Thursday, June 25, 2009

Sly & Robbie: 6.24.09 Oregon Zoo



Oregon Zoo Weds. concerts can be an agonizing scene if you put your blanket or sand chairs in the bowl and listen to soccer moms talk about their kids playgroups when they should be quiet and grooving on the tunes. At the Sly and Robbie show I found an excellent work around. I lay out my ground and disappear to another part of the Zoo to read a book until showtime and then go down below and hang out with truer music lovers.



Sly Dunbar. The man himself. This is about as good a view as one gets of him during his show, but you hear and feel the pulse of the riddim he lays down loud and clear. There really is no one else in the world who does what Sly and Robbie do when it comes to taking the listener into both strange and unfamiliar places at the same time. For instance, they started their show with a ten minute version of Fiddler on the Roof but let me tell you, Tevye, Topol and Theodore Bikel were no where to be found.


You feel like you are truly seeing something unique and all the way live. Shakespeare plays his entire instrument with movement making some sounds that seem impossible. He has this very cool effect where he holds the bass upside down and touches the floor with the fret handle. It becomes a very distinct bit of punctuation before he launches in a solo.

At one point his strap broke. The roadie came out and when it became obvious that hardware had fallen off and it was not going to be an easy fit he removed it. Shakespeare was able to do everything for a good part of the set with out it, never missing a riff. Finally it got to a point where he needed to end a jam with some pyro so had to get a chair to finish the tune until the support came out to reassemble the strap




I have a theory about the microphones musicians use at reggae shows. They are set in such a way that one can not announce fellow band members and make their names come out in an comprehensive fashion. Reggae microphones are made for dub toasting and shout outs like "Do You Lovvvve Reggae Mussic? and How you Feelin' Portland? So I really have know idea who the other fine musicians were on stage. If you recognize these guys, please leave a comment.




Sly and Robbie are rhythm kings. I was trying to recollect other sorts of performances that reminded me of the quality and unique interchange between musicians, and the only one I could come up with Booker T and the MGs. I logged on to emusic after the show and found that they had 150 albums with Dunbar and Shakespeare downloads. A friend and I used to joke that they made albums at about the rate that mortals take a meal.

Fret not if you missed them this time round. The good news is that they are slated to return to our area for Labor Day Monday. There will be no mail that day, but the Taxi Gang will gladly take you on as a willing fare to the land of Roots Rock Reggae. See you then.


posted by well-executed buffet at 10:30 PM
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Maxwell at Seattle Paramount 6.23.09


There is anticpation when a great artist goes back to work in the public eye after a long absence. Soul music returned to the scene after a decade of bands with lots of electronic keyboards doing dance charts. Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite arrived in 1993 after being pondered for months by record executives. It is an album to sit on the shelf timeless like That's The Way of the World or Marvin Gaye's best seventies work. There are inevitable comparisons to Prince when one considers Maxwell. But Marvin's albums, with exception of What's Going On can maintain both a long form vision with darn near every piece contributing to a mood, a kind of story without being too literal. Urban Hang is not only an album: it is a great first novel and collection of poetry and an album for all funky seasons.

Great are even good soul singers are a rare rare thing. There are probably fewer great soul singers than Wagner Tenors who are half way decently. It may sound a bit dramatic, but one of the prerequisites is that they have to have the right balance of the sacred and profane to pull it off. A classic illustration of this struggle can be seen the Marvin Gaye cover where he is shown as devil and angel.

So where does Maxwell 2.0 (or if you were to name revs by albums 4.0) fit into this dichotomy? Well, a little differently (and this pertains to all of the Maxwells of the past 14 years or so of his career, no matter how you count them. The difference is that Maxwell is so well connected with his feminine side as well. They don't seem to be in conflict. Sam Cooke was very pretty. Marvin Gaye also let you see his softer side at times. But Maxwell besides his very carnal moments on stage is kind of in a different bag.

Consider the first major ecstatic wave of energy outside of the opening from his Seattle concert that was exuded demonstratively from the primarily 30-50ish crowd with lots of ladies. It greeted the first few bars of Maxwell's cover of Kate Bush's A Woman's Work, which although he has incorporated into his book since he gave it a mass public debut in the MTV Unplugged session, still seems like a very improbable song for an African American soul singer to perform.

But then again, Maxwell in style and often substance resembles Al Green, a soul singer who was also unafraid to show his soft (some would say feminine side) duing his sexy period back in the day of hot grits before Reverend Al won the eternal soul mans struggle, more or less until the bills had to be paid and the secular was revived.

I thought of the famous Al Green album title when he worked up the women, in particular into a kind of frenzy. At the end of a really fine and inventive reworking of his Sumthin' Sumthin' he asked the crowd "How come you still have your clothes on?" My favorite crowd response of the evening came at a dramatic moment when Maxwell was facing his band and a woman near me yelled "Turn Around and Look at ME, Maxwell"

The patter as he wound into the final fifth of the show or so was even more explicit.
"Here's the part of the show where we are going to get a little bit nasty. I'm going to set the brothers up. If you can't get any after the show, come bring it back to me or us because you grame is whack." And then he launches into Al Green's Simply Beautiful in a most impressive way.

The old tunes seem to have a lot more heft to them these days. The base seemed to have a little more power to it and the horns were often featured to bring things home at the end in a big way.


Maxwell's new tunes were well represented. At times it seemed the crowd was singing along with those as well. This show is scaled large and well-executed. They've started on the road six or seven months ago promoting an album, Black Summer Night, which won't be released til next week. Maxwell is working real hard to remind the world of what makes his work special.

His stuff definitely addresses the racy and the world of carnal pleasures to be sure. After all this is the guy who has a song about making love ""...Til the Cops Come Knockin'

Yet probably Maxwell's song is Ascension one of the most extravagent of odes to the energy of affection of their partner. Or is he talking alluding to another order of Ascension as well? The song undeniably has a great chorus, one that sounds best with a couple of thousand people singing along with it at full volume.

So shouldn't I realize
You're the highest of the high
If you don't know, then I'll say it
So don't ever wonder

Here's a clip of Maxwell 1.0 taking Ascension to a highest high indeed.

posted by well-executed buffet at 9:59 AM
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009

A Few 14 hour Excursion Notes


The trip to see Maxwell in Seattle was a quick one. Fourteen hours round trip. I had the good luck to contact my copatriot for the evening just an exit away from where he lived, so I had the extra special treat of not having to brave Seattle traffic at the end of a business day.

We parked at the Convention Center, found out that our tickets could not be printed at will call until an hour before curtain so had an exceptional sojurn downtown where lots of young folks were hanging out in park and near fountains digging the fact summer was finally here.

In the midst of our pre-concert activities, I was introduced to two amazing business enterprises.


Along the Way


The Steilacoom has been my favorite stop for big corporate coffee and a chance to steel myself ready for the Tacoma-Seattle driving experience. No big subtext here. But I wonder what the heck this person was doing with a flute, a plate, and an instrument case on their passenger seat.






posted by well-executed buffet at 10:40 PM
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Monday, June 22, 2009

Benny Sings of Unconditional Love


Benny Sings is a thirty something pop star from the Netherlands. His voice and delivery remind me a little bit of Michael Franks and his exuberance a little bit like Jamie Cullum. Essentially, he has a talent to craft nifty tunes with a touch of inventiveness that is like a morning walk at about 8:30 or 9 when you know its going to be a good day, both with the weather, and what you will encounter.

He has a handful of albums that have been released this decade and the quality of his out put is pretty darned good overall. His fusion of pop, jazz changes, and R&B/Soul is infectious stuff.

My favorite of all of his tunes is one of my favorite kinds of love songs, an extravagant one. It is called Unconditional Love.

You Light Up my Life with the minimum.
What does it mean when I'm fully happy only looking at your face,
And What does it mean when I'm here and you're not around,
My feelings feel all out of place
What does it mean when the sound of your voice starts a sparkling noise in my ears
It means unconditional love

I'm throwing this one up on the buffet for a limited basis because the YouTube clip of the song is all screwed up and I know some you out there will likely dig this lovely song. Now you know about him, please buy his music if you dig him. He needs to be better known in the US, in my opinion.


bennysings_unconditional_love.mp3


posted by well-executed buffet at 10:57 PM
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Sunday, June 21, 2009

Jim Jarmusch testing The Limits of Control


"The best of films are like dreams you don't know if you ever had." Tilda Swinton says in an albino wig and a trench coat that looks like it was stolen from the wardrobe department outfitting Hitchcock's 1930s films. Her comment is to the lone man played by Isaach De Bankolé in Jim Jarmusch's latest and in some ways most ambitious film The Limits of Control, but it could almost be taken as a kind of explanation to the audience for the journey they have been on with De Bankolé for at least a half hour or so. A journey begun with a Rimbaud quote in a world that was described by another briefing as where "reality is arbitrary."

I'm not certain that The Limits of Control is among the best of films, but it does strike that unique and lovely cinematic version of the phrase "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" which Beat figures like Burroughs and Gysin popularized from the tale of Hassan-i Sabbah, 11th century Persian mystic and missionary.

The loan man in Limits seems to get previews and clues of the encounters and matchboxes he will exchange from visiting art museums. As in a dream, repetitions occur and then the twist will pop out like an unexpected development by a jazz soloist. And it seems absolutely correct somehow that this all takes place in Spain, the land of surrealist grandfathers Dali and Bunuel. Jarmusch has this wonderful lovely way of identifying and hanging on to a few finite key elements and moving them around again and again in for new results. De Bankolé's clothing is used to such result. For most all of the film he is wearing one of three suits, each one determining another act or level in his journey.

The last image on the screen at the end of the titles states No Controls No Limits but there is a kind of irony to this because Jarmusch's films are so tightly controlled. Camera moves and placement of extras often add significance to his films. An interview with Jarmusch in Film Comment reveals there is a spontaneous component in the making of his films in which he does not use storyboards, develops dialog for a film with a 25 page script, sometimes overnight, but he clearly possesses a concept and a vision for what he is after. He knows the same way it is clear that De Bankolé's wants two separate cups of espresso, not a double coup.

If one has followed Jarmusch's cinematic excursions before, they will find the world of The Limits of Control similar to Bill Murray's in Broken Flowers or Johnny Depp's in Deadman. But Limits will probably have me revisiting his Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to see some relationship with the rhythms and themes he uses in both films. Ghost Dog's Samurai code set him outside a gangster world. De Bankolé as the Loan Man also has a kind of existential relativity that moves him among a surrealist landscape with modern dress spaghetti western overtones.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:23 PM
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Saturday, June 20, 2009

The Hit


The Hit is a 1984 film by Stephen Frears starring John Hurt, Terrence Stamp, Tim Roth, as the principle characters and even features Fernando Rey, one of my favorite Bunuelian principles as a Spanish detective in the police procedural subplot. The primary plot involves Hurt and Roth's transfer of a protective custody stoolie across Spain to France on the behalf of the man he had fingered ten years earlier.

The film is interesting because it was done at a time where seventies cynicism was still in vogue vs. post-modern wink and nod irony that folks like Tarantino (with Roth in tow) brought to us about a decade later. This is a gritty little film with some fine writing and characterization. Roth's portrayal of Myron, a young punk thug on his first hit is probably the most interesting. He is a full bundle of raw nerve energy with a level of danger. This character and performance are reminiscent of Clu Gulager in Don Siegel's The Killers. I find most of Roth's work pretty self-conscious, but here there was something young, dangerous and different.

It is rare to find a satisfying mix of action film and plot-driven character study. The Hit provides both of these elements and, for that reason, is worth checking out.
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:24 PM
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Friday, June 19, 2009

Maxwell Returns to the Pacific NW: A Preview


I can't miss this. I have high hopes for Maxwell's return. My encounters with this his music over the past thirteen years or so lead me to believe that it will be a special show. Here's a mini profile about his return to the road which has been a series of small tour swings since Fall 2008 in anticipation of a new album to be released in two weeks.

I'm enough of a fan that I am willing to almost naively believe that is absence was about just learning how to be a regular person cutting off his hair and blending into the crowd.



And here is a smoking hot version of Somethin' Somethin' from the 1997 Chris Rock Show. This guy tore it up back in the day. Let's see what Tuesday brings...




posted by well-executed buffet at 5:57 AM
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Thursday, June 18, 2009

Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner


After watching three of Ernst Lubitsch's silent films from circa 1919, I jumped into his 1940 film, The Shop Around the Corner. This story has seen many manifestations including You've Got Mail in 1998. After seeing Bill Murray rave about Margaret Sullavan's about Margaret Sullavan, I paid special attention to her. This woman had great energy on the screen. Her character here is strong, but can be cautiously domineering as well as full-on forceful.

But the greatest presence in The Shop Around the Corner is of course that of Lubitsch. My current personal definition of "The Lubitsch Touch" is that he had the ability to problem solve on what seems to be a frame by frame level almost and come up with a solution that seems to best serve the movie and the audience experience.

Consider the many fast talk and sometimes cross talk scenes of three or more people. The dialog flows effortlessly even with quick measures and often break neck pace. It seems a reflection of what it is like to work with a team of people.

But most importantly, with a Lubitsch film, you find yourself caring pretty quickly about the characters, both those in primary confilct of the story but also those with specific supplementary roles that are easy to "read."

The latest issue (May/Jun 2009) of Film Comment has a story by Kent Jones where he analyzes The Shop Around the Corner as a film that gives us a truer reflection of the world of work than most movies. In his conclusive remarks, he finds a way to get at the substance of what makes this a special film.

"There is sentiment in The Shop Around the Corner, but there is no sentimentality. It is good-natured but it is also unerringly wise. The film's unparalleled grace is inseparable from the pettiness of its characters, which shifts unnoticed into magnanimity over the course of time. And then, perhaps we can imagine it shifting back again at a later date. Because this is one of those rare films that allows us to see a future for its characters, whose dreams of three-room apartments and petit-bourgeois happiness will be realized and replaced by grander dreams many times over as they make their way through a life at work."

posted by well-executed buffet at 6:02 AM
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Thursday, June 11, 2009

Currently My Favorite Beatles Cover


The Pozo-Seco Singers were a folk music group from 1965-1970 that country singer Don Williams was associated with before he hit the big time with his long sideburns and romantic crooning.

A few weeks back I stumbled across this version of the Pozo-Secos doing the If I Fell by the Beatles. Vocalist Susan Taylor sounds very determined and a little world weary on the intro, unsteered by the opening guitar chords. She still maintains the lead during the song but the back up, which I believe is other Pozo-Seco member Lofton Kline, with male harmony gives the song a new dimension and the guitar and bass work are just right to support them. The addition of drums would certainly have killed the beauty and delicacy of this treatment.

pozo-seco_if_i_fell.mp3

posted by well-executed buffet at 11:37 PM
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Duck You Sucker


Of the great five Sergio Leone "Spaghetti Westerns" my favorite is the last and least known. Giù la testa aka Duck You Sucker aka A Fistful of Dynamite is a 1971 film set in the in the Mexican revolution,with about an expatriate Irish revolutionary dynamite expert James Coburn and Rod Steiger as the paternal head of a rag tag family of Mexican bandoleros.


Because I love movies, I have a weak place in my heart for A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. But Duck, You Sucker Leone's final take on the western, is my favorite for many reasons. And this is partly due to my first encounter with it. About two decades ago. I was channel surfing cable premium channels late on a Saturday night, and encountered an exchange between Rod Steiger and James Coburn in stylish closeups so close they could only have been the work of Leone. I was amazed "What was this film?" I later found that it was known as A Fistful of Dynamite and later found out that it was also known as Duck, You Sucker God help the film that is named for an arcane catch phrases. Hellzapoppin!

It wasn't even the lost western status that has fascinated me about this film, it is because it is very rich, nuanced, and full of shots bigger than those of even Once Upon a Time in the West. Steiger is fully over the top as Juan Miranda a role which is in many way a carry over of Eli Wallach's turn as earthy bandito Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. and he contrasts well with the past-tortured IRA revolutionary played by Coburn.

I grew up watching Coburn in many movies, all cool ass and cocky with a grin that puts a certain Scientologist's smirk into filmic perspective. He is very hip coming into this film in full Leone bravado blowing up mountains and riding a motorcycle. We learn much about his past in a series of four or five dialog free flashbacks accompanied by one of Nino Rota's best themes with the chorus singing "Sean, Sean, Sean."

The flashbacks underscore a hard earned traits in Leone's. Namely, that his films could stand alone without dialog. Leone movies almost could stand as silents One could come in with a few intertitles and a Rota score and it would be an effective film experience.

I propose another title for Duck, You Sucker. Maybe it could be called An Irishman, a Bandit, and a Revolution. This is triangle is at the foundation of the film. The Mexican revolution is more than a backdrop, it almost serves as a character impacting the attitudes and the relationship of the two central figures for well over two hours.

But rest assured that Leone is not giving us a Marxist endorsement of overthrow, despite the near post-1968 revolution era of when Duck You Sucker was made and the Chairman Mao quote that begins the film. No, this is not a black and white western in that regard--good guy revolutionaries against the man. It is further from Godard and closer to John Lennon's in your face dress down of the Beatles' Revolution No.1 "Well, you know we all want to change the world." Although it shows us a lot of revolution and fall out from revolution, Duck You Sucker is really about these two oddball characters in the midst of it all.

The best way to watch this film is to find the two disc reissue of it that MGM brought out a couple of years ago. It features a remastered full length director's cut of the films and lots of fun extras. I'm glad I finally sat down and watched it, even if it took incoming library fines to finally inspire me to do that. I want to go back and watch the other Leones starting with Fistful. Maybe a viewing of what for Eastwood was a Sean Connery Dr. No kind of long term journey will lead me to the whole of the other western's chronologically, which would logically end with another screening of Duck You Sucker That would not be a bad thing at all, because I am convinced that there are a lot of wonderful things in this film I have not yet discovered.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:08 AM
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Trinity Bells



This Spring I have really learned to appreciate the tower outside of Trinity Lutheran Church on 39th and Columbia. It and the Clark College Fountain Pen Tower are by far my favorite free standing structures in America's Vancouver, as our mayor like to call it.

I listened to a lot of Leonard Cohen on my walks this past Spring. At least a couple of times Anthem would come on the random generator as I neared Trinity Tower as I call it.

Ring the Bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in Everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.


This chorus means a lot to me these days. I've had tough couple of seasons as far as passages are concerned. Let me pause for the peace of mentors who have influenced my point of view about many things: William Bland, Philip Robertson, Gordon Beck, and Alice Philips. Thank you for enriching my life.

posted by well-executed buffet at 4:43 PM
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Monday, June 8, 2009

James Brown Sings Sunny


I'm back. It is much later than the date shows. And Ladies and Gentlemen, there is no other way to kick off the first rainy day of my summer than Soul Brother No. 1. His turn on the Bobby Hebb classic is almost like going on a James Brown ride starting out smooth soul and then showing everything that one could ever hope for at a James Brown Show.



This man will continue to be amazing until the end of mankind or at least playback devices. Check out the source for this at Mofunk1's YouTube Channel. Mofunk is from the UK, he is a fine Northern Soul connoisseur fanmaster. If you didn't get enough James on the inbed. Then try his compilation of greatest dance moves to There Was A Time.

posted by well-executed buffet at 3:29 PM
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Sunday, June 7, 2009

A Kind of Epic: Kurosawa's No Regrets For Our Youth


I had seen this film on a VHS capture when it was screened on Turner Classic Movies several years ago. I don't remember being really impressed by it at all. I remember it had political content and a kind of feminist bent.

It took me a couple of times to get started into the Criterion release of this film that is a part of the Post War Kurosawa boxed set. I kind of cringed in the first few scenes where Setsuko Hara appears as Yukie a professor's daughter full of wanton desire for Noge, a radical firebrand of a student (Susumo Fujito) much to consternation of the more conservative and conventional Itokawa. A scene where she plays a furious and pounding version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition expressing a mix of frustration and desire is so over the top it reminds me of the piano player in Refer Madness. I had a feeling I was going to truly hate this woman by the time the film is over.

But it turns out that Yukie's story is one of the most interesting depictions of evolving political and personal conscience I've encountered in film. The tale begins in 1933 where her father is under fire for his outspoken views on Japan's invasion of Manchuria. It ends at the time the contemporaneously when film was made, a time when "the war was lost but freedom is restored" as its intertitle to its coda sequence announces. What happens in between is a story of growth, love, espionage, sorrow, harassment, reconciliation and birth. No Regrets For Our Youth is a kind of epic where the main character is transformed. It makes me wonder if my initial reaction to Yukie is mostly about the kind of character she was at the film's outset.

No Regrets is Kurosawa's first film after WWII and is based on a a real life incidents where a Kyoto professor was forced from his teaching position due to supposedly harboring "Communist thoughts" and his student was subsequently executed for being part of the ring led by Russian spy Donald Sorage. In The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Donald Richie maintains that Kurosawa was more interested in the story of one of social oppression vs. one where he was politically motivated to explore on film. Regardless, there is no doubt that there is a lot of passion and outrage even in this movie.

In a weird kind of connection, this viewing of No Regrets For Our Youth makes me want to go back and watch Warren Beatty's Reds or even Bertolucci's 1900 because both, like No Regrets are twentieth century political epics with strong elements of character studies. How's that for a sub-sub genre?
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:24 AM
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Saturday, June 6, 2009

Pre-Teen Love and Vampires


Oskar is a twelve year old who lives with his mother in an apartment overlooking a snow filled square in a suburb of Helsinki. His days at school are filled with encounters with intimidating bullies. It is the 1960s but the viewer is only made aware of that by closely looking at clothing styles or noting there are no devices digital, only a portable turntable in the apartment. Eli lives next door to Oskar, she is also twelve and lives with a distant man presumably her father. Late in the film she tells Oskar she is twelve, but that she has been twelve for a very long time.

Låt den rätte komma in aka Let the Right One In is a 2008 film by Sweedish director Tomas Alfredson based on a novel and screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It provides an interesting and engaging twist on the vampire film, which. let's face it, has been around almost as long as film itself.

In our current cinematic landscape of so much sameness and so many remakes, the vision of Let the Right One In stands out. Alfredson creates a controlled kind of environment a bit reminiscent of his Sweedish forefather Ingmar Bergman during his sixties period. To great measure it succeeds because the two young actors are the right fit for their roles. Kåre Hedebrant is wonderful as Oskar. As Alfredson says in the DVD featurette, the film is mostly told from the point of Oskar's point of view. Therefore, his reaction shots must count for plenty. The mysterious vampiress neighbor, played by Lina Leandersson also has the right look somewhere between Darlene on the old Roseanne show and a model goth archetype. And there is a kind of counterpoint in the film between the fantastic and preposterous and dialog and situations that feel authentic and real.

There are some moments of graphic violence, but much of it has a kind of clinical feel to it. There are some terrific set pieces one finds in a horror film including a finale that is absolutely unforgettable, but Let the Right One In is a surprisingly quiet film. Some of this is due to a very sophisticated sound design instead of a traditional music soundtrack. And the story plays well because it doesn't lose sight of three major elements: a boy, a girl (sort of), and the outside world around them, which in many good love stories, after and before Romeo and Juliet, threatens their bond and its possibilities.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:31 AM
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Friday, June 5, 2009

Meeting the Work of Guy Maddin


I'm finding that the supplemental features on Criterion DVD releases are sometimes more valuable and substantial to me than the films they were intended to support. A late seventies documentary on Charles Laughton was meatier and much more interesting to me than David Lean's Hobson's Choice. It featured some great interview footage with his wife Elsa Lancaster, Billy Wilder and others exploring this very intriguing character full of paradox and contradiction. It also featured tasty facts such as the fact that primaries of the cast of Night of the Hunter (Robert Mitchum, Shelly Winters) were students of Laughton's in an acting school he had formed years earlier.

I tried connecting first with Maddin's film Brand Upon the Brain! on its Criterion release but it wasn't working for me. Brand is a modern silent film and a couple of attempts to get into its nervous, kinetic but often highly stylized energy had failed me. But I have always had issues with David Lynch's Eraserhead as well. So instead of going back to Last Time Played on my DVD player, I checked out an enclosed documentary about Madden and Brand called 97 Percent True and Madden to be a fascinating artist. Like Todd Haynes, Maddin is iconoclastic, well-studied in film and fearless to be truthful to the vision he wishes to put on the screen.

Maddin talks about the film as being biographically true in an emotional way. As George Toles, his University of Winipeg mentor and co-writer of Brand Upon the Brain! says Guy is someone "who is dreaming his way back to spaces that he has occupied uncertainly and in confusion in earlier parts of his life and trying to use film to figure out what was going on with them." It isn't showoffy but trying to get at mystery according to Toles.

Childhood recollections are important to Maddin. He talks about film influences of films like Sajiyat Ray's Panther Panchali, but also the literature of Bruno Schulz which completely and empathetically try to recreate childhood experiences. He uses terms like "delicious confusions." to describe the ways that memory changes over time.

Maddin watched Bunuel and Dali's L'Age D'or 60 times when he was 24. Primitive Surrealism and the pure horny obsessions of the first wave of surrealism spoke to him. Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives was another influence. In the documentary, Maddin talks about his I vitelloni lay about friends probably watched 100 times. He talked about how he became drawn in by the "arcane and surprisingly elaborate language of silent films." "It was important for me to be obsessed about these things." Melodrama in a kind of classic silent film sense plays a big role. As Toles describes it as "the form which most fully acknowledges the way in which movies echo the dream life." Or as Maddin calls it "truth uninhibited."

Basement, punk and do it yourself bands is another kind of influence for Maddin. He picked up a camera to make a movie the same way that a garage band musician picks up an instrument.

I must have been distracted in October 2007 to have missed checking out the tour of live production accompanying Guy Maddin's film Brand Upon the Brain that played in Portland that featured celebrity narrators, Foley artists and an orchestra. It must have been a helluva show. Meanwhile, I'm finding myself entranced by some of Maddin's shorts available for online viewing and, probably and someday, I will check out Brand Upon the Brain! again. I have a feeling Maddin is a filmmaker whose work will grow on one over time. This is the kind of artist that one needs to catch up a bit with.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:20 PM
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Thursday, June 4, 2009

Obama in Cairo


In the past six months much of the greatest impact and best potential of having Barack Obama serve as President have been eclipsed by the US financial crisis and petty US politics. Those shadows ebbed on June 4, if not briefly, during his speech in Cairo to reinforce and reveal that we are in the midst of a great world citizen and statesman.

If you have not read and listened to this optimistic, aspirational speech, you owe it to yourself to take an hour and witness a moment instantly significant. He framed his remarks from an historical perspective stressing that Islamic world and the United States have a relationship that "includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars."

The first major note or theme in his remarks came within his first three hundred words. "So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity." A short while later he states: "There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." That is what I will try to do today -- to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart."

Good gracious. This is an American President, a world leader reaching out with hand and heart to the world at large. The lingering question is of course if the US and the world at large are ready for such a grand and elegant movement. If it is, Obama is certainly the one to make it. He cites his cultural and experiential credentials for this world view in the same way he made his case to become President or to be the point person to lead us out of economic woe. He carefully navigated the issues of trying to curb extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as Iraq ("a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world.") He got down to business talking about Israel, Palestine, Iran, middle eastern women's rights and all of those who are extreme and drink the Haterade.

The Cairo speech is worth your attention unless you have allowed your mind to be branded by the likes of fundie church and become blinded by the nonsense of Fox News and alike. I suggest reading the transcript while it runs in a You Tube window. I found myself pausing over some of the best lines such as "Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail." I like my country more than I did seven months ago. Nowadays, it is kind of like having an herb-less Bob Marley in charge of things, especially on the deeper philosophical level.

Transcript of Obama's Cairo University Speech



posted by well-executed buffet at 9:46 PM
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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Friends In Bands Who Play On Saturdays I


I have a couple different acquaintances who play free and accessible gigs most every Saturday during the day. That is a good thing to remember. As long as you don't act like Mel from Flight of the Conchords, folks who are in bands always seem to appreciate it when people they know come out to see them. And these gigs are wonderful because they don't require any exceptional disruptions of bedtimes and evening habits.

Kenny Lee and the Sundowners at Skidmore Market

Portland is many things. Among them, it is a blues town, and not just at the big July 4 weekend blowout at the Willamette Park Bowl south of the Hawthorne Bridge. There are blues musicians working every weekend, practically every night in town at places like The Candlelight, but also as regular weekend bookings in Vancouver, North Portland, even Oregon City.



The Skidmore Saturday market filled with booths for crafts people and artisans has always struck me as more of a tourist spot than a location that locals often frequent, but somehow it keeps on strong year after year. They have a couple spots for live bands to play. My longtime pal, Damon Brothers plays with this blues power trio which seems to feature a lot of guests at their afternoon gigs at the market. It can be quite a scene. The set I saw featured a one armed guy who could have been a pirate, a woman on the way up or way down on her medication ride dancing up a storm, and Portland's most illustrative Elvis impersonator. The impersonator no longer has a cardboard guitar and his glasses that are longer mended with scotch tape, he now wears a black Elvis in Vegas era jumpsuit complete with a rhinestone pattern. More evidence of the environment commented on by the the bumpersticker that reads Keep Portland Weird.


Anyway, it was fun to watch Damon and the Lee band do their thing for a little while, and reassuring to know that if I'm ever downtown on a Saturday, I can stop by here a bit of blues and say hi to an old pal.
posted by well-executed buffet at 2:38 PM
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Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Dylan's Shout Outs Now and Then


The best couple of lines from I Feel A Change Comin' On, the best song on Bob Dylan's latest take on Americana, Together Through Life are

I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver
And i'm reading James Joyce
Some people they tell me
I got the blood of the land in my voice

Shaver is a real deal Texas songwriter. A tough son of a bitch who served as Kinky Friedman's spiritual advisor when he ran for governor of Texas and was involved in a shooting incident a couple years back. As for Joyce, you want to ask Bob (all fans have lots of stuff they'd like to ask Bob) if its Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake. My listening to Bob Dylan of Late leads me to believe it might well be the first round of Daedelus in Dublin.

The shoutouts in the recent song lead me back to these lines from Blood on the Tracks'

Situations have ended sad,
Relationships have all been bad.
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.

I was working with a Dylan obsessive in a bookstore in 1976 when we both decided we didn't know anything about the two poets he called out except that we had heard Patti Smith talk about Rimbaud. We found a biographical citation but we ended up ordering copies of collections with biographical sketches of both from obscure college presses. Today someone curious would just go to Wikipedia and order up through Amazon
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:10 AM
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Monday, June 1, 2009

Horray For Art Side


Sometimes stories have a happy ending. The Buffet has been monitoring and even directly connecting with a set of circumstances in the New York City art community. The staging and storage space for an important repository and advocacy group of independent film was going to lose space to a studio for creating a studio to put on a magzine style arts related podcast in Tribeca.

In the only world that matters, it is obvious that the heritage of the moving image would overule the creation of another new media aggregate comodity. But I obviously don't rule the world. It seemed like all one could do is hope that the Film-maker's Cooperative would be able to find a home. This is an organization founded by Jonas Mekas, one of the last of a great generation of visual arts in this country. Mekas, now 87 is a film writer, cultural figure, filmmaker, central and foundational to the world of film artists who dedicate themselves to exploration of all aspects of the medium.

I was astounded when I read the story in the Feb 11 NY times about a forced eviction of the hundreds of films and the work of the Cooperative. What kind of world do we live in where a man of Mekas' stature has to defend the legacy of the work of culture preservation and advocacy of cinema in such a way.

So I wrote to the arts group that was scheduled to take the space as well as the the Co-operative. The arts group sent one line message that said thank you for your thoughts or something like that. On the other hand, MM Serra, the Co-operative's director and I exchanged a couple of e-mails.

Like I said, this story has a happy ending. An article in the May 28 New York Times began:

After months of uncertainty, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, whose future was threatened early this year when it received an order of eviction from a city-owned building in TriBeCa, has found a new home, and on terms that are likely to make it the envy of other arts organizations and tenants across the city.

Not all real estate developers are douche bags. Charles S. Cohen is a developer who loves film. He was one of the producers of Frozen River. He has arranged the group to move into over 3000 feet of prime NY building on Park Avenue S and 32nd. as well as a 15 seat scholar's screening facility near by.

In the Times article Cohen said “I was in a position to help, and I thought that I should. They are a wonderful group doing important work, and there is no other place to go and see this kind of thing. They needed a storage space for their archives, and this meets their needs.”

You rock Charles S. Cohen. I think I might just e-mail my close personal friend MM and tell him congratulations.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:15 PM
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Sunday, May 31, 2009

Summer Tunes Will Make Me Feel Fine I:
The Lee Boys


As I slam through last meetings through the that have been put off for months in the waning days of the academic year, I find myself sometimes anticipating some promising looking evenings of music that have been announced in the summer entertainment preview of the Oregonian's Friday A&E section. Original name eh? There was, in fact, a lawsuit with the A&E cable network over name dispute. I don't know how it was decided or settled.

At this moment, I am most interested in the upcoming July 3 lineup of Portland's Waterfront Blues Festival. The second day of the four day festival features Bayou guitarist Sonny Landreth, the irrepressible Karl Denson and his Tiny Universe, and a band I have only heard about through word-of-mouth so far: The Lee Boys.

The Lee Boys are a Sacred Steel funk band made upof brothers and nephews. They are as tight as outfit of family as one could fathom this side of Nevilles. Their origins are in a House of God church they attended in Perrine, FL lead by Rev Robert Lee, their father and grandfather who also played the sanctified steel guitar.

Nowadays they are bringing their music to the masses. The testifying gospel plays a role in what they do, but the funk that makes you feel good is what really takes prominence. They play a lot of festivals and sometimes show up with some very unlikely company when they jam, such as Warren Hayes of Allmans/Dead/Gov't. Mule or with Del McCourey's sons when they perform as the Travelin' McCourys. I watched some YouTube clips and somehow Sacred Steel and hot bluegrass complement and converge quite nicely.

On July 3 they will be doing a set on the BluesFest mainstage but they will also be on a three hour jam hour show across the street at the Marriott after the Albino Jimi Hendrix aka Johnny Winter has shut down the bowl (that place is hell on sad arches like mine, I'm telling you) for the night. They are also doing the blues cruise the night before, but I think they are the kind of act you only see once or once in a long while. Besides that is the night Bayren Munchen's B Squad is in town to flash over the Timbers. And you know they are going to be cooler with Karl.

Religious root soul is a tricky thing to pull off. Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin truly worked miracles. But I am always rooting for the Kirk Franklins and Winans of the world. Lee Boys are far more interesting to me than the first Sacred Steel crossover artist, Robert Randolph, who was the first High Sierra Music Festival act I ever saw. Randolph is truly a showboat. He does a great Papa Was A Rolling Stone. Lee Nephew Roosevelt "the Doctor" Collier can be flashy but he is more like a great B3 organist in the Charles Earland tradition who uses dynamics and leads up just so before he gives you some pyrotechnics.

These two clips are from the Sioux City Jazz and Blues festival in 2007 where they are "heatin' up the stage y'all" for the first couple of the blues Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks.


posted by well-executed buffet at 11:50 PM
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Saturday, May 30, 2009

Jellyfish: A film from Israel


Jellyfish (Meduzot), an Israeli film directed by Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret is one of those films I knew I liked a lot after the first few shots. It is no accident that it won the Camera d'or, the Cannes film festival award for best first feature. It features stories of three women in Tel Aviv, loosely interweaving and overlapping them.

Batya works for a wedding caterer. Joy is a Filipino guest worker giving support giver for elders wanting to make it home to her son. Keren is a newlywed who injured herself crawling over a locked stall at her wedding, an injury that forces her and new husband to stay at a local hotel instead of taking off for the Caribbean for a honeymoon. Keren appears to be high maintenance and superficial harpie, but the audience learns differently as the film transpires.

Jellyfish is filled with chance, circumstance, and sometimes destiny reminding me of Tom Twyker's Winterschläfer. It also pulls of some moments of magical realism that actually come off well. Directors Geffen and Keret fill their movie with thought provoking connections between the characters or the characters and their history amid solid imagery. Their being awarded the Camera d'Or was not a token or accident. Coming across a film like Jellyfish is a reassurance that film is international, universal, and still a wellspring from which viewers have the opporunity to make discoveries of films like this one.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:19 PM
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Friday, May 29, 2009

Dan & Louis Oyster Bar




Dan and Louis Oyster Bar is located on SW Second and Ankeny in Portland Oregon. Nowadays its used as a landmark for locations to Voodoo Donut or the Church of Elvis.The waitresses in oversize sailor outfits always the ones who called you dear. It was always a special treat when Dad would take me their to lunch with his work associates when I was off from school for a orthodonist appointment or other similar kind of reason.

To a kid this place is like going into a make believe ship world. I remember wanting to look at all the pictures. I still do. My favorite then and now is newspaper cliping of Sebastian Cabot at the height of Mr French working over a big plate of oysters. It is appropriate because Dan & Louis is the ultimate Family Affair a direct lineage going back to 1865 when a twenty four year old sailor named Meinert Wachsmuth (Louis' father)decided to stay at Yacquina Bay Oregon after being shipwrecked there. Meinert farmed oysters and forty or so years later Louis came to Portland as first a seafood marketer who sold oyster cocktails and expanding out as the restaurant with Oyster stew with Yacquinas from the family business.

I am glad the restaurant is still there and stil in the family. It has changed quite a bit lately. The shrimp Louis is no longer made up entirely cuts of iceberg lettuce angeled at 15 degrees or so. And the menu is no longer clam shaped with rainbow trim and a picture of Louis Wachsmith on the back. But other than that the other big change came a few decades earlier when when the container for the unlimited oyster crackers were no longer the large open sandbox pail sized buckets of oyster crackers. They are still plentiful but now distributed in liter wine carafes. Regardless, generations of us have loved that perk and still do.


If this was my unsubstanitated fictional picture history of the Oyster bar, I would want to believe that this ship was the Annie Doyle and Meinart Wachsmith was on board and that it was snapped by an early Zapruder or paparazi right before it ship wrecked.

Meinart Wachsmith was from the island of Sylt. I was there once. One of my first full days after my first transatlantic flight was spent with long bus rides and ferry rides to get there. I remember lots of narrow streets with angular close curves with big rich people's houses. At one point we walked through a closed down beach resort and gift area. And I took a picture of a poster with some penguins on it.


This image of Celilo Falls fishermen was contemporaneous of a lot of the history of Dan and Louis, certainly well before my time.

posted by well-executed buffet at 10:04 PM
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Thursday, May 28, 2009

Murder in a Blue World aka Clockwork Terror


Murder in a Blue World is a strange dystopic Spanish film from the mid seventies. It "borrows" excessively from A Clockwork Orange and emasculates it with a psychosexual slasher film. The US release of the film was even called Clockwork Terror.

Director Eloy de la Iglesia's version of droogies are leather clad biker types who drive around in a dune buggy perpetrating their form of ultraviolence with bull whips. (No I'm not making this up) There is also scenes of electroshock aversion therapy almost directly knocked off from Clockwork Orange. That therapy is overseen by the male lead of the film played by Robert Mitchum's son Chris, in a wooden performance reminiscent of Robert Wagner's acting.

I find a certain charm and allure to an international B movie from the sixties or seventies. American actors (or in Chris Mitchum's case, actors with relations which provide name recognition) for the grindhouse or drive in marquee. Blue World features Sue Lyon as the psycho killer. Lyon, of course, played Lolita in Kubrick's Lolita. At one point her character healthcare worker and seductress slasher Ana Verina is even shown reading Nabokov's novel before she takes out her next victim with a surgical scalpel. According to her imdb bio, Lyon lived in Spain at the time of this film as an expatriate because of pressures she faced in the United States due to her interracial marriage with photographer and football coach Roland Harrison.

Director Eloy de la Iglesia fills his movie with all kinds of elaborate camera movements and angles. It is quite entertaining to see how much of A Clockwork Orange is appropriated as well as other quotes in films of its time. He even endeavors to use classical music in a way similar to Kuburick. This and a surprise ending designed to give the film a higher level of profundity are not by any means enough to elevate it to what it truly is, a psychotronic filler from the seventies.
posted by well-executed buffet at 10:53 PM
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

A Vision of Desert Burbopolis


Video as an art medium has always felt like it had so much potential but more so than many media, it takes the right artist with the right formula to do be able to untap its unique powers. The essay is one of the most elusive of forms. The filmmaker must be careful and judicious of the elements they utilize to explore their topic and tell their tale.

Local 909er, a half hour video essay by multi-faceted artist Erin Baxter Blader is a stunning piece of work that explores the Inland Empire of Southen California. Baxter masterfully orchestrates the elements she has chosen: sun bleached video imagery, her narration that contrasts a stilted somewhat monotone with powerful impassioned content about what is happening to the region she calls home, several segments that utilize still photography in a way reminiscent of Chris Marker's La Jette and a sculpted soundtrack which repeatedly returns to sound of a radio being tuned.

"In the last three years more people have moved to the Inland Empire than anywhere else in the United States," Blader states in the film's narration. She moves through a series of short profiles of places like Upland where Blader lives. She contrasts a local County Fair festival in Upland that is barely attended with the synthesized old downtown Victoria Gardens Mall owned by the Lewis Corporation in Rancho Cucamonga.

We also visit Norco, California known as Horsetown, USA. One can get a good sense of the tone and voice of Local 909er by
viewing this excerpt from the film. Norco is one of the several towns filled with big burb homes filled with residents who commute two to three hours for work.

In the world of Local 909er big money and big profits are the ruling order. Master plan communities of new homes homes spring up in dairy land where residents "have to contend with flooded out roads, manure saturated mud on their cars and flies, the flies, and flies... ."

Then there is Banning, California, "pretty much in the middle of the desert." In this segment Blader shows how when big box stores like Walmart upgrade to Super store status the old buildings are abandoned and impact the buildings around them and other shops eventually close. One of the most compelling of segments in the film is when she shows "In Ontario, right next to the 10 freeway, you can see what a Target looks like when it dies." Big money abandons its old enterprises for new leaving multiple store closings in its wake.

The film closes with a return to Upland. Blader tells how the residents on her street know each other and take pride in how they work for their houses. She tells how a man came to her door and asked if they wanted to sell to make room for townhomes. She said we told him know. The last image is a balloon advertising new homes and development as credits roll. The last text screen asks the question "Does Every Neighborhood have to look the same?"

Local 909er (909 is the area code for most of the region and has been appropriated as local slang term for Inland Emiprites) was filmed over a four year period and was funded in part by th California Council for the Humanities. It appears on a recently released video collection called A Film Is a Burning Place: Works by Enid Baxter Blader. Most of her the other works on the disc seemed much more casual and did not connect with me. But it makes no difference because Local 909er is so strong and memorable.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:27 PM
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Again I Celebrate Dylan's Memorial Day Weekend Birthday Alone


One of my most memorable Memorial days weekends was in Bellingham WA 1976. I was like one of three folks in my dorm who elected not to go home, or at least it seemed it. It was bright and sunny and I could play music loud while I cleaned or poked at studying. On my solid state clock radio I picked up a public radio station in Vancouver BC were devoting an afternoon to music and talk about Bob Dylan who had celebrated his thirty fifth birthday. I liked Dylan okay. I heard records at my friend's sisters. I owned John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline when they first came out and played them, but not nearly as much as Simon and Garfunkel or the first three Chicago records.

The two Canadian Dylan "scholars" caught my attention big time when they played back to back versions of Its All Right Mom, I'm Only Bleeding, the original Bringing It All Back Home and the other from the Geffen Dylan/Band concert souvenir Before the Flood. This is the moment I really became a Dylan follower. The difference between the versions was pretty staggering, but the essence and the intensity of the song itself powerful in both settings.

The mid-seventies were a great time to get caught up in Dylan for the first time. This was the era of Blood on the Tracks, The Rolling Thunder Review, Desire and Renaldo and Clara. Then there was Street Legal and Budokon. Then Jesus, being baptized in Pat Boone's pool and leaving most of the world scratching their heads even when he drafted Dire Straits for Slow Train.

This past weekend I spent Memorial Day weekend 2009 and Bob Dylan's 68th birthday alone once again. And in circumstances a little bit coincidental, karmic, and cosmic, dug into Dylan, but not classic He's Not There eras of Bobby. Douglas Brinkley's interview with Dylan in Rolling Stone had me curious about the last nearly twenty years of his Americana personified period beginning with the albums of American standard folk songs (Frankie and Johnny, Little Maggie, Stack O Lee, etc) that consisted of Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong) to his albums Time out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times, and last month's release Together Through Life


I will reserve another time to expand upon Together Through Life, but like what I hear with a band that has a Tom Petty Heartbreaker and a Los Lobos (Dave Hidalgo) with tunes of American heritage. Sometimes muddy. Sometimes Bright. I'm fascinated to listen closer to hear the signs of Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter's contribution. he few hours I spent listing this weekend lead me to conclude that I like Americana Bob and love the concept of the Never Ending Tour, although he gets real sensitive when it is is called that. I wish I could be able to see Dylan with Willie Nelson and John Cougar Mellencamp at their AAA ball park tour this summer, but, alas, I don't see myself in Stockon or Fresno in mid to late August.

The only pre-nineties Dylan I have been listening to in this round has been the Bob Dylan and Grateful Dead show from Autzen Stadium, 7.19.87. That show features a phenomenal performance of Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest which originally appeared on John Wesley Harding. The tune is a gnarly, intense allegory about friendship and temptation. The performance features an impassioned vocal by Dylan, particularly in the final choruses.

No one tried to say a thing
When they took him out in jest,
Except, of course, the little neighbor boy
Who carried him to rest.
And he just walked along, alone,
With his guilt so well concealed,
And muttered underneath his breath,
"Nothing is revealed."

Well, the moral of the story,
The moral of this song,
Is simply that one should never be
Where one does not belong.
So when you see your neighbor carryin' somethin',
Help him with his load,
And don't go mistaking Paradise
For that home across the road.


The performance is pretty phenomenal. All of the major elements of the Dead: Brent's keyboard, Bobby and Jerry almost sounding like the two dueling protagonists on guitar (Frankie and Judas, perhaps?) Phil's bass runs are especially inspired and Billy and Micky are kicking some major drummer butt. Before the last set of verses you can hear what sounds like a board operator throwing out another filter or whatever it is they do for sweet house sound. But listen closely: it is the sound of thousands of folks going batshit crazy as the song moves to the moral of the story and song. I didn't go to Dylan and the Band 74 or the Rolling Thunder review but I was lucky to be there for this one.

Think I am exagerating or sweetening the situation here? Then check it out for yourself...


Dylan and Dead 7.19.87 Ballad of Frankie Lee & Judas Priest


posted by well-executed buffet at 9:24 PM
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Monday, May 25, 2009

Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday


There has been a genre of cinema for a long time relating to couples going through changes, usually over the course of a day or two, such as in Murnau's Sunrise or the abysml Richard Linklatter-Ethan Hawke Before Sunrise,(One of my least favorite films but one of my favorite beach towels. Thanks Steveman) A setting of a day or a couple creates a significant dramatic structure. But Couple Changes Cinema can experiment with time like how Stanley Donan's Two for the Road compresses an entire relationship through jump cuts.

I became aware of another film of this genre by Akira Kurosawa. One Wonderful Sunday (1947) was his seventh film. It shows us Yuzo and Massaka out on their weekly date. They only have 35 yen between them.

Yuzo has allowed himself to be beat up. He is the veteran trying to make the change in a society in transition. Life and the quality of living plus lack of confidence has created an equation situation: Money and Love = Security. Thank god that Massaka is much more an optimist and willing to accept their current station in life. Not only are they limited by their funds, These too also encounter greed motivated folks that prevent them from optimizing their few precious yen at a concert or a coffee shop. In the end, money, of course, does not equate hapiness either, but they have to sweat and work hard to get to that point.

In One Wonderful Sunday, Kursosawa is visual poet trying the possibility of the cinema out. He was trying to figure out a way to put hope and change on the screen. One Wonderful Sunday is two kinds of film in one. The first half is kinetic full of tempo and mood changes. The couple remains in the city but there is a kind of picaresque road trip going on.

The second is not a dream but Kurosawa has certainly taken us to a world with a fantasy domain. And that is really the major conflict going on here. Will injected fantasy be the victor? And he gives them time to do it. There are some really long shots here in the second half. This is not a movie you want to be watching when you are sleepy.

One Wonderful Sundayis one of five films in the Criterion/Eclipse box set Postwar Kurosawa which features five of the eleven films that Kurosawa directed between 1946 and 1955.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:17 PM
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Sunday, May 24, 2009

Pabst and Brooks: Redux with a Diary


Pandora's Box, directed by GW Pabst is one of the most revered films of the last years of the silent era, if not all of cinema history, and rightly so. It is a kind of epic exploration of sensual abandon and the shadow side of the human condition. It also features Louise Brooks as Lulu in a role as integral to her screen career as The Passion of Joan of Arc was to Maria Falconetti or as Marie in Au hasard Balthazar is for Anne Wiazemsky. We think of the film, role, and actress being inseparable.

Diary of a Lost Girl was the 1929 follow up by Pabst and Brooks to Pandora's Box. I need to go back and look at Pandora's before I give any kind of specifics and comparison. I can only say that I found this film to be a signficant and moving experience. There are some plot elements that don't make sense on a realistic and logical level, but there is a greater concern here to a high level of emotion and morality that Pabst and Co. are taking on it. It contains some dark and devastating moments, but Thymiane, the protagonist of Lost Girl gets to celebrate a spiritual victory, and the audience does as well.

Thymiane, Margarete Böhme's heroine of Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen is sexually assaulted and impregnated by her father's apothecary assistant. The baby goes up for adoption and Thymiane is sent to this brutal Dickens like reform school while her father takes up with his latest housekeeper. She escapes and becomes a prostitute in conditions that were certainly an improvement to the school. But it is the last act, in which money and time create circumstances towards redemption that makes this work kind of extraordinary.

This viewing of Diary will send me back to Pandora's Box, but also to move deeper into works by Pabst, Murnau and others like Borzage from the silent era. There is a kind of elemental connection with their subject matter and their audience that the best of silent filmmakers were masters. Technology has changed, but the best work of roughly the first third of cinema's history is filled with moments powerful and as eternal as the best of great literature.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:16 PM
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Saturday, May 23, 2009

When Volker Met Billy


Billy Wilder was 82 when he was interviewed over a two week period by another admiring filmmaker, Volker Schlöndorff. There is often something wonderful that happens when these kinds of situations occur. The Hitchcock interviews by Francois Truffaut will always feel like a kind of definitive document. As do the interviews that Peter Bogdanovich did with Orson Welles or, certainly, the book Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe with transcriptions of interviews done ten years after Schlöndorff's footage.

Wilder asked that Schlöndorff not show his footage until after his death apparently because it was not felt to be polished or professional enough. There was a reference in the film that there was an intent to later and do a more complete and polished presentation. The footage was assembled into a 2006 film, Billy Wilder Speaks.

This film has a lovely rough hewn, jump around feel to it in many ways. The original source material came from at least four or five different interviews filmed over the two weeks. He also moves between German and English depending on mood or topic. A viewer of this film must work and listen hard to sometimes grasp the context and flow of his stories and reminiscences as one does when listening to an elder/

Billy Wilder had served as a writer on almost twenty five films before coming to the US after Hitler came to power. He made quick study of English and all aspects of American culture, being hired as a screenwriter in short order collaborating with the likes of Charles Bracket, and director Ernst Lubitsch. In 1939 he wrote the screenplay of Ninotchka for fellow expatriate and career mentor Lubitsch whose influence was great on him. In Billy Wilder Speaks, we see the sign sign in his office that said "How Would Lubitsch Do It?"

Wilder had an unprecedented twenty year run beginning with Double Indemnity in 1944 until The Fortune Cookie in 1966. Movies in the mid twentieth century would have been not nearly as rich without the likes of The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, ,Ace In the Hole, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and One, Two Three Some of these films unblinkly show the darker side of human nature with a touch of irony that is unique to Wilder.

A lot of the anecdotes one would expect in a Wilder documentary are present. There is an explanation how the door opens up to the outside of an apartment so that Barbara Stanwyck could hide from Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity. And then there is the lesson in comic timing when drag disguised Jack Lemmon is using maracas to reveal his news of courting a man to Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot.

Yet, it is his exchanges with Schlöndorff about a US War department documentary he made called Death Mills which are among the most intriguing in Billy Wilder Speaks. Wilder, a eastern European Jew whose mother and step mother were killed at Auschwitz was determined to give a head on account of what took place in the concentration camps for a film that was intended for screening in German and Austrian cinemas. The first audience mostly walked out and stole the pencils for the post-audience reaction. Later audiences had to produce their ration cards for stamping after seeing the film, according to Wilder. He was determined to create a document that could not be dismissed as something manufactured by some Jews in Hollywood.

Another of the best moments occurs when Schlöndorff asks Wilder about his extensive use of the Paramount music library in his films, especially "Isn't It Romantic" in Sabrina. "It is very nice when you use it in Paris, when they are walking up the Champs-Élysée, but how about using it in Berlin when they are driving through the ruins? inquires Schlöndorff. Wilder responds with a question "Did I use it?" Schlöndorff replies yes. To which Wilder says "That just shows you how cheap we are."

There are several such moments in Billy Wilder Speaks and in the hour of extra interview segments on the DVD that are introduced by Schlöndorff. To lovers of film, these are priceless. I am thankful for the Crowe book for its completeness and earnestness in capturing Wilder's career but Billy Wilder Speaks is also invaluable, especially in getting a true since of what it was like to be able o sit down and talk with this master about his life and times.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:28 PM
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Friday, May 22, 2009

A Hero is Nothing But A Sandwich


I heard rumblings that this was a satisfying film to check out. I've seen it lumped in with blaxploitation films although like Claudine with Dihann Carroll and James Earl Jones or Charles Wright's Killer of Sheep. All three of these film are stories about regular African American folks getting by and getting through life's sometimes rough patches. The other films of this era were about "trying to get over" (Superfly--as the last line of the title song says) Or getting at the man. who might be the government or some cops or, my favorite, 1970s movie Mafioso.

Sure, there is some pretty arcane stuff in A Hero is Nothing But A Sandwich like an interminable dialog between the nationalist black power instructor rapping about the future with the Jewish reading and composition instructor or a rehab intervention smackdown that reminded me of something out of the ranch school in Billy Jack. I, a product of the seventies myself, like these kinds of time capsule moments.

Such moments ultimately do not matter because Hero is a fine well-crafted piece of American cinema which feels like a kind of not too distant relation to the kind of independent small movies that came on the scene a decade and a half later. Most obviously this film had two exceptionally high profile African American actors of their time coming back on screen together six or seven years after Sounder.

From Sounder to Sandwich. Here's how much time had passed. Kevin Hooks who was a focal point in Sounder and in a TV movie three years earlier about this kitty he found called J.T. is too old to play the barely teen junkie in Hero. Instead Hooks plays Tiger the small time lowlife dealer who gets Benjie (Larry B. Scott) on the mainline in no time.

Films about junkies are hard to watch and films about young smart people on junk get even tougher. But Hero is really a story of the human condition told with the same kind sensitivity that Tod Haynes gave to Safe As Safe is so much more than a film about environmental allergies, Sandwich is more than a story of a young kid on junk. Both are considered observations of the human condition well acted and interestingly crafted.

Hero's director Ralph Nelson has made a number of significant films (Soldier Blue, Charly, Lilies of the Field, and Requiem for A Heavyweight) I remember seeing two of his sixties films in theaters. The the nail biting air disaster procedural Fate Is The Hunter with Glenn Ford was the first second feature at a drive in I remember staying up and watching all the way through with my parents. Then there was Father Goose with Cary Grant an Leslie Caron. This bad broad comedy seemed to follow me like a disease getting booked as a second feature to a Disney cartoon or Don Knotts comedy at least twice that I can remember.

But the point is, Nelson knew how to make a film and here he had a lot to work with, not only to flight actors, but a solid screenplay by Alice Childress based on her novel. I first came across this book in the Young Adult section of a bookstore I worked at when I was going to college. Childress according to her Wikipedia article is most known for her work in theater. "She formed an off-broadway union for actors. Her first play, Florence, was produced off-Broadway in 1950. She was the first black woman to have a play produced professionally, and is also the first woman to win an OBIE award." I find this interesting because Hero very much has a play like structure, The first act is about Benjie getting hooked, the second is hitting bottom and going to rehab.

The third act of Hero is about the impact of the relationship between Benjie, his mom, grandmother, and the man who lives with them trying to surf the unknown of what their life and relationships are going to be after Benjie gets out of rehab. Winfield brings quite a lot to Butler, a former professional musician with service sector job who desires a stepfather role with Benjie. He describes himself well at one point: "I don't bother hardly nobody, but I am kind of direct in my way." His directness comes in inevitable conflict with the still fragile Benjie and his mother. But Nelson and Childress don't moralize or take sides in the battle. They instead keep to the view and perspective of telling a story about folks in complicated stead.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:07 PM
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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Stevie As A Sideman To Fellow Legends


I love YouTube's role as a giant jukebox of cultural ephemera. I used to hate it when a classmate or work colleague would come up to me and say "Hey did you see _______ lay it down with______ on And the moment was gone forever. My first VHS tapes consist of music performance and early video music clips from SNL, Fridays, Midnight Special, PBS Soundstage, and any other performance outlet that looked promising.

Here are a couple of gems I found one night doing the YouTube, looking for music that wasn't shot on someone's cell phone. Stevie Wonder performs a couple of his best tunes with a couple of other legendary musical geniuses. He brings a touch of Stevie to the performances, but it is clear to me that he is doing all he can for them as well.

Living For the City with Ray Charles
The funkiness of these masters slices through the bloated television variety show orchestra. Ray's fingers are on fire and his first couple of choruses transform it from its prior history as a hit tune on innervisions and take into something you would hear on an all blues and gospel label somewhere between Hi and Malaco records, a world that never saw a cross over like the ones that Al Green, Brother Ray and others had.

And then there's Ray's rap in the middle testifying about the plight of the ghetto with desperation at the keyboard pulpit. At another point his cryouts to Stevie 'All Right Son" come out with real deal gladness in the midst of television madness.

Wonder gets his licks in, but he is obviously there for the master's voice



Until You Come Back To Me with Aretha Franklin
You gotta Respect the Reee. Aretha Franklin and Stevie transform what could be a fully 100% cheez moment when they do Wonder's Until You Come Back To Me. And time has its way of changing bodies and ravaging voices once so sweet and unique. But the soul and phrasing is still there. Again, Steve is there to give

And a lovely thing happens, the arrangement kind of breaks down and Stevie laughs and seems to love the moment of near collapse as they fade out wrapping on doors tapping on window panes.

posted by well-executed buffet at 9:33 AM
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