Iggy Iggy Iggy Iggy.... This month's band of the month will be Iggy Pop and the Stooges. It will also be short (at least comparatively). Not that there isn't plenty to say about Detroit's finest, but you don't have to say it all.
They are simple and direct and powerful always. They get called the fathers of punk, though not very many punk bands live up to them. They have a savvy about them, though - which punks did too, let's be fair - an ability to slip sideways into those long grooves of Fun House. They never fail to rock, and they rock all over the place, at least on those first 2 records - they manage to be calculated and completely raw, musically adventurous and brutal at once. They are almost alone out there.
And Iggy - the Stooges made three records and then he went off on his own, and something was lost. Not his doing exactly - he made a lot of good (to great) music on his own - and Iggy himself was always a beast. But he spent decades seeming wildly out of place with his surroundings - way cooler and scarier and better than anyone around him, spending a lot of time playing with journeymen. Even when he played with people who were great artists in their own right, Bowie and Lou Reed, say, he was different, off kilter - too much, even for David Bowie. Too wild, too cool - as a performer - just beyond everyone else. He's not the only rock and roller to put on an extreme show - but he's one of the few who is both awe inspiring and a bit terrifying who never comes off as even remotely desperate. He is in control, no matter how out of control he is.
But still: after those Stooges records - it's all a bit less. Which is credit to the Asheton brothers, as much as anything - I can't say they're particularly great musicians, but they are dead on to what they are doing. They had a sound, and they nailed it - fuzzy guitar, the wah wah solos, the plain, relentless drumming - it's a sound that fits Iggy's voice, growling and punching along, distilling that garage sound to its perfect form. It is relentless and punchy and I can listen to them forever. Ron's guitar sound - that's something brought to perfection right there.
All right - here are my Ten favorite songs from Iggy's long and illustrious career. The songs are still pretty good in the late 70s - but the x sound misses the Ashetons. All right - here goes:
1. 1970
2. 1969
3. TV Eye
4. I Wanna Be Your Dog
5. Loose
6. Search and Destroy
7. Lust for Life
8. Passenger
9. Mexican Guy - even in their late incarnations, they can be funny and very funky
10. No Fun
Video: I wish there was more of them in their heyday - what there is is pretty mindblowing. Here's 1970, in 1970 -
And a short documentary, that works in most of the old footage (Iggy and his peanut butter!), along with some interviews from the time of their comeback: "we never failed to make an impression"
Lust for Life, later:
Full concert from 2003:
Searching and Destroying at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with James Williamson:
Finally, since I'm going to see them tonight, here are the Feelies covering Real Cool Time, Bill and Glenn trading solo, though Bill gets the better of them, for once:
And finally, a tribute to the power of the internet - here is a cute girl covering The Passenger on the Polish Voice:
Friday, September 18, 2015
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Ivan's Childhood
[Also cross posted at Wonders in the Dark as part of their ongoing Childhood films countdown.]
Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan’s Childhood begins with the sound of a cuckoo, and a shot of a boy standing behind a tree, looking up at us through cobweb. It ends with the same boy chasing a little girl along a beach, the two of them circling a dead black tree, that seems to keep forcing itself into the image. Both are dreams: the boy, Ivan, is in the middle of a war, dreaming of the world before the war, his childhood. He is still a child in the present of the film, but his childhood is long gone.
Ivan’s Childhood, like Germany Year Zero, is a war film about childhood that is also a childhood film about war, using each side of the equation to heighten the emotion of the other. Ivan is already a hardened veteran when Ivan’s Childhood begins - orphaned, a partisan, now working for the regular army as a scout. That is where he is when the film’s story begins - but that is not how the film begins. It begins with the dream, Ivan walking, running, flying, through fields and forests, coming to rest at his mother’s feet, drinking from a bucket of water. It begins with the childhood he has lost, before waking him to the war he is living in. But it is a very thin line between waking and dreaming. The difference may mean everything to Ivan, but it is very permeable for Tarkovsky’s filmmaking. In Ivan’s dream, Tarkovsky’s camera soars and swirls, almost gleefully defying gravity and rules of space. But when Ivan wakes in a ruined windmill and goes out, the camera remains as vertiginous as in the dream, swinging around, taking extreme angles, cutting up his experiences into flashes of imagery. Real life is immediately established as being as disorienting and strange as any dream.
As we come to know Ivan, we see that he thinks of himself as an adult, the equal of anyone around him - but he is still a child. In the banal outside world, he tries to be an adult, but he isn't, and he remains at the mercy of the men around him. They try to force him to be a child, to go to school, to find surrogate parents, none of which he he thinks he needs. And Tarkovsky's filmmaking emphasizes Ivan’s subjectivity, both awake and in dreams, in ways that show just how close he is to his lost childhood. Dreams and childhood push into his life, haunting him. Ivan isn't always sure which is which - he worries that he is talking in his sleep, his dreams and memories escaping into the world where he wants to be treated as an adult. And apart from the dreams, we see that Ivan has a kind of psychic bond to the world around him. Much of the film is set in a house serving as headquarters for Lt. Galtsev's unit, a house where 8 Russians, none over 19, were held before being shot by the Germans. Their last message is written on the wall - “Avenge us” they say. Tarkovsky emphasizes this graffiti throughout the film - and Ivan, when left alone in the room, is swept up into the story of those executed children. He hears them; feels them; sees them (and his mother, and himself). He seems to slip between his present and the past, theirs and his own, increasingly acting out their story. They are palpable ghosts for him.
It’s not just how Ivan sees the world, but how Tarkovsky sees the world that keeps the boundaries between reality and visions permeable. The camera work remains fluid and inventive throughout; the editing disruptive, jumping across time and space without connections. Things appear out of context, and Tarkovsky takes his time to reveal the context. For example, the first sight we have of Lt. Galtsev - a hand sticking up out of a blackness. A hand coming out of the ground? Out of the swamp Ivan had been wading through? No - eventually we see it is just a man, sleeping. But Tarkovsky delays the revelation. Similar imagery continues - isolated body parts (of the living or the dead); slippage between reality, flashbacks, visions and dreams; and the nature shots - vertiginous rows of trees, people moving through them; the earth disappearing under their feet. Some of this harkens back to other films - especially to Cranes Are Flying, another crucial Soviet war film. Tarkovsky’s camera work owes a lot to that film - the camera flying, spinning, moving, dancing, all of it in luscious black and white. As well as specific scenes and moments - particularly the scenes in a wooded swamp, referring to the death of the hero of Cranes Are Flying.
There are thematic parallels as well - the way human beings are swallowed by nature; the god’s eye views and worm’s eye views of the world. But we can see some of Tarkovsky’s obsessions appearing as well. Bells - pervasive natural imagery, the elements (earth water air and fire) - flying - memories, visions, dreams - and images and words on walls, seeming to come off the walls, into the minds of the characters in the film.
And in the end, Tarkovsky blurs all the lines of the film - between reality and visions, between Ivan's subjectivity and others, between all the times of the film. The final sequence takes place at the end of the war, the Soviets going throught he ruins of Germany - Galtsev, the only survivor, going through old Nazi records, looking at the fate of their prisoners. He finds Ivan's record - and it is as if he can follow the records into Ivan's memories and dreams. He imagines/sees/feels Ivan’s death - rather, the film shows it, but shows it as if Galtsev were experiencing it. And Tarkovsky moves from the vision of Ivan’s death to another dream, children on a beach, Ivan and his mother again - in a way here that links Galtsev to Ivan's mother, making identical gestures, reality and dream combining:
And so we end, with Ivan playing on the beach, running, laughing, with a little girl - though still haunted by the image of the war, that gaunt stark tree in the middle of the beach. (That reminds me, maybe incongruously, but maybe not, of the hanging tree in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome.) The kids play, but around that tree, that seems to keep intruding into the frame, and finally swallows them up.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan’s Childhood begins with the sound of a cuckoo, and a shot of a boy standing behind a tree, looking up at us through cobweb. It ends with the same boy chasing a little girl along a beach, the two of them circling a dead black tree, that seems to keep forcing itself into the image. Both are dreams: the boy, Ivan, is in the middle of a war, dreaming of the world before the war, his childhood. He is still a child in the present of the film, but his childhood is long gone.
Ivan’s Childhood, like Germany Year Zero, is a war film about childhood that is also a childhood film about war, using each side of the equation to heighten the emotion of the other. Ivan is already a hardened veteran when Ivan’s Childhood begins - orphaned, a partisan, now working for the regular army as a scout. That is where he is when the film’s story begins - but that is not how the film begins. It begins with the dream, Ivan walking, running, flying, through fields and forests, coming to rest at his mother’s feet, drinking from a bucket of water. It begins with the childhood he has lost, before waking him to the war he is living in. But it is a very thin line between waking and dreaming. The difference may mean everything to Ivan, but it is very permeable for Tarkovsky’s filmmaking. In Ivan’s dream, Tarkovsky’s camera soars and swirls, almost gleefully defying gravity and rules of space. But when Ivan wakes in a ruined windmill and goes out, the camera remains as vertiginous as in the dream, swinging around, taking extreme angles, cutting up his experiences into flashes of imagery. Real life is immediately established as being as disorienting and strange as any dream.
As we come to know Ivan, we see that he thinks of himself as an adult, the equal of anyone around him - but he is still a child. In the banal outside world, he tries to be an adult, but he isn't, and he remains at the mercy of the men around him. They try to force him to be a child, to go to school, to find surrogate parents, none of which he he thinks he needs. And Tarkovsky's filmmaking emphasizes Ivan’s subjectivity, both awake and in dreams, in ways that show just how close he is to his lost childhood. Dreams and childhood push into his life, haunting him. Ivan isn't always sure which is which - he worries that he is talking in his sleep, his dreams and memories escaping into the world where he wants to be treated as an adult. And apart from the dreams, we see that Ivan has a kind of psychic bond to the world around him. Much of the film is set in a house serving as headquarters for Lt. Galtsev's unit, a house where 8 Russians, none over 19, were held before being shot by the Germans. Their last message is written on the wall - “Avenge us” they say. Tarkovsky emphasizes this graffiti throughout the film - and Ivan, when left alone in the room, is swept up into the story of those executed children. He hears them; feels them; sees them (and his mother, and himself). He seems to slip between his present and the past, theirs and his own, increasingly acting out their story. They are palpable ghosts for him.
It’s not just how Ivan sees the world, but how Tarkovsky sees the world that keeps the boundaries between reality and visions permeable. The camera work remains fluid and inventive throughout; the editing disruptive, jumping across time and space without connections. Things appear out of context, and Tarkovsky takes his time to reveal the context. For example, the first sight we have of Lt. Galtsev - a hand sticking up out of a blackness. A hand coming out of the ground? Out of the swamp Ivan had been wading through? No - eventually we see it is just a man, sleeping. But Tarkovsky delays the revelation. Similar imagery continues - isolated body parts (of the living or the dead); slippage between reality, flashbacks, visions and dreams; and the nature shots - vertiginous rows of trees, people moving through them; the earth disappearing under their feet. Some of this harkens back to other films - especially to Cranes Are Flying, another crucial Soviet war film. Tarkovsky’s camera work owes a lot to that film - the camera flying, spinning, moving, dancing, all of it in luscious black and white. As well as specific scenes and moments - particularly the scenes in a wooded swamp, referring to the death of the hero of Cranes Are Flying.
There are thematic parallels as well - the way human beings are swallowed by nature; the god’s eye views and worm’s eye views of the world. But we can see some of Tarkovsky’s obsessions appearing as well. Bells - pervasive natural imagery, the elements (earth water air and fire) - flying - memories, visions, dreams - and images and words on walls, seeming to come off the walls, into the minds of the characters in the film.
And in the end, Tarkovsky blurs all the lines of the film - between reality and visions, between Ivan's subjectivity and others, between all the times of the film. The final sequence takes place at the end of the war, the Soviets going throught he ruins of Germany - Galtsev, the only survivor, going through old Nazi records, looking at the fate of their prisoners. He finds Ivan's record - and it is as if he can follow the records into Ivan's memories and dreams. He imagines/sees/feels Ivan’s death - rather, the film shows it, but shows it as if Galtsev were experiencing it. And Tarkovsky moves from the vision of Ivan’s death to another dream, children on a beach, Ivan and his mother again - in a way here that links Galtsev to Ivan's mother, making identical gestures, reality and dream combining:
And so we end, with Ivan playing on the beach, running, laughing, with a little girl - though still haunted by the image of the war, that gaunt stark tree in the middle of the beach. (That reminds me, maybe incongruously, but maybe not, of the hanging tree in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome.) The kids play, but around that tree, that seems to keep intruding into the frame, and finally swallows them up.
Germany Year Zero
[Cross posted from Wonders in the Dark as part of their Childhood films countdown. I neglected to post here when I posted it there - the holiday weekend and all, traveling, things were hectic... I wish I were taking this WWII class just now - I took it a couple years ago.... Childhood in WWII films would make a good paper; this and my other post for WITD would almost make a paper between them.]
War films often use children as protagonists - we've seen several in this countdown already (Come and See, Empire of the Sun, The Tin Drum, among others), with more to come surely. There are many reasons for this - I think those reasons add up to to the fact that the plight of children, of childhood, in wartime brings the horror of war into very sharp focus. Children in war films may be victims, they may be corrupted, may become (or be) evil, or at least hard-boiled, they may not seem to understand the nature of war, may not seem to treat it as completely real - but however they act, or are affected by the war, they reveal its nature through what it makes them. Children are new people - they are pliable, in the process of being formed - and what war turns them into shows us what war is. (And this, in turn, is why so many great films about childhood seem to be war films - because childhood is about becoming what you will be, and war heightens that, the way childhood heighten the effects of war. And maybe because childhood isn't necessarily as innocent, pleasant, secure as we wish it were - children in war become hyperbolic versions of childhood in any difficult situation.) Beyond this, children in war films draw the viewer in - child protagonists are often in the position of the viewer, having to learn about their world as they move through it. And maybe most of all - whatever a child might do in a war film, we know the child did not cause the ear. Children are always acted on by the war, no matter how active they are - adults in warfare raise questions of responsibility that children can sidestep.
In Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero, his protagonist, Edmund, does all these things. He is innocent - but he is corrupted, even before the film started (with his Nazi education), and is led to more and more compromised actions that culminate in murder. He is formed by the war, and by the horrific aftermath of the war - learning from it, made what he is by it. And he is our guide to the world of the film, Berlin after the war. This is quite literal - the camera often follows him through the streets, watching him in his environment, showing us the city and what happens there. He guides us through many encounters, vignettes of suffering and cruelty, in the streets and at home. At the same time, though, he is not just guide but quester - searching for food, searching (quite explicitly - Rossellini's symbolism and ideas aren't subtle here) for meaning, what the war meant, what he is, what life means for himself and others. He is both Virgil and Dante in the inferno of ruined Berlin - and one of the damned souls as well, a ghost in a ghost of a city.
There is no question that it is hell, and these are the damned. Rossellini doesn't dwell on Germany's role in the war, but the tone of the film, and the overall gist of the story doesn't leave much doubt about it - the people of Berlin are in hell, a hell on earth, and one they created, and one they damned themselves to. This is a relentlessly pessimistic film. Everyone Edmund encounters is a kind of monster. His father is weak and useless, full of self pity, if basically a decent man; his brother hides from the Allies, a burden to his family, who then whines at them for doing what they have to to help him. His sister, actually, might be the one truly admirable person in the film - willing to do what she can to help her father and brother, unwilling to condemn Edmund for what he does to help them, constantly trying to get Karl-Heinz to take responsibility, all while waiting in vain for her own lover, who is held in a prison camp somewhere. And those are the good guys - their neighbors are selfish bullies who steal and condemn and pass the blame. Edmund meets a former teacher who is a particularly overdetermined monster - a pedophile who seems to live with a ring of pedophiles, an unrepentant Nazi, still preaching its ethos of the strong living at the expense of the weak (while ducking work on some kind of health exemption) and living off the black market. The other kids Edmund encounters are hard-bitten thieves and gangsters. The people in the streets are selfish and dangerous - they fight over a dead horse in the street; old women chase Edmund away from a job he gets, claiming he's too young, though really doing it to get more for themselves. Even the Allies are shown as careless jerks, taking pictures at Hitler's bunker and buying Nazi memorobilia. (Nothing new about nitwits taking selfies at Auschwitz.) There isn't much relief from it, and even good deeds come wrapped in cynicism - a doctor who does a good deed; Christl's relative kindness; Edmund's sister, and Edmund himself, up toa point...
Only up to a point. As things go from bad to worse for Edmund and his family, he begins to consider desperate measures. His father is sick, and after a brief stay in a hospital, he comes home, to find the family in very dire straights. There is no more power in the house; they have no money, no food - they are in trouble. The old man's self-pity is getting the best of him - he tells Edmund he'd be better off dead; when he comes home he says he has been "condemned to live." Well - not for long. Edmund, still scrambling for food or a way out of this, had been talking to the teacher again - Henning spouted Nazi platitudes about letting the weak die so the strong can live, and Edmund took it to heart. He acts: he poisons the old man, hoping that would let the other three get on with their lives. It immediately backfires - the minute he gives his father the poison the police arrive and Karl Heinz decides to do the right thing. (I told you Rossellini wasn't being subtle.) In fact, Karl-Heinz is very quickly released (as his father and sister had told him would happen), but it is too late - the father is dead, and Edmund realizes he killed his father for nothing. It's too much - he runs - retracing many of his steps from earlier in the film, but especially going back to Henning - who drives him away in horror, refusing to take responsibility for what he said.
That (as Rossellini says in the introduction to the film on the Criterion disk) is the key idea of the film - it is about bad education. Edmund is trained by Nazism, grows up in it, internalizing its values - but when he acts on those values, his elders deny responsibility. The symbolism behind this, of the German people creating Nazism willingly, and then trying to pretend it wasn’t them, is clear enough as well. Germans do not come off well. The father, who seems to have disliked Nazism, clearly never had the courage or strength to do anything about it. His sons embrace it unambiguously. Henning is the other side - an unrepentant Nazi, but one who ducks and dodges - avoiding work, avoiding responsibility, dispensing bad advice and running away from it. Getting a former student to peddle Hitler records to soldiers for him (which I suppose is better than the other fate he had in mind for Edmund.) He’s a thoroughly loathsome creature.
And yet, the film is not just about damnation. Alongside Edmund's story runs his brother's story - in some ways, Karl Heinz is the hidden center of the film. He is the source of the family's trouble, being on the run - they have to feed him, and he not only costs them a ration card, but he is the most employable member of the family and does nothing. He is hard to take - preaching at his sister and Edmund for the things they do to feed him (self-righteously refusing to eat the food Edmund brings back from his nighttime adventure, all while reclining on a cot.) But one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way it balances his story against Edmund's. The ironies of their stories are not subtle, the way Karl-Heinz does the right thing at exactly the time Edmund does the worst possible thing - but the construction is more sophisticated than the obvious irony might indicate. Karl-Heinz’s story unfolds in the background - Rossellini watches Edmund, but in a way the real battle is fought over Karl-Heinz - his struggle and his decision is the decisive one. Except it isn’t. The film plays as though we think Edmund’s story is the real one, but the real story that is his brother's - except it isn’t, Edmund's is the real center.
Both brothers act at the same time - Edmund to poison his father; Karl-Heinz to surrender to the Allies - and their actions cancel each other out. Karl-Heinz gives himself up to save his father; Edmund kills his father to save his brother - but when he does, Karl-Heinz no longer needs saving, and when Karl-Heinz acts his father is beyond saving. The final sting of the story comes from the fact that Karl-Heinz could in fact save the family - had he done so at any other time, he would have, but he waited just a bit too long. And, consistent with Rossellini's theme, he waited because of his education - he took to heart what he learned from the Nazis, the need to fight to the death, the lack of mercy to expect from the Allies (probably justified, if he'd been caught by the Russians) - and held until it was too late. And Edmund is doomed.
The final section of the film is devastating. Edmunds walks through the city, retracing many of his travels from earlier in the film. He goes to Henning, who drives him out; he looks for the kids, Joe and Christl, but they chase him away; he wanders the streets, increasingly isolated - he tries to play soccer with some kids, but they won't have him; he hears music, and stands outside a church - but as others go toward the music, he turns away, alone.
And goes on, drawn on to death. But never quite shedding his place as a child. He tries to play, hopscotch, soccer - right up to the end, he is sliding down a bar he finds in a ruined house. But he also can't escape his place as a killer, as the product of a monstrous system who has become monstrous himself...
War films often use children as protagonists - we've seen several in this countdown already (Come and See, Empire of the Sun, The Tin Drum, among others), with more to come surely. There are many reasons for this - I think those reasons add up to to the fact that the plight of children, of childhood, in wartime brings the horror of war into very sharp focus. Children in war films may be victims, they may be corrupted, may become (or be) evil, or at least hard-boiled, they may not seem to understand the nature of war, may not seem to treat it as completely real - but however they act, or are affected by the war, they reveal its nature through what it makes them. Children are new people - they are pliable, in the process of being formed - and what war turns them into shows us what war is. (And this, in turn, is why so many great films about childhood seem to be war films - because childhood is about becoming what you will be, and war heightens that, the way childhood heighten the effects of war. And maybe because childhood isn't necessarily as innocent, pleasant, secure as we wish it were - children in war become hyperbolic versions of childhood in any difficult situation.) Beyond this, children in war films draw the viewer in - child protagonists are often in the position of the viewer, having to learn about their world as they move through it. And maybe most of all - whatever a child might do in a war film, we know the child did not cause the ear. Children are always acted on by the war, no matter how active they are - adults in warfare raise questions of responsibility that children can sidestep.
In Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero, his protagonist, Edmund, does all these things. He is innocent - but he is corrupted, even before the film started (with his Nazi education), and is led to more and more compromised actions that culminate in murder. He is formed by the war, and by the horrific aftermath of the war - learning from it, made what he is by it. And he is our guide to the world of the film, Berlin after the war. This is quite literal - the camera often follows him through the streets, watching him in his environment, showing us the city and what happens there. He guides us through many encounters, vignettes of suffering and cruelty, in the streets and at home. At the same time, though, he is not just guide but quester - searching for food, searching (quite explicitly - Rossellini's symbolism and ideas aren't subtle here) for meaning, what the war meant, what he is, what life means for himself and others. He is both Virgil and Dante in the inferno of ruined Berlin - and one of the damned souls as well, a ghost in a ghost of a city.
There is no question that it is hell, and these are the damned. Rossellini doesn't dwell on Germany's role in the war, but the tone of the film, and the overall gist of the story doesn't leave much doubt about it - the people of Berlin are in hell, a hell on earth, and one they created, and one they damned themselves to. This is a relentlessly pessimistic film. Everyone Edmund encounters is a kind of monster. His father is weak and useless, full of self pity, if basically a decent man; his brother hides from the Allies, a burden to his family, who then whines at them for doing what they have to to help him. His sister, actually, might be the one truly admirable person in the film - willing to do what she can to help her father and brother, unwilling to condemn Edmund for what he does to help them, constantly trying to get Karl-Heinz to take responsibility, all while waiting in vain for her own lover, who is held in a prison camp somewhere. And those are the good guys - their neighbors are selfish bullies who steal and condemn and pass the blame. Edmund meets a former teacher who is a particularly overdetermined monster - a pedophile who seems to live with a ring of pedophiles, an unrepentant Nazi, still preaching its ethos of the strong living at the expense of the weak (while ducking work on some kind of health exemption) and living off the black market. The other kids Edmund encounters are hard-bitten thieves and gangsters. The people in the streets are selfish and dangerous - they fight over a dead horse in the street; old women chase Edmund away from a job he gets, claiming he's too young, though really doing it to get more for themselves. Even the Allies are shown as careless jerks, taking pictures at Hitler's bunker and buying Nazi memorobilia. (Nothing new about nitwits taking selfies at Auschwitz.) There isn't much relief from it, and even good deeds come wrapped in cynicism - a doctor who does a good deed; Christl's relative kindness; Edmund's sister, and Edmund himself, up toa point...
Only up to a point. As things go from bad to worse for Edmund and his family, he begins to consider desperate measures. His father is sick, and after a brief stay in a hospital, he comes home, to find the family in very dire straights. There is no more power in the house; they have no money, no food - they are in trouble. The old man's self-pity is getting the best of him - he tells Edmund he'd be better off dead; when he comes home he says he has been "condemned to live." Well - not for long. Edmund, still scrambling for food or a way out of this, had been talking to the teacher again - Henning spouted Nazi platitudes about letting the weak die so the strong can live, and Edmund took it to heart. He acts: he poisons the old man, hoping that would let the other three get on with their lives. It immediately backfires - the minute he gives his father the poison the police arrive and Karl Heinz decides to do the right thing. (I told you Rossellini wasn't being subtle.) In fact, Karl-Heinz is very quickly released (as his father and sister had told him would happen), but it is too late - the father is dead, and Edmund realizes he killed his father for nothing. It's too much - he runs - retracing many of his steps from earlier in the film, but especially going back to Henning - who drives him away in horror, refusing to take responsibility for what he said.
That (as Rossellini says in the introduction to the film on the Criterion disk) is the key idea of the film - it is about bad education. Edmund is trained by Nazism, grows up in it, internalizing its values - but when he acts on those values, his elders deny responsibility. The symbolism behind this, of the German people creating Nazism willingly, and then trying to pretend it wasn’t them, is clear enough as well. Germans do not come off well. The father, who seems to have disliked Nazism, clearly never had the courage or strength to do anything about it. His sons embrace it unambiguously. Henning is the other side - an unrepentant Nazi, but one who ducks and dodges - avoiding work, avoiding responsibility, dispensing bad advice and running away from it. Getting a former student to peddle Hitler records to soldiers for him (which I suppose is better than the other fate he had in mind for Edmund.) He’s a thoroughly loathsome creature.
And yet, the film is not just about damnation. Alongside Edmund's story runs his brother's story - in some ways, Karl Heinz is the hidden center of the film. He is the source of the family's trouble, being on the run - they have to feed him, and he not only costs them a ration card, but he is the most employable member of the family and does nothing. He is hard to take - preaching at his sister and Edmund for the things they do to feed him (self-righteously refusing to eat the food Edmund brings back from his nighttime adventure, all while reclining on a cot.) But one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way it balances his story against Edmund's. The ironies of their stories are not subtle, the way Karl-Heinz does the right thing at exactly the time Edmund does the worst possible thing - but the construction is more sophisticated than the obvious irony might indicate. Karl-Heinz’s story unfolds in the background - Rossellini watches Edmund, but in a way the real battle is fought over Karl-Heinz - his struggle and his decision is the decisive one. Except it isn’t. The film plays as though we think Edmund’s story is the real one, but the real story that is his brother's - except it isn’t, Edmund's is the real center.
Both brothers act at the same time - Edmund to poison his father; Karl-Heinz to surrender to the Allies - and their actions cancel each other out. Karl-Heinz gives himself up to save his father; Edmund kills his father to save his brother - but when he does, Karl-Heinz no longer needs saving, and when Karl-Heinz acts his father is beyond saving. The final sting of the story comes from the fact that Karl-Heinz could in fact save the family - had he done so at any other time, he would have, but he waited just a bit too long. And, consistent with Rossellini's theme, he waited because of his education - he took to heart what he learned from the Nazis, the need to fight to the death, the lack of mercy to expect from the Allies (probably justified, if he'd been caught by the Russians) - and held until it was too late. And Edmund is doomed.
The final section of the film is devastating. Edmunds walks through the city, retracing many of his travels from earlier in the film. He goes to Henning, who drives him out; he looks for the kids, Joe and Christl, but they chase him away; he wanders the streets, increasingly isolated - he tries to play soccer with some kids, but they won't have him; he hears music, and stands outside a church - but as others go toward the music, he turns away, alone.
And goes on, drawn on to death. But never quite shedding his place as a child. He tries to play, hopscotch, soccer - right up to the end, he is sliding down a bar he finds in a ruined house. But he also can't escape his place as a killer, as the product of a monstrous system who has become monstrous himself...
Friday, September 11, 2015
Music and Sports
Another Friday. Another second Friday of the month, but I don't have anything ready. Hectic week - labor day in Maine, soccer game Tuesday (US vs Brasil, with predictable results). So no Band of the Month quite yet.
Maybe some brief comments on the anniversary. Apparently, someone found some hazardous chemicals in the basement of a convenience store in the Fenway this week. The cops moved in and closed down the area as they investigated. The stuff turned out to be an unauthorized fish oil lab - nothing sinister, just someone cutting corners. Since this was in the Fenway, the Red Sox sent out an advisory through their social media channels - I saw it - and saw that the first comment under it was some wag asking if they found a store of Don Orsillo merchandise.* Another commenter duly weighted in on Taking Threats Seriously and Don't You Remember 9/11? - at least the other commentators snickered at the poor fellow. Yes - it is time to get out from under the bed.
*Don Orsillo - for those of you who are not New Englanders - Orsillo is the Red Sox TV announcer. He was fired this year (his contract not renewed) after 15 years in the booth. He is very popular - and the fans have made their opinions known. And the Red Sox (an organization that usually manages its public presentation pretty well, but are not shy about going full Stalin if they need to), may or may not have gone full Stalin on the fans - confiscating pro-Orsillo signs at the gates. Thus - jokes about the Sox calling in Hazmat teams to confiscate Orsillo merch. Pretty good jokes, actually - gave me a chuckle.
All right. Random songs! hopefully next week we will get a band post (though I have enough coming up to mess that up too... we'll see.)
1. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - As I Sat Sadly by Her Side
2. White Stripes - A Martyr for my Love for You
3. The Carter Family - Lulu Walls
4. Van Halen - Atomic Punk
5. Derek Bailey - What it Is
6. Yo La Tengo - The Whole of the Law
7. The Who - Trilby's Piano
8. Meat Puppets - Love Mountain
9. Times New Viking - No Room to Live
10. METZ - Wet Blanket
And Video? How about some muddy, but occasionally very nice footage of Van Halen live in 1977?
Some Jack and Meg:
And let's do METZ...
Maybe some brief comments on the anniversary. Apparently, someone found some hazardous chemicals in the basement of a convenience store in the Fenway this week. The cops moved in and closed down the area as they investigated. The stuff turned out to be an unauthorized fish oil lab - nothing sinister, just someone cutting corners. Since this was in the Fenway, the Red Sox sent out an advisory through their social media channels - I saw it - and saw that the first comment under it was some wag asking if they found a store of Don Orsillo merchandise.* Another commenter duly weighted in on Taking Threats Seriously and Don't You Remember 9/11? - at least the other commentators snickered at the poor fellow. Yes - it is time to get out from under the bed.
*Don Orsillo - for those of you who are not New Englanders - Orsillo is the Red Sox TV announcer. He was fired this year (his contract not renewed) after 15 years in the booth. He is very popular - and the fans have made their opinions known. And the Red Sox (an organization that usually manages its public presentation pretty well, but are not shy about going full Stalin if they need to), may or may not have gone full Stalin on the fans - confiscating pro-Orsillo signs at the gates. Thus - jokes about the Sox calling in Hazmat teams to confiscate Orsillo merch. Pretty good jokes, actually - gave me a chuckle.
All right. Random songs! hopefully next week we will get a band post (though I have enough coming up to mess that up too... we'll see.)
1. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - As I Sat Sadly by Her Side
2. White Stripes - A Martyr for my Love for You
3. The Carter Family - Lulu Walls
4. Van Halen - Atomic Punk
5. Derek Bailey - What it Is
6. Yo La Tengo - The Whole of the Law
7. The Who - Trilby's Piano
8. Meat Puppets - Love Mountain
9. Times New Viking - No Room to Live
10. METZ - Wet Blanket
And Video? How about some muddy, but occasionally very nice footage of Van Halen live in 1977?
Some Jack and Meg:
And let's do METZ...
Friday, September 04, 2015
Friday in the World
Hello September. Maybe the world will get less stupid coming up - is August really the month of madness? (Via Slacktivist.) Might be - Donald Trump? This Kim Davis nitwit? I see she's off to jail, since she still won't issue marriage licenses, or allow others in the office to issue them instead. And since she is elected, she apparently can't be removed from office - it's jail for contempt for her!
Well - she deserves it. She is a disgrace. Her personal history is bad enough - the 4 marriages, apparently ending up with a fellow religious nut - but even so, she shows a particularly poor understanding of religion. First, those 4 marriages - if you don't recognize divorce, only the first one counts, getting saved isn't going to change that, so unless she goes back to #1, she is committing adultery.... And then there's her job - she talks about the right to exercise her religion - but what does any of this have to do wit her religion? No one is asking her to marry a woman - exercising her religion does not include stopping other people from exercising theirs. A pretty fundamental principal of religious freedom there. And finally - if she were sincere about her religious beliefs - she would have to resign. How could she not resign? If she is so worried that she will go to hell if she somehow facilitates someone else doing something she thinks is a sin - how can she serve in the government at all? By holding the job, drawing the paycheck, she endorses the laws of the land - whether she practices them or not. Any notion of god that forces her to not issue marriage licenses is going to hold her responsible for every single same sex marriage in the country. So all this posturing isn't going to fool a truly jealous god.
It makes one wonder if she might have a different motive, hm?
I've lost most sympathy for this kind of crap. You don't have to be a bigot to be a Christian. Though these days, way too much of Christianity seems to be invested in displaying bigotry. It's all politics - the bigotry drives the rest, people like this Davis call themselves Christians to cover for their vicious politics. She has nothing to do with religious freedom or religion - treating her actions as the sincere (if deluded) beliefs of a true believer is unjustified. She is a political bully, a bigot, a self-promoting thug, wrapping her nastiness in religion to confuse the punters. Though - I know: the punters aren't confused. That brand of Christianity is political from A to Z and it's an authoritarian, racist, violent politics.
I know: too much negativity. Here's a commentary on Kim Davis, dating from the early 70s. The fact that these loons end up reenacting Monty Python, 40 years after the fact - ought to tell us something:
Before getting to the musical part of the program, a somewhat more comical piece of nitwittery: the complaints about Obama renaming Mount McKinley as Denali. This is very amusing, mainly because that's what most people have been calling the mountain for many years - Alaska renamed it some time ago (more accurately: Alaska officially restored the original name some time ago), the Ultimate Arbiter of Truth in America, the Large Corporation, has long since accepted Denali as the name - I mean, Car Companies. This was just Obama making it official federally, bypassing the long standing efforts by Ohio congressmen to block the change. I doubt anyone cares outside the Ohio congressional delegation - though that hasn't stopped the professional Obama haters from milking it for copy. (Kinda like I'm doing here!) This particular claim, that Denali means "Black Power" - it's things like that... An obvious put on, that people (apparently) spread around as if they mean it? You can't tell the rat-fuckers from the Poes sometimes.
enough. Music:
1. Erase Errata - Fault List
2. Slapp Happy/Henry Cow - Giants
3. Pink Floyd - empty Spaces
4. The Flaming Lips - Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell
5. Liars - Who is the Hunter
6. Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today
7. Modest Mouse - Little Motel
8. Billie Holiday - Billie's Blues
9. Badfinger - Day After Day
10. Lou Reed & Metallica - Mistress Dread
Video? Loutallica!
And time has come today, hasn't it?
And Badfinger, because - I am obliged to post any Badfinger that comes up, I think.
Well - she deserves it. She is a disgrace. Her personal history is bad enough - the 4 marriages, apparently ending up with a fellow religious nut - but even so, she shows a particularly poor understanding of religion. First, those 4 marriages - if you don't recognize divorce, only the first one counts, getting saved isn't going to change that, so unless she goes back to #1, she is committing adultery.... And then there's her job - she talks about the right to exercise her religion - but what does any of this have to do wit her religion? No one is asking her to marry a woman - exercising her religion does not include stopping other people from exercising theirs. A pretty fundamental principal of religious freedom there. And finally - if she were sincere about her religious beliefs - she would have to resign. How could she not resign? If she is so worried that she will go to hell if she somehow facilitates someone else doing something she thinks is a sin - how can she serve in the government at all? By holding the job, drawing the paycheck, she endorses the laws of the land - whether she practices them or not. Any notion of god that forces her to not issue marriage licenses is going to hold her responsible for every single same sex marriage in the country. So all this posturing isn't going to fool a truly jealous god.
It makes one wonder if she might have a different motive, hm?
I've lost most sympathy for this kind of crap. You don't have to be a bigot to be a Christian. Though these days, way too much of Christianity seems to be invested in displaying bigotry. It's all politics - the bigotry drives the rest, people like this Davis call themselves Christians to cover for their vicious politics. She has nothing to do with religious freedom or religion - treating her actions as the sincere (if deluded) beliefs of a true believer is unjustified. She is a political bully, a bigot, a self-promoting thug, wrapping her nastiness in religion to confuse the punters. Though - I know: the punters aren't confused. That brand of Christianity is political from A to Z and it's an authoritarian, racist, violent politics.
I know: too much negativity. Here's a commentary on Kim Davis, dating from the early 70s. The fact that these loons end up reenacting Monty Python, 40 years after the fact - ought to tell us something:
Before getting to the musical part of the program, a somewhat more comical piece of nitwittery: the complaints about Obama renaming Mount McKinley as Denali. This is very amusing, mainly because that's what most people have been calling the mountain for many years - Alaska renamed it some time ago (more accurately: Alaska officially restored the original name some time ago), the Ultimate Arbiter of Truth in America, the Large Corporation, has long since accepted Denali as the name - I mean, Car Companies. This was just Obama making it official federally, bypassing the long standing efforts by Ohio congressmen to block the change. I doubt anyone cares outside the Ohio congressional delegation - though that hasn't stopped the professional Obama haters from milking it for copy. (Kinda like I'm doing here!) This particular claim, that Denali means "Black Power" - it's things like that... An obvious put on, that people (apparently) spread around as if they mean it? You can't tell the rat-fuckers from the Poes sometimes.
enough. Music:
1. Erase Errata - Fault List
2. Slapp Happy/Henry Cow - Giants
3. Pink Floyd - empty Spaces
4. The Flaming Lips - Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell
5. Liars - Who is the Hunter
6. Chambers Brothers - Time Has Come Today
7. Modest Mouse - Little Motel
8. Billie Holiday - Billie's Blues
9. Badfinger - Day After Day
10. Lou Reed & Metallica - Mistress Dread
Video? Loutallica!
And time has come today, hasn't it?
And Badfinger, because - I am obliged to post any Badfinger that comes up, I think.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Friday Music Quickie
I am starting to run late this morning, so here is a simple random ten to keep the blog alive. I may be back later with something else - politics? film? who knows. For now, here's music:
1. PJ Harvey - Written on the Forehead
2. Eric Dolphy - Bird's Mother
3. Boris - Laser Beam
4. The Who - Young Man's Blues (live at Leeds)
5. Deerhoof = Panda Panda Panda
6. David Bowie - Starman
7. Sleater Kinney - Hollywood Ending
8. Wire - Mr. Suit
9. Yoko Ono - Open Your Box
10. Elvis Costello - Alison (live)
Video? The Who at the Isle of Wight to start off:
More drumming brilliance, Greg Saunier and Deerhoof:
And end with Elvis:
1. PJ Harvey - Written on the Forehead
2. Eric Dolphy - Bird's Mother
3. Boris - Laser Beam
4. The Who - Young Man's Blues (live at Leeds)
5. Deerhoof = Panda Panda Panda
6. David Bowie - Starman
7. Sleater Kinney - Hollywood Ending
8. Wire - Mr. Suit
9. Yoko Ono - Open Your Box
10. Elvis Costello - Alison (live)
Video? The Who at the Isle of Wight to start off:
More drumming brilliance, Greg Saunier and Deerhoof:
And end with Elvis:
Friday, August 21, 2015
Lazy Summer Day
Another Friday. Another hot, sticky week, so I have gotten nothing of importance done, certainly nothing to post. I don't have much to talk about today - the world outside is as stupid as ever, with Donald Trump still showing up on every news source; Josh Duggar caught with his pants down again... though the Red Sox have been winning,a nd have unloaded Ben Cherington (and his 3 last place finishes in 4 years)...
And right now it is pouring outside - which might cool things down, if we're lucky. Maybe. Gotta hope.
Anyway - some music from the iRandomizer:
1. Bobby Darin - Happy
2. Franz Ferdinand - Stand on the Horizon
3. Peter Laughner - Lullaby
4. Madvillain - Rhinestone Cowboy
5. Mogwai - We're No Here
6. Gordon Lightfoot - Go-go Round
7. AC/DC - Ride On
8. Boredoms - Bo Go
9. Dead Moon - Dead Moon Night
10. The Carter Family - Bury me Under the Weeping Willow Tree
That was particularly random... Video? Dead Moon sounds like a good place to start:
or - Roseanne Cash, singing Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow Tree:
And - nothing live with Bon Scott on it, but some nice footage of old Bon, accompanying AC/DC's foray into slow blues:
And right now it is pouring outside - which might cool things down, if we're lucky. Maybe. Gotta hope.
Anyway - some music from the iRandomizer:
1. Bobby Darin - Happy
2. Franz Ferdinand - Stand on the Horizon
3. Peter Laughner - Lullaby
4. Madvillain - Rhinestone Cowboy
5. Mogwai - We're No Here
6. Gordon Lightfoot - Go-go Round
7. AC/DC - Ride On
8. Boredoms - Bo Go
9. Dead Moon - Dead Moon Night
10. The Carter Family - Bury me Under the Weeping Willow Tree
That was particularly random... Video? Dead Moon sounds like a good place to start:
or - Roseanne Cash, singing Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow Tree:
And - nothing live with Bon Scott on it, but some nice footage of old Bon, accompanying AC/DC's foray into slow blues:
Friday, August 14, 2015
That Used to be My Favorite Song
I don't know if it is just August, or if I have hit a snag, but I am having a hard time coming up with a subject for this month's Band of the Month. Probably mostly August and sloth, but I can see the shoals a-comin'. Not that there aren't plenty of bands left to write about (and list off songs) - but it might be harder to run out those 2000 word essays I am sometimes guilty of. And - I am starting to get to bands that, well, I think I need to do more work on before I write about. I may be forced to start researching these posts.
So far, I have had 3 criteria for this series: 1) bands I love, or have loved, or something like that; 2) bands that have some autobiographical significance - though this is starting to run out - quite a few of the recent bands have just been favorites, without a huge amount of biographical importance; 3) Bands that I have listened to pretty extensively, if not exhaustively - though a lot of them are pretty close to exhaustively, at least for their regular official releases. Now - 1 is not a problem - still lots of bands I like out there, love even - some quite devotedly. 2 might be harder to continue with - I got most of the extra-musical stuff done the first year. But it's 3 that's starting to pose problems. Maybe I should put up a 4) Bands that have put out a significant amount of music, that I am familiar with all the way through. Because when I look at the bands I haven't written about yet, that I want to - I notice a couple things. On the one side, bands that haven't got a very big library of material - Joy Division, Television, Gang of Four, Mission of Burma, say. And on the other side, bands that have a huge mass of material that I have not listened to comprehensively. I have a fair amount of Bob Dylan records, say, but there is such a mass of it... David Bowie; Neil Young; Captain Beefheart; Frank Zappa; the Kinks - I have a reasonable amount of most of them, but way less than half their total output. It is a problem. Other than Johnny Cash and a couple acts I dropped in the middle of their careers (Bruce Springsteen; U2) I have, or at least have heard, more or less everything (at least the official everything) of the bands I've listed. To do that with Dylan or Young to the Kinks is going to cost me a pretty penny and lots of time. It poses a problem.
Not an insurmountable problem. I rather look forward to spending some time trying to fill out my collection of Kinks or David Bowie records. (Dylan is daunting.) And there are bands that fit the criteria pretty well, and I am shameless enough to do a top ten off a greatest hits record if I have to... Material is forthcoming. But this is a good time to mark the likelihood that I might shift the focus of this series a bit, from bands to other sets of music. I started it partly as a way to add a little substance to my weekly music posts - something I tried fitfully through the years (like this one about a particularly nice Television song), but only managed to do with this series. It is something we may see more of though. Other types of lists (by decades or years or genres or what have you) - or whatever I do to accommodate bands that have problems fitting into the top 10 format. There are quite a few of those - from bands that only managed a couple records (a top 10 Sex Pistols songs list?) to bands that don't work through conventional songs. I have listened to a lot of more experimental bands in the last 10-15 years - Earth and Acid Mothers Temple and Godspeed You Black Emperor and so on - that... work differently. Even some more conventional bands feel that way to me - Sonic Youth and Six Organs of Admittance and the Melvins and Boris - seem harder to make a top 10 of then, you know, Bob Dylan.
All right. So - sorry for the meta whatever post this month. We should be back top our regularly scheduled whatever next month.
And since I couldn't settle on a band to write about, and indeed began to brood about same - let's go the opposite direction. If I am stymied in writing about Dylan or Bowie (who are on my mind) because I am missing too much of their music - let's make a virtue of it: and write about the best songs I have totally in isolation. That is: songs I have in iTunes, rated 5 stars (and then listed in order) - that are the only song I own by the artist. Which yields an unusual set of material, actually. Peter Gabriel? I like Peter Gabriel! I like lots of Peter Gabriel songs - but this is the only one I have bothered to acquire in any form. There are a couple of those - the Eels, The Brothers Johnson - I should have more of their stuff. It's not impossible I do, somewhere in some box somewhere, a greatest hits record or some such - when I started using iTunes I stuck a lot of single songs on it. Who knows. That is certainly the case with the Hoodoo Gurus - there's a compilation somewhere in the stacks... I was worried there might be some cringy songs on here - there are - Kansas? I can imagine some pushback against the Starland Vocal Band - though at least I avoided Coldplay. A close thing, too - I like Clocks, a fact that grieves me sore.... Still: this is not a guilty pleasures kind of post. I have also steered away from outright novelty songs - Right Said Fred (song or band), that sort of thing.... And so, without further ado - here it is: best 10 songs on my computer by artists I only have one song by on my computer:
1. Hoodoo Gurus - Bittersweet [Somewhere in the past I took the rest of the record this comes from off the computer; I considered eliminating them because of this - I own more - but... no, I'll stick with the letter of the law - this is the only song on the computer, so it goes... And indeed, it should be here, since this as good a justification for this post as any: a song that is seriously perfect, by a band that is mostly forgettable. No - that's not right: I remember the rest of their material as very pleasant pop rock in the same vein as this - but this transcends the rest of it. Alex Chilton would be proud of this song. It deserves a list to top.]
2. Peter Gabriel - Games without Frontiers
3. Brothers Johnson - Strawberry Letter 23
4. Eddie Money - Two Tickets to Paradise [this is pretty much the perfect song for this list: Eddie Money is awful; this is a surprisingly good song, and the guitar solo is, of course, brilliant.]
5. Mamas & the Papas - California Dreamin' [I think I must be dreamin' I have heard Monday Monday on my iPod - apparently it's not there.]
6. The Eels - Novacaine for the Soul [I should listen to them more]
7. Roger Miller - King of the Road [sort of novelty, but who doesn't love Roger Miller?]
8. Blind Melon - No Rain [another perfect fit for this - I have never heard any other Blind Melon songs - has anyone, ever? But I do like this.]
9. Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son [a bit surprising that Dust in the Wind, at least, has never crept onto the machine, but just as well really.]
10. Starland Vocal Band - Afternoon Delight [definitely a novelty, but it's a hell of a novelty]
Video? 4 aging Australians who have probably played this song 2-300 times a year for the past 25 years, and still hit it dead square. There is nobility in that, something positively moving.
it's a knockout.... I am rather surprised I don't have any more Peter Gabriel (or Genesis, in any form) - I'm not a huge fan, but he (and they) have made some good stuff, something I should have. I have this anyway:
As for the Brothers Johnson, I think I do have a greatest hits record buried somewhere - I might have to find that... Since I haven't put it on the computer, I can include this song in this post, and it is Ace,
Trailors for sale or rent, rooms to let 50 cents... Roger Miller performing on TV, with the kids squealing like he's a Beatle:
And I will end with Kansas - I think Steve Walsh wanted people to know he was working out.
So far, I have had 3 criteria for this series: 1) bands I love, or have loved, or something like that; 2) bands that have some autobiographical significance - though this is starting to run out - quite a few of the recent bands have just been favorites, without a huge amount of biographical importance; 3) Bands that I have listened to pretty extensively, if not exhaustively - though a lot of them are pretty close to exhaustively, at least for their regular official releases. Now - 1 is not a problem - still lots of bands I like out there, love even - some quite devotedly. 2 might be harder to continue with - I got most of the extra-musical stuff done the first year. But it's 3 that's starting to pose problems. Maybe I should put up a 4) Bands that have put out a significant amount of music, that I am familiar with all the way through. Because when I look at the bands I haven't written about yet, that I want to - I notice a couple things. On the one side, bands that haven't got a very big library of material - Joy Division, Television, Gang of Four, Mission of Burma, say. And on the other side, bands that have a huge mass of material that I have not listened to comprehensively. I have a fair amount of Bob Dylan records, say, but there is such a mass of it... David Bowie; Neil Young; Captain Beefheart; Frank Zappa; the Kinks - I have a reasonable amount of most of them, but way less than half their total output. It is a problem. Other than Johnny Cash and a couple acts I dropped in the middle of their careers (Bruce Springsteen; U2) I have, or at least have heard, more or less everything (at least the official everything) of the bands I've listed. To do that with Dylan or Young to the Kinks is going to cost me a pretty penny and lots of time. It poses a problem.
Not an insurmountable problem. I rather look forward to spending some time trying to fill out my collection of Kinks or David Bowie records. (Dylan is daunting.) And there are bands that fit the criteria pretty well, and I am shameless enough to do a top ten off a greatest hits record if I have to... Material is forthcoming. But this is a good time to mark the likelihood that I might shift the focus of this series a bit, from bands to other sets of music. I started it partly as a way to add a little substance to my weekly music posts - something I tried fitfully through the years (like this one about a particularly nice Television song), but only managed to do with this series. It is something we may see more of though. Other types of lists (by decades or years or genres or what have you) - or whatever I do to accommodate bands that have problems fitting into the top 10 format. There are quite a few of those - from bands that only managed a couple records (a top 10 Sex Pistols songs list?) to bands that don't work through conventional songs. I have listened to a lot of more experimental bands in the last 10-15 years - Earth and Acid Mothers Temple and Godspeed You Black Emperor and so on - that... work differently. Even some more conventional bands feel that way to me - Sonic Youth and Six Organs of Admittance and the Melvins and Boris - seem harder to make a top 10 of then, you know, Bob Dylan.
All right. So - sorry for the meta whatever post this month. We should be back top our regularly scheduled whatever next month.
And since I couldn't settle on a band to write about, and indeed began to brood about same - let's go the opposite direction. If I am stymied in writing about Dylan or Bowie (who are on my mind) because I am missing too much of their music - let's make a virtue of it: and write about the best songs I have totally in isolation. That is: songs I have in iTunes, rated 5 stars (and then listed in order) - that are the only song I own by the artist. Which yields an unusual set of material, actually. Peter Gabriel? I like Peter Gabriel! I like lots of Peter Gabriel songs - but this is the only one I have bothered to acquire in any form. There are a couple of those - the Eels, The Brothers Johnson - I should have more of their stuff. It's not impossible I do, somewhere in some box somewhere, a greatest hits record or some such - when I started using iTunes I stuck a lot of single songs on it. Who knows. That is certainly the case with the Hoodoo Gurus - there's a compilation somewhere in the stacks... I was worried there might be some cringy songs on here - there are - Kansas? I can imagine some pushback against the Starland Vocal Band - though at least I avoided Coldplay. A close thing, too - I like Clocks, a fact that grieves me sore.... Still: this is not a guilty pleasures kind of post. I have also steered away from outright novelty songs - Right Said Fred (song or band), that sort of thing.... And so, without further ado - here it is: best 10 songs on my computer by artists I only have one song by on my computer:
1. Hoodoo Gurus - Bittersweet [Somewhere in the past I took the rest of the record this comes from off the computer; I considered eliminating them because of this - I own more - but... no, I'll stick with the letter of the law - this is the only song on the computer, so it goes... And indeed, it should be here, since this as good a justification for this post as any: a song that is seriously perfect, by a band that is mostly forgettable. No - that's not right: I remember the rest of their material as very pleasant pop rock in the same vein as this - but this transcends the rest of it. Alex Chilton would be proud of this song. It deserves a list to top.]
2. Peter Gabriel - Games without Frontiers
3. Brothers Johnson - Strawberry Letter 23
4. Eddie Money - Two Tickets to Paradise [this is pretty much the perfect song for this list: Eddie Money is awful; this is a surprisingly good song, and the guitar solo is, of course, brilliant.]
5. Mamas & the Papas - California Dreamin' [I think I must be dreamin' I have heard Monday Monday on my iPod - apparently it's not there.]
6. The Eels - Novacaine for the Soul [I should listen to them more]
7. Roger Miller - King of the Road [sort of novelty, but who doesn't love Roger Miller?]
8. Blind Melon - No Rain [another perfect fit for this - I have never heard any other Blind Melon songs - has anyone, ever? But I do like this.]
9. Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son [a bit surprising that Dust in the Wind, at least, has never crept onto the machine, but just as well really.]
10. Starland Vocal Band - Afternoon Delight [definitely a novelty, but it's a hell of a novelty]
Video? 4 aging Australians who have probably played this song 2-300 times a year for the past 25 years, and still hit it dead square. There is nobility in that, something positively moving.
it's a knockout.... I am rather surprised I don't have any more Peter Gabriel (or Genesis, in any form) - I'm not a huge fan, but he (and they) have made some good stuff, something I should have. I have this anyway:
As for the Brothers Johnson, I think I do have a greatest hits record buried somewhere - I might have to find that... Since I haven't put it on the computer, I can include this song in this post, and it is Ace,
Trailors for sale or rent, rooms to let 50 cents... Roger Miller performing on TV, with the kids squealing like he's a Beatle:
And I will end with Kansas - I think Steve Walsh wanted people to know he was working out.
Friday, August 07, 2015
Dog Days of Music
High summer has been here, though we're probably starting to get past the worst of it. New England having gotten off very lightly this year - the world outside is melting and we are getting nothing worse than a week or so of moderate heat. We did get a neat hail storm the other day, even neater for being done and the sun back out in half an hour or so. Still - I think I will keep it simple this week - just see what iTunes can produce. Nothing worth noting going on in the world (Republican debate? why do I care? I don't watch Fox news, and don't care who they give a show to - and is this about anything more lofty than getting a slot of Fox?) Anyhoo...
1. Bruce Springsteen - Jungleland
2. 13th Floor Elevators - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
3. My Bloody Valentine - (When you Wake) You're Still in a Dream
4. Badfinger - No Matter What
5. Dungen - Finns Det Nagon Mojlighet
6. Bruce Springsteen - Atlantic City
7. The Red Krayola - Yik Yak
8. Raconteurs - The Switch and the Spur
9. Earth - Like Gold and Faceted
10. Cream - Badge
Video: Broooce!
Maybe some Badfinger:
and - though both are sound only - we can't let 2 sets of Texas geniuses come up witdhout posting something, can we? Red Krayola -
and 13th Floor Elevators, live:
1. Bruce Springsteen - Jungleland
2. 13th Floor Elevators - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
3. My Bloody Valentine - (When you Wake) You're Still in a Dream
4. Badfinger - No Matter What
5. Dungen - Finns Det Nagon Mojlighet
6. Bruce Springsteen - Atlantic City
7. The Red Krayola - Yik Yak
8. Raconteurs - The Switch and the Spur
9. Earth - Like Gold and Faceted
10. Cream - Badge
Video: Broooce!
Maybe some Badfinger:
and - though both are sound only - we can't let 2 sets of Texas geniuses come up witdhout posting something, can we? Red Krayola -
and 13th Floor Elevators, live:
Wednesday, August 05, 2015
Summer time Film Going
It has been a long time since I have managed to do this - I need to get back into the habit. I could blame my Russian class int he spring, and have been inclined to blame the heat lately - but there is no excuse. Time to write! Time to write about films - since the end of June, these are.
Starting with the most recent films I saw, two extraordinary documentaries about the evil than men do and the good they would do. Both utterly heart breaking films:
Don't Think I have Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll - 12/15 - Documentary about Cambodia's rock and roll scene of the 60s and 70s, and also Cambodia's history through its pop music, Sinn Sisimouth on. Start with Cambodia's independence - France let them go without a drawn out war - and continues through the 50s and 60s, as they tried to find a place to survive in an increasingly perilous world. Follows the music - the influences from outside - Afro-cuban, French, later British, American soul, American rock - showing how these outside styles influenced their music, and how the music itself evolved. The European and American music fed into Cambodian styles, especially gtheir singing styles and melodies, to create something really cool. There's quite a lot of detail, digging into the artists, the development of the music, the business and so on. This story is poised against the political history - Cambodia's attempts to thread a neutral path between its enemies - which can't hold. You see the dangers gathering - you see the bad decisions by Cambodians (Sihanouk's flirtations with both sides, the coup that overthrew him, his flirtation with the Khmer Rouge), the casual villainy of the United States, the opportunism of the Chinese and Vietnamese - leading to the final horror of the Khmer Rouge takeover. And the killing fields - which wiped out not just the music, but many of the musicians. Seeing them bac to back, you can't help notice the parallels with Look of Silence - in Cambodia, communists killed anti-communists; in Indonesia, anti-communists killed communists - though the actual targets of both seem eerily similar - artists, intellectuals, small time labor leaders, teachers.... At the end - the film does justice to those who survived - letting them speak, of the joys of their youth and the horrors of the 70s - and is a fine tribute to them all.
Look of Silence - 13/15 - This is the follow up to one of the films of the decade, The Act of Killing - again examining the anti-communist bloodbath of the 1960s in Indonesia. This time, Joshua Oppenheimer approaches the killings from the victim's side, particular one Adi, the brother of a man killed in the massacre in 1965. Adi was born later, 1968 - he grew up without the direct memory of the killings, though unable to escape their effects. He is an eye doctor, and uses this as a hook to talk to many of the people involved in killing his brother - he meets them and tries to get them to apologize, not heavy handedly - just telling them who he is, and asking if they have regrets. These interviews are the spine of the film. There are several of them. A thin old man who talks about drinking blood to not go crazy, and asks why Adi wants to talk about politics. The leader of the paramilitary, who brags about the killings until Adi mentions his brother, then tries hard to avoid the responsibility. (Oh, the army ordered us! he says.) There's a politician who as much as threatens that they will do it again if Adi keeps asking questions. Then another old man with his daughter - she talks about being proud of her father, but then the old man tells his version of the story of drinking blood to not go mad, and she cracks. Indeed - she is the one person on the side of the killers who does so - she apologizes, begs forgiveness, tries to reconcile. Adi talks to his own uncle, who was in the army, a guard at the prison camp - who tries to avoid responsibility for his part And finally, Adi confronts the widow of another of the leaders, a man who had been seen bragging about it on archive footage, showing off a book about it and bragging about killing Ramli (Adi's brother) by name. Ramli died hard - running away, being recaptured, being stabbed repeatedly without dying, finally being castrated and bleeding to death. Adi asks his widow and children about it, and they deny ever knowing about it - he shows them the book, with a drawing of Ramli being taken away from his family and they deny ever seeing the book. So Oppenheimer plays the clips from earlier, showing the man talking about it, showing the book to his wife and others. The man's sons get defensive and even turn on Oppenheimer. These visits are interwoven with scenes with Adi's family - his parents (father ancient, blind, crippled, mostly deaf, thinking he is 17, forgetting everything else - his mother, also old though not that old, and seeming to have forgotten nothing - and his children, growing up learning the stories of the killings, that still praise them as defeating evil communists. The film ends, finally, with Adi and his parents visiting another survivor - the father is lost, he doesn't know where he is; the mother falls into the man's arms weeping.
In the end, this is less formally thrilling than The Act of Killing, but even more gut wrenching. And it is a picture of the sheerest courage - Adi's interviews with his brother's killers might be the bravest thing I have ever seen on film. More than once, you know that all that is standing between Adi and death is a Danish film crew and an American with a camera. (An impression borne out in Oppenheimer's description of the measures they took to ensure their safety.) In a way, this film works like a sane, pacifist version of The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on - Adi confronts people who did heinous things, trying, over and over, to get them to acknowledge what they did, and that it was heinous - without any luck. But he does so peacefully, gently even, calm and direct in the face of the past - as quiet as Kenzo Okuzaki is ferocious. Paired, especially, Oppenheimer's films rank with the very best documentaries.
The Tribe - 11/15 - A fairly standard Young Gangster film made interesting by 2 things - all the characters are deaf, and perform it all in sign language without translations; and it contains a total of 34 shots (per IMDB; I counted 28 myself, but probably missed a handful.) Those are both gimmicks, but they work. The film is a tour de force, with those long takes and silence, and the visual punch of the sign language - performed with great elan, and very well made. Clear story telling, visually engaging, and so on. The formal properties are superb: the silence, the editing, the camera movements, the use of sound, the choreography - bands of kids moving back and forth - as well as the silent filmmaking chops. The story - is old hat, probably old hat 100 years ago (one kid in a gang falls for one of the girls and gets crosswise the rest of the gang, with lethal results), but traditional genres are traditional for reasons; this one doesn't do anything new with the story, but plenty new (or newish), and all very well with the form. And old hat or not, it is engaging - a very good film.
Do I Sound Gay? - 10/15 - Documentary about the "gay voice" - where it comes from, what it is, and so on - interesting, if not revelatory. Follows the writer/director, David Thorpe, as he examines his own voice, and takes steps to change it - there is plenty of interesting material around this. Old clips of comedians with "sissy" voices - Paul Lynde, Rip Taylor, Charles Nelson Reilly, Liberace - as a potential model; interviews with speech therapists, on the gendering of speech and so on; discussions of performance, and how - and why - sounding gay is sometimes perceived as worse than being gay. (A revealing Louis CK joke to that affect...) There is a lot of interesting material here, maybe too much - lots of questions and observations are raised, but they aren't always followed through that deeply.
Tangerine - 12/15 - Christmas eve in LA, with 2 trans prostitutes, Alexandra and Sin-Dee Rella. Sindee is just out of jail, and Alexandra tells her that her pimp/lover has been cheating, with a woman - so Sindee goes on the war path to find her. She tracks her down, and drags her back to confront Chester the pimp, while the film follows two other characters, Alexandra, and an Armenia cabbie named Razmik, who is having a very bad day. Annoying fares, 2 drunks puking in his cab, and finally what he thinks is a ladyboy prostitute who doesn't have anything between her legs - but he hooks up with Alexandra, and things get better. That night, Alexandra has a gig singing in a club - though only Sindee and Chester's white fish show up. And then they all converge on the donut shop (Sindee, the white girl, Chester, Alexandra, Razmik, Razmik's mother in law and his wife) to have it out. All of it adds up to a remarkable film. Shot on iPhones, taking full advantage of their size and flexibility, a really fine looking film. It's carried by the performances though - the leads (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) are fantastic - charismatic, funny, surprising. A very fine film.
Mr. Holmes - 9/15 - An entertaining and sometimes almost moving story about a very old Sherlock Holmes, losing his memory, going to Japan to get "Prickly Ash" - a plant with magical powers he hopes. He is hosted by a Japanaese man who seems to adulate him, but turns out to have lost his father because Holmes told the man to stay in England. Back in England, Holmes' health declines, and especially his memory - but he teaches his housekeeper's son bee keeping, and tries to remember a story that caused him to retire. The film jumps around between these time frames - the present in the country, the story he is trying to remember, and his time in Japan - and all come to their climax together. Roger is stung almost to death, but by wasps (one last piece of fairly obvious detection for the old man), and he remembers the story - a woman who lost two still born children loses her mind and he doesn't prevent her suicide... (Sorry for spoiling it, in case anyone is reading this... but I've spoiled better films already haven't I?) Anyway - it is sentimental nonsense - I've been reading Sherlock Holmes stories this summer and he failed rather often to save people, and while he always strove to avenge them, it doesn't seem likely to break him... But that aside - apart from the sentimentality, Ian McKellan and the kid playing Roger (Milo Parker) are fantastic. I'm sure Laura Linney would be too, if she had anything to do. But they are great and worth seeing the film for.
Amy - 11/15 - Biography of Amy Winehouse that does justice to her, as an artist as well as a fuckup. Starts with Amy in home movies, ae 14 or so, belting out happy birtthday, and then marches through her life - singing professionally at 16, making a record around 20, winning prizes, with a kind of jazzy sound - going more pop in 2006 with a huge record - then everything coming apart. Though we also see that it was always apart - she was already a pothead at 16, etc. Her nemesis is her boyfriend and eventual husband, one Blake Fielder, a flashy club kid who takes up with her, lives an amour fou, then dumps her; when she becomes a huge star he comes back, and they sink into crack, heroin and so on (along with booze) - and - 5 years of decline as it happened, until she died. And so? I didn't think much about Amy Winehouse when she was alive - the film does a fine job of demonstrating what the fuss was about. She had a stunning set of pipes, and more talent for song writing than I had any idea of. The film dwells on her songs - maybe leaning a bit toward milking the autobiographical content from them, but still showing them clearly, showing her songwriting skills. They are good songs. I'm still not totally convinced - she's a fine singer, a master of old styles, but all of it comes off a bit to derivative, too polite - she's too much Tony Bennett, not enough Frank Sinatra. But that's a matter of degrees - and she died at 27 and was basically done as an artist at 22 - if she'd had half a chance to survive a while, she might have lived up to the raw talent. Unfortunately, her doom seems pre-ordained: she was screwed up young and stayed screwed up, and surrounded by people who wren't going to let her troubles get in the way of her paycheck. Blake might be the most obvious monster, but you feel a hint or so of sympathy for him - he's in the same state she's in, after all. But her father and her manager come off as just about as crass and oblivious to her condition - they are riding the gravy train and trying to get everything out of it they can, as if they knew she wasn't long for the world, and they wee going to make their bank before she went. The kid never had a chance.
Big Game - 8/15 - Fake 80s style action comedy - the president's plane is shot down in Finland by Walter Palmer - wait, no - but - terrorists, or big game hunters - something. But on the ground, the president (played by Samuel L Jackson, who would make a fine president) is found by a 13 year old on some kind of coming of age mission to kill him an animal in the woods. The kid proceeds to save the day. Yay! It is all amusing, sometimes very nifty - though also usually simplistic and sometimes rather dumb. It's an homage to the 80s, in a way that seems half serious and half comical - since a lot of the films it riffs on were half serious half comic the math get confusing - but it's more than enjoyable enough on its own terms.
Testament of Youth - 9/15 - This is a handsome, inteligent adaptation of Vera Brittain's memoir of WWI. Brittain's book is a bit of a brute - very long and full of horrors, being about WWI - the film is not very long, and though it has its share of horrors it doesn't really do justice to the book. It starts well, this new film, but falls apart in the second half - which is probably an inevitable by product of the story. The book covers WWI and its aftermath - an in conventional terms (and this is a very conventional film), her story is very front-loaded. All the drama happens up front - she studies for Oxford - she meets Roland Leighton, a young poet on his way to Oxford - she gets into Oxford! - the war starts and all the boys go off to war - she goes to Oxford, but decides she can't be in school while men are dying in the Belgian mud, so she becomes a VAD (a volunteer nurse) - and then Roland dies in the Belgian mud. All that is by the end of 1915: there are still 3 years of war to go; 3 more close friends to die; and then it's back to Oxford and time to End War Forever. The effect is noticeable in the book (which I read for the class I've mentioned before, The Great War in Film and Literature) - it is a definite slog through the middle parts, a long march of death and pain - but Brittain knows it, and makes that part of the story. It is a story of endurance, survival - and survivor's guilt (in spades) - and maybe ultimately redemption and return to life, sort of. She makes it work by making the endurance part of her subject - treating her experiences like stations of the cross in her education: the Mediterrainean, Edward's wounding, Victor's death, her time in France and Hope Milroy, Edward's death and so on. And she makes it work by always maintaining a double perspective on the material, from beginning to end. Her voice writing in 1933 is always present, always important - along with her sense of her immediate reactions to events. (Often achieved with primary sources - letters and poems written at the time, incorporated whole into the memoir.) This film is pretty good, actually, through the first part, the dramatic part, the love story - but completely lost once Roland is gone. It never figures out how to get through the rest of the war, so reduces the main events to a couple scenes, and drops much of the material that gives the book its emotional punch: the sense of the length of the war; Vera's friendship with an older nurse, Hope Milroy; her brother's increasing bitterness as the war progresses. It speeds past things that have great resonance for Vera - her survivor's guilt, particularly, which is made worse when she leaves the VAD to take care of her mother; this happens in the film without any weight. It's probably hopeless, really - there's no way to make a conventional film out of the material without butchering the material, and this is a very conventional film. Though to be fair - even as a mini-series, it ran into trouble - it could cover the material, but they also dropped Brittain's narration, and that flattened out the material. It's a problem - that love story at the beginning makes it a tempting story to film - the rest of the story makes it very likely to come short...
Still - I wish they could have done better. The cast is very good - Alicia Vikander is especially good, Kit Harrington holds his own, and the rest of the cast is fine. But Vikander, particularly, doesn't get enough to do - Vera Brittain's character is flattened out along with the story - the politics (and it is a very political book - feminist and pacifist, and quite pointedly so in both) is mostly gone, certainly made polite. She registers suffering - she doesn't register the anger that is obvious in the book...
Starting with the most recent films I saw, two extraordinary documentaries about the evil than men do and the good they would do. Both utterly heart breaking films:
Don't Think I have Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll - 12/15 - Documentary about Cambodia's rock and roll scene of the 60s and 70s, and also Cambodia's history through its pop music, Sinn Sisimouth on. Start with Cambodia's independence - France let them go without a drawn out war - and continues through the 50s and 60s, as they tried to find a place to survive in an increasingly perilous world. Follows the music - the influences from outside - Afro-cuban, French, later British, American soul, American rock - showing how these outside styles influenced their music, and how the music itself evolved. The European and American music fed into Cambodian styles, especially gtheir singing styles and melodies, to create something really cool. There's quite a lot of detail, digging into the artists, the development of the music, the business and so on. This story is poised against the political history - Cambodia's attempts to thread a neutral path between its enemies - which can't hold. You see the dangers gathering - you see the bad decisions by Cambodians (Sihanouk's flirtations with both sides, the coup that overthrew him, his flirtation with the Khmer Rouge), the casual villainy of the United States, the opportunism of the Chinese and Vietnamese - leading to the final horror of the Khmer Rouge takeover. And the killing fields - which wiped out not just the music, but many of the musicians. Seeing them bac to back, you can't help notice the parallels with Look of Silence - in Cambodia, communists killed anti-communists; in Indonesia, anti-communists killed communists - though the actual targets of both seem eerily similar - artists, intellectuals, small time labor leaders, teachers.... At the end - the film does justice to those who survived - letting them speak, of the joys of their youth and the horrors of the 70s - and is a fine tribute to them all.
Look of Silence - 13/15 - This is the follow up to one of the films of the decade, The Act of Killing - again examining the anti-communist bloodbath of the 1960s in Indonesia. This time, Joshua Oppenheimer approaches the killings from the victim's side, particular one Adi, the brother of a man killed in the massacre in 1965. Adi was born later, 1968 - he grew up without the direct memory of the killings, though unable to escape their effects. He is an eye doctor, and uses this as a hook to talk to many of the people involved in killing his brother - he meets them and tries to get them to apologize, not heavy handedly - just telling them who he is, and asking if they have regrets. These interviews are the spine of the film. There are several of them. A thin old man who talks about drinking blood to not go crazy, and asks why Adi wants to talk about politics. The leader of the paramilitary, who brags about the killings until Adi mentions his brother, then tries hard to avoid the responsibility. (Oh, the army ordered us! he says.) There's a politician who as much as threatens that they will do it again if Adi keeps asking questions. Then another old man with his daughter - she talks about being proud of her father, but then the old man tells his version of the story of drinking blood to not go mad, and she cracks. Indeed - she is the one person on the side of the killers who does so - she apologizes, begs forgiveness, tries to reconcile. Adi talks to his own uncle, who was in the army, a guard at the prison camp - who tries to avoid responsibility for his part And finally, Adi confronts the widow of another of the leaders, a man who had been seen bragging about it on archive footage, showing off a book about it and bragging about killing Ramli (Adi's brother) by name. Ramli died hard - running away, being recaptured, being stabbed repeatedly without dying, finally being castrated and bleeding to death. Adi asks his widow and children about it, and they deny ever knowing about it - he shows them the book, with a drawing of Ramli being taken away from his family and they deny ever seeing the book. So Oppenheimer plays the clips from earlier, showing the man talking about it, showing the book to his wife and others. The man's sons get defensive and even turn on Oppenheimer. These visits are interwoven with scenes with Adi's family - his parents (father ancient, blind, crippled, mostly deaf, thinking he is 17, forgetting everything else - his mother, also old though not that old, and seeming to have forgotten nothing - and his children, growing up learning the stories of the killings, that still praise them as defeating evil communists. The film ends, finally, with Adi and his parents visiting another survivor - the father is lost, he doesn't know where he is; the mother falls into the man's arms weeping.
In the end, this is less formally thrilling than The Act of Killing, but even more gut wrenching. And it is a picture of the sheerest courage - Adi's interviews with his brother's killers might be the bravest thing I have ever seen on film. More than once, you know that all that is standing between Adi and death is a Danish film crew and an American with a camera. (An impression borne out in Oppenheimer's description of the measures they took to ensure their safety.) In a way, this film works like a sane, pacifist version of The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on - Adi confronts people who did heinous things, trying, over and over, to get them to acknowledge what they did, and that it was heinous - without any luck. But he does so peacefully, gently even, calm and direct in the face of the past - as quiet as Kenzo Okuzaki is ferocious. Paired, especially, Oppenheimer's films rank with the very best documentaries.
The Tribe - 11/15 - A fairly standard Young Gangster film made interesting by 2 things - all the characters are deaf, and perform it all in sign language without translations; and it contains a total of 34 shots (per IMDB; I counted 28 myself, but probably missed a handful.) Those are both gimmicks, but they work. The film is a tour de force, with those long takes and silence, and the visual punch of the sign language - performed with great elan, and very well made. Clear story telling, visually engaging, and so on. The formal properties are superb: the silence, the editing, the camera movements, the use of sound, the choreography - bands of kids moving back and forth - as well as the silent filmmaking chops. The story - is old hat, probably old hat 100 years ago (one kid in a gang falls for one of the girls and gets crosswise the rest of the gang, with lethal results), but traditional genres are traditional for reasons; this one doesn't do anything new with the story, but plenty new (or newish), and all very well with the form. And old hat or not, it is engaging - a very good film.
Do I Sound Gay? - 10/15 - Documentary about the "gay voice" - where it comes from, what it is, and so on - interesting, if not revelatory. Follows the writer/director, David Thorpe, as he examines his own voice, and takes steps to change it - there is plenty of interesting material around this. Old clips of comedians with "sissy" voices - Paul Lynde, Rip Taylor, Charles Nelson Reilly, Liberace - as a potential model; interviews with speech therapists, on the gendering of speech and so on; discussions of performance, and how - and why - sounding gay is sometimes perceived as worse than being gay. (A revealing Louis CK joke to that affect...) There is a lot of interesting material here, maybe too much - lots of questions and observations are raised, but they aren't always followed through that deeply.
Tangerine - 12/15 - Christmas eve in LA, with 2 trans prostitutes, Alexandra and Sin-Dee Rella. Sindee is just out of jail, and Alexandra tells her that her pimp/lover has been cheating, with a woman - so Sindee goes on the war path to find her. She tracks her down, and drags her back to confront Chester the pimp, while the film follows two other characters, Alexandra, and an Armenia cabbie named Razmik, who is having a very bad day. Annoying fares, 2 drunks puking in his cab, and finally what he thinks is a ladyboy prostitute who doesn't have anything between her legs - but he hooks up with Alexandra, and things get better. That night, Alexandra has a gig singing in a club - though only Sindee and Chester's white fish show up. And then they all converge on the donut shop (Sindee, the white girl, Chester, Alexandra, Razmik, Razmik's mother in law and his wife) to have it out. All of it adds up to a remarkable film. Shot on iPhones, taking full advantage of their size and flexibility, a really fine looking film. It's carried by the performances though - the leads (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) are fantastic - charismatic, funny, surprising. A very fine film.
Mr. Holmes - 9/15 - An entertaining and sometimes almost moving story about a very old Sherlock Holmes, losing his memory, going to Japan to get "Prickly Ash" - a plant with magical powers he hopes. He is hosted by a Japanaese man who seems to adulate him, but turns out to have lost his father because Holmes told the man to stay in England. Back in England, Holmes' health declines, and especially his memory - but he teaches his housekeeper's son bee keeping, and tries to remember a story that caused him to retire. The film jumps around between these time frames - the present in the country, the story he is trying to remember, and his time in Japan - and all come to their climax together. Roger is stung almost to death, but by wasps (one last piece of fairly obvious detection for the old man), and he remembers the story - a woman who lost two still born children loses her mind and he doesn't prevent her suicide... (Sorry for spoiling it, in case anyone is reading this... but I've spoiled better films already haven't I?) Anyway - it is sentimental nonsense - I've been reading Sherlock Holmes stories this summer and he failed rather often to save people, and while he always strove to avenge them, it doesn't seem likely to break him... But that aside - apart from the sentimentality, Ian McKellan and the kid playing Roger (Milo Parker) are fantastic. I'm sure Laura Linney would be too, if she had anything to do. But they are great and worth seeing the film for.
Amy - 11/15 - Biography of Amy Winehouse that does justice to her, as an artist as well as a fuckup. Starts with Amy in home movies, ae 14 or so, belting out happy birtthday, and then marches through her life - singing professionally at 16, making a record around 20, winning prizes, with a kind of jazzy sound - going more pop in 2006 with a huge record - then everything coming apart. Though we also see that it was always apart - she was already a pothead at 16, etc. Her nemesis is her boyfriend and eventual husband, one Blake Fielder, a flashy club kid who takes up with her, lives an amour fou, then dumps her; when she becomes a huge star he comes back, and they sink into crack, heroin and so on (along with booze) - and - 5 years of decline as it happened, until she died. And so? I didn't think much about Amy Winehouse when she was alive - the film does a fine job of demonstrating what the fuss was about. She had a stunning set of pipes, and more talent for song writing than I had any idea of. The film dwells on her songs - maybe leaning a bit toward milking the autobiographical content from them, but still showing them clearly, showing her songwriting skills. They are good songs. I'm still not totally convinced - she's a fine singer, a master of old styles, but all of it comes off a bit to derivative, too polite - she's too much Tony Bennett, not enough Frank Sinatra. But that's a matter of degrees - and she died at 27 and was basically done as an artist at 22 - if she'd had half a chance to survive a while, she might have lived up to the raw talent. Unfortunately, her doom seems pre-ordained: she was screwed up young and stayed screwed up, and surrounded by people who wren't going to let her troubles get in the way of her paycheck. Blake might be the most obvious monster, but you feel a hint or so of sympathy for him - he's in the same state she's in, after all. But her father and her manager come off as just about as crass and oblivious to her condition - they are riding the gravy train and trying to get everything out of it they can, as if they knew she wasn't long for the world, and they wee going to make their bank before she went. The kid never had a chance.
Big Game - 8/15 - Fake 80s style action comedy - the president's plane is shot down in Finland by Walter Palmer - wait, no - but - terrorists, or big game hunters - something. But on the ground, the president (played by Samuel L Jackson, who would make a fine president) is found by a 13 year old on some kind of coming of age mission to kill him an animal in the woods. The kid proceeds to save the day. Yay! It is all amusing, sometimes very nifty - though also usually simplistic and sometimes rather dumb. It's an homage to the 80s, in a way that seems half serious and half comical - since a lot of the films it riffs on were half serious half comic the math get confusing - but it's more than enjoyable enough on its own terms.
Testament of Youth - 9/15 - This is a handsome, inteligent adaptation of Vera Brittain's memoir of WWI. Brittain's book is a bit of a brute - very long and full of horrors, being about WWI - the film is not very long, and though it has its share of horrors it doesn't really do justice to the book. It starts well, this new film, but falls apart in the second half - which is probably an inevitable by product of the story. The book covers WWI and its aftermath - an in conventional terms (and this is a very conventional film), her story is very front-loaded. All the drama happens up front - she studies for Oxford - she meets Roland Leighton, a young poet on his way to Oxford - she gets into Oxford! - the war starts and all the boys go off to war - she goes to Oxford, but decides she can't be in school while men are dying in the Belgian mud, so she becomes a VAD (a volunteer nurse) - and then Roland dies in the Belgian mud. All that is by the end of 1915: there are still 3 years of war to go; 3 more close friends to die; and then it's back to Oxford and time to End War Forever. The effect is noticeable in the book (which I read for the class I've mentioned before, The Great War in Film and Literature) - it is a definite slog through the middle parts, a long march of death and pain - but Brittain knows it, and makes that part of the story. It is a story of endurance, survival - and survivor's guilt (in spades) - and maybe ultimately redemption and return to life, sort of. She makes it work by making the endurance part of her subject - treating her experiences like stations of the cross in her education: the Mediterrainean, Edward's wounding, Victor's death, her time in France and Hope Milroy, Edward's death and so on. And she makes it work by always maintaining a double perspective on the material, from beginning to end. Her voice writing in 1933 is always present, always important - along with her sense of her immediate reactions to events. (Often achieved with primary sources - letters and poems written at the time, incorporated whole into the memoir.) This film is pretty good, actually, through the first part, the dramatic part, the love story - but completely lost once Roland is gone. It never figures out how to get through the rest of the war, so reduces the main events to a couple scenes, and drops much of the material that gives the book its emotional punch: the sense of the length of the war; Vera's friendship with an older nurse, Hope Milroy; her brother's increasing bitterness as the war progresses. It speeds past things that have great resonance for Vera - her survivor's guilt, particularly, which is made worse when she leaves the VAD to take care of her mother; this happens in the film without any weight. It's probably hopeless, really - there's no way to make a conventional film out of the material without butchering the material, and this is a very conventional film. Though to be fair - even as a mini-series, it ran into trouble - it could cover the material, but they also dropped Brittain's narration, and that flattened out the material. It's a problem - that love story at the beginning makes it a tempting story to film - the rest of the story makes it very likely to come short...
Still - I wish they could have done better. The cast is very good - Alicia Vikander is especially good, Kit Harrington holds his own, and the rest of the cast is fine. But Vikander, particularly, doesn't get enough to do - Vera Brittain's character is flattened out along with the story - the politics (and it is a very political book - feminist and pacifist, and quite pointedly so in both) is mostly gone, certainly made polite. She registers suffering - she doesn't register the anger that is obvious in the book...
Friday, July 31, 2015
Murder, Empathy and Some Songs
It is Friday, time for more music - but maybe more than music. One of these days I might manage more than one post a week! but until then it can't hurt to expand the one post a bit.
Another week with a lot going on, I admit. Might we relate some of these events?
1) In Cincinnati, another policeman shooting another black person - this time, though, the cop has been indicted. The cop shot the man for no reason, and did it on camera - so... stunning how much it takes to get a case to come to this level of justice; also stunning to think just how arrogant some cops can be. How little attention they pay to the evidence that could emerge against them.
2) Cecil the Lion: this has been dominating the internet lately - a famous lion on a wildlife reservation in Zimbabwe was lured off the preserve and shot by an American dentist called Walter Palmer who paid $50,000+ to kill a lion. International outrage follows. Palmer's dental practice is chased out of business in short order by internet abuse and real life protests. Well - he deserves it. It's hard to fathom the awfulness of this person - flying around the world to kill rare animals for fun, at least some of the time breaking the law to do it; and then look at the way he immediately blamed his guides when he got caught! A real class guy.
It really is an awful story - I just don't get it at all. I understand hunting - I don't have any interest in it myself, never did, but I grew up in semi-rural places, and most of my family still lives in rural and semi-rural places, I have always known lots of hunters. And they strike me as being as unlike this Palmer character as I am. Hunting deer and birds - they hunt things they plan to eat (and that seems like a baseline: if you aren't going to eat it, don't kill it - not a complete moral system there, but an irreducible core of one); they hunt things where they are part of the ecological system. Deer hunters help control the population, which can cause problems when it gets too big - they have replaced the wolves and puma humans killed off centuries ago... And most of the hunters I know are also part of the ecology in the sense that they hunt where they live, hunt in the same environment. They live with deer year round; they share the ecology; the deer eats their zucchini and they eat the deer.... All this is completely unlike Palmer: he isn't eating the lions and elephants and bears he's killing; he isn't hunting creatures who are plentiful and have no other predators - in fact some of them are quite rare; and he isn't part of the ecology of the place he's hunting in. He's flying halfway around the world and paying someone else thousands of dollars to let him take a shot at something. Oh yeah - the deer hunters I know do their own shooting; they don't hire a band of locals to take all the risks and do most of the work. There's simply no level of contempt deep enough for this fucker.
3) A meme - I have seen a couple instances of this, complaints about all the attention for a dumb beast and none for the poor suffering XXX. Marco Rubio might be the most prominent person to post it (if Marco Rubio can be considered prominent), and he put it in the most ignorant and dishonest form, bringing up that bogus planned parenthood story.... For people like Rubio the lies are deep - because in what universe is anyone ignoring that planned parenthood video? both sides are flogging the hell out of that thing - no one is ignoring it. And really, the whole point is absurd. Yes there is a lot of attention paid to Cecil and his killer, but there is plenty of attention paid to the rest of the world. Look back at #1 - another police killing, getting a fair amount of attention. That is a pattern of stories that has been receiving attention for a couple years, which continues. The three recent mass killings in the good old USA continue to get plenty of attention. I've seen stories popping up about George Zimmerman, poor fellow. (He's homeless apparently - a shame, since in a just world he would be housed at the state's expense for some decades.) It's hard to see evidence that people are not moved by human suffering. Maybe not every single horror show the world has to offer - but there are no lack of horror shows.
The meme (why are people so worked up about a dead lion when there is human suffering to worry about?) misses the important point: all of this - all compassion, for anyone and anything - is based on the human ability to empathize. I came across a TED Talk about the rise of human beings - how did we become the apex predator of apex predators? The answer? Imagination - or maybe empathy - the ability to create stories that other people share, that bind us together. Or you could say - the ability to see ourselves in others - other people, other animals. To imagine their inner lives. It;'s obvious how this works with people - maybe less so how it works with animals, though it's not too far off - isn't that how we came to domesticate animals? We imagine dogs and cats (and horses, and even cows and pigs and chickens) as beings with some kind of consciousness that we can relate to, and we relate to them. Even a lot of the creatures we eat - we form bonds with them. (And they benefit - at the evolutionary level anyway: cows and pigs and chickens won't be endangered any time soon.) So - how can it be bad that people form a bond with a wild animal living half a world away from us? And understanding how killing it is an abomination? I don't think it distracts from our ability to sympathize with people - I think it helps form the habits of sympathy, that extends to other people.
Well - I guess that was more than just some observations to attach to a lit of songs... So I guess we're in for something less random today - today And now I find that I have written too much to allow me to append a random list of songs... so less random:
1. The Germs - Lion's Share
2. Dire Straights - Lions
3. Neko Case - Lion's Jaws
4. Sleater Kinney - Lions and Tigers
5. Wire - Ex Lion Tamer
Video: start with Dire Straits:
And add a bit - maybe Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing the Lion Sleeps Tonight?
And maybe some topical humor. In case of accidents he always took his mom - also appropriate I think:
This also comes to mind:
Another week with a lot going on, I admit. Might we relate some of these events?
1) In Cincinnati, another policeman shooting another black person - this time, though, the cop has been indicted. The cop shot the man for no reason, and did it on camera - so... stunning how much it takes to get a case to come to this level of justice; also stunning to think just how arrogant some cops can be. How little attention they pay to the evidence that could emerge against them.
2) Cecil the Lion: this has been dominating the internet lately - a famous lion on a wildlife reservation in Zimbabwe was lured off the preserve and shot by an American dentist called Walter Palmer who paid $50,000+ to kill a lion. International outrage follows. Palmer's dental practice is chased out of business in short order by internet abuse and real life protests. Well - he deserves it. It's hard to fathom the awfulness of this person - flying around the world to kill rare animals for fun, at least some of the time breaking the law to do it; and then look at the way he immediately blamed his guides when he got caught! A real class guy.
It really is an awful story - I just don't get it at all. I understand hunting - I don't have any interest in it myself, never did, but I grew up in semi-rural places, and most of my family still lives in rural and semi-rural places, I have always known lots of hunters. And they strike me as being as unlike this Palmer character as I am. Hunting deer and birds - they hunt things they plan to eat (and that seems like a baseline: if you aren't going to eat it, don't kill it - not a complete moral system there, but an irreducible core of one); they hunt things where they are part of the ecological system. Deer hunters help control the population, which can cause problems when it gets too big - they have replaced the wolves and puma humans killed off centuries ago... And most of the hunters I know are also part of the ecology in the sense that they hunt where they live, hunt in the same environment. They live with deer year round; they share the ecology; the deer eats their zucchini and they eat the deer.... All this is completely unlike Palmer: he isn't eating the lions and elephants and bears he's killing; he isn't hunting creatures who are plentiful and have no other predators - in fact some of them are quite rare; and he isn't part of the ecology of the place he's hunting in. He's flying halfway around the world and paying someone else thousands of dollars to let him take a shot at something. Oh yeah - the deer hunters I know do their own shooting; they don't hire a band of locals to take all the risks and do most of the work. There's simply no level of contempt deep enough for this fucker.
3) A meme - I have seen a couple instances of this, complaints about all the attention for a dumb beast and none for the poor suffering XXX. Marco Rubio might be the most prominent person to post it (if Marco Rubio can be considered prominent), and he put it in the most ignorant and dishonest form, bringing up that bogus planned parenthood story.... For people like Rubio the lies are deep - because in what universe is anyone ignoring that planned parenthood video? both sides are flogging the hell out of that thing - no one is ignoring it. And really, the whole point is absurd. Yes there is a lot of attention paid to Cecil and his killer, but there is plenty of attention paid to the rest of the world. Look back at #1 - another police killing, getting a fair amount of attention. That is a pattern of stories that has been receiving attention for a couple years, which continues. The three recent mass killings in the good old USA continue to get plenty of attention. I've seen stories popping up about George Zimmerman, poor fellow. (He's homeless apparently - a shame, since in a just world he would be housed at the state's expense for some decades.) It's hard to see evidence that people are not moved by human suffering. Maybe not every single horror show the world has to offer - but there are no lack of horror shows.
The meme (why are people so worked up about a dead lion when there is human suffering to worry about?) misses the important point: all of this - all compassion, for anyone and anything - is based on the human ability to empathize. I came across a TED Talk about the rise of human beings - how did we become the apex predator of apex predators? The answer? Imagination - or maybe empathy - the ability to create stories that other people share, that bind us together. Or you could say - the ability to see ourselves in others - other people, other animals. To imagine their inner lives. It;'s obvious how this works with people - maybe less so how it works with animals, though it's not too far off - isn't that how we came to domesticate animals? We imagine dogs and cats (and horses, and even cows and pigs and chickens) as beings with some kind of consciousness that we can relate to, and we relate to them. Even a lot of the creatures we eat - we form bonds with them. (And they benefit - at the evolutionary level anyway: cows and pigs and chickens won't be endangered any time soon.) So - how can it be bad that people form a bond with a wild animal living half a world away from us? And understanding how killing it is an abomination? I don't think it distracts from our ability to sympathize with people - I think it helps form the habits of sympathy, that extends to other people.
Well - I guess that was more than just some observations to attach to a lit of songs... So I guess we're in for something less random today - today And now I find that I have written too much to allow me to append a random list of songs... so less random:
1. The Germs - Lion's Share
2. Dire Straights - Lions
3. Neko Case - Lion's Jaws
4. Sleater Kinney - Lions and Tigers
5. Wire - Ex Lion Tamer
Video: start with Dire Straits:
And add a bit - maybe Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing the Lion Sleeps Tonight?
And maybe some topical humor. In case of accidents he always took his mom - also appropriate I think:
This also comes to mind:
Friday, July 24, 2015
On the Ground Like a Wild Potato
Good morning. A very lovely day outside - after a few days of real heat this week. More heat coming next week - nothing all that bad, really, for Boston, but it's been a cool summer, so it comes as a shock.
The world? The bloodshed and misery does not seem to want to stop - this one might be harder to politicize (from the preliminary reports) - just another crazy white guy. That's not a comfort exactly.
Comfort is hard to find. The local 9 have fallen on very hard times - I suppose that is a comfort to many fans, who have seemed a bit out of step with the Sox' successes. we are so used to suffering in Boston! having a team we can feel sorry for ourselves about is a bit of a comfort. Could be. I have taken some solace in the Tour de France - a fascinating event, way more addictive than I would ever have thought. Though it's been tough this week - the best American, Tejay Van Garderen, had been doing very well, top three for most of the race - but it all went wrong. A respiratory illness in the Alps - not an easy thing to ride a bike race with. So - it took some of the air out of the race, mainly because it looked like the most interesting battle was going to be for third place. 1 and 2 are Chris Froome and Nairo Quintana, who finished 1-2 2 years ago, and don't look likely to be challenged this year. 3rd place looked like it could be a fight. Still does, kind of, though it's harder to muster a rooting interest in the likes of Alberto Contador and Alejandro Valverde.
Enough of that. There is comfort in the world - music! and so to the business of the day.
1. Richard Thompson - I Still Dream
2. Billie Holiday & Lester Yong - This Year's Kisses
3. The Raconteurs - The Switch and the Spur
4. PJ Harvey - Who the Fuck?
5. Melvins - Pearl Bomb
6. Melt-Banana - Stick Out
7. Radiohead - Kid A
8. The High Back Chairs - Summer
9. Scott Walker - Face on Breast
10. B-52s - Private Idaho
Well - that was a good crop... Video? We have some PJ Harvey still, can't miss that:
Melt Banana might also be in order:
And the B-52s of course:
The world? The bloodshed and misery does not seem to want to stop - this one might be harder to politicize (from the preliminary reports) - just another crazy white guy. That's not a comfort exactly.
Comfort is hard to find. The local 9 have fallen on very hard times - I suppose that is a comfort to many fans, who have seemed a bit out of step with the Sox' successes. we are so used to suffering in Boston! having a team we can feel sorry for ourselves about is a bit of a comfort. Could be. I have taken some solace in the Tour de France - a fascinating event, way more addictive than I would ever have thought. Though it's been tough this week - the best American, Tejay Van Garderen, had been doing very well, top three for most of the race - but it all went wrong. A respiratory illness in the Alps - not an easy thing to ride a bike race with. So - it took some of the air out of the race, mainly because it looked like the most interesting battle was going to be for third place. 1 and 2 are Chris Froome and Nairo Quintana, who finished 1-2 2 years ago, and don't look likely to be challenged this year. 3rd place looked like it could be a fight. Still does, kind of, though it's harder to muster a rooting interest in the likes of Alberto Contador and Alejandro Valverde.
Enough of that. There is comfort in the world - music! and so to the business of the day.
1. Richard Thompson - I Still Dream
2. Billie Holiday & Lester Yong - This Year's Kisses
3. The Raconteurs - The Switch and the Spur
4. PJ Harvey - Who the Fuck?
5. Melvins - Pearl Bomb
6. Melt-Banana - Stick Out
7. Radiohead - Kid A
8. The High Back Chairs - Summer
9. Scott Walker - Face on Breast
10. B-52s - Private Idaho
Well - that was a good crop... Video? We have some PJ Harvey still, can't miss that:
Melt Banana might also be in order:
And the B-52s of course:
Friday, July 17, 2015
I'm Immortal When I'm With You
For this month's Band of the Month, we are back in the 90s and 00s, this time for one of the acts that brought me back into contemporary music in the late 90s: PJ Harvey.
I don't remember exactly when this happened - late 90s, 96, 97 - after her career was established, anyway. I remember seeing her on MTV back in the early 90s, but I didn't care, I was listening to jazz then - I picked up on her later. I remember a couple things: listening to Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love somewhat obsessively for a while; then seeing her on TV, singing songs from To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire. A TV show - must have been Sessions at West 54th Street (having consulted the googles, I see it was; I saw a few episodes of that show - Cibo Matto say...) - that was 98 or 99. The records came first, but that really sealed it - seeing her sing made those songs all the better. (Big fish little fish swimmin' inna water, come back here man gimme my daughter...) Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea just deepened it - those big jangly guitars, right in my wheelhouse. But really, she's been there since I started listening to her - Bring You My Love fit in nicely with what I listened to in the 90s - Pere Ubu and Built to Spill, to Sleater Knney and Captain Beefheart - and she led me to other things. Listening to PJ Harvey probably got me to check out Sleater Kinney - I am quite sure that Nick Cave's association with Harvey was the reason I picked up his records. I think I bought Murder Ballads first because of the duet with her. In this series, I've put her at the end of a 90s and 00s artists - but the truth is, she was the source of my interest in a lot of them.
Looking back across her career now, she is even more impressive. How much range she has! From punk (or post-punk - a musical offspring of Patti Smith and Nick Cave) to electronica/blues to jangly guitar pop to weird piano ballds (starting to sound like Kate Bush) to weird folk, sometimes all at once! She is a chameleon - changing styles; changing her voice, up and down in pitch, whispers, screams, shouts, croons, belting them out, thin and pretty sometimes, rich and powerful other times, capable of anything; changing her look. Looking through videos across her career - she covers pretty much every imaginable look, from punk to trashy to glamorous, to those weird white and black dresses she's featured in recent years. The look changes, her style changes - but she's there, a calm center - commanding every stage she's on. That volatility has always been her trademark, I think - the dynamic of her songs, the soft/hard dynamic on the early records; the mix of pretty melodies and seductive rhythms with edgy themes in the later ones - the shifts in tone, texture of songs, the sudden splashes of sound. She keeps you on your toes.
And finally, as a songwriter - she's among the elites. She's among my favorites - Cave; David Thomas; Mick and Keef; Richard Thompson, Lou Reed. Like Cave (and often Thomas, Thompson, Reed) she's more story teller than lyricist - she writes as a narrator - very striking on the early records, where the voice was often a man's, and on Let England Shake, where the stories were topical - and does it with great control, telling the story, and getting you into the narrator's emotional state. She creates characters that you come to know in 3 minutes - it's a gift. And she can turn a phrase with the best of them:
Seen and Done Things I Want to Forget
I don't want to make a fuss, I want to make my own fuckups
Until the light shines on me, I damn to hell every second you breath
I've lain with the devil, cursed god above, forsaken heaven, to bring you my love
Does it have to be a life full of dread, want to chase you round a table, want to touch your head...
Yes. So - on to the list, a top 10:
1. To Bring You My Love
2. Down By The Water
3. The Words That Maketh Murder
4. The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore
5. Rid of Me
6. Big Exit
7. Man-Size
8. Catherine
9. Dress
10. My Beautiful Leah
And video: Start here, a 1991 full concert. Right at the beginning - she had such a big voice, big sound, that she could go anywhere, and has gone most places. These early clips, she is so confident and powerful - there's nothing missing, she's a neo-punk act as good as anyone else at the time, and better in ways, her song writing voice - her perspective - and her voice, which is just shocking, even then:
Here she is in 1993, playing Rid of Me on Leno - Leno; electric; solo (which I didn't really notice til the long shots came - she and a guitar can fill the world):
Down by the Water, 95 - Jools Holland:
This is the TV show I saw back in the 90s - Sessions at West 54th Street - this is I Think I'm a Mother and Is This Desire, plus an interview with David Byrne:
To Bring You My Love - playing guitar, 2003:
Speak to me of your inner charm, how you'll keep me, safe from harm - I don't think so...
Words That Maketh Murder, live:
And end with another complete concert, from 2011:
I don't remember exactly when this happened - late 90s, 96, 97 - after her career was established, anyway. I remember seeing her on MTV back in the early 90s, but I didn't care, I was listening to jazz then - I picked up on her later. I remember a couple things: listening to Rid of Me and To Bring You My Love somewhat obsessively for a while; then seeing her on TV, singing songs from To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire. A TV show - must have been Sessions at West 54th Street (having consulted the googles, I see it was; I saw a few episodes of that show - Cibo Matto say...) - that was 98 or 99. The records came first, but that really sealed it - seeing her sing made those songs all the better. (Big fish little fish swimmin' inna water, come back here man gimme my daughter...) Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea just deepened it - those big jangly guitars, right in my wheelhouse. But really, she's been there since I started listening to her - Bring You My Love fit in nicely with what I listened to in the 90s - Pere Ubu and Built to Spill, to Sleater Knney and Captain Beefheart - and she led me to other things. Listening to PJ Harvey probably got me to check out Sleater Kinney - I am quite sure that Nick Cave's association with Harvey was the reason I picked up his records. I think I bought Murder Ballads first because of the duet with her. In this series, I've put her at the end of a 90s and 00s artists - but the truth is, she was the source of my interest in a lot of them.
Looking back across her career now, she is even more impressive. How much range she has! From punk (or post-punk - a musical offspring of Patti Smith and Nick Cave) to electronica/blues to jangly guitar pop to weird piano ballds (starting to sound like Kate Bush) to weird folk, sometimes all at once! She is a chameleon - changing styles; changing her voice, up and down in pitch, whispers, screams, shouts, croons, belting them out, thin and pretty sometimes, rich and powerful other times, capable of anything; changing her look. Looking through videos across her career - she covers pretty much every imaginable look, from punk to trashy to glamorous, to those weird white and black dresses she's featured in recent years. The look changes, her style changes - but she's there, a calm center - commanding every stage she's on. That volatility has always been her trademark, I think - the dynamic of her songs, the soft/hard dynamic on the early records; the mix of pretty melodies and seductive rhythms with edgy themes in the later ones - the shifts in tone, texture of songs, the sudden splashes of sound. She keeps you on your toes.
And finally, as a songwriter - she's among the elites. She's among my favorites - Cave; David Thomas; Mick and Keef; Richard Thompson, Lou Reed. Like Cave (and often Thomas, Thompson, Reed) she's more story teller than lyricist - she writes as a narrator - very striking on the early records, where the voice was often a man's, and on Let England Shake, where the stories were topical - and does it with great control, telling the story, and getting you into the narrator's emotional state. She creates characters that you come to know in 3 minutes - it's a gift. And she can turn a phrase with the best of them:
Seen and Done Things I Want to Forget
I don't want to make a fuss, I want to make my own fuckups
Until the light shines on me, I damn to hell every second you breath
I've lain with the devil, cursed god above, forsaken heaven, to bring you my love
Does it have to be a life full of dread, want to chase you round a table, want to touch your head...
Yes. So - on to the list, a top 10:
1. To Bring You My Love
2. Down By The Water
3. The Words That Maketh Murder
4. The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore
5. Rid of Me
6. Big Exit
7. Man-Size
8. Catherine
9. Dress
10. My Beautiful Leah
And video: Start here, a 1991 full concert. Right at the beginning - she had such a big voice, big sound, that she could go anywhere, and has gone most places. These early clips, she is so confident and powerful - there's nothing missing, she's a neo-punk act as good as anyone else at the time, and better in ways, her song writing voice - her perspective - and her voice, which is just shocking, even then:
Here she is in 1993, playing Rid of Me on Leno - Leno; electric; solo (which I didn't really notice til the long shots came - she and a guitar can fill the world):
Down by the Water, 95 - Jools Holland:
This is the TV show I saw back in the 90s - Sessions at West 54th Street - this is I Think I'm a Mother and Is This Desire, plus an interview with David Byrne:
To Bring You My Love - playing guitar, 2003:
Speak to me of your inner charm, how you'll keep me, safe from harm - I don't think so...
Words That Maketh Murder, live:
And end with another complete concert, from 2011:
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Happy Bastille Day!
The Tour de France is starting back up today, moving into the mountains - always fun. This year's race looks likely to come down to an Englishman (from Kenya) vs. a Columbian, with an American, Spaniard and Italian in serious contention - well - it's an international sport. So here, to celebrate it, is a group of Germans:
And to wish our French friends a happy Bastille Day, here are some nice Canadian boys:
And finally, a very French performance of the Marsiellaise:
And to wish our French friends a happy Bastille Day, here are some nice Canadian boys:
And finally, a very French performance of the Marsiellaise:
Monday, July 13, 2015
Halftime Film Report
I know I have become an awfully lazy blogger - lucky to get a list of autogenerated songs up every week, and that one long essay a month... Maybe an anniversary will wake me up, but those have faded, what with the Civil War over... Sad sad.
I haven't had a movie post up in forever - without external stimulation, I don't know if I'd have gotten one out this year. Of course that might help suggest why I have been such a slug here - I took a class in the spring, which as it happened did involve a pretty substantial Eisenstein paper. The Russians did rather finish me off for a while - at least that's what I hope happened. There's a decent post version of that Eisenstein paper somewhere - it might surface eventually...
For now though, I just want to get a hand in. I used to do this more often - knock off a Best So Far list about halfway through the year. Been a while since I have done that - three years in fact. Sad. But as a way of getting a hand back in, it'l do. So without too much ado - here are the 10 best films I have seen, in something like a real release this year:
1. Winter Sleep
2. Adieu au Langage
3. About Elly
4. Clouds of Sils Maria
5. The Wolfpack
6. Juaja
7. What we Do in the Shadows
8. The King and the Mockingbird
9. Amy
10. Results
And a much smaller list - best films I have seen dated 2015 - it's too early to do much of this: most of the films that I see in theazters the first half of any year are older, catching up on all last year's international films. (Thgough this year has been a bit ridiculous in that - The King and the Mockingbird? even About Elly is 6 years old. And if I wanted to really cheat, I could include Rebels of the Neon God, which is getting what I think is its first American theatrical run. I've seen it already, though, some years back at the MFA, so that's a bit too much for me. But I might as well post something from this year - since I have only seen 12 films dated 2015 (I think) - well - might as well rank them all. Very heavy on the documentaries...
1. The Wolfpack
2. Amy
3. Results
4. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
5. Iris
6. While We're Young
7. I'll see You in My Dreams
8. I am Big Bird
9. When Marnie Was There
10. Slow West
11. Mad Max Fury Road
12. Danny Collins
Actually - nothing bad - I enjoyed those all the way down (with occasional reservations). So not bad really.
I may even try to get some reviews up in the coming weeks - always a hope.
I haven't had a movie post up in forever - without external stimulation, I don't know if I'd have gotten one out this year. Of course that might help suggest why I have been such a slug here - I took a class in the spring, which as it happened did involve a pretty substantial Eisenstein paper. The Russians did rather finish me off for a while - at least that's what I hope happened. There's a decent post version of that Eisenstein paper somewhere - it might surface eventually...
For now though, I just want to get a hand in. I used to do this more often - knock off a Best So Far list about halfway through the year. Been a while since I have done that - three years in fact. Sad. But as a way of getting a hand back in, it'l do. So without too much ado - here are the 10 best films I have seen, in something like a real release this year:
1. Winter Sleep
2. Adieu au Langage
3. About Elly
4. Clouds of Sils Maria
5. The Wolfpack
6. Juaja
7. What we Do in the Shadows
8. The King and the Mockingbird
9. Amy
10. Results
And a much smaller list - best films I have seen dated 2015 - it's too early to do much of this: most of the films that I see in theazters the first half of any year are older, catching up on all last year's international films. (Thgough this year has been a bit ridiculous in that - The King and the Mockingbird? even About Elly is 6 years old. And if I wanted to really cheat, I could include Rebels of the Neon God, which is getting what I think is its first American theatrical run. I've seen it already, though, some years back at the MFA, so that's a bit too much for me. But I might as well post something from this year - since I have only seen 12 films dated 2015 (I think) - well - might as well rank them all. Very heavy on the documentaries...
1. The Wolfpack
2. Amy
3. Results
4. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
5. Iris
6. While We're Young
7. I'll see You in My Dreams
8. I am Big Bird
9. When Marnie Was There
10. Slow West
11. Mad Max Fury Road
12. Danny Collins
Actually - nothing bad - I enjoyed those all the way down (with occasional reservations). So not bad really.
I may even try to get some reviews up in the coming weeks - always a hope.
Friday, July 10, 2015
Musical Interlude
I am back. This is by rights my band of the month week, but that will have to wait. The holiday last week, and childhood film series entry this week, have me well behind. A weak excuse, but I have become so lazy.... It's all right. It's coming.
For now, then, just songs, randomized and all that.
1. Big Black - L Dopa
2. Ton Waits - Rainbirds
3. Dinosaur Jr. - Tarpit
4. Replacements - Within Your Reach
5. Tom Waits - Oily Night
6. Jay Farrar - Old LA
7. Scott Walker - Winter Night
8. Missy Elliot - Pump it Up
9. The Postal Service - Natural Anthem
10. Meat Puppets - The Touchdown King
Video - obviously Tom Waits this week. This is a neat piece of work, a student film set to Oily Night:
And - let's do - Big Black, live:
And maybe a preview for next week....
For now, then, just songs, randomized and all that.
1. Big Black - L Dopa
2. Ton Waits - Rainbirds
3. Dinosaur Jr. - Tarpit
4. Replacements - Within Your Reach
5. Tom Waits - Oily Night
6. Jay Farrar - Old LA
7. Scott Walker - Winter Night
8. Missy Elliot - Pump it Up
9. The Postal Service - Natural Anthem
10. Meat Puppets - The Touchdown King
Video - obviously Tom Waits this week. This is a neat piece of work, a student film set to Oily Night:
And - let's do - Big Black, live:
And maybe a preview for next week....
Thursday, July 09, 2015
Let the Right One In
Published as part of the Childhood Films countdown at Wonders in the Dark.
Adolescence can be a terrible time. It can be very painful. It is a time when you lose yourself, lose what you have been, and become a new person in spite of yourself. For most of us, this happens surrounded by others going through the same thing at the same time - is it any wonder how horribly 12 and 13 year olds can treat one another? Let the Right One In is a vampire movie, and a bit of a social satire (if that’s the word) - but mostly, it is about that time when you stop being a child and start to become something else (not quite an adult - but not a child). It is about loss - the loss of childhood, of identity, though also other losses (losing connections with other people, through death or changes in you and them) - but also about what you become. Change is loss, but also gain - you lose who you were, you become someone new. It is about the effects of these changes on groups of kids - about their cruelty, their pain, about how they cope, and perhaps escape.
The main story is about Oskar, a 12 year old living in a particularly horrifying suburb of Stockholm in 1981 (a period promising transition itself - Brezhnev was on his last legs; Reagan was rattling sabers across the sea - the Cold War itself was starting to change, but it wasn't sure what it was going to change into, and Sweden was right there between the two of them). Oskar lives with his mother, who is seldom home; his father lives in the country and is something of a refuge for the boy (except when he's drinking). He goes to school, where he is too clever for his own good, with an excessive interest in police matters; his classmates torment him mercilessly, and he goes home and imagines bloody vengeance on them. There don't seem to be any other kids in his apartment complex; then one moves in - Eli, a strange girl about his age who doesn't seem to dress appropriately for the cold, who seems about as lonely and suspicious as Oskar. It doesn't take them long to become friends - they bond over a Rubik's cube, and they are soon very close.
But Eli has secrets of her own. The film doesn't waste a lot of time letting us in on them - she lives with a Hakan, an odd, quiet, older man, who murders and guts people in the woods to bring her blood. Or tries - when he is interrupted, she has to go out herself and find prey, for she is a vampire. She kills a middle aged drunk, touching off a sub plot involving a number of aging alcoholics, who may have seen her. Meanwhile, things escalate at the school - the kids bullying Oskar get worse, and when he fights back (at Eli's urging), he hurts one of them badly enough to cause further repercussions. The assorted plots build - rising trouble among the kids; the developing friendship and intimacy between Oskar and Eli; and the complications coming out of the killings. Hakan is caught in the act of trying to kill another kid, and leaves Eli alone; one of the friends of the man she killed finds her and tries to kill her while she sleeps, but Oskar warns her and she kills the man; then the boys at school try to get their ultimate vengeance on Oskar, but Eli saves him in a spectacularly gruesome fashion, and they leave together.
It delivers as a horror film, but it is much more concerned with the relationships. The film concentrates on Oskar and Eli - the novel it is based on develops a number of relationships in addition to theirs. It delves into the lives of the kids who torment Oskar; it details Eli and Hakan's relationship; it spends more time with the old drinkers; more time with Oskar and his family. But the broader scope of the book mainly expands and deepens the themes that are at the heart of Oskar and Eli's relationship - the sense of loss, loneliness, change, and their powerlessness against that change. In the book, we learn that the bullies are more like Oskar than not - they lose parents, families, they are going through the same changes he is - they take their troubles out on him, creating a chain of misery. The film retains hints of this - Oskar's main tormenter has an older brother, who is introduced in the film bullying the little brother (who will pass it on to Oskar); the film also retains the subplot with Ginia and Lacke, an older couple who are in the process of losing one another (and in the end, lose everything.) This is a world of pain; everyone is alone, everyone is isolated - and Eli is the epitome of all of their pain.
Most of the characters are kids, most of them on the edge of puberty, about to change forever - and Eli is trapped forever at that very moment. Eli was made a vampire at age 12 - taken from his family, castrated, tortured to death, though not to actual death, then trapped forever at that point of transition and pain. Eli is locked forever in pre-pubescence, trapped between childhood and adulthood, between boy and girl, life and death, ageless and 12 years old, always in the middle. The film is extraordinary at capturing her strange condition - it shows her childishness, her sense of discovery of the world, of things like the Rubik's cube, her loneliness, her desire for contact, a connection, her willingness to try things - while never losing the sense that she is hundreds of years old, has been through this before, has suffered everything and more. And that she is a vampire, and must live on blood, is subject to a host of rules and conditions - she will catch fire in the sun; she cannot enter a place without being invited, without consequences, and so on. She is immensely powerful, but she can't get along without the help of others. We see it in her relationship with Oskar - she genuinely likes him, she longs for friendship, for communication - but she also sees that she can use him, that he can replace Hakan. She uses him - his anger and fear, his loneliness - while at the same time responding to him directly, as one lonely child to another. The film handles this with great care, we can see both; it is a superb balancing act.
And it is a superb film throughout. I've written before about its look, the cold spare spaces of Blackeberg, all square buildings and empty courtyards, a fair version of hell, but that excellence is everywhere in the film. It's beautiful, and it uses its look and feel to advance the themes. It is a film about the end of childhood, about transition - and plays that out, all the shots of doorways and windows and gates we see. The themes come from the book - the importance of those liminal spaces, the central metaphor of the vampire's inability to go in uninvited, with Eli as the ultimate liminal character, forever caught <i>between</i> - and the film finds the imagery to give them weight and power.
So we come back to adolescence, to the traumatic transition from a childhood to maturity, to the loss of oneself, and the discovery of a new self - and the importance of that part of the change. Oskar, at the end of the film, has lost everything - abandoned his family, his life, left a trail of devastation in his wake - he is moving into a very uncertain future, very possibly headed for a life of slavery to a vampire who needs him to kill for her, and certainly obliged to drag her around with him wherever he goes.... But he is on his way somewhere - moving, alive, sane, not locked in a trunk until sunset. He has put off the childish things, and become someone else, something no one else, not even Eli, can do.
Adolescence can be a terrible time. It can be very painful. It is a time when you lose yourself, lose what you have been, and become a new person in spite of yourself. For most of us, this happens surrounded by others going through the same thing at the same time - is it any wonder how horribly 12 and 13 year olds can treat one another? Let the Right One In is a vampire movie, and a bit of a social satire (if that’s the word) - but mostly, it is about that time when you stop being a child and start to become something else (not quite an adult - but not a child). It is about loss - the loss of childhood, of identity, though also other losses (losing connections with other people, through death or changes in you and them) - but also about what you become. Change is loss, but also gain - you lose who you were, you become someone new. It is about the effects of these changes on groups of kids - about their cruelty, their pain, about how they cope, and perhaps escape.
The main story is about Oskar, a 12 year old living in a particularly horrifying suburb of Stockholm in 1981 (a period promising transition itself - Brezhnev was on his last legs; Reagan was rattling sabers across the sea - the Cold War itself was starting to change, but it wasn't sure what it was going to change into, and Sweden was right there between the two of them). Oskar lives with his mother, who is seldom home; his father lives in the country and is something of a refuge for the boy (except when he's drinking). He goes to school, where he is too clever for his own good, with an excessive interest in police matters; his classmates torment him mercilessly, and he goes home and imagines bloody vengeance on them. There don't seem to be any other kids in his apartment complex; then one moves in - Eli, a strange girl about his age who doesn't seem to dress appropriately for the cold, who seems about as lonely and suspicious as Oskar. It doesn't take them long to become friends - they bond over a Rubik's cube, and they are soon very close.
But Eli has secrets of her own. The film doesn't waste a lot of time letting us in on them - she lives with a Hakan, an odd, quiet, older man, who murders and guts people in the woods to bring her blood. Or tries - when he is interrupted, she has to go out herself and find prey, for she is a vampire. She kills a middle aged drunk, touching off a sub plot involving a number of aging alcoholics, who may have seen her. Meanwhile, things escalate at the school - the kids bullying Oskar get worse, and when he fights back (at Eli's urging), he hurts one of them badly enough to cause further repercussions. The assorted plots build - rising trouble among the kids; the developing friendship and intimacy between Oskar and Eli; and the complications coming out of the killings. Hakan is caught in the act of trying to kill another kid, and leaves Eli alone; one of the friends of the man she killed finds her and tries to kill her while she sleeps, but Oskar warns her and she kills the man; then the boys at school try to get their ultimate vengeance on Oskar, but Eli saves him in a spectacularly gruesome fashion, and they leave together.
It delivers as a horror film, but it is much more concerned with the relationships. The film concentrates on Oskar and Eli - the novel it is based on develops a number of relationships in addition to theirs. It delves into the lives of the kids who torment Oskar; it details Eli and Hakan's relationship; it spends more time with the old drinkers; more time with Oskar and his family. But the broader scope of the book mainly expands and deepens the themes that are at the heart of Oskar and Eli's relationship - the sense of loss, loneliness, change, and their powerlessness against that change. In the book, we learn that the bullies are more like Oskar than not - they lose parents, families, they are going through the same changes he is - they take their troubles out on him, creating a chain of misery. The film retains hints of this - Oskar's main tormenter has an older brother, who is introduced in the film bullying the little brother (who will pass it on to Oskar); the film also retains the subplot with Ginia and Lacke, an older couple who are in the process of losing one another (and in the end, lose everything.) This is a world of pain; everyone is alone, everyone is isolated - and Eli is the epitome of all of their pain.
Most of the characters are kids, most of them on the edge of puberty, about to change forever - and Eli is trapped forever at that very moment. Eli was made a vampire at age 12 - taken from his family, castrated, tortured to death, though not to actual death, then trapped forever at that point of transition and pain. Eli is locked forever in pre-pubescence, trapped between childhood and adulthood, between boy and girl, life and death, ageless and 12 years old, always in the middle. The film is extraordinary at capturing her strange condition - it shows her childishness, her sense of discovery of the world, of things like the Rubik's cube, her loneliness, her desire for contact, a connection, her willingness to try things - while never losing the sense that she is hundreds of years old, has been through this before, has suffered everything and more. And that she is a vampire, and must live on blood, is subject to a host of rules and conditions - she will catch fire in the sun; she cannot enter a place without being invited, without consequences, and so on. She is immensely powerful, but she can't get along without the help of others. We see it in her relationship with Oskar - she genuinely likes him, she longs for friendship, for communication - but she also sees that she can use him, that he can replace Hakan. She uses him - his anger and fear, his loneliness - while at the same time responding to him directly, as one lonely child to another. The film handles this with great care, we can see both; it is a superb balancing act.
And it is a superb film throughout. I've written before about its look, the cold spare spaces of Blackeberg, all square buildings and empty courtyards, a fair version of hell, but that excellence is everywhere in the film. It's beautiful, and it uses its look and feel to advance the themes. It is a film about the end of childhood, about transition - and plays that out, all the shots of doorways and windows and gates we see. The themes come from the book - the importance of those liminal spaces, the central metaphor of the vampire's inability to go in uninvited, with Eli as the ultimate liminal character, forever caught <i>between</i> - and the film finds the imagery to give them weight and power.
So we come back to adolescence, to the traumatic transition from a childhood to maturity, to the loss of oneself, and the discovery of a new self - and the importance of that part of the change. Oskar, at the end of the film, has lost everything - abandoned his family, his life, left a trail of devastation in his wake - he is moving into a very uncertain future, very possibly headed for a life of slavery to a vampire who needs him to kill for her, and certainly obliged to drag her around with him wherever he goes.... But he is on his way somewhere - moving, alive, sane, not locked in a trunk until sunset. He has put off the childish things, and become someone else, something no one else, not even Eli, can do.
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