a while, a few individuals bump into one another, and they look exactly right together and share a focus and an aspiration and the right balance of musical similarities and differences." Yonder definitely also fits the this description of Clash's Joe Strummer about this convergent chemistry “It’s some weird thing that no scientist could ever quantify or measure, and thank God for that.”
Weird also is this message at the page this show is linked from. It says NOTE: We are not able to offer a simple piece of HTML to show the playlist along with the player. You gotta know there is some kind open source skufflebutt gossip about that one.
Another cool thing about Yonder's set is that each of the four had a chance to be featured on one of their songs. I regret to have it in print only, but any other option to create the "simple piece of HTML" seems too complex right now.
01 40 Miles From Denver (Ben)
02 Don't You Lean On Me (Dave)
03 New Horizons (Jeff)
04 Another Day (Adam)
.
Labels: Yonder as Warm up for Obama
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:56 PM
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Monday, December 15, 2008
The Andersonville Trial
Are war crimes an unfortunate anomolie of human experience or is it part of our DNA as a species. Regardless, It feels inevitable that dramas about war crime tribunals like the Andersonville Trial will never go out of season. I hope that the 1971 television presentation of The Andersonville Trial is still being shown in most classrooms in the United States forever.That is where I first saw it. I wonder if modern audiences will have the same titillating transition from regarding these actors as first the characters on television. It was Captain Kirk vs. Admiral Nelson (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea ABC Sunday evenings 1964-70)
Besides William Shatner and Richard Basehart, Buddy Ebsen plays Dr. Bates country doctor. Martin Sheehan has a very brief scene where as a union soldier he gets a dressing down by military chair Cameron Mitchell. And Whit Bissell, who played doctors, military officers in a whole lot of TV shows
And then there is Jack Cassidy, the defense attorney who is representing Col. Cassidy is such a seventies icon. I sware this guy played the "special guest" on just about every cop show in existence. I believe the majority of Americans saw at least one of these. Maybe it was on Canon, maybe Colombo or Hawaii Five O.
This is a great television moment. George C. Scott shortly after his triumph as Patton and before his star declined with Oklahoma Crude and Day of the Dolphin. Scott played the part of the Judge Advocate in the original 1959 broadway version of the play. It won a bunch of Emmy awards and I remember folks talked about how Scott's version of the Saul Hewitt's play was a kind of salute to the golden era of television.
There is a lot here to absorb. There is the war crimes theme, which are laid out with liberal Yankee outrage by Captain Kirk, oops I mean, Lt. Col. N.P. Chipman, Judge Advocate for the United States. But the strength of the Andersonville Trial is that it wants to drill deeper into the psyche, not just as a piece of advocate trial literature. There are Rashoman-like exchanges where witnesses come in and Mr Otis Baker, i.e. Keith Partridge's step father is able to raise all kinds of doubts by revealing alternative motives or deep psychological wounds of war.
But ultimately the showdown is between Shatner and Basehart with a wild gnashing exchange about military orders vs. moral authority. The energy of which I recall from the first time I saw this in a tablet arm chair in my junior history class, three or four years after it originally aired.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:05 PM
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Sunday, December 14, 2008
Sunday Storm
This is the view of our backyard at about 10:30 this morning. It is far whiter now. If you aren't from this part of the world, the word is we are in for several days of snow and sub-freezing conditions.
Mother Joesph's Address
The Mother Joseph Catholic Cemetery of Vancouver used to be known as St James Acre. It is now 11 acres and is named for the woman responsible for the, "completion of eleven hospitals, seven academies, five Indian schools,and two orphanages throughout an area that today encompasses Washington, northern Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, according to Wikipedia. She is kind of a big deal in Vancouver because of her overseeing the architecture and construction of Providence Academy. It once had a version of this image in its greeting area to a brew pub that was housed in its historic Hidden bricks. (Hidden is the guy who made the bricks)
This was too good to be true. The Mother Joseph Catholic Cemetery of Vancouver is on 28th and N street. Of course I have deigned that the N stands for Nun.
Urban Decay as Abstract Expressionism
To my readers who are fans of modern art, this is not the lost work of either a famous or unknown German Expressionist. It is apparently a painted guide to highly extensive cracking on the west wall of the TP Market, 39th and Columbia. I'm going to try to go back and record some more of this before repairs take place.
Bonus: Taxi Radio
Special dedication to the Skype posse of Garmisch, here is Taxi Radio as performed by Michael Franti and Spearhead. Maybe next time we will get the video kicking and can have a Skype Dance Party!
/Taxi Radio Spearhead at ACL Fest 2003-09-20
Be sure to check out the other Michael Franti and Spearhead downloads at archive.org.
/Taxi Radio Spearhead at ACL Fest 2003-09-20
>
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:52 PM
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Saturday, December 13, 2008
Murnau, Borzage and Fox: A Documentary
I am still deeply considering a feature documentary by John Cork which covers the intersection of three people, They are: FW Murnau, one of the greatest of film auteurs and poets, Frank Borzage, a romantic skilled movie director of tales exploring love and the nature of the human condition. And then there is William Fox, one of the most intriguing capitalists and moguls in the early decades of movies and key figure in the development of innovations in the early days of movies.The film uses as its launching place two theses or models. It describes Murnau as the artist who came to this country for Fox and created Sunrise, one of the most beloved and some say perfect of films in the first thirty years of movies. It also shows Frank Brozage, the dreamer, who shared the first Academy award in 1928 with Sunrise with his film 7th Heaven, also considered a great classic. Both of these films were in the creative employ of William Fox, whose story is an American archetype story of vision, tehnology and commerce.
Fox's story was mostly new to me. An Hungarian Jewish Immigrant who challenged Thomas Edison's patents, built a studio and fell in part to overreaching his level of control of the industry during its transition to the era of sound. Sunrise and 7th Heaven were a kind of climax for his career as they were for the era of silent film.
Cork's documentary is a companion to a huge box set of the same name that includes twelve DVDs featuring Sunrise, 7th Heaven, extensive documentation and other films by Murnau and Brozage of the era. The film includes tasty commentary by Scorcesse collaborator and Director Paul Schrader, who I was somewhat surprised to be enraptured in the history of this era, as well as ubiguitous film historian Jeanine Bassinger and David Thomson, who was extra cool to see and hear because I encountered him at a signing last month.
Sunrise is in the house. Borzage is in the queue, but I don't know if I will take on the entirety of this retrospective soon. Most of the films are from Borzage, a journeyman director and great American dreamer, who Cork's film gives a wonderful introduction, particularly in the human, unique and visual way he explores the nature of love between men and women.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:16 AM
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Friday, December 12, 2008
Sam Green at Columbia Writers, 12.10.08
There always has to be a first when a new tradition is started. Washington is majorly blessed by having the right person for the job as its first Poet Laureate. Sam Green is concerned as many poets are with the human journey . its universal conditions and mysteries. To me, what makes him unique is his passion, dedication and skils to communicate and connect it with the world at large with a voice that belongs to all of us. He brings us the world of the island he lives in and the world of poetry and study of insight where he dwells.
The only other poet I have seen up close who had this lovely gift to such a degree was William Stafford. I was able to share this observation first with one of Clark College's emeritus faculty who was one of Clark College's standard bearer for many years. (He also was the keeper of wonderful gaffes by students in process of becoming written communicators, but that's another story. He agreed with me that there was something similar. I maybe use the word populist too easily. But Stafford and Green are two from this region from which other great poets have dwelt (Snyder, Rilke, David Wagoner, Carver et al.) and to the world in general, very much deserve that description.
A query to Green about Stafford is met with a kind of essay of admiration, mentioning many titles especially those wonderful books Stafford wrote about the writing process. . He said Stafford was dropped from Harper and much of his work went out of print. (The Horror!) Son Kim Stafford's efforts to keep his work alive was also met with admiration by Green.
It was late in the Columbia Writers event before I had an opportunity to have Green sign my copy of The Grace of Necessity. I told him he had been my first nomination for the Clark College commencement speaker for 2009. I told him I didn't know how much it would be considered because Sherman Alexie was the speaker for 2008. He kind of chuckled and said that Sherman would be hard act to follow. He commented on the unique voice Sherman has and mentioned that they had both been a part of the Washington Book Awards, which sadly as a border dweller, I knew nothing about. He seemed to be approving of my second choice, Denis Hayes, who is a good selection for Clark's 75th Anniversary because of his world wide impact as Earth Day founder and dedicated leader for environmental change and solar energy.
Green is also making his own changeful impact on our state as well by connecting with Washingtonians and likely redefining their notions of poetry. The Columbia Writers event was a fine reading. Green knows how to share his revelations and poems as an exceptional well-balanced event. There were many highlights, but his reading from the group of poems he wrote as a daily challenge were my favorites. Pam and I refer to this as the NaBloPoMo model of which the buffet was born, and which she has followed for daily words towards various writing projects of late.
Green usually writes slowly. He said his output before the year of daily poetry was about five to six poems per year helped him in the daily discipline of writing, that it helped him again see the difference between talking about writing and the actual act of putting the words on paper. It is rather fortuitous for all he shares his poetry with that the year his year of "Daily Practice" took place from summer 2001-02 when our country and the world were stunned with some major changes.
His poem about an encounter with a New Yorker who assisted him on the subway five weeks after 9/11 is a lesson for everyone to keep in mind:
October 18 New York City
On the Subway an old
Polish Man takes me in charge,
Rides two steps past his own
to make certain I find
the right place to get off. When I try t
to thank him, he shakes his head
no, forget it. No one, he says,
should be lost when someone else
knows the way
The most lasting image in Green's reading, however, for me was when he talked about the life changing his father was left with after being beaten by his grandfather while working a fishing boat. From his poem On Board the Sea Lassie, 1944
He has become an old man in which pain
has lived like a lapping salmon in his ruined back
his whole life long.
It strikes me as a sorrowful image, pain unfortunate and unnecessary when instead of this beating there was, could have and should have been the opportunity for a father to show his son the way instead.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:18 PM
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Thursday, December 11, 2008
Herzog on Ice
A new documentary film from Werner Herzog is an event to be cherished. His latest film, Encounters at the End of the Worldd features the men and women who live and work in Anarctica. Here he finds scientists who are dreamers. Like Herzog's films this world is full of oddities and a universe of its own.
The National Science Foundation had invited for Herzog to come to Anartica "even though he left no doubt that he would not come up with another film about penguins" He goes on to reveal some of his own questions about nature, like why don't chimps control animals lesser than themselves. For instance, why don't they could ride goats?
He does, however, cover penguins in this film asking a very recalcitrant scientist about sexual practices and possible insanity with the birds. And he also seems to find a fascination with a" derranged or disoriented" bird who separates from the rest in his flock. That description also seems to describe the Some of the folks who make it to the pole are very strange and smart and quirky Werner finds down near the pole. But Werner could find the same lot at Berkeley or the 30 St zone of SE from Reed to Clinton to the Space Room on Hawthorne. The only difference is that there aren't other kinds of people around them as well.
Anarctica is a study in extremes. We see a naked magma lake of Mt Erebus. A frozen sturgeon is found in a cabinet under the South Pole. You either have the grungy frontier town look of McMurdo Station or scientists poking all over pristine looking snow and ice.
Sometimes they poke at the sky. Balloons are sent 40 km in the sky to detect neutrinos in the Stratosphere. "Neutrinos is most ridiculous particle you could imagine" says physicist Dr. Peter Gorham. Then he talks about the billions of neutrinos that don't really do anything, but they were the dominant particle of the big bang.
The most impressive imagery in Encounters occurs with the below the ice photography of Henry Kaiser. This footage appeared first in Herzog's The Wide Blue Yonder. It is quite arresting and is credited by Herzog as what motivated him to come to Anarctica. The sequence on the divers and their discovery of new organisms will prove to be the component of the film I will take away and remember. There is this great Mondo Herzog moment where his camera lingers on divers preparing to go under the ice. To Werner they are like priests preparing for mass getting ready to "Go Down into the cathedral..."
Kaiser's images are far more impressive than his music. He is on the David Gans fringe of the Dead. I sure like David Lindley, but the Kaiser and Lindley world beat new age dream phlegm is allowed by Herzog to pretty much overwhelm parts of the film.
I hope that Herzog's camera goes out in the world many more times to come. I love to watch the world through his lens and hear about it with his dry narration. Such as "For most of our time here we had postcard pretty conditions. This was frustrating because I loathe the sun on both my celluloid and my skin. So it almost came as a relief, when a few days later, the weather suddenly changed."
One more note: Herzog dedicated this film to his friend and early champion Roger Ebert.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:41 PM
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Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Meshell Ndegeocello PDX 12.10.08
Over the past fifteen years or so, Meshell Ndegeocello has remained one of my favorite artists. I have resolved that she will in some ways remain forever underground, cherished by a small by dedicated audience like the one who attended her concert at the Aladdin Theater. That's okay. When you go to a Meshell show, you need to expect that you will not hear her groundbreaking work of the early to mid 1990s. Instead, you will get the cutting cusp of what her and her artfunk New York band are up to at that given moment. Going to one of her shows is like seeing this band work at their loft. A concert goer needs to put their preconceptions aside and be in the moment. If they do so, the results can feel transformational.
In addition to her provocative compostions, Meshell is one of the great masters of funk bass playing. We're talking about Bootsy territory here, baby. In recent years there is more focus on her songwriting and stage persona. But check out the sounds of her early albums or The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel which really spotlights her monster bass playing in a mostly jazz instrumental setting.
As stated above, Meshell shows usually promise to be in the moment affairs. Last night's show seemed to draw a lot on the album she was supporting a year ago, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams. Maybe because most of the material was new, but last year's show seemed more full of fire than this time round. Yet, still, for us true believers, any time with Meshell will both funky interesting experience for mind and body.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 PM
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Tuesday, December 9, 2008
A Few Notes For Odetta
Odetta was rooted in the style of Miriam Anderson and the tradition of the spiritual but helped build the soul bridge from that art song foundation. Indeed the foundations of her music were the church, classical and the popular of the end of the big band era. Her father had her listen to both the Metropolitan Opera and the Grand Ol' Opry. She once told an interviewer "It's no wonder I'm half way decent because I had some good music put into me" I went to an early evening Odetta concert at the Aladdin back in 2001 with my mother, Priscilla. It was essentially a recital with little patter and a lot of songs. She was accompanied by a white middle aged bald piano player that looked like he came from one of the bands in Christopher Guest's folk music parody A Mighty Wind. There were a lot of blues because she had recently worked on tribute projects to Leadbelly and Bessie Smith. I recall rousing versions of The Midnight Special and Little Light of Mine. There was a lot of energy from the seventy year old woman who shared her art with us early that evening. I remember Priscilla was a bit amazed with a fellow who probably had been following Odetta since the fities who looked like the history of the beat and hippie eras wearing sandals in November, and carrying Odetta's recordings with him.
I get the impression that Odetta's music is not listened to as much as it is cited as influence. (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez first then later folkies and pop artists, etc.) Artistically rendered interpretations of folk music take a level of attention and focus that maybe makes too much of a demand on today's audience. The blues is easier than a performance which takes old song knowledge and casts it into a specific kind of interpretive setting.
But Odetta could kick out the blues with the best of them with that husky voice of hers so well determined. Other kinds tunes and settings would have her pull out her classically trained contralto warble. And then there is the way she positively growls her way through a reading of Kumbaya, that can almost give this most maligned of campfire songs a little bit of dignity, or at least raise it up from the near death numbness. Put the scrubber towards the end to see what I mean. It is worth a few seconds of your time, especially when she exclaims "I hear ya, I hear ya"
We have had generations of pop stars now that are referred to by their last names (Sting, Madonna, Bono et al), but I believe that Ledbelly and Odetta were the first American musicians that were generally referred to by their last name monikers, just as we do the greats from the Western classical tradition (Brahms, Mozart, et al) And somehow, that seems right since these folks created such a foundation. The foundation that a modern socially conscious rock and rhythm and blues, when it was ready, bounded from.
It is unfortunate that it takes a passing to put a great artist back into one's heavy rotation or close focus. One quick good way to get a focus on the scope of Odetta's work is to play the samples from her emusic collection. According to William Ruhlmann of the All Music Guide Odetta recoreded on "Fantasy (1954-1955), Tradition (1956-1957), Vanguard (1959-1962 with releases continuing into 1963), Riverside (1962), RCA Victor (1962-1965), Verve Folkways (1966-1967), and Polydor (1970)." And that doesn't cover the last 38 years of her career. Like Nina Simone, who she once shared a tour with in southern Italy, along with Miriam Makeba, who also died recently, a new level of influence and appreciation is likely to begin.
Odetta at her best can command your attention and transport you to a kind of eternal space of folksong and story. All you have to do is listen. But a couple of candles in the dark might help you get there as well.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:39 PM
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Monday, December 8, 2008
White Dog
Criterion releases a film about a killer dog with Kristi McNichol, Paul Winfield and...Burl Ives? That even seems strange for a review in the Onion. Until one hears that the film White Dog was directed by Sam Fuller.
Fuller is a fine craftsman and storyteller. Before his career in the movies he was a journalist, pulp novelist, and soldier. His use of angle and perspective engages the viewer intensely. As Producer Bruce Davison said in the DVD extra interview Fuller was always able to come up with something both visually interesting and something in service of the story. His direction on White Dog is quite compelling because he is able to create the illusion of what the dog is thinking. Maybe not exactly, but you knew something was going on behind those yellow green eyes.
What is happening with our white German Shepherd was racial hate. As time goes on the animal that a young actress played by Kristi McNichol is trying to save turns out to be a white dog, trained to harm and kill black people. Now the premise of Paul Winfield and his partner Burl Ives (His best line: "Can't nobody can unlearn a dog, can't nobody.") trying to do their part to eradicate racisim by proving to retrain a killer dog might be stretching things a bit too far. But when I really wondered if the film could pull it off or if I cared about this story anymore, there are engaging elements and even twists that come up from Mr. Fuller. Credibility had been stretched as far as possilble, but he brings the story back home with a most impressive dynamic in the last reel.
The original story was by Romain Gary and was based on a true incident involving a dog his wife Jean Seberg had acquired who would attack their black gardener. Paramount optioned the story back in the infamous Robert Evans days as a possible vehicle for Roman Polanski. Curtis Fuller, who later went on to direct L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, and Eight Mile worked on a early script for it, and then came back a few years later to work with Fuller on it.
It was Fuller's last American film. His films, especially Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss deserve attention of anyone who says they love movies. His cinema is tough and visceral. It can't stand societal intolerance in almost any form. And these characteristics are certainly present in White Dog.
The title character in White Dog is one scary ass dog. If you have a fear of snarling, frothing pooches, don't rent this DVD. It is even more effective by Fuller's use of setting, editing tempos and parspective. One of the most memorable scenes in White Dog is an audacious attack that takes place in a church under a stained glass of St. Francis. Sam Fuller was first and foremost a filmmaker of the bold and audacious--A cineaste with balls.
White Dog reminds me of Don Siegel's The Killers. These are cinematic oddities that we don't give a lot credence to until we are within them. The Killers was supposed to be the first NBC movie of the week, but basically became a Universal Pictures throwaway with John Cassavettes, Angie Dickenson, and Ronald Reagan, in his last film. But it also featured Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager as the prototypes of the post-modern hitmen of Tarrantino. White Dog had been called "Jaws with Paws" by Michael the fascist Eisner, but it is far more than exploitation. Even if the suits full of nose candy in the late seventies couldn't see that, those who love what movies do.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:08 PM
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Sunday, December 7, 2008
A Sunday in Downtown PDX with Writers and their Wares
I always try to find one or two holiday events to share with my mother each year. This year we didn't go to the Revels or another Christmas concert, but decided to support the Oregon Historical Society's Holiday Cheer event which featured dozens of writers and artists as well as a Powell's event with J.A. Jance. Mom looked great in her black leather jacket, black Gorton fish and chip hat, and her resplendent red holiday sweatshirt showing between the parting of the jackets. But the best fashion statement we saw was a woman with argyle patterned Paddington boots. We had never seen these before. I don't think they are for everyone but they are certainly stylin'.
After watching a bunch of Verizon dweebs hacking away at Mother's cell phone to make her voicemail a bit more accessible, we went to the OHS event. It was great to see all of these folks who are passionate sitting behind their books. The biggest presence was Terry Toedtemeier and John Laursen's Wild Beauty: Photography of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957. This $75.00 mega coffee table book is the companion to a high profile exhibit currently at the Portland Art Museum, which I hope to see sometime during the break. Mother was able to find some Christmas presents and I enjoyed the yule vibe of the big hall.
Then it was off to see J A Jance at Powell's. She was messing with her cell phone talking at the table with some of her fans and then contacted her husband to tell her she was at her destination, that everyone seemed nice. She decided not to have the Powells people read the introduction (actually this was a thankful departure, listening to author intros by these folks is about as engaging as a local deejay introducing a headliner at a festival) Then she launches into a very distinct presentational style. I appreciate the way she stops and halts briefly between thoughts and paragraphs when telling a story. It engages the listener and brings you into her story while she is taking her time delivering it. It maybe is what continues to give her delivery a bit of freshness, especially when she evidentally has given parts of her rap probably hundreds or thousands of times.
She would have made a good member of the police, like the folks in her books, this former insurance sale person and daughter of an insurance man. This was obvious when she followed up on a escapee in a halfway house three miles from their house who ended up in her bedroom one night. She went directly to the group home and confronted them directly, just as a detective would.
I don't read series mysteries and I don't watch mainstream series television. There is a connection, I believe. But I sure appreciated the diversity of the audience that came to see Jance. I would have thought that the vast majority of Judy Jance's fans were like my mother and my aunt, who tote her semi-thick Avons in their purses. But there were all types of folks there; young women and older men the type who meet their friends at the Donut Nook and drink from the checkered mug they brought from home a dozen years ago. I am not being snobbish here, her fans are glad to be there and seemed please to hear her weave tales not of her detectives, but of a just regular folks sixty something year old who has prospered with her efforts to a startling level of success. 40 in print mystery yarns and 35 million copies of those out there in the world. In the past I have taken notice of how many of her books are convex spined at the mystery sections of used books stores. Maybe some copies already have found four or five readers.
Jance does seem to kind of do a sort of rant about literary fiction types with a kind of malice, that is kind of like a Republican frothing. And somehow the image of Judy and her husband in the Winter Arizona evenings of drinks with John and Cindy McCain. But regardless of that kind of vibe, I do respect how seriously she treats her fan base. I like her blog, she doesn't right got up and had a cup of coffee stuff or just market blurbs. Her entries are well defined and connected entries of her life and observations, much like one would expect of Jance at a writer's event.
One more bit of lesson learned on Sunday. The Galleria parking lot on 10th and Morrison can be a real pain in the butt, but it makes for an easy trek to Powell's and keeps you off of the north side of Burnside, home of chaotic pedestrians, blind corners and some of the most precious parking this side of Manhattan.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:00 PM
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Saturday, December 6, 2008
Apocalypto Bizzaro In A Plague Year
Il Seme dell'uomo or Seeds of Man is a 1969 film by Marco Ferreri that has been included in a recent retrospective DVD collection. It is an odd product of the times. This film is in some ways a cinematic cousin of Antonioni's Blow Up and Zabriskie Point as well as Godard's La Chinoise and Weekend. It also brings to mind Alejandro Jodorowsky's wacked out films and a little bit of Nick Roeg's Walkabout. In other words there is excess. Shots go on much longer than we expect them to now. Long shots are used more frequently as is the zoom lens and the pre-Steadicam hand held. And most notably, a kind of god in the machine is what determines the plot devices and the fate of our protagonists in a highly random fashion.
The film is about two attractive people spared of a plague that has pretty much wiped out society. He is Cino, an earnest herbologist and a museum that contains a block of parmesan cheese and a Viewmaster among other "relics." She is Dora, looking like she just came off the cover of Teen Vogue, And, she kind of did, too. This character is played by Anne Wiazemsky, the young Au hasard Balthazar muse of Robert Bresson and post-Ana Karina creative and romantic connection with Jean Luc Godard with whom she was married for twelve years. She also is the granddaughter of Nobel prize winning French man of letters François Mauriac and the daughter of a Russian princess. Director Ferreri doesn't give her an awful lot to do in this film, but then again, he doesn't have to. This woman has one of the most commanding screen presences in the history of the cinema. But the screenplay is ever more superficial because we never find out why she is so resistant to breeding with the world falling apart.
This post apocalypse drama does not take place in the Garden of Eden, but in a large house overlooking the coast with these two, eating, drinking and doing better than making do with makeshift lamps.
Stuff comes to them and stuff happens. A weather balloon-like Pepsi bottle hovers overhead, a group of armed masked soldiers who are apparently the provisional government of what is left of society visit for a while, an older woman with designs on young Cino shows up, as well a giant whale that Dora interprets as a negative harbinger.
It is hard to look at this film as anything but a cultural curiosity and a zeitgeist exhibit, similar to the objects on makeshift stands in Cino's museum. Helicopters, the signature weapon of the Vietnam era are pretty predominant in the film. Seeds of Man begins with two and a half minutes of warped out stills in extreme close up showing folks that seemed to be damaged somewhere between holocaust and Hiroshima. In another ham fisted allusion, WWII newsreels are passed off as being contemporary of this society in the not too distant future.
It is intriguing to see dystopic interpretations of the future in our own times of uncertainty with big scale terrorist attacks and on the cusp, it seems, of total economic collapse. Yet one pauses and reflects on how forty years ago, these artists also harbored similar feelings and we are still somehow standing. This gives one hope that folks will view back on much of this era also with a long sigh and a gut response of "Really?"
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:24 AM
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Friday, December 5, 2008
SoulTube Extravaganza
Things get long and overwhelming the two wrap up weeks after Thanksgiving. The only thing that seemed right for an hour or two of unwinding at the Google Tube. What's with the new search window on the embeds. They get more annoying every day. I don't know if I will be overloading on bile if I was to try to read Planet Google over the break. Anyway, positive energy only near the soul food. Here are souveniers I found hyperlinking through the sea of funk.
Roy Ayers jamming with Ba Samba
Roy Ayers is as much a godfather of modern soul music as George Clinton or Quincy Jones. Ayers is seen as a central influence to the most important hybrids to soul music since its origins. I'm speaking of Acid Jazz an Neosoul, Since back in his day he has been sampled by Erykah, covered by D'Angelo, featured on the albums of many hip hop artists as either a source or a guest. Portland DJ George Page who was my source for loving Al Jarreau, Marlena Shaw, and organ saxaphone quartets by the score used to say Roy "lost his mind" when he left straight jazz vibraphone to his funk jazz explorations.
Roy Ayers either brought a soul convergence to jazz or jazz to soul. Chicken or egg situation, I vote for the latter because he had grown up like Maurice White did (from Ramsey Lewis) Anyway, I've loved his prodigious output of seventies jazzart funk smooth for thirty years now, and probably will until the final funkathon.
Ledisi sings EWF's Devotion
This is one of the most amazing vocal performances I have ever seen. Ledisi who has somehow escaped my searching for soulfulness until now, was described as being a lot like Anita Baker in Nelson George's Soul Cities program on San Francisco. Ledisi can sometimes remind some of early Bobby McFerrin before that dreadful happy face song. Her energy seems boundless likely to explode at any downeat. The harmonies and direction she gets out of the crowd are positively stunning at times.
EWF's Sun Goddess by the Students of Robert Newton School
I thought somehow it had to do with the guy who played Long John Silver awash in the garrish Technicolor of Disney in the fifties. Pirate funk? But no, we are not talking about Mr. redcoat one leg man here but a dedicated music instructor in South Carolina.
This version of Sun Goddess, the Ramsey Lewis-Earth Wind and Fire collaboration features the antithesis of Ledisi. It is positively the most unsuccessful vocal I have ever heard. I want to believe its because she couldn't hear the monitors over some of the MOST steaming funk I have ever heard.
BUT watch these guitar players work. It gets so intense at one point it threatens to derail but the most salid hash mark rhythm guitar part written in the history of funk brings us back to worship the Goddess of the Sun.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:36 PM
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Thursday, December 4, 2008
Fraulein and Film Movement
There are stories told for the sake of the tale and there are stories which exist to remind us of the human scale we are all a part of. Independent world cinema has more opportunities to explore and share the latter with HD-DV technologies and DVD and Internet distribution.
Film Movement is a kind of book of the month club for quality international independent films of the type that get recognition on the festival circuit. If I were to subscribe, I know that they would stack up and I would feel that nagging obligation to watch them and and would never seem to get around to watching them. (Note to self: get caught up on back issues of Wolphin, the McSweeny's video digest) Browsing their catalog and picking them up through Netflix seems to be a better option. I have had a few encounters with their releases before and they have always been good experiences. It is kind of like having a fine art house specializing in foreign film and knowing going in more or less on a blind date will probably yield at least okay results. Before DVD and its myriad of options, you could pretty much say What's happening at the Fine Arts/Cinema 21/Movie House/Neptune/5th Aveneue or Koin and probably have a somewhat satisfactory cinematic experience. Film Movement is like one of those art houses.
Fraulein is a Film Movement release. It is a 2006 film by Andrea Staka about women from the Yugoslavia region (Bosnia-Herzgovina -- what should it be called in the generic sense?) who work and live in Zurich. Mirjana Karanovic is Ruza, emotionally distant and successful cafeteria operator. She becomes star crossed with Ana (Marija Skaricic), thirty years younger than Ruza, recently arrived but very self-assured. Both of these actresses have a very strong presence. Skaricic reminds me of Milla Jovovich and Audrey Tatou. Karanovic is like Ingrid Thulin or Bibi Anderesen, and the dynamic between the two is reminiscent of Bergman's great mid-career films that strongly featured relationships between women. There is also a third character with Slavic roots, Mila (Ljubica Jovic) who is older and domestically mainstream than the other two.
In Fraulein, there is more an emphasis on experience than plot. The film is about 75 minutes long and Staka is able to economically pack a lot about these characters in that short amount of time. She uses sexual encounters and dance sequences to bridge time and plot point, but they don't feel gratuitous. And the film looks great from its opening scenes of winter pruning at sunset to urban Zurich highways at its end. I love the look of Europe on DV and HD. When executed well you can almost see your breath in the cold night air.
One more note. I must be mellowing out. I used to turn off any film that had any mention of a terminal illness. (I hate Terms of Endearment!) Now I mostly take it in as a part of the story, but that doesn't mean I'm not altogether unwary of it as a story element.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:47 PM
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Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Phantom India
When Louis Malle and his film crew with their Nagra tape recorders and Eclair NPR cameras came to India in 1968, they entered another world. The apt subtitle for this film is Reflections on a Journey. Phantom India is a big film that reflects the size and diversity of its subject twenty years since colonialization with republic in effect. The film is really seven television hour films each with individual theme and focus. It is not travelog or an attempt at comprehensive analysis. Phantom India is an essay of the sense with its own unique tempo. Malle's commentary serves as kind of running series of footnotes to its imagery.
My first exposure to Malle's documentary work was another film he made from his Indian trips, Calcutta. I remember being in a school auditorium being spellbound watching long takes of pilgrims at the Ganges. I remember telling a classmate how impressed I was with this experience. He had been a merchant marine and had been to India as well as a lot of the rest of the world and was not really terribly impressed. He told me it was too much like being there for him. That impressed me with Malle's film further.
In the thirty years that followed I never had much of a chance to see Phantom India. It showed up once or twice in the Cinema Repertory schedule, but that meant committing two long evenings to it, most likely in the middle of the week. Now DVD and personal electronics can make opportunities to view documents like Phantom India accessible. As a reader to this blog may have witnessed, I love the Criterion Eclipse editions. In the past year I have worked my way through the Late Ozu, Raymond Bernard, William Klein and Aki Kaurismäki Proletariat Trilogy sets. Criterion's description copy on the jewel cases for the set states its goals for Eclipse: "a selection of lost, forgotten or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer."
Malle began as a documentarian filming Jacques Cousteau's Le Monde du silence, aka The Silent World and sharing an Oscar with him before he had directed Elevator to the Gallows. Phantom India takes advantage of the portability of 16mm film equipment as the Maysles and Wiseman have, but it is evident from the outset that Malle approaches this as personal essay, not as an exercise in verite or direct objectivity. It is also a product of its times, the dynamic intensity of the late sixties when the vibrancy of international cinema was at a peak.
Additionally, the Eclipse box says this project came at a fortuitous time for Malle. He had divorced his first wife and had a difficult time working with Alain Delon in the segment he did for the Edgar Allen Poe omnibus film, Spirits of the Dead. Several sources have mentioned that Malle considers Phantom India to be his most personal film.
I have worked my way through the hours of Phantom India and what I am left with are a number of strong images and impressions. Buzzards and dogs fighting over who gets the first take on a cow carcass. The struggle of a group of men trying to engineer a wrong sized tire with a rim. ("It could take all day to change a tire") A middle man who buys fish from a village for the market in a intense negotiation with the fisherman where Malle lets the camera linger on this cultural gap and comments:
"This is my film On one hand, an entriely subjective reflection on my interior world. But on the other, just the opposite, the economic realities that won't let me escape into dreams. An incessant back-and-forth between myself and the things before me. Almost always reality gains the upper hand."
Later Malle reports on how he was asked by a school child if he is American and what caste he was in. Castes and contrasts fill much of his presentation of an India which certainly has changed greatly in the forty years since the film was made. He's not afraid to show the edges of things in this country: beggars and streetlife, foreign travelers and ashrams, aboriginal cultures such as the Boda and Toda, and even a small community of Jews maintaining their culture. ""The only problem is that our community is disappearing." a middle age Jewish woman tells him.
The six hours and seven segments of Phantom India begin and end with the images of work. It begins with a woman and an awl pulling up vegetation who does not want to be photographed because she believes the camera will take her soul. And it ends with a lengthy segment of a crew outside of Bombay harvesting salt, manually carrying it to a ridge than placing the load on rail cars they push through a highway intersection with trucks intent on destination. In between we had quite a journey indeed. Malle's last word:
In India we found another way of being, another way of living and seeing the world, that made us all feel notstalgic like a secret forever lost. But we felt all along it was a world living on borrowed time. Here where the population is greater than Africa and South America combined, modern life increasingly takes the form of man exploiting his fellow man.
.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:54 PM
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Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Der Stadt Mahagonny
Back in the mid to late eighties, one of the public radio feeds featured very long and comprehensive series on Kurt Weil's music on Weds. afternoons, I believe. I think this is right because my recollection is that it was the same day that the fellow on KBOO used to have a show where he was playing the entire Duke Ellington recorded catalog in chronological order. Yes, it took him years.
Anyways, I had this job where I had opportunity to listen to the radio in the afternoon and the range of Weil's art and career from the Weimer era operas with Bertolt Brecht to his later work in Hollywood. I recall rich music and a stories of a life of the first half of the century. I have brushed up against this music from time to time in decades since, but besides The Three Penny Opera, my exploration of the DVD of the February 2007 Los Angeles production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny directed by John Doyle and starring Patti Lapone is the first real time I have focused on his art and music to any extent.
Mahagonny created by Brecht and Weill at the end of the indulgent twenties is a large form parallel universe, maybe not so distant, where money and unguarded pursuit of self indulgent pleasure trump decency, civility, and the affairs of the heart. Where is exactly is Mahagonny? If geogrpahy was not a science it would be a pastiche like it is in the Brecht Weill world. This staging features freeway signs directing folks to Route 666, a highway from Alaska. Mahagonnians sing whistful songs of Alabama and Pensacola. And there seems to be a gold rush going on. I see der Stadt Mahagonny as a precursor to Las Vegas and Miami, even without Doyle's imitation of the famous Vegas sign.
The first act features a great deal of disorientation and some misdirection. The story seems to be first about the gang of three who set up a weird capitalist utopia in the middle of desert. Begbick (Patti Lapone in this production) and her two buddies Moses and Fatty decide to stop where ever they are and make a town called Spiderweb aka Mahagonny. But it becomes clear that the stage action is the cause and effect and the decline and fall the place has on everyman lumberjack Jimmy, one of the new immigrants to this place of vice and pleasure.
In the second act, the city becomes a civilization of no limits. The sins don't add up to seven but they certainly are deadly. There are apparently only four things that will preoccupy a man in a place like that: Eating, sex, fighting, and drinking. The eating episode was thankfully short. But then there is love with a capital f. Madam Begbick screens an receiving line consisting all Johns with aviator sunglasses white shirts and skinny ties. She directs them to spit out their chewing gum, wash their hands well and say a few words to the girl. There is great contrast here. Mechanical and emotionless capitalistic sex but with that warm bath of Eros Weil wrote called the Mandalay Song with a great hook telling the fellows to move faster.
In the DVD extra conductor James Conlon calls The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny a hybrid that he situates between "opera, legitimate theater, musical theater, and Brechtian theater." So again the question is raised "Where is Mahagonny?" At this point, from this encounter I conclude it is a place of rich musical texture and wide angle screen view of society that may take a bit of focus to see. But like the Alabama Song's ability to linger in your head, it seeks it way to the next whiskey bar, not asking why so much as how man falls.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:52 PM
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Monday, December 1, 2008
On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald
On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald is a 1986 reality television project that was produced for the British Channel Four network and first broadcast in the US on Showtime. It features twenty one witnesses who were either participants in the Warren Commission and/or other subsequent congressional subcommittees that investigated the assassination.
The judge was Lucius D. Bunton, a real Texas federal judge. The prosecutor was Vincent "Helter Skelter" Bugliosi who over twenty years later delivered a 1500 page, million and a half word tome about the Kennedy assassination still maintaining Oswald as the sole killer. The defense attorney was Gerry Spence, fresh from his blush of notoriety in the Karen Silkwood case. The setting looks real, but from what I can find out was in actuality a set in London where over twenty hours of coverage of the trial was presented for the British audience, prior to the five we now have in this set.
This document certainly is a unique viewing experience. It is worth looking at even if just for the contrast in style between the intense driven Guiliani-like energy of Bugliosi and sometimes affected home spun Wyoming cowboy shtick of Spence. It is almost quaint to look at this program pre-Court OJ TV and pre-JFK Oliver Stone, not too mention all of the thousands of hours of reality television that succeeded it. It is a rearview mirror inside a rearview mirror: We are looking at a unique twenty year old television show that describes twenty years prior to that.
The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, the grassy knoll, the Connolly stretcher bullet, the Zapruder film frame by frame, Jack Ruby and Officer Tibbet. These are among the objects of concern and discussion by the celebrity legal sparring partners and the folks they call to the witness stand. Was Oswald the patsy who acted alone? Bugliosi hammers facts to be confirmed and denied in a machine gun manner. Spence kicks the witness stand like tires on a pick up and asks "don't you think there is a chance that...?"
The most interesting witnesses are not the physicians, evidence experts, or those who obviously have benefited from the ongoing cottage industry of conspiratorial theory. (Bugliosi on the other hand has benefited from becoming an anti-conspirator, but his most recent book on another front, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder might prove to be intriguing, although not many folks seemed to notice in the throes of election fever.) The folks of most interest on the witness stand turned out to be the ordinary ones like Buell Frazier, who used to give Oswald rides to where his wife lived on weekends. Or Charles Brehm who was on the grassy knoll during the shooting. Or Ted Calloway, the used car salesman and Jack Brewer, the shoe salesman who encountered Oswald after the murder of Officer Tippet. Just ordinary folks who literally brushed up against history.
But the strangest, oddest witness of all was Ruth Paine. Marina Oswald and her child were living with Paine at the time of the assassination. It is also believed that the the Mannlicher-Carcano was stored at her house. She is certainly sharp and intelligent, yet somehow comes off as a little cat lady Quaker outside eccentric. She weathers both Bugliosi and Spence well, but something lingers when the viewer realizes again that this is not an actress. But someone who was closer to a fleeting moment of history than just about anyone. And that she is bound to know something, reflect on something she saw or heard that could maybe still be of significance.
On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald is ultimately an unclassifiable oddity. It is certainly not a feature film nor does it really resemble what reality television has become. It is an odd fusion of realism, courtroom histrionics, history and on some level it did succeed in creating an odd kind of parallel universe of the sort one dreams about when they have been in bed too long.