Friday Music, 1880 or So

Let's try something new - this Friday's musical post is devoted to one song, Television's 1880 or So.



I have fallen hopelessly in love with this song. For a long time I couldn't find it anywhere - I saw it on YouTube somewhere a couple years ago, and after that looked for it on records, but none of the records it is on showed up for sale, so I had to make do with occasionally watching the video. But - the last time I did that, it occurred to me to try iTunes - lots of stuff has been turning up there - and sure enough, there it was - a live version, Live at the Academy NYC 12.4.92. A glorious rendition of the song. (And a heck of a record too.)

But I'm hung up on 1880 or So. It's classic Television - pretty melody (deriving I suppose like much of the best American music of the last 40 years from the pretty Velvet Underground songs), with tight interlocking guitars and a throbbing motorik beat, Verlaine drawling the words, the two guitarists taking solo turns. Lloyd goes first - tight and fast, dense, a bit showy, with that gorgeous twangy stratocaster tone - Verlaine haunting the solo, keeping time, and starting to slip out of its shadows as Lloyd winds down... But first there's another verse - and it's Verlaine's turn. He plays a different kind of solo - one of the secrets to their sound, right? the way Loyd's style varies from Verlaines, complimenting each other... So Verlaine's solo is slower, spacier, built around simpler patterns, bending notes and tones, playing closer to the beats - staccato notes, and a way of slicing up the rhythms, speeding up, slowing down - the oft noted debt to 60s jazz, Coltrane and Dolphy, their way of making the rhythms of their solos as important as the notes. Verlaine, particularly, reminds me of Monk - solos that aren't hurried or forces, notes placed with precision, both as notes and as beats. Wandering the internet I found this review (at this site, devoted to the band) - I refer you here to the"two guys who can play rhythm guitar" line - that's another of their powers - the ease with which they slip from lead to rhythm. They never get lost, even when they are shredding - and they play around the beats, with it, against it, cutting it up, stretching it out, making the guitar lines percussive things, no matter how lovely the melodic and harmonic ideas may be.

Songs like this (1880 or So, Marquee Moon, etc.) put me in mind of Richard Thompson - I don't know if they were trying to play like him, but they sound like him. The clean guitar tones, and especially the way they build solos, always burrowing into the rhythms, always sliding the tone around, always surprising. Verlaine maybe more than Lloyd - Lloyd is great, but less surprising, more conventional - Verlaine, though, is mind boggling - his control over the machine, getting such a carefully controlled range of sound out of it, his mastery of time, his ability to make every sound beautiful. When they are right, there is almost nothing better. Maybe, maybe, there are bands that got it right more often, but we can leave them for another day.

Finally - like any great live band - always sounding different... take this version, from about the same time as the Later version above - the structure is the same, but the actual breaks are different - Lloyd, I think, a little more aggressive (than on the TV show, if not the record) - then Verlaine playing a much more minimal solo, manipulating the tone almost as much as playing - milking that beautiful guitar sound for itself....



Or this, from 2005 - a long intro, lovely twangy Lloyd solo that really lets fly, then a very minimal, but lovely, finale by Verlaine...

Le Quattro Volte

Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is the third great film I have seen this month. (After Certified Copy and Uncle Bonmee...) It is a simple seeming film, a beautifully shot meditation on the landscape of southern Italy and some of the people and animals living there. It's divided into four parts, following first a goatherd and his goats; then a new born kid; then a tree, which is cut down and used for a festival; finally, the same tree being used to build a kiln for making charcoal. All four segments are about death - and transformation - man to animal, animal to plant, plant to mineral (as Frammartino puts it in this interview). Reincarnation - or resurrection - and I'd say it is a very fine film to watch on Easter weekend. (Being itself set, in part, at Easter...) It is, throughout, slow, quiet, patient, beautifully shot, and - like the other two great films - gorgeous sounding. A good part of what I said about the sound design of Certified Copy is true here - Frammartino immerses us in the world of this film through its sound. It's like the photography - deep, rich, detailed, multi-layered... It's also almost as important as the images in telling the story.

Now: it might tempting to say that this is a film without a plot - or without much of a plot. It's probably more accurate to say it has an unusual plot - that progression of souls (as it were) is a clear enough story line, though it is unconventional. The actual progression of scenes can also seem eventless - but isn't, not at all. It's striking how much does, in fact, happen. Something happens in every scene - we learn something about the village, the people and animals, and so on, in every scene. And in the first section, especially, every scene, almost every detail, builds a very careful, subtle, structure, that gets paid off at the end in spectacular fashion. You can say quite accurately, I think, that the entire first part of the film (following the old man and his goats, and his dog) is an elaborate gag worthy of Tati. It all builds to an Easter procession past the old man's house and goat pens - the dog interferes, is chased off by the romans - then tries to bully a lone altar boy, who tricks him by throwing a fake rock - leading the dog to find a real rock, which just happens to be holding back a parked truck. It is a cinematic tour de force - all played out in one shot (itself rather astonishing when you remember that it is an impeccably timed gag starring - and completely dependent on - a dog), and carefully using sound and sight to create the scene... That is delightful, but there is more - as we have seen all the steps taking place to create this situation. Like how the rock got there... and so on. And - probably why the dog is so aggressive - the old man is nowhere to be seen in this scene - he should have had his goats out on the hillside by this time - that he doesn't is significant...

Over all - to me, this film played like a mix of Tati and Olmi - slow, quiet, patient, but carefully constructed, impeccably made, funny little humanist adventures, that, small as their scale might seem to be, feel perfectly epic in their conception. A joy, from top to bottom.

Earth Day Random Music

Friday music day, and earth day - reminding me that somehow I'd missed the fact that there is a new album out from Earth, the band... strange. Well - we will make up for that oversight by seeing what Genius offers us, starting from Earth - it's taken a couple tries, since Apple (or my music collection) only seems to notice Boris, SunnO))) and the Melvins as sounding like Earth - Peace in Mississippi yields a bit of variety...

1. Earth - Peace in Mississippi
2. SunnO))) & Boris - Etna [that was a shock, huh?]
3.Melvins - NIght Goat
4. Comets on Fire - Sour Smoke
5. the Warlocks - Slowly Disappearing
6. Espers - Children of Stone
7. Blue Cheer - Just a Little Bit - hey - let's give Genius Blue Cheer for a while...
8. 13th floor Elevators - Kingdom of Heaven
9. MC5 - COme Together
10. Earth - Tallahassee - that worked out!

For video - since every day should be a Good Earth Day, here is a song from The Good Earth....



And - Earth - doing Engine of Ruin - I suppose, between Glen Mercer and Dylan Carlson, I could just call this telecaster day...

Certified Copy

April is turning out to be quite a month for movies. Everything I have seen has been worth seeing - and I have managed to attend three pretty much great films as well.

Note the verb. In fact one of the strong ties between these three great films is that it would be an injustice to any of them to say I "saw" them. I did see them of course, but I also listened to them - they all make extraordinary use of sound. I will come back to the other two (which would be Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives [which I need to see again] and Le Quattro Volte) - I'll start here with some thoughts about Kiarostami's Certified Copy.

Brief run through what happens: it's basically a two-hander for Juliette Binoche and William Shimell (an opera singer in his first film) - he plays a writer, doing a book tour - she owns an antique shop - they go out for a Sunday drive in the Tuscan countryside, talk about art and her sister, see some sights, then, when they are mistaken for a married couple by a woman in a coffee shop, start acting the part. They visit a church specializing in weddings, a museum with a famous copy, they look at sculptures and art, try to eat at a restaurant, visit the hotel where they spent their wedding night, all the while growing into their roles as husband and wife, in a marriage on the rocks... Along the way they interact with a few other people - her son, the woman at the cafe, newlyweds, an old couple (Jean-Claude Carrierre and Agathe Natanson, as it happens) by a fountain, and various passersby - as well as a few people who don't appear, but have substance - her sister and brother in law, the people on the other end of their phones.... The story, then, is Strange - they begin as strangers, they are recast (as it were) by the observer as a married couple, and they start playing the parts - getting more and more engaged by the roles. Maybe they are play-acting with each other - maybe they were married all along - maybe reality changes - it probably doesn't matter. It seems to me, it is as if they are enacting the entire course of a relationship in one afternoon, from flirtation to courtship to marriage and the decay of the marriage. Maybe. Whatever is happening, the film is beautiful looking, gorgeous sounding, and all of it is very clever. Binoche is magnificent, her character a strange, rather off-putting person, but a great performance; Shimell doesn't quite seem up to her level - he comes off like Jeremy Irons in Inland Empire - though that may be the point. The character is pretty loathsome (though he is given some interesting critical positions - the arguments aren't really unbalanced), selfish, solipsistic, rude, though with an odd, sad, charm - gentle and cold... And everything is combined into a magnificent piece of filmmaking.

I've written before about how Kiarostami's films sound - and it's the sound that was most dazzling about Certified Copy. Nothing sounds like Kiarostami. That isn't to slight the visuals - this is a ravishing looking film, and visually clever to boot - but it sounds like nothing else. HIs films remind you how much we take sound for granted in films - and how hard it is to talk about sound. What does sound do? Most films use sound very conventionally - ambient sound to create a sense of realism - more precisely determined sound to emphasize actions - the music to shape our reactions - and dialogue... sound, in most films, guides us to the meaning of the film, shapes our attention and signals the importance of things on screen. Sound, most of the time, is used in a very similar way to analytical editing - it guides our attention, focuses us on certain elements of the film, shapes the emotional impact of the film.

Kiarostami doesn't use sound this way. He does a couple characteristic things, both different from conventional sound design. First - he immerses us in the sonic world of his films. His soundtracks are dense with ambient sound - voices and machines and natural sounds, tires and footsteps and wind and doors opening and floors creaking and so on, and snatches of diegetic music, TV and radio, etc. The sound immerses us in the world of the film, surrounds us - If most films use sound to guide your attention to the important elements of the image, Kiarostami uses sound to fill in the world outside the image. His sound designs are analogous to his cinematography - the deep focus, the open spaces, the somewhat disordered and random backgrounds. His films give the impression of being free, outside the direct focus of the story - the story takes place in a world that is going about its business regardless of the story. It's hard to describe properly - because it is combining two ideas. The story - in this case, the interactions between Binoche and Shimell - are carefully shot, framed, lit - they are edited precisely, taking full advantage of all the resources of art cinema (mirrors and frames in the frames and all the rest).... But behind the main actors, the rest of the city seems to be going about its business, just there. The sound design works to the same ends - the careful control of the dialogue, clear and distinct - but against the background sounds of the rest of the world (a city, a town, going about its business). Now: it can probably go without saying that these things are very highly controlled - you don't get a soundtrack as precise and rich as this without a lot of work and artifice. I imagine the same is true of the people wandering around in the back of the shots. (And it's certainly true of the compositions, the lighting, the reflections on the car windshield in the driving sequences, etc.) It reproduces at a technical level the general shape of his films - that carefully balanced blend of artifice and realism.

The other characteristic device Kiarostami uses here is a kind of split of the image and sound. There is always a careful interplay between the image and sound, and very often, Kiarostami breaks them apart. He does this in quite a few of his films - most radically in Shirin, but it happens repeatedly. In Certified Copy, that is how the film begins - the image (a table set up for an author talk, but with no people) is broken from the sound (an crowd, gathering, murmuring, somewhere behind the camera.) This changes - a man appears (a translator, introducing Shimell's character, James Miller, a writer, who is late) - then Miller - who begins by repeating (with a variation) the translator's excuse for his tardiness... Meaning already we have themes we will see again: characters repeating one another, even if they don't know what the other have said; a distinct image of an audience and spectacle - we hear the audience, and indeed seem to be part of the audience ourselves (the camera is in their place) - a relationship (between the camera and actors) that will be repeated throughout the film. (Several head on shots of the actors - interacting, diegetically, with other characters - but literally, interacting directly with the camera...

Okay... back to sound and image - and as that first sequence continues, Kiarostami continues to play games with the sound and image - we see the crowd rather than Shimell as he starts to speak; we see the antics of Binoche's character and her son, while the speech is going on, see them talking to one another and the translator, without hearing what they say; then she leaves - and Kiarostami gets in one more joke, when a cel phone goes off, and we pause a second, not knowing whose it is. Then - of course it is Shimell's, and he answers it, and we get half the conversation... And throughout the film, similar patterns return. Several cel phone conversations that we only hear half of, if that - though sometimes, the character on the phone (usually Binoche) gives a running commentary about the call... Their conversations sometimes run into other conversations, or people interact with one of them at a time, and fill in the other half of a conversation. The moment when they are mistaken for a couple plays like this - everyone seems to be getting about half of the conversation, and end up filling in the other half on their own - making jokes with languages - does Miller speak Italian? French? sometimes yes, sometimes no...

More than one scene plays as a tour de force - take the museum scene, with its copies and discussion of copies, its signs and glass, reflecting cases, the retellings of the story - Binoche tells Shimell about the piece (a 200 year old copy of an ancient Roman painting); then the tour guide tells the same story in Italian (and Binoche repeats it - inaudibly - for Shimell, who in this scene does not seem to speak Italian or French), then in French.... Or the scene by the fountain, especially the meeting with Carrierre and Natanson. Binoche and Shimell have been quarreling about the meaning and value of a statue - she has gone to solicit opinions of some of the others people in the courtyard, while he watches her in a series of mirrors. He sees Carrierre and Natanson - and when they first appear, he (Carrierre) is shouting - Natanson is behind him, apparently the target of his annoyance - then they turn, and we see he's talking to someone on the phone (she has the phone, he has the earpiece) - a lovely bit of misdirection. Binoche approaches them, talks to them - we don't hear their conversation (we see her in the mirrors) - then Shimell joins them. Binoche tries to get them to repeat what they told her about the statue - they won't quite do it, they even say she is the one who said what she wants them to say... It's all dazzling - the play of sound, the doubling of the pairs of characters (with the statue, of a man and woman, another in the series), the way what people say isn't quite original, people repeating each other, or putting words in each other's mouths - even the ubiquitous cel phones... words breaking free from their speakers, images and sounds divided, images and sounds multiplying, languages multiplying... a tour de force.

Friday Music Day

I have been sick this week, which along with the Champion's League has kept me from finishing a couple pieces that I have, in fact, half written - it has been a nice couple weeks for new movies.... But here it is Friday again, and so time for another post that will write itself! Fire up the iPod and see what we get!

1. Pere Ubu - Something's Gotta Give [always a good sign when you start with Pere Ubu!]
2. Iron & Wine - Sunset Soon Forgotten
3. Fugazi - Song #1
4. Boredoms - Super Good
5. Bing Crosby - Away in a Manger [with the Norman Luboff choir!]
6. The Pop Group - Words Disobey Me
7. Sigur Rus - Fljotavik
8. The Chambers Brothers - In the Midnight Hour
9. Pere Ubu - Make Hay [I am almost cured already! 2 Pere Ubu songs on the random 10, including this, Tom Hermann at his bluesiest... where does the time go?]
10. Red Crayola - Place for Piano and Electric Bass Guitar [and Red Crayola! let's hope this is a sign.]

Video? Not the same song, but here's Red Crayola live (with George Hurley on drums, I believe!)

Civil War

Today, April 12, is the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil, War, the firing on Fort Sumter. It was, as this post from the Britannica Blog points out, hardly the beginning of hostilities - the problem of slavery haunted the United States from its beginning - and more or less open warfare had been waged in the late 50s in Kansas - almost going national, when John Brown raided Harper's Ferry in 1859. But when the cannon balls started to fly in Charleston Harbor, there wasn't any going back....

The results of course - 4 years of warfare, 600,000 dead, massive destruction, and an imperfect but rather unmistakeable step closer to actual human decency. It is hard to say America saved its soul by fighting the Civil War - it took another 100 years for institutional racism to be eliminated (and even that, only in theory) - but it certainly helped. In some ways, it's taken even longer than that to acknowledge the basic facts of the war - the South managed to win the reconstruction, in the end - even 30 years ago, people who should know better could downplay the role of slavery in the war. Even now, there are plenty of folks who think they can pretend it was about state's rights or industrialization vs. agriculture or whatnot - a clash of cultures... It wasn't. It was Treason in defense of slavery. In the end, they didn't manage to destroy their country (in order to defend their right to own other human beings) - but they tried...

So to remember. And to remember what Confederacy stood for - slavery, racism, plutocracy, violence - and to note that, in the end, what we have is better than anything they could have given it.

Friday Random Music

Friday is here - and though I continue to fail to get anything else written (perhaps this time in utter despair at the misfortunes of the local 9 - though to those inclined too much to pessimism, let me commend the story of the 2001 Oakland A's, of the 2-10 start and the 102-60 finish - similar hype, similar beginnings...) - I can at least put together a music post in 15 minutes to - do something....

Here goes:

1. Frank Sinatra - My Funny Valentine (live in Paris)
2. Dungen - En Gang I Ar Kom Det En Tar
3. PJ Harvey - I Think I'm a Mother
4. Richard Thompson - Mr. Stupid
5. Earth - Rise to Glory
6. Buzzcocks - Promises
7. Isley Brothers - Footsteps in the Dark
8. Can - Spoon
9. Romeo Void - A GIrl in Trouble
10. Pere Ubu - Codex (Live - Mayo Thompson era)

Now - while I can't find anything better on the video front - here is the song, at least - The Isley Brothers...



and I probably post this every 6 months or so, but you can't have too much Can - this is Spoon:

Musical Foolishness

In honor of April Fools day (the weather is certainly foolish enough...) - let's run genius, starting with Frank Zappa's Dancin' Fool:

Starting point: Frank Zappa - Dancin' Fool

1.Devo - Jocko Homo
2. Captain Beefheart - ZIgzag Wanderer
3. Warren Zevon - Accidentally like a Martyr
4. Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless
5. Tom Waits - Singapore
6. Ian Dury & the Blockheads - Reasons to be Cheerful Part 3
7. Jane's Addiction - Ted Just Admit It
8. Nick Cave & Bad Seeds _ Hold on To Yourself
9. George Harrison - Apple Scruffs
10. The Mars Volta - Metatron

Here's Frank live:



And somehow, Ian Dury seems appropriate - since live footage of the song that came up seems rare - here's Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick...



Though this - a Bollywood number cut to Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3 - is too good to miss.

Baseball Prediction, 2011

Time for a baseball preview - the surest sign of spring, the start of the baseball season.

AL East:
1) Boston - There is obviously a lot of hype this year - they had the most active and successful offseason - and they were not far off last year, a game worse than Texas even with all the injuries, the underachievement (Beckett, Papelbon, Lackey), and so on. I think if they had brought back last year's team, they would be favorites - even without Beltre and Martinez, they would be contenders - but getting Crowford and Gonzalez is a lot more than that. It's hard not to pick them - they didn't have anyone really playing over their head last year - if the breakout players (Buchholz and Bard, notably) regress to the mean, you'd think Beckett, Lackey, Papelbon coming back to their mean would more than balance it out.... and I don't think the kids are all that likely to regress - Buchholz and Bard have been top prospects all along - they didn't overachieve last year. The team bolstered all their options - they have depth almost everywhere, including pitching... So - if they stay healthy - they should be formidable. If everything clicks, they might be awe inspiring.

2) NY Yankees - not exactly slouches, though. The team on the field is still pretty good - they also are more likely to get bounceback years from the likes of Jeter and Granderson than any regression from Cano or Gardner. They might be carrying some defensive holes - Jeter has been bad for a long time; A-Rod is getting old and slow as well - but the rest of the field seems pretty well covered. The pitching is another story though - Sabathia is a horse - Hughes, like Buchholz, has been a big prospect for a long time, and one imagines he'll continue to be an asset for a long time.... But then you get AJ Burnett - who seems to me a lesser version of Beckett and Lackey - not as good to start, and less likely to turn it around. And then - Bartolo Colon? Freddy Garcia? Ivan Nova?? I'll take Dice-K, thanks...

3) Tampa Bay - still a strong rotation, still the likes of Langoria and Upton, maybe Zobrist will bounce back - there's Manny and Damon with a lot to prove, but no real expectations - so they are still relevant... They should still have strong starting - they certainly have lots of good options to choose from, behind a very good ace in Price. The pen? Probably keeps them safely in third.

4) Toronto - they have a mob of good and intriguing young pitchers; they have some interesting players on the field - if Lind or Hill come back, if Snider continues to develop, if Bautista doesn't revert to the mean - they could be dangerous. A couple breaks and they could be fighting for third.

5) Baltimore Orioles - they have what - 3 good young players - and a mob of has-beens; and some promising young starters, and Jeremy Guthrie; and - Kevin Gregg? really? They might score some runs - they might not be embarrassing. Showalter might still be on the upward slope of his inevitable rise and fall... but fourth place would be an upset.

Central:
1) Detroit - I think - assuming Cabrera stays out of jail and all. They have some nice pitchers, especially at the top - Verlander and Schzerzer; they have decent players on the field. I think it's a fine line - they have to stay healthy, stay out of jail, stay out of the old folks home - if they do, they should be in contention. Truth is, I don't have a clue who will win this division - the top three teams all have some real stars, but some gaping holes as well - any of them could break in either direction.

2) Chicago - Why put them 2? call it - strong pitching, Dunn, etc. If Peavy were healthy, yeah, maybe... they have Juan Pierre still, though, and that has to be a major point in Detroit and Minnesota's favor.

3) Minnesota - No - actually, I expect them to win the division, as usual. Mauer and Morneau (if he is healthy) are too good - the Cuddyer Span Young Kubel Thome etc. supporting cast is decent - the pitching is decent - Joe Nathan is back, and the pen becomes deeper for it - so... I should put them first.

4) Cleveland - sooner or later something good might happen; though probably the best thing that could happen is they get enough of of Sizemore or Carmona to peddle them off to a contender at the trade deadline.

5) KC - wait til next year! actually - literally - wait til next year - they have some guys on the farm just waiting to shine - hopefully they will be more Johnny Damon, Carlos Beltran, Billy Butler than Alex Gordon. Who's still around too, isn't he? The organization keeps running out stiffs like Francouer and Melky Cabrera - but maybe, this time next year, all those kids will start to make a difference...

West:
1) Texas - they are somewhat weaker, without Lee, but the division is not strong - they should be safe favorites. They did more to improve their offense than pitching (adding Beltre), but they actually have some nice young pitchers - they should be all right.

2) Anaheim - an offseason which saw them fail to get any of the players who could impact the team, then trade for the worst contract in the game - but they have enough that they could be back in the mix. They should have a pretty good rotation (potentially a very good one, with Haren and Weaver in front of the likes of Santana) - they have enough hitters that they should survive... They are soft, though - getting old in kay positions - they are rteading water at best.

3) Oakland - If they had a little more offense I would be more optimistic - they have some great pitchers. The danger is getting too excited about a good young rotation that isn't backed up by much of a team on the field. Sometimes it works (last year's Giants) - usually, it regresses (last year's Mariners.)

4) Seattle - quite hopeless, until some kids develop. The encouraging thing is that the best player on the team is barely more than a kid himself - King Felix has been around forever, has become the class of the American league - and he's not 25 yet.

National League:

East:
1) Phillies - another superteam, it seems. That is a heck of a rotation, I won't deny it. And a good team, as well - though Utley's absence is bad - and they aren't getting younger. This is the baseball equivalent of the Celtics of the last couple years, I think.

2) Atlanta - they were pretty good last yearm and I suspect they will be better this year - as Heyward and Hanson develop, adding Uggla to hit home runs - they should be solid, a wild card contender.

3) Florida - there's quite a bit of talent here - starting with Hanley Ramirez and Josh Johnson - with nice younger players, some interesting veterans - will Javier Vazquez do his usual NL thing? will Nolasco come back? they never seem to catch all the breaks - but they seem a little stronger coming in than usual - maybe they will move up...

4) NY Mets - this is with Bay & Beltran & Reyes all year. Without them, they go to fifth.

5) Washington - there's actually quite a bit to like here - I think Werth's contract was ridiculous, but he is a good player to have on a team like this - he and Zimmerman are a nice middle of the lineup. They have quite a number of good young pitchers, too - though they also have Livan Hernandez (and may for the next decade, for all I know.) I think if the Mets run into their usual health and sanity issues, the Nats could get 4th...

Central:
1) Cincy - they have a lot of players who seem to be on the rising slope of their careers - Bruce and Stubbs and quite a few pitchers - I'd worry a bit about some of their pitchers maintaining their success - but not too much. They look like a pretty good team, on balance.

2) Cards - without Wainwright, they are nothing special. They aren't bad - though the pitchers may find Lance Berkman's stylings in right field something less than optimal. They will never be out of it - but...

3) Milwaukee - Greinke's out already? there's a degree of hype about them, too - and certainly if things were to work out, they could be a breakout team - Greinke and Marcum at the front of the rotation could be very very good - or - could put in a lot of time on the training table... I think they're more uncertain than the teams I have ahead of them - not necessarily worse, though.

4) Cubs - I have no idea what the Cubs will do. I rather like the chances of Garza and Zambrano mounting nice comebacks - I suspect Pena will get back over the MEndoza line and whack 35 or so bombs - but how it all fits? So stick 'em here...

5) Houston - in fact, I don't know if I believe this. They are a boring pointless team, actually. Even if they stay ahead of the Bucs, who cares?

6) Pittsburgh - that is to say - though the odds of getting out of the cellar aren't great - they are actually sort of an interesting team. McCutcheon is an exciting player - Tabata, Alvarez, even Jones are intriguing. if they find any pitching at all - htey might start moving. If they somehow get some pitching before McCutcheon hits arbitration, they might even approach .500 in a couple years.

West:
1) SF Giants - that is one hell of a pitching staff. As for the offense - they have a hell of a pitching staff. Though any kind of recovery from Sandoval, a full year of Posey - they should be okay.

2) LA Dodgers - they have a pretty good staff as well. Kemp and Ethier are first rate hitters, too. The rest fo the team does not thrill me.

3) Rockies - they tend to walk a tightrope - they too have a pretty nice staff (strange thing to say about the Rocks) - and some great players (Tulowitzki and Gonzalez, particularly.) And are thin behind them...

4) Diamondbacks - they are actually not half bad themselves. Need to get Young and Upton both playing well at the same time - and the young pitchers (Hudson, Kennedy) need to come through. They oculd be quite respectable...

5) Padres - another team with a fine staff and not much offense. Older mediocrities and promising youngsters who have not yet done anything... I imagine as the organization reloads, people like Heath Bell should probably keep a bag packed...

OKAY! Predictions!
AL: Boston - Detroit - Texas & Yankees for the wildcard. Boston comes out, I think.
NL: Phils - Reds - Gints & Atlanta - Phils should win it, but this is harder to predict - Giants will be hard to beat with those arms.
Leaving the Sox winners, though - I hope.

AL MVP = I'm gonna say Carl Crawford - watch him use that center field tringle as a triple machine! watch him steal 40, drive in 100, his .325!
Cy Young: make it a Red Sox sweep - Lester!
Rookie - oy - Hellickson seems like the safest bet.

NL MVP = default of course is Pujols. If not Pujols - Tulowitzki or why not Matt Kemp? AT least until the Marlins make the playoffs, which will give it to Hanley.
Cy Young = Halladay and Lincecum are the default choices there - my money would be on Lincecum.
Rookie = do I know? Belt in SF? could be.

Anyway - off we go! games tomorrow! all is well!

New Records

I can see that my posting has slowed down again - three Friday posts in a row.... At least this time I can vary it a bit. I've managed to buy a decent selection of new records this year - there seems to be a particular concentration of things I want out in the early going this year. WIth more to come (whenever the TV on the Radio record is supposed to come out - April 12?) Not only buying it, but listening to it - though in the 21st century way, all the new stuff in a playlist on the iPod, set to shuffle... It's like listening to the radio, back in the day! 2011 feels like 1977 sometimes. A theme that may return.... Anyway - I can't pretend to review these records - just offer some impressions from what the iTunes fairies have chosen to play...

Danielson: The Best of Gloucester County - haven't has this long, and only a couple songs have come up - but - nice stuff, more normal sounding than usual, though Daniel Smith's voice can never quite be normal. If their early career seemed to be built on variations of The Art of Walking - this is their Cloudland...

Decembrists: The King is Dead - they seem to have moved from remaking the Waterboys to remaking The River. (Though with more than a few early REM moments.) They remain quite good, though nothing on this record has compelled my attention like The Crane Wife did... Still - they are a pretty reliable act - I guess I liked their Waterboys act better...

Deerhoof: Deerhoof vs. Evil - nice stuff as always, a bit different, less jagged than before; they appear to be mellowing. Quieter instrumentation, and when the guitars and drums come in, their softer, gentler, with a bit of a latin lilt... interesting....

Gang of Four: Content - not up to their old stuff, but it still jumps out at you - I once confused a group of people at lunch by saying if I could be anyone other than myself I would want to be Andy Gill... that statement is still operational.... I admit too, every time a song from this CD comes up on shuffle, I like it more than I did the last time.



Iron & Wine: Kiss Each other Clean - Mr. Beam and company channeling Little Feat (or is it Harry Nilson?), between the prettier folk songs. Maybe it is 1977 - the bands that weren't actually around in 77 or 79 seem determined to sound like they were... This should not be taken as complaint though - this in particular is full of lovely songs, and a couple really cool songs, when they really dial up the Little Feat vibe - I've had Big Burned Hand running in my head over the last couple weeks.



Mogwai: Hardcore Will Never Die, But You WIll - even Mogwai is sounding rather mellow and 70s-ish these days - well - maybe it's the context; I'm not sure there's much difference from their usual sound - slightly different nuances of 70s style prog metal? Though then you get the end - "You're Lionel Richie" - which lifts it's main riff straight from Earth, and does it justice...

PJ Harvey: Let England Shake - this requires careful attention - Polly Jean is at the height of her powers. I feel inadequate to say anything about it now... if there's a classic in this bunch of CDs, this is it.



REM: Collapse Into Now - not sure why I bought this, but here it is. Nostalgia can be cruel. Though what little I have heard of it so far sounds - promising. Neat opening riff, that comes back again at the end, after a song that appears to have Patti Smith singing while Stipe does a fake Patti Smith thing - interesting. Looping back to the start is a neat little effect... In general - the songs that have come up on the iPod do seem more appealing than on the last REM record, whatever that was called. SO maybe...

Six Organs of Admittance: Asleep on a Flood Plain - Ben back to the classics, acoustic drones and layered sounds and percussions, and now and then, a blast of electricity coming through in waves...

Wire: Red Barked Tree - the music seems a bit softer than in the past, but the words - "please take the knife out of my back and when you do please twist it" - are up to expected standards.

Random Friday Music Post

Welcome to another Friday. Today I think I will revert to randomness -though one of these weeks I want to put up something on some of the new records I have gotten this year. For some reason, a host of bands I like have released records in early 2011 - I believe I have 10 new CDs since the beginning of the year, which given my diminished music buying is rather impressive. Good stuff too - Decembrists, Gang of Four, PJ Harvey - I'll try to run up a post before too long.

Meanwhile, I managed to get through Evacuation Day without posting anything by the Pogues - the last couple years, I have done that more at Facebook, but I even managed to avoid it there. I have also been haunted all week by the Blue Oyster Cult - "history shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men" - funny how stoner rock stars and monster movie filmmakers have a better grasp of how the world works than politicians and businessmen. I'm not alone in noticing this of course - Andrew O'Hehir had a piece in Salon about Japanese apocalyptic films - they have a strong track record of finding striking images of disaster, that illuminate as well as terrify. History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men.... framing these images as something that seems less that serious just confuses people - the original films are derived pretty directly from real, horrifying events - and the BOC may kid, but they know what is going on:



But enough of that... today, let's stick to iTunes shuffle:

1. Xiu Xiu - Sad Pony Guerilla Girl
2. Mars Volta - Son et Lumiere
3. Decembrists - Summersong
4. Elton John - Bitter Fingers
5. James Brown - It's a Man's Man's Man's World
6. Public Enemy - Hannibal Lecture
7. Pavement - Type Slowly
8. Neutral Milk Hotel - Avery Island - April 1st
9. Ruins - Muoljimbog
10. Boogie Down Productions - Breath Control

For video - a nice long stretch of The Ruins:

Friday Music and Best Wishes for Japan

Today's terrible news out of Japan has rather put a damper on my enthusiasm for fun Friday music posts - but I shouldn't let that stop me. Since some of my favorite bands are from Japan - and particularly, one of my favorite musicians over the last 20 years or so - it's not hard to come up with some. Hope things come out okay...

You Ishihara & Friends:



Ghost, playing Hazy Paradise:



And - completing the Kurihara trilogy, backing Damon & Naomi on Song to the Siren:



And because that is such a beautiful song - here's Tim Buckley playing it live on the Monkees TV show.

Korean Film Blogathon - Announcement and List

Today is the first day of the Korean film blogathon. I have been looking forward to this very much. Korean films have become one of the most exciting national movements in the world in the past decade or so. I know there was a strong Korean film tradition before that - unfortunately, I have seen very few Korean films from before the 00s, almost none from before the 1990. That is something I hope to change....

One of the things I like about Korean cinema is that it is so varied. Most of my own experience has been with auteur cinema from Korea - that is a strong point, with Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-Wook, Lee Chang-Dong, Hong Sang-soo all among the world's very best, and several others (Im Sang-soo for instance) - not far behind... But beyond auteur cinema is a thriving pop cinema industry - and even the auteurs often work in popular genres, and have produced some of the biggest drawing films of the decade. (And pop cinema has produced some fine directors - Kim Jee-woon, for example.) Leaving aside my own personal preferences, that is, to me, the surest sign of a powerful national cinema - the ability to produce exciting popular cinema as well as art cinema. It's what marked American cinema during its highest periods - it's a characteristic of Japanese films through most of the 20th century, of Hong Kong in the 70s through the 90s, and so on. At the moment, I'm not sure any national cinema now does as good a job of playing both sides, art films and pop films, as South Korea...

So then: I hope to write more as the week goes along - but I think I'll start like with the Iranian blogathon a couple weeks ago, with a list. These films are, again, heavy on the auteurs, though I did try to spread it out among several of them... and Song Kang-ho, who's in 4 of them - and could have been in even more, since he's in a number of near misses as well. He is, I think, one of the great stars of the decade - possibly THE film star of the decade.... Even if I weren't inclined to see any Korean film that got an American release on principal, I would see any film he is in on principal.



1.) Secret Sunshine - Lee Chang-dong
A woman and her son move to her husband's home town after he is killed in a car accident. En route, she is rescued from car trouble by a Mr. Kim (the almost inevitable Song Kang-ho), a mechanic, who soon takes her under his wing. Helps her find a place to live, start up a piano school, etc. - keeps trying to romance her without much luck. She slowly integrates into the town; she is trying to reinvent herself, cutting off all ties with her family and inlaws - and almost starts to manage it when - something worse happens. So. There is a pharmacist in town who annoys her with religion - desperate now, she takes it - converts, zealously, and decides to make the grand gesture of forgiving the one who had harmed her most. But when she does, he says he too has found god, and god has forgiven him already.... She is understandably outraged. She replaces zealous evangelical christianity with self-destruction and vengeance, but.... It's an extraordinary film, rich and complicated and full. It swings from comedy to horror to despair to comedy again, turning on a dime, and committing itself completely to every mode. When it runs down, as it does, as she runs down, it turns to the basics, the camera turning down to the sun playing on the ground - one must find salvation in the earth... All through, it poses Song against Jeon Do-yeun (the woman) - as she breaks down, he waits - standing over her shoulder, in the background, half in focus, shot after shot - watching, waiting. This does tend to become symbolic - he's God: real God - he's waiting for her, but she has to save herself. He can't save her - he's singing karaoke to himself when she comes for help with her son; he gets mad when she makes a pass at him, while trying to insult him. But he's always there, watching and waiting, but not insisting. It works.

2) Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - Park Chan-wook
A deaf mute who works at a factory has a sister who is dying for lack of a kidney. He can't donate, but he can sell one of his own and buy one for her on the black market - or try - the black marketeers double cross him and he is left without money or kidney for his sister, and down one himself. Well - when a kidney becomes legally available, he has no money, but he (and his anarchist girlfriend) come up with a cunning plan - kidnap the boss's daughter. This almost works, even, until the sister discovers how they are getting her kidney. After that, no one gets out alive.... A film about guilty consciences, where everyone has good reasons, but do stupid, careless, selfish things - and are ruthlessly punished by someone else with a guilty conscience. Add to this politics - anti-capitalist, while mocking (but seeming to understand and half agree with) anarchists; add to that allusions to one of the greatest thrillers ever, High and Low. A rather plainer, more direct film than Park's later films - as well as harsher than his earlier films.

3) Memories of Murder - Bong Joon-ho
Korean policier set in 1986 in a village where women start turning up dead. The local police are don't get very far, they're hacks, and brutes who are more interested in torturing suspects into confessions than catching the killer. A professional from Seoul arrives, with bright ideas and attention to the evidence, and they try to investigate for real. Things move, but not always forward - they make progress, they fail, women keep getting killed, they work on suspects but can't prove anything (they might even be innocent), and the cops themselves change places, the Seoul detective turning brutal, the locals thinking about the evidence and the process - but in the end, none of them get anywhere.... It is a striking and remarkable films, though - witty and strange from the beginning (a little kid imitating the cop - Song again - investigating one of the murders), funny and weird and a bit political (the old military rule is crumbling - students and radicals are protesting, talking back to the cops - culminating in a brawl that pretty much destroys everything), and featuring first rate performances by all...

4) Mother - Bong Joon-ho
A girl is killed, head bashed in and left on a roof; a local kid, brain damaged, is arrested and pinned with the killing - he was drinking, he went home that way... His mother insists on his innocence, fighting the cops, hiring a lawyer, pamphleting the neighborhood, but nobody cares. But she manages to falsely accuse her son's no good pal - he starts to shake her down, but then decides to help her - together, they uncover evidence and piece together the story... Like Bong's other films, it is a masterful mixture of tension and wit - everything happens at an angle, high melodrama played against straight comedy. There are strange flashbacks and details, there are hallucinatory sets and giddy shots and odd misdirections. A great looking film - big, wide shots and tight closeups, blurry (but active) backgrounds, beautiful compositions, high comedy....

5) Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors - Hong Sang-soo
Like most of Hong's films, a love triangle - here, a gallery owner and a film director pursue a much younger girl. It is a very highly structured film - told twice, more or less in the same order, once roughly from the gallery owner's point of view, once more explicitly from the girl's. There are interesting variations between the two - some attributable to different perspectives or memories - some seem completely playful. Scenes are flipped around, dialogue is different - in one half a fork falls on the ground; in the other a spoon... It's a lovely, fascinating film - hard to pin down, but moving... Shot in black and white, quite lovely, though both the DVD and print I saw of it seemed to be in pretty bad shape - though not so much damaged as glitchy - I almost wonder if that's what it really looks like.... (I also just remembered that this film was the subject of a blog-a-thon of its own, back in 2007...)

6) Lies - Jang Sun-woo
A 38 year old sculptor and an 18 year old student meet and fuck, about that abruptly. They have their reasons, and get together again, but then he starts to draw her into his more exotic habits - he starts by spanking her, then moves on to whips and sticks and wires - things get harsh. She takes it,though - and then he takes it - but they are happy enough. But nothing lasts forever.... It's a very strange and radical film - the sex is real, the beatings are mostly real - while the filmmaking is very stylized. There are documentary moments, with the actors (in and out of character) talking to the camera, discussing the film; the artifice of the film is foregrounded, the constant assertion of the presence of the camera in the room with the actors - which comes to a head in a scene where the crew appears to comfort the girl after a terrible fight with another girl - or when someone off camera seems to start talking to the characters (the devil has no smell). All this does a couple things - at once reminding us that we are watching an art film; but also that what we are watching is really happening... it keeps the tension of the depiction of what we see and the act of depicting something present all the time... Well, I'm not going to pretend not to be a nerd about things like that - I love it...

7) The President's Last Bang - Im Sang-soo
The assassination of Park Chun-hee, told in a strange, dark comic style. A parade of nincompoops pass through the film - the president, his oafish bodyguard, the KCIA man with a bad liver and worse breath, various underlings, some competent, most not, various whores and singers and actresses looking for a break, unflappable waiters, drivers pressed into emergency service as assassins, cowardly generals, etc. It reaches a crisis point at the president's meal with 2 girls, an actress and a Japanese singer, the bodyguard (who isn't armed), an obsequious secretary, and the KCIA man - who halfway through stages a coup, apparently deciding to do it on the spot. Mayhem and screwups of all sorts follow.... It's a marvelous film - the style, ice cold, sharp as a knife satire - the absurdity of it all, the incompetence, everywhere. Played, though, against a number of characters whose competence or decency seems to be stranded by events, and who bring out a surprising depth of emotion.

8) Why has the Bodhi Darma Left for the East - Bae Yung Kyun
The first Korean film I ever saw... The title comes from a zen koan, the film is structured somewhat like a koan. It is slow and very beautiful, shot imaginatively and expressively - things constantly change, move, change significance. The story is very basic, and slippery - it works you into its rhythms, you fall into its patterns and it makes sense on its own levels. Though there is a plot, I suppose - a young monk, who leaves his obligations, seeks enlightenment, and in the end, decides to return to the world in order to learn to love it - told in an oblique way...

9) Thirst - Park Chan-wook
Vampire film combined with Zola, with all that ought to entail. Song Kang-ho, again, plays a priest who volunteers to be infected with a disease (the Emmanuel Virus, named for a Dr Emmanuel) for science - he dies, of course, coughing up blood through a flute, but comes back, whispering a prayer under the sheet. He goes home and gains a following who think he can heal - then meets an old friend, who thinks he has cancer. The friend invites him to his house for mahjong - he discovers that the girl he thought was the friend's sister was a foundling, now his wife - abused! miserable! But our hero gets a whiff of her blood, and - the sun burns him - but - the blood is the life... Soon he's drinking blood from a fat guy in a coma and flirting with the girl - she seduces him - he tells her what his disease is - she isn't quite as terrified as he'd like... in fact, everyone who finds out about him wants a bit of the action. Anyway - he and the girl act out Therese Raquin (and every other story where a wife gets a sap to help her kill her husband) and are duly consumed with guilt and paranoia - and sooner or later, he shares his disease with her - and she takes to it like a natural.... blood and gore and comedy follow, before a genuinely moving end. Like most of Park's films, morality shifts and blurs all over the place - the priest is guilt ridden and tries not to hurt people, unless he has to, and then he has a great ability not to stop things he wants to be true. The girl loves it, she is sensuous and wild. Park shoots the whole thing without ever quite committing - to a point of view, a moral position, a consistent tone - it's always funny, but has that consistent undercurrent of sadness in his work.

10) Woman on the Beach - Hong Sang-soo
Another triangle, and another diptych from Hong. Here, a film director and his friend go to the beach so the director can write - they take the friend's girlfriend with them. But she is not his girlfriend, she says (he is married) - soon enough, she and the director are lovers, though this has complications. They leave, but the director comes back and starts pursuing another girl, who he seems to think looks like the first one - then Moon-sook (her name) comes back, finds out about his affair, gets drunk and makes trouble. They hang around for a while, he hurts his leg, he writes his script, then leaves after a confrontation with Moon-sook (after she has one with the other woman) - he leaves, and she lets him go, and she and the other woman say goodbye. This is made in the full flower of Hong's style - the long takes, the little zooms to reframe, the arrangements of 2-3 people in shots, the conversations, the twists and turns of emotion and plot. Very well done - very much like Rohmer, like those early films, their emotional mazes, etc. It is hard, in fact, to pick one of Hong's films over any other, easier to talk about them in the mass - he is one of the most consistent filmmakers going, revisiting the same kinds of stories, in the same style, but endlessly reworking them, finding new nuances to them. They are lovely films, everyone one engaging from start to end...

Friday Ritual Music Post

Right? Plus a little bit more. Like - after a year or so when they seemed to be out of fashion, blogathons are everywhere. Another big one (for my money) coming up next week - Korean Film Blogathon, at New Korean Cinema and cineAWESOME. Conveniently, in Boston, this is the week Lee Chang-dong's Poetry opens, one of the films I am most anticipating.

And, looking back (in more ways than one) - I found out late about the Jean Harlow blogathon in honor of her 100th birthday - it started Monday and continues all week, and is well worth a few clicks.

Now, music - the year's off to a lively start, a bunch of nice records out - PJ Harvey, Mogwai, The Decembrists and so on - not that I've actually listened to most of them yet. One of these days I will have to make some kind of stab at reviewing them... not today, I fear. Nope - we're back to straight random 10 posting today!

1. Amos Milburn - One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer
2. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Elmo Delmo
3. Ramones - California Sun (live)
4. De Rosa - Steam Comes off Our House [another mojo collection special.]
5. Heavens to Betsy - Waitress Hell
6. The Stooges - ATM
7. OOIOO - Ring Ring Lee
8. The Beatles - Here, there and Everywhere
9. Grateful Dead - Sugar Magnolia
10. James Brown - I'll Go Crazy (live)

Amos Milburn, doing Bad, Bad Whiskey:



And - another thing I could use right now - California Sun:

Sound and Image in Shirin and The Mirror

Today is the last day of the Iranian Film Blogathon, hosted at the Sheila Variations. Today I want to write a bit about Shirin, one of Abbas Kiarostami's most experimental films. Shirin is best known, perhaps, for being made up completely of shots of women in a darkened theater, watching a movie, an adaptation of an old poem, Khosrow and Shirin. The film on the screen that we don't see (but hear) is an old fashioned melodrama - the audience reacts, more or less as one would imagine... we hear the story, and see the emotional high points reflected in the audience's faces.

There are many things to say about this film, I'm interested in the play of sound and image. This is the most extreme instance of Kiarostami's love of manipulating the sound and image tracks of his films - a love he shares with many Iranian art film directors. His soundtracks have always been among the densest, richest, most beautiful in film - usually ambient sound, the world around the characters, as well as the dialogue - I remember from his films, car engines and tires on gravel, traffic noises, sirens in the city, bird calls, even wings flapping, construction sounds, machine sounds, snatches of music and talk from radios, prayers... There is a sense, consistently, in his films, of the world pressing in on some kind of enclosed space - all those cars passing by teeming cities, with the sound, and glimpses of the city and countryside just out of reach. In all his films, there is a play between when we can see and can't see - things glimpsed too quickly to grasp - and on the manipulation of sound. He manipulates tape recording in documentary films (sound cutting out in Close-Up, say) - manipulates the soundtrack of the metafictional films, the various levels of reality competing. He makes films that underline the way sound and pictures interrelate - the stories about how he shoots and records films like A Taste of Cherry, or Shirin - putting them together after the fact, sound and image - keep the relationship of sound and image in your mind. Shirin, then, is the most extreme version of this, where the sound track and images never mesh. The pictures, the audience for the film we hear, react to the sound - but remain separate from it. Though they do react - maybe not literally, maybe they are reacting to whatever he is telling them to react to, but he has edited the sound and image into a coherent piece. Which is also consistent with his other works - he manipulates sound and image to form a beautiful whole. In Shirin, this is done partly by matching the audience emotions to the soundtrack, partly by manipulating lighting (we see the flickers of the film, as well as hear it, which show and hide the other people in the audience) - and partly through cutting between images in time with the sound. A lot of the things I've read about this film concentrate on how the sounds modify what we see - but it's worth noting that the images also modify what we hear. They do work to generate emotional investment in the narrative. This is, among other things, a way to tell an old fashioned story in a fresh way...

This interest in sound and pictures is common in Iranian films. Documentaries (real and fake) get a lot of mileage from their manipulation of sound. Jafar Panahi's The Mirror does this masterfully - sound becomes vital to the film. The story is allegedly about a little girl, left at school by her mother (who may be having a baby), trying to get home - then half way through, she rebels against the film crew shooting her, and heads off on her own - and they follow. It's a neat trick, ratcheting up the tension on the story - and a device that highlights both the relationship between sight and sound, and the importance that the manipulation of information (what we see or hear or know, and when) has in Iranian films. When the girl leaves the film crew, the film suddenly becomes like a surveillance. The role of sound changes - where before, the noises and traffic and people were obstacles for the girl to overcome, as well as the texture of the world she lived in, when she leaves, this becomes a kind of obstacle to us, the viewers. (Through the film crew.) The crew follows, but now the cameraman has to work to jeep her in sight. She is miked, but the mike cuts in and out, sometimes dramatically (at one point there is a screech of tires, then the mike cuts out, and for a long time, we don’t see or hear the girl - this is a very distressing moment, no matter how much you tell yourself, it's being staged! it's being staged!) There are always cars and trucks and people between us and the girl, sometimes the camera loses the girl, though we still hear her, and the crew drives around looking for her, while she talks to people. It gives the film other dimensions - the sheer intrusiveness of film (media, surveillance,w hat have you), a rather graphic demonstration of the sheer number of people in Tehran. And pushes the theme of seeing and hearing, being seen and heard, that Panahi pursues in several of his films. I mentioned in my earlier comments on The Circle, the effects of Panahi withholding information - his way of showing a character's reaction to something before showing the cause of the reaction. (More or less the whole idea behind Shirin....) It's also there in Offsides - the way the characters are prevented from seeing the game, but try to follow it, through glimpses, sounds, and so on... Though of course it also goes back to realism, the invention of realism - you can follow an entire soccer game through The Mirror, for instance, off snippets we hear on the radio...

Friday Music, Iranian Edition

It's Friday, and that's music day, so in honor of the Iranian Films Blogathon, here is some Iranian music...

Here is Take it Easy Hospital, the band featured in No One Knows About Persian Cats, performing live in Budapest:



And another band featured in the movie, the Yellow Dogs:



And, clicking around on YouTube - here's something different, a rather video featuring some rather neat Tool inspired animation, by a metal band called Aliaj:



And - to finish - something completely different: traditional Persian music, by Mohammad-Reza Shajarian.

Iranian Film Blogathon - Announcement and a List

All this week, The Sheila Variations is running a blogathon dedicated to films from Iran, beginning Monday and running through Sunday. I hope to contribute more substantively as the week goes on - there are many things to be said about Iranian films; right now, though, I am behind on everything, so I will have to start with something more modest. Perhaps a list of my all time favorite Iranian films?

It's something of an awkward list - very heavy on the Great Auteurs - Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Mehrjui, and heavily pre-2000 (all but one) - but that mirrors my viewing experience. As I mentioned previously, Iranian films were something of a thing back in the late 90s - they were certainly featured in festivals, retrospectives and so on. In the 00s - they haven't exactly faded from view, and in some ways, they are more available then before (heck - I found a copy of Offside for $3 at Big Lots a while back...) - but some of the excitement seems to be gone. And - with the increasing repression in Iran, the films have dried up as well as people go abroad or suffer under the government. And artistically - while several important directors have emerged in the 2000s (Panahi, Ghobadi, Samira Makhmalbaf, notably), they seem less adventurous than the previous generation. (Panahi might be the exception there.) Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf in particular combined humanism, realism and political engagement (in difficult circumstances) with some of the most audacious formal experimentation in the world. Their successors have carried on the first three, but (except for Panahi) dialed back on the experimentation. Which leaves us with some nice films in the 00s but not quite the eye-opening masterpieces of the earlier years. (Though it should be said that neither Kiarostami or Makhmalbaf have abandoned anything - their recent films have been as challenging as ever...)

So without further ado - a fairly simple list, with some commentary...

1. Through the Olive Trees - the third film in Abbas Kiarostami's Koker/Poshtar trilogy, after Where is the Friend's House? and Life Goes On, and a particularly elaborate piece of metafiction. The three films seem like a camera tracking backwards, revealing levels of framing. The first one tells a story, directly. The second tells a story about the people acting in the first film, revealing its fictionality, as well as the reality behind the fiction of the film. This, the third, tells a story about the making of the second film, while foregrounding its own fictionality, even more than the previous film, as actors step in and out of roles, the time frames are manipulated and so on. It's also a lovely and funny love story, focusing on a young man, an actor in the second film, trying to convince the girl he has a crush on to love him. Ending, as Kiarostami films are wont to do, magnificently.

2. A Moment of Innocence - Mohsen Makhmalbaf's reflection on his own youth, as a political radical... In 1974, Makhmalbaf (ae 17) attempted to steal the gun from a cop; he ended up stabbing him and the policeman shot him. 20 years later the policeman showed up to audition as an actor in one of Makhmalbaf’s films, and they made this film. It;s mostly about the process of making the film - looking for actors, coaching the actors, using the rehearsals to talk about their own motivations 20 years before. And, in the end, shooting the film, about the events, 20 years ago - but, I guess you'd say, trying to get it right this time. A beautiful and moving film, full of wit and grace and a sense of sadness and regret, and redemption. A marvel.

3. The Circle -one of Jafar Panahi's ambitious feminist films - following a series of women one night in Tehran, a series of women, one after another, in a circle through the night in the city, each one running, but all ending up in jail... An intense and powerful film, its politics is brutal and sharp and expressed through the story - it has a propulsive desperation, with its tight, in you face camera style, putting you in the middle of the story, starting stories in the middle, staying close to the protagonist (at any given time)... Panahi has a way, in many of his films, of withholding information - sometimes by limiting our point of view to the characters - but also, by denying us information they have. In this film, we often see women panicking before we learn what spooks them - we have to figure out what is going on. An intense and masterful work.

4. Close Up - Here, Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf team up, in a film, about a man who Mohsen Makhmalbaf, insinuating himself into a family, convincing them he wanted to use them in his next film. He was, in the end, caught, exposed and tried - Kiarostami filmed the trial as the man tried to explain, his obsession with art, his poverty and helplessness, the pleasure and power of acting this role. And then, the principals play themselves in this film, and the imposter gets to meet Makhmalbaf himself (an amazing scene, the man bursts into helpless weeping when he sees Makhmalbaf). One of the first films to plunge wholeheartedly into metafiction, a device that became extremely common in 1990s Iranian cinema.

5. A Taste of Cherry - Kiarostami again, here - shot almost entirely from a car, driving around the outskirts of Tehran, as a man looks for someone to bury him, if he kills himself. He finds three potential helpers - a soldier (who runs away), a Afghani religious student who tries to convince him not to do it for religious reasons, and a taxidermist, who will do it (because he needs the money), but tries to talk him out of it for humanist reasons. And in the end? a strange coda, on video, the film crew on the side of the hill where the man was to die, soldiers lurking near the tree that marked his grave - stepping outside the story without any fuss, leaving it hanging in the air, accompanied by Louis Armstrong. It's a strange and lovely film about alienation (a film set almost entirely on a series of barren hills on the outskirts of a city of 6 million) and paying attention...

6. The Cycle- A much older film - Darius Mehrjui's 1978 film about a father and son who get involved in a blood donation scheme - they give blood, they get involved in the workings of a hospital, they get involved with gangsters, etc... Slow building but brilliant... Sometimes reminiscent of Oshima's The Sun's Burial - the blood donation scheme (an obvious enough metaphor in both cases), the way the film follows the factions involved, the similar blend of nihilism and metaphor.

7. Where is the Friend's House? - Lovely film, the first of Kiarostami's Koker/Poshtar films. A boy takes his friend’s notebook by mistake, tries to return it, running an obstacle course to do so: his mother won’t listen to him trying to explain what he’s doing; the friend lives in the next town and when he gets there, no one knows the boy he’s looking for; the town itself is a maze of streets and stairs and alleys - he's sent back and forth, following lead after lead, never quite finding the friend. It's full of nifty details and characters, very funny at times...

8. A True Story - Abolfazl Jalili is a filmmaker whose work showed up stateside in the 90s, but not so much since. This is another of the many films about filmmaking from the late 90s - here - a documentary about a boy with as crippled leg. The story starts as the director looking for an amateur actor for a film - he finds this boy, a talented musician, and sets out to get help for his bad leg, and to make a film about it.

9. The Silence - If there is a more deliciously sensuous director in the world than Mohsen Makhmalbaf, I don't know who it is. In this film, a blind boy and his mother have five days before they will be evicted. The boy tunes lutes for a mean instrument maker, but he keeps getting lost - he rides the bus to work, but follows people with beautiful voices or who play beautiful music. He is led around by a gorgeous little girl in long braids who dances to his lute tuning, wearing cherries for earrings and flower petals to paint her nails. The movie is full of grace notes, building to a thoroughly transcendent ending - the landlord knocks 4 times and the boy imagines it as Beethoven's fifth. Pieces of the symphony crop up on the soundtrack, he gets people to play it - at the end, he gets a pair of pot pounders to play the beat - then a whole factory pounds it, then, it turns into a full symphonic (augmented with middle eastern instruments) rendering of the fifth.

10. The Cow - One of the films that brought modernist filmmaking to Iran - Merhjui's 1969 film is about a man named Hassan who owns the only cow in his village. He loves his cow. He goes one day to work, and while he is gone, the cow dies. The village panics - they don't want to tell him, so they hide when he returns. He refuses to admit the cow is dead - he ends up moving into the barn an becoming the cow himself. The villagers drag him away in ropes - this doesn't end well. A strange, surrealist film, full of clever details and subplots - a neighboring village, an idiot, a delinquint who'd been to the city, old women worrying about witchcraft - a great film. And - I recently discovered to my great delight - available on Netflix, on DVD or streaming.

Friday Music Cleveland Noir Edition

In honor of the blogathon - here's one of the noiriest songs you will ever hear, by frequent pulp and film citing Pere Ubu - My Dark Ages, live in 1995.

in the dark I get so confused, I fall in love like a fall from grace...



You can donate to the film preservation fund at this link.

Same Place, 10 Years Later...

Here again - another post inspired by the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon, which continues apace... This is a pretty direct follow up to my first post - this time, let's look at how John Huston handled the meeting between Gutman and Spade in his version of the Maltese Falcon. Doing this, I admit, isn't quite saying anything about noir - though the comparison of the scenes brings out a couple things that do mark the style...

Both films draw pretty directly on the Hammett book - but there are some notable differences between the way the films handle this scene. First, the Huston version is a good deal longer - and split into two interviews, as in the book. Second - Wilmer's present (in both parts), significantly. And Cairo is not. Those changes illustrate a couple things different in Huston's version - the supporting characters have quite a bit more to do in the 1941 version. Gutman and Cairo are featured in the first, but Wilmer is almost a cameo. (A shame since it's Dwight Frye, who brings even more baby faced psychopathy to the role than Elisha Cook.) The other change - removing Cairo from the scene - is directly relevant to the evolution of film noir, I think. Huston's version never departs from Spade's point of view. That's a fairly important element in noir - the limitation of knowledge. Characters who are in the dark - and audiences who are kept in the dark with them. We don't get the outside perspective, we don't know more than the characters. We share their subjectivity.

As for this scene - in some ways, it is actually more conventional than in Del Ruth's version. Instead of beginning in the middle of the conversation, as Del Ruth did, we start with an establishing three shot -



- then move closer through a series of alternations. The effect is less jarring than in the 1931 film - also, better integrated into the film as a whole. This scene comes as a departure from the otherwise stolid style of the 1931 film - here, the angles, decor, and so on are used as in the rest of the film.











Huston's framings aren't quite as jarring as Del Ruth's, but in this film too, the objects, decor, and so on, are very prominent. Bottles, lamps, paintings, light and dark, windows and so on surround the characters - sometimes innocuously, sometimes as pure visual elements - but always seeming to be waiting to take on significance....





The sequence builds to this very famous low angle shot of Gutman - then Spade jumps up, and we get this - not quite as low, but noticeable - and Sam's threatening gesture echoing the painting behind him....



... Wilmer comes back in, and we get this lovely, tense triangle (lots of triangles in this film), before Spade storms off...



When Spade returns, Huston follows much the same pattern. Establishing shots with Spade, Gutman and WIlmer, then a two shot, Spade on the couch now...



He alternates closer shots, shooting Gutman from below...



...and Spade more from eye level (though below Gutman's POV) - with Spade starting to look hemmed in by the bottles and flowers and background decor...



...Gutman rises to pour the spiked drink, looming over Spade -



- and shot from below, as he looks down on Spade, waiting for the mickey to kick in -



- and as it does, the camera comes closer, catching his anticipation -



...then moving closer to Spade, surrounded by bottles and flowers and curtains, looking up, starting to drift a bit...



And ending, with a pair of shots of the men on the couch, the fatal glasses raised...



And so... you can see the evolution of filmmaking in the ten years between these films - in Huston's moving camera, the more expansive staging, and so on... But also the continuity - the similar use of decor, of props, the similar framings - low(ish) angles, the prominent placement of props in the shots. And the specific differences, as in the very different conceptions of Gutman... As it happens - this is clearly the high point of the 1931 film - and probably the high point in 1941 as well. The dialogue shines - the performances shine - and both filmmakers rise to the moment. A conversation between two men - but one frought with deception, threat, menace - which you get from the way the scenes look. And those bottles, glasses, resting there like loaded guns... neat stuff.