Saturday, February 28, 2009
Disaster Disaster
When Time Ran Out... was Irwin Allen's last big budget disaster film filmed in 1979. It concerns an exploding South Pacific volcano and the usual Lifeboat Stagecoach Poseidon cross-section stereotypes either avoiding, escaping or becoming victims in its wake in the midst of their hubris, love affairs, avarice , etc.
I remember Poseidon Adventure and Towering Inferno, which were created by Irwin and many of the talents who were slso involved in When Time Ran Out... and although I was much younger, they both felt like big Hollywood films. When Time Ran Out... is really a film filled with big stars caught in a televison movie with a couple extra special effects, some of them laughable even.
And the results are nevertheless kind of intriguing. The small pond actually calls attention to the technical lesson aspects as far as acting is concerned. It is interesting to see the likes of William Holden or Paul Newman make marks, give a reaction shot or, in Newman's case, rely on body language to help compensate for a horrendous script. In the first half of the film he wears a cowboy hat so is able to sculpt the kind of poses he was famous for looking like a middle aged Hud who lost his way. And it says a lot about Newman who was saying on record that he regretted being in "the volcano movie" when you see him in contrast in a number of scenes with James Franciscus, one of the most wooden of teeth-gnashing television actors. The solid pros don't necessarily shine, but one can get some insights into why they were both fine actors and big movie stars. They rise to the top of the lava pool here.
Most of the high dramatic and suspenseful moments of the film tend to be when folks are suspended over lava. There are at least three sequences which use this device. the most unintentionally humorous of these involves an early scene where Newman, Franciscus and John Considine (who I guess they picked because the was supposed to look like a scientist) are suspended in a bucket over the crater but the cables malfunction and former football player turned actor Alex Karras (so ever subtly given the name of Tiny) needs to manually jump start the device so they don't plummet to their death. But don't forget the folks hanging off of Paul Newman's helicopter, or an interminable scene of crossing a collapsing and flimsy bridge over a canyon filled with lava. Come on. Did anyone really believe for a moment that Paul Newman and the little girl were going to plummet to their deaths before they get to the other side of the island?
The film was first released on DVD a couple weeks back in a version shorter than the theatrical released or the pumped up television release known as Earth's Final Fury. I thought it would be a little campier and a little more entertaining than it was. But along with albums from that same time where artists maybe reluctantly but desperately tried their hand at disco, it is an odd cultural curiosity along with Airport 1979 I would not be sad to miss if ever cross its path again.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:08 PM
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Friday, February 27, 2009
El Fandi: not just any Matador
David Fandila aka "El Fandi" is the top ranked bullfighter in Spain. One gets the impression that he is kind of the David Beckham or Michael Jordan of bullfighting, a personality who is taking something to a nother level. The Matador is a nonfiction film directed by Stephen Higgins Nina Gilden Seavey that covers the life and career of El Fandi between 2001-2005.
The best of nonfiction documentaries engage the viewer and make them feel a bond and maybe even an intimacy with their subject. The Matador accomplishes this not only in showing us what David's life is like, but also takes on the task of giving the non-Spanish viewer background and insight into the pageantry, dangers, challenges and controversies surrounding bullfighting as well. We hear from various commentators on the inhumanity and brutality of the sport and see the presence of protesters, but this is a film about El Fandi and his pursuit to become the fourteenth matador to accomplish the goal of participating in 100 corridas in single Spanish bullfight season.
This task of surviving without injury of mishap is both a singular pursuit and a family affair. His brother, who gave up a career as a world class skier, acts as a kind of valet, personal assistant and head of team El Fandi. His father, a former lower league bull fighter himself, travels to the matches and watches his son fight as does his mother. There is an unforgettable scene where David and his mother are being interviewed on a Spanish television program where the host cuts away to another reporter in a hospital interviewing a local matador who has been gored in the head. Mother Fandila's reaction to this footage is kind of indescribable.
But also indescribable was my reaction when the film shows a corrida in his hometown of Granada where he takes on six instead of two bulls in a single afternoon. He is gored while taking on his third bull, has his leg operated on while fully conscious, and returns to the ring after 45 minutes for three more bulls. What does one say about a day at the office like that?
By having a focus on David Fandila within a world that most who see the film are not going to have an intimate understanding, The Matador succeeds in illustrating a personal story within a subculture, one of rich heritage and nuance. It is a hard life on the road in Spain from one corrida to another, with the Winter spent traveling to Peru for more bull fights. We also see a bit about the hard edged business world of bullfighting. During the time span covered in this film, David fires Santiago, his long time manager and trainer and hires Antonio Matilla, a kind of Albert Grossman or Michael Ovitz of bullfighting who takes El Fandi to a higher level. By the time this happens in the film one feels truly connected with David and his world. A world the viewer may not understand fully, but certainly knows better than the Blood and Sand or Sun Also Rises perceptions they may have held about it seventy five minutes before the disc disappeared into their playback device.
Link to Image Source
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:12 AM
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Thursday, February 26, 2009
Margarethe von Trotta's View of Three Women
Sisters of the Balance of Happiness (Schwestern oder Die Balance des Glücks) was German Margarethe von Trotta's second solo directorial credit. This film came out in 1979 after her successful and well-recognized collaboration with husband Volker Schlöndorff, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) and her first film The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (Das Zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages).
It came out in a time when artistic and independently minded filmmakers were creating features were routinely creating psychological studies of contrasting personalities as their primary content. Sisters feels a bit in the wake of Bergman's Persona, films of Eric Rohmer, or even Altman's Three Women but it is definitely its own film and vision. I'm not sure if one would be able to tell that it was directed by a woman if they did not have that prior knowledge. What it does do tells its story directly, carefully and certainly without sentimentality. The overriding color in the film is a kind of dark blue, especially in its urban scenes, creating the kind of mood of smudgy clouds in Hamburg fall and winter.
The film concerns three women. One is Maria Sunderman, played by Jutta Lampe is an intense and icy executive secretary. Maria is the primary provider for her sister Ana (Gudrun Gabriel) who is a graduate science student on the brink. Jessica Früh plays Miriam Grau, a pleasure seeking dreamer who works in Maria's office. By this description you can see that this trichotomy is ripe for contrast and dramatic conflict. The key is that von Trotta has created characters you think about long after the ninety minutes of their story is over. And further credit should be given to the fact that despite stylistic differences in dress and with some filmic techniques, this film and its dramatic substance feels quite timeless, contemporary even.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:35 AM
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tropical Heat & A Filmmaker in Twilight
I knew about the Red Shoes, but my first awareness of the films of Michael Powell and his producer partner Emeric Pressburger came when they were championed by Martin Scorsese on the old Bravo cable network sometime in the late eighties. I have never taken time or effort to really explore their films, but Marty and others indicate there are lots of pleasures to be found there. I am not an Anglophobe, but British made television and film, with the exceptions of I, Claudius and the New British cinema of the sixties has a tendency to make my teeth hurt, especially when broad comedic elements are included.
The broad comedy included in Age of Consent, one of Michael Powell's last films, just about killed that one for me. However, Helen Miren's youth and physical attributes, James Mason's impeccable vocal delivery, and lush blue tropical skies of Australia's Great Barrier reef saved the day.
In our northern wet winters of the Pacific Northwest, a film about a warm blue place can give one a bit of relief. I remember really enjoying and feeling a bit of relief in seeing Boy On A Dolphinhome sick from school about forty years ago, or even a year and a half ago when I saw Gilo Pontecorvo's film with Yves Montand about a fishing village, The Wide Blue Road.
In Age of Consent James Mason plays Bradley Morahan, a highly successful New York based artist who needs to turn his back on production for profit and return to his Australian roots. He goes to live on a nearly deserted island tethered to society by a boat shuttle that comes over with supplies. And, lo and behold, the island seems only to be permanently inhabited by three women: A fairly batty middle aged one living on a trust, a really batty old lady, and, her granddaughter, a young, semi-feral, and physically stunning Helen Mirren. We see a lot of Mirren in this film, especially when the artist asks her to disrobe.
Things just about totally go off track both for the artist, and I say the film, when a deadbeat acquaintance of Morahan's arrives along with the kind of icky quasi-comedy that shows up too often in my taste in standard British cinema. But, as I say, you've got blue skies, a fine young woman, and a great actor who is fun to watch even when he is coasting or nearly at rest. I'm not sure if those elements are enough to fully redeem this film, but I kind of enjoyed it because of those factors.
The theme of the older artist and the younger woman also played a role in Powell's real life as well. In 1981 he married Martin Scorsese's film editor Thelma Schoonmaker who was 35 or so years younger than Powell. Scorsese introduced them, and all accounts I have seen indicate they spent 9 wonderful years together before Powell died at the age of 84 in 1990.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:35 PM
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Doors Opening and Closing
New Yorker Films died a couple of days ago. This is like all the great literary publishers disbanding operations all at the same time. I spent so many hours at campus film screenings and the Fifth Avenue Cinema with New Yorker Films. There was also about a decade and a half of cranky library videos the public library. And, of course, hours upon hours of programming on the Bravo, IFC, and Sundance cable networks. Seeing their name on the head of a film is like returning to a favorite cafe for that particular cup of coffee or deli sandwich.
This happened the week after a Times story about the Filmmaker's Cooperative probably getting evicted for a frickin' Arts Internet podcast project. Life sucks for the arts kind of like it did back in 1980.
Film distribution is somehow one of the most vulnerable links in the chain. I am having a hard time getting a handle on all of what New Yorker films distributed. Distribution rights and types of rights seem to expire, come and go and are transferred depending on product and type of distribution. New Yoker Films are noted for handling Breathless and Bertolucci's Before the Revolution at one time. I just recall seeing their Manhattan skyline logo probably as much as the Janus logo when I went to college. Well, regardless, for many of my generation, as I can tell by the kinds of response that has been on the net this week, Dan Talbot (now in his eighties) closure of New Yorker films felt like a kind of significant passasge, of the sort one acknowledges when their pop culture heroes show up in obituaries.
I mentioned the departure of New Yorker Films to Pam. She said you are going to see a lot of doors closing and a lot of others opening in the near future. And sure enough, doors also opened on that same day. The Iraqi museum reopened after America's shameful neglect in not protecting its antiquities.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:10 PM
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Monday, February 23, 2009
Chuck Brown: Godfather of Go-Go
I'm talking about Chuck Brown here, not Chris, the punk who beats up women before award shows. Unless you live in DC or Maryland, are African American in your forties at least, you probably don't know about this unsung, unnoticed American music godfather of Go-Go Music. Go-Go music is funk with latin cross rhythms a slappy bass line, and solid horn lines. It is filled with hooks and surprise and is meant to rock the house for a mighty long time. Go-Go came into mainstream briefly a couple of times. Once was when was Brown's tune Bustin' Loose ("Gimme the bridge y'all") another was Da Butt, the tune E.U., another Go-Go band did for Spike Lee's School Daze.
I have had a couple of Brown's shows on my IPods and they invariably put a big smile on my face. At seventy four he can still tear it up The key to this music is the rhythm. Like the funk you feel it on the one, but the timbales, congas, and other percussion adorn it into a groove that involuntarily moves one's shoulders and hips.
I shore up two clips from the YouTube waters, they consist of the climax of a show of Brown did with his band the Soul Searchers a couple years back. The whole show broken into six parts is worth checking out. It is a helluva jam consisting of his take on jazz chestnuts It Don't Mean A Thing (but here its if it doesn't have the Go-Go swing), Midnight Sun, Moody's Mood For Love and, oddly enough, of all things, the Woody Woodpecker theme. Check it out.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:51 PM
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Sunday, February 22, 2009
Strange Times in the Kodak Theatre
I hesitated posting about the Oscars this year, but since it promised to be "different" I was intrigued and thought there would be some things to consider and observe. There certainly had been a lot of press about surprises, change in format, and bringing in a real movie guy, Hugh Jackman, to seduce the female demographic into tuning in.
I don't think this year's choice of host worked. If it did, then how come it didn't really feel like the Oscars until Steve Martin came on. The opening number with the low rent sets didn't work at all. It would have been stronger if they had Jack Black and Mos Def doing a Be Kind Rewind parody, but I'm thinking that film came out a year earlier so they couldn't do that. Hugh Jackman's singing voice reminds me of gargling, Pam says it is stage singing. The robot dancers for The Reader were just plain strange and Anne Hathaway as Nixon was like an ill fated experience you would expect with a high school drama club.
At the end of the first 90 minutes came another huge miscalculation: the big musical number by Baz Luhrman. Couldn't they have had more Pineapple Express parody instead? And is this interminable, parody-like over the top number a more substantial waste of time that could have given folks a better taste of the Oscar songs, especially Peter Gabriel's. And what they finally did with his Wall E credits song was actually kind of an abomination. They mashed it into a Slumdog Millionaire sandwich with the big picture's two songs surrounding and then reprising all three together. For once I thought, too bad that something from Wall-E didn't win. I would have loved to have seen Gabriel come out and sing it anyway for his acceptance speech.
I guess the point with the songs was the same reason they piled on loads of technical awards for Will Smith to present. We have got to get through the boring ones so we can pile on the stuff we know our middle aged or older female audience is going to like.
And that appears to be the fawning and bizarre Oprah speak that five past acting award winners gave to the nominees as a kind of one on one personal introduction. It reminded me of the kind of crap stars would generally say to each other on the Merv Griffin Show. However, if the folk were genuine, it felt genuine. Shirley MacLaine talking at Ann Hathaway was pretty good, as was DeNiro's pitch to Sean Penn. Still. I hope no one ever uses that format again. I don't think the orchestra, (now elevated on stage, no pit) was playing one of those big chords like when the guy read the questions in Slumdog, when the actors were toadying each other, but it kind of felt like the same kind of dramatic artifice was being applied. I am impressed that last year's best actor winner, Daniel Day Lewis wasn't there to play along, whatever his reason for not attending may have been.
The lengthy bits Hugh Jackman read about how various stages of movie making got pretty tedious in a hurry. And there was this kind of weird information architecture going on in the introductions where everyone was either mentioned obliquely with video screens or directly before announcing them again. A large collection of LCD screens also seemed out of control sometimes like the TV wall at Frye's or Circuit City sort of pulling a HAL and doing what it wanted. A cycle of stuff would come up randomly. Kung Fu Panda showed up during the best actress nominees. And during Queen Latifah's I'll Be Seeing You (Sorry Queen, you are a favorite of mine, but Sarah Vaughn you certainly are not) they played around with the skew so you couldn't see or read what was going on the various screens. But the Queen's song did curb the strange phenomenon of the audience clapping for the dead people where you wondered if some year they were going to bring in an applause meter in the lower left corner of your screen.
What did work were the montages for the Best Picture nominees where their themes and content of the films were linked to other classic movies. It was getting to be long in the broadcast for such a moment of profundity, but it made us take notice. Casablanca tied into Slumdog Millionaire, who would have known?
It was weird to realize I missed the guy who did the voice over talking about how many nominations or awards the recipient had prior. But his disappearance kept my Google search box busy as in "Didn't Sean Penn win an Oscar already? What was that for?
The best moments were the ones that show producers Laurence Mark and Bill Condon couldn't condense or control. The acceptance speeches by non-Americans and ESL speakers were especially charming this year. Pam commented on how good the stage looked loaded with brown people when everyone involved with Slumdog Millionaire was on it.
And then there was Sean Penn, who made me feel that sitting through this thing, writing some notes for this dispatch and doing some low impact school administrivial work was a worthwhile way to spend the end of the weekend
.
"I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect, and anticipate their great shame, and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone. "I'm very, very proud to live in a country that is willing to elect an elegant man President, and a country who, for all its toughness, creates courageous artists,"
I try to keep an eye on pop culture, but I didn't realize the significance of Penn's final remarks about Rourke ("In great due respect to all the nominees who despite sensitivity that sometimes has brought enormous challenges, Mickey Rourke rises again, and he is my brother") were loaded because of Rourke shooting his mouth off in December calling Penn a homophobe and an average actor who probably didn't deserve the nominsation. Maybe he didn't realize he wasn't still on the set playing a wrestler when he was smacking like one. Nor did I have any idea what was going on with Ben Stiller's Joaquin Phoenix parody when he did his presenter appearance. Is this just growing old or just having my head in a different sector?
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:46 AM
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Saturday, February 21, 2009
Bobby Hutcherson + Lou Donaldson: PDX Jazz Festival 2.21.09 Crystal Ballroom
This was the one show in this year's Portland Jazz Festival I had been anticipating for weeks; a Saturday afternoon matinee at the Crystal Ballroom with one of the greatest boogaloo groove alto players with pure bop roots along with one of the most admired vibraphonists in jazz history, Bobby Hutcherson. Does life get much better?
Lou Donaldson is 82 years old. He was part of the generation of musicians who emulated Charlie Parker and was more or less an original Jazz Messenger for Art Blakey. He also led his own group through a number of Blue Note records releases between 1957-62. But his greatest contribution is in being one of the individuals who brought a more blues gospel kind of playing into the world of mainstream jazz. He is one of the grandfathers and godfathers of a boogaloo groove style generally accompanied by some of the finest B3 organists in the history such as Charles Earland and Dr. Lonnie Smith. He is one of the last legendary musicians of his generation and he still can put on a heck of a show.
I overheard a couple of jazz photographer types with 300mm lenses talking before the show about what to expect. He did an interview as a PDX Jazz event earlier and was throwing out opinionated one liners that took the interviewer and others in the audience aback. And his show was full of the same. He made it clear that this was going to be a show of straight ahead jazz. "No Fusion no Confusion. No Kenny G or Najee." And no rap. "50 Cent ain't worth a quarter." In his ramp up to Bye Bye Blackbird, he talked about how it was a song that Miles Davis used to play back when he was playing jazz. There was an audible response from the audience. But that response was even louder when he introduced his Alligator Boogaloo by saying this was maybe Blue Note's biggest record. "I don't know about Norah Jones and all that. We used to throw records like that out in the street." I guess it proves you can get away with a lot when you are a legend in your eighties.
The B3 organ-guitar-sax quartet has its own set of jazz rituals. One is to have most of the groove tunes after first solo be followed by an energetic guitar solo and an organ solo that starts out solid, takes itself down somehow and then cascades into wild swirling fury til the sax comes in and brings it all home. It is definitely a form that was refined in decades of playing for drinking folks in roadhouses on the chitlin' circuit. In an interview segment on Lou's 2000 Live on the QE2, (which also featured several of the tunes and jokes in Saturday's concert) he talked about how he was forced to bring in an organ many years ago while he was in ghetto clubs with no amplification and he continued to use it for records "because the organ gives you the sound of a big band if it is done correctly and the people love it."
An afternoon with Lou Donaldson seems likely to include some of his classic tunes like Blues Walk. But will also feature a Charlie Parker tune. He introduced another tune which he did not name in the introduction other than to say it was associated with the greatest jazz figure of all time. I figured he was going to do an Ellington tune, but instead kicked out an absolutely lovely version of What a Wonderful World complete with a Satchmo vocal for the last couple of lines of the tune. I turned around in my seat to watch a thousand people in daylight all trying to keep from being too noticeably misty eyed.
But with Lou Donaldson you are also going to get some blues. The first of the bluesWhiskey Drinkin' Woman Blues was introduced as being a cautionary tale about getting to know the woman one has a Viagra binge with before you marry her. It Was A Dream showed him in full command of the blues, this one with a great punchline that ended his set with a chorus of how his visit with George W Bush was a dream because he woke up with a President named Barrack Hussein Obama. The blue state crowd roared with approval.
I wasn't sure there was going to be an encore, but here comes Lou and quartet for one more. He talked about Bird again then launched into a most energetic turn at Cherokee, his own to be sure, but clearly a version in the Parker tradition. Not one for the Confusion Fusion crowd, to be sure. And it served as a great self-testifying moment for this musician who calls himself one of the Last of The Mohicans.
Bobby Hutcherson's set was all about the music. No set introductions or back announcing of tunes. For most of the show he threw out the names of tunes to the band inventing it as he went along. Most were standards: Old Devil Moon, Nancy with the Laughing Face, Old Devil Moon, For Sentimental Reasons, and I Thought About You. But the Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer classicOut Of This World was my favorite. It is a tune that, it seems to me, demands a special precise attack and phrasing. Hutcherson's last approach on its chorus made me want to ride in that tune, if not forever, for a very long time.
Hutcherson is truly a painter when it comes to the vibes. He creates mood and color.
This was especially evident in the second tune of his set, a ballad that sounded like a cross from the Themes to Sandpiper, Spartacus love theme and Black Orpheus with a touch that put the listener's, at least this listener's emotions right in the center of things.
I saw Hutcherson about 20 years ago at my first Cathedral Park Jazz Fest and my recollection was that of a very physical and engaged player. That impression was definitely reinforced with today's performance. He breathed deeply like an athlete for not only himself, but it seemed for the rest of his quartet. When he went in for the attack either for the melody line or midst solo, it seemed to be with absolute focus and a kind of abandon. After decades of his life devoted to playing the vibes, he still seems surprised and sometimes joyous when unique surface sounds occur he brushes his mallets against the bars.
I loved this show. I splurged a bit and got the ones for the higher priced section. Most of us in that section looked like we had spent too much time in record stores. And the section behind us looked more like a lot of folks who had seen lots of nights of clubs and concerts. Regardless, it looked to me like most folks there were pretty darned happy to be at such an event. To Bill Royston and PDX Jazz: this one you got right.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:13 PM
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Friday, February 20, 2009
Joe Louis and the Blues
If the definition of the blues is the range of experience where one suffers both the lowest of the lows, but also knows what the highest of the highs are too, then the blues was the life of Joe Louis. I have been reflecting on this because of a juxtaposition of screening the DVD Joe Louis America's Hero...Betrayed, a new documentary on HBO along with the first two films in the Paul Allen funded project that ran on PBS a few years back, The Blues.
The HBO film is a bit ham fisted with music swells and lots of talking heads, but overall it tells its story of the fighter who first worked through the stigma and burden of both racial inequality and the past champions Jack Johnson's flamboyance and indiscretion to even get an opportunity to compete at boxing's highest level. And of became the toast of the free world on June 22, 1938 when he beat Max Schmeling in a rematch of an earlier defeat for the Heavyweight World Championship.
Then came the blues, big time. After working his butt off to support the war effort as an enlisted soldier, he faced 15 years as a pursued man by the IRS forcing him to fight beyond his time and sell his name to anything that looked like it might make some revenue for him, including appearing on game shows and doing time as a pro wrestler. There were also years of drug abuse, serving as a Las Vegas greeter, and being castigated as an Uncle Tom by the likes of Muhammad Ali and younger generation blacks who had an impatience and anger regarding civil rights he could not relate to.
The first two installments of The Blues, the films by Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders show artists like Son House, Robert Johnson, Skip James and J.B. Lenoir who were either never recognized or were only regarded towards the end of their lives. I actually see more parallels in the likes of James Brown to Joe Louis more than these blues artists. Or maybe Jimi Hendrix or Sam Cooke if the champ had died in the late thirties or early forties after he had broke through. But the champ lived on for nearly forty years after WWII in a life without a roadmap and no one as his peer really.
Jackie Robinson is often cited as being the African American who broke the color barrier in Sports. But as one of the commentators in this film stated with a qualified respectfully, we should consider Joe Louis as the one who really broke down the walls and opened the door for hundreds of talented individuals in a variety of sports. There had to be a Joe Louis before there could be a Michael Jordan.
Films like Joe Louis America's Hero...Betrayed provide a service even though they may not have the artistic integrity of nonfiction film at its finest. I knew of Joe Louis and Schmelling, but did not know as much about the dark post years and all of the humiliations and tragedies of those times for Louis.
Yet what the documentary does best probably is show what Louis meant to blacks during his championship era. Jimmy Carter gave probably my favorite anecdote in the film. He told how his father graciously granted a request by some of the black farm workers to listen to the game. He thought it would be three or four, but it turned out to be about forty folks. Carter said the manners of the times were in full effect. The black men were exceptionally quiet and thankful to hear the broadcast of Louis' latest victory in the ring until they crossed the tracks to where they lived. And then you could hear celebration and all hell break loose late into the night.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:04 AM
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Thursday, February 19, 2009
Outraged About Art
A recent New York Times article last week has me a little worked up. It tells how the Film-Makers' Cooperative, one of the most important vestiges of avant garde cinema is being apparently forced out of their space for an Internet Radio station project. Jonas Mekas, a patriarch of independent cinema says this move would result in "throwing out the only organization that independent filmmakers have to distribute their work.”
The generations of cutting edge filmmakers who create film with the goal and intent of creating art do not get the respect they deserve. The Film-makers Cooperative has been around for 45 years stores a collection of around 5,000 titles and makes them available as rental for non-profit outlets such as museums. I don't believe that archives of print or static art be treated with such disregard. The respectful preservation, the education, and the distribution of experimental films should not be a hard sell, even if one does not wish to explore the work of artists mostly making art more or less for arts sake and personal expression.
I hope that the NY Times article will help rally support for the ridiculousness of this move and that it will help lead to a better solution. The history and heritage of experimental film needs to be preserved. I don't really understand why MOMA or the AFI or other major arts organization can stand by and let this happen.
I found myself feeling a bit like I did in 2003, despondent and angry at our government when they allowed the Iraq's heritage to be unprotected just after the Mission Accomplished debacle. Yes, I was angry about the Shock and Awe attacks, the Abu Gharib photos, and the thousands of Americans and Iraqis who have died or had their lives irrevocably impacted by this incredibly wasteful military action. Yes, I believe Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should be considered war criminals. But a disrespect for heritage, culture, and art is something that truly strikes at the heart and makes my skin crawl.
On the other hand, I applaud the efforts of the AFI, Kino Film and Anthology film archives to preserve the avant garde film with wonderful DVDs like Unseen Cinema and Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s. I understand a new DVD of more recent Avant Garde American filmmakers is also coming out soon. And I want to support local efforts as well: The Cinema Project in Portland, Or has interested me for a while, but I currently have concerns about them because their website seems to be down.
The article bugged me enough to write an email to the Art On Air people with a cc to the Filmmaker's Cooperative and let them know that I hope "the leadership of your organization will see that the efforts of an organization to preserve and distribute the art of film need to be honored, respected, and revered. Please either let them keep their home or help them strengthen their mission. Or both."
I'll let you know if I hear back from either party here.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:30 PM
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Hotel Bunuel
Several times per year I end up seeing movies considered classics which for some reason I have never seen before. The Exterminating Angel is 1963 film by Luis Bunuel recently released again by my favorite purveyors of DVDs, Criterion Collection., is the experience of aristocratic guests at an opera after party where the guests are paralyzed by some unstated, unknown force that compels them to stay in a drawing room night after day after night.
I knew I had not seen the film, but it felt familiar to me. When I checked out some reviews and essays on it afterwards (it is the kind of film experience where one needs to connect with what others might have seen in it after a viewing) I realized why I had this weird sense of familiarity, The first Bunuel feature I saw was the first of his last three films The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Roger Ebert pointed out that in Charm is "is a reversal of ``Exterminating Angel.'' This time dinner guests are sitting down to a feast, but repeatedly frustrated in their desire to eat."
The creatures at this house party are certainly quite heinous. An exceptions is a doctor who is kind of cool to watch. Bunuel seems to be hardest on the women. Is he commenting on them needing to get their act together or just slamming on harpies. Closets play a big role in the film: dead people are dragged to them, illicit sex takes place as well as toilet duties. These effete clueless open up a water line in the house, light fires, watch sheep come and go.
But if you have ever seen or admired one of the more noted films of Bunuel, you recognize his unique world and means of creating cinematic experience. Is there another director who displayed such a kind of consistent control? Well, maybe Bergman in his prime, and I am getting that same felling about Rossellini as I watch his television history films. And Fellini. But in Bunuel camera and the graphic layout of his shots, especially those which deal in formations of people. Ebert calls him a most "individual and iconclastic of filmmakers. Yet the surealism in the later films is more like a seasoning, but in Exterminating Angel that seasoning is sometimes replaced for a sauce.
But unadultarated surreal weirdness certainly not lathered on like it was in his early years. Two of his early credits, Un Chien Andalu and L'Age Dor truly were spiritual relations of Blood of a Poet, which I saw a few weeks ago. I tried to do a treatment poetry kind of piece for Exterminating Angel, but it felt more like swtich hitting between straightish narrative and then describing a special effect or odd circumstance. Exterminating Angel requires the viewer to both use his or her brain and also forces it's reasonable logical part to be turned off at the same time.
I really don't feel like looking it up on the Internet, but I somehow have recollections which are probably imaginings of one of those Sunday rock and roll feature shows like they play on PDX's KGON on Saturday mornings. I recall or imagine, not sure which, Casey Kasem or some other syndicated DJ leading off a spin of Hotel California by the Eagles by telling how Frey or Henley came up with this song after seeing Bunuel's Exterminating Angel. After reviewing at the last two verses of Hotel California, I'm thinking it might be true.
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said 'We are all just prisoners here, of our own device'
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
'Relax,' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!'
``The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, there is no explanation.'' He might have added, ``Those seeking reason or explanations are in the wrong theater.''
-- Roger Ebert quoting and expanding on remarks of Bunuel
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:50 AM
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
A Cultural Techno-Bluesology Aside
I'll likely post further on it, but I'm working my way slowly back through the Paul Allen/Martin Scorsese maxi project with six or seven others about the blues that was delivered for PBS broadcast five or six years ago. The first episode, the Scorsese film Feel Like Going Home features Corey Glover and Keb 'Mo, I believe singing some version of Walking Blues, Robert Johnson style.
I believe that the form of the blues will always be vital, eternal, and will ring true. But I woke up this morning, not trying to find my shoes, but to try to get my connective media in order--cell phone, last bits of what seem to be high level email, quick revision of a blog post. And it lead to a passing thought that this modern blues might turn out to be something like
"Woke up this morning, can't get me no social touch..."
"No Facebook myspace or textin' comin' my way"
"I'm caught in a void feelin' like I'm not worth much"
I'll spare you additional choruses.
My mind wanders from this trivialization of the blues to one the discussions I had with some of my students about MIT fan geek professor, Henry Jenkins and his book Convergence Culture. "Welcome to Convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the poser of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways." as he describes in his introduction. Jenkins goes on to explore how "media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence" are highly intertwined and as an intersecting force making a huge impact in our world.
From this I rush back thirty years recalling that Talking Heads song Found A Job, the one that ends with that great Velvet Underground What Goes On style tag on the end of it. It is the story of Bob and Judy whose relationship on the skids was saved by creating a kind of reality television world for themselves long before YouTube.
So think about this little scene; apply it to you life.
If your work isnt what you love, then something isnt right.
Just look at Bob and Judy; They're happy as can be,
Inventing situations, putting them on t.v.
A strange bit of prescient coincidence? Or is David Byrne some kind of sage prophet? OR both?
Certainly, it was a heck of a lot harder for Bob and Judy to put up shows thirty years ago as studio rats at their local cable access. I wonder now if they would turn away from their media activities because everyone is doing it or if their shows would just turn out to be a modern version of the blues.
Enough of this jangled, disjointed rumination. On with the day.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:12 PM
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Monday, February 16, 2009
The Fiddle and The Drum: The Singer-Songwriter Artist and the Ballet
The DVD of Joni Mitchel's collaboration with the Alberta Ballet and choreographer/director Jean Grand-Maître, Joni Mitchell's The Fiddle and The Drum is surprisingly engaging. It works because it doesn't come off as a flashy re-imaging or a collection of the artist's greatest hits committed to dance.
The core of the dance piece consists of seven Mitchell songs that only the most hardcore fans of the artists would recognize other than aural wallpaper of KINK in Portland, Oregon. (who seem to get around to playing all her tunes sooner or later) Sex Kills, Passion Play (When All the Slaves Are Free), Three Great Stimulants, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Beat of Black Wings, If I Had a Heart, and, If certainly are not the tunes one first pulls out when they think of Joni Mitchell. If anything, they represent the artistic op/ed side of her output. This group of songs, mostly from her eighties and nineties work deal with big themes: war, ecology, fame, power, and the nature of existence.
Because these are songs full of so many words and ideas, they work in this setting because they don't recall moments of nostalgia, either of Both Sides Now and Woodstock nor the jazz rock ground-breaking diva of the seventies courting and sparking herself onto a new artistic ground.
These songs sometimes with their concrete story telling and but always with penetrating observations make a wonderful counterpoint with Mitchell's mostly minimal visual designs, mostly restrained to a large portal against a black background. And. of course, both music and image certainly act as a kind of perfect counter to Grand-Maitre's minimal dance staging. The men wear boxer briefs and the women one piece bathing suit looking dance skins and sometimes light green men's dress shirts flowing openly. Most of the pieces focus on a pair or two of dancers and the company at large seems to be serving as a chorus representing the cross-rhythms and sound textures that accompany a lot of Mitchell's work of this era.
However, not all of the work in this ballet comes from albums like Dog Eat Dog and Turbulent Indigo. The title tune, The Fiddle and the Drum is familiar from Clouds, the album that brought us Chelsea Morning and Both Sides Now. The symphonic version of For the Roses fits in quite nicely. But the encore coda of Big Yellow Taxi is kind of a throwaway given, I believe, to the audience as a bonbon award for dealing with a fairly uncompromising hour of dance, art, ideas, and music.
The Fiddle and The Drum has since been staged by the National Ballet of Canada after its origins with the Alberta company. This well executed film treatment of the ballet on the DVD entered the festival circuit late last year. I found myself returning to it several times during the long weekend (a modern dance DVD, really?) impressed by its beauty and how well the visual, aural and dance elements integrate but also play contrast with each other.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:59 PM
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Sunday, February 15, 2009
Stuff I See & Think About
This sign is on the AA5 building at Clark, which has its fourth floor totally devoted to the machining department. It looks like someone in that department has discovered clip art lately. The irony here is that this building used to house the graphic communication department. If they were still there, would the sign be designed much differently. Maybe. I'd like to make one up next year with only Harding, Polk, Arthur, and some of those lesser known presidential guys with the word closed and the date, but no mention of President's Day and see if people get it.
Is there peanut snack dumping going on here at college vending/study areas? If you become a little peanut-phobic in recent weeks, you better like Three Musketeers. Maybe the Twix bar doesn't contain peanut products, but I'm not sure.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:48 PM
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Saturday, February 14, 2009
Dirty Dozen Brass Band with Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue and The Pimps of Joytime: Roseland Theater, PDX, 2.13.09
Once in a while a show comes to town that is bigger than being just a concert. I recall close to twenty years ago going to see Living Colour and Fishbone on the same bill. Fishbone had finally become a bit known with their third album Truth and Soul and Living Colour was a flicker of light, blowing the minds of a lot of folks in the late eighties troth of hedonistic metal and MTV. By the time the evening it was through, it truly was nothing but a party; both bands were on stage blowing as hard as could be imagined. A version of Hendrix's Spanish Castle Magic with full forces combined will be a musical highlight for my entire life.
The triple bill of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, and The Pimps of Joytime brought back that evening as well as some other bigger than life concert experiences. It would be easy to say that it was a night mainly of New Orleans Brass bands, Funk and Soul, but like its cooking, culture, and heritage of its people, that means that it covers a whole lot of musical ground.
Brooklyn musical polyglot, The Pimps of Joytime kicked the evening into pretty full gear. They move from a kind of juju funk to a full on salsa party at the turn of a rimshot. They looked like New York even more than Sharon Jones' Dap Kings did a couple weeks back at the Crystal: There was latina percussionist who reminded me of J Lo and Sheila E,a straight haired anglo bass playing who looked like she was a coed at Stony Brook, a dreadlocked percussionist, a drummer who I believed was Asian, and an obviously music nerd guitarist, who reminds me of G Love with a little Lou Reed thrown in for good measure. They were the opener to the opener, but their short set had the crowd in a responsive groove in no time.
I had been anticipating the return of Trombone Shorty. Last summer I saw two great shows: Stevie Wonder and Trombone Shorty. Everything else could not touch either of those evenings in July. I am pleased to report that I wasn't let down by my second encounter with Mr. Troy Andrews aka Trombone Shorty, who at only 24 years old is one of the most dynamic and amazing performers I've witnessed.
His trombone solos are more like rock and roll guitar than JJ Johnson. He combines a lifetime of watching great performers into his charismatic stage presence and knows how to pace a show to put the crowd into a kind of ecstatic frenzy. His band reminds me a lot of Tower of Power before they choked on their own Squib Cakes. He solicits the crowd's response from a crazy solo by Freaky Pete Murano or saxophonist James Martin with the same level of command that George Clinton does. Orleans Avenue is his band clearly, one that expands Shorty's high level of musical ability and showmanship.
New Orleans music, as I have said, is not about any one thing. But it is rare to see both jazz, soul and funk get a kind of equal footing that they have in Shorty's music. And probably no where better than an extended, expanded cover of Al Green's Let's Stay Together. Shorty played trumpet on this one through many choruses and expansions of musical ideas, then let the crowd sing their hearts out with them. His solos reminded me Freddie Hubbard during his prime time CTI days. After the crowd singalong then returned to trumpet where he did a multi-echoplex chamber version of the tune and the returned to an even greater charged crowd shouting out we were going to stick with it whether "times are good or bad, happy or sad." Have mercy. Then there was the mambo version of St. James Infirmary that I think Cab would have approved of.
Only a veteran group of musicians like the Dirty Dozen Brass band could take the energy of a show with the likes of Trombone Shorty and take it up notches further. As on of their signature songs exclaims "Ain't Nothin' but A Party." And it was, with various members of Shorty's band coming on and off the stage. In their more than 25 years in music they have been dedicated to both maintaining the New Orleans tradition and expanding it. I heard their music first in the late eighties when they morphed Hail to the Chief and the Flintstones theme together on their Mardi Gras in Montreaux album.
In the years that followed, there was lots of collaboration, sometimes with guest shots on their album with Dr.John or John Medeski or connecting in concert semi-frequently with southern jam band Widespread Panic. I am surprised that this was the first time I have seen one of their shows. It reminded me a lot of when I saw another great New Orleans band Ivan Neville's Dumpstaphunk. There is obviously a set procedure going on, but lots of time is taken to give both regular and guest musicians a chance to show their stuff, but in a way where it reaches points of ecstatic crescendo.
Performance is the key to these acts. Like their New Orleans brethern, The Radiators, the Dozens have floated around to record labels large and small. Their latest came out a couple years ago. it is the entirety of Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On with each tune a carefully created set piece with listener taking a trip through Katrina's wake as well.
Here is a Dirty Dozen performance of What's Goin' On from last Summer which I believe demonstrates the mix of soul/funk/jazz/contemporary urban and NOLA tradtion that is uniquely theirs but has also has influenced at least a couple of generations of musicians, including quite obviously, one Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews.
Dirty Dozen plays What's Goin' On June 13, 2008
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:00 PM
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Friday, February 13, 2009
Big Day Out With Librarians 2009
Online NW is one of my favorite days of the year. If you look closely you can see signs of Spring between Albany and the OSU conference center across the street from Parker (or Resser Salsa?) Stadium, which looks bigger than ever. ( It amazes me that such infrastructures exist only to put on six home games per year.)
But it does not amaze me that Online has been around for 26 years hosted in a variety of locations. I love Online for a variety of reasons, but one is that it gives one both a preview and a snapshot of the technology. The library community tends to shovel stuff out of their way that doesn't work. But if it does work they attack it head on with both the heart and soul of the information doctor and give us access with presentation and support that is like wizardry at times. The library community in the Internet infrastructure era is one of my favorite zones in the universe.
If the Online conference day for the year is a good one, you come out considering key trends and how they contrasted from prior years. Online 2009 cross section confirmed numerous times during the day that we are living in the midst of a huge wave of influence from monolithic prominence of Facebook and the ubiquity of video online.
BJ Fogg and His Hour of (Persuasion) Power
BJ Fogg's speciality is persuasive technology. He had a coined word on one of his first slides. Captology = computers + persuasion. He does research, teaches at Stanford and goes out to Industry.
He is a fortunate man to have his field of psychological study when we see how a widely permeated social technology that no one has really seen the likes of before be a part of triggers that sometime see a million people not only hearing about but making a kind of connection with a technology. I'm talking about Facebook, of course, which is now at 16 million users. Whatever it is, Fogg sees Facebook as here to continue to grow its web. He says Facebook could kill itself. Marketing and sales of the data on users would lose their credibility. He says the key is for users to be aggressive with Facebook and take control of their profiles.
The first part of his talk walked around observations of how powerful web video was. He showed an informal experiment (by psychologist standards, I guess) of how a personal birthday appeal for his favorite charity was most effective in imbedded video.
Fogg was the kind of keynote speaker who is a bit showy about pulling from a kind of personal jukeboxes of stuff from other presentations, conferences and workshops and then pulling them up on the fly for a pretty nice speaker fee, I would imagine.
BJ's next section was about defining what motivates us. There are three pairs of motivators that impact humans universally according to good Dr. Fogg. They are:
- Pleasure and Pain
- Hope and Fear
- Acceptance and Rejection
He showed this interminable video about playing with his dog, Millie, and later gave an impromptu door prize of the same style ball that he and Millie were playing fetch with. (A weird misguided moment of theater) Then he gave this whole pitch about simplicity as a driving force for persuasion and the speech gave me a kind of sensation that was somewhere between Sunday school and a day where you knew your body was working pretty well overall. But then he also got into a pretty interesting rap about ritual computing.
But the lasting anecdote was about the class he did in Facebook at Stanford. Teams of students marketed products, I get the impresion that most were software or web-related products. About two-thirds of products (those not coincidentally that succeeded were products that were simply executed or were grounded in premises of simplicity) Some of the projects were very successful financially, some teams were raking in 2k per week. This, said Fogg, obviously made parents happy.
Fogg was okay, but I am going to ask the program committee to bring in Brenda Laurel next year. She'll show you some patterns, beth'um for sure.
Rachel Bridgewater & Anne-Marie Deitering on politics, history and media: social and otherwise
The seeds of the presentation Reed College librarian Rachel Bridgewater and Anne-Marie Deitering of Oregon State University gave this year began on Septmber 26 2008, the night of the first presidential debate. It was truly a kind of mixed media experience for Bridgewater of social networking, traditional media, and discussing the debate in person with her partner. "It made the debate exciting," she said, and "I finally got Twitter."
Bridgewater and Dietering looked back at three environments and traditions when it came to American politics and their manifestation or development in relationship to "social media." And I think it significant and well-considered that Bridgewater did not call it social networking. All this Web 2.0 stuff has turned into something bigger. It has turned into a medium of itself.
The Soapbox. The first lens or metaphor these librarians took on was the American tradition of being able to take a corner, get on a platform and make your view known. Dietering stressed how this is a "powerful image for the disenfranchised" and is "the antithesis of traditional media." We can accept that we will occasional crazy person on the corner is one of the by-products of this tradition have to put up with.
Dietering's training as an historian and the passion that brought her to that training was evident as she used the concept of soapbox as a point to review the history of American journalism. She quickly covered its evolution from the partisan century to penny press and wire services. She reminded me of one of my several examples of technology's shaping of communication form i.e. the unreliability of the electronic telegraph lead to the practice of the encapsulated lead beginning news stories. You had to get as much of the story out as you could before your connection was lost.
The soabox metaphor was very prominent in the days of Howard Rheingold's populist view of virtual community fifteen years ago. Dietering showed how today's most popular electronic soapbox publication the Huffington Post is a convergence of old and new media similarly reflective of the debate night experience that lead to the presentation in the first place. "You can't really talk about social and traditional as separate things." The Huffington Post has user generated, social and tradtional media all at a one stop soapbox.
The Echo Chamber effect was blamed in part for Howard Dean's weak showing in 2004. Folks looked at its rise and fall as a road map for how insulated forums of shared views ultimately lead to a kind of inbreeding defeat. But then, of course, came Obama. Bridgewater explored the nature of our avoidance of cognitive dissonance. Her discussion, as she acknowledged, connected directly to Fogg's keynote discussion of the power of hope and fear & acceptance and rejection. Bridgewater made the case that the echo chamber is not necessarily bad or evil. It plays a connective role with traditional media and is an important tool for organization
I also liked Bridgewater's connection of how real life environments can be echo chambers as well. She showed a display of Obama signs, presumably from her lower SE Portland neighborhood which reminded me of how rare McCain supporters back in the campaign months were a rare presence indeed in these parts.
The Salon and its enlightenment origins in coffee houses, female organizers and as an organized, social and scheduled activity was discussed by Dietering. Can new more fully informed truths come out of the exchange and interchange of opposing views. We have an entire Presidency which seems to be riding on that notion.
And of course the Salon is an obvious metaphor and lens for much of what is going on in the world of the Web and the Internet. They showed how websites alike Daily Kos hold their own netiquette and are mini-worlds of their own.
The election of 2009 is indeed an interesting bench to assess the impact of new media. According to these librarians, 40% of all Americans watched videos relating to the campaigns, and in many cases these videos were distributed and forwarded through the trust networks of a populist citizenry. We looked at images through Flick'r feeds and Twittered to one another in great number, sought out more primary and unfiltered resources such as CSPAN clips, and monitored polling numbers at a variety of websites.
Inauguration Day provided some of the most illustrative moments about the state of media, new and old, social and traditional. Flick'r feeds of the Buscopter on its way to Texas was huge as were the other web sites where it seemed just about everyone in Washington on January 20 was laying out their media on the web as an eye witness.
And then there was CNN, the source most Internet users turned to, broadcasting in two windows: broadcast feed in one, Twitter reactions in another. As one of the librarian's friends said of the phenomena. "A single linear feed we all watch in real time. How retro."
Best Quote of the day
It actually came from a conference attendee, not a presenter.
I tend to think about Twitter being my Id, Facebook being my ego and my blog serving as my superego."
Fine Instructional Technology Solution for Teaching Ethics at Pacific University
A couple of folks in the library staff, at Pacific University, Isaac Gilman and Lynda Irons, managed to convince the powers that be that it would a good idea for their college freshman to be engaged in a class session devoted to the ethics of information technology as a part of their required Humanities class. They used technology to do this and even based the course on the library community's ACRL standard 5: "The information literate students understands many of the economic legal social issues surounding the use of information and access and uses info ethically and legally."
Standardized attempts at information and technology are one of the foundational areas I try to pursue at my institution so this was an excellent session for me to attend. I was really impressed with what they were able to accomplish with Google Sites and Pollanywhere. They used these tools to stage and engage the classes in what appeared to be meaningful discussions on freedom of speech, social networking, academic honesty, and Intellectual property/copyright. In regards to this last topic, they confirmed what I have seen in my classes: perceptional understanding of copyright and use are all over the map.
Lunch, Raffle and Bob & Kitty Return to the Alumni Lounge
Lunch at Online is always a good one. This year it was a salad buffet with about four varieties and copious platters of cookies. Radka gave her Idaho Spud to Laurie. It almost immediately got coveted by two of the others. Joan won some designer M&Ms. No one anything cool this year like cameras, USBs or hard drives. Two years ago almost everyone at our table came home with a door prize. Maybe Zachary's nametag was the lucky talisman)
I found it impossible to photograph and copresent at the session that Kitty and I facilitated, so I instead close out with this declination letter from John Foster Dulles. I guess he was too busy to come and talk to the Beavers. And so ends another year's big day out with librarians at Online.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:59 PM
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
Artist Talking Amongst Each Other: When it Works and When it Goes Sadly Awry
I love the notion of two successful and similar artists share a stage or recorded time together. In the past week or so I encountered one of the best of these kinds of encounters. And one of the most embarrassing of these.
First the great one. On the bonus disk of the Criterion Collection DVD of Gus Van Sant's My Private Idaho, there is a conversation lasting nearly two hours between Gus and Todd Haynes. They primarily talk about My Private idaho, but they explore lots of issues about filmmaking, the creative process, and the unique careers they both have in bringing an important sensibility to the features they directly; namely the kinetic energy of the "traditional" avant garde cinema. There is an incredible amount of inventiveness and creativity with these individuals.
It is a lovely surprise to find Van Sant so thorough and conversational. He has one heck of a deep and quick mind. And it is wonderfully intriguing to find him giving an account of the processes of all stages to this film, which has got to be one of the most defined of anomalies. He talks about the old 4th and Taylor scene of PDX with yellow front stores and some presence of boy hustlers between the bus depot and the arcades. I am a bit of a sucker regarding any sort of story about times when the low numbered west of Broadway streets featured not one but two grind house theaters, The Blue Mouse and the Roundup. The latter so sleazy it did not even advertise in the newspapers.
Anyway, this recorded discussion between these filmmakers felt really definitive. It is a kind of unclassifiable, but I think guided discussion is as good as an attempt at description as any could be.
On the other end of the spectrum, there was this week's Arts and Lectures presentation A couple of best selling literary women writers fold up their legs on overstuffed chairs and blather about their fortune to make money from writing, travel to cool places, and, in sprinkling showers of name dropping, remind us of the famous people they intersect with.
I'm talking about Anne Patchett and Elizabeth Gilbert, the pen pal sisterhood of the jaw jaw club. So many common traits to tell 3000 people about! "We both had huge fourth books." Oh, Brother.
I was in a bit of a negative zone anyway due to some odd administrator to employee emails that were illing, and listening to these two twitter was pretty painful. But one big bummer is not so bad in a series that so far has featured Richard Russo, Annie Leibovitz, Michael Pollan.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:22 AM
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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Spike's War Movie
I have been a defender of some of Spike Lee's films that everyone else seemed to hate. I maintain that although School Daze, Bamboozled, and Crooklyn are far from perfect, they are not terrible films. They all have some excess, but there are enough moments or an overriding mission or spirit that keep them afloat and ultimately stand as works that transcend this unique filmmaker's vision over his excesses and indulgences.
Girl 6, Jungle Love, and Mo' Better Blues did not fare as well. He Got Game, Summer of Sam, and Get On the Bus were interesting excursions, but missed the mark of Do the Right Thing and She's Gotta Have It. I recall 25th Hour as a solid film I would like to revisit sometime. And his for hire films, Clockers and The Inside Man show he can adapt as a journeyman director.
I had hopes for Miracle at St Anna It was going to be the film where Spike went toe to toe with Clint Eastwood to tell the story of a unit of Buffalo Soldiers in WWII. I try to see his films when they come out theatrically despite the short windows. But Miracle had a very limited release last fall and literally disappeared in about a week. And its three hour run time looked like it might have been a factor in it not resurfacing a few weeks later the brew pub circulation. I ignore reviews of Spike films because his films are so polarizing. However, viewing this film on DVD confirmed for me that this film's disappearing act was not unmerited.
Miracle of St Anna is ultimately a pretty bad movie. I am thinking that its greatest value over time will be the screen exposure it gave four pretty fine actors Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller. These guys were great to watch even though they suffered through a film that indulged highly in racial polemic (no surprise there), spiritual overkill (new ground for Spike, unfortunately) and subplots full of distateful Italian partisans, vicious Nazis and white racists. This is one overstuffed flick, even by Spike Lee standards, constantly overwhelmed by a well-intentioned and sincere but overbearing soundtrack by Terrance Blanchard.
But in the midst of it all, there are at least half a dozen fine filmmaker moments. One of these is the film's opening shot, a rapid track down a hallway at the welcome mat level. There is also this wonderful high angle shot of sky road and train tracks during a brief flashback of the soldier's training where they turn their jeep around at the tracks to return to town to face down some racial injustice instead of crossing back over to a more familiar side. And the cinematography by Matthew Libatique (Inside Man and Darren Aronofsky's early films) and longtime Spike Lee collaborator Ernest Dickerson is quite impressive.
Spike is returning to some television film projects and Inside Man 2 has been announced. I'll obviously be there to see those as I will in a few years when the funding gods grant him a budget for another big film. I know that being an admirer of Spike Lee's work means being on board for the long game.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:39 AM
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Snaps From A Walk
Fence Dogs peaking out to see who might be passing them by. The one below seems to have a rougher time getting any kind of a view
If you were a neighbor to these folks it would be easy to tell others how to get to your house. "I'm just three doors down from the tin man."
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:58 PM
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Monday, February 9, 2009
Mr Warmth?
Chris Rock says being funny is like being a pretty girl, you can get away with a lot of shit. He's talking about Don Rickles in a soundbite in John Landis' film Don Rickles: Mr Warmth - The Don Rickles Project. Sidney Poitier talks about how Rickles is still basically a little boy trying to see how much he can get away with.
He must be the last standup standing of another era, another world. In the film his managers tell how they worked for Frank Sinatra before Rickles. His late teenage stint in the Navy during WWII still informs his comedy. He somehow can still get away with Tojo and Nazi jokes. His is a humor built from the strip clubs, lounges, and showrooms back when Miami Beach and Vegas were run by the mob, back when all the comics seemed to be Jewish and did five-ten minutes on all the talk shows.
When Rickles comes out, it seems always to be with huge bigger than life flair. We see his Mr Warmth introduction to mariachi opening playing De Virgin de Macarena several times at Caesar Palace or in vintage clips on the Carson era Tonight show where he was a fairly ubiquitous presence. Current clips show he is still all bluster, high energy putdown and a bunch of schmaltz thrown in. The fact he is still doing this at eighty is still pretty impressive, even if he isn't your favorite comedian.
Rickles trained as an actor when he got out of the Navy. He showed up in films like Up Periscope and Kelly's Heroes but also seemed to guest star on just about every popular sixties television show: Gilligan's Island, F Troop, Get Smart, Gomer Pyle, etc. And now maybe two generations know him as Mr Potato Head in the Toy Story movies. But being familiar with the G rated Rickles is not the same as the hammer down comedian funny mean with just about no holds barred. Similarly Redd Foxx (born only 4 years prior to Rickles) really wasn't all about playing Fred Sanford.
Mr. Warmth is is currently available on a free stream on hulu.com. It could have told its story in an hour and might get a little tedious for some at feature length, but some how a little excess for this topic seems a bit appropriate.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:49 PM
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Sunday, February 8, 2009
Geri Allen and her quartet of magic and surprise: Reed College 2.7.09
Geri Allen has a touch and phrasing that reminds me of looking closely at a flower. Herbie Hancock has the same gift. When Chick Corea plays like this it sounds kind of baroque. But there is a kind of purity when this style is approached by Herbie or Geri. I get the same kind of chills when I hear Amhad Jamal. You know what I'm talking about if you are familiar with Hancock's tune Dolphin Dance: chords of richness intercepting figures that circle, lunge, and, well, dance.
It seemed a mystery at first why Geri Allen was being billed as the Geri Allen Quartet. The stage of Reed College's lovely old growth timbered Kaul Auditorium, a room that feels more like church sanctuary than concert hall, only seemed equipped for standard jazz trio with Steinway, upright bass, and Gretsch drumkit. The first two numbers were in the trio setting. Allen starting out with a meditative opener, the spiritual, Freedom with a lovely segue into an original from her latest album from a couple years back called Portraits and Dreams.
She then introduced Maurice Chestnut, the fourth member of her group. Not sure what this was about. There didn't seem to be a microphone on stage left. And from where we were it didn't look like there were any percussive props either. After announcing that the next number would be Charlie Parker tune (which turned out to be Ah-Leu-Cha) Mr Chestnut's role became clear, he is tap dancer. But we aren't just talking about time steps here. Chestnut's approach to dance seems similar to that of Bobby McFerrin's approach to jazz vocal--everything is fair game. This man sings with his feet and his body.
What ultimately made the hour and a half with Allen and her group so exciting was that each of the four individuals on stage seemed equally dedicated to both the percussive and instrumental qualities of their instruments. The piano was a vibrant time keeper with their version of McCoy Tyner's Four by Five. The bass player whose name I missed, but who Allen referred to as the veteran of the group played lyric solos and served as rhythmic foil for the other players, especially drummer Kass Overall and the kinetic control of Chestnut. Overall and Chestnut exchanged licks, rhythms from hip hop riffs to statements of almost military precision in the tribute tune to great drummer Philly Joe Jones.
But the most memorable moment of the evening was their version of Lover Man. It sounds strange to those who weren't there, but tap dancer Chestnut managed to take the lead line for most of the tune, using silent spaces between his steps to judicious and dramatic effect. And there was a moment or two of pure delight where Ms Allen and her dancer were inspiring and playing off of each other just as wind or brass would.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:54 AM
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Saturday, February 7, 2009
Outstanding Saturday Outing
it's downtown on a pleasant but cool Saturday with out of town relations. You can let yourself go a little bit. You end up checking things out and maybe seeing some parts of your city differently than you would otherwise. And I just couldn't resist the Elliot Erwitt like moment either.
I certainly have never checked out the lower deck passage of the Steel Bridge and it had been many many years since I had walked Front Avenue to Union Station. An Amtrak Cascades passed by a long Union Pacific freight run as bikes and joggers and folks just out walking across town like us on a fine morning making its way to noon.
If you are native or near native to the Pacific NW, there is something about the shade of yellow of a UP engine that is hard to describe. It is the color of train we saw on decades of calendars in offices and classrooms. It always seemed bright even on a cloudy day. Rocky the Great Northern Goat took a distant second to this golden hue.
Two images of Pam through glass of two relatively new Portland phenomena. First from the outside of one of the streetcars that travels from the boho of NW Portland to the Southern waterfront. The second of her and Lillian from the bubble of the Portland tram just before it took her father Werner and I up Marquam Hill to the university hospital, a ride we took for touristic pleasure on this sunny Saturday where the top of Rainier kind of merged off to the left of Mt St Helens twenty eight and a half months after it misbehaved in a most dramatic way.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:07 PM
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Friday, February 6, 2009
Suze's Side Of the Freewheelin' Years
This book has a place alongside Bob Dylan's Chronicles Vol. 1, and David Hajdu's Positively 4th St. as key works for understanding the early days of the Greenwich Village folk scene and the first meteor rise of young Robert Zimmerman from copy cat folkie to, well, something the world has never seen quite the likes of before. That rise to hope and glory to become the weatherman who maybe didn't know altogether which way the wind was going to blow, but, oh had a time of helping the wind blow. That was Bob Dylan from dropping in on Greenwich folk basket houses to the motorcycle crash.
Now, what Suze Rotolo shows us in her book is what it was like to have your first serious adult relationship (for both parties) in the midst of that hurricane eye. She will always be known as the chick on the album cover. The woman lots of America wanted to be. Right there walking in the city in winter with him freezing his skinny little ass off because he had this tissue of a jacket on. But then again, as Dylan said in the Martin Scorsese documentary, they didn't have clothes to face the weather like they do now.
Regardless, this is a solid and entertaining little memoir. Her success is due to a couple factors. One is that she is not a bad writer. Another is that she keeps true to the subtitle of the book: "A memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties." By merging her memory and history together, she paints a nice picture, as Dylan did in his aforementioned Chronicles of this time and place. She is a first generation Italian off spring often describing herself as a red diaper baby; her father a red diaper baby and her mother a journalist and sometimes political activist. She is full New Yorker and in late teens fit into the wacky wild world and caught the eye and glands of a young man from Minnesota with an extra large capacity of personal invention as superstar athletes have greater measure than the majority of mortals.
But still this is a love story of that first big late teen early twenty tied to the mast variety. It is never pretty. And she talks about how she can't listen to the music of that era more or less through the Another Side album at least. "The old songs from the early time of his life in which I participated, are so recognizable, so naked, I cannot listen to them easily. They bring back everything. There is nothing mysterious or shrouded with hidden meaning for me. They are raw, intense, and clear." I find this a stunning comment. For the rest of the world's population they are a very different experience, full of mystery, interpretative components and the rawness makes for a kind of foreign journey, not a personal one. But this was the first big love and that would be rough enough, but for the whole world to want a piece of him and you both. As the Stones sang, Gimme Shelter indeed.
When the shit was just about to break fully, in the second half of 1962, Suze went to study for a while in Italy, in part this was mother Rotolo's attempt to chill things down a bit. The letters and memories of that time a part show just how young she and Bobby were. They didn't get the opportunity to give comforting and reassuring touch during those we are going to die hysteria moments of the Cuban missile crisis. When she got back it was the winter of the album cover and the rocket engines of stardom and unique social icon-dom were at hand. The drifting apart, Baez as partner years--singing and otherwise, the breakdown of the heaviness of it all when you are barely on the other side of twenty, that is all going to soon enough. But Rotolo's presence on that cover will always give us something.
The last hundred pages of the book are a lot about Rotolo moving away from the folkie pokey scene. She went to Cuba on an illegal tour with a group of other students of art and politics standing up to the government to claim constitutional right to see the country first hand for themselves. This account was actually one of the books highlights, maybe because it was kind of a surprise.
But what I love best here is the spirit of discovery the book evokes of great art and events around them, if it be their discovery of art, modern theater of films like Don't Shoot the Piano Player by Truffaut. And fun details like the fact that their appreciation did not carry over to fellow French New waver Alain Resnasis. Regarding Last Year in Marienbad "The film was totally incomprehensible, and as we walked out of the theater Bob said that in the last scent the camera should have slowly pulled away to reveal a sign over an entrance gate: "Marienbad Insane Asylum."
A Freewhelin' Time is a heckuva lot better than it could have been. And I think this is a situation where decent reviews and effectively chosen blurbs (by Steve Earle and Todd Haynes, no less!) on the back lead me to go inside the covers to another world almost fifty years ago of a time when the g was dropped, there was worry the bomb would be too and a bubble of hope and freedom, kindled with the music of an American heritage started a whole lot of stuff.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:21 AM
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Thursday, February 5, 2009
Cocteau's Blood of A Poet: A Treatment
I sure didn't seek out to watch Blood of A Poet tonight. But I was stuck. The Netflix selections were Blaise Pascal by Rossellini, Horton Hears A Hoo or a concert of Schubert Lieder. I had Cocteau's film here because it was part of the Orphic Trilogy set from Criterion that I had checked out from the library. After nearly eighty years this film is still very odd but somehow oddly compelling.
What follows is an impressionistic treatment mostly written as a live blog while the film played. It is not intended to be definitive, but it is intriguing how a certain
kind of syntax reflecting the world of dreams results.
The man in plaster and tie. Doors and locks and intertitles about poems and coats of arms and choice and spaces between notes. There is also a dedication to classic artists before a tower falls and we see the artist contracting a mouth to his hand like the scar next to the pentagram on his back. He draws. The wireframe above him rotates. The mouth on the drawing moves then moves to his hand and his visitor retreats in terror. The artist throws away his wig, soaks his hand to see the throbbing mouth. That is one powerful hand. The mouth as a wound. The artist must then feed and moves the mouth to a statue which then lives.
Do Walls Have Ears? A man and his living statue are the sole residents here. Can one go through mirrors? The statue urges him to take the plunge. He swims in the abyss. It is only when we have the courage to confront our reflections can we be something else on the other side.
Our hero looks into the keyhole. The shoes are left outside. What does he see? An execution at Sam Peckinpah speed. Each room and a peephole a sensation. In room 19 he sees shadows of an opium pipe. You can only climb the door so high, We see you looking in.
Room 21 is flying lessons. Slippers left outside this tim. A young girl in bondage and bells whipped by a severe matron against a fireplace. Her back scales the wall. And then she rides the ceiling scorning her tormeter. Next is the shooting gallery of optical illusions and a nude in recline. She is announced as an hemaphrodite. Her changes of head and lines of body are announced by tatto drums.
From the model recline and the word yes, we see the wireframe spin againts the wall and instructions tell the poet how to kill himself. He bleeds and throws the towel away. Again he clutches the wall and the wire frame descends but comes back into view.
Away he returns from the reflection of the mirror he went into. And once again he encounters the armless statue he brought to life only this time he destroys her. He breaks her down to her plaster essence.
The third episode is called the snowball fight and boys are seen doing just this cavorting over statue. We then see the bullies smoke. The snowball fight escalates further. the Statue is broken up in their battle. bloody wounded carried away and the fight goes on. Statue is reduced to a pile on a pedastal. One is victimized terribly with a scraf. Snowballs as dangerous as knives of Spain Cocteau says and the victim he is struck and falls. Killer snowball.
Fourth is "the profanation of the host" we are told. The body lies there in the snow blood pouring from his mouth. This is an evening of upmost elegance we are told. A table appears on top of the corpse and a couple is playing cards. Opera boxes one filled with aristocrats another with a bejeweled matron and her courtiers. One of them has an eyepatch. The game below between Miller and the man goes on. A caped courtier continues to watch the players.
An African comes down the stairs. He is an angel with transparent wings. He covers th corpse and those in the powder and preen. The angel turns into a negative image with a low bass chord. The ace is pulled from the man's hand. The angel then ascends the stairs.
Th game continues. Lee Miller stares and the fellow pulls a gun to shoot himself and then blood comes out of the temple of his star shaped wound and those in the boxes applaud.
THe woman again becomes a statue. This time with black gloves and then film magic allows her to capture the cape. The courtier with the three pointed hat watches a sphere traveling in air and the statue disapearring down a corridor. Only to open another door she is alabaster wonder with painted eyelids. But snow is still on the ground and a large cow cutaway with what looks like a map of the world arrives. A traveler with a lyre appears, then we see it is the statue again laying on the ground next to a globe and finaly, the tower falls again.
Whew. That is one heckuva fifty minutes.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:45 PM
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Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Some Oddities
Tuesday, January 27 brought a freak morning storm to our area. It was a threshold or so below freezing so was kind of a pain in the butt to move around for a few hours. By late afternoon, it was certainly history.
One of our local factories was kicking it out as the sun was going down.
One is most aware of this structure between highway and footpath. I now call it the great wall to Hazel Dell
Glow in the dark nunchucks at night? Sounds like a show indeed. I wouldn't want to attend a workshop, but it would be great if some glowchuck masters could warm up a crowd for a concert someday.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:04 AM
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Tuesday, February 3, 2009
My Geri Allen Preview
This weekend Reed College is presenting Geri Allen in a free concert. Her playing has a wonderful individual style but to my ears it is music that springs from the Isles of Hancock and his Blue Note era and other commentators have made mention of some Jarret like influence as well. She is 51 years old but it seems like she has been on the scene for a very long time, doing time at major labels once or twice, but mostly just out there making music, doing clinics, being an artist.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:08 PM
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Monday, February 2, 2009
George Wallace By Frankenheimer & Sinise
John Frankenheimer's early 1960s films Seven Days in May, Birdman of Alcatraz, and The Manchurian Candidate feature low angle shots, crisp editing, that result in a sense of intensity and intimacy that is uniquely cinematic and individual.
There are moments in his 1997 television movie about George Wallace starring Gary Sinise made for TNT which are on par with some of those films made decades earlier. Frankenheimer has the ability to create a kind of uncanny kind of documentary realism, but not reality because it is fully staged and blocked with precision that directors like Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet do so well. I believe that their foundational training in live television drama is a significant factor in their directorial styles throughout their careers. One of the best sequences in George Wallace is when Robert Kennedy comes to visit Wallace to discuss the resistance of the Alabama governor to allow the admittance of students to the University. Frankenheimer's camera and editing bring us into the discussion and tension in a way that is not unlike Robert Drew's landmark documentaries of JFK that first showed the potential of 16mm camerawork, but more theatrical and dramatic.
Regardless of the accomplishments and pedigree of its director, George Wallace is still a television biopic and contains many of the elements and conventions that are familiar to that form. Clarence Williams III (Yes, Linc from The Mod Squad) plays a composite and symbolic character, Archie Weathers, a black former boxer-murderer trustee prisoner, who serves the Governor of Alabama from the fifties through the seventies. Regardless of the conceit, Williams is surprisingly effective in this role. You can see the undercurrents of seething rage in his face and body language when he is tucked in the corner of Frankenheimer's low and wide angle frame.
George Wallace succeeds greatly due to the quality of the portrayal of the title role by Gary Sinise. He is all rooster bantamweight boxer in the scenes of the younger George Corley, unyielding and severe during his years as Governor and presidential candidate, and, finally, moving from pain and anger to repentance during his years in a wheel chair after the assassination attempt by Arthur Bremmer. But Sinese's is not the only fine performance in this film. Mare Winningham is pretty stunning as Lurleen Wallace's first wife and successor as governor. And Joe Don Baker is quite a presence as Big Jim Folsom, another Alabama governor who once served as mentor to Wallace.
But then there is a early twenty something year old Angelina Jolie back when her acting credits were almost exclusively B Movies and televison shows and she was probably best known Jon Voight's daughter. Jolie plays Wallace's second wife, Cornelia with a kind of blatant sexuality that is not typical for a TV movie. She appears to have taken on the role with full abandon. She won a Golden Globe for this role.
The screenplay by Marshall Frady and Paul Monash shows the Wallace story as a Faustian bargain where an ambitious but somewhat moderate politician uses the race card to attain power and later lives in pain to regret and beg forgiveness for his actions. I believe the real story of Wallace was likely much more complex, but historical compression and the structure dramaturgy are essential when you are telling the story of a man and an era in a three hour television presentation.
Another wonderful Frankenheimer touch is apparent when he recreates famous public George Wallace moments such as his blockage of the schoolhouse door, his assassination attempt or famous inaugural address with exclamations of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever." In each of these and other sequences, Frankenheimer returns again and again to a shot from just behind the perspective of photojournalists and television cameramen. It could almost be viewed as a history lesson of the development of the TV camera, the 35mm still camera and the strobe. But this over the camera view not only gives the viewer a media-eye view of the rise of the Wallace phenomenon, it implies a kind of complicity in the media's role to his rise to power as well.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:46 PM
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Sunday, February 1, 2009
The Yellow Rolls Royce
I was six or seven years old when this film came out. I don't know where I got the idea that it was for grown ups and that it might be naughty. At the time I wasn't really sure what that meant even. Well, regardless, when it was released on DVD a few weeks ago, I thought I would check it out.
Well, I can see why Parents Magazine or whatever source of authority would probably deem this inappropriate for young eyes. It is, of course, now pretty tame stuff despite that Jean Moreau and Edmund Purdom, Shirley Maclaine and Alain Delon, as well as Ingrid Bergman and Omar Sharif all have trysts in the title "character's" copious back seat.
The Yellow Rolls Royce is one of those International co-productions of the sixties that is sometimes referred to as a mid-Atlantic Film. There were lots of war movies that had featured lots of international casts of this ilk (The Longest Day and Is Paris Burning? come to mind immediately) and they are kind of the forerunner of the Airport style blockbuster that came along in the sixties. Quality was usually pretty sketchy but it gave audiences a chance to see gatherings of stars like the ones mentioned above as well as, in this case, Rex Harrison, George C. Scott, and Art Carney together in a big bright wide screen movie.
This film is directed by Anthony Asquith, the son of a British Prime Minister, who despite his swan songs being this film and another international mob of starsathon called The VIPs, actually had a pretty interesting and storied four decade long career in film beginning with silents. He is probably most noted for the 1938 version of Pygmalion with Leslie Howard.
In a structure similar to La Ronde, where characters were linked together by sexual encounters and venereal disease, the three stories in this film are linked together by the ownership of a Yellow Rolls Royce. We travel from English nobility and Rex Harrison to George C. Scott, Art Carney, and Shirley MacLaine as Miami gangsters in Italy to Ingrid Bergman in a role that revisits her roles in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Casablanca as a blue blooded American matron hooking up with some Yugoslavian resistance fighters at the beginning of WWII.
There is a kind of messy excess in the films of the sixties as the iris closed on old studio system. A new day of liberation was on the way. Exhibit no. 1: a Vadim/Bardot like shot of MacLain topless revealing her back. One could make the conclusion that International film was making an impact on Hollywood.