Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Encounters with John Fahey
A bearded man working on what was obviously not one of his first pints tells the audience that the next song is going to be called Santa Claus Rides A Death Sleigh He picks up his steel stringed guitar tuned to a minor key (D Minor was a favorite of his) and weaves strange dark music for several music. It was a midweek crowd in the late 1980s or early 1990s at an old town bar in Portland known as Key Largo, which is where Robert Cray would play back when Curtis Salgado was still in his band. I had serendipitously won tickets by playing with the speed dial functions on my work phone and was watching the show with a guitar player friend of mine who was fairly awestruck at the technique and presence of John Fahey.
But some other folks in the house were less than pleased. I remember one woman whining for more Christmas music from the record. He did throw a few familiar tunes albeit that weird chordal John Fahey way, but basically the man on the stool with the guitar was making it clear this was his performance and he was going to play what he wanted to. And that was Santa having adventures on a death sleigh.
It is hard to impress on folks the presence that John Fahey's Christmas albums, particularly the first volume A New Possibility had in my family and in the Pacific Northwest. It is spare, kind of steel string metallic with some odd and open tunings. Of the album itself, Fahey said: "Well, the arrangements are pretty good, but on the other hand there are more mistakes on this album than on any of the other 17 albums I’ve recorded. And yet, here’s the paradox…this album has not only sold more than any of my others, I meet people all the time who are crazy about it. I mean really love it. What can I say. I’m confused."
I didn't think much about the evening until a 1994 SPIN article came out that talked about how Fahey was living in shabby motel in Salem. The article gave him opportunity for work, recognition and influence on younger musicians. He stretched boundaries to the very in self-describing a lot of his later work as "Gothic Industrial Ambiance." On the Sundance Spectacle program Elvis Costello recently asked musician and Portland resident M Ward who is influences were. He unhesitatingly replied, "John Fahey."
The tunes he plays often have a structure all their own and one should listen with a quiet open mind if possible, because when one does, like good or great poetry it can be quite tranformative. His music can remind one of a rootsy blues club or feel like a meditation in a cathedral, but there is a voice that, once you know how to listen for it, is his alone undeniably. It is a kind of poetry with a folk, blues, Bartok/Ives foundation but all kind of comes out as John Fahey music.
This post was mostly inspired by a recent and rather random encounter with a DVD called John Fahey In Concert & Interviews 1969 and 1996. It allows us to compare a pensive, nervous 33 year old on a public television guitar show with the resurrected bloated and bearded survivor on stage in Berkeley. There is some pretty fine picking in both of these segments, and the hard road of the 27 years between is apparent but not predominant.
Fahey's life and music are far too complex and full-faceted to do good justice to in this brief space. There are some fine articles about him online, such as this tribute piece shortly after he died in 2001 and this article in the New York Times by Ben Ratliff during his "comeback" years in the nineties. And. of course, one can view volumes of You Tube clips for this unique artist who will certainly become more legendary over the years to come.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:44 PM
(0) comments
Monday, March 30, 2009
Far From The Ordinary Epic
British filmmaking of the late sixties in the hands of folks like Tony Richardson, Richard Lester, and Lindsay Anderson was, like their counterparts in the French Nouvelle Vague a visual fest of cinema's possibilities. John Schlesinger's 1967 adaptation of Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd stands as more than a big ordinary epic film from the sixties because it comes from that world of creative ferment.
An important element of that mix was contributed by Nicholas Roeg, who served as Director of Photography on the film. Madding Crowd calls for shots of vast panoramic splendor of Dorset and these are wonderful indeed. But What makes the film crackle still are the times faces in fields are caught briefly or the way the details of Peter Finch's profile is allowed to go into high contrast silhouette when he comes to terms with his fate with the unattainable object of his desire, Bathshseba Everdene, played by Julie Christie.
But most impressive are some of the sequences between Christie and Terrence Stamp as Sgt. Frank Troy in the early stages of their romance. The famous swordplay seduction is a stand out, but more impressive still is the use of telephoto lenses to isolate these characters on the promenade in a highly pivotal moment in their relationship.
I am not a big Victorian novel person so I am probably the last to address the issue of Schlesinger's fidelity to Thomas Hardy's tale. But the story of three suitors surrounding a willful desirable woman is certainly a powerful archetype. Spike Lee used it to great effect in Do the Right Thing
I first saw Far From the Madding Crowd at a Sunday matinee as part of a roadshow revival package about twenty five years ago. I remember the print being adequate but not in the best of shape. The recent widescreen DVD release, on the other hand is quite lovely. One can spend three hours easily watching something with much less merit.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:04 PM
(0) comments
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Slaughter Times Two
I loved the so-called blaxploitation films of the seventies when they were in vogue. At the top of this cultural phenomena were three iconoclastic or iconic works by Black directors in 1971 and 72: Sweet Sweetback's Baddass Song, Shaft,and Superfly. There are elements in each of these that were appropriated in a series of films targetting black audiences by both low rent studios like American International that were quick to turn around films and larger studios who looked at the large urban audiences opened up by these films as a means to continue to stay in business.
These films featured were tougher than tough action heroes, lots of sex and skin, the world of pimp and drugs, racist, immoral and inept white gangsters and cops, and if good fortune would have it a chart making soundtrack album by a popular soul artist. Nearly forty years later, they are cultural time capsules with a fair amount of entertainment value.
A couple years back I indulged in a Fred Williamson double feature of Black Caesar and its sequel Hell Up in Harlem. Thanks to Comcast On Demand, I recently got to watch another athlete who went to the movies Jim Brown in his turn at the box office during this trend in two American International Films: Slaughter and Slaughter's Big Rip-Off. Hell, I can't always be watching Criterion subtitled films.
Both Slaughter films are about Jim Brown being a bad ass ex-Green Beret with a mission of revenge. In Slaughter from 1972, the year after he avenges the murder of his parents at the bequest of some treasury agents. For some reason they end up in Mexico where they encounter the lamest bunch of bad haircut syndicate gangsters and Stella Stevens. Stevens, no longer a playmate and rat pack counterpart, is featured in several nude scenes with the former number 32 for the Cleveland Browns. Slaughter is basically a pretty sloppy gangster film but there is a kind of shaggy quality about it that makes it sort of fun.
Then there is Slaughter's Big Rip-off which followed a year later set in LA. There is still gangster revenge plot, but this time the king pin is Ed McMahon with his hair parted in the big silver framed eye glasses and a psychotic hit man who would be at home in the Dirty Harry movies whose first hit was an underwater strangulation with a beach ball.
Rip-off also features a lot more urban trappings: pimps, coke, and a black cop played by a very skinny Brock Peters who is definitely above board. They hired James Brown to do the soundtrack this time out and there are some tasty grooves going on in some of the sequences. There are a few cool oh shit moments, but Rip-off with its high body count and much more choreographed fight sequences doesn't have the same kind of raggedy ass charm as the first. Sometimes a bit of polish reveals how then the substance truly is.
But still...you can imagine the tinny speaker on the window of the car during the final shoot out inform you that the snack bar is closing in five minutes. Or towards the end of the movie you wonder how you are going to clean the generations of sticky soda from the soles of your shoes. In conclusion, I say appreciation of cultural artifacts of another time is not a bad way to spend part of one's spring break.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:12 PM
(0) comments
Saturday, March 28, 2009
His Own Private Pacific Northwest
Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho is one of those film whose content and premise threatens to derail it, but is saved by the artistic sensibility of its execution and, for lack of better descriptor, its heart. The combination of hot bankable stars playing street hustlers in a road movie that fluctuates into Shakespearean dialog at many quick turns is not a likely formula for success. I believe it is a great film and a film that has its own way, but I certainly understand why anyone would not share my admiration for this movie. Idaho is one of those which, as may be the case with Van Sant's non-"work for hire" films which tends to polarize audiences quite divisively.
Until this weekend I had not seen My Own Private Idaho since October 1991 when it came out. It is not necessarily a film I would seek out for a routine rotation viewing. By coincidence, I had in my posession of loan copies of both the 1989 version of the screenplay and the exhaustive Criterion set and both needed to be returned to separate owner and library that day. This provided me a kind of unexpected opportunity for an immersion experience similar to those I promote in my classes. The screenplay had a wonderful interview with Van Sant during the era when he was involved in exploratory development of an earlier attempt to get the Harvey Milk story on the screen back when Robin Williams was attached to Randy Shilts' Mayor of Castro Street as an Oliver Stone production, I believe. The interview covers all of Van Sant's filmmaking prior to To Die For, with. as one would expect. a fair amount of discussion about My Own Private Idaho
The published screenplay was created shortly after Van Sant had gotten his first Mac and there is some pretty creative use with fonts as well as generally unorthodoxy with the conventions of screenwriting. And although it contains many of the same elements of the final film, it feels like a blueprint and work in progress when it stands next to the finished product. There is in this work, like the early films of Spike Lee, a firm vision but also an exploratory spirit at work here. You might hate the famous tracking treadmill dolly shot of Lee's or the sequence where the characters on the gay porno magazines start talking to each other, but one can not deny the spirited exuberance of their cinema.
One can focus on one or many plot lines and character considerations in My Own Private Idaho. River Phoenix's performance with all its ticks and James Dean IV mannerisms doesn't connect with me. During this screening, I was impressed by how much veteran actors Udo Kier and William Richert bring to the film. Their characters have experienced more life than the characters of Scott and Mike (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), they also are lost, caught in their ways. The tale of Scott looking for his mother moves the characters forwards through a variety of settings (Portland-Seattle-Portland-Idaho-Italy-Portland-Idaho --I might have an extra Portland in there, I'm not sure.) The Mike (Keanu) plot line about the lad who moves away from his privileged background to the streets and back to his status roots again connects with me more so.
When I look at My Own Private Idaho or Drugstore Cowboy, I see a Portland before Pearl, before dot-coms and a kind of hyper trendiness that is currently associated. The Chinese cafes and grimy street culture near the old bus depot are long gone. The time lapsed skies of clouds coming and going will resonate with anyone who has lived in these parts. Van Sant's NW, particularly in Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and Idaho is a personal one he shares through the home movie sequences, and highly individualized transition sequences. His early interest in the painterly styles and personal crafting of avant garde film seem never too far as elements from which he tells his tales. And he uses it to reveal his own private Pacific Northwest vision.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:47 PM
(0) comments
Friday, March 27, 2009
Die Berührte
Die Berührte(No Mercy, No Future) is hard ride of a film based on a schizophrenic's diary and filmed in that unblinking way that was part of the sensibility of the new German Cinema. In 1980. filmmaker Helma Sanders-Brahms (Germany, Pale Mother) took on the task of translating the diary of an upper class young woman who sought Christ and sought the holy in the embodiment of men on the fringes of Berlin; the elderly, the johns looking for a hooker,immigrants both Turkish and African. When she does not reach the ecstasy she is looking for, she blood lets, which admits and readmits her into psychiatric facilities
This film of dark passage in walled West Berlin shown both objectively and frequently subjectively reminds me of the best of films I can recall that show the solitary struggle of the woman on the outside: Agnes Varda's Vagabond and Tod Haynes' Safe.Sanders-Brahms clearly strives for authenticity in the story she brings to the screen. In the opening credits of single line green on black printout accompanied by underwater breathing and electronic sounds, the film is credited as "Einem film von Helma Sanders-Brahms und Rita G."
After three and a half minutes of these credits we see Veronika, played unflinchingly by Elisabeth Stepanek in her hospital bed waking from a dream of having her breathing apparatus ripped off of her in full scuba. There is what can only be defined as dream logic in the next sequences, with a group of festive Christmas revelers, the Blue Danube playing, and an Asian man who dances with our protagonist (who we later learn in the script is named Veronika Christoph, not Rita G.), which later cuts to a seduction by an older man in gelded paint who later takes Veronika's virginity in an abandoned attic.
She is then seen back in black in another spare room listening to reports of El Salvador. She takes the radio out into the snow and lays down. A military compound sign on a storm wire fence appears. It is not clear if she is she is simply wandering or moving determinately to a destination in the cold winter dawn. She sits down in the snow and takes off her clothes. Is this a kind of penance for losing her virginity in an earlier scene? It is hard to say because we see this all in single long shot with light going through the trees. She lies down in a crucifix pose. I think of Patti Smith's line about how the cross that is the form of the tortured woman.
Soldiers come and take her she is forced into a bath and a Down's Syndrome kid looks at her through glass. She then is seen thrashing on her bed, wrist restraint obvious. We see a syringe being inserted into her belly...
And this is only the first reel, her journey continues in such a matter for nearly another hour and a half. I'm not sure that the juxtaposition between the objective and the subjective succeeds as well as it was intended by the filmmaker. This is not a particularly pleasant film to watch, but, I, for one, appreciate the opportunity to see any substantial work of the New German Cinema era and the bold power that surrounds it.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:34 AM
(0) comments
Thursday, March 26, 2009
More Seattle
Pornography and exotic dance proprietor Roger Forbes recently made headlines by getting a license to open a lap dance establishment 400 feet away from the main entrance to Safeco field where the Mariners play. Here the Lusty Lady, which I believe is a Forbes' enterprise as well, has a way of pronouncing itself in the SAM, which always felt like an overwrought out of place stodgified temple to the arts. I much preferred the pilgrimage to Volunteer Park back in its pre-Asian days. Anyway, when I first wandered Seattle as an independent adult, First and Second streets seemed overloaded with Army/Navy stores and taboo yellow front stores. There are still signs of each, but Seattle is definitely a different place a third of a century later.
Maybe I'll continue seeking Seattle baked good establishments in future trips up north.
Students organized dinner at the downtown Seattle Buca di Beppo, which is kind of rustic version of Olive Garden that actually met our needs well. The staff didn't even blink when we told them we were a party of twelve and it provided a lot of hot food at a reasonable price. And you just got to love wall decor like this shrine to Frank.
I don't imagine Seattle residents get sick of the Space Needle. I love turning my head to the north or west and seeing it there poking out through the trees embellishing the skyline with a shape uniquely its own/
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:33 PM
(0) comments
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Seattle
The Buffet gives a shout out to Julian Nelson, who in three and half years created and sustained a top-notch Berlin Studies program for community college students. I accompanied Nelson and his Deutsch Klub students on a 36 hour trip to Seattle, obstensibly for the students to have an opportunity to see a world class exhibition dedicated to the Munich Secession artists at the Frye Museum.
You can see them in any large American city with rucksacks and a gaze of visitor. They are student groups. If you are in one, you look like these folks on the corner. If you aren't in one, you tend to cross streets or wince when they come on public transportation. Actually, our trip worked out very good. The group seemed to naturally divide into subgroups of six, three or four with cell numbers exchanged and rendezvous coordinates well-established.
This was one of the best lunches I can remember in a long time. If you have a love for German meats and breads you will know what I mean.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:36 PM
(0) comments
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The Munich Secession and America @ Frye Museum
The Munich Secession and America, an exhibition at the Frye Museum in Seattle is designed for the visitor to explore and engage in how an exhibition in 1893 helped open up transform artistic ideals and styles, but also how it was a reflection of arts and ideas at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The story of a group of artists who go off to do their own thing because the formal organization is getting preferential treatment by those in power is marginalizing them could be treated in a pretty historical, dry, and static manner. Instead the folks at the Frye and their German collaborators let the viewer see that a representation of what was going on with the foundation establishment of recognized German art, Künstlergenossenschaft that the artists moved away from. The Künstlergenossenschaft works laid out against brown walls were pretty darned impressive in their own right, and not really stodgy at all. I was expecting to see be less impressed with them after the Midge Bowman, Frye's Executive Director explained the lay out concept of the exhibit to our group.
The Künstlergenossenschaft images were just an appetizer for the the three long white rooms topped with classic Hellenistic gilded lines at the tops of the walls filled with a wide variety of arresting images representative of what one would see at the 1893 and subsequent Munich exhibitions, or when they were first represented at a Met show in 1909, significantly a century ago. The presentation is significant because the Secessionist artists wanted their work to be seen away from overstuffed walls of a large salon-style exhibit. Paintings should be given breathing room, a world of white space to separate them.
Another satisfactory in this show is that it is not about anyone thing. The introduction to the exhibit's catalog by Bowman and others states: "Symbolism, Impressionism in its German form, and Jugenstil are the styles particularly pronounced within the Munich Secession." The joy of this show is to see these styles and elements of these styles about to burst forth. Hugo von Habermann Franz von Stuck, Ludwig Dill, and Max Liebermann, may not be rockstar names, but in their work you see road maps and harbingers of Munch, Expressionism and the twentieth century.
The artists of Munich were the first of many groups of artists at the time to raise manifestos and proclaim secession. Ultimately, historical details and content specifics of poltical issues on what motivated the artists to stand up, speak up and move out. Their works ultimately is what speaks for their actions.
The folks at the Frye ("one of the few institutions in America, possibly the only one, whose founding collection was dedicated primarily to the Munich Secession and their predecessors, the Kunstlergenossenschaft") and the museums in Europe they worked with understood a retrospective manifesto on an art movement can bea lovely place of discovery. The viewer gets to ask a huge "So What?" going in and exits with a head full of connections to other artists. Who could ask for more?
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:29 PM
(0) comments
Monday, March 23, 2009
Iron Ian
True, Pam and I do not live with pets or children. That doesn't mean I don't want them to live on my blog. For more of Ian, be sure to check out the link on your right to the Consummate Dabbler
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:19 PM
(1) comments
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Petty by Bogdanovich
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Running Down A Dream is a four hour documentary that lives somewhere between Scorcese's Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, The 1995 Beatles Anthology mini-series and VH1 Behind the Music. It is directed by Peter Bogdanovich who tells the story of the Gainesville, FL 58 year old who one can't imagine doing anything but Rock 'n Roll. Bogdanovich takes a chronological approach with a time and tempo deserved for a solid 30 year career of Petty and his band, who you get to know pretty well by the time we have circled back to the real time anchor of a thirtieth anniversary concert in Gainesville.
A lot of how one appreciates this film is going to be determined by their relationship with Petty's music. I was 19-20 when the first couple albums came out. There was a zest and an urgency to the Byrds jangle of his early music, just as there was seven or eight years later when REM appeared. And then, with Damn the Torpedoes, he and his band became something bigger--an almost instant iconic omnipresence on adult rock and classic rock stations. I think Refugee was always on the radio in 1979.
I always found the band impressive. I had this tape from an old King Biscuit Flower Hour from one of their early tours with hot versions of I Need to Know and American Girl on it, but Tom and the HB's reading of It's My Life as an encore, was especially impressive. This was a rock and roll band with all the stops pulled.
With the exception of the Dylan 1986 tour, I never saw Petty in concert. And I prety much cringed the mad hatter hat era and squeaky clean tinny sound of his production with Jeff Lynne with Full Moon Fever and The Traveling Wilburys. The Wilbury's were cool to look at, but in too damn slick a package for the talent that was present. If you lived in Portland in the mid to late eighties, one either had to put up with constant Tom Petty-Stevie Nicks duets, Lynne's squeaky clean Wilbury productions, Stevie Winwood's comeback records or find another station. Quick.
Sometime in the mid nineties, I heard the Wildflowers album, produced by Rick Rubin and was somehow aware that the band was kicking it in the background of Rubin's first Johnny Cash album, but I confess, until I sat down to watch the Bogdanovich film, I hadn't ever really revisited Petty since the days of Breakdown and that long lost concert cassette. When I heard he was going to be the headliner for the second Vegoose festival, I kind of saw that as a reason not to go.
Although I can't always go where Tom went on record (especially when that musical autoclave operator Jeff Lynne is concerned) I love the live sound of the Heartbreakers. Mike Campbell and Benmont Trench, the two players who have stuck it out with TP since the beginning are phenomenal musicians. I listened to a little bit of the Dylan tour after watching the show and concluded that this band was as substantial a back up to Dylan as the Band or the Bloomfield/Kooper mafia were. Benmont out-Kooper's Al Kooper with the take of Like A Rolling Stone I heard.
Another thing that makes Petty stand out is that the man truly has balls. In his first decade in the business he stared down MCA twice (once in regard to his publishing and recording contract and once when they were going to jack up the price of his fourth album) and reigned victorious. Bogdanovich tells these tales as well as gives us large servings of concert footage, some pieces of the music video and television appearances. By longevity, consistency, and artistic vision, Petty is a rare American music figure. Running Down the Dream will be the authoritative record on his life and music for years to come.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:48 PM
(0) comments
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Deuxième souffle and the World of Jean Pierre Melville
I love the world of Jean Pierre Melville. It is full of borsalinos and trenchcoats and cops and crooks. It is night clubs in Montmarte where there are floor shows with girls and cigarette holders. It is wise guys in Marseille. It is hard ethical code between gangsters and cops who aren't afraid to throw a punch or two to get what they need.
Deuxième souffle (Second Breath 1966) was made about ten years after his iconic Bob le flambeur (Bob the Gambler.) It is basically a crime procedural, but there is nothing typical about this type of film in the hands of Melville. Just as The Beatles, Stones, Animals and Them took American Blues and R&B, Melville took the gangster flick, much of Warner Brothers crime films and directors like Howard Hawkes and transmorgified it into his own.His gangsters are mostly gentlemen, polite to each other unless it is a killing time. There is a lot of talk about honor and ethics as well as a lot of cut throated moves, if it comes to that. This one has both a strong cop character, Inspector Blot, who I think looks a tad like Jack Webb, but he is so much cooler than Joe Friday. He is in pursuit of big time escaped criminal Gustave Minda, aka Gu, who is forced to be involved in a heist trusting folks which from the audience perspective look pretty darned untrustworthy.
Deuxième souffle is nearly two and a half hours long, but once the viewer surrenders to its characters and conflicts, time seems to float away. What matters is the world Melville has created. Some of the coordinates and circumstances are familiar to the viewer, but mostly it is a world that of cops and robbers that is his alone.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:33 PM
(0) comments
Friday, March 20, 2009
Soul into Spring
First day of Spring and the last day of classes, I need some soul music.
I. Leon Ware with Michael Franti and Carlene Anderson: If I Ever Loose This Heaven
Leon Ware says it all at the end of a tune you still want to go on "This is a lot of love, ya know that." And check out the handshake finale .
The song was first recorded by Ware with Minnie Ripperton and Al Jarreau on Quincy Jones'Body Heat album. The version on this clip is a bit inspired by he Q arrangement, to be sure, but it has been transformed to showcase these three amazing musicians. Franti's rapping here is especially strong, he throws in some licks that have become his. Carlene shows how she was the goddess of the birth of neosoul in the nineties. And Leon "I Want You" Ware shows how he is a godfather of soul music. "No, no, y'all I'l never be the same" is sung from a highly deep heart space.
I will have this in heavy rotation for some time to come.
II. Marcus Miller Master of All Trades featuring Lalah Hathaway: People Make The World Go Round
Long form jazz funk here from one of the most important musicians of the latter 20th Century. So much of the goodness of Miles later years was done in collaboration with this artist. This performance features Lalah Hathaway, what an amazing singer. She can be soul diva with a tad of Leon Thomas thrown in, but not so much in an Al Jarreau way.
This jam begins and ends with the Stylistics but progresses in funky fashion in a logical and most jamming way. Great Stuff.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:28 PM
(0) comments
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Susan Slade
By reading the summary from Netflix, I assumed that Susan Slade, a 1961 film with Connie Stevens, Troy Donahue, was basically an exploitation film about a teenage pregnancy. But it turned out to be an entertaining, modest and pretty well made Warner Brothers melodrama directed by Delmar Daves who is also responsible for some great Hollywood films: the original 3:10 to Yuma and Dark Passage with Humphrey Bogart among them.
The Cool Cinema Trash website can provide you with a much more detailed synopsis and commentary on the film. Basically it is a cautionary tale about an upper class and sheltered girl played by Connie Stevens who gets impregnated in her first physical romance with a mountain climber son of an industrialist. After her family returns to the US she starts a friendship with a kind of tortured writer artist (Troy Donahue) who owns a stable. The family responds to her pregnancy by retreating to Guatemala where Susan has the child under the rouse that it is her mother played by Dorothy McGuire.
I don't want to give any other plot details away except to say if you love good tasty fifties style melodrama ala Sirk, you will find that film has some very tasty moments, albeit without as many semiotic moments of intensity that were Sirk's mastery.
As a social document alone, it is fascinating to watch almost fifty years after it was made. In this era of Bristol Palin, a lot has changed. But alot remains the same. But the Technicolor photography, which receives the first credit after the actors of Big Sur scenery and the solid directing of Daves give us a kind of capsule in time worth kicking back to on a late night when one is nursing a cold or home on the couch during hard rains on a Spring Pacific Northwest afternoon.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:09 PM
(0) comments
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Cadillac Records
In Cadillac Records, there is some great music, some fine acting, and some amazing details in depicting the time and culture of the 1950s. But these fine attributes somehow don't come together and I believe the main problem comes down to focus. Is this a biopic of Leonard Chess, the founder of Chess Records? And/or Muddy Waters? Or is it first time feature director Darnell Martin's (who also wrote the film) attempt to recreate the pastiche of this important historical era for both music and culture of mid-century America?
And to that end the audience is introduced to lots and lots of intriguing characters, many of which are well known to fans of the blues and early rock n' roll: Chess and Waters, of course, but also Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Etta James, Chuck Berry, Alan Freed, but also folks like Geneva and Revetta, the wives of Waters and Chess, who appreciated the rewards, but suffered the hedonism of their husbands.
Anecdotes come and go during this mostly fast paced film without the viewer having time to take stock in it all. Gun happy Little Walter shoots another bluesman traveling with the same name by the side of road and one doesn't know if it is added as a kind of character aside or a weird kind of not-so comic relief. There is another aside involving Leonard Chess arranging for the meeting between Etta James and Minnesota Fats who allegedly was her father that also feels squeezed into the film.
Like Idlewild, the ambitious musical staring Outkast a few years back, Cadillac Records is obviously a vehicle for some of the biggest name African American stars in pop music to cross over into the movies. Mos Def makes a pretty fine Chuck Berry. He has the swagger and the style that could be in the same zone of the rock 'n roll icon. And I also must mention that Cedric the Entertainer is quite fine as Willie Dixon, the formidable bass playing songwriter and flamekeeper of the Chess tradition
But Beyonce Knowles is no more convincing an Etta James than Diana Ross was as Billie Holiday thirty years ago in Lady Sings the Blues. And unlike Billie, Etta has had to endure Beoyonce becoming the contemporary link to her music. Etta was gracious about her performance when the movie came out in the Fall, but has since been on stage saying she is going to kick her butt. I love it when old legends go off, it's their right. Maybe she has been hanging out with Lou Donaldson lately.
But there are also real actors doing some amazing work in this film as well. Jeffery Wright is like Philip Seymour Hoffman, great to watch in anything. I have admired his work greatly ever since Angels in America. Here he plays Muddy Waters quite convincingly demonstrating as complicated a range of emotions as this overstuffed film will allow. One of Wright's best scenes is when he becomes fearful of Howlin' Wolf (also in an amazing depiction by Eamonn Walker) as he simultaneously taunts him during a recording session while singing Spoonful and seduces a woman who was formerly behind the glass in the booth with Waters.
Director Darnell Martin's primary credits are in episodic television. One could easily surmise that maybe she wasn't ready yet for a project this ambitious. Martin's dialog seems to use the f bomb as a crutch and could probably have used another hand at the structure of the film. I wonder what another director like Craig Brewer who showed he has a great sense of incorporating music and story with Hustle and Flow, or Taylor Hackford, who did a solid job in Ray, could have done with the tale of the Chess legacy. Marshall Chess produced the film as well as Who Do You Love? which focuses in on more of the Bo Diddly and Rock 'n Roll aspects of the Chess records legacy, so there is a kind of sense of self-aggrandizing despite the warts and all approach to its its subject. (It reminds me of the Sinatra authorized TV movie biopic from 1992) Yet, Cadillac Records, filled with its imperfect charms, will stand as a noble effort to try to capture a historical moment and a rich, transitional American music legacy.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:04 PM
(0) comments
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Scott Simon at PAL 3.17.09
So it was NPR night at Portland Arts and Lectures. Portland loves its OPB and NPR and almost always responds in a PAL sell-out when one of their personalities appears. In years past we have had evenings with the likes Ira Glass or Terri Gross. This year that programming honor went to Scott Simon. It didn't seem like the must-see evening of this year's series and the additional factor of being downtown on St Patrick's Day did not seem terribly promising, but we avoided the pre-show crowd by making sure we went to Dragon Fish instead of Jake's, and turned out to enjoy a pretty pleasant evening at the Schnitz.
I spent a lot of Saturday mornings listening to Simon on my pick up and delivery route throughout the late eighties and early nineties. I even heard some of his commentaries and interviews repeated as the hours of the shift moved towards CarTalk and quitting time. He has a great set of pipes, quite often a passion, and a quick wit, although his sports fan schtick would run a little thin with me some mornings.
The first thing that impressed everyone in his appearance was this striking pin striped suit he wore made more over the top by a contrasting engineering grid shirt with green handkerchief flowing out of his pocket. Most importantly, the suit gave him an opportunity to warm the crowd up with anecdotes about it. Nice icebreaker.
The main part of the evening's talk involved Simon's transition from journalist to novelist. I am always a little suspect of when a professional writer does this, as when I see an actor or media personality do this, because often it isn't done very well. I have not read Simon's two novels, Little Birds about Sarajevo, or Windy City about Chicago politics, and I don't know how good they are, but I certainly can't dispute his sincerity in their creation after seeing his talk.
"Sarajevo changed my life and Little Birds allowed me to become a novelist." He was appalled that the world did not respond with complete and total outrage to the siege and ethnic cleansing of the early nineties in the Bosnian region. So he created his novel of teenage girl snipers because he wanted to get to a level of his story that journalism would not allow. He saw fiction as being the form for telling this story "after the door closes" on journalism and that it was a story that needed to be told because "the world looked away." The passages he read from Little Birds were indeed sobering and compelling.
By comparison, his discussion of his novel on Chicago politics, Windy City was much lighter and bouyant, but still shows his compassion for the human condition and a deep interest in the pluralistic, multicultural nature of Chicago politics and culture, as well as it being a reflection of the world at large. The book certainly has not been hurt by the recent national focus on Governor Blagojevich, Senator Burris and our President. The book will be coming out soon in paper and Simon says it has been more or less a non-stop tour. He commented that critics have called the book prescient, but Simon said that was a bit like calling any novel set in the Gulf prescient if it happened to feature a tropical storm.
Some of the best comments by Simon came during the question period, especially when he addressed issues of new media. He wonders how long we will be listening to radio on the radio and tended to be positive about the demise of newspapers, believing that new options and opportunities will appear. The positive result is that "There is very little reason for a voice to go unheard these days." He has used Twitter tweets to field questions from the public for forthcoming interviews and has been pleased with the results. "There is a lot of strength in the wisdom of the crowd."
I was glad that the evening with Simon was so pleasant, especially after the horrific couch talk presentation by Anne Patchett and Elizabeth Gilbert last month. It probably was made more so because I had to take an emergency nap to recover from the first class final grade-a-thon. I told Pam afterwords that I would prefer a Portland Arts and Lecture speaker who was more media savvy and less literary, because, you know, it is nice to be entertained as well as edified.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 PM
(0) comments
Monday, March 16, 2009
A Few More Notes on Soderbergh's Che
Here I am checking out the credits to Che Part One. You can tell because the Mary Ellen Mark portrait of Benecio on this side of the cover has him with his fifties Castro era garb. The reverse side features a pipe-smoking Che from the Bolivian era. The latter has added significance once one knows the story of how his bones were first identified in a controversial exhumation by Cubans thirty years later because they were linked to an accompanying packet of tobacco.
One of the revelations Soderbergh made on his post screening appearance on Saturday was that there was, at one time, a consideration of a third film. I don't know if I can describe the sound of an audience on the other side of 4.5 hours of biopic after he made that statement, but it is probably best summarized by Soderbergh's bemused response of "I know" accompanied by a shoulder shrug.
The tweener film for Che, according to Soderbergh would have covered the time period where Che went to the Congo to help kick up a revolution but ended up facing Michael Hoare, the guy The Wild Geese is based on, and a bunch of CIA trained mercenaries from South Africa. Che returned to Cuba, and, according to Soderbergh, ended up facing a political fallout from both Russia and Cuba. I thought that it was intriguing that Soderbergh had conceived it well enough to know how long it would be: 85 minutes. I think I would have enjoyed that more than the Bolivian death march, which is Part Two.
As for Che in Bolivia, it was a doomed campaign where Presidential leadership and American CIA played hardball. . Soderbergh said that perhaps Che was nearly 40 years before his time. Bolivian president Evo Morales is now the indigenous President of that country
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:39 PM
(0) comments
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Post Screening Moments
Who is this face in the reflection of the car Soderbergh is standing by? He looks like he could be one of Che's folks fighting to make revolution happen. I had some other better pictures of Soderbergh, also with this person's reflection, but I decided to have a Harry Caul (The Conversation) moment and edit and present this one accordingly.
Here is Kyle preparing for his Stephen Soderbergh autograph moment. Kyle was out here visiting from Chicago. We share much the same bandwidth and attitude about cinema, so it was excellent that he was able to attend the roadshow event as well.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:40 PM
(0) comments
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Che Roadshow with Stephen Soderbergh: Cinema 21 PDX 3.14.09
I am grateful to IFC films, the NW Film Center and the Cinema 21 for the opportunity this weekend to see both parts of Stephen Soderbergh's recent film project, Che, with the director in attendance. This was a cinematic event.
Che's two parts are a study in contrast. The common links are Benicio del Toro's intense performance as Revolutionary guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara and an opening of a map slowly animating key locations in Cuba for the first film and Bolivia for the second. Another common link is the Red digital motion picture camera. Soderbergh said that this was the first feature shot on the Red. Red Digital Cinema is a company founded by Jim Jannard, a fellow who made millions with the Oakley brand on sunglasses and lots of other stuff, according to a Wired magazine article several months ago. The portability and versatility of the Red were certainly factors here. Soderbergh said there were very few shots in the film where he added outside lights.
Part One of Che is called the Argentine. It was filmed in a classic widescreen format filled with lots of deep focus shots with multiple planes of action that were sometimes lovel to linger on. Soderbergh said he felt it had a kind of John Sturges look to it (Bad Day at Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven) The action intercuts Che's improbable, but true, trip in 1964 to address the United Nations with the revolutionary activities of Che and Castro as they moved across Cuba in 1957-58 through mountains and jungle to eventually control the government. Soderbergh joked it was a kind of like a Brukheimer film theme about a half dozen people who go to fight and take over a country. Regardless, it was a memorable and rewarding film experience.
The second half of the film, Guerrilla, follows Che's revolutionary activities in Bolivia and has its rewards, but is a much more grueling and demanding film experience than part one. Soderbergh said it was styled to look more like Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. We also see the Bolivian government working hard to make sure that Cuba will not be repeated, and without a charismatic native leader like Fidel Castro this was not going to happen. Where vegetation was lush and green in part one, this is dry, sunlight hot, and feels fully inhabitable as we look at Che's circumstances go from bad to worse to capture and death.
When the film was over Soderbergh came out for about a half hour of Q & A. It sort of weirdly reminded me of the beginning of his film Schizopolis where he comes out on stage like DeMille did for the theatrical edition of The Ten Commandments and talk about how important his picture was. In the Schizopolis introduction he tells the audience they need to see the picture again and again until they truly understand it. In the case of Che, although I had a backup plan to see the film twice, I opted for a single screening, at least during this roadshow.
Amazingly, there was not a stupid question during the entire Q & A with Soderbergh. He reflected on how he was here for a similar event twelve years earlier for Schizopolis and shared a ride across town with Gus Van Sant who sketched out a story about a genius by a couple of talented guys from the east coast. Of course, this turned out to be Good Will Hunting.
When asked about the tight feel of the ensemble and the sense of camaraderie, he confessed to handing a lot of that level of the staging to the actors during these grueling 39 day shoots. "You guys are on your own. I've got a lot to take care of here." And impressively, the sense of purpose and dynamics of the actors in both parts of the film is one of its greatest attributes. The results are that you feel Fidel and Che's Cuban forces getting better and more confident as their struggle continues. And you feel the Bolivian campaign hopeless and without any opportunity to succeed.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:59 PM
(0) comments
Friday, March 13, 2009
Q turns 76
I'm not going to post a bunch about my own birthday. Amazingly enhanced with Facebook wall greetings and lots of new friends from Pam's adventures last summer, but also bittersweet because of the lost of a friend and mentor. So instead, here is a very lame video of Quincy Jones in 1981 when he was a kind of essence of cool. Q turns 76 on Saturday, March 14.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:28 PM
(0) comments
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Month of the Daisy 3 and Kerouac's Birthday: Pull My Daisy
Here is a post in the continuing honor of the month of the daisy (here the term is being used as slang for male thingy) and also what would have been Kerouac's 87th birthday. The sad 40th anniversary of his death is coming up this October.
Here I have posted a three part YouTube embed of the infamous Pull My Daisy. The film was directed by Robert Frank and was actually a much more planned and plotted out affair than one would figure when first viewing it. Kerouac changed the definition of American prose and Frank transformed the world of art photography turning the Leica into a kind of handgun that captures instead of kills. This film will always stand as a kind of iconic landmark in the history of 20th American art and expression. I have always felt that manic angel Gregory Corso sort of steals the show here.
Here is a great essay from Photo-Eye Web Magazine which talks about the background of this lovely little gem from the Beat era and how it was made.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:40 AM
(0) comments
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Cracker and Teen Angst
This is a great song that holds up year after year, like the best of the Violent Femmes or stalwart bands like Los Lobos or The Bodeans. Cracker as Cracker or various permutations of Cracker Von Beethoven is one of those bands too. Teen Angst and a couple of other tunes deserve their rightful place in our culture.To sample the lyrics...
I don’t know what the world may need,
But I’m sure as hell that is starts with me.
And that’s a wisdom,
I’ve laughed at.
I don’t know what the world may want,
But a good stiff drink it surely don’t.
So I think I’ll go and fix myself a tall one.
Cause, what the world needs now
Is a new kind of tension.
Cause the old one just bores me to death.
Cause, what the world needs now
Is another folk singer
Like I need a hole in my head.
...AND THEN LATER, the closing verse...
Cause what the world needs now
Is a new frank sinatra
So I can get you in bed.
Cause what the world needs now
Is another folk singer
Like I need a hole in my head.
I don’t know what the world may need,
But I’m sure as hell that is starts with me.
And that’s a wisdom,
I’ve laughed at.
I don’t know what the world may want,
But a good stiff drink it surely don’t.
So I think I’ll go and fix myself a tall one.
Cause, what the world needs now
Is a new kind of tension.
Cause the old one just bores me to death.
Cause, what the world needs now
Is another folk singer
Like I need a hole in my head.
...AND THEN LATER, the closing verse...
Cause what the world needs now
Is a new frank sinatra
So I can get you in bed.
Cause what the world needs now
Is another folk singer
Like I need a hole in my head.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:18 PM
(0) comments
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Phish Begin Again
It is a bold rock move glorious that Phish has done by immediately giving away the mp3s of their epic three night Hampton run homecoming this past weekend for the first time 4.5 years since "breaking up."
"Phish is a great band." I remember when Chris and Tina of the Talking Heads proclaimed that boldly in an interview, sometime in the mid-nineties I think. If it was then, that was also about the time I quit seeing them live. Strange fact is that I have seen Trey in solo shows more than I have seen these Vermont roommates eternal play shows.
Vermont hippies are different from Washington, Oregon, and Northern California I think. Boston and New York Deadheads are, that's for sure. Phish phans are quite a motley lot. My friend Robert believes folks happiest with the return to stage are the guys who write, compile, and publish The Pharmer''s Almanac. Maybe so.
The problem with Phish is that if you aren't on the bus, you are not likely to get it. So that's another reason why the free downloads are an opportunity to expose yourself to a kind of greatness. I say do em all and work through them when you are doing errands with your IPod on. You will hear some stupid-ass stuff because there is a fair amount of that when they play. The barber shop quartet stuff is especially cloying. But power through that and the Mike Gordon moments. This is a great American Rock band making big moments like the Who and Yes and the Grateful Dead. Give them some props. Phish can be stupid. But they really aren't, except sometimes.
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:28 AM
(0) comments
Monday, March 9, 2009
Ahmad Jamal
I will always love this man's music. He is the piano player probably closest to my soul, but mid Blue Note Herbie Hancock and some of Mal Waldron's work. Homer Clark on KBOO introduced me to his album At the Pershing back when I was in High School. Freeflight was one of the first jazz albums I purchased for myself and definitely the first to feature electric piano primarily. In the mid-eighties Priscilla and I saw him in Washington DC back in the late eighties at Blues Alley. It was a slow Sunday and I got to stay for a second set.
The Amhad Jamal Trio playing Poinciana is one of the great wonders of American modern music. A blogger, Ted Gioia, wrote a lovely piece about it when the recording turned 50 years old in January 2008. It was a hit record for two years. There is a vamp like there was similarly to other hit jazz records such as Take Five or The Sidewinder, but as Gioia says, it is more than a repeating figure that makes this perfomance spceial. It is the fury and style of Jamal. He celebrates the 2005 version included here. It is easy to see why. He is playing in San Francisco at the Herbst Theater but it is after Spring break is over. Bummer. Maybe next time in Seattle.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:23 PM
(0) comments
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Month of the Daisy II: I Thought of Daisy
I Thought of Daisyis generally listed as being the only novel written by influential American critic and man of letters, Edmund Wilson first published in 1929. This surprised me because I remember reading his Memoirs of Hecate County, about thirty years ago and recall it correctly as being a work of fiction, rich and full of detail, but don't remember a lot of the specifics of its content. According to the Wikipedia article I linked to here, Hecate is not considered a novel because it consisted of six short stories connected by a single narrator.
There is a determined structure as well to I Thought of Daisy, which a 1967 introduction by Wilson in the copy I have talks about how each of the five sections combines together to create a kind of symphonic arrangement, each of which somehow connects the narrator to a free spirit sprite of the times, kind of a Louise Brooks, Lee Miller sort of gal by the name of Daisy Coleman. Each of the sections has a tone and filter of its own with a focus on another character of the book besides the last section which focuses in on Daisy and all of the other filters and conceptions the narrator has had of her fall to the side.
I picked this book because I wanted to connect again with Wilson. And because I was at Powell's looking for something in a pocket book format that I could easily transport in my jacket and read while waiting for Bobby Hutcherson and Lou Donaldson to perform. Another inspiration for picking this up came from my friend K.S. who read me a passage from an Upton Sinclair novel she is teaching with such relish that I realized that I needed to return to fiction reading, but that return should begin and focus with American prose in the first half of the twentieth century, when the novel was kind of king of arts and folks who did it best pushed, pulled and stretched into the directions they wished and needed to for telling their tales. If it took a couple pages to give what might seem like superflous background---well, who cares?, so be it. Novels and literature was not about product and best sellers like it is today.
Like The Sun Also Rises, novel of those times, I Thought of Daisyis filled with lots of talk and lots of scenes of folks getting hammered. Most of the book takes place with a group of hard partying folks in Greenwich Village. The Village of the twenties here reminded me much of a similar kind of hedonistic, "Jimmy Crack corn and I don't care", of Kerouac's fifties or the early sixties folk scene that I recently visited in Suze Rotolo's memoir A Freewhelin' Time.
But it is the prose and detail that are most captivating. Here Wilson describes a couple of prostitutes that a restaurant owner brought to a big roarin' party with lots of misbehaving drunks.
"And in their eyes, I saw the public stare, the stare of the prostitute, which, like the jockey's bowed legs, the courtroom intonations of the lawyer, the military officer's curtness, is the universal sign of the profession--that stare which sometimes looks amazed, sometimes panic-stricken, sometimes resentful and sullen, and sometimes insane, but which seems always to rob the face of some essential element of personality, and therefore, of humanity itself."
Wilson's prose is filled with wonderful sentences like this. Not on every page, but often enough just like a phrase in the third verse of a saxophone solo by one of the great soloists in the history of jazz. And the theme of the novel itself is a bit like a the big bluesy melancholia of a Hawkins, Webster, Gordan, or Young. Our narrator is a watcher who also seems hooked on taking his mind back to the scenes we saw prior for a kind of instant nostalgia hit. And he watches. He watches his old blueblood roommate, he watches a poet lady and is later allowed to sleep with her (based on Wilson friend and maybe lover Edna St Vincent Millay, he watches the scene at a huge drunken party and acts just as badly. But mostly he watches Daisy from different perches and perspectives and sees her up close as much as anyone would.
It is not a great book, but at times it felt like one does. And I so look forward to finding that sound and feeling that books of that era in the months to come.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:22 PM
(0) comments
Saturday, March 7, 2009
A Lost American Classic Resurfaces: The Whole Shootin' Match
It has been a really long time since I have felt the inclination to champion an American film in a broad and unequivocal way. Yet the thirty year old independent film The Whole Shootin' Match is truly an American classic and I hope that my encouragement will lead to some more folks to see it.
I knew a bit about The Whole Shootin' Match by reputation and have some memories of his follow-up, Last Night at the Alamo which showed up at the Clinton Street Theater, I think, partly perhaps, because it was the first out of town credit for the film's cinematographer, Eric A. Edwards, who later went on to shoot several of Gus Van Sant's features. I knew Edwards slightly back in the late seventies and early eighties, but don't remember if we ever had an opportunity to talk about this film.
The Whole Shootin' Match described by journalist Louis Black as a "hopeless alcoholic" who died at 49 from the excesses of his lifestyle. Shootin' Match, was ahead of its time. He was only in his late twenties at the time
This is an influential film that has been lost for a long time, recently resurrected and distributed on DVD by a company devoted to distributing landmark independents, Watchmaker Films. Lore has it that The Whole Shootin' Match was the inspiration for Robert Redford to begin the Sundance Film Festival. It certainly helped pave the way for folks like Richard Linklater, whose Slacker holds many similarities to Shootin' Match in its approach and style.
Most importantly, this film holds up very well. It portrays truly a most American white west Texan experience in stark black and white. Its main characters, Frank and Lloyd(Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman) are two losers whose plans and shortcomings unfold in high contrast long most of which involve money making schemes and inventions. Pennell has a way of having these characters find their way into your heart despite their shortcomings and character flaws. Frank, in particular, is especially hopeless. He has a fine razorback woman of wife, Paulette (Doris Hargrave)and a son named T Frank, but he still is a only occasional repentant of his cheating and drinking ways. Despite this, one cares about Frank and wonders what kind of stuff he and Lloyd will get into next.
My next stop is to go to Amazon and send a copy of this film to a relative who I suspect will truly enjoy and appreciate this film. As I said, I can't remember the last time I stumbled across something that gave me a similar kind of response.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:33 PM
(0) comments
Friday, March 6, 2009
Raphael Saadiq's Rhythm and Soul: Wonder Ballroom PDX 3.3.09
Saadiq is the real deal. He wrote his own page as part of the history of Rhythm and Blues music in the New Jack Swing era as a part of Tony Toni Tone. And now he is going back further into the legacy of great African American music and laying it down with a heat and intensity quite impressive. What separates Saadiq from, say, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings is that the song craft of his original content done in a mid sixties to early seventies Stylistic is that the songs on his album The Way I See It are really strong, only a couple feel like Todd Haynes doing Sirk or Van Sant copying Psycho.
And Good Gracious, What a showman! His band was a styling presence of its own with choreography, breaks, and solos in all the right measures. His band was absolutely exceptional playing soul that if one listened closely is filled with lots of Oakland music, both Sly and the gospel scene mixed together. This is no prodigal prince, this is a twenty year veteran of the music business who is capable of some really great work as evidenced by his latest release, The Way I See It.
It felt appropriate to have this in a north Portland landmark for last night's show. The Wonder Ballroom is a 95 year old building "built by The Ancient Order of Hibernians, a group committed to immigration reform, civil rights for those of Irish descent and the preservation of the old Irish culture." It also says that these Hibernians went nose to nose with the KKK in parochial school rights issues. Later it became a Catholic Church, an American Legion Hall and, in recent decades, a rotation of community and daycare services. There are some tradeoffs but it is always a kind of bittersweet lovely to see a top notch musician on a place with wooden floors (that don't bounce...if you are a Portlander, you know what I am talking about. And besides to be in crosshairs of the great Portland nightlife time circa shipyards and pre Vanport Flood that Bob Dietsche talks about in Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland jazz, 1942-1957 Places like Paul's Paradise about a block from where I heard the show that used to feature Basie sidemen for after hours and where Don Manning, long time radio host and bebop purists learned his drumming chops. In the early eighties I saw Don Manning get up and leave at a screening of jazz films before Sun Ra, Ornette, and Cecil Taylor came on.
I knew enough about his music to recognize that the show was organized to bookend sections of the new retro soul album stuff with medleys of hits representing the Tony Toni Tone era. I spent a lot of hours driving cars around listening to KBMS. I could sing some of the words as well as the rest of the crowd for the Anniversary song and a bunch of others. His solo stuff prior to The Way I See It sounded pretty good to me too.Saadiq shouted out to his friends in Portland and his connection with former Blazer Brian Grant. I didn't see Grant there but was standing near Channing Frye, a current local fav Portland Trailblazer.
I personally believe it is not a coincidence that this image of Saadiq so closely resembles the Sam Cooke Live At the Harlem Square Club. I also think of Frankie Lyman and all the great dramatist soul singers like Jackie Wilson.
Excellent review and lots of audience video clips of another Saadiq concert appearance last Fall
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:54 PM
(0) comments
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Some Misses
You can't win them all. I can't really verbalize what inspires me to include a film into our Netflix cue., and most of the time, I am pleased with my choices, but recently there have been some selections and choices that were disappointing. Here's a quick round up.
Olympics Opening Ceremony on DVD
Big media outlets don't get what folks want. When it comes to live events like the Olympics Opening Ceremony, make my funk uncut. No commercial time outs, no commentary. Give me a superior field broadcast with some solid journeymen editing and that would give the viewer a chance to sit back and savor without Bob Costas jawing at you about stupid stuff. I loved last year's Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame induction which was just a real time record ala CSPAN.
So I picked my own mix to play behind the first disc which featured about half an hour of sports guys talking to telegenic American atheletes and the cermony's first hour or so. And what an hour it is" the giant LCD screen, the bird's nest, the scores of drummers, dancers, Tai Chi masters. August 8 2008 will stand as one of the biggest displays of pageantry ever. Even on a crappy reprise from NBC.
Please Vote For Me
This documentary sounded promising. It followed three primary grade students in China who were encountering their first experience with democracy. All three had been nominated by their teacher to run for Hall Monitor, a position that was formerly fully appointed. The problem was that the kids were absolutely dreadful. They gave their parents fits for not doing homework, practicing their instruments. I guess some things are universal. I chose not to go down that path and turned off the film less than a half hour into it, because I didn't feel I needed to do this as a proxy either.
Der Untertan
Some of the best films I have encountered in recent films were East German Films produced at DEFA studios during the Soviet years. Unfortunately, Der Untertan aka The Kaiser's Lackey (1951) was not one of them. It is a broad satire with its origins with a Heinrich Mann novel from 1919. My biggest problem with this one was that the lead character was so reprehensible, one couldn't care about him. Some of the backstory online was that the East Germans promoted the film because it showed an individual whose politics and attitudes were much in line with what made National Socialism possible. Diederich Heßling is a self-indulgent industrialist who did awful things and had no character or soul. Franz Beiberkoph, the protagonist of Berlin Alexanderplatz was full of shortcomings and moral drawbacks, but there was a kind of depth and empathy with the character that was not apparent here. It has historical and social importance, for certain, but did not prove to be either entertaining or enlightening for me.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:26 PM
(0) comments
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Raphael Saadiq Is Coming to Town (Soon)
It is just a few days away from Raphael Saadiq's appearance at the Wonder Ballroom. Saadiq was one of the key folks behind the George Bush I New Jack Swing, eighties in twilight band, with the precious cutesy name of Tony! Toni! Tone! I was never a big fan of Tony to the third power, but it certainly wasn't the most disingenuous thing on the airwaves back in those days, not by a long shot.
But "T to the 3" is necessary to mention for cluing folks into what one of their founders is up to these days. After years of producing folks like D'Angleo and Joss Stone, Raphael Saadiq has put on a nice suit and some stylin' Mars Blackman uber eyeglasses, stepping up to the plate with a big ribbon microphone and laying down some moves in videos that take one back to the golden era of sixties and seventies soul music.
Neosoul is a label that gets bandied about a lot the last decade or so referring to a number of artists like Saadiq who are the standard bearers of classic R and B and put their own flavor and content to the form. It still remains a kind of underground, which is cool, but can be a little frustrating. Even though his album and video were kicking around on the charts and single 100 Yard Dash was getting some rotation, I still have to throw out Raphael's T3 credits out there with the explanation that he is now channeling soul somewhere between Stevie's I Was Made To Love You and Marvin's Grapevine. Check out this clip from Leno a few weeks back and you will be hearing from me with more about this gentleman in the not too distant, to be sure.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:49 PM
(0) comments
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Luchino and Ludwig
Luchino Visconti's 1972 follow up to Death in Venice, his most universally noted and acclaimed film was a four hour biopic of Ludwig II of Bavaria. It has recently been restored for DVD and is stunning to look at.
Visconti was a director with strong ties to stage and opera, but was also a master of location and light. In Ludwig, it is always clear where the large castle or drawing room windows are located as Visconti moves his actors in, out and through pools of light and color in a given scene. Weather also plays a very important part in much of the film, much of Ludwig's story is midst snowfalls of crisp Bavarian winter or blue gray skies and interminable rain.
Ultimately, Ludwig is the story of the lost boy man child king self-victimized by Romanticism and fantasy as he avoids the adult and regal responsibilities and the world tumbles towards a twentieth century of alliances and government. His major missions and legacy were to use state funds to be a patron of Richard Wagner and to build a series of castles, most of which were never lived in. I have always felt it a poignant fact that the most famous of these, Schloss Neuschwanstein, was the model for all of the Disney amusement park castles.
Helmut Berger was a more than a favored actor for Visconti. He was the muse and often a strong presence in his films of the late sixties and seventies. In an excerpt from Berger's autobiography Ich he describes himself as being Visconti's "widow." "Visconti was the benefactor who had extracted more than 100% of my makings from me who were only a nervous boy trembling in front of the camera. He was not only the benefactor but also the great patron, the teacher in arts, and my lover."
Berger's work in Ludwig is stunning. He will remind the contemporary viewer of Johnny Depp at his best, both in appearance and approach to the role. Ludwig's descent is a slow burn. We see the externals as his teeth go bad and red circles around his eyes seem to become a regular part of his appearance, but also get a true sense that this is a captured soul going mad.
Romy Schneider became famous for her trilogy of mid fifties German films where she played Sissi, Elisabeth of Bavaria who became Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, who was also Ludwig's cousin. In a move rather unprecedented in film, she returns to that role a decade and a half later Ludwig. Visconti and his screenwriters portray Elisabeth as an unattainable object of desire for the King. They share some romanticism in common, but other than moonlit horseback rides, the closest he will come to her is in almost marrying her sister Sophie. Elisabeth is frank with him: "I give you the illusion of love. Love is also a duty, marry Sophie." Ludwig's love life is instead one that is acted out covertly with his male courtiers which in the film culminates in a sequence of drunkenness that takes place in a kind of cross between a Bavarian tavern and the Dionysian gay bath house.
This film is long, but like many of Visconti's camera moves it finds its own direction and pace. It can be a bit disconcerting to see this most German of stories told in looped Italian dialog, (Gianni Giancarlo is the voice of Ludwig.) Yet at least for myself, I forgot about that distraction fairly quickly and got lost in the unblinking conflict of fantasy and reality that Visconti and Berger present for us here.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:55 PM
(0) comments
Monday, March 2, 2009
A Favorite Seuss
Okay Google, you started this. I saw your link today was decorated up quite nicely for birthday of Dr. Seuss. And it got me thinking about a night I was parked in front of the hotel that used to be my dad's office and before that it was the Multnomah Hotel. They had one of those street level galleries that was selling prints by Dr. Seuss. It was at night after a concert and, those cats, they have kind of haunted me ever since. I wish I could have afforded the print back then. It is called Plethora of Cats and is now sold out according to the Dr Seuss art web page. I used it as a desktop wallpaper for many years. And to those who might encounter this image and are paid to care about such things:
Of no harm I try to do,
Heirs of Seuss please do not sue.
To the rest of you I offer no apologies for the last two lines except that my father loved good puns and word play. Also, his readings of Seuss were stellar childhood memories still. And, after all, I did encounter this image first in front of the building of his old office.
Of no harm I try to do,
Heirs of Seuss please do not sue.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:57 PM
(0) comments
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Month of the Daisy I: Inside Daisy Clover
For the March buffet, there will be several posts about daisies, some in literature, some in film. This theme came up very much by accident and coincidence and it is not really designed to find connections between characters or themes or titles that share the common name of the flower of the Asteraceae family, which I was not aware until looking in Wikipedia "is the largest family of flowering plants, in terms of number of species." Think of it more as a kind of Jeopardy category that will weave in and out of this month's entries
Inside Daisy Clover is a 1965 Warner Brothers film that can be looked as this kind of passage films in the mid to late sixties between old and new Hollywood. It carries the production values and the sensibilities of a traditional Hollywood film, but it also is endeavoring to have a star vehicle break through and give audiences some artistic values, adult themed topicality, and a better reflection of the times. It is a movie on the corner, and when that corner will be turned a couple years later with the likes of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and Rosemary's Baby and 2001 a year after that.
Central to the film is the tired conceit of a child star being discovered, although Natalie Wood is over ten years older than the character of Daisy Clover, especially at the beginning of the movie. But what makes Inside Daisy Clover interesting is that although there is fame and fortune involved, she enters a world of almost pure darkness. The only glimmer of light is when she is seduced by matinee idol Wade Lewis, a first high profile role for Robert Redford. Lewis marries Clover, partly because his hand was forced to avoid morals charges by studio head Raymond Swan (Christopher Plummer as a real over the top bad ass), but also in the turmoil of his own sexual confusion. The big zinger here is that Lewis likes men too--still breakthrough stuff for plot points back in 1965.
After Lewis is gone, the predatory Swan takes up an affair with Clover. This is the man who put her mother in an institution to help preserve and create the image of "America's Little Valentine." She comes home to the beach house the studio has equipped her with saying "Middle of the night and I honestly believe in nothing." And then things get worse: her mother dies.
But all of this tortuous stuff pays off in the next sequence which is still incredibly effective. Daisy comes to the studio to do some looping over an especially saccharine number about being in the circus. The repetition of singing the lines in an isolation booth, shown from the outside in silence, leads to her breaking down. It is chilling, intense stuff.
By the time of Inside Daisy Clover, Natalie Wood was known as a star in musicals (Gypsy, West Side Story) and then-provocative dramas with hot young leading men where she either goes mad (Splendor in the Grass, Warren Beatty) or gets pregnant (Love with the Proper Stranger, Steve McQueen) I guess you could say Inside Daisy Clover is kind of the crossroads of all that cinematic journeying when Hollywood was still trying to make big, bold, Hollywood films for adults.
Director Richard Mulligan and Producer Alan Pakula certainly accomplished that goal a few years prior to Clover with To Kill a Mockingbird. And Pakula went on himself as a director to give us some of the most noted and more mature Hollywood based films of the seventies and eighties: Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, and Sophie's Choice. And also notable in Daisy is the often low angle, wide screen cinematography of Charles Lang, who contributed great work through most of the golden years of Hollywood.
Inside Daisy Clover is ultimately a product of the times we reflect back on when viewing it. The love scenes with Wood on a sail boat give one pause when one considers how she died. And the score by Andre Previn is a strange mix of dark music cues and show-stopping tunes. On DVD forty years later, this film feels a bit like a cultural curiosity on the cusp of something new to happen, a bit like Daisy in the opening of the film sitting against a graffiti wall of a girl wanting to bust forth into the world.