Well-executed buffet

Young Ears that Changed the World

2007-12-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

Tender Ears that Changed the World

Yesterday's viewings of "Atlantic Records: The House that Ahmet Built" and Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There" have me again realizing how the enthusiasm for Jazz and other African American based musics by the likes John Hammond, Alfred Lion, Bob Weinstock and Ertegum brothers changed the world. Critics can pontificate and help popularize. But these folks gave the world access to some of the most important and influential artists in the world.

They were fans first and their joy for the music was early and deep. There are stories of them all getting very close and even evangelizing the music early on. Hammond heard Billie Holiday when he was in his teens in 1927, moved to Greenwich when he was 21 and promoted the ground-breaking Spiritual to Swing Concerts at Carnegie Hall in the Decembers of 1938 and 39. German immigrant Alfred Lion, who also caught the jazz bug as a teenager ten years earlier when he was in Berlin and saw Sam Wooding's Orchestra was at one of the Spritual to Swing Concerts. It inspired him to begin a record label, BlueNote Records.

Bob Weinstock was 15 years old when he started a mail order record business out of his house and made his first recordings with Lennie Tristano when he was 20. Soon after he founded Prestige records. Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun fell in love with jazz when they grew up in Turkish embassies around the world and promoted mixed race jazz concerts in Washington DC at the Turkish Embassy, an event that could not have been held in the South otherwise. Ahmet formed Atlantic records in 1947 with a loan from his dentist and Nesuhi produced Atlantic sides by Coltrane, Mingus, Ornette Coleman.

Our world was changed because of adolescent passions for the sounds that were coming out of the likes of Harlem and Kansas City. I guess it is getting close to Christmas so its okay to get a little George Bailey on y'all. No Columbia jazz as we knew it? No BlueNote with Blakey cymbals crashing? No Prestige---imagine a world without the classic sides of Miles and Coltrane? No jazz and blues and Ray Charles on Atlantic? The world would have indeed been duller greyer and not as rich. And I don't know what conclusion I should draw here besides a soulful shoutout: Praise be to the lights inside the messengers who as conduits brought the artists and their works!

Scaled to Myth and Legend

2007-12-18T21:03:00.000-08:00

I'm not There: Cinema Scaled to Myth and Legend

Todd Haynes' meditative exploration of Bob Dylan is nothing less than an epic media poem that creates its own language and rules to tell its tales. It brings one to a discussion of the definition of truth. Biographical truth or rather biopicgraphical truth could not be up to the task of a film regarding Dylan. And biographical & autobiographical were covered quite well in recent years with the exhibit that the Experience Music sponsored, Dylan's first volume of memoirs, and, of course, the wonderful "No Direction Home" by Martin Scorsese covered his story from that perspective quite well.

So what kinds of truth is Haynes trying to get at here? Emotional truth is a term bandied about in How Robert Sullivan's NYTIMES magazine profile in October Perhaps this is why I felt the experience was much like a Fassbinder film when I reflected on it during my walk home. Haynes is another director god in his machine pulling levers and using film language (remember his degree is in semiotics) in visual quotation (the dream traffic sequence from Fellini's 8 1/2, or, my favorite, the wheelchaired people from Lester's Petulia, riding in an elevator.) Sullivan also mentions how the sequence in the old wild west time of Riddle is a world like the seventies westerns it is emulating.

There is a fork in the road in the film early on, or actually, a fork in the train tracks, in a box car. It comes down to whether or not the viewer is willing to have a 12 year old African American boy portray Woody Guthrie. Not the languishing late fifties Woody Guthrie with Huntington's Chorea at a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, but this black youngster playing the Woody Guthrie that Robert Zimmerman played when he played Bob Dylan playing Woody Guthrie. If you look at the screen and say to yourself "Okay Todd, take me away" you will love this film. But if you don't take that ticket, I don't know what you will think of "He's Not There" Your reaction might just be to laugh, like when the 250 pound African American woman in the juror box in Woody Allen's Bananas claims to be J. Edgar Hoover in disguise. But if you are that literal, you probably wouldn't have come to see "He's not There." And I'm thinking that ultimately the audience will turn out to be kind of limited anyway. The 1pm Tuesday show I went to had one other fellow in attendance wearing motorcycle leathers, a Harley Davidson ball cap, and was carrying a paperback.

Would He's Not There play to a non-Dylan fan or someone who really doesn't know his story? Does emotional truth need to be bought into to for one to have a frame of reference for it to be truly effective? I don't know, because I am a sucker for the allusions and choices that Haynes makes and the way he intercuts any two or three of his Dylans to make its own cinematic music. I also know and love the Dylan story. I even saw a version of Renaldo and Clara in a theater back in the seventies. So take my words as someone who has been on the train (but never before with young black Woody) for some time.

And I kind of dig the way that the studio put out a brochure that serves as an official guide to the film kind of like publishing their own Cliff's Notes. I thought that a blog entry from Kevin C. Murphy's Ghost in the Machine blog (If content and spirit addressing was a web/Internet convention, the Well-executed buffet might be a neighbor) did as well a job dealing with characters and structure.

Another web find: Todd Haynes has an infectious energy when he is talking about his films. See the two IFC clips below.

My Little Town

2007-12-17T17:01:00.000-08:00

Back in My Little Town

I want to share this great link of film clips of Vancouver , Washington in the 1940s.

Alcoa! Kiggins! The Columbian! Shumway Jr. High! All here and in living color.

A William Kentridge Experience

2007-12-16T17:18:00.000-08:00

Rock, Cup, Brain: A Kentridge Experience

Today was the last day for an exhibit of William Kentridge's work at Lewis and Clark College's Hoffman Gallery. A review of the show in Portland Art piqued my interest. I also had heard his name at numerous times, often connected with animation and was impressed with reproductions of his charcoal drawings. The Hoffman show consisted of a number of charcoal drawings that are a part of his film from his animated film of 1997, Weighing and Wanting.

I was not prepared for what the distinct,strange, and disturbing world that lives in Kentridge's animation. Weighing and Wanting's charcoal drawings take on a metamorphisis, shift change, drift, and make connections in strange and unusual ways. Things get reduced and erased. Lines overlap and score objects. Lap dissolves propel the viewer through a gallery of a mind's objects.

I spent nearly about a half hour watching repeat viewings of Weighing and Wanting, almost until it took me into a kind of pre-REM bedtime state. Then I returned to the outer gallery for a closer look at the ten or so images hanging in the outer gallery that appear in the film. The single panel of explication and the gallery essay were helpful. Both pointed out that the bulky bald post-middle age industrial executive-looking Gorbachev-reminiscent fellow in the film is a reoccurring character in Kentridge's work named Soho Eckstein. In this particular time-based Kentridge gallery, he has a MRI brainscan and works through all kinds of reminiscences as he studies the exterior interior of a big rock he collects on his property, listens to his coffee cup like a telephone, puts his head into a lap of a reappearing naked woman who gets overlaid and kind of transformed into large towers associated with the mines.

Images of objects become leitmotifs and they return in little sequences of relationships that create action. For instance, a teeter tottering empty scale later holds both rock and cup that Soho has been interacting with. Or grey line animations brain scans intercut to create montage illusion of Soho and the naked woman come together and face each other. And then there is the cup, that is broken in a sequence of redlines and descriptive violence, which comes back whole at the end of the film.

If the two words in the title of this film were dissolved or overlapped together in the same way as objects in the film, they kind of make the word wait (weigh+want=wait). What might Soho be waiting for? An opportunity to create patterns for meaning? Test results from his MRI? Or for more memories he finds in the center of his rock?

I believe there are probably few things in Kentridge's work that are ever clearly and directly comprehensible, which may be why I was drawn to watch the piece for almost an hour yesterday and why there just doesn't seem to be enough commentatary, critique and interview on this intriguing artist.

New York Magazine feature on Kentridge

Review of Kentridge's 2004 show, Drawings for perfection.

An interview with Kentridge

A bootleg video of another film, Felix in Exile (also embedded below

Cynical Shopping

2007-12-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

Cynical Shopping

I just received Stash 38, Stash DV magazine's November 07 collection of international motion graphics, commercials, short films, etc. I decided to watch it until I found something that really impressed me. Hifana, who I am kind of gathering is sort of a Japanese Daft Punk had a video called Connect. It is pretty darned cool and resonates with at least some of my attitude of Christmas related consumer spending. The opening shots by line and light take you into another world. And the very Beckish slide guitar meets techno riddim track is swell too!

Katja and Mouse

2007-12-14T21:09:00.000-08:00

Katja and Mouse

With the exception of two or three set-up sequences, Interview is essentially a one act psychological sparing match between a reporter in the process of a reporter on the decline and a glossed out mainstream media starlet. Steve Buscemi (who also adapted and directed) plays Pierre the reporter and Siena Miller is Katja, who is kind of like watching a walking jeans ad at times.

Tight one act two or three actor films are drama nerd paradise when done correctly if less they are interesting exercises. Interview, My Dinner with Andre, Inserts, and Two Girls and A Guy are memorable because of their tightrope walk if nothing more. I didn't connect that extensively with the overall content and execution of Interview but it hyperlinked me to three areas of observation:

Real-time cinema in the HD DV era
Interview covers some of the same ground that Mike Figgis (Hotel and Timecode), Soderbergh (Full Frontal and Bubble), (Nine Lives) and Alexander Sukorov (Russian Ark) have been working with. Most of the films listed above are the sons and daughters of Hitchcock's Rope, actively, mucking with the cinematic ability to record real time. There are one noticeable jump cuts out of the illusion of real time in this film. Buscemi doesn't take time for the characters to set up a video camera for one of the confession sequences in the film. But for this film, they don't rely on a single camera, but with three cameras with stable and agile video operators. It was the same crew that worked on the original with director Theo Van Gogh. And I can see where it has the potential for a kind of intimacy and truth that might be more immediate and intense than traditional master-closeup-mediumshot-reaction-cutaway methodology of 'ol Hollywood. Think about it---the reaction shot is now a part of the master, or at least of its same performance.

Meeting Theo
Before seeing this film, about all I knew of Theo Van Gogh was that he was murdered a couple years back. Interview intrigues me to check out more. My red envelope crack dealer only has a couple of his titles for now, but I imagine the cable indy twins (IFC and Sundance) have been all over this for a while. There was some interesting stuff going on in that loft between Pierre and Katja, and how it got there is peaking my interest. The Buscemi Interview is one of three remakes by American directors that Van Gogh's former colleagues are spearheading.

Hooray for our side
It is quite cool to see former fireman Buscemi (Fargo's funny looking one) direct and act in this is one more victory for the extraordinary ordinary looking actors who are in the mainstream. Bravo for John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Buscemi, and Jack Black! I think it is great that it is great that theaters and media ink can be filled with folks who aren't Cruise-Affblech-Clooney and others with male beauty carved and unreal except for an exceptional minority.

Of Face and Type

2007-12-13T06:45:00.000-08:00

Of Face and Type

Helvetica, the film by Gary Hustwit did its job well. It covers the history, ubiquity and cultural impact and cultural impact of the Helvetica typeface in a way the faithful typography indoctrinated and the general public can enjoy and think about. Here's a great interview with the filmmaker.

This film consists of eighty minutes of interviews with western type and graphic designers and numerous type montages of signs and publications. The top tier Type designers in the film are overall a passionate group with lots of lucid insight. Helvetica (the film), at least for this viewer, is going to require some repeat trips to the buffet to absorb all of what it has to offer. In other words, one of my sets of red envelope and sleeve is going to staying here for a few days. More comments about it coming to this blog? Perhaps so.

Coolest factoid from viewing one: Helvetica was invented in 1957. This is the same year I came to the buffet and the same year as Sputnik's launch. What a year!

Chewing on a bit of Bazin

2007-12-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

Chewing with Bazin

I'm not hung up on Andre Bazin as a critical force of the post-WWII or the godfather of the New Wave or how he changed the face of criticism or birthed the autuer theory, although all of those things are notable in his 40 years between 1918 and 1958. When I come across a collection of his work like Bazin At Work edited by Bert Cardullo, as I used to with "What Is Cinema?" (The French title of those volumes sounds so much better not so elementary and simplistic "Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?" which I also believe was not his title since they were published posthumously) I scan the pages and find these passages that seem to have a poetic and solid truth formulated from the perspective of viewer, not theoretician.

Statements like "The fantastic in the cinema is possible only because of the irresistible realism of the photographic image." in an essay that explores the use of superimpositions in films with fantasy elements make one want to take pause and consideration of these words. Something to chew on.

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The Ontology of the Photographic Image on the other hand is the first (and perhaps last) encounter that many folks have with Bazin. This is Bazin the theorist writing. It is a well enough thought provoking essay. It begins with "If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation."

But I rather prefer Bazin the moviegoer:

On Fellinni: "One remembers the discovery of La Strada as an aesthetic experience of great emotion, of an unanticipated encounter of the world of the imagination."

"The extraordinary richness of acting in Welles's films is this technique" (low angle, deep focus Mise-en-scène)

"For the producer and the distributor, the western cannot be anything more than a n infantile and popular film destined to end up on television, or an ambitious superproduction with major stars."

Bazin must be considered to be one of the many patron saints of the well-executed buffet.

Treasures Captured and Restored

2007-12-11T06:26:00.000-08:00

Treasures Captured and Restored

Film Preservation is to me one of the noblest of all enterprises. The specifics of the National Film Preservation Foundation were unknown to me until beginning to work my way through the first disk of the anthology they released in 2000, "Treasures from the American Film Archives." An impressive aspect of the first anthology is how much diversity of film, history, and culture it contains. It is a collaboration of 18 different film archives in the United States including the University of Fairbanks, the National Center for Jewish Film and some of the Smithsonian museums.

My eyes are opened. I always thought of most film preservation efforts in the U.S. as being a kind of limited top down effort from the AFI running those ads on Turner Classic Movies with some scattered efforts from probably the Library of Congress. The NPFP was commissioned by Congress and is impressively doing work all over the country with a variety of initiatives including focusing on silent film, federal and partnered grants, and a focus on preserving visionary avant garde works of independent filmmakers.

I don't think they could have found a better word than TREASURES to describe the contents of these anthologies. Discovering these anthologies is a lot like falling for a jazz artist you didn't know about earlier and finding a row and half of three decades of work in a record shop. I am only 2/3 the way through the first of disk and their are 11 more that have been released in NPFP anthologies, impressions of which will likely be recorded on this here (trying to be) well-executed buffet.

Ethiopians in a Strange Land

2007-12-10T07:02:00.001-08:00

Ethiopians in a Strange Land

Journey to Lasta is probably the first and only film most of us will ever see about expatriate Ethiopian musicians in Los Angeles. And there is always room at the buffet for these kinds of unique efforts. The fact that the film exists and tries to tell a story of three folks "trying to get over" (as Mayfield wailed in Superfly) with their music to some kind of world beat festival was worth a try. I want to embrace any film that has the promise of showing me a subculture and/or turn me on to a musical experience I never had before. I loved the way that the characters seamlessly between English and (probably) Amharic it made me question if it was even set in the US. But I never felt I knew much about these folks.

The issue I think in part is the fundamental problem of how to illustrate emotions like alienation and ennui on the screen. The nature of cinema is to engage, not disenfranchise. I sensed the same problem in an independent film, Police Beat by Seattlites Robinson Devor and Charles Mudede. The lead character, also an African immigrant, became more and more disconnected from reenactments of actual police incidents and more the outsider as he was unable to connect with his out of town lover leaving the audience feeling ???

This was the same kind of reaction in Journey to Lasta I received when watching the bass player non-communicating with his girlfriend, the drummer suffering through baby sitting, or the bands manager manipulating the group out of the last bit of dignities they had left.

Of course, there are usually upbeat endings about musicians following their dreams. But this one took a long time to get to leaving the viewer with respect for their convoluted journey, and a sense of relief that they finally got there. But I didn't feel I watched them do this on their own, it took all kinds of script conventions. As audience, I wasn't as an engaged component of their quest as should be the case in these kinds of tales.

Blacksmithing in 1893

2007-12-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

Blacksmithing in 1893

This film is 114 years old. It portrays men at work with a pause that refreshes. I came across Edison's Blacksmithing Scene in the Treasures from American Film Archives anthology, and felt inclined to share it with you all.

Silent Doll

2007-12-08T15:11:00.001-08:00

A Silent Doll

The Doll is a 1919 short feature directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It accompanied the disk that included "Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin" a feature documentary I discussed here in the buffet a couple days ago.

Another great aspect of the consumer DVD revolution is that it gives folks opportunities to check out great film work in the first eras of the development of the film medium.

Sure, it is easy to find the acting overwrought and artificial or the technical aspects artificial in pre-1930s cinema. But the rewards are great once finds ways to become more engaged. I sometimes will watch silent film on computers because I find that it will give on a bit more intimate experience. Soundtrack substitution is also useful. Folks who reissue silents don't always take care or creativity to come up with something that works. And lastly, things sometimes just move too darn slowly with fixed camera and stage like exposition, especially after you understand the characters and action being played out. The solution? Judicious use of the 2x or greater for when things feel slow. I always try to know where the remote is to hit the double arrow button from time to time.

The Doll has lots of wonderful moments and is very funny in places. Not roll over and clutch your midsection kind of laughter, but I found myself in lots of involuntary bursts of Ha! or even Ha! Ha! And lets face it there is lots of entertainment that is supposed to solicit that kind of response here 90 years later that fails.

Lubitsch targets aristocrats, duplicitous monks, and anyone or anything else he finds disingenuous. Baron Chantrelle is concerned about preserving his family's aristocratic dynasty, but nephew Lancelot is fearful of marriage and women. A town decree brings out 40 women who chase Lancelot through the street in a sort of medieval village version of A Hard Day's Night until he is finds refuge in a monastery occupied by greedy monks who all look kind of like Curly Joe of the Three Stooges. When a personal ad is located by the monks requesting Lancelot to return for a 300,000 franc dowry they urge Lancelot to marry. But he clearly states he does not want to marry a woman.

The Monks then show him an advertisement of Hilarius Giluermund, the world famous dollmaker: "Offered to bachelors, widowers and misogynists! I have succeeded with the help of a mechanism I built, in constructing a human-like doll who can walk, dance and sing by pushing different buttons. Hmmm interesting the monks knew about this. Lancelot agrees to check things out, but is concerned: "Only if it doesn't hurt." the intertitle reads.

Well, through plot and circumstance, Lancelot ends up, not with a doll, but Ossi, the daughter that Hilarius model for his life like doll. The doll is played by Ossi Oswalda a comic actress that the Lubitsch in Berlin documentary held a Mary Pickford like status.

The world of the doll is filled with creative touches. The large showroom that the less respectable dolls dance in has twin stages an arched entry way and zig zag triangles that make it unique and memorable. Another dancing scene with Ossi as the doll and monks is also a lot of fun.

The Doll is a trifle. But one can't be impressed by its craft, sense of whimsy, and its ability with its men in a horse suit and trees of triangular plywood to create a kind of world of its own with limited means, just as the expressionist films of Lubitsch's countrymen did for the darker side of human nature in the next few years.

2007-12-07T23:58:00.000-08:00

The Other Side of Bob Dylan's Mirror

I remember reading comments in the past about Murray Lerner's documentary Festival! I saw it a couple years back and enjoyed the energy he captured at the grand daddy of modern festival. I am even more pleased with his recent The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival.

I guess the model for this release are a couple films by another great documentary chronicler of Dylan, DA Pennebakerwith his single artist performances from Monterey Pop: Shake! Otis at Monterey and Jimi Plays Monterey. In Lerner's new DVD and these films of Pennebaker's, the filmmakers perform the video music equivalent of a key rule in algebra here; they isolate the variable.

It would be easy to classify this collection as the DVD equivalent of a record album and it is rather. But Lerner's straight forward presentation style with smart choices in editing creates a film that needs to be recognized on its own terms, not just as a collection of performance clips. This really becomes clear when one watches the DVD's extra, a recent interview of Lerner.

In the extra, Murray Lerner begins with a perceptive remarks about the relationship of film and modern poetry, and Sergei Eisenstein. As mentioned, there are folks out there who have unfortunately dismissed Lerner. Hopefully, this release and especially the interview will give lots of folks like myself the chance to discover a very creative individual who gives lots of great insights and memories of the time, and more notably,he takes this time as opportunity to share his philosophy and theories of film and music. What we know now as the sixties zeitgeist was recognized early by Lerner and his fascination on what what Dylan and others were doing at the time is central to his filmmaking craft in this film as well as Festival. I now look forward to Electric Miles and another screeing of his Isle of Wight film.

Space and time limit the comments of all of the performances and fine documentary film craft that are in Other Side of the Mirror, but here are few I have to note:

"North Country Blues," which feels like a biographical backdrop painting during a workshop session with Docs Boggs and Watson sitting in the background onstage, as well as that most ubiquitous of folk men, Pete Seeger.

"Only a Pawn in Their Game," his song about Medgar Evers ends the evening set. This is the performance truly showcases pure protest voice of pre-Tambourine man Bobby Z.

You just got to love the lunky hanging mikes above the heads of the finale with Baez, Seeger, Peter Paul & Mary, and the Freedom singers as they back up Bobby on Blowin' In the Wind."

The 1964 workshop session with an early performance of Mr. Tambourine which begins with a crowd shout request for Cocaine to which Dylan says "Yes, yes I hear you well. I think you got the wrong man."

Chimes of Freedom from 64. Eh gads! Is there power in this performance or what? The crowd goes wild and one of the Peter Paul and Mary guys as emcee is overwhelmed by the melee until Bobby comes out amped out and happy to take another bow.

"Love Minus Zero/No Limit" has been my favorite Dylan song ever since I viewed Pennebaker's Don't Look Back a couple of years ago. The 1965 Newport version features a tight closeup on dylan with boughs of trees blowing behind him. (Oh how I love the 1960s Kodak BW PlusX and TriX film emulsions!)

Dylan goes electric is, of course, the big story of 1965 Newport mainstage peformance. The soundcheck, Maggie's Farm, and Like a Rolling Stone are marvelously documented here. The Newport 65 performance of Like a Rolling Stone is not so in your face as the single or later live versions with the Band. It is almost a shuffle version and the organ parts are more gospelly. Two organists are listed in the credits. Al Kooper, of course, but what gives with Barry Goldberg's listing? I'm straining to hear if there are two organs on the track. I'm sure Greil Marcus has this covered in his book on Like a Rollng Stone, but I don't have it nearby to check.

And, of course, there is the famous acoustic encore (how much booing was there really?) where Dylan asks for an E harmonica and what sounds like scores of them immediately hit the stage.

There have been a lot of strange and dubious releases in recent years in the wake of Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home. Including

, but Mirror is the real deal, an authorized Columbia CBS video release with what really matters, primary source performances interpreted quite well by solid filmmaking.

Goodbye Hoof

2007-12-06T20:19:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Hoof

The buffet is lit by candles tonight in honor of the life of Greg Hoofnagle. Greg and I were in some of the same classes over 30 years ago at Western Washington University when he was a rising star in the journalism department, although we didn't know each other or later realized we were there until we talked about it 20 years later.

We recalled a most memorable class with Tom Robbins as guest speaker, shortly after Cowgirls was released in paper where he begged a beer from the audience and drew hisses from the hardcore feminists in the audience even though he carefully tried to explain the the difference between sex and sexism, it made no difference, they did'nt want to hear his description of what it was like for a guy to have an erection in a field when he thought about his girlfriend. It was astonishing how, even though we didn't know each other, I remember who he was (Western Front editors had a pretty high profile on campus) and how we shared other vibrant memories of those times, like the war that went on in dorms in the Fall of 1975 where residents voted their lifestyle preference by putting a cross or a cannabis leaf in their windows. It was a heck of a colorful tic-tac-toe on those buildings overlooking Bellingham Bay or High St. that season. Maybe we remembered it so well because it was the kind of thing that one best appreciated as an outsider, not as one or the other side trying to outdo each other.

It was an honor to have Greg in my classes at Clark College. He took on new computer applications with a zeal and intensity that makes it a real pleasure to be in an educational institution helping others gain access to digital tools and what they can do for them. It was a privilege to have been his faculty sponsor for the Washington Award for Vocational Excellence. The WAVE scholarship is a highly competitive, funded by legislative fiat and paid for two years of tuition. Greg couldn't attend the luncheon with state officials in attendance where he was recognized because he had a more important personal duty: he had to help care for an urgency situation involving his grandmother. Family and friends play an important role in our lives, but maybe even more so for Greg.

In 2003 and four, it was excellent to watch him take his vibrant, energetic work ethic and intellectual intensity to challenge and raise the bar up at Washington State University Vancouver's Digital Technology and Culture program where he finally earned the bachelor's degree he began so many years earlier before a period in his life where he didn't make the best of choices.

And it was very exciting to have watched him turn his life to another new level in the last year after recovering from catastrophic health episodes. His legacy will be memories of many, many folks who will recall his positivity, high energy, and the intelligent sharpness he brought to his life and endeavors. Goodbye, Hoof. You inspired a lot of us.

The "Other" Lubitsch

2007-12-06T06:53:00.001-08:00

Meeting the "Other" Lubitsch

Living life as if it was a full buffet in a well-executed manner means poking at things that might be interesting.

Kino released a boxset of pre-Hollywood films of Ernst Lubitsch. One of the offerings is a documentary about Lubitsch's life in Berlin prior to coming to Hollywood and bringing a level of quality of class and entertainment that was definitely iconic. Lubitsch were his high profile films of the late thirties and forties--films like Heaven Can Wait and To Be or Not To Be.

I dug into the screening of the documentary "Lubitsch in Berlin" figuring it was going to be one of your average DVD box set extras, but found it to be exceptionally engaging. I had assumed Lubitsch to have been a refugee to the US due to Nazism, but Lubitsch came to the US in 1922 after already creating quite a body of work in Max Rheinhardt's theater, acting and then directing silent films, both comedy and epic.

Hail Antonia!

2007-12-04T17:25:00.000-08:00

Hail Antonia!

Music and movies are most universal and international of currencies and expresion.
Antonia is about a group of four Brasilian woman hip hop background singers who glimpse the fancy of creating a group of their own.

The details of their lives are revealed to the story in a naturalistic progressive disclosure. Each of the women have an individual and contrasting personality. It is the level of detail that draws one into the experience of Antonia. The sisterhood solidarity and dream of these women built up over their lifetimes in the early scenes of the is worn down by their essentially worthless menfolk and the tough Brasiliana streets and men folk. But plot doesn't matter a whole lot in a film like this: music, personality and experience do as they did in Black Orpheus or The Harder they Come. Antonia doesn't necessarily sit on the same level of those films but carries you into its own world with zest and vibrancy. Also, the rap and hip hop in the film sound great in Portuguese.

Waiting for Ornette

2007-12-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Waiting for Ornette

Today was a strange day. The weather had two casts and tempos: wind and rain or more wind and rain. Where is my cell phone? It disappeared somewhere mid-day between the gradeathon and the meeting I was not looking forward to. Phil and Friends had apparently sold out before I could even contemplate getting tickets for their two night run at the Crystal billed as a 40th Anniversary of the famous shows that took place in Feb 2008. I'm not sure I would have jumped at back to back Monday and Tuesday night shows, but I would have liked the chance to have considered it. Even a trip to the grocery store on the way home seemed to be embroiled with complication.

At home finally, I decided to burn through the new Rolling Stone while I ate. The latest issue features current fossilized versions of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant on the cover. The coverage of Iowa demos was interesting (What if Hillary comes in third on caucus night? It could happen.), but the evening and day turned around when I read a well done profile of Ornette Coleman by Scott Spenser. Spenser gets great credit for taking on the task of explaining this man and his music to somewhat mainstream America. "Coleman's great affront to the jazz establishment was to base his improvisations not on the chords of the song, but the melody and then not on the actual notes of the melody, but how the melody makes you feel."

Many years ago the great Portland weekend KBOO volunteer DJ, George Page would rail on about how he never had much affection for "yang music." Typically, my tastes are more towards hard bop than the free yangy stuff. In most circumstances, I'll pick out George Coleman and Harold Mabern before innovative saints like Ornette or Albert Ayler or even Rollins and Coltrane. I considered going to see Ornette during the Prime Time era, but the music seemed like a battle zone whenever I heard it and the collaborations with Jerry Garcia never really took off for me. Yet in about ten weeks, I'll be going to the opening weekend of the Portland Jazz festival weekend that begins with Ornette and ends with Cecil Taylor. This programming is inspired and one could only get such a dosage by living in NY with lots of spare time, ready cash and the stars to be lined up ever so correctly.

I'm now playing Coleman's Sound Grammar, which won the Pulitzer last year. I listened to it a couple times prior, but its spare dual basses and Ornette's son Denardo's drumming seemed too spare, not the first choice for Ipods and Spring walks home. But somehow they fare better for rain logged Mondays. These tunes are mostly all the blues underscored and countered by the bass players with kickouts of splintered percussion punctuation in just the right burst by Denardo. I'm not sure that I ever found the rhythm of the day, but Ornette's songs are working now well enough instead. And a good time and space for beginning to dip into the sounds and spaces of this master on the edges who I will have the privilege to see at work in February. Yet as this journey begins I need to keep in mind a comment Spencer's friend once made to him: "Ornette doesn't reward casual listening--and if you don't believe me, ask my neighbors."

Velvet from Victoria

2007-12-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Velvet (from Victoria)

House music always confused me because there was nothing soulful or funky about it unless you had the sort of cross-over acid jazz stuff from the late eighties and early nineties (Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai) that gave it some hooks, some riddim, and hopefully, some soul. I like Velvet from Victoria, BC because they take the pulse, some beats and the happy hedonism of house and apply the stuff of jazz, improv, soul and groove onto it to come up with a sweet and infectious sound that is unique.

Velvet is a band of eight musicians, still without a web page, that has reportedly been the best thing to take place in Victoria, BC on Sunday nights, where they are famous for a standing gig at a place called Steamer's. Descriptions of their sound seem very accurate in a Whistler, BC news magazine
preview of a concert in Whistler for their Film festival last night. Author Nicole Fitzgerald calls it "organic live dance music, produced by vocals and instrumentals, as opposed to turntables, attracts an artistic crowd as funky and groovy as the music thy produced. The largely improvised show draws from the finest elements of funk, soul, electronica, jazz, and rock 'n roll to create an electro groove entirely their own." In another infotainment preview article for the band's twelfth anniversary shows in Victoria, Kuba Oms talks about how the band has "“Over the last five or six years we’ve been honing this sort of dubby acid blues rock thing over the beats" again showing the mix and diversity of these folks. Additionally, Kuba seems to able to do a singer songwriter deal as well. Even though the example here could possibly seem a bit precious, you can't deny the passion this man kicks out.

I stumbled across Velvet this weekend when I was laterally browsing emusic for something new and substantial in using up my monthly downloads. I sampled through their three collections recorded at live gigs in the early to mid double 0s at Streamer's and I became hooked in a hurry becoming a near instant fan. Kuba Oms has a determination and confidence in his vocal delivery during a Velvet jam that reminds me of another great Canadian vocalist, Burton Cummings of The Guess Who. Their sound makes them kind of a natural for a side stage at Sasquatch or a berth at High Sierra Music Festival. CD Baby has a page with one of their Victoria concerts with some nice sized sample streams There is something very liberating about a dance music that strips togehter all kinds of lovely strands and strains from the world of rhythm with mindful spirit.

Wilberforce of Nature

2007-12-02T11:27:00.000-08:00

Wilberforce of Nature

If I saw Amazing Gracewhen I was between 13 and 15 years old, it could have been a favorite of mine. Historical, earnest, and socially conscious to the nth degree, Wilburforce's principled sensitivity would have resonated like a new Beatles record with me.

Will Wilberforce sounds like a name for 1950s TV wrestler, but he turns out to be an 18th Century abolitionist whose major conflicts in the film are whether or not he can get he can get anti-slavery bill through Parliament before his colitis and a kind of traumatric stress related to dealing with this issue for too many years gets to him first. Michael Apted, a hero of mine forever for the 7 Up series, but his features are a mixed bag, still he has left a well crafted body of work (Coal Miner's Daughter, Thunderheart, Nell, a James Bond flim) to at least check in with him here.

This film provides a service then for 7th through 9th graders who can still tolerate a screen hero who an artist,activist, and golden child of god without cynicism. And no matter And why not? Maybe it will help provide some folks with the opportunity to have more of an Obama-like and less of a Rudy Von Bush one.

So what about the rest of us? It all depends on your weakness or tolerance of historical liberal cheese platters. I try to be strong and walk away, but get hoovered into it anyway. I guess I stil have my adolescent who still is impacted by getting much Crosby, Stills, and Nash before the Young kicked in fully. You know, Graham Nash catterwalling about if you believe in justice and going to Chicago and all that. Otherwise, it is easy to get cynical and impatient with this one, partly because it feels like a noble movement instead of an entertainment. Evidence this with the way the official movie website pushes related products or the film's extras that include a tour by abolitionist 15 year old Zach Hunter More evidence of my theory of the film's target and best demographic audience, intentional or not.

Souled out

2007-12-01T13:02:00.000-08:00

If the world had Souled out

One of the flaws of modern society is that they don't put Soul and Rhythm and Blues music in a special top-drawer holy place.---Yes, there is the question if such a place lives in our world anywhere, but that's a problem to explore another time.
The bandwidth span we need for folks to get real with is from Louis Armstrong to Jill Scot, most of the last hundred years. The testament that begins with Sam Cook, should be considered most prominently.

Consider Chuck Brown. The "Feel Like Bustin' Loose" man from DC. and Godfather of GoGo has the ability to make one feel remarkably awake and alive. Why is this pitiful world satisfied with him doing regional gigs only? Why isn't he at Bumbershoot, the Warfield, the Wiltern, the Moore and the Crystal Ballroom with the same routine frequency as George Clinton and his busses of funky folk. And for that matter, shouldn't George be giving six hour mini-Wattstaxxes in stadiums one for every region in the country?

I ponder an alternative cultural universe where in 1970s, Leon Russell and Joe Cocker's Mad Dog and Englishmen review didn't implode in a post-Woodstock wake, but continued to infuse the mainstream pop world with R&B with entire waves to follow. What if tight horns, gravelly and sweet soul vocals, and music truer to Memphis had turned out to spring forth and replace the sort of cultural influence that say, Led Zeppelin had. The world would be a better place, I say. As George Clinton used to say Funk not only has the power to move, but to remove.

Ultimately, you won't get logic from a disciple of Soul and Rhythm and Blues. Certainly not from someone who read the latest mainstream media report on the St John Coltrane Church and concluded it made more sense than many or most varieties of faith that millions participate in.

Fluorocarbons Unleashed!

2007-11-30T20:53:00.000-08:00

Fluorocarbons Unleashed!

One does not feed well-executed buffet exclusively of subtitled films and sober auteurists with themes of mortality and queries of existence. Sometimes one has just gotta have fun! And the gang from Hairspray certainly does. Media messages I intercepted in the last couple of months came in two forms, a bunch of nonsense about John Travolta in a fat suit and reviews that this was a very entertaining and clever movie.

There is much to enjoy here. The script is tight and funny. Musically it is fun to hear every Brill building Motown Philly corner Spector riff be recast and sung by likable actors such as Christopher Walken, Queen Latifah, and Nikki Blonsky as the irrepressible Tracy Turnblad. Tomorrow I will probably try to get through Day of Wrath and other sober fair, but tonight it was 1962 , the New Frontier in Baltimore where a change is gonna come, even if the first steps are mainly dance steps on the Cony Collins show where DAs and beehives abound.

2007-11-29T19:12:00.000-08:00

Find Me Guilty

Viewing Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead linked me to seeing what else he has been up to in recent years. Find Me Guilty came out in 2006 and to my mind, deserved a greater audience and a better reception than it received.

Lumet is like an orchestra conductor in the courtroom. And extra attention to orchestration is needed when you are trying to tell the story of a trial in the 80s involving 20 mob defendants, their lawyers which took two years to complete. A Lumet courtroom is an interior with the right camera angle and well crafted observation of what light does in a finite interior. But this is no ordinary court or trial. It has an outrageous center.

That center is Jackie DiNorscio, a mobster whose family and interactions were government witnesses in the longest and probably most expensive criminal case in federal court history. Vin Diesel's performance and the real life character of Jackie are fascinating. He has the kind of endearing characteristics that America in its love affair with the mob appreciated with Tony Soprano, is obviously a heinous amoral sociopath criminal, but also toggles between buffoon and a person with intelligence and some emotional depth. DiNorscio was the only defendant of the 20 already in prison and burned by former legal counsel decided to defend himself.

Find Me Guilty clearly sits in the zone of satisfying entertainment. Ron Silver as the presiding judge struggles to keep his court in control, but the script of the film (with healthy helpings of actual trial transcript) and an attention to detail by a master director. (In the a special feature on the DVD, Lumet says he approved the hire of every courtroom extra) is really what keeps things grounded.

Lumet's openings are often memorable. Find Me Guilty begins with some choice footage of a 80s Rudolph Guliani with hair back in his zealous prosecutor days pontificating with flourish about efforts to eradicate the mafia. That shot is quickly followed by a botched murder attempt, which is a powerful visceral experience because its significance is not known in context of the story. It turns out to be very key to the storyline. The target is Jackie Dinorsico and the gunman with a 22 caliber is his troubled junkie cousin who later turns out to be the star witness in the large scale RICO trial. Progressive disclosure is a storytelling tool that Lumet uses well and wisely. There is some of this in Find Me Guilty but it is central to the drama in the current release of Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. Not often to never does one get to see accomplished work by a maestro in his sixth decade of filmmaking.

My Brother Ego: Fliegenden Robert

2007-11-28T21:31:00.001-08:00

My Brother Ego: Fliegenden Robert

Of Class and Play: Free Cinema's Original Programme

2007-11-27T20:48:00.000-08:00

Of Class and Play: Free Cinema I

The first wave of state sponsored British documentary lead by John Grierson had very high minded ideals. They were films inspired by Walter Lippman's notion for society to know itself better and for self identification of noble world at work to lead to a better society.

The Free Cinema movement of the fifties and sixties seems more inspired to document play, class, in a natural spirit of the times. Most importantly it served as the film school for the likes of Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and Karel Reisz whose creativity and influence impacted the cinema in their many achievements beyond Free Cinema documentaries. The films were filmed using the likes of a 16mm hand cranked Bolex, and were highly modeled in the editing room with a variety of soundtrack resources. Here is the manifesto for the first program of Free Cinema from 1956 and some comments from my screening of these in the new BFI collection on DVD of British Free Cinema. The entire program is available here.

O Dreamland by Lindsey Anderson
The first image is a chauffeur polishing a Rolls Royce, the we enter a fenced gate to the carnival. Images shown are in direct irony with a soundtrack featuring Frankie Laine singing I Believe and Bingo numbers being called. Anderson's camera and cutting explores the surreal environment of the carnival midway. The fun seems bleak and forced.

Momma Don't Allow by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson
First a rehearsal of a slow traditional dixieland blues intercut with butchers in the kitchen, a dentist office, showing folks getting off work. Then life at the night club. Smoking, drinking talking swinging. High toned upper class folks come in as the chauffeur pulls off the hood ornament. All dance and groove to the hot dixieland sounds at the Wood Green Jazz Club Slow blues changes the mood and folks talk and gaze at one another. Light reflections of the disco ball reverses right when the tag coda is played. Turtle necked hipster chick goes outside followed by a "what's wrong baby" back inside the music picks up and the rich folks leave. Dude talks her back inside. Final uptempo blues and the night and film are over. Impressive rhythmic cutting and use of looped sound. At times feels like it was truly synched up.

Together by Lorenza Mozetti and Denis Horne
Lindsey Anderson had an editing credit as well. Intertitle shows this is going to be about London's East End. Sounds and sights of children playing
Barges on the river. Sound plays a critical part in these films, that are in essence silent. Non-actors staged. I guess I somehow missed that the two main characters were deaf mutes. Certainly the lively pub scene is broken up with silence on the soundtrack as geezer is chatting at one of the young lads the film is following. Another clue should have been the protagonists find their way home and a truck wants them to move out of way. Shots in this film have a rhythm and a repetition that feels natural and a lot like Italian Neorealism. Great scene where a sweatered beatchick dances as a kind of barker in a carnival followed by more pub more hot dancing Big guy plays with marbles again A chick finally cop in street skinny guy home chick comes home lovin' Natural sounds of the harbor return to the wall. Kids play and move through an abandoned building intercut children a silent film greek chorus, retuning again man on the wall bridge overlooking the harbor.

These films are the DNA foundation for the kitchen sink British New Wave to follow, with most of these filmmakers expanding their vision into stories of working folks, youth, and anxiety as the fifties turned into the sixties making stars of folks like Tom Courtney and Albert Finney in the process. As the original Free Cinema states, the fictional features of the films also were created with the feeling that "An attitude meant a style." And "A Style Meant an attitude."

Journey made the Wrong Way

2007-11-26T20:13:00.000-08:00

Journey made the Wrong Way

Wim Wender's fifth film, Wrong Move or Falsche Bewegung, was a modern interpretation of an 19th century Goethe novel recast in modern times. Peter Handke later collaborated with Wenders in Der Himmel uber Berlin (Wings of Desire) Characters in Wrong Move show up with dreamlike predestination similar to Wings in this interpretation/inspiration of Goethe's coming of age story or Bildingsroman, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

As Wenders explains in his voice over commentary, he and Handke had the premise is that the romantic notion of going out into the world to learn about it, as was the case in Wilhelm's Apprenticeship is no longer important. In fact. it is now the wrong move. One no longer has to learn by moving out. "The world is no longer a theater for experience," as Wenders says in the voice over and they wanted to turn this romantic notion on its ear in the brash New German Cinema Zeitgiest of young men setting out to prove something in the world themselves.

The first half or so of the journey is filled with a sense of hope and newness. Wilhelm says he wants to be a writer but he has no experience, no ideas or ideals. An ensemble builds around him, a former Nazi officer who claims to be a singer and punctuates life with a harmonica traveling with a young girl acrobat (Nastassia Kinski--her first role at 13 never speaking), Hanna Schygulla as a listless actress, and a large and awful poet from Austria who attaches himself to the group. Things fall apart. Our apprentice poet is unable to empathize and see the folks who surround him. Wilhelm can't get out of his own head. He doesn't take the opportunity to listen and give to the folks around him. Was his move wrong? Maybe less what it was as opposed to what he did with it.

With a very small crew, long takes, using a Renault being pushed as a dolly, dialog about dreams and meaning with lots of wonderful choices in location and light, and 100% live sound, Wrong Move still impresses as a small and earnest film. And one whose modern Germany feels eternal caught in time. The look and feel of the country in 74 does not feel so foreign to my own frame of experience in the country 25, 30 years later.