Masters

The Master
One of the best movie experiences I've had in a long time was seeing The Master in 70mm at the Ziegfeld Theater. I avoided reviews before seeing it, and still haven't caught up with them (so some of my comments may be inadvertently repeating critical conventional wisdom), but I did see some chatter about the 70mm format possibly being a gimmick. Maybe the images on the screen would've been just as impressive in 35, but on the genuinely big screen of the Ziegfeld, this was a flat-out beautiful-looking movie. One particular beauty shot stands out in my memory, of The Master's Fitzcarraldo-looking ship sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Master seemed like a further exploration by Paul Thomas Anderson of some of the themes/conflicts/relationships seen in There Will Be Blood. Some of those themes, and certainly the title character, made me think of Orson Welles. The Master, Lancaster Dodd, would've been a natural role for Welles - a charismatic patriarch with serious flaws and an outsized gift for bullshit (not to mention a somewhat outsized waistline). Philip Seymour Hoffman (who is commanding in the role) and Anderson surely must've had Welles in mind, at least as one reference point. Joaquin Phoenix is captivating and weird and brilliant, and despite a fairly large cast, the movie almost feels like a two-hander between Phoenix and Hoffman, with the other characters receding into the background when these two are in the same scene.

Oliver Lake
If you've been wanting to see Oliver Lake play in NYC, the last couple months (centered around his 70th birthday) have offered plenty of opportunities. During his multi-group run at Jazz Standard, I saw a set of Trio 3 (Lake, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille) with Geri Allen. This trio, whose combined discographies must be mind-boggling, has a wonderful chemistry, perhaps partly due to their being more-or-less contemporaries, having each made important contributions to the development of the jazz avant-garde. The trio has a strong book of compositions, and Geri Allen was featured effectively, but I was most impressed by Reggie Workman - his sound, his time, and his melodic ideas were all exquisite.

I also saw Lake around the same time with Tarbaby, one of the most exciting groups going, and one Lake has been collaborating with since his appearance on their End of Fear album. Their show at Le Poisson Rouge included a number of compositions from a new, commissioned project inspired by the anti-/post-colonialist writer Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth). I didn't make any notes from which I could try to describe this new music, but there were at least one or two pieces that didn't sound to me like anything this band has done before. The album will definitely be on my must-buy list whenever it appears.

Tarbaby members Orrin Evans and Nasheet Waits were scheduled to be on Oliver Lake's night of improvised duos at Roulette over the weekend, but Waits was apparently under the weather and had to cancel. I only managed to catch one set, but Lake's duo with Evans was a highlight, with the pianist touching on blues, gospel, and what sounded to me like Milton Babbitt. Another of Lake's duo partners, Joe Daley, on tuba, was something of a revelation. I don't have much of a point of comparison for tuba in this context, but Daley seemed to be doing things technically that I hadn't imagined a tuba could do. I missed Lake's Big Band the next night, one of his groups that I have not yet seen, but I did see another excellent big band at Shapeshifter Lab, Andrew D'Angelo's DNA Orchestra. Driven by D'Angelo's charismatic playing, conducting, and composing and a powerful rhythm section of drums and electric bass and guitar, the music embraced relentless rhythm, daunting complexity and unabashed emotion. Both Lake's and D'Angelo's big bands have records on the way, and I'm sure both will be highly worthwhile.

Heard and Seen - Projectors, Shipp on Farfisa, Konitz, Ornette on Film

Dirty Projectors - Swing Lo Magellan  
The new DPs album has grown on me after some initial disappointment. Though I've found much to like, I still have a hard time seeing it as a step forward from its predecessor, Bitte Orca, an album that sounded like a sustained, cohesive statement of a new direction without obvious predecessors. Swing Lo is a more stylistically diverse record, but perhaps as a result, there are more weak spots, and I don't think the more Bitte-like songs (like the opening "Offspring Are Blank") quite reach the highs of "Cannibal Resource" or "Temucula Sunrise" (to be fair, that's a very high standard to meet). 

I'm not sure whether to describe it as cloying or grating, but "Dance for You", programmed smack in the middle of the record, breaks up the flow for me to the point where I've taken the liberty of editing it out of the album. Its admittedly strong melody did succeed in getting stuck in my head, but I wish Dave Longstreth had left the melisma on this one to Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle. I'm not quite ready to accept Longstreth singing more or less directly about love and feelings, but he does pull off a solid, honest-to-God love song with "Impregnable Question", an undeniable album highlight. 

While Swing Lo isn't a Nashville Skyline-level WTF? veer into romantic crooning, Longstreth does seem to be trying out some new vocal personas. He really is crooning on the closing "Irresponsible Tune", doing what sounds to me like an impression of late-model Nick Lowe, and it works, so much so that I'd like to start the campaign to get Nick to cover it. Another successful move into what sounds like new territory is "Unto Caesar", with lyrics written in some sort of courtly, high Dylanese leavened with casual, sassy responding harmony vocals and a horn section (plus some prominently mixed studio chatter). Just the sort of eccentric mix of elements that get this band accused of being pretentious or weird-for-weird's-sake, but it all adds up and makes a strong impression, especially sequenced after the beautifully minimal arrangement, featuring (amplified? synthesized?) thumb piano, of "The Socialites". For me, this is one of those rare backloaded albums, with a strong run of tracks at the end making up for some weak spots in the middle.

Black Music Disaster 
A single live improvised track with two electric guitars, a Farfisa organ, and drums. Hearing a Farfisa in this kind of long form, rock-leaning improvisational context makes me think of Rick Wright on the early Syd-era Pink Floyd records - not a reference point you'd normally expect when the keyboardist is Matthew Shipp. John Coxon from Spring Heel Jack and J. Spaceman (Spiritualized) are the guitarists and British improviser (and Derek Bailey collaborator) Steve Noble is on drums. I don't know about Noble, but Spaceman and Coxon have recorded with Shipp before, and it was my appreciation of Spring Heel Jack's Live album (which also features Han Bennick, Evan Parker, and William Parker!) that made me pick this one up. I haven't listened to Live in a while but recall it having quite a bit more space than this record, which is pretty full-on start to finish, with Shipp's seething Farfisa expanding into all the sonic cracks like a luridly colored psychedelic fog. 

Lee Konitz - Satori and Enfants Terribles
One of my better finds at Chicago's great Jazz Record Mart last month was Lee Konitz's mid-'70s Satori. The lineup is pretty stacked - Martial Solal, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, with producer Dick Katz sitting in on electric piano on the free, swinging, and seemingly collectively improvised title track. Though I've never really connected with the only other record I've heard with Konitz and electric piano - Pyramid, with Paul Bley and guitarist Bill Connors - the two electrified tracks here (Solal also switches to electric on "Sometime Ago") fit just fine with the rest of the album - Konitz's approach remains the same and it's just a different texture added to the mix. Solal - virtuosic, restless and unpredictable - has a fine rapport with Konitz developed over many collaborations (their shared, deep commitment to improvisation is very much in evidence on the fine live duo album Star Eyes). Though each has recorded with the saxophonist separately, this is the only Konitz record I'm aware of with both Holland and DeJohnette. Only a few years removed from their epochal recordings with Miles Davis, they're relatively restrained here, but swinging and subtly easing the music forward into adventurous territory. Holland and Konitz have a nice duo passage on "On Green Dolphin Street" which helps make it one of the standout cuts on the album.

Konitz himself is in good form (he sounds particularly strong to me on the closing "Free Blues"), as he was recently at the Blue Note with another sterling lineup - Bill Frisell, Gary Peacock and Joey Baron - playing under the name Enfants Terribles. Some of the tunes I remember hearing were "Devil & the Deep Blue Sea" (intro'd by Peacock), "Subconscious-Lee", "I'll Remember April" (with a beautiful intro and melody statement by Frisell), and at some point, a little hint of "Misterioso". This group has a live album coming out from an earlier Blue Note appearance, which, based on the performance I saw, should definitely be worth getting.

This is another band, like Bill McHenry's quartet with Orrin Evans and Eric Revis, that I imagine might've featured Paul Motian if he was still with us. But as with Andrew Cyrille in McHenry's group, having Joey Baron is not exactly "settling" - it's just a different kind of awesome. This was my first time seeing Konitz live, though I've heard live recordings from various periods of his career, including two highly recommended albums with Motian recorded 50 years apart - Live at the Half Note with Warne Marsh, Bill Evans and Jimmy Garrison, and Live at Birdland with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Haden. While the early records with Warne Marsh featured some very tight and tricky heads, these days Konitz seems to cultivate a loose atmosphere in which improvisation is valued above all else and form can take care of itself. I don't know at what point Konitz started moving in this direction, but it was already coming into focus (or becoming more diffuse, depending on how you look at it) on Satori. Since Konitz has returned to many of the same tunes throughout his long career, it would be possible (and fascinating) to trace his development by comparing some of the various versions - "Just Friends", for example, or his own "Subconscious-Lee" which he's been playing for over 60 years at this point (for a little context on that, try to imagine how Charlie Parker might've been playing "Confirmation" if he had lived into the Obama administration).

Ornette: Made in America
Finally, I'd urge anyone who's an Ornette Coleman fan to try to see Shirley Clarke's restored and rereleased documentary, Ornette: Made in America, which recently opened at IFC in New York. Made in the mid-'80s and focusing on a Fort Worth (Ornette's birthplace) performance of Skies of America with Prime Time and the Fort Worth Symphony, this is far from cinema verite. Clarke, who directed and edited, deploys a large battery of devices and effects to get at the nature of Ornette and his music - otherwordly, forever futuristic but always rooted in the blues. We see a (very much pre-CGI) Ornette on an exercise bike in space, Ornette eating BBQ and talking about King Curtis, a string quartet (w/ Denardo) in a Buckminster Fuller terrarium, and William Burroughs (no special effects needed), among many other strange and wonderful things. Ornette's early music isn't much represented (and I don't think the great Billy Higgins appears at all), but there is some amazing footage of Ornette and Charlie Haden rehearsing with 12 year old Denardo, plus a bit of Blackwell and Cherry, and Ornette and Robert Palmer playing with the Master Musicians of Jajouka. In other words, wonders upon wonders.   

The Trip

Steve Coogan plays "Steve Coogan" in a film (largely) about Steve Coogan. The relationship of Coogan and Rob Bryden, previously explored to great effect in Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy (Winterbottom also directed The Trip), makes this a bit like the British Old Joy, a road trip buddy movie about friendship and the tug of war between freedom vs. responsibility, substituting the English Lake District for the Pacific Northwest. As scenic as Old Joy, The Trip is, on a more modest scale, nearly as layered and digressive as Shandy. Though clearly a fiction, the film draws heavily on the public personas of the two men and leaves us wondering how accurate a glimpse of their inner lives we've actually been given.

I liked how the emotional threads emerge as the characters try to repress their anxieties (about aging, career, etc.) or hide them beneath a veneer of humor (even when the humor is precisely about those anxieties). Coogan is by turns critical and dismissive of Bryden's (rather masterful) celebrity impressions when they're together (the premise is that Coogan has brought Bryden along on a sort of journalistic food tour of the North of England), but then we see him practicing them alone in front of the bathroom mirror, a picture of insecurity. The interplay of the ridiculous (the constant dueling impressions) and the more "serious" content was handled with relative subtletly and naturalness, capturing something very true about the way men talk about pop culture as a way of avoiding more personal or serious subjects. I only felt the balance tip too far in one direction at the end, when the contrast between Brydon returning to his family and Coogan to his cold, empty luxury apartment was scored with music a little too "on the nose", as if the point wasn't already obvious from the images.

All said, though, this is one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen all year and certainly one of the funniest. I wonder if it would work as well for someone who hadn't seen Tristram Shandy or wasn't familiar with Coogan's early work (especially Alan Partridge). Even without that background, I think it would be obvious that Coogan and Bryden are operating here at a very high level, turning the mundane, the trivial, and the repetitive into hugely effective comedy (they're helped by editing which displays timing almost as sharp as that of the actors, letting bits run on just long enough and cutting on just the right beats). Before watching the film, I didn't realize that it had been edited down to feature length from a longer TV series. Netflix doesn't seem to have the TV version, but a great deal of the cut material seems to be on the U.S. DVD as deleted scenes, including a sequence of multiple takes of a driving scene where Coogan and Brydon explore the idea of a historical drama where a lord (to be played by Coogan) instructs his men that they leave for battle at "10ish" in the morning. Watching the two actors try out seemingly endless variations on this simple idea (Coogan must say "Gentlemen, to bed" about 150 times) was hypnotic and absolutely fascinating, putting me into some sort of weird comedy trance.

[I enjoyed this list of commercial voice-overs the versatile, prolific and apparently ubiquitous-in-the-UK Bryden has done, according to his Wikipedia page: Renault, Tango, The Times, Tesco, Abbey National, Sainsburys, McDonald's, Toilet Duck, Cahoot, Mint Card, Pot Noodle, Domino's Pizza, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, The Observer, Fairy Liquid]

Three Un-recent Movies Seen Recently

Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices
I don't remember exactly when or where I first heard about this one, but I did some have curiosity about the (to me) mysterious world of polyphonic vocal music - motets, madrigals, etc - and, at this point, I would watch a Werner Herzog documentary on just about any subject. Herzog's rather free (to put it mildly) approach to documentary filmmaking surely reaches one of its highest points of invention in Death for Five Voices, as he packs numerous staged scenes and outright fabrications into a 60-minute running time (it was originally made for German TV). Though anyone with an ounce of natural skepticism or previous acquaintance with Herzog's documentaries will be doubting at least half of what they see on-screen, it's all somehow appropriate in telling the story of a man, Prince Carlo Gesualdo, who inspired plenty of wild legends and rumors in his own time and for centuries after. Why shouldn't Herzog get to invent some of his own?

Though some of the stories Herzog tells about the mad, murderous composer are fictional or exaggerated, the music, performed for the film by a couple of different ensembles, is very much for real and quite striking. Though I didn't know enough about the style or have a good enough ear to immediately distinguish the elements that made Gesualdo's music so strange in its own time but attractive to much later composers like Stravinsky, Herzog includes enough explanation from musicians/musicologists to give the viewer things to listen for without getting into levels of detail that might have bogged down a 60-minute film. Herzog rarely gets bogged down, especially in his documentaries, which with their abundance of fascinating people, places, and events have represented his stronger work in recent years. The Herzog filmography contains many lesser-known gems like Death in Five Voices, The White Diamond being only the first that comes to mind.

The Loved One
Check out the list of names associated with this movie, from 1965: Tony Richardson (fresh off his Oscars for Tom Jones) as director; Jonathan Winters, John Gielgud, Liberace, Milton Berle, James Coburn, Tab Hunter, Roddy McDowall, Rod Steiger, and Paul Williams among the cast; Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood as screenwriters, adapting Evelyn Waugh; Haskell Wexler as DP and producer and Hal Ashby as editor. It's not uncommon for movies that are overstuffed with big names to be big flops, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It's dark, a bit strange, and has strong performances from all the leads, including Mad Men's Robert Morse as the at-first befuddled but ultimately resourceful protagonist, an English poet living by his wits in LA. There are so many off-the-wall characters (none more so than Steiger's Mr. Joyboy, though he has stiff competition) and bizarre/surreal set pieces that it almost doesn't matter whether it all adds up, but for the most part I think it does.

The Loved One is one of the many, many films in which Hollywood turns the camera on itself, though here the the funeral industry (along with the pet cemetery business, anticipating Errol Morris' Gates of Heaven) plays an even bigger role than the film industry in making up the strange sea in which Morse's fish-out-of-water finds himself. The idea of a lone sane man and/or outsider trying to survive in the insanity of Southern California is something of a film subgenre, of which Sunset Boulevard and The Long Goodbye are two of the finest examples (though here, as in Sunset Boulevard, the hero is not exactly a white knight, but a man with ambitions whose eye for opportunities is sharper than his moral code).

I don't know how faithful the adaptation is to Waugh's novel, but Terry Southern's influence seems evident in the tone of the movie - anti-authoritarian, satirical, horny, and a bit perverse. The Loved One looks forward to the similarly-themed but more anarchic (and to me, less effective) movies that Southern was involved in later in the '60, Easy Rider and The Magic Christian. While not a restrained piece of work by any means, The Loved One shows more craft and discipline than those later films, which for me typify the period after the decline of "studio system" craft but before the "new Hollywood" had really found its footing. Simultaneously experimental (or perhaps just aping experiments done years before in Europe) and nakedly/desperately appealing to the "youth market", some of these movies (like the Monkees' Head) are still great fun to watch, but they tend to give the impression that most of the cast and crew were high and/or assuming the audience would be.

One last, rather trivial note: I took the shots of rotating statues in the Whispering Glades "memorial gardens" to be an obvious nod to Godard's Contempt (try 1:25 in this excerpt), but in the making-of doc on the DVD, Wexler makes no mention of Godard, even though he singles out those shots and discusses how he set them up. As Contempt opened in the US less than a year before The Loved One was released, I suppose it's possible that Wexler and Richardson wouldn't have seen it in time, but if not, it's a pretty striking coincidence.

Jubilee
Derek Jarman's Jubilee has an all-star cast of a different sort, featuring generally lesser known actors but some big names from the music world, including a very young Adam Ant, punk/glam pioneer Wayne/Jayne County, Siouxie and the Banshees, and soundtrack contributions by Brian Eno. Jarman seemed to have a great ability to find a style for each of his films suitable to the subject (the compositions, lighting, and use of color in Caravaggio, for instance), and the anarchic, violently eclectic look and flow of Jubilee (apparently inspired in part by early punk 'zines) is no exception, though it's not entirely clear how much of this was planned and how much resulted from necessity, disorganization, or lack of funds. As with The Loved One, the succession of wild characters and strange happenings keeps things interesting, with Jarman stuffing a surplus of ideas (mostly good ones) into the cinematic blender.

Among the strange case of characters, Toyah Willcox's performance as Mad, the genuinely frightening butch pyromaniac, is of particular note. Though she was a serious, trained actor in a cast made up largely of non-actors, friends of Jarman, and genuine punks, her performance came across to me as more "real" and believable than some of those who may have been playing characters much closer to their off-camera selves. Apparently Willcox later became something of a pop star, but I hadn't heard of her, and until I saw the making-of documentary, I assumed she was someone Jarman found trawling around London punk shows.

Though very much inspired by and steeped in the punk aesthetic, Jubilee is by no means a celebration of punk. Jarman was an outsider, fascinated by the aesthetics but able to retain a critical distance from the scene he was immersing himself in. His skepticism about punk as a cultural revolutionary movement is part of the reason Jubilee is still watchable as something more than a period piece and helps explain why many scenesters were apparently upset and disappointed with the film when it opened (most notoriously, Vivienne Westwood, who responded with her "Open Letter to Derek Jarman" t-shirt, a reading of which reveals that Jarman's film certainly hit a nerve). This reaction from the true believers is understandable in light of the film's (cynical but, in retrospect, rather uncontroversial) suggestion that punk was just another style ripe for co-option and exploitation by the star-making machinery. Even some of Jarman's friends and associates took the film as a politcally conservative piece of nostalgia for the Golden Age of Elizabeth I, and there is certainly enough material in the film to make that a defensible interpretation, though not the only one.

Jubilee fits well with some of the work that Ken Russell and Nicolas Roeg, among British directors, were doing in the '70s, as well as having some apparent nods to Kenneth Anger and, perhaps inevitably, to some of Godard's late-'60s films. Jarman was clearly well-read, but the book that Jubilee put me in mind of was written many years later. The idyllic seaside ending (with Elizabeth and her astrologer/advisor/magus John Dee walking off along some very scenic cliffs) reminded me a bit of Iain Sinclair's novel Downriver, which, like Jubilee, shows contemporary Britain (Downriver came out just after the Thatcher era; Jubilee just before) through a dark, twisted mirror (Sinclair also shares Jarman's fascination with Dee, though I don't recall that he figures in Downriver). In both works, the ending feels like a relief, resigned if not necessarily hopeful, after the violence and grotesquerie that went before. In an unexpected but effective touch, Jarman lets the seagull sounds from the last scene continue for a minute or so over a black screen, like the blank pages at the back of a book, inviting the audience to sit for a bit longer and reflect.

The Most Fascinating Cultural Figure of Our Time

Isn't James Franco amazing? He's in something like four different degree programs and he's hosting the Oscars and he played Allen Ginsburg (pretty well, actually) and he does weird art videos, etc, etc, etc. 

Well, you know who's more amazing? BILL M****RF***IN' MURRAY, that's who.

So Franco's way into poetry.  Well, so is Murray. 

Franco was on a soap opera. Bill Murray signed on to be the voice of goddamn Garfield because he thought the script was by Joel Coen! (Turns out it was Joel Cohen.)

And let me ask you this:
When was the last time you heard about James Franco winning a major professional golf tournament, LIKE BILL MURRAY JUST DID?!?!?!?

Late To The Party - Organ Damage/Wild Things/Bird Notes

End of the year roundups are a great way to find out what you've missed from the previous year.  To cite just one example of something I'm sure I wouldn't have found any other way, my favorite discovery from the year-end conversation at Nate Chinen's The Gig is the (get ready for it) badass Norwegian organ trio Elephant9.  I realize that the phrase "badass Norwegian organ trio" sounds like it contains multiple oxymorons, but check 'em out and see for yourself.

----------

I don't remember where I found the link to this Awl piece from 2009, but I just came across it this weekend.  The Awl was one of my most-read sites of 2010, but I guess I wasn't checking it regularly before that.  In any case, Tom Scocca articulates the problem I had with the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are with much more clarity and force than I'm capable of.  Reading it was cathartic.

----------

Another thing from 2009 that I only recently got around to reading was Steve Coleman's Charlie Parker "Dozens" at Jazz.com, an epic piece worthy of its subject.  As the writings on his M-Base website demonstrate, Coleman is almost frighteningly knowledgeable and insightful on just about every aspect of the art of spontaneous composition (his preferred term), and this Charlie Parker piece is like 12 excerpts from the best textbook on the subject never published.  There's the basis of an education here, an implied course of study.  It takes some close listening to grasp some of Coleman's points, but if you follow his example and really dig into this music, he will teach you some things.  And lest you think he's just blowing conceptual smoke, he provides plenty of transcriptions to illustrate his points.  With one complete reading, I feel like I've only started with this piece, but Coleman has already made me listen more closely to the music he discusses, which is perhaps his most important lesson.  As Phil Schaap's long-running radio show has amply proven, this is inexhaustible music which just sounds better as you pick up on more of its nuances (most of which are guaranteed to elude on a first or even third or fourth listen).

Coleman is particularly strong in trying to understand (without pretending to be certain) how Parker and his associates thought about the music they were playing from a technical standpoint (which may have been quite different from the way the music has been analyzed after the fact).  Though it may sound like a ridiculously esoteric piece of musicology, Coleman's elaboration (supported by quotes from Parker and Gillespie) of the distinction between minor sixth (with a sixth in the bass) and half-diminished chords is a valuable bit of analysis insofar as it illuminates something about the thinking behind the improvisation.  Coleman isn't just describing what Parker played, but how he (along with Gillespie, Monk and others) might have developed the approach that led him to play it. 

Reading David Foster Wallace's "The Empty Plenum", a review of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, just after reading some posts on Coleman's blog, I noticed that the concept of time and its relationship to language comes up in both places.  Language is particularly important to Coleman's understanding of Charlie Parker's music.  He conceives of Bird's solos as hip, streetwise conversations, with the natural but extremely intricate rhythms of speech (Coleman takes the idea of musical "phrases" quite literally).  Jason Moran did some experiments in this area, "transcribing" recorded conversations into music ("Ringing My Phone" was one recorded result).  Coleman suggests listening to a Parker solo and focusing only on the rhythms while ignoring the pitches.  Both Moran's transcriptions and Coleman's listening exercise serve to reveal underlying structures that may be obscured by "content" (words or pitches).  [Update: some interesting speculations about the connection between language and improvised music in this video.]

One last note re: Steve Coleman and his appreciation of the masters - his 1991 album Rhythm In Mind, which I recently downloaded from his website, is a beaut.  It's an all-star lineup, including Von Freeman, Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland and Ed Blackwell, but to me, Tommy Flanagan shines brightest of all.  Flanagan is one of those widely-acknowledged piano greats that I've never taken the time to really get to know, but his work on this album has made me resolve to dig into the Flanagan discography in the new year.

Dorothy in Concord

You know that thing where you turn off the sound on The Wizard of Oz and play Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack?  And if you start it at the right place, it matches up in all kinds of cool ways and makes the movie like totally more psychedelic than it already is?  Well, it doesn't work so well with Charles Ives' Concord Sonata.  I noticed that The Wizard was on one night last weekend, but I also felt like listening to Marc-André Hamelin's Charles Ives/Samuel Barber disc, so I thought, let's try this and see what happens.  And what happened was, my focus alternated between the music and the movie without the former ever becoming anything like a "soundtrack" to the latter.  Not that I really expected it to work, but I thought maybe something cool would happen.  Maybe it would work better with this version.

In any case, I can certainly recommend Hamelin doing Ives when listened to on its own.  My appreciation of both of them is still in its early stages, and I know there are hours and hours of music I've yet to hear, but one particular area of Ives' work that I want to explore further is his large collection of songs, many based on pre-existing texts by others (poems, lyrics to other songs).  I've heard only a small selection so far, initially drawn in when I found out that there was an Ives-ized version of "Abide With Me".  Setting these words to new music is perhaps not a terribly radical idea, but it's one that struck me as bold and even inspiring, having grown up with the hymn as an immutable fact of life (in comparison to the Ives version, Thelonious Monk's wonderful and slightly skewed arrangement of the original tune sounds quite traditional).  The titles of Ives' songs alone (including one called "Slugging a Vampire"!!!) make me want to hear more.

One last, rather remarkable, thing I just learned from Wikipedia re: the Concord Sonata:

In 1986, Bruce Hornsby borrowed the opening phrase of "The Alcotts" movement as the introduction to his hit "Every Little Kiss" (as heard on the album The Way It Is).

A Brief Note on the Late Leslie Nielsen

This may sound like a snob/connoisseur thing to say, but the original Police Squad! TV series, which lasted all of six episodes, was funnier and better than the Naked Gun movies in just about every way.  I watched these things over and over again on VHS in the late-'80s/early-'90s and certain gags still pop into my head from time to time.  Come to think of it, the complete series on DVD would make an excellent Christmas gift. 

Leslie Nielsen certainly made some sub-par movies later in his career, but with the six episodes of Police Squad! and the other Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker exclamation-point-enhanced masterwork, Airplane!, he earned his lifetime pass.  Some of the funniest sh*t I've ever seen.

Leitch At The Movies, Part Two

This is awesome news:
Will Leitch, who, as I've noted before, I've been reading since approximately 1994, finally has a full-time gig writing about movies, his true calling.

Some Thoughts On The Nilsson Doc

I finally got to see the long-time-in-the-making Harry Nilsson documentary, Who Is Harry Nilsson?, the other night.  Some lightly sifted thoughts:

This movie may be unmatched as an endless parade of bad teeth and embarrassing hair styles.  Some of the fashions on display betray the length of time it took to finish the movie - clearly, much of the interview footage had to wait several years before making it to the screen.  I'm sure some of the participants are as mortified by the way they look in this movie as I am by my high school yearbook photos.  Yes, Van Dyke, those jeans do make your butt look big.

Though not made with the skill of an Errol Morris, a D.A. Pennebaker, or even a Burns brother, I would've been happy to sit through this movie if it had run to the length (239 min) of Peter Bogdanovich's admirably workmanlike Tom Petty doc.  There's probably a sharper, more stylish movie to be made with this material, but as a Nilsson fan, I'll take what I can get and like it.

I was disappointed that one of my favorite Nilsson albums (and a great example of the Late Work As Neglected Gem genre, a genre I think I made up*), Knnillssonn, wasn't mentioned (although one or two songs from it made the soundtrack).  The story of its "comeback album" potential being squelched by the ill-timed death of Elvis (Harry's RCA labelmate) seems like it would've been an irresistible story for the filmmakers, but instead, the late RCA albums were glossed over as if they were all of a self-indulgent yet half-assed piece.

Speaking of underrated albums, I wanted to shout at the screen when Richard Perry started dissing Son of Schmilsson.  I love both of the Perry-produced Nilsson albums, but I've always preferred the rough edges of SoS over the more polished (but undeniably masterful) Nilsson Schmilsson.  Perry's interview footage is very revealing.  After "Without You" became a worldwide hit, he saw a wide open road of nothing but good times and platinum records ahead, but Harry grabbed the wheel and, like Neil Young at around the same time, steered into the ditch.  The footage of Harry with the pensioners' choir recording "I'd Rather Be Dead" undercuts Perry beautifully (the old folks get it, Richard!), though he would probably see it as indicative of Nilsson's growing self-indulgence. In any case, it makes me wish the SoS making-of documentary had been finished and released (it's not too late, of course).

Some of the best moments in the movie occurred, as one might expect, on the soundtrack.  Although Cinema Village must have some of the smallest screening rooms (calling them theaters seems a bit too grand) in New York, and the sound is nothing special, it was still a thrill to hear Harry's voice writ at least semi-large.  Due credit was given to his amazing self-harmonizing and overdubbing abilities and to the phrasing that he was forced to lean on after blowing out his voice during the Pussy Cats sessions.  I'd love to see something like the "Layla" mixing board scene from the Tom Dowd documentary done for one of the great, many-layered Nilsson vocal performances (though for calling attention to the artifice/magic of singing with yourself via studio technology, it would be hard to top his "three Harrys" BBC performance).

In summary: I'm not sure if this documentary is greater than the sum of its parts, in that I'd probably rather see a two-DVD set of Did Somebody Drop His Mouse? and The Music of Nilsson (if such a thing existed), but, for someone who's already a fan, there's more than enough good stuff here to justify the enterprise.


*Though, of course, the idea of artists having a distinct "late style" is a well-known one and can be useful as a lens/key to view/interpret difficult or neglected works in a new way.

"Wes Anderson Sucks, Spike Jonze Sucks..."

Could this Vincent Gallo interview be the inspiration for the instant classic Scharpling-Wurster "Sucks" bit from the Best Show on WMFU?  Check out Part 1 of the Gallo interview starting at around 14:08 and decide for yourself. [Gallo interview via].

The Best Show episode in question (from 7/6/10) is archived here.  Even funnier to me than the ten-minute-long list of "sucks" novelty records was the list of Newbridge-area power pop bands recorded by Wurster's strangely principled audio engineer:

Lovely Boys
The Bill Bixbys
The Craigs
Sherbet Falls
The Album
Sleestacks
[a name I couldn't make out - Wurster almost loses it as this point]
I Love You The Ghost of Andrew Davis
Bam Bam
The Resistance (a "white power pop" band that sounded like "the Rubinoos fronted by Goebbels")

I really want to start a band called The Craigs.

Of Film Diaries & Biopics, Philosophers, Aliens, and Prog Keyboardists

Good interview with London writer and Selected Ballads favorite Iain Sinclair here [via].  The video, a sort-of guided tour of Hackney with Sinclair, is the real highlight, and a must-see if you're a fan, as it includes bits of his 8mm film diary from the '60s and '70s.  I really want to see more of this footage.  Maybe someone could collaborate with Sinclair on editing a couple hours of highlights from the diary, fly him over, and screen it at Anthology Film Archives (with live narration?).

Speaking of Anthology, their Anti-Biopic series (in its final week) was a brilliant idea well executed.  I've seen only two of the films so far, Ken Russell's over-the-top-of-the-top Lisztomania and Derek Jarman's cerebral, irreverent, and altogether engrossing Wittgenstein, but the impressive range of the series and the film knowledge that went into putting it together is clear from just reading through the program.  With Roger Daltrey (as Liszt), Ringo (as the Pope), and Rick Wakeman (as an Aryan FrankenThor - you just have to see it - and the man responsible for the soundtrack), Lisztomania makes Tommy seem restrained, as if Pete Townsend's conception was holding Russell back from really letting his freak flag fly.  Lisztomania is as quintessential a '70s movie as any of the gritty, realistic Dog Day Afternoons that are now so associated with that decade.  [Update: I just saw that Lincoln Center is about to kick off a Russell retrospective, including appearances from the master himself.]

Wittgenstein, the biography of a notoriously difficult-to-understand (and yet highly quotable) philosopher filmed against a black backdrop, could have easily been as dry as Lisztomania is juicy.  Though it runs at a decidedly cooler temperature, Jarman's film has its fair share of sex and eccentricity, integrated with, rather than providing relief from, the philosophy at the core of the story.  The most memorable example of this integration is the glockenspiel-playing "little green man" from outer space who engages the young Wittgenstein in a philosophical dialogue.  Had this dialogue been set in a Greek temple with phallus-shaped columns and scored with some wicked prog synth, it would've been worthy of Ken Russell.

Discovering Prine

After reading about the strange-but-true Roger Ebert-Sex Pistols connection, I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that Ebert is responsible for another footnote in music history: he wrote the first review John Prine ever received.  Though his beat was movies, Ebert broke the story on the emergence of one of the Great American Songwriters.  His post about it is several months old, but I just came across it a few days ago.  It contains the original review, which came so early in Prine's career that he seemed not to have settled on final titles for some of what would become his most famous songs ("Sam Stone", for example, was apparently called "The Great Society Conflict Veteran's Blues"!).

I've had the pleasure of being bowled over by some brilliant performances that I was in no way prepared for, but I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to walk into a club with no expectations and hear "Sam Stone" for the first time.  And then "Angel From Montgomery".
 
Bonus Links
Swamp Dogg's cover of "Sam Stone" (if it's possible for a knife to the gut to be transcendent, then that's what this is)
Susan Cowsill and Brian Henneman doing "Angel From Montgomery"

Bonus Commentary
Armond White's recent comments about Ebert ("I think he does not have the training.  I've got the training" "I'm a pedigreed film critic") remind me of the old, intermittently funny syndicated public radio character, Dr. Science, whose catchphrase was "I have a Masters Degree...in science!"  I've never thought about this before, but I wonder if Dr. Science was an inspiration for noted public radio fan John Hodgman's "expert" persona.

I'm Assuming There Are No Wooden Puppets In Inception

All this talk about Inception and the way dreams are portrayed or used as plot devices in movies reminds me of the most dream-like movie I've ever seen, Jan Svankmajer's Faust.  It's not about dreams, and there are no "dream sequences", but it feels the way a dream feels.  The logic, the rhythm, the repetitions of certain actions, all seem more akin to a dream than to a mainstream movie, as if Svankmajer replaced conventional film grammar with dream grammar.  There's something about the way stairs are used in Faust that is key to its convincing dream-ness, but I don't think I could explain that without seeing it again, if even then.  Thinking about how images, scenes and, most of all, the feeling of the thing have persisted in my mind, coming to the surface with surprising frequency, it's hard for me to believe that I've seen it only once, in or around 1998.  I like the form it has, the place it inhabits, in my memory, and I'm a little afraid of the way a second viewing might alter that.

As a side note, another thing I remember about that screening (here comes some name-dropping) is that Jeff Mangum and a bunch of the Elephant 6/Orange Twin gang were there.  They all showed up together in a van.  Which, now that I'm typing it, kind of sounds like a dream I would've had.  But that, kids (here comes some nostalgia), was Athens, Georgia in the late '90s.

Beeswax

Finally got around to seeing Beeswax.  I liked both of Andrew Bujalski's previous films and will continue to see whatever he puts out until such time as he starts making end-of-days thrillers with Nic Cage (actually not sure I wouldn't see a Bujalski-Cage joint).  I don't know if Beeswax is my favorite Bujalski (I'd have to rewatch the others to be sure), but it does clearly represent another step forward in his development as a director.

Beeswax made me think about Bujalski's approach to comedy, so low-key as to be almost unrecognizable as such.  I found myself thinking "that was really funny" a lot, but only laughing (or, really, half-chuckling) a couple of times.  And even then, there wasn't a clear sense that the scenes or lines or moments I found funny were intended to be funny.  I suspected that most of them were, but there was no way to be sure, and certainly no "laugh here" cues.  That's the kind of sub-sub-level Bujalski is working on, but even so, I think Beeswax is, in essence, a successful comedy.

Although the primary pleasure I found in Beeswax was simply watching the two (real life and movie) sisters, Maggie and Tilly Hatcher, especially their reactions and facial expressions, there was a satisfying, and perhaps surprising, wholeness (artistic unity?) to the film that suggests that Bujalski has matured into something of a young master.  His ambitions may seem small, bafflingly so to some viewers, but he seems to have reached the point of being in complete command of his art.  You may not know where he's going, or why, in Beeswax, but if you pay attention, you can tell that he's guiding the action with a sure, confident hand.

Q: Who's Counting?, A: Roger Ebert

If you stopped reading Ebert's one-star review of Sex & The City 2 before the end (or never started reading it), you missed this:

Note: From my understanding of the guidelines of the MPAA Code and Ratings Administration, Samantha and Mr. Spirt have one scene that far, far surpasses the traditional MPAA limits for pumping and thrusting.

The review also has a great first line:

Some of these people make my skin crawl.

On First Looking Into Thomson's Have You Seen

I picked up a cheap, mint hardcover copy of David Thomson's Have You Seen...? at the Housing Works bookstore the other night.  I began casually paging through it after I got home, and the next thing I knew, a couple of hours had gone by.  The same thing has happened to me many times with Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film.  Have You Seen...? (subtitled "A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films") is perhaps a more conventional film book than the Dictionary, being an alphabetized collection of capsule review/essays, at least superficially similar to the ones many other critics have published.  Thomson's style is unmistakable, though.  While he occasionally produces a sentence that leaves me stumped, even after multiple readings, the condensed format generally keeps Thomson sharp and critically focused, while allowing him to show off his mastery of the pithy summation. Many of the entries, in both books, end with a well tuned, instantly memorable line (on Audrey Hepburn: "...Audrey - in eyes, voice, and purity - rang as true as a small silver bell. The great women of the fifties had a character that is in short supply now."; Eyes Wide Shut: "It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison"; or his most succinct tagline of all, re: His Girl Friday: "Bliss").

Hopefully, Thomson will get the chance to revise and perhaps extend Have You Seen...? as he's done with the Dictionary (currently in its fourth edition), but even in its current form it's great fun, the one-page-per-movie format yielding some wonderful juxtapositions (part of Thomson's plan, as he explains in the introduction), perhaps none better than Bringing Up Baby opposite Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (imagine those two movies mashed together every time the book is closed!).

One remarkable piece of trivia gleaned from Have You Seen...?:  
Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place, arguably the two finest "dark side of Hollywood" movies, came out in the same year, 1950.  I say "arguably" because I think Mulholland Drive (or to be accurate, Mulholland Dr., a fine distinction Thomson makes a lot of) deserves to be considered a peer of those two films.  Before seeing In a Lonely Place, I thought of Mulholland as, among other things, a kind of homage to Sunset Boulevard, but in fact it has echoes of/affinities with both earlier films.  And what's this I hear about Lynch planning a sequel?

Quote of the Day - Burden of Dreams

"I was sick all day, and then the fever began to subside.  I had received another telex, monosyllabic, saying it was the twilight of the gods, and I knew who had sent it and what the code meant." 

- Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless

Loaded For Deer

Roger Ebert + Russ Meyer + Malcolm McLaren + The Sex Pistols = !?!?!?!?!?!!!

Jules Dassin, Not French

I received an email yesterday from the Film Society of Lincoln Center (one of the two best places in NYC to see a movie, along with BAM) promoting their Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series.  In the brief description of 1959's The Law, they refer to its director as "the French auteur Jules Dassin".  Oops.  Dassin, who died two years ago this month, was from Connecticut. 

I saw a late interview with Dassin where he joked about how often people assumed he was French because of his sort-of French-sounding last name (in fact, his father was a Russian Jew) and the fact that he spent a large portion of his career working in Europe after being blacklisted.  Probably his most famous film, the ur-heist picture Rififi, was a French film.  I like to think of Rififi as the Paris part of a three-city crime trilogy, along with The Naked City (New York) and Night and the City (London, and probably my favorite of the three).  I haven't seen any of his later European work, but when he was working within the realm of "tough guys in hats doing bad things in a big city", Dassin was a master.