I changed My mind was changed

Whether you agree with Truthout.org or not, this is a fascinating glimpse into the way the White House works these days.

And you have to wonder what that little scribble is before the note lapses into the passive voice.


FMFM: Post-War, in anticipation of Sunday night's solo gig at Bimbo's after the big game

Marked: Aguirre

I knew only Grizzly Man among Werner Herzog's films upon entering the Red Vic this afternoon for a screening of Aguirre, The Wrath of God, a bleak 1972 tale of an ill-fated conquistadores expedition through the Amazon rainforest in 1560 and 1561. A slow-moving, green and moist opening sequence initially spurred memories of the gentle Old Joy (seen in the same screening room eleven days earlier), but Aguirre would soon reveal itself as a violent, dark story of greed, envy, and misguided colonialism.

The story centers on a splinter expedition intended to save a larger group led by Gonzalo Pizarro, whose crew includes holy men, nobles and slaves. Bogged down in the Amazon's muddy headwaters, Pizarro sends forth three rafts and a couple of dozen men in order to find a populated area downriver and report back in two weeks. Their chances for survival seem slim-to-none within a day or two, as the group encounters hostile natives, rough rapids, and most prominently, dissension within the ranks. Aguirre, originally second in command, leads a mutiny in the hopes of finding the city of gold, El Dorado, and eventually finds himself in charge of a raft floating into near-certain peril, fever and insanity.

Aguirre seemed to combine elements of both Apocalypse Now and Blood Meridian, though it preceded both. Like the former, it distills the jungle madness from Heart of Darkness; like the latter, it takes the shine off a once-glorified era of conquering the savages and forging a new America. Herzog's characters are made to look preposterous when they wave around a Bible and execute a confused native for blasphemy. Their words turn into black humor, ripe with irony in the context of the familiar story of Christian settlement and civilization in the animalistic jungle.

Reportedly shot with only one camera, Aguirre is full of how'd-they-do-that moments and unrepeatable takes. Its final shots are frighteningly memorable, as are various others in the story; I was not disappointed to learn that it is primarily a work of fiction. And I will certainly keep my eyes peeled for another upcoming Herzog screening in the same movie house.

Side note: Something about watching the Spanish explorers shout at each other in German was hilarious. Like it'd be more realistic if they were speaking English, of course.

Respect at this point is pretty much out of the question

Something tells me the narrator of this one is Randy Newman. My god.

[UPDATE: I note that the NYT's op-ed page published an "abridged version" of Newman's song. This blog has the complete lyrics, and it's easy to see why the NYT canned one verse, late in the song. Wow. What was that about going racist on people?]

[UPDATE 2: Here's someone with a live mp3.]


FMFM: "Political Science"

Dropping the ball

The Patriots lose, and BostonDirtDogs.com asks, "Are you ready for some baseball?"


FMFM: Kenny Burrell's A Generation Ago Today, a tastefully engineered LP created in tribute to Charlie Christian. (AMG mysteriously says that "the music is excellent" but awards it two and a half stars; the same album under a different name receives three stars here.) At any rate, I don't really need one more interpretation of "I Surrender, Dear" or "Stompin' At The Savoy," but I'm still enjoying these warm, round-toned versions, with intermittent Getz-ish blowing from Phil Woods. The great Grady Tate provides subtly shifting rhythms, and Ron Carter gets all bossa nova on you. Another simple pleasure, if not an aggressive one that grabs you by the throat. (The fine guitarist Steve Khan discusses here, and transcribes a solo here.)

Punks not dead

Evidence that punk rock happened 30 years ago, and that its participants are now in their fifties:

The Buzzcocks' "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" is in a commercial for the AARP.

I saw it this morning, and it's very possible that I said "aarp" out loud, with a sharp intake of breath, when it happened.

Fair and balanced

As Stephen Colbert gets into it with Bill O'Reilly, here's a story from one of O'Reilly's victims.


FMFM: The Beatles' Anthology 2. Best part: the "Strawberry Fields Forever" sequence.

I'd love her if it weren't that I bind myself to a single joy

The trailer for Old Joy that ran before the recent screening of Jonestown at the Red Vic was enough to attract me for another budget-priced matinée today. I hadn't seen Will Oldham in a movie since his memorable turn in Matewan, and the Yo La Tengo soundtrack seemed like another vote of confidence from a familiar artist.

From the outset, Old Joy sucks you into its world with its impossibly slow tempo. It depicts a young father-to-be heading out on a brief camping trip in Oregon with an old friend, the drifting but insightful character strongly portrayed by Oldham. Mark is the responsible one who needs a little downtime outside Portland; Kurt, lost in his own emotional interiority, mostly needs a hot meal and ten bucks. Within the first five minutes of the film, we've already seen people sitting around waiting for something to happen. You'd be forgiven if you left the theater feeling like you'd been doing exactly that for the film's 76 minutes, as the boys get lost on the road, camp out, reminisce about old times, get breakfast and hike out to some hot springs for a dip.

I liked both characters. Both are familiar; they may be two sides of oneself. They remind me of people with whom I went to school, some of whom don't take themselves too seriously today, some of whom have taken on more work than they can handle. In some ways, characterization is one of very few things Old Joy gives you, besides scenery. (It also gives you Air America, by the way, to frame Mark's existence in the distressed detachment of contemporary life, delivered via radio feed.)

There is a fair amount of subtlety in the film's dialogue, and in its woodsy scenes. Minutes go by with shots of trees, water, leaves, big slugs and dogs, as well as people drinking beer and smoking pot. I hesitate to say this is wasted time; a lot of it is quite pretty, and some of it is highly revealing. I've often been bothered to hear people say they didn't like The Station Agent, one of my all-time favorites, because there are too many shots of people staring into the distance and smoking cigarettes. But in the case of Old Joy, there is simply not enough happening that made me feel like I'd experienced much at all. Both people, in the end, return to where they've been, and it's not clear whether they've changed much at all, whether they remain friends or not.

That said, I didn't share the exasperation of the one-star reviewer on IMDB, who seemed to think the worst aspect of the movie was that the filmmakers played fast and loose with the geography of the greater Portland area. Man, I hope no one tells him Dustin Hoffman drives the wrong way on the Bay Bridge in The Graduate.


[UPDATE: It's almost a week later, and I have to admit that Old Joy has really stayed with me. The film did lack action, but it was made of highly contemplative material, and it has continued to provoke reactions in me all week long. At this moment I actually have the urge to see it again. Consider me a DVD ownership candidate.]

Rippling mango

John Updike, Television Writer


FMFM: 12 Songs. The key to getting Randy Newman is the realization that not only is the song's narrator never actually Randy Newman, he's usually saying the opposite of what Randy Newman actually thinks. As with Steely Dan's best material, any degree of polish on the songs simply adds to the ironic effect. Newman was still a long way from "The World Isn't Fair" in 1970, but when you consider that he'd been writing hit songs for Irma Thomas and Dusty Springfield prior to his early solo albums, 12 Songs sounds like a fake secret diary, an album he assumed no one would bother with, but one that allowed him to feel free to say whatever he wanted. Like, say, going racist on a couple of different ethnic groups as a way of lampooning real racism. Did it even attract much attention at the time? Can you imagine what would happen if he said those things today?

[UPDATE: Yes, I can imagine what would happen if he said those things today.]

Moustache party

I'm glad they got Greg Norton in there. But why no love for Franz Nicolay?


FMFM: A Arte de Vinicius de Moraes

Checkmate

Normally I wouldn't link to TheSmirkingChimp.com, but I did enjoy this interesting blog post.

The peso's only worth a dime but they've got all that land

This afternoon I saw Fox News über-idiot John Gibson frothing at the mouth over Southwestern pizza chain Pizza Patrón's announcement that it would begin accepting Mexican pesos at its 59 locations, mostly in Texas.

Gibson's guest was Texas State Senator Dan Patrick, who represents an area of Greater Houston and finds it unacceptable that a private business can perform financial transactions using whichever currency it deems necessary. (Looking a map of his District 7, it's not clear whether there are any Pizza Patrón locations within its boundaries.) And why would he be so upset? Patrick's defense of his position was indefensible. He said several times, "We're losing our culture here."

Now I am not usually one to go around calling people racists. (I'm with Eggers, for one.) But how, exactly, could that statement not be racist? Who is losing which culture? Especially when we're talking about selling Italian food! Appalling.

Oh, and by the way, I wonder if he's ever been to Tijuana. Or Canada.



FMFM: Wilbur De Paris Plays/Jimmy Witherspoon Sings: New Orleans Blues, Atlantic 1266. I first heard this one while browsing the racks at Jack's Record Cellar, the joint on Page Street where Roy Loney works (worked?) sometimes. A big man with a cane, who doesn't work there but has been hanging out with the owner every time I've walked in, had brought in a copy and they were spinning it. I asked if it was for sale and they said no, although I noted the "Amoeba $2.99" sticker on it. The owner commented that it was "a pretty obscure Witherspoon" and noted that sometimes Amoeba Records lets this sort of thing get by the goalie.

Well I looked around for that record, remembering only that it was a Jimmy Witherspoon record on Atlantic, for almost two years. Complicating matters was the apparent fact that Jimmy Witherspoon never made any records for Atlantic. (We're entering Borges territory here.)

Finally, one day, it appeared in the New Arrivals bin at Amoeba, sealed in a plastic bag, with the word "HIGHLY" printed by hand above the "Recommended By Amoeba Staff" sticker. Unfortunately I wasn't feeling the $30 price tag that day, but at least now I knew what I was looking for. eBay wasn't much help ($80?!?), but a Google search yielded the mysterious WeGotRecords.com, apparently operated by a man named Bill in Florida. Apparently he had a $4 copy, with the jacket a little rough but the record more than satisfactory. I called him up; he said he still had it. ("Hey, why don't you throw in the $3 copy of The Exciting Wilson Pickett too?") He asked me to PayPal him $10 total, including shipping, and he'd drop both records in the mail later that day. No receipt? No invoice? No problem. Deep breath. Send the fellow $10.

When I came back from Christmas it had arrived by U.S. mail, and it still sounds like it did that day in Jack's Record Cellar: lazy-river-tempo New Orleans jazz, with a major-league blues singer up front. How the heck do these things fall out of print?

(I admit the search may have been a little more satisfying than the product, but damn, what a great session. And Tommy Dowd was there for it too.)

It's a god-awful small affair

What a mistake!

Shades of this story too.

I'm one knot, tangled in the heap

Today's matinee screening of Jonestown: The Life And Death of the Peoples Temple at the Red Vic was remarkably well-attended, especially considering that a later show was due to feature the film's director and two actual Jonestown survivors, including Jim Jones Jr. The topic's always been of interest to me, and the local angle is intriguing too, so I made a point of making time for this one. After a tasty, uncrowded, unhurried organic lunch at Bia's, a restaurant I'd walked past for several years but never entered (as well as a pitstop at Amoeba, which set me back $3 for The Kink Kronikles and King Curtis Live At The Fillmore West), I headed into the Red Vic.

The film's narrative and pacing capture the Peoples Temple's transition from what initially seems like a fairly reasonable, progressive organization to a nightmare in the isolation of the South American jungle. Quite frankly, if the 1970 version of Jim Jones presented his ideas to me, I'd say he was on the right track (though I doubt I'd have joined him). When I think of cults I tend to imagine strange scenes: say, New Agey people dressed in robes, touching fingertips and chanting to some sort of sun god. The Peoples Temple, as we see, wasn't like that. It featured Southern-style gospel music and references to Christian symbols. Jones preached racial harmony and brought his communicants to lively anti-war protests. We learn that the Peoples Temple and Jones himself had legitimacy conferred upon them by Walter Mondale, Rosalynn Carter and the city government of San Francisco. Nearly everyone seems levelheaded, sane. Even years after the Temple's terrible end, some survivors seem to view their time in the church somewhat nostalgically.

And yet, well prior to the mass suicide murder, we see that the Peoples Temple was an accident waiting to happen. Jones took advantage of racial tensions, sexually exploited men and women (and, it seems, possibly children), took people's life savings, lied to his supplicants and lived by different rules than his followers. We learn that he killed animals as a child (surprise), although the film doesn't necessarily make a case that Jones was always cold-blooded, megalomaniacal, or sociopathic. It leaves room for the possibility that he was a good-hearted man who gradually became drunk on power, and it largely allows us to discover his psychotic tendencies in stages, as a member of his church might have done during the 1970s.

The horrifying episode in Guyana more or less ends the film. I would have appreciated a little epilogue. We don't find out much about how the survivors made it out of Jonestown, and the film omits key facts such as the existence of a second plane on the airstrip. (One unimpressed reviewer notes that the film doesn't explicitly say that the victims drank poisoned Kool-Aid -- or Flavor-Aid as the case may be!) But the closing sequence, during the credits, does bring home the unimaginable magnitude of the disaster, which I had a hard time wrapping my head around up to that point. People left the theater in silence; most seemed unsettled and shaken stepping out onto the sidewalk scene, busy with shoppers bathed in late-afternoon sunlight.

Jonestown benefits from Jones' own megalomania, because apparently he documented his own rise obsessively on film. Much of the awful climax of his story was filmed by NBC cameramen, and the consumption of the poison was captured on audiotape. Director Stanley Nelson had a lot of existing material to assemble, but his own contributions are what makes Jonestown into a cohesive story. The interviews are deeply revealing, and add perspective that can only come from years of trying to lead a normal life following a strange and terrible experience. Some people seem embarrassed. No one seems proud.

Jonestown is already being touted as an Oscar contender. I would guess that Al Gore's film is still the favorite -- and of course, after seeing For Your Consideration how could I possibly care about award culture anymore? -- but it'd be nice to see Jonestown receive the wider audience that comes with a nomination or a trophy. And I'm looking forward to the Balboa Theater's "Doc Days" already.

[Two notes of local interest: The film does not tell you that the People's Temple was located on Geary next to the Fillmore, where the post office now stands. And it does not mention that Mayor George Moscone, who appears in the film for about a minute, was assassinated just two weeks after the massacre in Jonestown.]

What's the cover, and where should we park?

San Francisco's new scourge: Parking rage!

Although driving around San Francisco makes me generally wonder about people, I can't say I've ever flown into true parking rage.

I recall one amusing incident at Bush and Leavenworth, though: I was backing into a spot, and some guy tried to nose his way in behind me (like in that Seinfeld episode). I rolled down my window and politely asked him what he was doing.

"I'm backing into this spot!" I said.

"But I saw it as well," he replied.

Strange fellow.


[UPDATE: If you think the parking rage is bad, well, look what it did to the city's #2 parking official.]

Cities of 2006

A slightly longer, but generally less interesting list than my 2005 list. I need to get out more. (Thanks, JSK, for the reminder.)

San Francisco, Calif.*
South Lake Tahoe, Calif.
Bishop, Calif.
Joshua Tree National Park, Calif. (not technically a city)
Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Los Angeles, Calif.
Weaverville, Calif.
Geyserville, Calif.
Kensington, Md.
East Brunswick, N.J.*
New York, N.Y.*
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Bethlehem, Pa.
Fredericksburg, Va.

[UPDATE: Thanks, Anthony. Downieville, Calif.! Of course. New California image now posted.]