Friday, February 19, 2010
Go Ask Moon Alice on the Corner of Burnside and Haight
A week ago I was in San Francicso, but in some ways the most SF experience I have had was here in Portland tonight at Dantes on 3rd and Burnside. Moonalice consists of the interface of married couple Roger and Ann MacNamee with some of the best musicians in the world: Barry Sless, Pete Sears, John Molo, and, sometimes, Jack Cassady. It was also musical home for G.E. Smith for a couple of years.
Roger MacNamee is also a venture capitalist and successful businessman. He had another band called the Flying Other Brothers that I heard some hippie music lovers trash on. But I caught a performance of theirs at High Sierra once and was impressed. Why? Because Sless and Sears were tearing it up were the most visible reasons.
Regardless, Moonalice's performance at Dante's felt more authentic than some Grateful Dead alumni evenings (e.g. Ratdog) when it came to what makes SF American roots plus hippies incubates great msic. In fact, Sears is a full on rock legend, playing piano and bass on early Rod Stewart (Ever Picture Tells A Story, etc.) albums as well as being a member of both Jefferson Starship and Hot Tuna. His vocals are a reminder that the sixties could be a time when a vocalist did not need to be a natural singer, but someone who knew how to use his voice as an instrument of both music and emotion, And that generation had it, in Sears I hear John Stewart, Leon Russell, Neil Diamond, Loudon Wainwright III. I would imagine that Elvis Costello is an admirer of his too. They both take very similar approaches to song and lyric.
Berry Sless last night illustrated how great musicians and artist rise to the occasion despite appointed or expected acts not present. I had been looking forward to hearing pedal steel guitar as only a very small minority in the world can. But, alas, the truth came out during the first set by MacNamee that they forgot the insturment in his garage. There are only a small handful of guitarists who can attract my attention and put me in the place where I am listening to their solos as I would navigate a ski run. The tradition of much of this music has legacy and impact of Airplane, Quicksilver and Dead. But Sless is more Django than Jerry. Maybe you will even hear some big fat Wes Montgomery chords interacting with a Corryell quickness. His solos were more than solos, they were tales told well.
Add to the mix John Molo, a drummer with credits with Phil and Friends and Bruce Hornsby. He drums like he is both Mickey and Billy of the Grateful Dead. A great jazz and rock drummer is a wonderful thing.
There was this guy who came out with a rant at the halftime break who was like Wavy Gravy if he had a job in a sort of office. I was reminded a bit of Lester the hanger on poet who used to stink up String Cheese Incident shows when he was carrying on about listening to music with your eyes. I was a bit dumbfounded to find out that the MacNamee posse includes Steve Parish, infamous Jerry Garcia roadie and protectorate.
Whatever. McNamee was a great host. He would read factoids and passages from Wikipedia between songs, and he has the public service announcement down to almost pull it off. There was a weird coincidence tonight. Pam and I watched last week's Simpsons where Marge and Homer when a demonstration gold at the Olympics in Curling. When we walked into the club, McNamee was just getting through reading what was apparently the Wikipedia entry for Curling.
The show was at Dantes but it felt like an excursion in time and distance both. As mentioned it was kind of an extension of my week ago trip to San Francisco. And as far as time travel is concerned, I went to the show with a friend from workdays almost two decades ago. And the music and the vibe reminded us both of old taverns and clubs in now long gone: Key Largo, The Earth, Euphoria.
posted by well-executed buffet at 1:02 AM
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posted by well-executed buffet at 1:01 AM
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Sunday, February 14, 2010
MacWorld 2010
If you wanted to visit Apple at MacWorld, you had to go to the Market St Apple Store a few blocks away from the Expo.
On some level I am thinking that this year's MacWorld is a little bit like going to see a classic rock band from twenty or thirty years prior with some changes in the line up. Apple is no longer part of the show. The groove feels right at times, but times have changed and it is undeniably different. IDGWorld have taken the dimensions they were given and made it work somehow. There was always a fan fest element to MacWorld that lived along side the hardcore Silicon valley trade event of the year. But that was back in the GoGo years. Now the fans are left. The trade show isn't as crass as a county fair, but this is all about consumer marketing really. Back in the old days consumers just came along for the ride. I could go all grumpy old man nostalgic or get into corporate speculation porn, but I've got to give IDGWorld credit. They kept MacWorld alive.
Part of that formula is access to the best pundits and trainers in the business. I skipped out on David Pogue early (more on that later) and saw Ted Landau, who among other things wrote a book with one of my favorite titles of all time: Sad Macs, Bombs and Other Disasters. This is the godfather guru of showing us common guys how to troubleshoot Macs in a cool logical fashion. I've consulted his stuff since System 7. I like that he complained about how folks who post insist on OS identifers as OS10.6 instead of OSX.6. It was cool to see him still at it.
There was an excellent RAW photo session lead by author and photographer Ben Long and a number of others. Russell Brown was irrepressible as ever showing cool ass stuff in Photoshop with crowd interaction and 20th Anniversary PhotoShop lore.
I was also able to catch about half of Kevin Smith's presentation the day before the too fat too fly incident. It felt a little bit like going to a naughty assembly with a famous dude. Smith has his college audience patter down. And frankly what is the audience of a fan-oriented MacWorld going to consist of--college students both current and those who never left. Smith is going to be in the public eye for quite some time. And I'm sure that his new film Cop Out is going to get more attention than ever. Oh Well He should be able to take it, this is the Dogma guy, afterall.
And then there were the auditorium variety shows with Guy Kawasaki, David Pogue, and Leo Lapote. Lapote's had the best content: Sarah Silverman was not there but Sarah Gold was. Gold was a heyday employee of Apple and from what I can tell a bit of an icon on the SF comedianne scene. Entertaining enough for a while. I don't do reality based television, but was impresed with Adam Savage who has this show called Mythbusters that I didn't have a clue about.
Roger McGuinn was there too, demonstrating his Martin seven string, doing a version of Eight Miles High for all the boomers in the house. (observation less ponytails on men this time than any other at a MacWorld I have attended.
But this was all a set up for Warp 7. A band of near middle-agers dressed devoting themselves to writing and performing music about Star Trek and drinking. In the past I would encounter stuff like that but usually it was at the Digital Be-In when MacWorld proper was closed.
I got a lot out of MacWorld this year. But you have to come after it wheras before it would kind of slam itself into you. There is a Grateful Dead lyric that parallels this experience "Nothin shakin on shakedown street. used to be the heart of town.
Dont tell me this town aint got no heart. you just gotta poke around"
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:49 PM
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Saturday, February 13, 2010
Van Dyke Parks at Swedish American Hall, SF 2.12.10
Van Dyke Parks is indisputably an American original. He is the ultimate quirky but scholarly piano nerd who mines all sorts of musical, social, and artistic by roads. He came to a kind of cult prominence during the singer-songwriter era. But how many singer-songwriters seem most comfortable performing with a modified chamber string section. His patter onstage is like no other. He moves around language, thoughts ideas in a kind of oblique fashion. For instance, he started talking about boy and the dolphin and it wasn't clear that he might be referring directly to the 1957 film but rather Greek legend and the wonder of creatures of ascension. But then he dropped that as a young man seeing Sophia Loren come out of the water in was a kind of ascension for him.
Parks seems to advocate for a kind of civility and discourse that left long ago. His sets are filled with references to riverboats, left wing politics back in the beat era, the forty years of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's life, FDR's visitation to Trinidad, Mark Twain, the B'rer Rabbit, and even a recitation of a Robert Frost poem he paid performance rights for.
And, if nothing more, for those who care about the rock and roll era, he will forever be a footnote, as the author of Sailin' Shoes, maybe the finest moment for Lowell George and Little Feat. And the lyricist for Smile, the lost for a very long time Beach Boys follow-up to Pet Sounds.
The Swedish American Hall in San Francisco's Castro district turned out to be a lovely place to see Parks perform. Like much of his subject matter, it is a throw back to another era constructed with big timbers and great care. The room seemed to warm up his music even more so. This evening was truly an evening of collaboration. The first half of the evening was a performance by Clare and the Reasons, lead by Clare Muldaur (daughter of Geoff, but, evidently not Maria) and her husband, classically trained violinist Olivier Manchon. They had their own kind of plucky chamber pop infused by Harry Nillson sensibilities. The Reasons also served as Parks' band for the evening, playing most of what can be found on his live Moonlighting album, which featured a much larger musical setting.
Parks was obviously charged by the crowd, the vibe, and the fine playing of Manchon and friends. He ebulliently flexed his muscle Charles Atlas style between songs when the group really nailed it. This was quite a jocular sight since Parks is a small round white headed man who has a copy of yellow pages to boost him on his piano bench. He seemed surprise that this was only the third performance with Manchon and friends. All indications were it was a musical collaboration that existed long before. But, then again, there it seems to point to a kind of timelessness and agelessness that goes beyond his 67 years on the planet that seems to be formed decades before his formidable ones.
Some Links:
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:21 AM
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Tuesday, February 9, 2010
South Korean Spaghetti
Until I saw Ji-woon Kim's huge The Good The Bad The Weird I always thought the last word in the big scale spaghetti western would be Sergio Leone's Duck You Sucker AKA A Fistful of Dynamite. I can't recall having such unrelentless fun at at the movies for a very long time. The style and form of the Leone western is transferred to late 1930s Manchuria where three characters, not too far removed from portrayals of Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach are thrust into a plot involving a treasure map, bank barons, a black market village known as the ghost market, and the armies of both China and Japan.
This is huge, whacked-out entertainment with chase sequences that rival David Lean and Kurosawa. I'm sort of speechless about this one. I'm glad I saw it in a theatrical setting. It will translate well enough to DVD on a good sized television, I suppose, but one should try to see it at one of the screenings at the Portland International Film Festival, or hopefully it will make the rounds to the brew pubs afterwards. Some critics have complained it is too long at a full two hours plus a little change. Maybe so, but can you really have an epic western that only runs 85 minutes?
The only way to describe this experience, it seems is to dip into it a little bit. Here is a six minute drop from the film that someone posted on YouTube:
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:54 PM
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Monday, February 8, 2010
Police, Adjective
Some films create a special relationship with time that is unique and is not likely to work for the film going public at large. Jim Jarmusch is probably the most known practitioner of this kind of filmmaking in the US. His films move at their own pace in a controlled environment, not telling you a story as much as revealing character in a setting. Finish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki is also a master of this kind of cinema.
Corneliu Porumboiu is another filmmaker who is working in this realm. He is not afraid to take his time and work with long silent moments. "Cinema is dealing with real time and cinema is dealing with rhythm" he comments in an embedded clip that accompanies A O Scott's review of Police, Adjective late last year. Scott describes Porumboiu, correctly, I believe, as having a "talent for infusing mundane, absurd moments with gravity and drama as well as humor." One could definitely use similar terms for describing the work of Jarmusch in Limits of Control and Broken Flowers or Kaurismaki's Match Factory Girl.
Police, Adjective observes Cristi, a plain clothes cop (or put more accurately, plain sweatered) investigating some teenagers who are routinely smoking some cannabis in a school yard each morning. He begins to doubt the importance of this activity as time goes on. The climax of the film is a lecture by his supervising officer is a didactic encounter that involves defining words like police and conscience in a dictionary, single camera and in real time. I realize that this sounds like this would be boredom personified, but it is really quite engaging, in a quiet and unique way. Porumboiu does not present us real life, but rather an observed vision with some big and substantial ideas in a way fashioned from real life. In this there is a huge, but subtle difference. Police, Adjective is a rich experience in its own way. But an ever so quiet one.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:31 PM
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Saturday, February 6, 2010
Gil and Al Just After the Double Lives
In a wide variety of ways, Wolfgangs Vault is serving us well on the web. Their release of hours and hours of Newport Jazz Festival is one of the reasons why I love going to this site. As I have written once before, listening to those tapes gives one an experience of truly being there, almost as though you were laying on the floorboards. I also appreciate their massive releases of Bill Graham Archives and King Biscuit Flower Hour programs in a complete fashion. It is a wonderful opportunity for music lovers to compare their favorite bands as they evolve from tour to tour or even evening to evening on the same tour. And what about the opportunity to listen to the entirety of The Band's Last Waltz, warts and all? I found it to be wonderful aural wallpaper to dealing with a bunch of grading I had to do last fall.
Recently, I have been appreciating the Vault for being able to provide extensible opportunities for two of my favorite live record albums of the seventies. The seventies, of course is the era of the live album, but the purpose of this post is certainly not to expand on the virtues of Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same or Frampton Comes Alive. I am actuallly pleased to say I I have never owned a copies of either.
Two double lives from the seventies that still mean a lot to me are Gil Scott Heron's It's Your World and Al Jarreau's Look to Rainbow, which were both recorded and released during 1976-77. Both of these records opened up new worlds to me. I had been exploring Gil Scott's music and poetry for some time prior, but the power of the Midnight Band ripping through a quarter hour versions of Home is Where the Hatred Is and The Bottle were revelations of what jazz and funk could be when they are pulled together in a full force gale. I first heard Jarreau's live recording on a August evening when the sun was going down and was dumbfounded by his energy. This was Al Jarreau long before the goes down easy Breaking Away album that helped define the smooth jazz era. He didn't just sing songs back in those days. They were more like propulsive excursions of joy.
I played the hell out of both of these doubles. And I secured them on CD as soon as I was able. Now fast forward to our current download demand wonderland and Wolfgang's has released the equivalent of the sequel to Its Your World, capturing Gil Scott Heron, Brian Jackson and the Midnight Band a year after It's Your World and a concert six months after Jarreau's pyrotechnics on Rainbow. Unlike the conditions of their predecessors, these are not scrubbed and sanitized concert records but broadcast quality boards that feel a little more like being there.
Full disclosure. My main motivation to create this post was to include the embeds so they were more easily accessible, but I hope you might take time to connect with them as well. I love these performances, both from the summer of 1977. And listening them takes me back to my early twenties and the possibilities those years had in store.
Here's a full workout by Gil Scott and the band taking us to Vidgolia. "Step Right Up...It is very close to San Clemente."
And here is Jarreau bursting in with the dawn with even more energy than he did on the Rainbow recording. His voice may not be in great shape, but the energy is still there big time.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:16 PM
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Friday, February 5, 2010
Light Rail Sideshow
I've been digging the scene waiting for the light rail these days. Hundreds of geese working their way back and forth between the Portland International Raceway and Delta Park. In a few weeks, this sideshow will fly out and the waits for the train will not nearly be as entertaining.
Pam has spotted the train. Soon we'll be downtown.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:07 PM
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
Zoo and Birthday
As a part of my mother's birthday, we decided to go to one of her places, the Oregon Zoo. It was a lovely day with few visitors.
Inevitably this scene brought some commentary from my mother comparing the interactions of these two reminded her of dynamics and relations of those of my brother and I back in the day. I did not attempt to augment or dispute her. Afterall, it was her day. And she actually had a point.
These two are always posing fine whenever I go to the zoo. They know their job, I guess.
Rose Tu and Samudra were enjoying the fine day as well.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:06 PM
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Hipsters
"Every hipster is a potential criminal" Or so says Katia, buttoned-down party-line, not party girl in the fifties Stalin Russia of Stilyagi. Also known as Hipsters, this is a dynamic musical from Russia directed by Valeriy Todorovskiy featured in this year;s Portland International Film Festival.
This is a film with a very free camera and a flexable definition of permissible reality, which by definition is what one would expect of a musical, but here even more so. We are talking about a world that uses some of the same kinds of laws of physics and narrative that Baz Luhrman applied in Moulin Rouge or Julie Taymor utilized in Across the Universe. From time to time, the camera sweeps, swoons and characters who were in the background become part of a vigorous chorus line.
Hipsters shows youth in fifties Russia as a kind of binary world. One is either grey and uniform or and follows the party or outlandish to the extreme with bright colors an pompadours that would make those of the Stray Cats seem conservative. The latter is almost an act of unthinkable defiance in a country where "sneezing too loud might get you arrested." Or in a place where saxophones are traded on the black market like guns.
The adventurous ones transcribe records from broadcasts on old XRay film, anglecize their names (Boris becomes Bob, Paulina becomes Polly, etc.) and always seem to be just a step or two ahead of disapproving authorities. The main character is Mels, whose encounter with a proto-feminist and hot free spirited girl leads him into an almost overnight transformation as Mel, a sax wielding hipster who later tells Katia a junior Rosa Klebb that its cool when people are different." But Mel later learns that there can be freedom in simplicity in style and appearance, it kind of blows his mind.
Hipsters is a film that might be almost a reel too long and it suffers a few missed steps in its script and structure. But it makes up for it with heart, verve, and style along with some pretty interesting commentary about freedom,identity, and the transformation from youth to adulthood.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 PM
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Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Marketplace and Subsidy
Near the conclusion of the post-screening event for the feature version of Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense Portland Jazz Festival director and founder Bill Royston repeated the following phrase like some kind of mantra for the survival of events like his and the future of public arts in general: "marketplace or subsidy."
Royston said the festival receives a small state subsidy, but could not survive without marketplace funding. When Qwest pulled out as sponsor in late 2008, the festival was shuttered until Alaska Airlines came to rescue. I have sometimes expressed some of my concerns, frustrations even, about PDX Jazz, but Royston has made some great contributions to this community with the festival. And if for last year's amazing afternoon with Bobby Hutcherson and Lou Donaldson alone, he deserves great ovation.
I've been thinking a lot about a Recent New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman about European Museums moving towards private funding. The traditional European attitude towards art preservation of the arts is something that the US has a hard time comprehending, just as they do the concept of how many European countries deal with healthcare and other social services.
I love art museums when they are populated by the few, but always feel a bit funny that too much of that could lead to their demise. I will always remember Pam and I finally making it to the final week of the Clement Greenburg collection's first showing at the Portland Art Museum on September 13 2001 when there was still a lack of normalcy in the activities of the world and pretty much no patrons besides ourselves. But in recent weeks I have been dropping into the museum more frequently and have found that you don't need a world crisis to time a quiet visit among the collections.
I appreciate Kimmelman's description of this phenomena:
Here in Berlin I often escape for an hour or two to the Gemäldegalerie, this city’s museum of old master paintings, one of the best in the world. But because it’s off the beaten tourist path, and because this is Germany and not France, it is nearly always empty. In room after room of Giotto and Raphael, Titian and Rembrandt, Dürer and Holbein I find myself alone, save for the sandal-clad guards spending quiet days of monkish solitude, sharing what I have come over the years to think of as my private Filippo Lippi, my personal Vermeer, my own Chardins and Watteaus.
It is a glorious gift, and I am grateful to a public financing system that in this particular case is not yet in thrall to, or is proudly resisting, the marketing strategies that have turned the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London into the equivalents of Wal-Marts on Black Friday...
It is a huge issue and neither subsidy or marketplace sponsorship are the answer. Curators and directors will need to continue to find the right balance. And most importantly, we the public, need to help support wherever we can as well as costs get ever tighter for those trying to make our communities and worlds just a little bit richer.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:57 PM
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Monday, February 1, 2010
Grammys 2010: A Late Wait for Any Master's Voice
The Stephen Colbert monologue was entertaining, but there was nothing of interest until the final half hour of the show with the exception of the Zack Brown Band doing their number with Leon Russell.
Send the kids to bed at 11 and on comes Dave Matthews, Maxwell and Roberta Flack doing Where is the Love, and Jeff Beck's super How High The Moon tribute to Les Paul. Actually I didn't stay up to 11 because we DVRd it so I could quickly speed through the five thousandth Michael Jackson tribute, Pink in the aerial cage, Beyonce, Haiti pleas, lots of unlistenable rap and Taylor Swift caterwalling with Stevie Nicks. The Grammys were always a mixed bag, but I don't ever recall a year where most any performance of any merit was stacked up at the last half hour.
Either I'm getting old for most of this or pop music is getting much worse. Or most likely, both of these statements are true.