Category: Suggestions

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Netflixed: Woman in the Dunes

Seth Anderson2 Comments


“Three Films By Hiroshi Teshigahara (Pitfall / Woman In The Dunes / The Face Of Another) (Criterion Collection)” (Hiroshi Teshigahara)

Don’t believe I’ve ever seen this film, though do remember discussing it in a film class, possibly with clips. Sounds odd and intriguing.

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s award-winning drama centers on a bug expert (Eiji Okada) conducting research who’s captured by locals. Held captive in a sandpit with a young widow, he struggles with his imprisonment — and his growing attraction to the woman (Kyôko Kishida). Based on Kobo Abe’s novel, the provocatively erotic allegorical film earned the Cannes Special Jury Prize and two Oscar nominations.

[Click to continue reading Netflix: Woman in the Dunes]

Ebert liked the film enough to add it to his Great Movies database:

More than almost any other film I can think of, “Woman in the Dunes” uses visuals to create a tangible texture–of sand, of skin, of water seeping into sand and changing its nature. It is not so much that the woman is seductive as that you sense, as you look at her, exactly how it would feel to touch her skin. The film’s sexuality is part of its overall reality: In this pit, life is reduced to work, sleep, food and sex, and when the woman wishes for a radio, “so we could keep up with the news,” she only underlines how meaningless that would be.

The screenplay is by Kobo Abe, based on his own novel, and it reveals the enormity of the situation slowly and deliberately–not rushing to announce the man’s dilemma, but revealing it in little hints and insights, while establishing the daily rhythm of life in the dunes. The pit-dwellers are serviced by villagers from above, who use pulleys to lower water and supplies, and haul up the sand. It is never clear whether the woman willingly descended into her pit or was placed there by the village; certainly she has accepted her fate, and would not escape if she could. She participates in the capture of the man because she must: Alone, she cannot shovel enough sand to stay ahead of the drifts, and her survival–her food and water–depend on her work. Besides, her husband and daughter were buried in a sandstorm, she tells the man, and “the bones are buried here.” So they are both captives–one accepting fate, the other trying to escape it.

The man tries everything he can to climb from the pit, and there is one shot, a wall of sand raining down, that is so smooth and sudden the heart leaps. As a naturalist, he grows interested in his situation, in the birds and insects that are visitors. He devises a trap to catch a crow, and catches no crows, but does discover by accident how to extract water from the sand, and this discovery may be the one tangible, useful, unchallenged accomplishment of his life. Everything else, as a narrative voice (his?) tells us, is contracts, licenses, deeds, ID cards– “paperwork to reassure one another.”

[Click to continue reading Woman in the Dunes :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies]

Pearl Jam: The Backspacer – artwork by Tom Tomorrow

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Backspacer” (Pearl Jam)

To be honest, probably the only reason I’d impulse-buy a Pearl Jam record would be because of Tom Tomorrow’s1 artwork. I’m not much of a fan of the band otherwise even though I have 43 of their songs currently in my iTunes library. The cartoonist, Tom Tomorrow, on the other hand, has long been a favorite. I even donated to his server bandwidth over-run sometime early on during the Bush years.2. Anyway, Billboard interviewed Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder about their new album:

Tell me about the artwork that Tom Tomorrow made for “Backspacer.”

I’ve followed his work for years. I read “This Modern World” way back in the early ’90s and thought we should and could collaborate. The night at Madison Square Garden when Ralph Nader spoke, in 2000, I was quite thrilled to meet Tom. He came to a couple of gigs here and there and we stayed in touch. Previous to meeting him, I wasn’t sure that even our politics were up to par for his biting take on things. I wasn’t sure that as a popular band if we were underground enough for him. We just happened to be talking at the time this came around, and we thought, “We’ll give it a shot and we’ll remain friends if it doesn’t work.” What he did was phenomenal. He put so much thought into it, to the point where we had so many conversations about each drawing, that I said, “Look, I just need a week to write lyrics” (laughs). At the same time, it was invigorating. Certain ideas came from him as far as the overall scope: the randomness, but also the detail. It’s really a cool piece of art.

[Click to continue reading Pearl Jam: The ‘Backspacer’ Audio Q&As | Billboard.com -page 1 starts here btw ]

Ben Sisario of New York Times wrote:

Dan Perkins, who writes and draws the political cartoon “This Modern World” under the name Tom Tomorrow, got some bad news in January.

Village Voice Media, the chain of alternative weekly newspapers, was dropping all syndicated cartoons as a cost-cutting measure, and Mr. Perkins lost 12 papers at once, a major blow to his income. He called his friend Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, whom he had met at a Ralph Nader campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in 2000. Maybe, Mr. Perkins said he hoped, he might get a gig designing a Pearl Jam concert poster.

“He said, ‘Maybe we could help out a little bit,’ ” Mr. Perkins, 48, remembered Mr. Vedder telling him. “ ‘Maybe we could put something up on our Web site. Maybe you could do a couple posters for concerts coming up. And maybe you could have a shot at designing our next album cover.’ That’s about when my jaw hit the floor.”

Within weeks he was working on the cover for Pearl Jam’s latest album, “Backspacer,” which will be released on Sept. 20. It is Mr. Perkins’s first album cover, and the first time that Pearl Jam has gone outside its circle to find a cover artist. Both parties also realized that they had been brought together partly as a result of the transformations of their fields by new media, since the Internet has wreaked the same havoc on newspapers as it has on the music industry.

[Click to continue reading With Dan Perkins and Pearl Jam, Bad Luck Turns Good – That’s Rock ’n’ Roll – NYTimes.com]


“The Future’s So Bright I Can’t Bear to Look” (Tom Tomorrow)

Via Tom Tomorrow’s blog and/or Twitter feed, I forget.

Footnotes:
  1. aka Dan Perkins [↩]
  2. and got an autographed calendar in compensation [↩]

Rockers of Ages

Seth Anderson0 comment

I can’t say the Rolling Thunder era is my most favorite of Dylan eras, but this is humorous nonetheless.

Rolling Thunder Logbook
“Rolling Thunder Logbook” (Sam Shepard)

Rocks of Ages – New York Times … No one living has a better appreciation for the sneaky and unnerving power of American myth than Bob Dylan. In the fall of 1975, the United States was gripped by what the playwright Sam Shepard, who had been hired to work on a film about the tour, called “Bicentennial madness.” With 1976 fast approaching, America was obsessed as never before with its origins, and as Mr. Dylan knew perfectly well, there was no better place to launch his tour than the mythic landing ground of the Pilgrims. Mr. Shepard did not end up contributing much to the film, but he did publish a log chronicling the tour’s first six weeks. Included in the book is a bizarre photo showing Mr. Dylan and several fellow musicians peering over the side of the Mayflower II, a reproduction of a 17th-century vessel berthed at Plimoth Plantation. A stiff breeze is blowing, and two of the party are desperately hanging on to the brims of their cowboy hats as the front man of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn, speaks on a huge, ’70s-style portable phone. But perhaps the weirdest and wackiest portion of Mr. Shepard’s log describes how Mr. Dylan and his pals recreated the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. As the poet Allen Ginsberg sat beside the iron fence that surrounds the rock, chanting and chiming his set of Tibetan bells, Mr. Dylan haphazardly piloted a dinghy to the Plymouth shore.

Nate Philbrick’s essay continues
The book is a fairly quick, amusing read about what a major tour with rock stars is like, if you are Sam Shepard.

You Should Own Black Swan

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“The Black Swan” (Bert Jansch)

Listened to this Bert Jansch album over the weekend1

Scottish guitar hero and songwriter Bert Jansch (Pentangle) recording for Drag City, with a host of admirers in tow — Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart, Noah Georgeson (who performed and co-produced with Jansch), Helena Espvall, son Adam Jansch, and more. Black Swan is a collection of original and traditional tunes. Jansch turns in a performance that shows his typical restraint, and within it his wonder as a guitarist. His use of the blues, American, Celtic, and British Isles folk forms is also informed by music from Eastern Europe, and he ties them all together seamlessly. “High Days,” a solo track, uses all three, as he winds out an elegy for a friend. “When the Sun Comes Up” begins with Orton’s vocal and David Roback’s slide guitar and Otto Hauser’s drums, shuffling underneath. Jansch spills it modal and bluesy, Orton grabs onto his changes and effortlessly lets her voice wrap around his lyric lines. Her signing on the traditional number “Katie Cruel” has been brilliantly rearranged by Jansch. Banhart sings in a muted duet with Orton, but his vocal was unnecessary. It’s a spooky track that’s been prepared for by the preceding cuts. The slippery Piedmont blues style Jansch tucks into his British folk on “My Pocket’s Empty” is evocative of an earlier, simpler time, though as revealed by the tune, times were hard then, too. Jansch’s singing is at its most expressive here; he’s moaning in his reedy baritone. Orton makes one more appearance here on the gorgeous and-all-too-brief arrangement of the blues tune “Watch the Stars.” Hers and Jansch’s vocals take the tine out of the song’s Southern American birthplace and brings it into the world, one grainy line at a time. It’s a singalong blues that reveals the sheer expanse of the universe in the grain of their voices.

Ultimately, this disc is not so different from Jansch’s others, but it is wonderfully spirited and loose. It feels live, and backroomish. It’s as informal a date as one can find among superstars — and make no mistake, you may or may not know his name, but his large catalog proves it — Jansch is one. As for the rest, the hardscrabble dirty, slide guitar-drenched English folk of “A Woman Like You” rings as true as a Texas blues love song by Lightnin’ Hopkins. Traditional public domain nuggets such as “The Old Triangle” are almost radically reworked and ring spookily true for the current era. The blues-rock of the humorously political “Texas Cowboy Blues,” complete with keyboards and popping acoustic 12-strings, shimmies and even shakes in places. The last few cuts, a gorgeous instrumental called “Magdalina’s Dance,” and “Hey Pretty Girl” (performed solo), are drenched in historical tropes, but are thoroughly modern and soulful.

[Click to continue reading allmusic (The Black Swan > Overview)]

Really good stuff, highly recommended if you like acoustic guitar playing, and music graceful enough to have space between the notes. This ain’t Wall of Sound crap, this is gorgeous winter music.

from Grayson Currin’s Pitchfork review

It almost seems as though Jansch spent most of his four-decade career preparing for The Black Swan and its cast: His early solo work for voice and guitar staked out a clean, inventive style, focused on high fretting action in the left hand, an integrated system of hammers and drags that gave his instrument a thorough voice. With Pentangle, and later with Loren Auerbach in the 80s, he put that style into collaborative focus. His guitar playing– somehow constantly understated and completely unorthodox– has been the generous, enchanting source of it all.

It’s the wellspring here, too: Helena Espvall’s cello lines on opener “The Black Swan” dress Jansch’s guitar and voice in winter gloves, warming the chill of his melody– “Every day is quiet and calm/ Like a lull before the storm”– with perfectly paired playing. Otto Hauser’s cymbal and hand-drum percussion and Paul Wassif’s slide guitar on “Woman Like You” are likewise just shapely beds for Jansch’s playing. Orton, who handles vocals on three tracks, is flawless and selfless, her austerity informed by each song’s direction. She sounds like a weary survivor on “When the Sun Comes Up” and like a dejected soul on “Katie Cruel”, a traditional folk song about withered glory.

On an album all about meeting maturity with vibrancy, Banhart alone mars the effect when he mismatches Orton’s straightforward nerviness with an ultra-affected, reverb-buried vocal track on the gorgeously unsettling “Katie”. Even though Banhart is attempting to recall the voice of his idol Karen Dalton, who brought this song to proper attention, he sounds like the dilettante, roving unnecessarily for the freak side, still in search of guidance. Perhaps the rest of this beautiful, elegant Swan will help him find his way.

[Click to continue reading Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Bert Jansch: The Black Swan]

Footnotes:
  1. we wrote about it in 2006 prior to actually owning our own copy [↩]

Saul Alinsky Know Thine Enemy

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Rules for Radicals” (Saul Alinsky)

I’ve heard of this book for years, but I’ve never read it myself. Add it to the pile I guess.

Saul Alinsky, the Chicago activist and writer whose street-smart tactics influenced generations of community organizers, most famously the current president, could not have been more clear about which side he was on. In his 1971 text, “Rules for Radicals,” Mr. Alinsky, who died in 1972, explains his purpose: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. ‘The Prince’ was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. ‘Rules for Radicals’ is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

It is an irony of the current skirmishing about health care that those who could be considered Mr. Alinsky’s sworn enemies — the groups, many industry sponsored, who are trying to shout down Congressional town hall meetings — have taken a page (chapters, really) from his handbook on community organizing. In an article in The Financial Times last week, Dick Armey, the former Republican House majority leader, now an organizer against the Democrats’ proposals on health care, offered his opinion: “What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.”

[Click to continue reading Word for Word – Saul Alinsky – Know Thine Enemy – NYTimes.com]

If you follow politics and political theatre at all, you’ve encountered organizations that have followed1 Mr. Alinsky’s suggestions. Tips such as:

Make yourself look as big and scary as possible:

For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people’s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.

from the book jacket:

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and educated first in the streets of that city and then in its university. Graduate work at the University of Chicago in criminology introduced him to the Al Capone gang, and later to Joliet State Prison, where he studied prison life. He founded what is known today as the Alinsky ideology and Alinsky concepts of mass organization for power. His work in organizing the poor to fight for their rights as citizens has been internationally recognized. In the late 1930s he organized the Back of the Yards area in Chicago (the neighborhood made famous in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle). Subsequently, through the Industrial Areas Foundation which he began in 1940, Mr. Alinsky and his staff helped to organize communities not only in Chicago but throughout the country. He later turned his attentions to the middle class, creating a training institute for organizers. He died in 1972.

Footnotes:
  1. knowingly or not [↩]

Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix

Seth Anderson7 Comments

My mom bought me the Miles Davis box set, The Cellar Door Sessions for my birthday a couple years ago.

The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Miles Davis)
“The Cellar Door Sessions 1970” (Miles Davis)

In reading the liner notes, I was struck by the thought that one of the greatest musical tragedies of the early 70s was that Jimi Hendrix never got to make an album with Miles Davis. They had talked about it at some length apparently, with Keith Jarrett, and maybe Michael Henderson and the rest of Miles Davis’ crack funk-jazz band of this era, but they never got around to actually recording/playing before Hendrix died, at least that I’m aware of.

Electric Ladyland
Electric Ladyland

Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland1 remains one of my favorite albums, especially in the moody, jazzed up sections. However, Hendrix received so many accolades for being a bad-ass guitar wizard that I think he allowed himself to get lazy in subsequent years, playing down to (or occasionally up to) the level of his jam buddies. If Hendrix and Miles Davis had recorded an album, there would have been no way that Miles, as serious a musician as has ever been born in the States, would have accepted anything other than stellar work, and Hendrix would have obliged.

The Cellar Door sessions

This music reveals a truly muscular Miles Davis at the top of his form as an improviser and as a bandleader with the most intense and nearly mystical sense of the right place-the right time-the right lineup. These shows, played in a club instead of a concert hall, provided a virtual laboratory for possibilities Davis was exploring. The money for the gig was nearly non-existent compared to what he was used to making playing halls, so he paid the band out of his own pocket.

..What happens as the band plays each night is that the sense of adventure grows, while the utter relaxation and confidence in each member is carried through to Davis who pushes the buttons and in strange, nearly wordless ways, communicates what he wants on-stage, and the other players give it to him. There are so few rough moments here where someone drops a line or doesn’t quite make it; when it does happen on that rare occasion, some other member picks it up and goes with it. And DeJohnette’s drumming, in his virtual mind-lock with Henderson, is some of the best playing of his career.

Hendrix would have fit right in. A real tragedy this collaboration never occurred.

Footnotes:
  1. aka Electric Dylan Lad [↩]

Wonder of Whifling

Seth Anderson0 comment


“The Wonder of Whiffling: (and Other Extraordinary Words in the English Language)” (Adam Jacot de Boinod)

The author of Toujours Tingo


Toujours Tingo

Adam Jacot de Boinod, has written a new book:

“The Wonder of Whiffling” is a hugely enjoyable, surprising and rewarding tour around the language of the British Isles (with plenty of fine coinages from our English-speaking cousins across the pond, Down Under and elsewhere). Discover all sorts of words you’ve always wished existed but never knew, such as fornale, to spend one’s money before it has been earned; cagg, a solemn vow or resolution not to get drunk for a certain time; and petrichor, the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell. Delving passionately into the English language, Adam Jacot de Boinod also discovers why it is you wouldn’t want to have dinner with a vice admiral of the narrow seas, why Jacobites toasted the little gentleman in black velvet, and why a Nottingham Goodnight is better than one from anywhere else.

Monsieur Jacot de Boinod1 also added, in comments to this post, the following

Delving passionately into the English language, I also discover why it is you wouldn’t want to have dinner with a vice admiral of the narrow seas, why Jacobites toasted the little gentleman in black velvet, and why a Nottingham Goodnight is better than one from anywhere else. See more on http://www.thewonderofwhiffling.com

Listening to the Conversation's Ebb and Flow

Tangentially, and surprisingly, I’m at the beginning of a cagg of my own. Vowed to forswear booze for at least a month2 – my target to resume consumption is Labor Day. Why? Mostly vanity, my pants were getting a little snug, and I was polishing a couple of bottles of wine a day. Cause and effect, most likely. Anyway, possibly more on that subject

Footnotes:
  1. I assume I’m spelling that correctly, my French language skills have atrophied to point of parody [↩]
  2. along with gluten – bread, pasta, etc. – and a few other items [↩]

Ridealong

Seth Anderson0 comment

As Mo Ryan, the Chicago Tribune television critic tweeted earlier today, there is Fox television drama being produced by Shawn Ryan. I might even watch an episode or two – especially if Chicago is the central character in the drama.1

City of Chicago Department of Police

Fox has given a put pilot order to “Ridealong,” a Chicago-set cop show from “The Shield’s” Shawn Ryan.
Project’s a personal passion project of Ryan’s, who grew up in nearby Rockford, Ill. “Ridealong” will center on three groups of police officers –ranging from uniformed beat cops to the female chief of police.

Ryan is set to write and exec produce the hourlong drama, which comes from 20th Century Fox TV.

Ryan plans to shoot the skein in Chicago, which he plans to make a major part of the show.

“It’s a city I’m very familiar with, and one I haven’t seen photographed much, at least on TV,” Ryan said, “In my opinion, Chicago has become the center of the universe: It’s the place that Barack Obama comes from, it’s a candidate to host the Olympics, and it’s where Oprah dispels her wisdom.

“When I pitched it to the people at Fox, (Chicago was) the first character I described,” Ryan said. “It’s a gorgeous town and is the most interesting architectural city in America.”

Ryan said Chicago is also a “city with a big crime problem at the moment,” which will inform the show.

Ryan said “Ridealong” will mostly take place on the streets of Chicago, and will be populated by unique people — including the central lead character, a Polish-American cop who plays up his heritage.

[Click to continue reading Fox on Ryan’s ‘Ridealong’ – Entertainment News, TV News, Media – Variety]

I wanted David Simon and Ed Burns to extend their show, The Wire, and set it in Chicago, but I guess they are busy working on the Haymarket Riot film without a working title. Ridealong (possibly) is an acceptable substitute.

April 6 2007

Ms. Ryan2, interviewed Mr. Ryan:

No filming dates have been set, but if the “Ridealong” pilot gets the green light, it would be shot in Chicago in the spring. If Fox orders a full series, Ryan wants to film that in the Windy City as well.

“These things always come down to finances and I’m told that at the moment that Chicago is film-friendly and feasible,” Ryan said.

The show is “mostly about cops, but we will deal with how cops are affected/stymied/supported by local political elements,” Ryan said. “Ridealong” will also feature a “young, female chief of police and her attempts to navigate Chicago politics.”

So how will the show be different from “Hill Street Blues” — or Ryan’s own influential cop drama, “The Shield”?

“I’ll take comparisons to either of those shows any time,” but Ryan said “Ridealong” will be “very different” from either the NBC classic or the influential FX drama.

“I definitely would not be interested in doing the network version of ‘The Shield,'” he noted.

“Ridealong” will be “filmed primarily on the streets with our cops’ vehicles serving as their offices. It will be part cop procedural, part buddy comedy, part political thriller, part undercover drama… or it will just be a huge mess,” he said. “But I’m going to try to make it good.”

[Click to continue reading The Watcher: ‘Shield’ creator’s new cop show a ‘love letter’ to Chicago ]

Alleys are life, embodied

Worth paying attention to, maybe they’ll need some photos for location scouting?

Footnotes:
  1. television shows don’t really hold my interest, with a few notable exceptions [↩]
  2. no relation to Shawn Ryan, as far as I know [↩]

Mad Men Returns Soon

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Mad Men – Season One” (Lionsgate)


“Mad Men: Season 2” (Matthew Weiner)

I recently watched both Season 1 and Season 2 of Mad Men on DVD [you should rent Netflix Season 1 and Season 2 ] in a marathon session. Am very happy that Season 3 is about to air.1

But, ah, television. Its great accomplishment over the past decade has been to give us the best of all movie worlds, to meld personal filmmaking, or series-making, with something like the craft and discipline, the crank-’em-out urgency, of the old studio system. I’m thinking first and foremost of The Sopranos, which debuted in 1999 and sadly departed in 2007. This strange and entertaining series, as individual a work as anything by Hitchcock or Scorsese, was the creation of David Chase, and it paved the way for The Wire, Deadwood, Rescue Me, Damages, and its successor as the best drama on television, the equally strange and entertaining Mad Men, which will launch its third season on AMC August 16.

Set in an advertising agency in the early 1960s, Mad Men debuted two summers ago and right off the bat earned itself two Golden Globes and a Peabody Award, and was nominated for 16 Emmys, becoming the first basic-cable series to win for outstanding drama. Its second season, no sophomore slump, has been nominated for another 16 Emmys, including best drama and four out of five possible writing nominations. A more interesting measure of the show’s impact is the fact that its title has become a kind of shorthand: you can now talk about a Mad Men skirt or lampshade or pickup line where once you might have used “space age” or “Kennedy era” or “Neanderthal.” But while the show, like its subject, has many surface pleasures—period design, period bad behavior (if you like high modernism, narrow lapels, bullet bras, smoking, heavy drinking at lunch, good hotel sex, and bad office sex, this is the series for you)—at its core Mad Men is a moving and sometimes profound meditation on the deceptive allure of surface, and on the deeper mysteries of identity. The dialogue is almost invariably witty, but the silences, of which there are many, speak loudest: Mad Men is a series in which an episode’s most memorable scene can be a single shot of a woman at the end of her day, rubbing the sore shoulder where a bra strap has been digging in. There’s really nothing else like it on television.

The central character is Don Draper, the cool and commanding creative director of the fictional Sterling Cooper agency. He’s a man in flight from his own past, a Gatsby-esque figure without the romance of a Daisy; or rather, he seems to be looking for a Daisy everywhere but his home in the suburbs, where his beautiful, bored, emotionally stunted wife, Betty, is stranded in what feels at times like an improbably compelling adaptation of The Feminine Mystique. Played in an instantly iconic performance by Jon Hamm, Don is a man whose emotions are in lockdown—a man as sleek and handsome and seemingly invulnerable as a hood ornament. But in the show’s central irony he is able to plumb human needs and desires with an artist’s intuition: if Mad Men ever approaches shtick, it’s when Don gets a faraway look in his eyes and somehow pulls a psychologically barbed selling point out of his own inner ether (a trope wonderfully parodied on Saturday Night Live last fall, when Hamm was hosting). In short, Don Draper is an advertising Mozart, or at least he’s the best Sterling Cooper has to offer, for another of the show’s ironies is that Don and his colleagues are dinosaurs not just in terms of the impending social revolutions of the 1960s but also in terms of the creative revolution that would roil advertising that decade. As in Hitchcock, the characters are unaware of shocks that the audience knows all too well lie ahead, whether they be the Kennedy assassination and women’s lib or long sideburns and the lasting influence of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s witty, self-deprecating “Lemon” ad for Volkswagen, which Don dismisses with the words “I don’t know what I hate about it the most.”

[Click to continue reading Bruce Handy on Mad Men | vanityfair.com]

Of course, it helps that the actors playing the Dan and Betty Draper2 are so damn good looking.

This is another:

One thing [Matt Weiner] quite consciously set out to do with Mad Men was to reclaim the 1950s and early 1960s from the condescension of “baby-boomer propaganda,” as he put it, the easy ironies with which the era has been caricatured in popular culture. “You know,” he continued, rattling off some cultural clichés, “Fun with Dick and Jane, the dad with the pipe, Ozzie & Harriet“—goofy and square and uptight and supposedly innocent, no one having sex, or good sex anyway, except for maybe Frank Sinatra. “We think everybody was walking around in corsets, but people are people,” Weiner said, and cited a 1968 episode of Firing Line he once saw in which a drunken Jack Kerouac was interviewed by William F. Buckley Jr. on the subject of “the hippie movement” and said to the younger generation, in essence, “You think you invented fucking?” Don Draper and his colleagues at Sterling Cooper, the women as well as the men, would seem to be asserting the same point.

Footnotes:
  1. I had seen a few of early season’s shows on television, but it was much more satisfying to take them in as a whole entity, without having to skip commercials [↩]
  2. Jon Hamm and January Jones [↩]

Bad Like Jesse James

swanksalot0 comment


“Live At The Cafe Au Go-Go (And Soledad Prison)” (John Lee Hooker)

There are certain songs that give you chills, no matter how many times you’ve heard them. John Lee Hooker singing, “I’m Bad Like Jesse James”, from the album, Live at Cafe Au Go Go is one such song for me.

It is one of those tracks you want to stomp your own foot to the relentless and insistent beat.

Simply one of the greatest live blues recordings ever. Hooker plays alone at Soledad, yet the real thrill is hearing him backed at Greenwich Village’s Café Au-Go-Go in 1966 by Muddy Waters and his band, including pianist Otis Spann, unsung harmonica giant George Smith, Francis Clay on drums, and guitarists Sammy Lawhorn and Luther Johnson. All are at the height of their abilities, but it’s Hooker who works like a hoodoo conjurer, making misery rain down in “Seven Days” and “When My First Wife Left Me.” This August night’s reading of I’m Bad Like Jesse James ranks among the most intimidating vocal performances ever taped. His guitar and baritone singing sink to rarely heard depths of the blues–that secret place in the music (known only to its absolute masters) where it becomes an elemental force.

the lyrics go something like this:

A little thing I’m going to do called
‘I’m Bad Like Jesse James’

I’m bad
I’m bad
Like Jesse James, uh-huh

I had a friend one time
Least I thought I did
He come to me
Said, ‘Johnny?’
[I ] Said, ‘What man?’
‘I’m outdoor’
I say, ‘Yeah?’

I taken the cat in
Get him a place to stay
And I found out
He goin’ ’round town
Tellin’ everybody that he
He got my wife

Then I gets mad
I goes to the cat
Like a good guy should
I said, ‘Look man
‘I’m gonna warn, you just one time’
Next time I warn you’
‘I’m gonna use my gun’

‘Cause I’m mad, I’m bad, like Jesse James

I’m so mad, I’m so mad.
I’m gonna ruin you this mornin’.
I’ve got three boys
Do my dirty work
Now, you don’t see me
I’m the big boss
I do the payin’ off
After they take care of you

In their own way
They may shoot you
They may cut you.
They may drown you
I just don’t know
I don’t care
Long as they take care of you
In their own way

I’m so mad, I’m bad this mornin’, like Jesse James.

They gon’ take you right down
By the riverside
Now four is goin’ down
Ain’t but three comin’ back
You read between the line
We’re gonna have a deal

‘Cause I’m mad, I’m bad, like Jesse James.

They gonna tie yo’ hands
They gonna tie yo’ feet
They gonna gag your throat
Where you can’t holler none

An cryin’ won’t help you none
Set you in the water
Yeah, the bubbles comin’ up.
Whoa
Rrrrrrr
Rrrrrrr

Oh yeah, I’m so mad!

So intense. When I saw John Lee Hooker perform at Antone’s1 he stomped his foot to keep time. Hard not to when playing songs like this. When I saw him perform, he was playing solo, but surprisingly, turned up his distortion and played a little proto-grunge on a couple of songs. I’d say circa 19882

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J3j74R9dbw
a 1986 solo version, not nearly as intense, but still, JLH!3

Footnotes:
  1. the famous blues club in Austin – I think it is closed down now – Clifford Antone had some problems with the law, sold drugs or something, and has since passed away [↩]
  2. I remember being too young to drink, went by myself, and tried to tip the waitress $5 for taking her table and only drinking a coke. Of course, I had my bong in my car, but that’s another story [↩]
  3. playing a guitar with BB King’s name on it for some reason. [↩]

Bloodshot Records to celebrate 15th at Hideout block party

Seth Anderson1 Comment

There’s a lot of good music on Bloodshot Records.

Violence Inherent in the System

Greg Kot reports:

The Hideout’s annual end-of-summer block party will be devoted to Chicago-based Bloodshot Records on its 15th anniversary, the label announced Monday.

The Sept. 12 festival will feature some of Bloodshot’s finest artists, past and present: Alejandro Escovedo, the Waco Brothers, Bobby Bare Jr., the Deadstring Brothers, Scott Biram, Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, and reunions of the Blacks and Moonshine Willy.

A $10 donation to benefit charities is requested. Reservations can be made through bloodshotrecords.com.

[Click to continue reading Bloodshot Records to celebrate 15th at Hideout block party; Wilco adds second show | Turn It Up – A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap]

I’ll try to make it if I can, will you be there?

[1354 W. Wabansia, Chicago, IL ]

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (Bob Dylan)


“Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Two-Disc Special Edition)” (Sam Peckinpah)

Finally got a chance to see this film a year or so ago. Watchable, not spectacular. The story behind the movie sounds more interesting. [Netflix / Wikipedia / IMDb

When Bob Dylan learned that Rudy Wurlitzer was penning a script focusing on the Bonney-Garrett legend, he tracked the writer down and requested a meeting.

“The script was already written when Bob came to see me in my apartment on the Lower East Side of New York,” Wurlitzer recalled earlier this month from his getaway home, a cabin in his beloved Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. “He said that he had always related to Billy the Kid as if he was some kind of reincarnation; it was clear that he was obsessed with the Billy the Kid myth,” a notion that was validated 34 years later in Todd Haynes’ multi-persona Dylan movie biography I’m Not There (2007). In the film Richard Gere assumes the Dylan shape-shifting persona of Billy, a bespectacled, enigmatic outlaw.

Initially, Wurlitzer suspected that the elusive singer wanted to contribute an original tune to the score of the film but Dylan had other plans – he wanted to be in the movie, despite having no acting experience whatsoever.

Wurlitzer continues: “I called the producer (Gordon Carroll) who was thrilled that Bob wanted to be in the movie and then I wrote the part for Bob off the cuff in New York. We flew down to Durango, Mexico, to see Peckinpah – who had no idea what was up – and we found him in his house, drunk and half-naked, shooting at an image of himself in the mirror. When I told him I had written a part for Bob Dylan and ‘here he is’, Peckinpah turned and after a long pause, said to Bob, ‘I’m a big Roger Miller fan myself’.”

From that moment on, the author remembers, “Dylan followed Sam around like he was one of the last real outlaws, which, who knows, he probably was, at least in my partial experience.”

[Click to continue reading Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto < Columns | PopMatters]

Making the film was a long, drawn out process:

In a 1982 feature for Rocky Mountain Magazine titled Last of the Desperadoes: Dueling with Sam Peckinpah, journalist and Elle magazine advice columnist (Ask E. Jean) E. Jean Carroll summed up the experience in a colorful and breathless single adrenaline-rushed paragraph that reads like a passage from a later Peckinpah film, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia:
Peckinpah wants to shoot in New Mexico for authenticity. Metro wants Mexico to cut costs. He loses. Peckinpah wants a Panavision repairman in Durango, Mexico, to fix the cameras. The studio says nothing doing. The first footage is sent to L.A. to be processed. The lab calls Peckinpah. Says the film’s out of focus. Panic in Durango.

Downtime. The camera is fixed and the paranoia sets in. The actors get sick. The crew gets sick. Peckinpah is puking every day. They fall behind schedule. James Aubrey, president of MGM, wants to save time and forbids Peckinpah to shoot a raft scene. Peckinpah shoots it. The scenarist, Rudy Wurlitzer, starts complaining. Says Peckinpah is rewriting the picture with the help of his old TV scripts. Jerry Fielding, Peckinpah’s music composer can’t work with Bob Dylan and quits.

Dylan’s unhappy. Kris Kristofferson (the Kid) says Rudy’s dialogue is corny. Rita Coolidge (Maria, the Kid’s lover) says all that remains of her role thanks to MGM is that of “a groupie.” James Coburn (Garrett) says Peckinpah is a creative paranoid who generates tension to give everyone the same experience to feed on during the film. A fight breaks out one Saturday night.

Two guys. One is on the phone ordering a couple of gunmen to Durango. Wants the other guy killed for threatening Peckinpah’s life. Whitey Hughes, Peckinpah’s stunt man, says they always have a good time, but on this film they aren’t having a good time. The hit is canceled at Peckinpah’s insistence. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is brought in 20 days over schedule and $1.5 million over budget.

MGM’s building a hotel in Vegas and needs cash. The studio moves the release date up and gives Peckinpah only two and a half months to edit. On the sly MGM duplicates the work print and employs another cutter. Peckinpah’s version runs between 122 and 126 minutes. The studio’s runs 106. The producer, Gordon Carroll, negotiates day and night. Gets nothing restored. The picture’s released. Peckinpah sues for $1.5 million. Orders all the cuts put back or his name taken off. Nada. Nada. Nada.

[Click to continue reading Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto < Columns | PopMatters]

And of course, the Bob Dylan song, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door becomes a big hit, and is oft covered by others, including Dylan1. Now that I think about it, I saw the original studio version of Pat Garrett, not the so-called Special Edition. Maybe I’ll watch it again, sometime.

The soundtrack was also haphazardly recorded:

As Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid neared completion, Dylan held a recording session on January 20 at Columbia’s recording studio in Mexico City. Filming had been so difficult, both of the film’s stars and Wurlitzer accompanied Dylan out of Durango. Wurlitzer said at the time, “Sam knows he’s losing to Dylan…but I don’t care, man. I’ve got to get away.”

Backed by local Mexican musicians and members of Kris Kristofferson’s band, Dylan had difficulty recording a satisfactory take of “Billy.” Eventually, he began paring down the arrangement, and by the last take, he was backed only by bassist Terry Paul. This final take was used for the film and later included on the soundtrack album as “Billy 4.” A brief instrumental, “Billy Surrenders,” would also be featured in the film. The session would continue until 4 a.m., but it would not produce anything else that would be considered usable.

Meanwhile, Peckinpah hired Jerry Fielding to advise Dylan on his work. Fielding was experienced in film scoring, but he held very conservative views regarding popular music. Dylan was fully aware of Fielding’s opinions regarding his work (“a lot of nonsense which is strictly for teenyboppers”), but he did not resist Fielding’s recommendations on how to score the film.

On Fielding’s advice, Dylan sang “a relevant verse” of the “Billy” ballad “as it fit the story at [four] separate points throughout the picture.” Fielding had also heard Dylan’s new composition, “Goodbye Holly,” which was written for an important scene involving the character, Holly. Fielding recommended dropping this song and writing a new one for a scene involving the death of Sheriff Baker.

“I set up two dubbing sessions,” recalls Fielding. “Dylan had this song [‘Billy’] he’d written for which he had a limitless number of verses that he would sing in random order…So I had to tape Dylan’s song, because he had nothing written down, and have it transcribed…At the same time I asked that he write at least one other piece of music because you cannot possibly hope to deal with an entire picture on the basis of that one ballad. So finally he brought to the dubbing session another piece of music – ‘Knock-Knock-Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.’ Everybody loved it. It was shit. That was the end for me.”

Dylan recorded the final version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” at a session in February, this time on Warner Bros. Records’ soundstage in Burbank, California. “It was very early in the morning,” recalls drummer Jim Keltner. “I think the session was 10 a.m. and again it all fell into place…There weren’t any overdubs on that, the singers were singing live, little pump organ, Roger McGuinn I think played [guitar]. This was for a particular scene in the movie when Slim Pickens is dying and that’s the first time I ever cried while I played. It was the combination of the words, Bob’s voice, the actual music itself, the changes, and seeing the screen…In those days you were on a big soundstage, and you had this massive screen that you can see on the wall, [with] the scene…running when you’re playing. I cried through that whole take.”

The sessions at Burbank lasted several days. Though they were much more relaxed and amiable than the Mexico City session, the process was still irritating to Dylan. At one point, he told producer Gordon Carroll that “this is the last time I work for anyone in a movie on the music. I’ll stick to acting.” Though Dylan would produce his own films and later contribute songs to other soundtracks, he would never take sole responsibility for an entire soundtrack again.[Click to continue reading Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (album) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Though of course, Dylan won an Oscar decades later for Things Have Changed. [YouTube of his acceptance speech]

Footnotes:
  1. when Dylan sings out of his vast songbook, he usually “covers” himself, i.e., makes new interpretations of the original song. Sometimes similar, more often radically different [↩]

Desert Blues

Seth Anderson1 Comment


Aman Iman: Water is Life1

Pitchfork reviewer Joel Tangari has a nice historical overview of the music from the Sahara, including one of my favorite African based bands, Tinariwen.

The roots of today’s Kel Tamashek guitar revolution lie in varied soil. From a purely musical standpoint, it descends from traditional chant music played on distant relatives of the guitar, which in turn draws from sources north and south. The music of Al Andalus to the north– a family of sounds extending from flamenco in Spain through Arabesque and Berber orchestras in North Africa and Lebanese string music– is one source of input, while the myriad musics of the Sahel, a semi-arid band of land that spans Africa to the south of the Sahara, are also close relatives.

The pentatonic scales echo those heard along the curve of the Niger River, and it’s easy to draw a line through the music of Senegal, Guinea, southern Mali, and other parts of West Africa straight to American blues. This YouTube video isn’t much to look at, but it’s soundtracked by a Tamashek chant recorded in the 1930s that offers a good glimpse of the connection between traditional Kel Tamashek music and the modern, electrified version (I believe the stringed instrument is a tehardent, a three-stringed lute related to the ngoni and ultimately the guitar):

[Check it out Pitchfork Feature: Rebel Blues in the Sahara: A Desert Guitar Primer]

There is a certain ineffable quality to music of the desert, a rough-hewn beauty. Perhaps due to the dual desert heritage of my name (ancient Hebrew, ancient Egypt), perhaps for deeper DNA related reasons, but the music of the Sahara, and nearby, resonates in my soul.

Footnotes:
  1. repost from my old blog [↩]

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip (click to pre-order from Amazon)
Calvin and Hobbes was that rare newspaper comic – smart, funny, and not cloyingly cutesy. And rare also in that once Bill Watterson grew tired of creating it, he stopped, and dropped out of the public eye. No recycled Peanuts here.

For ten years, between 1985 and 1995, Calvin and Hobbes was one the world’s most beloved comic strips. And then, on the last day of 1995, the strip ended. Its mercurial and reclusive creator, Bill Watterson, not only finished the strip but withdrew entirely from public life. There is no merchandising associated with Calvin and Hobbes: no movie franchise; no plush toys; no coffee mugs; no t-shirts (except a handful of illegal ones). There is only the strip itself, and the books in which it has been compiled – including The Complete Calvin and Hobbes: the heaviest book ever to hit the New York Times bestseller list. In Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip, writer Nevin Martell traces the life and career of the extraordinary, influential, and intensely private man behind Calvin and Hobbes. With input from a wide range of artists and writers (including Dave Barry, Harvey Pekar, Jonathan Lethem, and Brad Bird) as well as some of Watterson’s closest friends and professional colleagues, this is as close as we’re ever likely to get to one of America’s most ingenious and intriguing figures – and a fascinating detective story, at the same time.

Only 3,160 Calvin and Hobbes strips were ever produced, but Watterson has left behind an impressive legacy. Calvin and Hobbes references litter the pop culture landscape and his fans are as varied as they are numerable. Looking for Calvin and Hobbes is an affectionate and revealing book about uncovering the story behind this most uncommon trio – a man, a boy, and his tiger.


“The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes) (v. 1, 2, 3)” (Bill Watterson)

You can read a weeks worth of the strip at the GoComics website

My Dinner With Andre

Seth Anderson0 comment


“My Dinner with Andre (Criterion Collection)” (Louis Malle)

Saw this last week for the first time in ages, what a great film. It had been unavailable for quite some time before the Criterion Collection geniuses put out a new 2 disc edition

Wally and I would get quite upset because wherever we went people were saying, “It’s one of my favorite movies.” It’s one of Barack Obama’s favorite movies. He says he’s seen it eight times. So there was something very sad about the fact that it had disappeared.

[From ‘Andre’ inspires talk almost 3 decades later]

On the surface, sounds like a boring film, two guys yammering at dinner, but it isn’t.

Roger Ebert added it to his Great Films collection:

Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of cliches. I thought for a moment, and then answered, “My Dinner With Andre.” Now I have seen the movie again; a restored print is going into release around the country, and I am impressed once more by how wonderfully odd this movie is, how there is nothing else like it. It should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.

The title serves as a synopsis. We meet the playwright Wallace Shawn, on his way to have dinner with “a man I’d been avoiding, literally, for a matter of years.” The man is Andre Gregory, a well-known New York theater director. Gregory had dropped out of sight, Shawn tells us, and there were reports that he was “traveling.” Then one evening recently, a friend had come across him in Manhattan, leaning against a building and weeping. Gregory had just come from an Ingmar Bergman movie, and was shattered by this dialogue: “I could always live in my art, but not in my life

…

Like many great movies, “My Dinner With Andre” is almost impossible to nail down. “Two men talk and eat (in real time) at a fancy New York restaurant,” writes CineBooks. Wrong, and wrong. Not in real time but filmed with exquisite attention to the smallest details by director Louis Malle over a period of weeks. And not in a New York restaurant but on a studio set. The conversation that flows so spontaneously between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn was carefully scripted. “They taped their conversations two or three times a week for three months,” Pauline Kael writes, “and then Shawn worked for a year shaping the material into a script, in which they play comic distillations of aspects of themselves.”

Comic? Yes. Although the conversation is often despairing (Gregory speculates that the 1960s were “the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished”), the material is given a slight sly rotation toward the satirical. There is a lot to think about in the torrent of ideas, but also a saving humor. Gregory plays a man besotted by the ideas of the new age; he almost glows when he tells Shawn about an agricultural commune in Britain where instead of using insecticides, “they will talk to the insects, make an agreement, set aside one vegetable patch just for the insects.”

[Click to continue reading My Dinner With Andre :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies]

Luckily, you can rent the film from Netflix, or purchase your own copy. It is one of those films that rewards multiple viewings, so owning your own version is not a bad idea.

At The Criterion Collection’s website, Amy Taubin writes, in part:

The idea for My Dinner with André originated with Shawn. For several weeks, he and Gregory recorded their conversations about the strange extended episode in the latter’s life when he went in search of the miraculous. The script made its way to Malle, whose enthusiasm for the project might have had to do with the challenge of making two men talking over dinner into a compelling cinematic experience. That is to say, it was a perfect fit for a seriously eclectic career. As much as Steven Soderbergh today, Malle seemed determined to try something new with every film.

He had made his mark, as part of the French New Wave, with an anxiety-ridden, noirish quartet of character studies—Elevator to the Gallows (1957), with its smoldering Miles Davis score; The Lovers (1958), which established Jeanne Moreau’s reputation as the thinking person’s sex symbol; the borderline nihilistic The Fire Within (1963); and Le voleur (1967), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo in what could be viewed as a rejoinder to Godard’s Breathless. He punctuated these walks on the dark side with the dazzling proto-pop-art ode to the city of Paris Zazie dans le metro (1960) and the somewhat less successful romp Viva Maria! (1965), which teamed Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Despite his great talent for directing actors, Malle then undertook, as his filmmaking second act, a series of documentaries, notably the epic Phantom India (1969) and its devastating spin-off, Calcutta (1969). Malle’s third act took place largely in the United States, where he tried his hand at studio movies. In the strongest of them, Atlantic City (1980), Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster give performances that are both emotionally true and larger-than-life. But the American films that embody Malle’s understated mastery of cinematic pace and rhythm and his skeptical humanism are his two collaborations with Gregory and Shawn, My Dinner with André and, thirteen years later and just a year before his death, Vanya on 42nd Street.

In addition to the challenge of making a film that was literally all talk and no action, Malle must have been excited by the mix of fact and fiction in My Dinner with André (that’s true of Vanya as well), and by André’s descriptions of his far-flung journeys, which echoed aspects of Malle’s own travels in India. And there is also the matter of the Holocaust, the nightmare that haunts André’s quest for enlightenment. Wally is clearly embarrassed by these references—perhaps he thinks André is being excessive or flip when he says that sometimes he feels he should be “caught and tried like Albert Speer,” or that he imagines an SS officer identifying with Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, a book that has great significance for him. The references are so casual that you can’t quite believe you’ve heard them, but they gather as the film goes on to become a dark subtext and suggest something that André never articulates: that in his travels, he was fleeing the horror of the past as much as he was pursuing the pure light of cosmic consciousness. Shawn and Gregory come from families of Jewish descent. Malle does not, but his traumatic childhood in France under the occupation became the subject of two of his most painful and personal films, Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Au revoir les enfants (1987).

[Click to continue reading My Dinner with André:Long, Strange Trips – From the Current]

Until I watched the new edition, I didn’t realize who Louis Malle was, even though I really enjoyed Elevator to the Gallows [also available via Netflix]. I just added a bunch more of his films to my over-stuffed queue.