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[theculturalevolution]

SHE DON’T CARE ABOUT TIME The Byrds: An Appreciation

by David

For the past several months I have been listening to The Byrds obsessively, which is, I believe, the best way to listen to them.  Though they have produced a number of amazing songs – “Mr. Tambourine Man,” ” Eight Miles High,” “So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star” – they are much more about a sound than a song.  Their greatest hits package does not do them justice and allows only a vague approximation of their true greatness.  

They were the first major US Rock and Roll band to emerge post British Invasion (you know – Beatles, Stones, Dave Clark 5, Zombies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Animals, etc..) I am, of course, excluding the soul and Motown stuff which was also dominant on US charts before, during and after all those English hits.  And, no, Gary Lewis and the Playboys don’t count as “major,” though they beat The Byrds on to the pop charts with their own teeny-bopper sound.   Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs also conquered the charts earlier with their superbly frenetic, “Wooly Bully.”  Other American bands, like The Beau Brummels and The Sir Douglas Quintet, had hits prior to The Byrds.  They were really good bands who tried to cash in on the British Invasion, with deceptively British names despite their distinctly American sounds.  They did not sustain their pop successes but each had noteworthy careers as cult acts in the years following.  Also remember that those contemporary charting behemoths The Beach Boys with their sunny West Coast sound, and The Four Seasons with their East Coast doo-wop predated all that cross-the-ocean stuff.  All in all, the top 40 charts of 1965 were a wild and wonderful place to be.  

And so went the Byrds with their name alluding to The Beatles, and their sound reminiscent of The Searchers – sweet, high harmony over jangly guitar.  Play “Needles and Pins” after a listen to “Feel a Whole Lot Better” for convincing.   Listening to both terrific songs, you will also hear that The Byrds did a fuller, more rocking version of that sound.  

Released on April 12, 1965, “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a revelation.  Anyone who heard it on the radio was challenged to stop, look and listen. That opening is still magic: a few seconds of ringing 12 string, followed by a sonorous, melodic bass, and then the wispy, barely heard harmonies emerge. You are hooked whether you hear it on a tinny car radio or a state of the art hi-fi set . It was a huge hit, and announced the beginning of Folk-Rock, paving the way for Bob Dylan’s own entrée to top 40 radio.  For a few blessed weeks, starting July 3, 1965 the best selling singles in the US were “Can’t Help Myself,” “Satisfaction,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” eventually joined over the weeks by “Like a Rolling Stone,” “I Got You Babe,” “ Do You Believe in Magic,” “ Help” and “California Girls” -- The Greatest Summer of the Greatest Year in Rock Music!  That summer, pop music had expanded its reach, both musically and lyrically, and grew up (or, at least, reached later adolescence.)    

Starting with their first album, The Byrds begot hypen rock, moving from folk-rock on to pioneer psychedelic-rock (“Eight Miles High”), electronic-rock (“2-4-2 Foxtrot” with its sole lyric of “Come ride a Learjet baby”) and country-rock (“Time Between,” etc.)  Their harmony laden, folky strum sound laid the foundation (for better or worse) for Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, The Eagles and the whole LA mellow sound. Their guitar sound was crucial to REM who spawned College-Rock, and in their Sweetheart of the Rodeo phase they were a cornerstone of the Americana and Alt-Country genres.  Though their shape-shifting, and their willingness to incorporate diverse sounds in their music was emblematic of the time and represented a generally held restlessness and exploratory impetus, they were, I have to say, frequently first.  The Byrds were, in short, an astonishingly important and influential band with myriad pleasures to be gotten beyond their singles.  

What’s significant about the Byrds is not their musical diversity but their core sound which remained essentially identifiable through all the innovations.  Jon Landau wrote that “what makes their eclecticism so interesting is that the style they have concocted out of all these musical sources is very uneclectic and is, in fact, a style of incredible consistency.”  Jim (Roger) McGuinn’s distinctive voice was a constant, but other better singers contributed – Gene Clark, David Crosby, Gram Parsons.  The harmonies remained largely singular, their instrumental sound, anchored by McGuinn’s 12 string and Chris Hillman’s bass, was easily identifiable, and the way their voices were mixed under the instruments remained constant. Their music seems to have a consistent density. The liner notes for their first album quotes Jim McGuinn reflecting that they wanted to create a modern sound which mimicked the whoosh of a jet plane.  And that sound is what makes immersion both necessary and pleasurable.  

They couldn’t do funk or hard rock – compare their “Hey Joe” to Hendrix’ for a laugh – and they vie with The Beach Boys for the whitest sound of all time.  They really could not jam.  I once heard a live version of “ Jesus is Alright With Me” that went on for an entire album side that was a monstrous snore.  But they were all about lyricism and beauty and enveloping sonic transcendence.  Their signature and central irony is that they took songs important for their lyrics – Dylan and Pete Seeger for example – and drained them of their meaning and emotions to create pure loveliness.  I’m not sure how many listens it took me to realize that the mining disaster ballad “The Bells of Rhymney” was supposed to be sad and accusatory. You sure could not tell it from the sound.  In the Byrds’ version it is a startlingly lovely song, angelic and shimmering.  Andrea debated a high school teacher about this very idea.  This approach worked perfectly most of the time -- “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “My Back Pages,” “ Turn, Turn, Turn,” etc – and sometimes it failed – the jolly sounding “The Times They are A’ Changing.”  The best way to listen to them is to submerge yourself in their sound, preferably alone, at length and at high volumes.   Yes, The Byrds can be background music, but that’s not them.  

When I talk about the Byrds, I am talking about their first six albums, and the song, “The Ballad of Easy Rider” which I love.  And I’ll recognize The Notorious Byrd Brothers here, one of the most gorgeous, unheralded albums of all time, a gem of psychedelia.  Even their sixth album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, seemed to signal a decisive change in aesthetics:  beautiful, yes, but more country then rock, and more Parsons then McGuinn.   They were hi-jacked by the immensely talented Gram Parsons, who left the group after four months and went on to make the brilliant, first Flying Burrito Brothers album, The Gilded Palace of Sin with Byrd’s bass player Gene Hillman.  During and after this transition, The Byrds as we know them were no more.  

Though they wore those goofy Beatle bowl cuts, The Byrds had a rough hewn quality in photos.  They seemed like men rather than teenagers, and though I can’t prove it, I think they were the first act to pose in blue jeans and denim jackets, like brawny cowboys rather than fey Brits.  Just look at the beautiful cover of “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

McGuinn was the group’s leader, but the real most valuable player of the first two albums is Gene Clark, their first songwriter.  He was thrown out/left the group after their second album. (I heard fear of flying, I suspect alcoholism.)  His songs were knotty little minor key ditties about love’s complexity that took a while to sink in and when they did, attached themselves to your brain for days. His songs are the exception to the disjuncture between lyrics and sound.

Which brings me to “She Don’t Care About Time,” a B-side (to Turn Turn Turn) non-album obscurity that I discovered for myself a few years ago.  With cryptic, mysterious lyrics and joyous music (“Ticket to Ride” riff) this song is about an idealized romantic space where time is of no consequence: “time stands still” is the cliché. But this song extends that stale sentiment in unusual ways.  The female in this song  is beyond extending judgment (cf Dylan “she knows too much to argue or to judge”) and time stands still not only when she is with him, but when she is not there because she stands outside of rationality and temporality.  Because of this the narrator is able to psychologically incorporate her into his being (introject a psychoanalyst might say) and keep her with him continually.  This song alludes to religious space, to mindfulness, to cosmic consciousness, and to the psychoanalytic unconscious.  

 She Don't Care About Time

The Byrds

Hallways and staircases everyday to climb To go up to my white walled room out on the end of time Where I can be with my love for she is all that is mine And she'll always be there, my love don't care about time

I laugh with her, cry with her, hold her close she is mine The way she tells me of her love and never is she trying She don't have to be assured of many good things to find And she'll always be there, my love don't care about time

Her eyes are dark and deep with love, her hair hangs long and fine She walks with ease and all she sees is never wrong or right And with her arms around me tight I see her all in my mind And she'll always be there my love don't care about time

Songwriters: Gene Clark

She Don't Care About Time lyrics © BMG Rights Management US, LLC

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTlS2JhaBJM

2/4/18 

#mrtambourineman #geneclark #byrds #jimmcguinn #shedon’tcareabouttime

[theculturalevolution]

2016:  The Year in Review

by David

What a MISERABLE year!   What a God forsaken year, both politically and personally.   And 2017 doesn’t look any better, at least in terms of public life, and likely a lot worse.  I barely want to discuss it.  Why add my thoughts to the many words already expended on this public farce?  We’ve been in touch with some of life’s truisms:  that we don’t always get what we want no matter how much we want it, that the world is not fair or even reasonable, and that life ends.  But this year of public and private tragedy has been mitigated foremost by my family and friends, and, secondarily by the loving and healing world of pop culture.  It’s times like these when we need our cultural lives, and the implied communities those interests provide us.  

But this has also been the year when the time/space continuum imploded for me, pop culturally speaking.  I mean that my consumption of the stuff I write about became largely unmoored by any sense of temporality.  I watched and listened and read stuff with little sense of when it was produced.  One can, of course, do that now with streaming.  It is a funny way to consume pop culture given that the essence of pop culture is its nowness and its symbiotic relationship to the present.  I know, however, that given the collapse of time/space I (and, I assume, everyone) am in an eternal, solipsistic and existential now.  We all create our own pop universes and live in our own independent popular culture.  I know that because I still don’t believe that Donald Trump is President. That fact shocks me every morning when I read the news. We create our own communities virtual or actual, listen to our own facts and have difficulty comprehending a world unlike our own.   Where is that former standard arbiter of popular taste – the water cooler moment – when we work from home or drink bottled water at our own cubicles.  I was at a gathering recently, talking about TV and no one else knew the shows others were presenting as their own personal current faves.

D. Trump/A. Baboon

Anyway, sometimes life sucks, but much of the time it doesn’t. So in this new, strange, fragmented world I want to present what was culturally significant to me in 2016.  

D. Trump/A. Baldwin

Given the rent in the time-space continuum, the first item of business has got to be the movies I missed in 2015 but caught up with in 2016, and thought noteworthy. 

Sicario – beautifully directed, slick and tense, morally ambiguous, with some character and plot inconsistencies. 45 Years – the best of this lot, a luminous and quiet film about relationships.  Though notice went to Charlotte Ramplings’ vibrant performance, I was bowled over by Tom Courtney’s vulnerable and transparent acting.  A great film.  

45 Years

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl – better than you think.   Diary of a Teenage Girl – more disturbing than you think.   Brooklyn – subtle and sweet. I saw this in the same weekend as the Revenant and my head nearly exploded negotiating the extreme chick/dude movie dichotomy.   The Martian – Golden Globe for best comedy????  Huh?  It was, however, fun to watch. Straight Outta Compton – certainly not on the level of the best films, but enlightening and energetic. The Revanent – beautiful, long and gruesome.  What was the point, again?   Room – creates its own world like it’s supposed to.   Bridge of Spies – It’s not the time for my Spielberg discussion, but FINE, and I mean that as a compliment here.   Carol – so that’s what the 50s were about.

The most culturally significant addition to my social media arsenal:   Instagram (i.e. the only addition to my social media arsenal):  When I wrote poetry I would apprehend my world through snippets of language I gathered in my head.  Now I see the world through discrete visual stimuli, and I have a community to share them with.  A whole new reality, and another way that my caring daughter has shepherded me into this brave new world.    

Best Concert:  Ghost Light Radio Show at The Big Chill Cantina in Rehoboth. Sometimes the best band in the world is your neighbor’s cover band playing for a crowd at an open air beach bar on a beautiful summer night:   “Maggie May”, “Copperhead Road”, “Interstate Love Song”, “What I Like About You”, “Thinkin’ Out Loud” and tons more songs that sound great with beer.

GLRS

TV: Glittering Prizes – 70’s British series about friends from Cambridge University that I finally caught up with forty years later.  What an unusual, touching, intelligent pleasure.  

Veep – binged this one.  The joy of invective, hatred, self interest and wild profanity!  Politics as humiliation!  The delight of pure id!  Julia Louis-Dreyfus offers one of the all-time greatest female comedy performances, fearless in her full embrace of the characters’ substantial flaws. Unlikeableness reaches new levels. This series was absurdly hilarious and outlandish when Obama was President,  and now is devastating and nightmarish with Trump.  In a surreal moment I watched the final episode about transfer of power the night before the inauguration.  Arghhhhhhhhhh!

JL-D/Veep

Fargo – The first season explores the nature of evil in the world.  Stunning and dark.  

  Red Oaks – Endearing coming of age Amazon show set in the 80s in a New Jersey country club.  Top notch directors and two mensch actors in Richard Kind and Richard Mazur (in a bit role).  Like Philip Roth in setting and theme, if not in tone or quality.

  John Oliver and Bill Maher – how else to stay informed?

Modern Family - Still....

Blackish- preachy but wacky.

Movies: Moonlight – lovely, powerful and transfixing, the most worthwhile film of the year. Both this film and the other best film, Manchester by the Sea, are characterized by their examination of emotional constraint, and by their deep and specific sense of place: the ocean is key in each film.  

Moonlight

Manchester by the Sea – I just loved this sad, upliftingly depressing movie about how things happen that can never be made right.  Kenneth Lonergin has a distinct voice (see You Can Count on Me – another favorite of mine) Casey’s performance was specific and heartbreaking.  Extra points for Kyle Chandler and his FLN connection.  

Manchester by the Sea

Hell or High Water – excellent modern Western with traditional Western atmosphere of bleakness and destiny.  It portrays  a desolate, marginalized population who would rather support a bank robber than a bank, and sheds light on those who embrace Trump.  Jeff Bridges is, as always, fantastic. Arrival – abstract, metaphysical and poetic sci fi about language, communication and time.  A really unusual popular movie. Great Amy Adams. American Honey – teenage wasteland.  Is that Shia LaBoef acting like James Franco?  Captain Fantastic – intriguingly ambivalent.  Plaudits to Viggo Mortensen. A Bigger Splash – slick and sensual thriller where one character talks too much and one is silent.  Memorable Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton.

                                                       *****

Hidden Figures – movie of the week template elevated by sterling execution and good intentions.  Usually good intentions are a negative for me, but this corny thing gets away with them.  Sully – Tom Hanks used to do swagger; now he excels in anxiety.

Love and Friendship – Jane Austen film without the usual stick up its ass.   La La Land – meta without irony.  I experienced this as a film about the issues in making a movie musical in 2016:  I thought it was quite cerebral.  I really did not get the heartwarming stuff.  And Ryan Gosling?  He was so cool and edgy in Half Nelson, an amazing performance.  When did he become so stiff?  Is it the cost of his working out?   Florence Foster Jenkins – better than you think Sing Street – charming and goofy.  Also better than you thought it would be,  especially for this afficianado of teen comedies and music.   Loving --  reserved and moving.  Another film that got away with good intentions. Fences – Great play, too stagey, too bloviating.  

Sasha Lane/American Honey

MUSIC Music from here, there and everywhere entered (and re-entered) my world this year.  

Josh Ritter – Sermon on the Rocks: When I heard these songs on WXPN this year, they just popped, especially “Birds of the Meadow” which always made me take note.  

“Sunshine Superman”:  The vastly underrated purveyor of the terminally hippy dippy, Donovan, wrote and sang this 60’s single of pure joy.  One of the things that makes Donovan so special is the inventive arrangements of his songs.  Just listen to the baseline.  And the same sunshine that “came softly through my window today” in this song was evident to Joni Mitchell who saw “the sun through yellow curtain lace” on her “Chelsea Morning,” and to the Vaselines “and the sun shines in the bedroom when you play” in “Son of a Gun,” two other songs of unadulterated hedonism.   Let’s also remember another single,  Donovan’s purest expression of hippy mindlessness and flower power, “Atlantis,” which always brings a smile I can’t wipe off my face no matter how hard I try. Performing “Atlantis” on TV in the 60s, midpoint through the song, Donovan whispered “Hail Atlantis” in his most wispy voice, and then stood up in his white Nehru gown, and started throwing blossoms. You gotta believe the 60s were sweet!  For Donovan’s tart musical antidote to this treacle, listen to the bad vibes made manifest in his “Season of the Witch.”  In fact, the entire Sunshine Superman album is well worth the listen.  If you like it, try Mellow Yellow next.  

Donovan

“Autumn Sweater”:  Yo La Tengo:  oh! Yo La Tengo! I’ve been loving their quiet covers album Stuff Like That There from 2015 all 2016, read a decent book about them, and been listening to their other albums, most notably I Hear Two Hearts Beating as One from whence comes “Autumn Sweater”:  Minimal sound, trance-like sensual beat, mysterious, obsessive lyrics, whispered vocal.  Over their long career, this band bit off a piece of Velvet Underground, added a dollop of 60s trash, and built the little band that could (how mixed is that metaphor?): has it been 30 years now of regularly released, lovely soft/ harsh excellent music?

Yo La Tengo

“Falling Rain”:  trance-like folk rock cover from Karl Blau that lasts 10 minutes but only seems like 6 minutes.  Loved it every time I heard it. 

  American Band by Drive-by Truckers –They play churning, passionate classic two (or three) guitar rock that splits the difference between those rivals Neil Young and Lynard Skynard, with sharper politics than either (but more limited melodic gifts.)  They’ve maintained consistently empathic songwriting for over 20 years and 11 studio albums, and, deeply affected by the current political turmoil going on in the USA, this piece may be their best yet.  From Treyvon Martin to Robin Williams.  Words of wisdom:  “Killing’s been the bullet’s business”; “You don’t see too many white kids lying bleeding in the street.”  

You Want it Darker -- Leonard Cohen: I don’t have to go through the list of those major music artists we’ve lost this year.  Though Bowie and Prince are undeniably giants, the two whose loss affected me most deeply are Merle Haggard and this man who left his profound, clear-eyed, stirring goodbye note.  It completed his extraordinary and singular life work, and listening to it is heartbreaking.  An earlier song by L. Cohen I’ve always loved is his epic about “Joan of Arc,” a stately waltz, making manifest his major theme: the confluence of sex, death and spirit.  This final album is its epitome. I treasure the three times I was able to see him perform.  

L.Cohen “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling”:  This song, that never really left, re-entered my consciousness through a radio interview and a book passage this year.  I loved it when I first heard it: I remember responding to its deep, echoed sound of profound sadness in November of 1964.  I’ve been thinking about what 13-year-old me made of its message of romantic despair and loss.   I realized that this song did not chiefly resonate with feelings of sadness I already had; it instead taught me one way of how to be sad in love that I took with me and held deeply.  I learned how to be depressed in a bad relationship from this song.  Art doesn’t only resound with our prior feelings, it provides emotional education.  

“Cigarettes and Alcohol” – Oasis: tuff “Bang a Gong (Get it On)” remake.

Patti Smith sings “A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall” at Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize induction:  Dylan is great; since 1964 he’s been my hero; I adore him. One could make a case for Greatest Songwriter Ever!  He clearly extended the range of song to include literary influence -- Beat and Surrealist poetry chiefly -- like no one ever has done -- (I’ll have to check that statement out with my Classical Music friends.)  But I experience some melancholy at the choice because his victory denies the prize to my favorite contemporary writer, the richly deserving Philip Roth.  They are not going to award this to another American Jew for decades.  Patti’s genuine emotional presence and humility at the ceremony along with the songs current relevance add layers of complexity to this whole Nobel process. Incredible performance and incredible song. Hail, hail Bob, Patti and Philip!

  Books: Tess of the D’Urberville—a classic is a classic because it amazes.

Thomas Hardy

The Anatomy of a Song by Marc Myers -- Taken from his column for The Wall Street Journal, 45 songs from Lawdy Miss Clawdy to Losing My Religion are discussed through interviews with creators about how each song got to be.  Tidbits about songwriting inspiration are less interesting than the production details, but most of these allow you to hear the song in a new way, and to get some neat factoids.  I found it compulsively readable and it has stuck with me more than some of the other music books I read this year.  Fun! 

Taras Bulba – Gogol.  Yes, Taras Bulba.  Explains Putin (and Trump)

After Dark by Haruki Murakami -- elegant exploration of mediated reality.  Lovely in its unity of time. 

Last Night by James Salter -- Sharply written, stunning stories about adultery.

The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost – Roth at his best.  Extraordinary complexity, passion and humor in two short page turners -- a book and its sequel -- separated by almost 30 years.   They book end Zuckerman’s story, and offer a prelude to Roth’s retirement. What tremendous place do these contemplative and impulsive men -- Nathan Zuckerman, Rabbit Angstrom (see John Updike) and Frank Bascomb (see Richard Ford) -- occupy in our time.

P. Roth

[theculturalevolution]

25 ¼ INCHES:   My Retirement Plans

By David

In my retirement I publicly declare that I plan to read a number of books that I am ashamed to say I have never read (and Moby Dick which I have read but not for a long time.)  The pile measures 25 ¼ inches.  This is my lifetime project.  

How many pages?

David Copperfield                                 901 Invisible Man                                        503 Middlemarch                                         811 Magic Mountain                                    716 Bleak House                                         989 The Brothers Karamazov                     776 Remembrance of Things Past          I                                                  1032         II                                                  1169         III                                                 1119 War and Peace                                   1224 Moby Dick                                            561 The Paradiso                                       365 Ulysses                                               1078 The Tale of Gengi                               1120

Don Quixote (not pictured)                  940

TOTAL                                                13,314

[theculturalevolution]

American Movies of the 70’s:  a syllabus

By David 

When Molly took a film course about the 1970′s she noted that I could probably teach it, and so here it is.  It is strange when something I lived through becomes a subject for historical study, but, I guess, it all does.  I was the right age and sensibility for the 70′s films, and movies then were as exciting to me as music was in the 60′s.  The 70′s was a period when many of the longstanding ideas of the previous fifty years in literature, art and philosophy finally made it to the screen.  These directors were schooled in the history of cinema, unafraid of big ideas, big emotions, radical technique, self consciousness and tragic endings.

  In brief, of necessity simplified, here are The Themes:

The Outsider Roots and consequences of violence in American Society Corporate Capitalism destroys the soul of the individual; and its corollary:  money and power corrupt Corruption and darkness in the heart of American society Paranoia is justified Death of the American Dream Indeterminacy of truth and moral relativism   The loss of Romantic Illusion Consciousness of the history of world cinema, and the reinvention of genre films: Cinema had achieved an intellectual heft by the 60’s, and was studied in universities both academically and technically and many of these directors were students or critics (akin to the French New Wave directors).  These films played homage and just played with, the conventions of the gangster movie, film noir, the rom/com and screwball comedy, the police drama and the horror movie, sometimes twisting them in strange new ways frequently with abrupt tonal juxtapositions.

Antecedents: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:  “I reckon I got to light out to the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.  I been there before.” Tosca:  melodrama and murder Heart of Darkness:  the venal, depraved heart at the center of civilization The Searchers: John Ford’s Western about the complexities of the obsessive quest Breathless:  the existential criminal

The Maltese Falcon:  the more you learn the less you know

70’s Films in the 60’s: Bonnie and Clyde – sex and violence in the USA The Graduate – alienation made funny.  “Plastics!” Easy Rider “You do your own thing in your own time.”

  Cool Hand Luke - It’s all about the attitude Blow Up:  what is true? Dr. Strangelove:  the blackest of comedies:  It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. 

Faces:  Let’s not forget the artsy, wildly improvisational films of John Cassavetes who maintained an important presence through the 70′s.                                                           

Films to Study:

Five Easy Pieces:  1970  Bob Rafelson’s enormously pleasurable rebel with or without a cause pix kicked off the 70′s and paradigmed Jack Nicholson’s sensitive, bad-ass persona, later codified in the slicker One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In Rafelson’s film, Jack plays a man dangling between the dumb, raucous blue collar life he adopted and the sterile, moribund upper class world he abandoned.  He is at home nowhere.  With its confused politics, this film demeans both proletariats and elites.  In general, you tended to watch the characters in 70′s films at a distance with a mixture of distaste and pity.  These were antiheros, flawed and tragic.  But I’m trying to think of a 70′s hero with which I identified more closely.  At the time, Five Easy Pieces struck me profoundly and spoke to issues in my own life about where I fit in.

The French Connection:  1971 William Friedkin’s gritty, slamming, morally ambiguous police drama reinvented the genre. This is the movie that launched a thousand cop movies and tv shows.  It was filmed on the filthy NYC streets with available light and film stock pushed to maximum grain.  Its murky palate was punctuated by caustic yellows and dark bleeding reds.  Gene Hackman’s sadistic protagonist, Popeye Doyle, vibrated with frustration and hatred.  Dialogue was limited to two or three lines at a time.  Best picture and actor Oscars.  Friedkin went on the retool Horror with The Exorcist.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller:  1971  Robert Altman’s offhandedly poetic Western utilized indelible visuals and a ramshackle narrative which chronicles the creation of a new community in the Pacific Northwest.  This creation of community serves as both a metaphor for film making and for the growth of America.  The quietly tragic ending reads as both random and inevitable.  My favorite movie hit me at just the right time.  It enveloped me in the movie theater.  Like the Godfather films, it’s the story of how corporate capitalism killed entrepreneurial individualism.  Isn’t this the rage expressed in politics right now?

The Godfather (parts one 1972 and two 1974):  Francis Ford Coppola’s towering, operatic, virtuoso work.  Part 2 embellished and darkened the first, expanding the historical sweep to encompass the history of America in the 20th Century – those scenes of old New York are gorgeous.  After viewing these films in a double feature, Molly noted that in a unique way these films create a visceral and complete world.  You experience the sights, textures, smells,  sounds, and even tastes.  Remember that scene where Clemenza teaches how to make his pasta sauce? Even the minor characters are vibrant. Nobody has made a better film. It’s compulsively watchable, each scenes is spellbinding.   Trivia question:  what two actors won an Oscar playing the same role?

Badlands: 1973 A stunningly, cold gem by Terrence Mallick about youth culture, violence, and the media prescient in its portrayal of the psychopath as media hero.  What do we have now but the exemplar of presidential election as cult of celebrity?  It’s based on Charles Starkweather’s mass killing spree through the Heartlands, accompanied by the teenage Caril Ann Fugate in 1950′s America.  I can vividly recall two scenes from the movie of strange invention and odd amalgam of tones.  After killing Caril Ann’s father, they set fire to his house, and it burns in exquisite miniaturized beauty as stylized electronic music plays.  In the second, lit by the auto’s headlights, Charles and Caril slow dance on an empty prairie as Sam Cooke plays on the radio.  

Chinatown:  1974 Roman Polanski’s nasty neo noir has a devastating emotional impact – I’m not quite sure how it was achieved.  Three friends who know their stuff told me that Chinatown is their favorite 70’s movie. My sense of its power is in its depiction of a world falling apart, or, more accurately, a world that has already fallen apart, and, perhaps, has always been that way.  As the film progresses, the cocky, cynical (but actually Romantic) hero, Gittes, discovers the Original Sin that pervades society, and his helplessness in its face. When Evelyn asks him what had happened in Chinatown, Jake says “I tried to keep somebody from being hurt;  it turned out I made sure she was hurt.”   Well acquainted with manifestations of evil, Holocaust survivor Polanski had his home invaded and his pregnant wife murdered by the Manson Family prior to making this film; following it he was convicted of drugging and raping a 13 year old.

  Dog Day Afternoon: 1975 – A wild, messy movie with abrupt shifts in tempo and mood by that great actors’ director Sidney Lumet, whose emotionally intense films stretch from 1957’s classic 12 Angry Men to the savage, octogenarian work Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in 2007.  This one stars Al Pacino in an inept bank robbery on a hot August day in NYC, motivated by the need to pay for his boyfriend’s sex change operation.  At this point Pacino was demonstrating his versatility – The Godfather films, Serpico and this.  These four movies are his career legacy.

Shampoo 1975 directed by Hal Ashby:  In the guise of a fluffy sex farce, Shampoo is a supremely entertaining film about the cost of hedonism and the death of the 60’s.  It takes place on the eve of Richard Nixon’s 1968 election win, and the seven years between that event and the film’s release establishes a historical distance which frames the events: it is the past. (In a subtle bit of historical accuracy, Warren Beatty opens a can of beer with a church key.)  The film is elevated by the autobiographical echoes of Warren Beatty’s character, the always sublime Julie Christie, and the subtly comic Jack Warden.  Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant and a young Carrie Fisher round out the women juggled by Beatty’s character.  This is a small, underrated masterpiece.    

Taxi Driver: 1976 – a garish violent nightmare about NYC, and, hence, America, directed by Martin Scorsese, that pushes every edge you have.  

Carrie: 1976 – Brian De Palma’s baroque high school horror show recycled all sorts of movie trash into pure, self-conscious movie joy, depicting the outsider’s revenge in its gory glory.  

Annie Hall:  1977 Woody Allen’s genius was in autobiographical comic observation rather than in the meta-insights that dominated his work since.  He lost the scattershot approach of his wonderful earlier films (Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper) to make this serious and sad comedy about true love in modern America (of course, for Woody Allen, New York is America) and position himself along with the great mainstream comic artists – Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx and Bob Hope. Nobody knew this at the time, but Woody would never surpass Annie Hall, he wouldn’t even come close, and hackneyed/low rent contemporary Clint Eastwood would come to be known as the greater artist. Last month a friend bravely admitted that at the time she had gone all in on the Annie Hall Look, hat and tie included.  

An underappreciated, correlative figure to Allen in the 70′s is Paul Mazursky,  another Brooklyn born Jewish director of comedy.  Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice (pictured above), Blume in Love, Next Stop Greenwich Village, Harry and Tonto, and, most notably, An Unmarried Woman were witty, sometimes gentle, sometimes lacerating glimpses of contemporary urban upper middle class life.  He dissected the dynamic of self-involved characters struggling between an urge for freedom and a need for love. He made his greatest film in 1989:  Enemies, a Love Story.  

The Ugly Guys Club: Dreamboat actors of the 50′s and 60′s (William Holden, Gregory Peck, Tony Curtis, Peter O’Toole, Paul Newman) were replaced by average guy types frequently with an ethnic bent.  These were the stars: Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Robert Duval, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Elliot Gould, George Segal, Roy Scheider, Richard Benjamin, Woody Allen, Richard Dreyfus.  Even the handsome Brando of the 50’s became the ugly Brando of the 70’s.

Lanky, baby faced, somewhat wooly, wise-ass son of old Hollywood, Jeff Bridges established a new kind of hip in numerous semi-obscure films well worth checking out if you can find them:  Last Picture Show, Fat City, Bad Company, The Last American Hero, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Rancho Deluxe, Hearts of the West, Winter Kills.  He went on to a marvelous, and very successful career – a superbly consistent actor -- but in his own way he is the outstanding newcomer of this decade. 

While there were certainly stunners starring in the 70′s – Faye Dunaway, Julie Christie and Queen of the 70′s, Jane Fonda – less traditional kinds of beauty entered the cinema:  Sissy Spacek, Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Diane Keaton, Louise Fletcher, Marsha Mason, Jill Clayburgh, Ellen Burstyn, Sally Field, Glenda Jackson.

Fonda’s 70′s achievement was lost in her politics and subsequent identity shifts (Workout! anyone):  but the 1969 They Shoot Horses allowed her to step out of her ingénue roles into the live wire women in Klute, Julia, Coming Home, The China Syndrome, and two Oscars.  Most Valuable Actress of the Decade.

Films that destroyed the 70s: American Graffiti – Wonderful film which retreated to reactionary nostalgia and inspired crap like Grease and Happy Days.  This nostalgia ultimately lead to the election of Ronald Reagan who wanted to take America back to the good old happy days. These films eschew the tragic and the complex. 

Rocky – Lovable loser triumphs: a simplistic corrective to the righteous despair of most of these films.    

Jaws – If your film doesn’t gross 100 Million, why even bother.

Star Wars – Make a film that can be reproduced ad infinitum.                     

One From the Heart -- after four consecutive, undeniable masterpieces --  along with The Godfathers, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now  -- this film capsized genius Coppola financially and artistically, exposing the downside of this era’s grandiosity.  He never recovered. 

June 25, 2016

[theculturalevolution]

I Want None of Everybody Wants Some!!

By Molly

A few months ago, I saw Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater ‘in conversation’ at the Austin Film Society. Ethan Hawke told a story about how he went to go see Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s animated philosophical dream tale, at Lincoln Center. After the film, he heard two men discussing it.

Man 1: I didn’t like it. It was just like a bunch of kids at college.

Man 2: How come only college kids get to discuss philosophy? Or have those meaning of life questions?

It’s a good point. Why do we associate philosophical discussions with college? Can’t other people have those conversations? Maybe practical matters take more time and you no longer have time to spend considering questions beyond what to make for dinner or when your next rent check is due. In any case, it seems fitting that Richard Linklater finally made a movie about college and the search for identity.

Let me begin by stating that I LOVE Linklater. I love his films. I thought Boyhood was a masterpiece. The Before Sunrise trilogy is amazing. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and even School of Rock are delightful.

I wasn’t that interested in Everybody Wants Some!! (note the TWO exclamation points) based on the previews - but I love Linklater and the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater made a special beer for the film - so I went.

Everybody Wants Some!! begins almost exactly where Boyhood left off. At the end of Boyhood, Mason (Ellar Coltrane) drives to college for the first time. He is nervous, but hopeful. In Everybody Wants Some!!, we meet our protagonist driving to college for the first time. Jake, played by Blake Jenner, is a much more swaggering, confident version of Mason. And he looks much older (which he is).

Everybody Wants Some!! was billed as the sequel to Dazed and Confused. But Richard Linklater thought Dazed and Confused was too plot-driven - which is pretty funny if you’ve seen Dazed and Confused. So Everybody Wants Some!! has very little plot. Like many of Linklater’s films, the movie takes place over a short amount of time. In this case, it is the first few days before classes begin. This is emphasized with titles that count down the days until classes begin - which prompted NYTimes critic A.O. Scott to call the film, “the least suspenseful ticking-clock movie ever.”

Loosely, the film is about the search for identity. We follow a baseball team over a few days as they try on the clothes and lifestyles of punks, cowboys, disco dancers, and hippies. Jake asks his fellow baseball players what the guys on the team major in - asking them for an identity. They tell him that his major isn’t important. He’s on the baseball team. He doesn’t need to select an academic group to be in. His girlfriend isn’t on a sports team so she identifies as a theater major. This encompasses her entire being in the film. Her friends are theater majors and they come with the stereotypes of theater majors. The film is a very surface-level portrayal of that search for identity. The characters coast through these different identities with little anguish. But college was full of anguish.

And this is my main complaint with Everybody Wants Some!! Being away from home for the first time is really hard. What do you want to do? Who do you want to be? Linklater addresses these questions, but with the glow of nostalgia instead of the ache of reality. It’s just a party. He had a great time making a film about this great time in his life.

One more complaint - there are many scenes of the baseball players talking to the women, who just listen, saying little. The women are just objects of sexual desire or props for the comedy. For shame, Rick! For shame.

The film has gotten a lot of good reviews. Is it because the critics are old, and men? What am I missing here?

At the end of the film, I said “I think I hated that.” I wasn’t sure, because parts of it were enjoyable. I laughed sometimes. Some of the scenes were perfectly executed. But overall, I thought the film was so unrealistic. However, my brother-in-law, who spent much more time in with dudes at his fraternity than I did at my women’s college, said it was too realistic. He walked out mid-movie. Either way, we both came to the conclusion - why do I need to see a movie about this?

[theculturalevolution]

Ten Reasons I Love High School Comedies

by David

I started thinking about high school movies after watching Me and Earl and the Dying Girl at home on disc. Not expecting a whole lot I grew more and more impressed as the film pulled off some difficult stuff -- smile to my face, even tears to my eyes—and pulled me in.  It was a difficult weekend -- I watched it alone in the house-- and a perfect movie to get me through, a winning tightope walk between the silly, the corny and the sublime, and a curious meta-scrutiny of the genre.  The quirky main guy’s quirky thing was producing stupid/funny pastiches of Art House Movies:  Eyes Wide Butt, Ate ½ (of my Lunch), (for Fellini’s 8 ½, of course), The 400 Bros, and Mono Rash (instead of Rashamon.)  Earl is different from the usual sidekicks – he’s black, and poor as well as the typically snarky and brutally honest; the beautiful, “mean girl” is actually empathic and generous – she is not ridiculed; and the eccentric dad (played by the great Nick Offerman) and the cool teacher are pushed to extremes of weirdness.  The pace is leisurely and unemphatic.  A charming and touching movie despite itself, it’s also a commentary on the conventions of teen flicks, and, ultimately, about the function of art in life. Great line about main character’s mom:  “She’s basically the Lebron James of nagging.”  

Here are ten reasons I love that genre:

   1) Cute Actors:  If you make one of these movies you’re going to need a bunch of young, fresh-faced, attractive people.  Frequently they’re unknowns and sometimes they are immensely talented.  Some of the stars who got a start in teen movies are Miles Teller, Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, John Cusak, Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer, Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, John Travolta, Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, Sissy Spacek, Harrison Ford, Matthew McConaughey, Ben Afflect, Parker Posey, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Shailene Woodley, Brie Larson, Winona Ryder, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Ellen Page.           Gold stars awarded if you can identify the movies in which each of these actors appeared. And bonus points if you can tag the Oscar nominees and winners – not for any of these movies, however, of course. (Maybe the 11th reason I love them is their disrepute with serious moviegoers.)  

2)  Hierarchical Structures:  High School provides social structures both formal (Administration, Teachers, Parents, and Students) and informal (school cliques – athletes, nerds, popular girls, stoners, etc.)  which mimic and comment on other more serious social structures – class, race, establishment vs antiestablishment, the haves and have nots.  They provide readymade equivalencies for 19th century England Jane Austen reboots.  See Clueless, a remake of Emma. Some even tackle Shakespeare.  You got your evil authority and representation of societal rigidity right there.  These structures provide built in tensions and conflicts with which we can identify: “No more teachers’ dirty looks!”  College movies lack this dynamic.  High School movies are all about limits and boundaries:  you can do whatever you want in college.  

3)  Funny:  We all know that teens experience extremes of emotions, so pure dramatic teen movies tend toward the bathetic.  But put on a satiric or comic twist and you can develop layers of sadness, rage, shame and love underneath that will be more powerful than the pure, unteathered raw emotion.         Plus I love the comedy.  It can be tender or goofy or raucous, because in these movies you can have a full range of character types, and you can mix emotions like crazy.  The comedy can be heartfelt and tender also because it comes from autobiographical observation – everbody involved in these movies experienced high school themselves.  

4)  Unity of Time and Space:  Aristotle prescribed drama be unitary in action, time and place – it take place in one day, in one place and be about one thing.  Like the world of most teenagers, locations in teen movies tend to be circumscribed and time periods tend to be limited.  Many take place in one long, mind blowing day (Ferris Buelers Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Dazed and Confused) or are formulated around the familiar, organic and comforting cycle of the school year.  There’s a poignant sense of loss in these movies -- the night ends, the school year ends, our youth ends.         Teen movies also tend to be limited in place.  We have the public space of the high school, a wonderfully complex building.  The classrooms are isolated and controlled and tend to be the seat of the student/teacher conflict.  There’s the Administrative Offices, frequently the seat of fascism, and then the labrynthian, undersupervised hallways and stairwells where anybody can run into anyone, and anything can happen – challenges, insults, fights, affirmations of love and make out sessions.  How many great high school scenes take place in the hallways.   And those fabulous theaters of humiliation:  the cafeteria, the gym, and the athletic fields.  The teachers’ lounge is a glimpse into enemy territory, where we spy on their foibles, their views of the teenages and their interactions with each other.  There’s usually the transitional space between the institutional and the private:  the teen hangout, and the automobile.  An entire treatise could be written about the car in teen movies.  I remember all those cars floating around town in American Graffiti.  They prefigure the Star Wars space vehicles.        And then there’s the private space:  the generic living rooms and kitchens and then the spectacularly inventive kid’s bedrooms usually self decorated with amazing collages and funky collectables and totally cool posters.  These express the inner self of these characters who are artistic and hip.  Parents and siblings are shut out.  Strangely not evident are the usual, real life piles of junk in the teenager’s room: clothes, books, albums, food wrappers, dirty socks and school papers growing mold.  I suppose the maids are allowed in on Tuesdays.    

5)  Hopeful:  Teen movies tend to be ultimately about growth, renewal and coming into yourself.  Bonds are formed, loving relationships (between friends, lovers and generations) are confirmed. You find out who you are and you’re ready and willing to go there.  The just are redeemed and the mean get their just rewards.  ...And then they all move on to college.  

6)  Emotionally Resonant:  Adolescence is a psychologically significant transition from childhood to adulthood characterized by dynamic interplay between extremes:  you development abstract reasoning while undergoing seismatic emotional lability; you form your own identity by trying on other’s identities; in a schizophrenic move you attempt to achieve independence and interdependence at the exact same time.  This can result in extreme reactions to authority, and to bat crazy hormonal imbalances; You’re experiencing chronic and simultaneous lust and guilt, brash recklessness tempered by fear and trembling.  HS is about mastering social, intellectual and romantic tasks: one is bound to fail many times.  What better subject for comedy can there be than this?          I’ve written earlier (“The Poetic, The Transgressive “) about the visceral openness of adolescent experience – everything is new and full of impact.  I have vivid and powerful memories of 1967 when I can’t remember lunch yesterday.  

7)  Director:  Due to above, adolescence is a salient and developmentally important time for the directors of these teen movies, who form their personalities, incubate their artistic sensibilities, and define their social status as quirky outsider, nerd, or master of ceremonies.  Scenes and situations spring from the director’s heart and mind.  On a visit to Austin to visit Molly, I met a woman going to her high school reunion.  She said that Richard Linklater was in her class and Dazed and Confused (best teen comedy title?) captured their experience exactly:  “It was just like that!” she declared.  Teen movies tend to be time specific, capturing the sights and sounds of a particular era.        Not exactly the same but Fast Times at Ridgemont High is NON-FICTION.  Cameron Crowe, a young, baby faced reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine (depicted in his Almost Famous) went undercover for a year at a LA high school.  He wrote the film and then he became a film director himself with the iconic teen comedy Say Anything to his great credit.          Literally or figuratively, these movies are autobiographical.  

8)  Audience:  Because I botched my high school years, I remain fascinated by high school life.  I want a redo. I went so far as to become a high school teacher, and then a psychologist who specialized in adolescence.  I loved observing this teenage stuff from the outside, in part because it was so painful and alienating from the inside.  I would be talking to a teenager and would think “don’t do that, man (in the unisex sense). I was there and I know.”  Because the work of high school is learning to handle all the stuff of adolescence, many feel that they would like to go back with the fantasy of knowing-what-I-know-now:  these movies give us all a chance for a time traveling do over.  Of course you are better able to handle high school later because of everything you learned through your trial and error earlier experiences.  Aren’t there a number of body switching teen movies, as well as that Never Been Kissed, all about a high school reboot.  I received this statement of great wisdom from a fortune cookie yesterday that spoke to this very issue:  “All things are difficult before they are easy.”

9)  Suburban: Teen movies are a microsm, and in the interest of establishing the universality of their microcosm, teen comedies tend to take place in generic middle class suburbs, removed from real world problems.  I know that there is exclusion in this assumption, but these movies mimic the adolescent self absorption by taking place in an unreal fantasy world.  Their charm is that they exist in an alternative universe without real external pressures (except getting into college) or concerns about politics or poverty or crime, where adults tend to be ancillary, ineffectual or even non-existent.  These are not the suburbs of soul numbing banality and emptiness.  These are the suburbs that I grew up in that had their advantages as well as their obvious liabilities.          I would argue that the way microcosms function is that they set up an artificial situation that is not the real world, but is a metaphor or analogy of the real world.  If they were not artificial and apart from the world then it would not be a microcosm.  Teenage society removed from reality mimic issues and concerns of the adult world rather than depicting the reality of the adult world.  It gives us a chance to isolate and abstract issues so we can look at them differently.  And suburban America is the perfectly bland place to make that happen.          These nether-communities on the edges of cities that offer escape from urban intensity, bordering on farmland and wooded area, but not rural, were a product of a number of forces converging after WWII --  affordable automobiles and newly constructed highways, GI’s returning from war and looking to get on with their lives, population growth (baby boomers were housed there,) and flight from urban complexity, poverty, and rural isolation.  In college I recognized that I was coming of age in the first generation raised in these hybrid communities en mass, and I looked forward to seeing what new kind of art we would produce, neither cosmopolitan nor pastoral.  In college I read John Cheever and John Updike, those lush lyrical voices of suburban life, but they were of a previous generation, whose work was really about the proto suburbs, those old small towns that ringed the cities.  While I believe that ET is the great suburban film statement, these teen comedies, for better or worse, are the suburban, cinematic genre.  

10)  Cool Music:  Teenagers live music – it’s the soundtracks to their existence.  When I was a teenager, I always had a song in my head.  Truth be told, I still do.  So it’s no wonder that teen movies have great soundtracks.  American Graffiti brought back pre-Beatles doowop, rock and roll and teen pop with a vengeance, and the Stoner Rock of Dazed and Confused totally set the stage, especially Foghat’s magnificent piece of ambling, cornball dreck, “Slow Ride.”  Pretty in Pink produced a genre defining New Wave soundtrack.  There’s a hilarious lip sync scene in Can’t Hardly Wait to “Paradise City,” and The Moldy Peaches in Juno. And who can forget that scene in Say Anything where, playing the great Lloyd Dobler, John Cusak holds up that (remember the 90s) boombox, bombarding sought after Ione Skye (singer Donovan’s daughter) with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”  I just saw that scene satirized on Bill Maher’s show last night.  And if it’s instantly recognizable 20 odd years after, it was right on target at the time.  And here is Lloyd’s answer to hyper conventional and achievement oriented Diane Court’s  equally success oriented father’s request to know about his career plans:

“I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”

I love these movies!

The Lists:   Antecendents: Catcher in the Rye – it’s the ur-novel of teenage alienation, and tearfully hilarious. The Life and Loves of Dobie Gillis – I vividly remember loving this show from my childhood, everybody my age does, and I have no idea whether it’s any good.  It’s a high school comedy.   Rebel Without a Cause –  the opera of teen identity formation

Worthwhile Teen Comedies in random order: American Graffiti – established the template Mean Girls – defined a phenomena:  female bullying Rock and Roll High School – (see Movies and Music) Porkys  -- add raunch to the formula and birth a sub genre American Pie Ten Things I Hate About You – adapts Shakespeare She’s All That – removes glasses, becomes beautiful Juno Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – the John Hughes portion of our program with his deracinated approach. The John Ford of the genre? 16 Candles The Breakfast Club Pretty in Pink Bring it On – class item of the cheerleader subgenre The Spectacular Now – teen alcoholism; sidesteps the cliches Dazed and Confused Fast Times at Ridgemont High – perfected the archetype Pretty Maids all in a Row – bizarrely perverse Clueless – tackles Jane Austen Can’t Hardly Wait The To Do List Superbad – Judd Apatow’s group’s effort (see also Freaks and Geeks) Ghostworld

Rushmore -- oddness

Heathers -- black comedy Back to the Future -- sci-fi Valley Girls Easy A – tackles sexual hypocrisy and Nathaniel Hawthorne Risky Business – tackles capitalism Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Cooley High – add African Americans Revenge of the Nerds Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist – I actually read this charming YA book after seeing the charming movie.                                                                       Carrie -- Though not exactly a comedy, this excellent film was enormously influential in the teen comedy genre.                                      And Gregory’s Girl -- An adorable Scottish teen movie .                                                                                                                      

                                   4/30/16 

[theculturalevolution]

My latest guilty pleasure

By Molly

On a recent JetBlue flight, I started watching this show on Bravo. I rarely watch reality television, especially on Bravo. I find most of it pretty boring. They replay the same footage over and over. This show that I happened upon was different. I thought it was so funny and delightful and silly. I later found out that I was watching Vanderpump Rules, a spin-off of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The show focuses on the staff of Sur, a restaurant owned by housewife Lisa Vanderpump.  Luckily on my flight back, there was a Vanderpump Rules marathon. And... I was hooked. 

Right after I started watching this show, the New York Times published this piece - claiming that Vanderpump Rules is great because the characters seem to have no ambition. Naomi Fry argues that the show represents stasis  - it’s enjoyable because the cast is not working very hard. It helps us relax in a society that pushes constant work. 

I would argue that this stasis helps the show because in other reality shows, as the characters become more famous, they also become more guarded. This does not seem to happen on Vanderpump Rules. Vanderpump Rules is so enjoyable because the stars of the show do not have business ventures they need to protect by being discreet. They admit to all on camera - including incidents that they could have hidden from producers. I have looked into how fake the show is - but I really think that the stars just can’t be that good at acting. Really - they seem to be constantly drunk and then hilarity ensues. And it’s a delight to watch. 

Some favorite quotes: 

I've taken up reading books. - Lala 

I don't mean to sound conceited but I'm the white fucking Kanye West - James, the DJ

I take sketch comedy very seriously so it offends me when people think they can just, you know, do it - Ariana

Through therapy, I've learned to not be so confrontational, but getting in Ariana's face right now is going to be really fucking therapeutic - Kristen

[theculturalevolution]

Top Ten Songs

By David

On an Autumn day in 2014, these were my ten favorite all time songs. I know that 50 or 100 lists without overlap could have been produced, but but this was it on that particular day.

1) Midnight Hour – WilsonPickett 2) Ain’t No Way – Aretha Frankin 3) Christmas – Darlene Love 4) Dark End of the Street– James Carr 5) A Change is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke 6) Walking in the Rain –The Ronettes 7) Dock of the Bay –Otis Redding 8) You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling – The Righteous Brothers 9) When a Man Loves a Woman – Percy Sledge 10) You’re All I Need to Get By – Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell

[theculturalevolution]

2015 Pop Culture Year in Review

by Molly

2015 was quite a year for me - I finished graduate school, got married, moved across the country, changed jobs, got a dog. And watched a lot of TV.

This year marked the end of Mad Men, Glee, and Parks and Rec, all of which had ups and downs but certainly contributed to pop culture over the past 6+ years. Pretty Little Liars finally revealed A. FINALLY. And we saw even more shows on non-traditional television. 

Since there is just so much media and so much of it is great, here is my little slice of what I most enjoyed watching from 2015.

Television

10. The Grinder - This show is actually really funny. Rob Lowe does such a good job of playing a diva and it is amusingly meta. So far, they’ve been riding on this shtick of a show within a show and I’m not sure how long it can play out, but it has potential. And who doesn’t love seeing Fred Savage back on TV?

9. Certain skits from Key and Peele and Inside Amy Schumer - Not all of Key and Peele’s and Amy Schumer’s skits appeal to me - but overall - they are among the most insightful and pointed commentaries on feminism and race in the US right now.

8. The Jinx - Robert Durst is so fascinating and so creepy. Director Andrew Jarecki follows in Errol Morris’ footsteps by creating a truth-seeking documentary. At first, Durst is like Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known - a slippery fish who won’t admit his wrongs. But by the end, do we get the redemption from The Thin Blue Line? That’s yet to be determined. Either way, the storytelling is powerfully executed.

7. Brooklyn 99 - This show is pretty formulaic, but the formula works. Andre Braugher is always great. Joe Lo Truglio is always great. Andy Samberg is often amusing. Chelsea Peretti is often amusing.

6. The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Who didn’t have this theme song stuck in their head for the first half of 2015? No one. You can see Tina Fey’s fingerprints all over this one.

5. Master of None - Everyone said this show was great and not very funny. I agree with that statement. This show did a wonderful job of presenting the shades of gray in growing up. Marriage? Kids? The changing relationship with your parents? The episode Mornings is one of the most beautiful and realistic depictions of a long-term relationship I’ve ever seen.

4. Jane the Virgin - Jane the Virgin perfectly executes delightful television. It’s funny. It’s charming. It’s exciting. It’s dramatic. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. Just so fun to watch.

3. Broad City - At first I hated this show, but quickly I grew to love it. I wrote about it in a previous blog post 

2. Veep - I binge watched all four seasons this summer, and the season released in 2015 was definitely the best. Richard Splett (see previous post)

1. Bob’s Burgers - This is the show I watched most and loved best in 2015. Bob and Linda are mine and Zach’s extreme alter-egos. If you love fart jokes, this is the place for you.

Honorable Mention:

Seasons of shows that used to great but are now only okay - Game of Thrones, Modern Family, Orange is the New Black. I still watch all three. They are still doing their thing well, but not as well.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - Watching this show makes me think of when I would watch Friends with my parents and they’d say “I can’t believe this is on at 8 o’clock!” Raunchy and kooky, this show can be inconsistent, but is usually delightfully creative and original.

Fresh off the Boat - I wanted to recommend this show because I originally had no interest in watching it. I thought the title was offensive and thought the show would be as well. I tried watching it and found an amusing and clever take on asian stereotypes. And what saves the show is it is not ONLY about this. It is also just about a family that happens to be asian - and that is a rarity on TV.

Worst TV:

Truth Be Told - Unlike Fresh Off the Boat (or Black-ish I’m guessing since I don’t watch it), Truth Be Told tried to do this race analysis and ended up smacking everyone on the head with it. “Ooohhh we are so edgy that we talk about race….ooooh.” I couldn’t make it through one episode.

Once Upon a Time - Why do I watch this show? I don’t really know but I do. Maybe because it’s something that can be on while I’m knitting? I’ve never really felt the need to talk about it to other people or think about it beyond the time I spend watching it. This past year’s finale in May though was so clever and had the power to transform the show so that I was really excited for the fall, and then it fell flat.

Movies

1. Room - I thought this would be tough to watch and it was - but not in the way I expected. Room covers a very tricky subject without being exploitative or melodramatic. The film most analogous to it that I’ve seen is What Maisie Knew, in which we see a divorce through a child’s eyes. Room is from the child’s point of view, which at once makes the horror of captivity heartbreaking and whimsical. The cinematography and editing make you feel claustrophobic, which I thought was pretty amazing since I was sitting in a large, mostly empty theater. All the performances are excellent. I cried a lot.

2. Spotlight - When we left the theater, my husband turned to me and said, what an exciting movie about archival research! Like Room, Spotlight took a really tricky subject and looked at both the victim’s stories and the wider system to make a compelling and empathetic film without being melodramatic or exploitative. In a sea of great performances, standouts go to Michael Keaton and Billy Crudup, in my opinion. I am not as huge a fan of Mark Ruffalo’s crinkly emotional face as other people seem to be.

3. Creed - I. loved. it. Enough said. (Actually much more to say in longer blog post I have been obsessing over)

4. Mad Max: Fury Road - Mad Max: Fury Road is pure adrenaline. And the most feminist film to come out this year. Mad Max’s character was really just a vehicle for us to see Charlize Theron kick ass. 

5. The Tribe - When I left the theater I was so angry at my friend for making me see this film. It’s a Ukrainian film about a violent deaf gang at a boarding school. Sounds great - right? The filmmaker intentionally chose not to subtitle it, so the only people who would actually understand the dialogue are Ukrainian sign language speakers. The result is a return to days of silent film, while also putting the audience in the position of the deaf. We have to interpret everything in the story visually, which is an incredible experience. I’ve had many of the shots in the film seared in my brain all year.

6. Anomalisa - After listening to Terry Gross’ interview of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, I have greater appreciation for this film. It is entirely stop-motion, which means every shot, every movement, is deliberate and important. Through this animation, Anomalisa makes the mundane extraordinary.

7. Inside Out - This movie about a girl moving across the country came out just as I was about to move across the country and I could feel my emotions going all over the place. I love the incorporation of neuroscience into children’s entertainment. I’m curious if this film will affect how children (and adults) think about their emotions and neural processing.

8. Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Unlike other films on this list, this film didn’t really break barriers or transform cinematic storytelling or touchingly depict the evils of humanity - but it did give us some new Star Wars action figures. It was just overall I think a good adaptation of the original Star Wars film for a new audience. I liked that there were slightly more women. It had really good production design. And it was entertaining. And I love Adam Driver.

9. Tangerine - This movie got a lot of press because it was shot entirely on iPhones. Beyond that, it also breaks barriers by starring two transwomen. I enjoyed the saturated colors of the California streets, the loving and silly friendship between the two women, and a glimpse into the fringe populations of Los Angeles.

10. Pitch Perfect 2 - This was not the best movie ever but I could have watched it for three more hours. The Pitch Perfect movies are just so fun!

Books

(Not from 2015, but of what I read in 2015)

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafòn

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

Case Histories - Kate Atkinson

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

On Such a Full Sea - Chang Rae Lee

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

Crow Lake - Mary Lawson

Are You My Mother? - Alison Bechdel

When Will There Be Good News? - Kate Atkinson

Music

I really don’t feel like I can comment on music this year. I didn’t listen to enough of it and I’m not an expert. All I will say is that Uptown Funk never got old and this was the year I learned about country music. Also Hotline Bling happened. 

[theculturalevolution]

The Year in Culture (mostly movies)

by David

1) Spotlight:  This workmanlike and modest film is exciting in its tautness and the efficient competence of its script, direction and acting.  Despite its good intentions this old fashioned movie is rousing and heart-rending.

2) Clouds of Sils Marie: What year did this film come out?  See my previous post.  Still haunting.

3) Timbuktu:  What Molly said. beautiful, fascinating, sad.  See it with Wadija for a treatise on the impact of Islamic fundamentalism on a moderate culture. 

4) Mad Max: Fury Road:  This is why they’re called motion pictures.  Visceral, combustible, primitive, mythic.  Loved the look, loved the allusions to Westerns and Metropolis.  Tolstoy said “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” A stranger comes to town!   

5)  The Big Short:  Part of the joke (and point) is that this movie makes the unintelligible intelligible.  I loved the always impressive Christian Bale (Is he the best male actor working right now other than Daniel Day Lewis;  what about  Sean Penn, Andrea adds, but with SP, I ask "what have you done for me lately besides interviewing drug lords?” )  Melissa Leo nails her tiny bit, and Steve Carrell is working deeper and deeper.  Docked a position because the heros are driven by the same greed that motivates the miscreants.  This subject is better covered in the documentary Inside Job, and less well covered in the excessive Wolf of Wall Street. Watch them as a triple feature and you'll put a gun to your head.

6) Love & Mercy:  While writer Michael Alan Lerner used 5 actors and an actress to play Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, he uses only two actors to play the less complex Brian Wilson in this biopic with its tight focus on two distinct time periods.  Most biopics are ruined for me when they cover a lifetime and have to find a kid that looks like the main actor (who sort of looks like the bio's subject) which is usually pretty funny, and then they have to use makeup to age the actor which generally looks stupid and depressing.  

John Cusak communicates pathos and vulnerability within the limited emotional range of the post psychotic Wilson.  Movies about artists generally convey the drive that made them successful and the obstacles they had to overcome on their career path (drugs, relationships, etc..) This film does more;  it successfully depicts the artistic process of creating music. Love and Mercy might have benefited if it offered a more nuanced view of the battle between Melinda Wilson, Brian’s second wife, and Eugene Landy, his therapist:  maybe she was a bit of a gold digger and maybe he cared about Brian a little and wasn't all about power.  

7) The End of the Tour:  Another focused biopic, moving and quiet, that exploits the dynamics and discomfort of the celebrity interview to comment on writer and subject David Foster Wallace's themes:  art, celebrity, mass media and pleasure.  Who would have thought Jason Segal could pull this off. 

8)  Ex Machina:  This sleek film grafts the soul of a new machine onto Classic Noir.  Stunning debut for Alicia Vikander.  

The following two documentaries exploit our increasing (and amazing) access to technology which creates bizarre intersections between the public and the private.  In the first film we magically and disturbingly view moments of great intimacy.  In the second we hear distinctly private thoughts of a public person.  Both of these films position the viewer as voyeur.  In our own daily lives social media thrust us into that position:  we walk that line between participant and voyeur in Facebook and its ilk.

9)  Amy: is a touching portrait of uber-trainwreck Amy Winehouse, made even more arresting by the almost exclusive use of cell phone video.  First you think “how did they film that;" then you realize that these scenes were filmed by friends and family, which amplifies this movies exploration of media, psychopathology and celebrity.  

10)  Listen to Me Marlon: With Brando's privately recorded reflections on a tumultuous life and career accompanying archival footage, this documentary investigates Brando's central concern:  truth and lies in acting and life.  Whether he is the greatest screen actor of all time is open for debate (what about Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Lawrence Olivier, Charles Chaplin or Meryl Streep?) Indisputable are his several towering performances -- chief among them is the startlingly empathic, transparent depiction of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront that is really like nothing else that came before and altered everything after -- and his powerful cinematic presence:  I defy you to look at anyone else when Brando in on screen. 

Best old movies seen: 

Pather Panchali -- Unavailable for 20 years.  Worth the wait.  Stunning.

George Washington -- Wait for The Cool List write-up.

Red River -- As good as I remember .  It’s big!

Of course I have seen just a fraction of this year’s worthwhile films.  Perhaps I’ll post a second list like I did in 2015 as I catch up. 

I feel even less able to offer usable information about music and TV.  As noted in my Taylor Swift post, I have stopped pursuing new music, but this is the stuff that has been thrust on me during the past year.  Most are from old favorites except the deeply old-fashioned Courtney Barnett who, though she offers a unique approach to lyrics, is an amalgam of Gods Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and the odd Father John,

Complicated Game -- James McMurtry -- excellent songs;  he’s always been sort of off my radar, but this impressed me.  

Stuff Like That There -- Yo La Tengo -- lovely

Can’t Forget -- Leonard Cohen  --  he’s become a consumate live performer

The Best of the Cutting Edge  1965-1966  -- Bob Dylan -- reinventing rock and roll, in love with language

Something More Than Free -- Jason Isbell

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit  -- Courtney Barnett

Shadows in the Night -- Bob Dylan -- you forget how musical this guy is

I Love You, Honeybear -- Father John Misty

Starwars -- Wilco

The Blade --  Ashley Monroe

I liked appearances by First Aid Kit, and Field Guide.  And clearly concert of the year was Loretta Lynn at the Moody Theater in Austin, Texas with Molly, Andrea and Zach. Andrea and I met in 1980 at a showing of Coal Miner’s Daughter :

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” ― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

My best music purchase this year has been an epic box set by the titanic force of nature:  Hooker.

And old stuff I’ve discovered or rediscovered is Illmatic by Nas, Life After Death by The Notorious BIG, Reasonable Doubt by Jay Z, and the first two Stooges albums. 

TV shows viewed and appreciated: Justified, Transparent, Game of Thrones, Mad Men,, Modern Family, Blackish, Louie, Bill Maher and John Oliver

Spectacular books read this year (with no pretense of currency):  Rich and Strange -- Ron Rash (stunning short stories about rural North Carolina), By Night in Chile -- Roberto Bolano (enitre book is one paragraph,)  if on a winters night a traveler -- Italo Calvino (a book about books -- very experimental), The Rest is Noise -- Alex Ross (far reaching synthesis examines the history of Classical music composition in the 20th century.)

Roberto Bolano

Excellent books:  The History of Rock and Roll in Ten Songs -- Griel Marcus, The Murder Room -- P.D. James, Absurdistan -- Gary Shteyngart.

Solid but not as good as their priors:  Freedom -- Jonathan Franzen, The Whites -- Richard Price.

And disappointing:  The Goldfinch -- Donna Tartt -- Dickens was a genius; her not so much.

1/24/16

[theculturalevolution]

MOVIES AND MUSIC

by David

Best Musicals (in chronological order)

Any Fred Astaire/Ginger Rodgers Movie – they made ten in the 30s and they’re interchangeable if interchangeable is a complement (i.e. consistently fantastic) like P.G. Wodehouse, Elmore Leonard or John Lee Hooker; each perfects a limited stylistic domain. Astaire’s dancing, of course, and his singing and acting, all seemingly effortless, make him one of the greatest American artists.  Ever.

Golddiggers of 1933  (1933) – Busby Berkely’s mind altering high camp produced dance routines that could exist only on film. “We’re in the Money”

The Wizard of Oz (1939) – obviously iconic.  It exemplifies the magic in movies.

Pinocchio (1940) – Best Disney cartoon.  First movie I ever saw in a theater. “When You Wish Upon a Star.”  

Singing in the Rain (1952) – “We’re singing and dancing in the rain!”

West Side Story (1961) – compelling artifice; stylized, corny, and modern

My Fair Lady (1964) – stately artifice

Mary Poppins (1964) – Julie Andrews’ revenge on My Fair Lady achieves wonder and charm, and it’s message of liberation resonated with the 60′s.  Best kids ’movie ever?

Cabaret (1972) – perverse artifice breaks the fourth wall implicating the audience

Hair (1979) – by transposing this hippy artifact with historical distance, and ramping up the frenetic energy (choreography by Twla Tharp), Milos Foreman successfully remakes The Wizard of Oz (New York City becomes Oz to this Kansas denizen) into the most successful Pop movie musical I can think of.  (Quadraphenia and The Wall are worthy attempts, though.)

Worst Movie Musical:

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers:  Makes a satire of movie musicals unnecessary

Best Concert Films: 1) The Last Waltz  (1978) – Ace, spectacularly dynamic director, Martin Scorcese, pairs with an amazing A-list of rock heroes, backed by the tightest backing Band in the world who have some of their own, heartfelt, seminal songs, and the greatest concert movie of all time ensues.  This film was directed which means that shots and camera angles were determined beforehand: you’re looking at what you should be looking at, and the editing supports the music rather than creating its own frenetic pace.  So much live music is filmed in a chaotic and random way.  You observe The Band members communicate with each other on stage – nods, smiles, jokes, catching each other’s eyes – responding to the various guests they’re accompanying.     Moments of note: *With Robbie soloing, Ronnie Hawkins fans Robbie’s guitar with his hat in a humorously self-consciously corny gesture – “Smokin’, Robbie, smokin’!” *The usually stolid Van Morrison kicking into the air during a riff – “One more time!” – and it feels so good, he does it again, and again.  In the background, The Band are visibly delighted. *And, again, the aged and earthbound Muddy Waters jumping with enthusiasm and passion as he closes his song, The Band laughing and astonished. *Neil Diamond’s Vegas blue suit, entirely out of sync with the rugged hippy wear everybody else is sporting. *Joni Mitchell’s stern looks as Neil Young falls all over her during the finale in his drug induced stupor.   *Dr. John’s slyly salacious “Such a Night.” *At his entrance, the downward tracking shot that catches first the long red feather and then the white hat Bob Dylan wore.  Observe how the Band members watch Dylan raptly to figure out what he’s doing so they can follow.

2) The TAMI Show (1964 no real theatrical release; unavailable for viewing until 2010) – A survey of the various, mostly marvelous music content of AM radio c.1964:  the preppy Beach Boys, the glamorous Supremes, the presumably suave but actually quite gawky Marvin Gaye, little powerhouse Leslie Gore, deservedly obscure Gerry and the Pacemakers and many more. The technical primitivism of this show spoke to the time and the perception of rock and roll as “music for you kids” as Ed Sullivan would say.  Manic, poorly choreographed and inappropriately distracting Go Go dancers almost ruin some of these acts, and the corny hosts, Jan and Dean, are strictly amateur, but it all turns out to be a big hoot, and a delightful nostalgia trip until James Brown blows apart the screen with tension, passion, ambition and arrogance in his undeniable performance.  The young and somewhat sheepish Rolling Stones mistakenly chose to follow him.  Watch Mick tentatively attempt a few of JB’s dance moves.  

3) Ladies and Gentleman, the Rolling Stones (1973; first available on disc in 2010) – The World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band at their pinnacle with their best guitarist who wasn’t Keith Richards (that would be lyrical lead guitarist Mick Taylor.)  In The TAMI Show (see above) they were a groove band par excellence, riffing in a loose, supple roll that could go on forever.  In this 1973 incarnation, taking the torch for their peers – The Beatles and Bob Dylan – who had both withdrawn from the competition, and coming off their Olympian string of albums, Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, they learned drama and dynamics, engulfed in their personas as the Princes of Darkness, building the songs until they explode.

4) Monterey Pop (1968; box set 2002) – Document of the first big rock music festival which kicked off the 1967 San Francisco Summer of Love, and which lead to Woodstock in 1969 and Altamont in 1971 (both of which have their own movies.)  This trilogy of rock festivals chronicle the Rise and Fall of something I’m not brave enough to guess at, but Monterey was where music defines itself as an encompassing culture beyond mere diversion.  The original theatrical release of Monterey Pop was fine, – but the expanded version contains a disc of additional performances – check out the wired Mick Bloomfield and the Mommas and Pappas who organized the festival and who demonstrated unexpected grace and charisma in their extended performance.  A number of acts emerged from the Festival as superstars through sheer power of talent and personality – The Who, Janis Joplin and the two doomed giants whose entire performances are documented on the third disc of this set – Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix.   The latter two explore the extremes available for black artists of that time through passion and tenderness, creation and destruction. 

5) Stop Making Sense (1984) – A most humane director, Jonathan Demme, and a most inhumane band, The Talking Heads (c.f. “Psychokiller,”) find shared purpose in the exuberant sense of community in this concert.  It begins with one strange man in a strange suit on stage singing above referenced song, and, gradually joined by others over the set of songs, concludes with an exhilarated troupe of dancers, singers and musicians bouncing around stage to loud, ecstatic sheets of polyrhythms.  

Honorable Mentions:  Leonard Cohen in London, anything with Bruce Springsteen who is pretty universally terrific, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, No Nukes, Heart of Gold with Neil Young.  

Five Memorable Musical Moments in a Non-Musical Movie: A song in a movie can telegraph feelings or ideas.  It can be used very effectively but can also be a lazy way to communicate things unearned. I just saw Rikki and the Flash, and wonder if that’s what’s going on in that movie.  Music was certainly used very effectively.  (In no particular order): 

In America (2002) – “Desperado” – The serious ten year old Christy sings this song that draws on American iconography at her school talent show in a clear and sweet voice.  You hear her vulnerability and her resilience, and recognize this family’s status as outsiders and their desire to remake their lives.  

Jerry Maguire (1996)  “Free Falling” –  Driving in his car after making a move that could destroy his career, Tom Cruise sings along full force as this emblematic song comes on the radio:  the terror and joy of freedom.

Jules and Jim (1962) – devastating French beauty plays the guitar

Before Sunset  (2004) – alluring French beauty plays the guitar

Lost In Translation (2003) – Expressing the inexpressible through karaoke, Scarlett Johansen sings the sexy “Brass in Pocket” and, completely out of character for the actor who achieved fame playing a sleazy lounge singer, Bill Murray sings the uber-romantic “More Than This,” with complete sincerity.  

My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) –  Of course the show stopper is the hilariously absurd “I Say a Little Prayer” at the lobster restaurant.  Absolutely brilliant!  But completely winning and more important in terms of character revelation and plot development is Cameron Diaz’ karaoke “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.”  Her ability to go with a joke turns awful into winning.   And the awful is very funny.  

The Blue Angel (1930) – Marlene Dietrich “Falling in Love Again.”  Indelible.  

Great Fiction Films about Music: (random order)

This is Spinal Tap (1984) – duh I’m Not There (2007) – metaphysical examination of Bob Dylan as a creator of personas The Buddy Holly Story  (1978) –inspired, career performance by Gary Busey blazes.   High School Confidential (1958) – bizarre high-school-beatnik-undercover-drug-agent movie

American Hot Wax (1978) – Exciting Alan Freed movie, chubby Tim McIntire shines. The Idolmaker (1980)– Ray Sharkey’s intense performance elevates this movie about early days of Rock and Roll.   Sid and Nancy (1986)– Beautiful, weird, sad, absurd, definitive punk movie. Control (2007) – beautifully photographed and acted (Sam Riley) Joy Division biopic Saturday Night Fever (1977) – The sociology of disco, made a star of JT, much better than it needs to be.   Payday (1973) – Rip Torn as a demonic country singer Rock and Roll High School (1979) – Cheesy high school flick starring The Ramones, as goofy and cool a band as ever existed.  What more could you want.  “I just wanna have some kicks, I just wanna get some chicks.” Honorable Mentions (and too obvious for this list) – A Hard Days Night and The Harder They Come

Music Documentaries:  A subject too vast to consider here and now.

9/25/15

[theculturalevolution]

My return to pop culture

By Molly

For those who read this blog regularly, you may have noticed that my dad has been the one holding down the fort. Well that’s because I was finishing graduate school, getting married, and moving across the country. But I’m back now and have fallen full force back into my love of pop culture. And it certainly helps that I’m living in the live music capital of the world and have lots of time to watch things. Here’s some of the best media I’ve been consuming.  

Loretta Lynn - I moved to Texas, and what better way to celebrate my new home than fall in love with country music. I never ever thought this would happen, but it has. My parents came to visit and we went to see Loretta Lynn. I would not exist were it not for her. My parents met at the movie theater seeing A Coal Miner’s Daughter. So I finally watched the movie and saw her in concert. I am very happy that my parents met at a movie about such a feisty and strong woman. I recommend “One’s on the Way” to get a sense of Lynn’s blue-collar feminism.

Red Dirt Music - A lot of country music is just pop music with a country twang. Red Dirt Music takes country and adds rock and roll. And mainstream music is currently devoid of rock and roll, so to find it you have to go to country. Just to underline this, Adam Levine claims that Maroon 5 is a rock band. I mean, come on. And by far, the most rocking performance at the Grammies last year was Miranda Lambert’s. Lambert is from Oklahoma, where Red Dirt music originated. I saw the Turnpike Troubadours perform here in Texas and they also blew me away.

Veep - I wasn’t that interested in this show for a long time. It seemed like a tired topic – politics? Julia Louis Dreyfus? The first season was okay, but I just binge watched and it kept getting better and better as they introduced more and more characters. And my favorite? Richard Splett played by Sam Richardson. I laugh after literally everything he says.

https://youtu.be/SLIxmVdb1Q4?t=11m13s

Jane the Virgin – It just started it’s second season, but I’m halfway through the first season on Netflix. It’s a soap opera, or telenovela, I should say. But Gina Rodriguez as Jane is so incredibly charming and smart that you never feel this a guilty pleasure. Her Golden Globe was well deserved. It’s easy to watch, but self-aware enough that it simultaneously embraces and mocks conventions of the telenovela.

Broad City – You probably already know how funny this show is – but in case you don’t, you should. Lena Dunham and Girls got so much press at the time, but Broad City also depicts girls in their early ‘20s in New York and it is just so much more enjoyable and funny. Watch it. Don’t watch Girls.

[theculturalevolution]

2014:  ALTERNATE REALITY

by David

I’m not a film critic, or a person with free time, so I tend to catch up with movies well after their release, usually on disc at home.  Not ideal – I love the vastness and intimacy of the movie theater; you get lost in the movie, experience it as a dream.  But I underrated the quality of movies in 2014 because I missed so many good ones.  Here’s an alternate best-of list.  The first two are gems.

I watch these movies on my amazing plasma tv with my new blu ray player, so despite their being viewed at home, their visual impact is startling.  Many of these films employ a hard edged, urban-type photography with saturated, hallucinatory colors that serve to intensify the sense of subjectivity – these films provide a visual correlative for the skewed psychological states of their protagonists.  I found this in Nightcrawler, Inherent Vice, A Most Violent Year and A Most Wanted Man. 

Mr. Turner is Mike Leigh’s masterpiece companion to Topsy Turvey.  While most historical films just put contemporary characters in period dress, Leigh reminds you of the historical divide between our times and the 19th Century.  Leigh stock actor Timothy Spall so inhabits his titular character that he makes Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne look like Rob Schneider. 

Clouds of Sils Maria – Like Birdman, a film about the relationship between life and art that is, in some ways, even more mysterious and rich than the Oscar winning movie.  All the Olivier Assayas films I’ve seen – Clean, Irma Vep, Summer Hours -- are quietly potent. 

A Most Wanted Man – Phillip Seymour Hoffman will break your heart again with his performance and the tragedy of his loss.  His rumpled agent is cynical but not cynical enough.

Inherent Vice – Quirky, minor Paul Thomas Anderson that will remind you what an expressive and interesting director he is. 

A Most Violent Year – Wonderfully evocative, emotionally and intellectually complex NYC story with Oscar Isaac, post Llewyn Davis, showing he can do desperation many ways. 

Whiplash -- How good could a movie with anxiety as its primary emotion be?  Very!

Interstellar – A more literal take on space travel akin to that 60’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It’s better and more moving than you’d think.

Nightcrawler – Its look and a feel calls Taxi Driver to mind. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance takes this black comedy thriller to odd places.

Goodbye to Language – Visually luscious, intellectually prickly Godard cinematic essay with a cute dog performance.  He’s still pushing boundaries.

Gone Girl – Give this a try as a satire.   

The Humbling – Like Birdman, a film about a breaking down actor.  This one contains a surprisingly nuanced and vulnerable performance by Al Pacino.

Ida -- Austere, serious, haunting Holocaust-related movie full of silence, about memory, identity and guilt.  To its disadvantage I streamed this film and watched it in segments, alone, all of which diminished the movie.  But as I now reflect on it, images and characters vividly come back to me.  Beautifully photographed in black and white, an early 6o’s setting, I noticed the framing.  Frequently the top half of the screen would be filled with sky or bare walls or something empty with the people crowded into the bottom half.  Was that about Earth and Heaven? Or a manifestation of the film’s silence? I wish I had seen this in a theater. 

And I’m not done yet.  I still haven’t seen Molly’s fave Snowpiercer yet.  Or Timbuktu.

9/6/15

[theculturalevolution]

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

by David

Nobody is counting, obviously, I don’t know how I could, but Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys may be the album I’ve played the most.  I’ve been listening since 1966 when it was released and still listening now, 49 years later (despite, might I add, its dumb title and unattractive album cover), because it’s gorgeous, complex and, most important in terms of its staying power,  elusive:  I have difficulty encompassing the album.  Some albums I love, I can play through in my mind, track by track.  I can’t do it with this album. Many great rock albums aim for singleness of effect.  Not this one.  There is a distinct but difficult emotional valence here.  The songs have unusual titles, complex melodies that echo from song to song, abrupt shifts. There are two instrumentals. For a time I thought that the greatest Beach Boys statement was “Don’t Worry Baby” with its thick Specterian production, vulnerably direct lyrics and sublime guitar solo.  A cocky but insecure narrator appreciates his girlfriend’s reassurance the night before a drag race:  he doesn’t say “don’t worry baby” to her, she says it to him.

  But that song was just a dry run for Pet Sounds, which charts life’s course from innocence to experience:  it begins with a teenage couple imagining perfect adult love in “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” as the Platonic merger of their separate identities (“I wish that every kiss was never ending,”) in a world that reflects their purity: “ And wouldn't it be nice to live together/ In the kind of world where we belong,” (I realize that the song is also about teenagers who want to have sex.  I was thinking of doing an entry about songs of teenage horniness – “I Think We’re Alone Now,” and “Go All the Way” being leading candidates – but then realized that every rock song is about teenage horniness.) The rest of the album explores and eventually refutes that fantasy of blissful love.  The album ends with “Caroline, No,” a leading candidate for the saddest song ever recorded, which observes “It’s so sad to watch a sweet thing die” , the death, perhaps of the soul of the female character in the first song.

Among the earlier songs there’s “You Still Believe In Me” where no matter how bad he screws up, his girl still loves and supports him, and “That’s Not Me” where forays into the world teach him that impressing others with independence and self-reliance is not as important as the girl he left behind.   There’s a bummer job on the boat “Sloop John B” (“This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on,”) and the silent, healing of their love communion in “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)”.  

In the later songs, he ponders the transience of love --“Here Today,” (gone tomorrow, of course) – his isolation as a searching individual – “I Know There’s An Answer” -- and his alienation from contemporary life in “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” 

The lyrics for Pet Sounds were primarily written by Tony Asher, an advertising jingle writer, taken from nowhere by Brian and then, after completion, plunged back into obscurity, but the songs were close collaborations between lyricist and composer: these lyrics expressed Brian’s feelings. Asher explained that they had "truly spontaneously generated a lot of those songs" from lengthy, intimate discussions centered around their "experiences and feelings about women and the various stages of relationships and so forth".

Pet Sounds associates innocence with peace, community and secure relationships that are pre-verbal (“Don’t Talk”) and, perhaps, presexual.  It is a safe and psychologically regressed place, womblike in its inclusion.  Experience is associated with alienation, loneliness, conflict and loss.  Journeys away from home are met with defeat and disillusionment (“That’s Not Me”, “Sloop John B.”), love leads to loss. 

It seems to me that two somewhat different theories about the interaction between innocence and experience operate in the context of this album.   The Christian version associates innocence with a prelapsarian state, with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, before the advent of evil and sexual knowledge.  Experience would, of course, be the opposite of that.  An alternate version, espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, posits that humans are born innocent and then corrupted by social institutions.  My sense is that William Blake in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience played with both of these ideas. 

 With Freud positing infant sexuality, and Lee Harvey Oswald terminating the golden age of Camelot, the latter of these ideals – the Rousseau version -- became the ethos of the 60s. Dramatized vividly in the beat writer Allen  Ginsberg’s poems, most notably Howl , rigid, soulless and repressive society again became the evil, and structure became the enemy. Innocents were those who saw things with fresh eyes, resisted society’s strictures, and sought all kinds of novel and extreme experiences through drugs or sex or whatever.

This Beat insight (arrived at through the Romantic Poets and the Transcendentalists – were not Wordsworth, Blake and Thoreau Hippy gods?) grew to dominate 60’s counter -culture with its hedonistic, anti-authoritarian bent: just a year after Pet Sounds, Jimi Hendrix asked “Are You Experienced?” and the Doors welcomed us to “Break on Through to the Other Side.”  Most music of this time valued freedom, licentiousness and risk taking.

And, perhaps, because it resisted this ideal, and undercut The Beach Boys’ own good-times- surfing-and-hot-rod culture, Pet Sounds did not succeed commercially.  Pet Sounds is one of the least sexual of albums. Brian Wilson feared this brave new world where relationships were fleeting, peer pressures to conform lead to uncomfortable and harmful behaviors : “That’s Not Me”,

        I wanted to show how independent I'd grown now         But that's not me …I once had a dream         So I packed up and split for the city         I soon found out that my lonely life wasn't so pretty

and the world away from home was a strange and frightening place, filled with isolation and narcissism.  Brian Wilson’s concept of innocence and experience seems closer to the Christian:  for him, experience and sexuality corrupt. Human’s natural state is the one closest to childhood and to home. 

While experimental musically and mind blowing in its willingness to set its own path, Pet Sounds expresses more disillusionment with mind expansion than it does with straight culture.  Gershwin was as much a musical model as John Lennon.  In this light, the monster hit follow up to Pet Sounds, “Good Vibrations,” with its brilliant embrace of hippy exuberance, can be seen as a retrenchment rather than an advance:  this song became the musical equivalent of the happy face.  The title of another follow up hit, “Do It Again” spoke for The Beach Boys’ rejection of innovation.   Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys could not sustain Pet Sounds’ truth.

The elusiveness of this album is the result of each song containing awareness of its opposite. Each song expresses both the longing for innocence and the destructive but robust force toward experience. The songs never sit still. The love songs all recognize the possibility of loss of love and the heart break songs all endorse the value of the love that was lost. Innocence is shadowed with its potential tragic loss, and experience is viewed in the light of the beauty of innocence gone.  The Beach Boys’ greatest love song, “God Only Knows,” sees love only in the negative: what loss of love would mean. It voices suicidal despair:  “The world would show nothing to me.  So what good would living do me.  God only knows what I would be without you.” 

This dance of opposites is reflected musically in the contrast between joyous group harmonies and the vulnerable individual voice, in the contrast between Mike Love’s hearty, frat-boy voice and Brian’s quavery falsetto, between middle and high register, and between lush  orchestral passages and solo instrument flights.  Dramatic shifts in tempo, mood and instrumentation amplify these differences. 

There has been a tendency of late, expressed clearly in that powerful film, Love and Mercy, to reduce these themes to autobiography, or, even worse, as manifestations of Brian’s psychopathology, his fearfulness and paranoia, his experience of the world falling apart around him.  Soon after making this album, Brian Wilson began his own disengagement with the world, and a regressive return to innocence, refusing to leave his home, and living in his own private sandbox. Literally.  While not untrue, this autobiographical focus minimizes the universality of these delicate feelings expressed in Pet Sounds of loneliness, fragility, loss, insecurity,  and yearning.  These feelings got lost somewhat in the bravado, aggression, ecstasy, absurdity, and good and bad vibes as the 60’s wound down, but I don’t think any other album captures these tender feelings with such gossamer beauty.

And beautiful it is.  There are transporting instances of magic:

the drum snap into full bounding harmony that opens “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”

the coda of “You Still Believe in Me”:  the group sings about crying in happiness “I want to cry… “ and then repeats it wordlessly four times, varying each passage, a gap, a false ending after each so you can’t believe it’s going to happen again.  It melts your heart

and the huge group vocal entrance after “Love is ...” in “Here Today”

the soaring melodies and heart beat bass of “Don’t Talk.”  A warm, liquid bass sound is achieved throughout the album – listen also to “God Only Knows,” “Caroline, No”,-- and the line “We could live forever tonight” echoing earlier words from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” but like a whispered hope

the richly varying textures of “Let’s Go Away for Awhile”

the swirling, chaotic sounds during the first line of ”I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” And later in that song, in the bent note Theramin solo where it’s difficult to tell where voice ends and instrument begins

and the hollow, doom-laden percussive sound in “Caroline, No,” a prayer over the Fall of Man.

[theculturalevolution]

“We’re Having A Party”

By David

It starts with a jaunty five note guitar figure echoed, more elegantly, by the string section, then Sam Cooke’s smooth, adult voice describes the teen party that’s happening.  With mundane details – “Cokes are in the icebox, popcorn’s on the table,” – he sets the scene.  Though there is excitement in the anticipation, his voice is tinged with melancholy.  “Me and my baby, we’re out here on the floor.” 

He instructs the DJ (”If you take requests now”) with desperation:  “Play that one called ‘Soul Twist,’” drawing out the first syllable, twisting the second with some grit, he savors all the sacred and profane implications of the title.  “Play that one called ‘I Know’” as if it contained the wisdom of the sphinx. “Don’t forget ‘The Mashed Potatoes,’ no other songs will do.”  Really?! “The Mashed Potatoes?”   “’Cause I’m having such a good time dancing with my baby.”   The world depends on it.

Then the song shifts to the entire group: “We’re having a party.  Everybody’s swinging.”  Repeat, repeat.  

Recognition of the transience of that moment of intense happiness makes it all the more precious.  There are other readings of this song – check out Southside Johnny’s exultant party anthem – but this is the first and the best.  No one layers emotions like Sam Cooke:  he has a hesitation and restraint in his voice that always allow joy and sadness to coexist: extreme emotions are tempered, humor undercuts anxiety.  The recognizable, but decidedly true insight – that happiness is fleeting and fragile, and we have to take it when it comes – is expressed simply, elegantly and subtly.  What more can we ask of a beautiful pop song.   6/30/15

[theculturalevolution]

Cool List V

By David

“Drunk in Love” - Beyonce

This song achieves its well-earned transcendence when Beyonce voice joins her husband Jay Z’s and inchoate passion, autobiography, celebrity gossip, and art converge.  The bass rumbles my rear view mirror.  “We be all night.”

Mets with best record in MLB on April 28, 2015

I know it’s only April, and I know it’s not really important in the scheme of things, but I’m surprised at how excited I am and how connected.  I’ve been a fan since the beginning (1961 and it’s been mostly downs over the year), but did not think I still had it in me.  I constantly check the scores on my phone. What great, childlike, primitive psychological space does team fandom occupy? It’s where emotion can run untethered to real world consequence, where group affiliation generates omnipotence, and where perpetual play (i.e. freedom) forbids death.

“Song for the Siren” -- Tim Buckley

Despite a late high school/early college adoration for Tim Buckley (yes, Jeff’s dad), I missed this simple, soaring song on the Starsailor album which followed the subpar Lorca and which I quickly dismissed.  There was so much else to listen to in 1970 (Layla, Let It Be, Moondance, After the Goldrush, Workingman’s Dead – what wonderful music -- among many others) and I kind of jettisoned Tim Buckley because he was the soundtrack for my inept adolescent romantic longings and indulgent despair.  “Song for a Siren” later came to me through an austere and haunting cover by This Mortal Coil, and then a lush and romantic one by Bryan Ferry.  Then I watched the charming but mild film Greetings from Tim Buckley and got a double CD Tim Buckley anthology which opens with this song in its spare arrangement.  I’ve been listening a lot recently.  Referring to the passage in The Odyssey, where Odysseus has the crew put beeswax in their ears and tie him to the mast so they will not succumb to the seductive sounds of the sirens and crash on the rocks, this gorgeous song about yearning evokes disparate elements – tides, a new born child, primitive life forms, death and a dream of a dream -- and welcomes the annihilation of self that is risked in love.

[theculturalevolution]

VINYL’S BACK

By David Music Hall mmf-2.2 Turntable; Spin-Clean Record Washer MKII; audioquest Anti-Static Record Cleaner; LAST Stylus Cleaner – Addendum to “Too Much Content” (where I explained how I got so many records.)  Yesterday we went out and bought a turntable at a high end electronics store.  We planned on buying a particular model, but then, in the store, we listened to the adjacent one which cost three times more, and it sounded really awesome, maybe three times better.  I wasn’t sure what a $1200 turntable sounded like.  It sounds great!  Amazing clarity and detail.  Who knew?  We did not purchase it, however, because I couldn't see spending that much, but we did get a great deal on the one we originally planned to buy – it was National Record Store Day after all -- and then walked out of the store with a record washing system, an anti-static and dust remover brush and a stylus cleaning kit.  We decided not to go with the cowhide turntable mat despite its revered status as a conversation piece. 

The salesman promised that played on our new turntable (with the cartridge upgrade) and cleansed with all this equipment (the record washer calls for distilled water) our huge album collection would now be listenable; in fact, revelatorally so. And, damn, if the guy wasn't right.  These albums do sound terrific again. 

In the old days of record albums some guys would only transport the record from the jacket to the turntable wearing latex gloves and a surgical mask, and some guys used the disc as an ashtray, Frisbee or floor mat when it wasn’t playing. I once purchased a copy of the first New York Dolls album from a bum store on Astor Place solely because it was the most destroyed vinyl platter I had ever seen, clearly used to cook heroin when it wasn’t wrecking record player cartridges.  

Andrea and I now plan to be totally anal with our records, washing them, drying them, cleaning the needle so we can listen to the warmth of that old technology. (And it does sound warmer!) Vinyl is back at Dave’s!     4/19/15