Hubris

In which a sympathetic character/heroine, lightning rod for righteous indignation and emblem of all that is just and good as the Powers That Be try to silence her wounded cries, chooses to become the bubbleheaded clown the opposing meanies say she is -- and a power-grabbing one at that. Ms. Cindy Sheehan, you have officially jumped the shark. Kindly move on. I bet even David Letterman thinks Bill O'Reilly is smarter than you now.


FMFM: The Modern Jazz Quartet At Music Inn Featuring Jimmy Giuffre, a subtle, low-key outing in which Giuffre proves to be the perfect complement to the hornless Quartet's sound: roomy, lustrous, genteel.

Slower than a ten-second buzz

Sometimes news travels slowly, even in the age of the Internet.

Somehow, this person made it into a movie theater on or about January 21, 2006, without knowing that Brokeback Mountain was about gay cowboys.

I guess not even Fox News has made it to his town.

[UPDATE: And Yahoo is quicker than a wink, removing the review less than 90 minutes after I posted this. But I'm sure that if you read enough of these, you'll find more people who also paid to see Brokeback Mountain thinking it was just a plain old cowboy movie. Look, here are two. And this one... well....]


FMFM: A bit of Bowie, in preparation for one of my One Night Stand bands.

Rhythm in Motian

Anecdote from today's Times story on jazz drummer Paul Motian:

One day during a recording session a few years ago, Hank Jones, the wise old pianist, took him aside. "I know your secret," he whispered. Mr. Motian told this story with a baffled shrug. "I wish I knew what he meant," he said. "Wow!"


FMFM: Lady Soul, featuring that incredible rhythm section. And King Curtis.

Cities of 2005

Passing along this item, via JordanK. Places I slept in 2005, with asterisks next to the ones I visited more than once on non-consecutive days.

San Francisco, Calif.*
Clear Lake, Calif.
Truckee, Calif.
Los Angeles, Calif.
Pasadena, Calif.
New York, N.Y.*
Roslyn, N.Y.
Brooklyn, N.Y.*
East Chatham, N.Y.
East Brunswick, N.J.*
New Orleans, La. (sniff)
East Douglas, Mass.
Falmouth, Mass.

Not the worst list, but I do wish I'd made it to more places. I attended so many weddings that I never got to go anywhere I just plain wanted to visit.

Longest lists ever: Probably 2002, 2001, 1999 and 1981.


FMFM: The Beatles (White Album), in mono. "Helter Skelter" a whole new way, and more.

Beyond the valley of Visitacion

Who knew there was a neighborhood called "Little Hollywood" in San Francisco? And who knew there were people like this living there?


FMFM: John Lewis and Hank Jones, playing mostly standards on an Evening With Two Grand Pianos. Somewhat related: There's a documentary about New Orleans music called Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together. Apparently the filmmaker who made it just died, apparently distraught in the wake of Katrina. Sad story.

You've blown it all sky high

I find myself inexplicably drawn to the half-hour-long TV ad for Time-Life's ten-CD set 70s Music Explosion. Something about polyester shirts, unruly hair and melodies like that of Pilot's "Magic" are mysteriously riveting. Every time I come across it on cable, I just can't stop watching. (Wow, so that's Albert Hammond, Senior. He looks just like his boy.)

"I love that song!" says Erica Shaffer, so unconvincingly it hurts, as Barry Williams looks on approvingly.


FMFM: Solo Monk. Not necessarily the best album of Thelonious playing alone, but as always it's a revealing window into his incomparable mind.

Match light

One more thing about Match Point....

I enjoyed Scarlett Johansson's portrayal of wronged bombshell Nola Rice. But I started wondering about that name. NOLA RICE. It seems like it should be an anagram of something.

Among those created by an anagram server were:

Cain role
Race loin
Real icon
Liar once
Nice oral

Well, she does pit brother(-in-law) against brother(-in-law). She proves sexually irresistible. She holds the camera like a screen goddess. Her most dramatic scene involves her screaming the word "liar." And her pillowy lips are filmed in close-up so often that they well be the lasting image of the film. Interesting.

(Separately, you do all know that "Britney Spears" is an anagram of "Presbyterians," right?)


FMFM: Ellington's "Liberian Suite," from his 1947 Carnegie Hall concert. I'm not too keen on the intro song, "I Like The Sunrise," but the five "dances" are classically difficult Ellingtonia. "Liberian Suite" isn't really that fun of a composition, but it's far from static; there's a lot of unresolved tension there.

The game is set

I didn't really have a New Year's resolution this year, but I do plan to make an effort to go to the cinema more often in 2006. For years I hardly ever went, believing that I wasn't really missing much at all. This year I'll put that to the test.

With that in mind, I took in a matinee of Match Point this afternoon. To my surprise, the cinema at West Portal was nearly sold out for the holiday afternoon showing. Most of the crowd was over 50. (I wonder about the hours I keep sometimes.)

Spoiler warning: I'm not giving away the ending in this posting, but I can't write about the film without saying something about the end. I'll try to be vague. So here it is:

For the first, oh, hour and 55 minutes I was pretty disappointed in Match Point. It seemed like far too ordinary of a story, albeit one with well-developed characters and intriguingly layered dialogue. I didn't quite believe main character Chris Wilton would do what he did, nor did I feel his tearful remorse at his decision. Furthermore, despite a few signature Allen shots, I found the editing a little choppy, especially when the film is supposed to represent the passing of time. I was just about ready to leave thinking Match Point was completely overrated, when the last five or ten minutes of the film threw everything else into question. If its final sequence isn't exactly thrilling, it certainly energizes everything that preceded. The mind races as the credits roll. It's a manipulative film. I think people left happy, although I can't quite give it a little-man-jumping-on-the-chair rating myself.

(Side note: It's, um, not "abhorrent" due to "upper male nudity" either -- but I do find it interesting that Ted Baehr elects to spoil the ending.)


FMFM: Buddy Miles' Them Changes. It's rare that one of my dollar-bin purchases turns out to be warped, but this one has a little thumbprint-sized bend that affects the first thirty seconds of each side. Anyone ever successfully un-warp an LP without ruining it?

Econo lodged

I always forget that coffee brewed in a cafe is going to be about three times as strong as the stuff I make at home. It almost ruined my viewing of We Jam Econo Thursday night. I'd just eaten dinner and feared falling asleep in the Red Vic, so I purchased a small coffee and drank it while waiting in line. Mistake. I wrung my hands and squirmed throughout the film, although I admit it was hard to tell how much of that was due to the caffeine and how much of it was because I was staring my own formative years squarely in the face as I watched.

Just about anyone who knows me knows how I feel about the Minutemen. You don't exactly have to encourage me to watch an 85-minute documentary about them, especially one that sold out both evening shows (!) last time I tried to see it. We Jam Econo is certainly the best existing film about the band, and may be the best one that will ever be made. The filmmakers talked to all the right people (Pettibon, Baiza, Doe, Rollins, Ginn, Carducci, Flea, Mom Watt, etc.). It is, basically, the film I've been waiting twenty years to see.

There is some messy live footage, but some really terrific film of the band in action too. The narrative follows the band from childhood through its tragic end, simultaneously tracking its musical evolution and its fraternal tale of discovery and inspiration. Mike Watt has always had the uncanny ability to translate his own light-bulb realizations into a musical language that spurs other people to do good work as well, and that comes out loud and clear in the film. There is also quite a bit of wit, particularly in relation to the band members' early years ("I like my strings loose!") and their preoccupations ("D.Boon chose his guitar tone for political reasons....").

Now I've been listening to Double Nickels for days. It never gets shelved for long in my house. (Was it really all about Ummagumma and Hagar?)


FMFM: Ida Cox's Blues for Rampart Street, which you could take as an elegy for our missing city.

It is what it is

The most overused term in casual music criticism? That's probably genius.

Witness:

[Olivia Newton-John's 1971] interpretation of Richard Manuel's "In a Station" is respectful and intuitive. Music From Big Pink was only three years old when this recording was pressed, and it is one of the few albums to survive the hype and get better with age. Olivia Newton-John dipping into the Big Pink songbook was a stroke of genius.

Please, let's save genius for Mozart. And Thelonious Monk.


FMFM: Herbie Hancock's Quartet album, which introduces Wynton Marsalis as a 19-year-old phenom. Marsalis' playing is lucid and authoritative, and he brings out the best in Tony Williams (who himself was all of 17 when he joined Miles Davis' quintet in the early 60s). I can't quite detect whether this is subtlely innovative music, or just a much clearer recording than the ones from the mid-60s that tread in similar territory. But it sounds fine, fine.

Ginkers

A few days ago Jeff wrote about a piece of local slang from his high school, specifically the word "rant" to describe a woman. Anyone who went to my high school would immediately think of the word "ginker" upon reading that. "Ginker" was a term unique to my town, although ginkers were everywhere in New Jersey during the 1980s. I have no idea why they were called that. You probably called them burnouts -- they were heavy-metal listeners who drove sleazy cars and had chain wallets and denim jackets. They might have smoked pot on ths bus, or made out with big-haired metal chicks against the lockers. (Actually the girls were ginkers too, or maybe "ginkettes".) Sometimes you would even see a ginker-in-training in the eighth or ninth grade. Other times some normal kid would come back from summer vacation in full ginker mode. Ginkerdom had a strange allure.

A kid named Andy was probably the biggest ginker of them all, at least in the class of '89. Nice guy, actually. Quite friendly. He wrote the names of a bunch of metal bands on the cover of one of my textbooks one time in ninth grade. (For the rest of the year people wondered why I seemed to be a fan of Celtic Frost.) I vividly remember him disrupting an assembly in the school auditorium one morning. The school had brought in a rock band -- probably a Christian rock band -- to tell us not to use drugs. (I am somewhat embarrassed to remember that they were called The Edge.) All Andy did was climb onto the stage and start clapping along with the band as he walked across in front of them, to the delight of the entire junior class. They suspended Andy from school for that. If another kid had done it, the deed wouldn't have drawn such a stiff punishment, but because of who he was, it was clear he was making a mockery of The Edge's well-meaning but completely ineffective performance.

The only other thing I know about Andy is that he was on America's Funniest Home Videos a couple of years later. He was on the custodial staff of the public library at the time, and he was caught rocking out by the security cameras as he vacuumed the reference section.

Anyway I bring this up because I located an Urban Dictionary citation for "ginker" the other day, after Jeff invited comments about local slang. In the three days since I linked to that page in the comments section of Jeff's blog, someone has posted a very lengthy and hilariously accurate definition of "ginker". It's currently definition #4, but it may rise in the rankings as people give it the thumbs-up. I'd love to take credit for the posting, but I didn't write it, and neither did my brother, class of '86. (The "Ginkovitz" thing is clearly fictitious, although the writer had me going there for a moment.)

The farther my high-school experience slips into the past, the funnier New Jersey in the late 1980s looks. Could it really have been like that? Were those people real?


FMFM: Quincy Jones' The Quintessence, on what is probably the thickest, nicest piece of vinyl I've ever owned. This one's from his era of more traditional big-band orchestration, although I've been digging the funkier, weirder Gula Matari and especially Walking In Space lately too.

Downfall

Possibly the most excruciating film-watching experience I have ever had. The Nazis are first humanized; then you see them say terrible things and perform monstrous acts. There is one scene for which nothing in the world, not even knowing it's going to happen, can prepare a person. Not for the faint. Wow.


FMFM (earlier): The Ramsey Lewis Trio's all-groove The In Crowd, and the stunning Ellington Uptown ("grab it and run," which I did for just $1).

Surprise

Bill Gates does not have an iPod. And more.

Ladder's 'bout to fall

From the Onion's year-end wrap-up, one of the best sentences ever:

The plight of Terri Schiavo, whose brain, according to doctors, has been mostly "non-sentient" and "liquids in suspension" since her heart stopped for five minutes in February of 1990, has come to the attention of Americans whose brains have been mostly sentiment and superstition for most of their lives.


FMFM: Side Three of Blonde on Blonde, which never fails. What a great-sounding band -- brass, Robbie, and the late great Kenny Buttrey.

Curb your enthusiasm

Someone else whose work I admire disagrees....

[UPDATE: Larry David's article has gone behind the NYT's wall of sleep, but you may be "entertained" by dunderheaded Fox News anchor and vaunted Christmas-defending warrior John Gibson's riff on David's editorial. FYI, I doubt there are more than two minutes of "getting it on" in the entire film. Maybe less than a minute.]


FMFM: Irma Thomas' spectacular vocal on "It's Raining"

Upward over the mountain

Having nothing else to do yesterday morning before football started, I decided over coffee to see Brokeback Mountain. I sat among vast fields of empty seats at Stonestown, with perhaps thirty other people in a room that might have held at least 300. It was the early matinee, and the weather was just letting up after the biggest soaking of 2005. I hear the film is still wildly popular in San Francisco, but this wasn't evidence of that. I prefer to see films when the theater is mostly empty anyway -- it's easier to hear everything, and you can stretch out a little.

The film is very good, probably as good as Hollywood productions get these days -- although I see so few Hollywood productions that I'm really not qualified to say that. I do prefer small, well-scripted stories with few special effects, which is why I find myself enjoying independent cinema more. What indie cinema might lack in scope, it typically makes up for by hitting closer to home.

Brokeback is more ambitious, I suppose, but it isn't a "big" story. There are tons of wide-angle shots of mountains covered in trees and sheep, but there are only a handful of characters that get more than, say, three minutes of screen time. Most of the story is about internally conflicted people who only let their conflicts rise to the surface in violent outbursts or in secrecy. It is a story of denial and repression. And it is a story of people choosing against what they really want out of life, out of fear, and having to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

I have seen people say that the main characters, both strikingly portrayed, make immoral choices. They do cause a fair amount of heartbreak -- mostly in the character played very strongly by Michelle Williams, but they don't ruin anyone else's life any more than they hurt themselves. (I also thought the lovely Linda Cardellini made the most of her screen time.) It's not a "pro-family" film in the way some people would like it to be. But it is most certainly about people following, and failing to follow, the truth about themselves. And what is that besides moral behavior?

(I'm going to dismiss the idea that Brokeback Mountain somehow exhibits "a pro-Marxist or pro-Communist subtext... with some strong anti-capitalist sentiments," by the way. And, for the record, I'm not really concerned about the "upper male nudity" that has Ted Baehr's undies in a knot.)

Ang Lee and the screenwriters, including Larry McMurtry, add a fair amount to the story, although upon closer review with the original Proulx I see that they have mostly added dramatized scenes that are merely described in the narrative. The Cardellini character, and most or all of the dialogue with the Del Mar daughters, are brand-new.

I wonder if I'm being overly sensitive here by saying that Brokeback Mountain is nearly ruined by its score. Acoustic guitar and pedal steel would seem to be appropriate, but somehow the backing music turned a few scenes to mush. (Hey, a terrible soundtrack nearly turned Hotel Rwanda, a film about genocide, into sap too.) On the other hand, the popular songs in the film are very smartly chosen. And I had to smile when I saw that the closing credits are accompanied by songs from Willie Nelson and Rufus Wainwright.

Just a little bit closer

"We'll even throw in some goddamn tinsel. And a fairy to go on top. Shouldn't be a problem finding one in this office."


FMFM: Jimmy Smith's wide-open Home Cookin'. Hard to imagine anything sounding better with rain pounding against the windows.