Thursday, April 30, 2009
How Does It Feel In A Long Black Cadillac?
I came across this a couple of days ago. It is a recording by an Afro-Puerto Rican folksinger by the name of Jackie Washington, who should not be confused with a 89 year old Canadian blues singer with the same name.
This song is strongly inspired by Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone but it isn't about Miss Lonely who used to get juiced and that. This protagonist is not on his own without a home, at least not as literally as the images in the Dylan original might project. Regardless, it is a cool little tune that I wanted to share with the buffet goers.
Jackie Washington's Long_Black_Cadillac
Jackie Washington's Long_Black_Cadillac
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:13 PM
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Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Mira Nair at PAL
Filmmaker Mira Nair was the last presenter in this year's Portland Arts and Lecture series. Her intelligence and intensity was apparent throughout the evening. You believe her when she says that she believes art can change the world. Another theme apparent in her lecture was her desire to make films that are unique to her vision and life experience. She talked about striving to make films or bring something to stories that no one else can.
I had intended to watch a few of her films prior to the lecture but found myself at other ends of the buffet. I certainly had heard about her films over the years and may have even watched a couple of reels of Mississippi Masala on Bravo or Sundance, where her films seem to get a lot of play, but was relatively uninitiated to her life and work.
Part of the reason is that India is hard subject and setting for most westerners to get their heads around with its extensive history, geographic, religious and cultural diversity. I've been working my way through Michael Wood's Story of India PBS mini-series and it kind of makes my head spin. And most folks, I venture, have probably learned more about the country in recent years from tales of call centers and economic boom, and, most recently, the success and cultural phenomena of Slumdog Millionaire.
During the Q and A component of the evening's presentation, Nair powered past the apparently immense amount of cards that had questions about Slumdog except for one that concerned the similarity of subject manner of street kids in India, which also was the subject of her first fictional film, Saalam Bombay! She told how she consulted with director Danny Boyle and was pleased that they had the done the section with the young kids in Hindi. She also was pleased to report that they replicated her model of a trust fund for the child actors as she had done with Saalam. She was somewhat dismissive of the latter part of the film describing it as a fairy tale. One could tell that Slumdog was a subject she harbored some strong opinions about. Its success can't help but now be the frame of reference on films set in India and themes she has been exploring for over twenty years in both documentary and fictional films. But it may open more doors for her still. One wonders if the outlook be as positive for a Broadway musical adaptation of Monsoon Wedding without Sundog in the public consciousness.
The reel they showed as part of her introduction indicates that a Mira Nair film is a rich visual experience. Her art is a synthesis from many resources. Her roots were in street theater and provocative theater of the sort that was produced by Peter Brook. At Harvard she studied with Richard Leacock, one of the true godfathers of non-fiction film. Mitch Epstein, her first husband is a well-known fine art photographer who shot her first two films and she cited an encyclopedic list of photojournalists and photographers who influence and inform her. She also gave tribute to Satyajit Ray, talking about recently one of his rarely screened films with the joy of a fan and in voice of another artist in tribute and admiration. She also talked about Ray's ability to capture the rhythm of nature.
In advice to those pursuing their art, she talked about the importance to be a bit of a dreamer but also how it is important to experience "the sweetness of rejection." At one point she learned how to make something out of nothing, or at least with more limited means finding inspiration in the approach of Dogma filmmakers. But the one idea that she returned to frequently was the need for one to tell their own stories. She rejected an offer to film a Harry Potter film for The Namesake, a story of cultural transplantation, because one was a story that others could tell and the latter was a story she needed to tell in her own unique fashion.
Nair is finishing up a big Hollywood biopic due out this fall about Amelia Earhart staring Hilary Swank and Richard Gerr. After seeing Nair speak I am relatively sure about two things. One it will be very strong visually. And, secondly, she will likely provide her own unique imprint and interpretation on her film's subject.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:45 PM
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Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Zach, Miri, and Others Make A Movie with Kevin
Most of the time it appears that Kevin Smith doesn't make movies as much as he makes media documents intended to be naughty and provocative. Sometimes his stuff works. Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jersey Girl are clever, thought-provoking,and in spots highly entertaining. But anything Clerks and Silent Bob is pretty damned worthless overall. Zack and Miri Make A Porno is better than Mallrats, but basically one gets the feeling here that the Weinsteins are just gambling, that they got their checkbook out with the hope that it might bring in a profit for them. "Here Kevin make another movie and try to make us money."
A film with a title like Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back or Zack and Miri Make A Porno that fully express the conceit and premise of the enterprise. Zack and Miri are roommates who have never become biologically entangled. They are in deep slacker financial crisis (Zack spent the rent money on skates) and through a series of weird circumstantial situations (the only kind really when it comes to Kevin Smith plot points) they embark on planning, casting, and filming a pornographic film with the hope of it getting them out of their economic circumstance. And, of course, that setup exists so the characters can fumble around with the whole sex and love conundrum. ("Did you feel something when we had sex on the coffee bean sacks with the camera running and half a dozen freaky people watching?")
Seth Rogan seems to have two vibrating modes in this film. The woe as me shlumph sounding like a Woody Allen impersonation or a hyperactive Mickey "let's put on a porn" Rooney overdrive. Apparently, becoming a homegrown pornographer is the first time he has been truly motivated in his life. Miri complements him on how she feels this new found character suits him well. Oh brother.
Then there is the group of misfits they recruit for their cinematic masterpiece including former porno star Traci Lords (who plays Bubbles, for a special talent she performs at bachelor parties, enough said about that), Smith perennials Jason "Jay" Mewes, Jeff Anderson who played Randall one of the Quick Stop Clerks and a few others who create a faux family that both characters and audience are supposed to become quickly sentimental about.
But Craig Robinson, who has the functional role of Zack's African American work buddy is a standout. He has great timing and delivers some of the film's funniest lines. His work in the film feels fresh against a recycled jokescape of Smith's socially, hygienically, and politically incorrect universe.
I do appreciate Smith's fidelity in depicting the world of the working class American. Zack and Miri shows what a pain it is to be trying to survive without any resources or creature comforts in Monroeville, a suburb of Pittsburgh. And the details he shows between characters are quite telling such as the crap car the title characters depend on that never gets fully defrosted. Jersey Girl also did a nice job of showing the relationship of characters in their workday existence and environment in a realistic way, even if the characters were often kind of cartoony and unidimensional.
Even a Kevin Smith movie that is a mixed bag is going to be far more interested than a cookie cutter film envisioned by a studio head and doctored to near death by a team of writers. Full naughty boy excess can be a bit much for a 90 minute feature, but in this kind of setting a few entertaining moments can be good enough to be sure.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:37 PM
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Monday, April 27, 2009
Webb Sisters
Leonard Cohen's concert last week provided excellent connection with the poet and his body of work, but also introduced us to Charley and Hattie Webb. Sure, they look kind of like models, but they harmonize beautifully and one of them even plays the harp! Leonard refers to them as "the sublime Webb Sisters." Pam calls them the World Wide Webb sisters and has to put up with my momentary obsession when I first discover telegenic sibling musical acts, as she suffered when the Dixie Chicks first made the scene or when the Corrs seemed to be in the media and storefront everywhere when we visited Victoria on our honeymoon.
Regardless, we both agreed that the Webbs' performance of Leonard's If It Be Your Will was one of the highlights of the evening. (I also when they did carwheels to the cue of "the white girls dance" during The Future. Here is a link to a fan video of an excerpt of when they performed it in Munich last summer that will give you an idea of their excellence. A full performance is featured on the Webb Sisters' EP Comes In Twos that is available through emusic. The other tunes aren't bad either.
I'm not sure if Hattie and Charley could sustain my interest (musically) through an entire evening of song. But I'm certainly willing to try to find out if such an opportunity were to arise.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:35 PM
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Sunday, April 26, 2009
Ondaatje on Cohen
In 1970, a 64 page essay by Michael Ondaatje on the written work of Leonard Cohen was released as a part of the Canadian Writers series published by McClelland and Stewart Publishing of Toronto. I have had the book for a few weeks and fortunately was able to give it a final read through before it was due to go back into the amazing Summit Library system of 38 academic libraries.
Ondaatje makes it clear that he focusing in on Cohen's literary life and not his career in music, which then had him pretty much classified as a folk singer. He does acknowledge where Cohen's career is at the point of this critical essay's time of publishing as a parallel to Dylan's. He quotes Cohen as saying Dylan as bringing "the word back to the jukebox which is were you have to have it, or at least where I like to have it."
It was an interesting to read one master analyzing another over a component of the body of Cohen's work I am less familiar with. There are chapters in the essay covering his first four books of poetry and two novels. He sheds some light on the very dense and dark Beautiful Losers, which is one of those books, like most of Burroughs I have encountered. I appreciate it for the art he is endeavoring to accomplish, but can't really say I like it.
Despite this lack of familiarity with most of the work, I found a number of Ondaatje's observations quite perceptive and even moving at times. The brief passages create a kind of roadmap to various dimensions of Cohen that are valid today as he takes his touring band dancing to the end of love every evening throughout North America this spring.
What is successful in these poems which evoke dramatic dreamworlds is that Cohen can, in spite of the vague situation create a precise and subtle mood." The figures are obvious and one dimensional, but Cohen draws them from a complex state of mind. (14)
It is a world where the morals are imagistic, as they are always in the context of dreams. And at the centre of these poems is Leonard Cohen, the author of the action and the chief actor; like Mickey Spillane, he is his own best Mike Hammer. He says in one of his poems, "it is important to understand one's part in the legend," and these dreamworlds review new wells in the mind as he, like Suzanne, moves and touches perfect bodies. (14)
In regards to Let Us Compare Mythologies, Cohen's first book of poetry.
Cohen is incredibly good at making ballads with lines that hook in your memory, but the grand gestures and promises of love have already been sabotaged by him (18)
Cohen is seldom allegorical. When he talks of bones, he means bones. (19)
In general, he is lyrical when dealing with himself, and anarchistic when he deals with the world outside. The emotions blend awkwardly, with a result that the style is as affected as it is successful. (23)
The most haunting songs of today are sung with a yell which some superficially mistake for joy. Cohen's art links fear and joy, nastiness and beauty so that the end results are often ironic(23)
In regards to The Spice Box of Earth, Cohen's second book of poetry.
The book is riddled with vicious and humorous self-flagellation. "Do you know what the ambition of our generation is, Wanda? We all want to be Chinese mystics living in thatched huts but getting laid frequently"(25)
In regards to The Favourite game, Cohen's first novel.
His self-imposed sainthood, and what he says as the jet-set Mahtma, is also not really pretentious in the context of his work as a whole. It is the logical and end result of key themes in his writing. Cohen is clearer about this when he says, "we are creating a loose church where each man can have his own vision." In other words, in an age of too much formality, we must be our own saints and must be sure to promote our own private cells of anarchy." (61)
In regards to Parasites of Heaven, Cohen's sixth book.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:12 PM
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Saturday, April 25, 2009
Ruffin, Kendricks, Oates and Hall
We were at dinner last night at one point I said: "I hated the eighties." And the fact is they sucked big time, especially in pop music. Looking back now I see I barely tolerated the mainstream in music. Prince provided some highlights and style. Byrne and Talking Heads created a nice body of work. But for every hour of MTV there was damn little that I cared about then or now. Examples: that overly smug turd Phil Collins. ubiquitous Madonna dance attitude anthem of the season and that David Bowie China Girl Let's Dance nonsense. And then there was the Stevie Winwood comeback that never seemed to end. And it took me about three plays to hate Dire Straits' Money for Nothing for the rest of my life. Grumble, grumble grumble. Give me Miles or give me Grateful Dead, and even then the former's Michael Jackson and Cindi Lauper covers almost the death of cool and as for Touch of Grey, it kind of blew up their scene with unintended consequences.
Here is an exception and its only because two of the great voices of the sixties took up a late seventies duo with an eighties string of video hits to another level. David Ruffin rough shouting and Eddie Kendricks' sweet falsetto left the sound of The Temptations in 1968 and 71 respectively. Both did okay with solo careers on the R and B charts but never crossed over very well. However, both produced some fine soul records that sound pretty darned good to my ears today. Their paring with Hall and Oates at the Apollo was their last great public exposure. They both died in their early fifties pretty much on the cusp of the next decade. The decade of grunge.
In 1985, Hall and Oates were pretty much top dogs in the seventies pop video music game. They hooked up with Kendricks and Ruffin for the reopening of the Apollo Theater. It is easy to be a little bit cynical about this paring, but it is also easy to crack jokes about John Oates' height. (Annie Leibovitz confessed last Fall in Portland that she felt bad about pointing out this feature of the mustachioed one putting him on a box--or was it a stack of catalogs?-- in a photo shoot she did for Rolling Stone ) I think the collaboration worked and these clips reveal that.
The Motown hits medley is okay, even if some of the dance moves are a little over the top when the Hall and Oates try to execute them. Certainly Eddie and David show they have plenty of chops and passion left. And once in a while the four voices really connect during My Girl.
But surprisingly, the performance that is worth revisiting was when the four of them take back Hall and Oates album track Everytime You Go Away which had been covered and made it big on the charts by Paul Young who Daryl refers to only as "an English artist." I'm reminded in a way of Otis Redding when the hardest working soul star would kick it up a notch further whenever he sang Respect after Aretha blew it up. If you haven't seen or forgot about how this unlikely gang of four work out with this song, it is worth eight minutes of your day to check it out.
Daryl Hall was one pretty rooster in 1985 and he puts as much soul as he can into this, But the great stuff happens about five minutes into it when Ruffin shouts some exchanges to him. And then there is this very cool showbiz coda that takes it on home in a way that transcends the unfortunate era it was performed in. I can't think of too many other musical moments of the eighties as worthy of revisiting.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:03 PM
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Friday, April 24, 2009
At 74 still "Just a Kid with A Crazy Dream":
Leonard Cohen at WAMU theater 4.23.09
Once in a while, one has the opportunity to attend an event that truly feels bigger than life, a few hours that are on a scale than larger than our daily existence. Watching Leonard Cohen present a significant sampling of his life's work was certainly such an evening. A major factor contributing to the quality of this concert certainly is due to the unique quality of this man's poetry and music and his humble zen monk meets well-dressed elder persona. But another contributing factor is the sum result of the amount of care that Cohen, his musical director Roscoe Beck, and the show's sound, staging and other technical personnel put into the pacing, design and execution of this show.
On the new Leonard Cohen Live in London CD and DVD he says he appreciates the "financial and geographical inconvenience" that people take to get to his performance. Pam and I left the WAMU theater after three hours of great art and performance feeling that such measures were totally worth it. And by the content, somewhat glazed looks of others who were leaving the building to look up at the Smith Tower and other unique buildings of the Seattle skyline, I imagine the majority of folks who attended felt the same way.
In the blues, you feel the pulse on two and four. In funk, of course, its all about being on the one. On one level an evening of Leonard Cohen is one of 3/4 time or otherwise have a hard pulse on the third beat. This rhythmic component starts off immediately with his opener Dance Me to End of Love and is returned to time and time again throughout the evening in milestone compositions like Take This Waltz (obviously), So Long Marianne, and Sisters Of Mercy. It has been many years since I concerned myself much with the technical components of poetry, rhyme schemes, stichomythia, and so forth. But it seems to me that if one was to dig around with Cohens lines, you would find plenty of example and justification for why a unit of three beats is common to his work.
Cohen's show also features other examples of the presence of three; most notably the trio of women who bring a haunting texture to his music, his sometimes songwriting parter Sharon Robinson, the phenomenal sibling duo of Charley and Hatti Webb. (I will be commenting on the phenomena of the Webb Sisters in a future post) And there were frequently three guitars playing on stage at the same time: Cohen himself, veteran of other Cohen tours Bob Metzger and also the Spanish guitar master Javier Mas working out on the twelve string guitar but also bringing bandurria, lute, archlute to give an ethnic authenticity in the presentation of tunes like Gypsy Woman and The Partisan.
There are certainly gypsy and Spanish instances and overtones in many of the songs Cohen presents on this tour, but his band has a foundation of a highly well connected state of the art session band from the seventies or early eighties. And no wonder with the likes of Neil Larsen, who played on records by everyone from Foghat, George Harrison, Rikki Lee Jones, and Kenny Loggins. "Instruments of wind" musician Dino Soldo and drummer "Priest of Precision" Rafael Bernard Gayol also contribute to a world class band that has a sound that is polished, but not sterile.
My seeing Cohen this week also is a kind of personal landmark. I think he is the last major musical artist I wanted to see perform live. Larry Rohther's February 25 NY Times interview with Cohen mentioned that Cohen's rumored North American tour was indeed going to be a reality this Spring. My next stop was the Internet where I discovered that the LC fanclub presale would take place in two hours. It took a little while to find the magic password, but I had my tickets secured in the first few minutes. (Then I called Pam with "Honey, you know I don't ever do stuff like this before I talk to you but..")
Rohther's article also explains the circumstances for Cohen's touring at age 74. "“It was a long, ongoing problem of a disastrous and relentless indifference to my financial situation." His manager fleeced him of millions when he had retreated to a monastery for zen studies. ("I studied deeply in the philosphies and world religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through" he tells audiences these days) His current personal circumstances were summarized by a "Good for us" by another woman who sat a table next to ours at our pre-concert Cajun dinner at the New Orleans restaurant in Pioneer Square.
His abandon in his performance on this tour indicates that he is here for more than economic need. Cohen seems to be experiencing a great deal of joy in performing this show across our continent. He dances frequently and even skips between segments during parts of the second set. This may surpise folks who mainly know Leonard as a poet who wrote a lot about surviving the battlefield of love, and in some cases, a literal battlefield. Cohen's work can be somber but it can be joyous. And there are many shades of somber joy in between.
The tour has been captured on DVD and CD and will, I believe, be as important a document as the 2005 documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man for generations to come to appreciate, understand and enjoy this important and outstanding artist.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:42 PM
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Thursday, April 23, 2009
How To Digitize The World..And How Not To
The UNESCO/Library of Congress premiered this week. Initially I was pretty impressed by the interface from an information architecture perspective. I am a big proponent of Richard Saul Wurman's LATCH model as the five ways one can organize information (Location Alphabet Time Category and Hierarchy) WDL allows you to do this pretty quickly and directly. The home page shows the items on a map (Location) And there are browse buttons on top to view the items on a Place (location), by Time, by topic or type of item (category) and Institution (Location again) Very cool I thought. I'll show this example to my students.
But as I searched and researched the tool further, something else became obvious. There wasn't really a lot there. Maybe only 1500 items. And the About section of the website revealed it took almost four years to produce this interface since it was first proposed by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. There were scores of institutions involved in it And corporations like Microsoft and Googlecontributed about ten million dollars to its development. Ten million dollars for a collection of 1500 items? Even with a cool interface. Really?
I think what this once again proves is that WWW does not work best when it comes from the top down. Compare this project with Brewster Kahle of archive.org and his vision to scan the world's books, music, and in this TED Talk from last year. In it he talks about how a million books could be scanned for about 30 million dollars. Digital rights are an issue to be sure, but he shows how archive is filled with thousands of bands and concerts, historical films, and the Wayback Machine archive of the web's history. He is thinking big here, talking about putting the world's information online. And certainly there have issues: "Do we do it public or private?" "How do we have a world where we have both libraries and publishing?" But he shows how it can be done and it turns out to be more than a the WDL's token feel good project.
After I watched this video, I wonder if we should try to get the ObmamaMan to fire Billington and replace him with Kahle. Some of that stimulus money could go a long way to helping reduce unemployment numbers by hiring federal digitizers. After watching Wall Street gobble up tax payer millions, why does it seem at all lame ass idea to try to come up with 750 million dollars to put the complete content of Billington's LOC into a digital format?
Watch Kahle on his TED talk and see how this is possible.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:29 PM
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Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Great Photojournalism about a time of change
I came across this amazing set of images and feel obligated to share them with the Buffet world at large. Because proximity and association, photojournalism has been an object of awareness and fascination for the very vast majority of my life. It was a trade of my father's and in our household folks like W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, and Elliot Erwitt were held in status and esteem the same way that folks regard saints or rockstars. We would track the rise of local heroes in the field such as David Hume Kennerly or Brian Lanker.
I felt a desire, an obligation, even, to give full buffet exposure to Karlheinz Jardner when I recently encountered his work. Jardner, a West German, went to the island of Rügen with visions of Caspar David Friedrich's white cliff paintings in Spring 1990 within the year of the fall of East Germany.
Here is an article about his journey and most importantly, here is a collection of 45 images that document a world, now lost, transitioning into the west. The pictures of bedrooms and shop windows are especially defining and descriptive. And finally, there are images of the ostensible object of his journey, the White Cliffs.
These images are impressive for both their historical and aesthetic value. It is hard to believe that twenty years have passed.
Cliff Hotel Rugen, 1990.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:28 PM
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Hey Rachel, Get Married Already...
I have a feeling that Rachel Getting Married directed by Jonathan Demme is one of those films that will polarize audiences. Some folks will embrace the zany dysfunctional characters and the almost overwhelming information overload that occurs when jump cuts and hand held camera are used to compress about 70 hours into a two hour film. At times this seems at times have a kind of dizzying effect, but at other moments feels pretty static and extended. There is certainly more than a single feature film's worth of character and embellishment to keep track of here. This film is filled with a swirl of family relationships, wedding guests, musicians, relatives, and plot points, some of which are heavy handed and awkward. The main point of the action concerns a furloughed long term rehab patient coming home for her sister's East Indian themed wedding. This last detail makes for a trapping with weird ambiance. It's kind of like what happens when people use Disney as a theme for their wedding when they dress up as Sleeping Beauty or something like that.
Anne Hathaway is more than just a presence in this film as Kym, the sister from rehab, she is kind of a phenomena. She is most impressive when she is given the opportunity to react and respond to disclosures and events around her. Her eyes are especially expressive and she uses her body to describe and define her feelings about the circumstances in her world as well as the incisive dialog that is associated with her character and her relationship with her past indiscretions and tragedies and current relationships with her sister, mother, and father.
The most effective of her three parental relationships is the one who doesn't do or say much in the film. Anna Devere Smith plays Carol with a kind of stoic intensity. The camera loves this woman. We don't hear her say or do much, but the viewer knows rapidly who she is and what she is all about. Deborah Winger returns in a high profile independent film as Abby, Kym and Rachel's mother. I don't believe the character is given the opportunity to develop, she I also there mostly as a kind of presence, and although it is good to see her return to the screen, her performance felt like a bit of a let down.
Even more of a shortcoming was modern performance vaudevillian Bill Irwin who is cast as the father, His excessive emoting and constantly changing rubber-like face became pretty annoying after a while as did the device of him constantly trying to feed everyone in his family and in the wedding party. And least effective of all is a sequence where he gets engaged in a dishwasher loading contest with his son-in-law that ham-handedly ends when (spoiler in the next few words) the next plate in the stack turns out to be the plate that was used dead infant son. How profound.
Rachel Getting Married has some fine moments and Demme, one of America's best living directors can move evoke a mood and some fine cinematic moments. Yet by my comments so far you may come to the conclusion that there are indeed some major shortfalls in the script by Jenny Lumet who is indeed Sidney Lumet's daughter (and by the way, Lena Horne's granddaughter). She utilizes a clumsy three act structure that is driven by the three days that are covered in the story and that is a good part of the problem. Day one has Rachel coming home, going to a rehab session and encountering a fellow there who when she returns to the home later this guy is revealed out to be the best man in the wedding. I guess it is because they are addicts, but they both respond to immediately by having casual sex. In aftermath conversation Emma finds out Rachel has chosen her truly awful best friend to be maid of honor instead of her sister. Big Surprise: They have a big show down. Later in a interminable wedding banquet sequence with more jump cuts than a Godard film exercise, Emma painfully blathers on to families on both sides like she is back in her rehab group. And yes, another big family shouting match takes place later the night. So much for Act One.
So at this point, I'm thinking we have just witnessed the eve of the wedding, right? No way. Screenwriter Lumet daughter needs to squeeze another day of pain and angst out of Emma and the family so the script has a second act. I wanted to shout at the characters to shut up, buckle down and deal with their discomfort. But this would not be the stuff of independent film family drama. There is this kind of floating inevitable kind of psychological action involved in the film that seems to move forward on its own with people who are ultimately not all that nice or interesting (save Hathaway as Emma) that reminded me of how I felt about Alan Cummings and Jennifer Jason Leigh's The Anniversary Party from several years back.
Eh gads, then at last, comes Act Three with Indian wedding with bridesmaids in saris and an elephant on the cake. The vows consist in part of the large African American groom quoting almost the entire lyrics from Neil Young song. The ceremony and reception include the same loopy string players that are insistently practicing throughout the film and Robyn Hitchcock and reggae toastmaster Sister Carole appear out of nowhere at various points to do a song or two---Young, Hitchcock, and Carole were featured in other Demme films. What's that all about?
But...wait there's more randomness. Donald Harrison plays his saxophone at one point, a deejay keeps the party going, and Cyro Baptista and a troop of samba dancers even show up towards the end of the festivities. I don't think there has been a reception like this ever in the history of the world. No wonder mama Debra Winger wants to go home near dawn. And no wonder Emma is quick to get out the place and back to rehab early the next morning. It will take her days to recover from all this drama, multicultural stimuli and quirkiness. I know I was pretty tired by the time it was time to sweep up the petals and confetti.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:26 PM
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Monday, April 20, 2009
Three Brief Observations on Technology
I. Oskar Barnack turned it on its side
The revolution of 35mm still photography started with Oskar Barnack, an employee of the Leitz factory in Wetzlar Germany in the few months before WWI. The great optics of the Leitz company were a major factor, but most importantly was his break through of threading 35mm movie film sideways. An 18 x 24 mm frame of movie film became the 24 x 36 mm frame of still film and the world was changed.
If there is a moral to this tale it might be try putting something on its side and see what happens.
II. Private to Public and Back Again
Edison's Kinetoscope technology had the three elements important to the motion picture, perforated film light source and shutter, but it was a very private and individual experience. That dancer with the veils was dancing for you, Joe Late 19th century worker who decided to drop into the Kineteoscope parlor instead of his vaudeville hall. When movies meant projection to an audience of more than one thanks to the Lumieres and some others, the private experience became the public.
As I walk through a lobby in an airport or the lounge at the community college I work, I invariably will see folks with headphones watching a movie strapped into their laptops. Have we somehow kind of come full circle in a bit more of a century of technology.
III. Great Except When..
Google blogger has been powering the buffet for quite a while now. In the past few days, its FTP configuration to my remote domain and site has gone pretty much kaput. Life is in full swing and I have somehow not found the time to trouble-shoot this, except by browsing the group mind of the forums to see that a bunch of other folks started experiencing difficulties last week when they went down for upgrades. Hence, I am currently doing hand hewn upgrades and FTPing them myself until I can come up with the solution and eventually be a DIY Wordpress driven site, partly because I don't want so many aspects of my life to be connected directly to Googleville. As for now, my apologies to those who might want to RSS, comment and so forth.
This last snapshot's resolve is one we all have said and felt at one time or another--Technology is great when it works, and at least an annoyance and a nuisance when it doesn't.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:21 PM
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Sunday, April 19, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Meeting David Walker, the man behind BadAzz Mofo
The Stumptown Comics Fest is a yearly event in Portland, Oregon that emphasizes the comics artist community in Portland. Portland is a comics town in much the same way it is an indie music town or micro brew mecca. There is a whole heck of a lot of all three and there definitely is a community surrounding each of these that is quite extensive.
Portland, Oregon also seems to be a place where people who are into niche extreme interests in culture and art do their thing quite visibly. Do you know of another town that features the likes of a Zombie film festival with eleven media sponsors or an annual HP Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhu Con that seems to get bigger every year?
Portland is also the home of David Walker, also known as the writer, editor, designer, publisher, and HNIC (apparently an acronym featuring a certain ethnophaulism) of BadAzz Mofo a pop culture zine dedicated to the 1970s filmmaking which has been given moniker, blaxploitation for both better and worse. He also is the the co-author of a new book, Reflections on Blaxploitation: Actors and Directors Speak. He has also made some films including a documentary on the blaxploitation era, provided some pretty entertaining writing on film for Willamette Week for several years and is currently the director of a computer technology after school program that Intel sponsors.
I met up with Walker at Stumptown where he had a corner table. I was getting overwhelmed by the volume of young dedicated artists who with their homegrown books and quirky visions that take more than a passing glance to truly appreciate so on my third or fourth turn around the large room in the Lloyd Center DoubleTree tended to gravitate towards the room's perimeter and folks who were obviously dealers selling graphic novels and so forth. Walker and I quickly found ourselves in a multi-layered discussion about independent film, blaxploitation and the history of exploitation filmmaking in Portland. I was glad to have met up with him. I haven't met anyone who could finish my sentence "I have a theory that all the films of that era were somehow templated in Superfly, Shaft, and ..." "Sweetback's," Walker interjected. And he agreed with me that they wouldn't have had the impact they did if it weren't for the kind of Renaissance men who made them (Gordon Parks Sr., Gordon Parks Jr., and Melvin Van Peebles.)
Since this meeting, I have much been enjoying his book and the issues of Badazz Mofo he gave me. I like his writing about this era because he takes it on from so many perspectives: historical, sociological, but mostly as a fan of kick-ass movies that had their own style and swagger. He started his print zine in the nineties. And there is a parallel to the discussion he and I had about independent filmmaking both then and now. I truly believe that independent filmmaking in the pre-digital era was a heroic act, more than it is now due to the finicky technology of 16mm celluloid film stocks, sync sound and the multiple prints needed to even get your work completed and so forth. The image of Cassavetes putting mortgages on his house to finish films always come to mind. In print, Walker took his love for a genre and did what folks do now, seemingly ubiquitously with blogging. Here's to you, Mr Walker. I'll be ordering up some back issues soon.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:19 PM
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Saturday, April 18, 2009
Memorial Service
I attended a memorial service for a father of a high school friend. I had been to the service of his wife some years earlier. And somehow it seemed like the right thing to do.
It was held in the dining room of a senior care facility, which coincidentally, I had been to once before, almost exactly a year earlier for another memorial.
Neither my friend or his brother, who both live across the country attended. The family was represented primarily by a granddaughter whose mother, the sister of the brother I had been friends with, died of cancer about a year ago. There were some other family members present including her brother and a very infant great granddaughter of the fellow whose life we were commemorating.
Almost everyone else present was a resident or a worker in the care facility. My friend's father had a big presence and had a way of making a significant connection in the lives of the people around him. One of the workers had developed a manuscript on caretaking and had kind of adopted him as a grandfather-like figure. A woman in the kitchen had dedicated the evening's meal to him making sure that they were going to have meat raviolis, which he favored more than the standard fare which generally only included cheese. And you certainly could tell that lots of the elderly women residents had developed friendships and crushes, even, on this individual.
It was an interesting moment, being surrounded by elders, their caregivers, and a generation of his family that I had very little or know connection with. I'm not sure what it all means, but it seems to be some sort of significant take stock in mortality moment for me that I'm sure I will think about sometimes. And somehow I was glad I to be there.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:16 PM
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Raphael Saadiq on Daytrotter
Back in February, Raphael Saadiq put on one of the best shows I had seen in years. I strongly believe that his early Motown-inspired album That's the Way I Feel is not a retro-trick, but an extension and exploration of this very talented and heart filled artist and performer. You can hear it in his other solo albums of the last decade, records that when you hear them now serve as a kind of bridge from his Tony Toni Tone new jack swing to his current back to the future project.
Anyway, the point of this post, is to provide a link to Saadiq's newly released Daytrotter session which consists of four tunes you can download for free. All have that Daytrotter loose, semi-demo, band on its day off quality that a true new music lover will cherish. I have been away from Daytrotter for a while because in the past their sessions generally consist of hair in the eyes moody alt rockers, you know, SXSW stuff, but lately they seem to be mixing it up. They even posted a session with the Preservation Jazz Hall Band last month.
The Saadiq set starts out a little tentative but is burning full by the time it gets to 100 Yard Dash, the final tune which features some truly tasty organ licks. All four songs can also be found on the last album and its fair to say the performances are somewhere between those recorded sessions and the full-blown Saadiq live experience. These peformances have an authentic feel to me. I like that the Daytrotter piano seems a little out of tune. A little heavier mix on the drums reveals the New Orleans style beat in this music especially in The Big Easy, probably the best song yet to be written about Hurricane Katrina.
Daytrotter Sessions tunes can be streamed, but the downloads are free for a quick and painless login registration. It is definitely a place on the web worth stopping by and checking out from time to time.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:40 PM
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Obama Reads!
This is truly wonderful. Obama reads Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are on the White House lawn on Easter weekend. Presidents should read to children. It isn't enough to totally wipe out Bush and his 9/11 pet goat from our memories, but it sure as heck does help. "Let the Wild Rumpus Start..."
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:35 PM
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Monday, April 13, 2009
Mike Nichols: Intelligence Great and Style Invisible
The Arts section of this Sunday's NY Times also had a fine little article by Charles McGrath in conjunction with the Musueum of Modern Art retrospective of Mike Nichols' film work that is currently underway. He focuses in on two things that make Nichols unique: the quality of his work that is so often focused on actors and story that it seems like the director is invisible and a strong intelligence that gives his films a unique flavor.
McGrath states: "it’s sometimes hard to say what makes a Nichols movie a Nichols movie. They seem like vehicles for actors, not the director, whose stamp is in leaving almost no trace of himself." In the article Nora Ephron describes him as having "an almost invisble fluidity."
Probably no filmmaker came out of the gate from other high profile enterprises, both with theater, Welles revolutionizing and raising the bar on dramatic radio and Nichols one of the most important satiric voices of Post WWII in his work with Elaine May. And probably no other filmmaker except Sidney Lumet had such a consistent and cultural influence as Nichols had with Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge.
But then came the period that brought what McGrath called "Except for a puzzling string of duds in the mid-’70." It took me a long time to take Nichols seriously again as someone who was capable of creating films that had a really special quality. Day of the Dolphin and The Fortune were embarrassments so very far removed from the first four films. I don't think it was until The Birdcage, twenty years later where I really connected and appreciated Nichols again. Working Girl, Biloxi Blues, and Heartburn aren't really my kind of films
But Angels in America, Closer and Charlie Wilson's War certainly are the kind of movies I admire. And they don't seem like the kind of work that someone in his seventies would turn out. And even more so with the kind of invisible fingerprints hard to define, but with quality so strong and high.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:49 PM
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Sunday, April 12, 2009
Dead Levels
After article after article about unemployment, stimulus packages, and the Republican party on life support, It was a great pleasure to find this 2500 word Sunday NY Times article about the Grateful Dead's recorded legacy timed as The Dead begin their tour of the US. Ben Ratliff does a pretty good job of explaining the relationship that fans have with the over two thousand shows that were captured on tape between the bands origins in mid-sixties to the final show before Jerry Garcia's death in 1995.
Ratliff explores three basic aspects of this world. First, he talks about how there are levels of relationships between the fans and how they discuss the music. A level one fan is going to primarily going to know commercial releases and have a pretty casual level with the music. The next level of fan is going to know the fundamental timeline of the band and be able to identify the music in terms of eras. Then there are the folks who can start citing dates and locations and talk about the various merits of performances of individual tunes. Then there is the level that Ratliff describes well as "an area with much thinner air: here involving, say, audience versus soundboard tapes, the mixing biases of different engineers, techniques of customizing early cardioid microphones, and onward into the darkness of obsession."
He also explores the notion of how to come to terms with how to approach the notion of how to assess the best of the Dead. The article recounts the history of the May 8, 1977 Cornell University show which is certainly one of the most popular of Dead shows. You can explore deeper Dead levels by poking around the thirteen recorded versions of the show at archive.org. Its okay, I doubt you will slip into the darkness of obsession by browsing here. Dropping into the stream of the various shows is kind of like an exhibit I attended a few years back that displayed different Ansel Adams prints side by side.
As I write this, I am revisiting June 24, 1990 at Autzen Stadium. I'm pretty sure I crossed over into another level that day. It was a wonderful show and I stood by the tapers, which generally meant you didn't have a lot of folks talking around you. I started tracking set lists after that show and was much more aggressive about taping shows when they were broadcast on Portland's KBOO. I have a couple of very heavy boxes filled ferric oxide cassettes in my closet (TDK SAs my favorites) that represent those years for me.
Ratliff writes "In the late ’80s information access was limited. You had to work for your collection. It wasn’t all online. In 1987 the ability to point to a certain show — a Cornell ’77 or a Fillmore East 1970 — indicated great knowledge." When I drive around town on Saturday afternoons running various errands, I still enjoy hearing the rotating deejay cast of Grateful Dead obsessives talk about the fine points of performances and recording qualities during KBOO's latest incarnation of Dead programming from noon to two. If you spent sometime in that world, you get it. If not, well, its a lot like tuning into a panel show on ESPN if you don't really give a damn about sports.
The Internet has had a very long time relationship for Deadheads. Message boards on The Well and Usenet groups were among the biggest and most active back in the net's formative years as it began to cross into becoming a major infrastructure component of the world at large. Nowdays, archive.org serves up streaming of just about every show in circulation, you have the equivalent of a big jukebox. I kind of dreamed and speculated how cool it would be for something like that to exist. It is easy to take for granted now, but back in the day when a friend of a friend handed you an audience tape of an especially hot second set, it was a mighty powerful vision indeed.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:39 PM
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Saturday, April 11, 2009
Kings
Kings, a television serial on NBC, is smart, engaging, and contains acting and production values that are top-notch. The premise is a modern-retelling of the King David story, but what makes it most unique is that it does this by creating an entire parallel world which feels kind of like 1984 and Oliver Stone's Wild Palms mini series from many years back, but not necessarily as dystopic as those efforts, yet still filled with elements that make pointed commentary.
The cast is exceptional. Ian McShane plays King Silas Benjamin, king of Gilboa with a kind of Pacino-like abandon that brought him to the spotlight in Deadwood. Susanna Thompson as his queen channels a certain kind of Nancy Reagan imperial energy about her. The younger actors all seem solid enough: Christopher Egan as David, Allison Miller and Sebastian Stan as the King's children. One of the elements of the series that gives it some extra depth are the interesting court characters, from palace guards to personal assistants that are enjoyable to watch from one episode to the next.
I don't really know much of my Old Testament at all so I can't tell you about much of any issues involving adaptation or fidelity from the books of Samuel or other sources that are at the heart of Kings. And although it has all the trappings, associations, and devices that are connected to soap operas, its story raises questions on the nature of power, of media, and the nature and motivation of war.
It looks and feels different than any other television virtual world I can think of. Shiloh, the principality of the modern monarchy of Kings looks like Manhattan in disguise skyline. And CGI is also applied world to create a flock of butterflies or birds when the story calls for them.
There are many dispatches from "old media" journalists and bloggers alike despondent over the lack of energy NBC put into the promotion of the series. A two hour pilot and three additional episodes have aired. The ratings were crap so they are sending it to Saturday night slot, which is basically programming Siberia, allegedly to run it out. But there is obviously a public for it out there. It is available for free on hulu, which is where I have caught up with it and also a download on ITunes and Comcast On Demand for nominal fees. And web reports I saw indicate it has been quite popular on these alternative distributions. Regardless of your medium of delivery, it is worth checking out.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:07 AM
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Friday, April 10, 2009
Goin' Up Yonder with Lady Tramaine
Here is a bit of an Easter tribute with Tramaine Hawkins, a gospel singer that not enough people are aware of. These three clips are the finale of a medley she ended her concerts with back in the early 1990s. I was balancing work and school in this era and would often find myself moving around my apartment getting ready for my day during the five 'o clock hour, a time when a gentleman named George Fitz would broadcast a program called the Gospel Unlimited Radio Hour on Portland's soul station KBMS.
Frequently, Mr. Fitz would close out his show with Hawkins' medley from her Tramaine Live album. The performances here have a way of transporting me back to those long multi-part days that would begin with five or six hours revolving around school activities followed by an eight hour shift at a healthcare facility. She exudes an energy that if they don't even prescribe to her Christian beliefs can find full, true and heartfelt testimony and musical exuberance that is very helpful for, well, tasks like getting ready to face a fourteen hour day.
The first clip features the great saxophonist Stanley Turrentine testifying alongside Hawkins as she sings about how she will never let her lord down. Daryl Cooley another fine gospel singer comes out near the end of this segment and the energy definitely raises up a little bit higher. The second clip is an exuberant couple of minutes where Tramaine tells the crowd how she is walking up the King's Highway each and every day and how someday soon she'll be going up yonder to be with her lord.
"Reverend" she says as she addresses Jesse Jackson pointing a finger at him even, at the beginning of the final clip and gives him a bit of testimony before launching into Changed. The tune begins as sweet as gospel can be but by the time it is over we watch something that is clearly far more than a vocal performance, it is a full-on testifying experience. And, yes, that is an amazing dress.
She is now known as Lady Tramaine and is still active in gospel music, a world she has been a part of since she sang in the Edwin Hawkins group with Oh Happy Day back in the late sixties. She later went on to marry Walter's brother Edwin and most of the songs in the medley were reprised from his very successful Love Alive albums.
She was born into the church and blessed with the gift and ability to sing like few others. Tramaine Hawkins is an interesting bay area parallel to one Aretha Franklin of Detroit, Michigan. But Hawkins only had flirtations with crossing into the world of secular music. If she had followed a path like Aretha's, the world at large would probably know her if she had moved into it further because hers is a voice, a presence, and energy that can not go unnoticed for very long. Yet that is a road she has not taken. Contemporary gospel is just one of those worlds in a bubble that one may not encounter readily, unless, like me back in 90 and 91, when I had my radio set to the right place at the right time.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:59 PM
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Thursday, April 9, 2009
Tokyo Zombie
This is off the wall, totally over the top midnight movie kind of fare. Fujio and Mitsou are a couple of bumblers who are more interested in polishing their jujitsu moves than in their job at a fire extinguisher factory. They somehow end up at Black Mt Fuji, which is an overloaded mix of garbage, toxic waste, and human bodies. This mass is a recipe for zombies who eventually destroy Tokyo. Later the zombies are used as a gladiator entertainment for an audience of upper class women who survived the zombie holocaust. Oh, there is so much more. Heads get snapped off, bodiess get disemboweled and the whole thing feels more like a wild ride of a dream that went on too long than a movie. Tokyo Zombie is a direct adaptation of a manga comic. I can't recommend it, but I didn't hate it. You never know where your limits and tolerance levels are unless you explore and take a chance on a cool sounding title once in a while.
posted by well-executed buffet at 5:47 PM
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Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Stand By For A Great Musical Experience
This video can only be described as good medicine. It works because the performances are solid and the execution of the editing is so seamless. It seems to have been distributed under a couple different guises, but this one is as a promotion for a digital music magazine type distribution called (Red) Wire, dedicated to fighting AIDS in Africa.
Stand By Me from David Johnson on Vimeo.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:33 PM
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Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Soderbergh's K Street: A World Unique
K Street is a ten part five hour HBO series directed by Stephen Soderbergh and written by Henry Bean that came out in 2003. It was shot on digital video and integrated fiction in reality in a manner similar to Soderbergh's 2001 feature Full Frontal and has a tone much like his film Traffic. Political operatives Mary Matalin and James Carville play themselves as the primary partners of a fictitious lobbying firm along with three actors (Mary McCormack, John Slattery, and Roger Guenveur Smith), each of whom have their own subplot and/or character arc.
But the thing that is harder to appreciate when one watches it retrospectively on DVD, is the real time component of the show that features scores of elected officials, real lobbyists, and various Washington insiders in discussions integrated into the story. The series scored big when Howard Dean actually used a James Carville one liner that he threw out in a coaching session for the September 9 2003 Presidential debate between the nine Democratic candidates. At other points, the interjection of the "real" Washington folks can get a little overwhelming and confusing because the viewer is forced to either previously know or listen closely for context to who is talking and, sometimes what the heck they are talking about.
I'm not sure if I missed K Street the first time because we didn't have HBO at that point. (We would subscribe only when Sopranos was on) or if the September madness of getting ready for a school year got in the way. I was drawn to watch it recently because Soderbergh likened its production to the arduous shooting of Che when I saw him in a Che roadshow appearance a few weeks ago. I can certainly see where this was likely a very physical and intense experience.
I think overall it mostly works. Carville is his usual strange ebullient self and Matalin is actually very endearing as well. She has got so much more going for her than other women in the public eye associated with conservatives and Republicans, such as that harpie Anne Coulter or Peggy Noonan. But the series would truly be a drag if the writing, especially the characterization of the fictional elements wasn't strong. McCormack, Slattery, and Guenveur Smith have characters that reveal a little bit more each episode with each of their stories coming to some kind of conclusion by series end.
This is film/television where one doesn't want to give away any spoilers, but I will note that Elliot Gould is terrific as one of the lobbying firms owners in two of the episodes devoted which take place in flashback a couple of months before the primary action takes place. Watching him here or in the Ocean's movies always serves as kind of a joyous flashback to the days of MASH and the anarachistic energy he brought to other films in its wake.
Soderbergh is kind of the Neil Young of film making. (By the way, I understand Young recently released an entire album devoted to his new electric car--Cool.) I see two primary parallels here. He constantly exploring and tinkering with his art form, massing a body of work which is alternatively personal and commercial. And that work is going to intrigue audiences and scholars for years to come.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:12 PM
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Monday, April 6, 2009
When Kurosawa Met Dostoyevsky
I have been appreciating the cinema of Akira Kurosawa for almost 40 years since my father took my brother and I to a Japan Festival to see Rashoman, but there was either a booking or a scheduling mistake on our part and we instead saw Red Beard, his last collaboration with Toshiro Mifune. I've seen most of his major and minor works over the decades since, but somehow never his adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, his 1951 follow up film to Rashoman.
I'm pretty certain the reason I had not seen it until this weekend is that the opportunity never came up. Kurosawa's legacy is so broad there is bound to be something the steady but relatively casual consumer of his work might miss. What a body of work: the samuarai films, the explorations of human condition like Ikuru, the Shakespeare and Gorky adaptations, exceptional detective and police procedurals, and, of course the mix of epic and meditative personal films of his later years (Dersu Usala, Ran, Kagemusha, Dreams, Madadyo, others.)
Donald Richie was pretty severe with The Idiot in his indispensible volume, The Films of Akira Kurosawa. And I think his severity is because he saw it from both the perspective of a translation of a great novel and also as a chronolgical component of Kurosawa's career. I'm very glad it is my habit to not reviews, notes or analysis generally until I have seen the film without cranky old Donald Richie glasses on.
Because what I saw as I watched it a reel between chores on the last Sunday of screen break was equivalent to Ira Gershwin's line about how now I know how Columbus felt when I discovered a new world. The Idiot was more than just another earlier Kurosawa film, it is its own little universe. I felt the same way when I saw Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons after only knowing Kane, the ragged version of MacBeth and the big man doing magic tricks on the Merv Griffin show.
And like Ambersons, the Idiot was savaged by its studio and ended up being a film different than what the director intended. According to Richie, the original cut of the film was a full fehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifature length more than the one that was released. The original version, apparently lost forever (the era of Avid and director cuts does indeed have its advantages in keeping film legacy) was over four and a half hours long. The release version is two hours and forty hours.
The cuts very likely contribute to what are the worst aspects of the film as it lives with us now. One is the reliance in the first hour on lots of intratitles and voice over to introduce key characters and plot points. It takes a while for the viewer to sort this out. Kurosawa films don't usually make you have to work on keeping key relationships and characters straight. Another annoyance, perhaps also mediated at times by the excessive cuts is a very large number of vertical wipes to move the film between sequences. I've never liked the transition even though it is not unique to Kurosawa and others I admire. But these are minor quibbles. The Idiot is an exceptionally poetic film on many levels. The character blocking and shot framing, for instance is almost always chock full with layers of significance.
The film revolves around Kameida, (Masayuki Mori) psychologically transformed from his WWII prison experiences with both the gift and detriment to only see the good in mankind. This view contrasts greatly with that of Akama (Toshiro Mifune) and object of their desires, Taeko, a notorious kept woman in the snowbound world of Hokkaido, a Japan that Richie says is historically more western.
Snow has never been such a constant used to dramatic effect in any film I have encountered. It snows nearly constantly and the viewer feels the chill, especially in shots where Kameida is outdoors on his own. Kurosawa does a pretty admirable job merging the often documentary feel of the Hokkaido location shots with studio sets.
I've never read The Idiot so I don't have a relationship with Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin or Nastasya Filippovna to cope with like Richie apparently had to. What I do know is that Kameida, Akama, and Taeko are characters who engaged and moved me through the eyes and hands of a master. If this is to be considered a lesser work in the Kurosawa canon, then it is greater proof of what an amazing force this artist was.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:28 AM
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Sunday, April 5, 2009
Karen Wyman: A Very Full Voice
The web will continue to unlock, reveal and deliver the folks in our pop culture history who circumstances and music business infrastructure allowed them to record an album or two but the world didn't get hear, let alone get hip to.
I really know nothing about this woman except she recorded at least three records alm almost forty years ago. A lot of her arrangements and song choices don't come off, but when she has the chance to define the term full-throated it is with a kind of abandon that I have not encountered before. A couple of Chicago covers and one of my favorite Young Rascals will show you what I'm talking about.
I hardly ever post tuneage at the Buffet, but know these tracks have been out of print practically since they came out and feel folks need to have the opportunity to hear vocal power which to my ears may be superhuman.
KWyman_MakeMeSmile.mp3
KWyman_HowCanIBeSure.mp3
KWyman_DoesAnyoneReallyKnow.mp3
KWyman_MakeMeSmile.mp3
KWyman_HowCanIBeSure.mp3
KWyman_DoesAnyoneReallyKnow.mp3
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:34 AM
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Saturday, April 4, 2009
Sister Ray Goto Japan
I've been checking it out on line and it looks like this track is pretty cool to post. And if Mr Shinobu Goto finds this on line and asks me to remove, I gladly would. But only after I thank him for this excellent version of Sister Ray which used to be found on his website. It also appeared on a full two disc compilation of Velvet Underground covers by Japanese artists called the Warrior Heart of the Velvet Underground.
One has got to love the contrast of Sister Ray as a solo koto with a heartfelt vocal compared to the hard shredding of the Velvet's original on the White Light White Heat album.
Sister Ray by Shinobu Goto.mp3
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:30 AM
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Friday, April 3, 2009
The Last Soul King of Rock 'n Roll
Who would have predicted that the last true major soul survivor of the original generation of Rock 'n Roll innovators would be Solomon Burke. I get more impressed with this artist as time goes by in the years since I saw him perform at the Waterfront Blues Festival . Only in Rock n' Soul is it possible that beleive that the last survivor would be a 69 year old former mortician of 375 pounds who according to Wikipedia that in Feb 2009 was "the father of 21 children (14 daughters and 7 sons), 90 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren." Big men have big appetites, what can I say?
One of the more recent packages bringing the King and his music is an exceptional DVD with Solomon Burke: The King Live at AVO Session Basel. This is a 75 minute concert features some offerings from Burke's albums like Don't Get Up On Me which features unrecorded or little recorded tunes that folks like Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Van Morrison, and Brian Wilson give up for the legend to record. But mainly this tony Swiss crowd is given the full Solomon treatment of several of his hits and the others of the era.
Many years ago I made a promise to some very special friends of mine. Back in the early sixties we made a pledge that as long as one of us was living and could sing and walk on a stage that we would sing each others songs. I would like to recognize their names right now. A young man by the name of Joe Tex, Ben E. King, Percy Sledge, Don Covay, Wilson Picket, and Otis Redding.
At which point the King while sitting in his throne while he and his youngest son King Solomon Haile Selassie hand out huge amounts of flowers "just to the ladies" (I'm not exagerating at all here, I assure you) while he does his take on Dock of the Bay, Stand By Me, and, of course the one about the rose in Spanish Harlem and some others. His survivor status becomes even more apparent even more so when he sings Sam Cooke Ray Charles, and Curtis Mayfield.
And from the beginning of the show, Burke's band The Souls Alive Orchestra delivers. They heat up the house with a smoking version of Back at the Chicken Shack where guitarist Ricky Rouse and two keyboards duel it out with the help of a four piece horn section. After the greasy chicken organ jam, Rouse and comapany kick into a blues. There is a a harpist (the harmonica kind) and the entrance of another harpist on stage (the symphony orchestra kind played by a blond goddess named Julia Cunningham in a jacket with military jacket and leather pants. The king sings the first chorus off stage and is escorted out to his center stage throne by Selassie eduring the second set of solos. This is the kind of entrance a king of soul should have. I can only compare it to some of the entrances of Sun Ra or (Which one is) George Clinton.
Selassie is always pretty near Burke's throne whispering to him frequently during the show. Its not clear if he is giving him cues, calling up tunes, or telling him how many minutes are left. If its the latter he is pretty inaccurate because he tells the audience he has ten minutes left throughout the last twenty five.
"Easy" is a word that Burke is likely to blurt out whenever he wants the right balance between his voice and his band. He never gets too soft or low. Certainly not "where you can here a rat pissing on cotton" as Clinton loves to say. Even his ballads command a huge punch from a huge man.
The king's own music is a mix of soul tunes based on standard soul tunes such as the New Orleans twinged Down in the Valley that one can easily imagine on a jukebox in the sixties. But his lasting legacy in soul and pop culture will be the tune that provided the absolute finale of the Basel show, Everybody Needs Somebody To Love was also probably the finest moment of the Blues Brothers, probably even more than their version of Soul Man. Here is a version of Everybody on the Top of the Pops which is almost spoiled by a twit remark from the announcer at the end. Not all British people are as hip as Eddie Izzard, Ricky Gervais, or Russell Brand, that's for sure.
And finally here is another Buffet post about Burke from a little over a year ago.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:05 PM
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Thursday, April 2, 2009
Happy Birthday, Larry Coryell
Larry Corryell turns 66 today so I thought I would find a nice performance of his to celebrate it.
I've always thought that it was very cool that there were two major innovative guitarists from the state of Washington who were roughly the same age. Jimi Hendrix flamed out at age 27. Coryell got past his demons and excesses eventually (both musical and lifestyle/chemical) and has continued to be one of those special musicians who is almost always worth a close listen particularly when he helps keep the jazz guitar tradition alive.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:14 PM
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Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The Real Life Cinema of Ross McElwee
Certain artists call out for one to approach their works in an immersive fashion. I am feeling some weariness and great reward for consuming all of the films in the Ross McElwee DVD Collection in such a manner. The collection includes six films that McElwee made over a twenty five year period that focus on his life and family interwoven with great themes and concerns. He is a kind of real time memoirist who entertains and engages the viewer on a significant personal level. He is a son of the heart of the South who didn't fit the family mold and went to school and work in the most Yankee of worlds, the Boston area. He then repeatedly "came home" over a substantial period of his adult life armed with 16mm camera and a head full of inquiry seasoned with anxieties of where he was in his life's journey. What results is a unique and individual body of work which I believe, is best appreciated as a whole.
You can see the template for his later feature length films develop in two earlier films, Charleen and Backyard. When they are viewed first in the collection, they serve as a kind of prelude or overture for what was to come. Backyard is in essence, random footage made when he was an MIT graduate student focusing in on his father, a successful, conservative, and dedicated physician and other members of the McElwee household. It was filmed in 1978, but didn't get completed until 1984. McElwee was certainly very fortunate to have Charleen Swansea as a former teacher, friend and mentor. She is ebullient, over-the-top southern woman, and her zest and energy is an important aspect of all of the films in the set except Backyard. Her unorthodox teaching in the Poetry in the Schools program is a key aspect of the film named for her, but viewers also glimpse her often troubled relationship with a man a decade and a half younger which is revisited and expanded upon in future McElwee films.
I saw Sherman's March first back in the late eighties when it was making the theatrical rounds of art houses and it really resonated for me. It is really best described by the film's subtitle: " A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation." McElwee is in his mid-thirties at the time of the film is uncertain of his life and unsure of what his film should be. He has returned to the South after being on the ass end of a relationship, filming the kind of everyday activities and things that filled his first efforts, But he then there were all these amazing Southern women: the cuckoo actress, the earth woman linguist, the ex-girlfriend art teacher- nuclear activist, the lounge singer, the Morman in need of a husband set up by Charleen, and a self-absorbed attorney with a revolving door relationship that frustrates Ross. It is as though lots of life's possibilities are coming at him. He had good fortune to realize that there was something significant happening here. He gave his film some breathing room to explore these various individuals along with the themes of what the Southern Confederacy now looked like in the eighties as well as his the generational angst (he was born in 1947) he felt as being a part of the nuclear era. And, always, his process and misgivings are never too far away. "It seems I'm filming my life in order to have a life to film" he remarks at one point.
Could there be a Sherman's March in this era of YouTube and quality prosumer DV and HD cameras? It certainly would not be the same. There is a ragged quality to 16 handheld and McElwee as he blends the verite tradition of his MIT mentor Richard Leacock, the Maysles and others with a comic and self-depreciating eye. The technical imperfections and challenges systemic with portable 16mm become a part of his story telling form. At one point he poignantly narrates a sequence where lost his sound. And there is an ongoing gag where his equipment never seems to work correctly when filming his father.
Themes in Mcelwee's life get darker and more complex with the two films that followed next,Time Indefinite and Six O'Clock News. In Time Indefinite he gets married, his father dies, Charleen's life is filled with tragedy and he ponders metaphysical questions throughout, Later, he is renewed by filming the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Lucille and Melvin, African Americans who have been helping maintain domestic chores of good Dr. McElwee's household for several decades, and his wife's second pregnancy yields a wonderful boy who , almost spookily. resembles McElwee. Partly because of its unblinking nature, Time Indefinite is my favorite film in the collection. Six O'Clock Newsfirst screened on PBS Frontline in 1997 still features McElwee family life and Charleen, but also considers the universe of television news and how close it seems we all are to being a part of the tragic events it reports on a daily basis.
The most recent film in the collection, Bright Leaves felt a bit strained to me when I watched it this time. In content and style, it probably most resembles Sherman's March but the center does not hold as well. Here McElwee seems much more a New England outsider as he returns to the south to come to terms with the relationship tobacco plays in his North Carolina homeland. His journey here also involves the investigation of whether or not the 1950 Gary Cooper film was based on McElwee's great grandfather whose innovative tobacco business was more or less totally crushed by the Duke tobacco dynasty. Bright Leaves is not as organic or original as what he was able to accomplish in his earlier films, but still has its enlightening and entertaining moments.
With the exception of Backyard and Charleen, I have seen all of these films prior, more or less near the time they came out. But I conclude t hat seeing them as a kind of large uberwork is the best way to check out the work of this original artist. There is a sense of discovery of a life unfolding before your eyes that is unique, intimate, and unforgettable.