(no subject)
I'm just going to stop going to bed early. Still feeling a little congested, crashed at 7:30... wide awake at 1:00, after an hour just gave up. This is why people end up speed addicts.
Wednesday night went to see Vijay Iyer for the first time he's ever played Columbus courtesy of the Wexner Center. Fucking unreal. He's one of my favorite up-and-coming piano players, I didn't really get hip to him until he played on those Burnt Sugar records and then the spoken word collaboration with poet/rapper/producer Mike Ladd about the marginalization of immigrants In What Language?. In his solos he almost reminds me of Bobby Few without the gospel leanings, broken, jagged tone clusters that all flow out of and back into a solid, soulful pulse. You can tell the working band has been together for a while, opening with a piece clearly composed in theme and overall structure but stretched out Rudresh Mahanthrappa on the alto had a very sweet tone, not quite a steeped in the blues as Ornette but not played over-the-top fast like all the guys still trying to be Bird. I never felt throughout the show like he was bullshitting or like he was soloing excessively. The rhythm section was all kinds of tight. The kind of group that can stretch out on a postbop piece and then follow it with a fifty-minute unbroken suite commissioned by a chamber music company, "Tragicomic". There were times it kindled vaudeville with the piano and drums matching each other in sharp phrases, black keys and woodblocks, and times it sounded like classic Bill Evans but mostly it didn't sound like an imitation of anything.
Ended up not going to Cuong Vu or the Hong Sang-Soo film on Friday night because while at work on Friday I noticed online something going on in New York next weekend whilst I'll be there and the $30 a cheap ticket to see a production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler staring Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, cost me was basically a fast food meal more than the cost of those two things. Ended up with a twelve pack of High Life at Brenda Arnold's house where I finally got to meet the legendary Don Hartman I'd heard so many stories about, with all the usual suspects, Carrie, Martita, Matt and Lori Benz, Ed Mann, Amy Watson, Dave Gibbs, Dave and Melanie Holm, a guy who I think had played with Don and Ed in either the Bush League All Stars or the Gunshy Ministers whose name I never got, and everyone's assembled children.
Clancy Arnold (Trent and Brenda's daughter) is officially the coolest 13 year old ever. Her drawings have gotten really, really good and at one point she actually put on the Birthday Party. I sure wasn't hip to the Birthday Party when I was 13. And Townes, well, he's ready to raise some hell. The Li'l Holms still have these adorable, taking-everything-in eyes and sat on the couch completely content watching Star Wars completely oblivious to the loud, laughing, half-drunk room full of grownups in the next room. And I was extremely jealous of little Hawken's hat, some kind of jester cap/cat ear number. Saturday was my Mom's birthday with some time spent at the parents' house which was nice.
Saturday night went to see The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada which was fucking beautiful, the kind of movie you assume only someone who wrote a thesis on Flannery O'Connor could have directed. The comparisons you've been hearing to Cormac McCarthy are completely right on. Tommy Lee Jones plays Pete Perkins, who's the same kind of crazy John Wayne was in the Searchers. He's a nihilist in the purest sense, at the center of his life and his belief system is a void. He believes in the actions of others and he believes people are convinced through action. Heaven and Hell are rumors at best, and love might redeem somebody but he's never seen it. By the time he does reach out to another person it's too late and he's misjudged everything. All there is is the work, and everything gets filtered through that work. He has these huge sad eyes and the lines on his face tell enough of a story that you don't question how he ended up there but you buy the charisma that people hover around and respect him, in flashbacks you buy the friendship between him and Melquiades and the sexual chemistry he shares with Melissa Leo.
Barry Pepper and January Jones are perfect as the couple down from Cincinnati with limited ambition and less sense than God gave a stone staircase. She tells him she's bored and he offers to buy her a Nintendo. He grabs her in the kitchen, she just shifts her weight back and lets him have sex with her while she keeps watching her soap opera. He's got a rage he doesn't know what to do with and he's not clever enough to hide it under the cover of rules. Even the good ol' boy network thinks he's a liability. I'd seen both of them in a few movies and wasn't at all prepared for how good they are here.
Melissa Leo whom I've liked since she was on Homicide is stunning, perfectly open and perfectly hard. There are moments where I was convinced she's the only one who completely perceives things as they are, and is occasionally exasperated when other people don't get it. When one of her lovers is jealous of the other. She's willing to be happy in whatever limited way or circumstances she can find that happiness but she doesn't expect it to last long or to happen often. Dwight Yoakam's perfectly slimy, he considers justice to be the smoothest possible way to grease the wheel. Ultimately, you think he believes that really is best for everyone because the more questions that get asked the more flaws become obvious, even if that doesn't stop you from hating him. He and Leo also share one of the most vulnerable, brave sex-related scenes I've ever seen in a movie (that descriptor will become obvious once you see it). Also some special props to Levon Helm (yes, *that* Levon Helm, from The Band) who is only in about ten minutes of the movie but will break your heart.
Guillermo Arriaga's script is pretty much perfect, the structural backflips not feeling showy but filling in the emotional cracks as you go along. The grief and the pain snowball as you go until I, at least, was on the verge of tears for the last half hour. Violence is omnipresent but it's not gleeful and it's not stylized, it hurts and it feels heavy and real. And Jones has a much stronger visual sense than you'd expect from an actor directing his first movie. There are images that hang like tableaus and burn themselves on your brain for a long time: Jones, half drunk, staggering through a cantina strung with tiny white lights like spiderwebs; a young white man running away into a literal blur of wildflowers; a beautiful Mexican girl with a bandaged nose holding a knife over the flames of a stove; a rusty windmill in a dusty crevice pockmarked with cactus. The movie's a wonder, is what I'm saying, though probably not the kind of thing many of you would enjoy.
After that, strolled through the cold and the street lights up to the Newport to see Tim O'Brien. Ostensibly a Yonder Mountain String Band show, O'Brien opened and he hasn't played here in forever. Plus, his backing band included the great Danny Barnes (of Bad Livers fame, also played with Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, et al) on banjo, electric guitar and harmony vocals and a terriffic upright bass player whose name I'm blanking on. And the tickets were no pricier than the last time I was in NYC and O'Brien was playing but I had too much other stuff on my plate so I missed that. I intended to check out Yonder Mountain, hell, maybe they'd be good, I like string band music. That changed once I was actually there.
The show was Sold Out. Crazy packed, with fratboy DMB fan assholes and spinning, grinning, high-ass hippies. One of the best things about that audience is how open they are, they will literally get down to anything, they don't discriminate by genre at all. The bad thing is they don't have any critical faculties at all. They would howl during an acoustic banjo and fiddle duet so you couldn't hear what was going on. They would cheer when Danny Barnes *started* playing a banjo solo, so you couldn't hear the first half of the solo, instead of cheering afterwards as though they were cheering the very fact of someone playing a banjo. They shouted at each other and shot balloons up into the air and tossed balloons down from the balcony. One of them said to his friend next to me "Finally, the first straight-up real bluegrass song they've played!" The song was Dylan's "Tombstone Blues." People griped about them doing a very similar setlist to the night before, not thinking that maybe it isn't a band that plays hundreds of dates a year but rather a couple of guys who don't usually play with this leader. As soon as the O'Brien set was over I bolted, I couldn't take another minute with those people.
The actual set, though, was great aside from sound problems frequently obscuring Barnes' banjo and harmony vocals unless the bass and O'Brien almost completely laid out. O'Brien's one of my favorite songwriters, it's hard to write songs about being at peace with your life and finding a place of comfort without being boring. He finds the joy and expresses it in a hightened way that substitutes for any sense of drama which might be lost. He sings in a clear, natural, pretty voice and plays guitar, mandolin, and fiddle better than 90% of the people you'll ever hear. The tunes are great and the lyrics are fine, and his solos have a structure and a connection to the melody that never falters. He's also a born arranger/interpreter, there's a reason Steve Earle called him to lead the Bluegrass Dukes after Earle's famous falling out with Del McCoury. The records he was promoting are full of mostly standards so we got a lot of that. I could have lived without the bluegrass song rewritten to incorporate references to the internet, but the rest of it was gold. Highlights included an amazing, gorgeous Jimmie Rodgers blue yodel with Barnes on electric and O'brien on mandolin with a sly grin - "I went to the gypsy woman down at the fortune teller's place / She read my mind and then she slapped my face" - the aforementioned Dylan cover, and the traditional "Let's Go Huntin'". Hopefully next time they can come through headlining in a smaller room.
And Sunday I made my way out to see Cache (Hidden), the new Michael Haneke movie with Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. Wow. I've liked pretty much all of Haneke's stuff since my friend Melissa hipped me to The Piano Teacher when it came out and I immediately set out to rent/watch everything else of his and this is just as strictly formal as any of his work. The acting's great, and within half an hour it has so completely fucked with the perceptions of the viewer that we don't trust anything happening. It's so tightly wound I don't want to give anything away but if anyone sees it I want to talk about the ending with you. I haven't seen an audience this pissed off or confused by an ending since John Sayles' Limbo. It was clear to me what happened, but someone else leaving the theater had a similar and equally plausible explanation which also worked. The best grim, everything-going-wrong thriller with almost no actual violence I've seen in a long time.
Urgh, I have to work tomorrow and do enough laundry for my trip. I should try sleeping again. Love to all of you.
Wednesday night went to see Vijay Iyer for the first time he's ever played Columbus courtesy of the Wexner Center. Fucking unreal. He's one of my favorite up-and-coming piano players, I didn't really get hip to him until he played on those Burnt Sugar records and then the spoken word collaboration with poet/rapper/producer Mike Ladd about the marginalization of immigrants In What Language?. In his solos he almost reminds me of Bobby Few without the gospel leanings, broken, jagged tone clusters that all flow out of and back into a solid, soulful pulse. You can tell the working band has been together for a while, opening with a piece clearly composed in theme and overall structure but stretched out Rudresh Mahanthrappa on the alto had a very sweet tone, not quite a steeped in the blues as Ornette but not played over-the-top fast like all the guys still trying to be Bird. I never felt throughout the show like he was bullshitting or like he was soloing excessively. The rhythm section was all kinds of tight. The kind of group that can stretch out on a postbop piece and then follow it with a fifty-minute unbroken suite commissioned by a chamber music company, "Tragicomic". There were times it kindled vaudeville with the piano and drums matching each other in sharp phrases, black keys and woodblocks, and times it sounded like classic Bill Evans but mostly it didn't sound like an imitation of anything.
Ended up not going to Cuong Vu or the Hong Sang-Soo film on Friday night because while at work on Friday I noticed online something going on in New York next weekend whilst I'll be there and the $30 a cheap ticket to see a production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler staring Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, cost me was basically a fast food meal more than the cost of those two things. Ended up with a twelve pack of High Life at Brenda Arnold's house where I finally got to meet the legendary Don Hartman I'd heard so many stories about, with all the usual suspects, Carrie, Martita, Matt and Lori Benz, Ed Mann, Amy Watson, Dave Gibbs, Dave and Melanie Holm, a guy who I think had played with Don and Ed in either the Bush League All Stars or the Gunshy Ministers whose name I never got, and everyone's assembled children.
Clancy Arnold (Trent and Brenda's daughter) is officially the coolest 13 year old ever. Her drawings have gotten really, really good and at one point she actually put on the Birthday Party. I sure wasn't hip to the Birthday Party when I was 13. And Townes, well, he's ready to raise some hell. The Li'l Holms still have these adorable, taking-everything-in eyes and sat on the couch completely content watching Star Wars completely oblivious to the loud, laughing, half-drunk room full of grownups in the next room. And I was extremely jealous of little Hawken's hat, some kind of jester cap/cat ear number. Saturday was my Mom's birthday with some time spent at the parents' house which was nice.
Saturday night went to see The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada which was fucking beautiful, the kind of movie you assume only someone who wrote a thesis on Flannery O'Connor could have directed. The comparisons you've been hearing to Cormac McCarthy are completely right on. Tommy Lee Jones plays Pete Perkins, who's the same kind of crazy John Wayne was in the Searchers. He's a nihilist in the purest sense, at the center of his life and his belief system is a void. He believes in the actions of others and he believes people are convinced through action. Heaven and Hell are rumors at best, and love might redeem somebody but he's never seen it. By the time he does reach out to another person it's too late and he's misjudged everything. All there is is the work, and everything gets filtered through that work. He has these huge sad eyes and the lines on his face tell enough of a story that you don't question how he ended up there but you buy the charisma that people hover around and respect him, in flashbacks you buy the friendship between him and Melquiades and the sexual chemistry he shares with Melissa Leo.
Barry Pepper and January Jones are perfect as the couple down from Cincinnati with limited ambition and less sense than God gave a stone staircase. She tells him she's bored and he offers to buy her a Nintendo. He grabs her in the kitchen, she just shifts her weight back and lets him have sex with her while she keeps watching her soap opera. He's got a rage he doesn't know what to do with and he's not clever enough to hide it under the cover of rules. Even the good ol' boy network thinks he's a liability. I'd seen both of them in a few movies and wasn't at all prepared for how good they are here.
Melissa Leo whom I've liked since she was on Homicide is stunning, perfectly open and perfectly hard. There are moments where I was convinced she's the only one who completely perceives things as they are, and is occasionally exasperated when other people don't get it. When one of her lovers is jealous of the other. She's willing to be happy in whatever limited way or circumstances she can find that happiness but she doesn't expect it to last long or to happen often. Dwight Yoakam's perfectly slimy, he considers justice to be the smoothest possible way to grease the wheel. Ultimately, you think he believes that really is best for everyone because the more questions that get asked the more flaws become obvious, even if that doesn't stop you from hating him. He and Leo also share one of the most vulnerable, brave sex-related scenes I've ever seen in a movie (that descriptor will become obvious once you see it). Also some special props to Levon Helm (yes, *that* Levon Helm, from The Band) who is only in about ten minutes of the movie but will break your heart.
Guillermo Arriaga's script is pretty much perfect, the structural backflips not feeling showy but filling in the emotional cracks as you go along. The grief and the pain snowball as you go until I, at least, was on the verge of tears for the last half hour. Violence is omnipresent but it's not gleeful and it's not stylized, it hurts and it feels heavy and real. And Jones has a much stronger visual sense than you'd expect from an actor directing his first movie. There are images that hang like tableaus and burn themselves on your brain for a long time: Jones, half drunk, staggering through a cantina strung with tiny white lights like spiderwebs; a young white man running away into a literal blur of wildflowers; a beautiful Mexican girl with a bandaged nose holding a knife over the flames of a stove; a rusty windmill in a dusty crevice pockmarked with cactus. The movie's a wonder, is what I'm saying, though probably not the kind of thing many of you would enjoy.
After that, strolled through the cold and the street lights up to the Newport to see Tim O'Brien. Ostensibly a Yonder Mountain String Band show, O'Brien opened and he hasn't played here in forever. Plus, his backing band included the great Danny Barnes (of Bad Livers fame, also played with Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, et al) on banjo, electric guitar and harmony vocals and a terriffic upright bass player whose name I'm blanking on. And the tickets were no pricier than the last time I was in NYC and O'Brien was playing but I had too much other stuff on my plate so I missed that. I intended to check out Yonder Mountain, hell, maybe they'd be good, I like string band music. That changed once I was actually there.
The show was Sold Out. Crazy packed, with fratboy DMB fan assholes and spinning, grinning, high-ass hippies. One of the best things about that audience is how open they are, they will literally get down to anything, they don't discriminate by genre at all. The bad thing is they don't have any critical faculties at all. They would howl during an acoustic banjo and fiddle duet so you couldn't hear what was going on. They would cheer when Danny Barnes *started* playing a banjo solo, so you couldn't hear the first half of the solo, instead of cheering afterwards as though they were cheering the very fact of someone playing a banjo. They shouted at each other and shot balloons up into the air and tossed balloons down from the balcony. One of them said to his friend next to me "Finally, the first straight-up real bluegrass song they've played!" The song was Dylan's "Tombstone Blues." People griped about them doing a very similar setlist to the night before, not thinking that maybe it isn't a band that plays hundreds of dates a year but rather a couple of guys who don't usually play with this leader. As soon as the O'Brien set was over I bolted, I couldn't take another minute with those people.
The actual set, though, was great aside from sound problems frequently obscuring Barnes' banjo and harmony vocals unless the bass and O'Brien almost completely laid out. O'Brien's one of my favorite songwriters, it's hard to write songs about being at peace with your life and finding a place of comfort without being boring. He finds the joy and expresses it in a hightened way that substitutes for any sense of drama which might be lost. He sings in a clear, natural, pretty voice and plays guitar, mandolin, and fiddle better than 90% of the people you'll ever hear. The tunes are great and the lyrics are fine, and his solos have a structure and a connection to the melody that never falters. He's also a born arranger/interpreter, there's a reason Steve Earle called him to lead the Bluegrass Dukes after Earle's famous falling out with Del McCoury. The records he was promoting are full of mostly standards so we got a lot of that. I could have lived without the bluegrass song rewritten to incorporate references to the internet, but the rest of it was gold. Highlights included an amazing, gorgeous Jimmie Rodgers blue yodel with Barnes on electric and O'brien on mandolin with a sly grin - "I went to the gypsy woman down at the fortune teller's place / She read my mind and then she slapped my face" - the aforementioned Dylan cover, and the traditional "Let's Go Huntin'". Hopefully next time they can come through headlining in a smaller room.
And Sunday I made my way out to see Cache (Hidden), the new Michael Haneke movie with Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. Wow. I've liked pretty much all of Haneke's stuff since my friend Melissa hipped me to The Piano Teacher when it came out and I immediately set out to rent/watch everything else of his and this is just as strictly formal as any of his work. The acting's great, and within half an hour it has so completely fucked with the perceptions of the viewer that we don't trust anything happening. It's so tightly wound I don't want to give anything away but if anyone sees it I want to talk about the ending with you. I haven't seen an audience this pissed off or confused by an ending since John Sayles' Limbo. It was clear to me what happened, but someone else leaving the theater had a similar and equally plausible explanation which also worked. The best grim, everything-going-wrong thriller with almost no actual violence I've seen in a long time.
Urgh, I have to work tomorrow and do enough laundry for my trip. I should try sleeping again. Love to all of you.