TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2013
Gary Clark, Jr. : These Boots Are Made for Rockin'
Last night Gary Clark, Jr. and band members played the Clive Davis Theater at The Grammy Museum after a video of Gary's sizzle reel for his album Blak and Blu and a discussion with Gary and his manager Scooter Weintraub, which was moderated by the museum's Scott Goldman.
My 2012 post on Gary went into his early influences and his start in his hometown of Austin, so I won't reiterate that history here, which Goldman also elicited. Gary did share his early vision of himself: "I wanted to be Snoop Dogg meets John Lee Hooker."
Here's the set list from the show:
1. Ain't Messin' Around
2. When My Train Pulls In
3. You Saved Me
4. Things Are Changin'
5. Please Come Home
6. Travis County
7. Numb
Numbers 2 and 7 slayed me, particularly in the small venue with its great acoustics and a clear line of sight from my seat in the second row, and no tall people with phone cameras in front. I only wish the museum had allowed Gary time for my favorite, Bright Lights, his debut song that had wowed everyone at the Crossroads Festival. (At one point Gary said, "It's gettin' real hot up here. I've been thinking about taking off my jacket, but I don't want to spend the time. So that's what's goin' on up here." And he gave us that smile. Everyone laughed, but later I realized that the museum must impose a time limit on performances, because Gary seemed inclined to give the audience another song when everyone clamored at the end, but Scott Goldman jumped back up onstage and whisked the band off, alas.)
I also really dig Gary's boots (John Varvatos?), which he has worn for all three of his shows I've seen in the past year. The photo of them at top was taken at Gary's sold out Wiltern show on 9/26 by my friend and concert buddy Linda Wake-Garza, rock photographer extraordinaire (to whom I'm indebted for alerting me to Gary's music). I should add that Gary's current tour is completely sold out.
So, a lot of disappointed music lovers will have to wait until the Gary Clark, Jr. train pulls in once again.
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FRIDAY, AUGUST 10, 2012
Jack White & His Beige Suede Shoes
Jack White appears to revel in surprise and the unexpected. He is one of those artists who possess what Keats called Negative Capability (click on my Favorite Quotes tab for the full reference)--the ability not only to tolerate, but to court uncertainty and mystery and ambiguity. Interviewer Robert Santelli (Executive Director of the Grammy Museum) asked White about his songwriting process on Blunderbuss. White described it at least three times as his pushing to "attack myself," by which he meant to put himself in situations in which he was expected to have the answers, but didn't. (It's no wonder that White reveled in what might happen when he finally got together with Jimmy Page and The Edge at the climax of It Might Get Loud--on his way to the stage to meet them in the film, he seems to relish the fantasy that it could end in a fist fight.)
White explained that when he worked with his previous bands, the songwriting process was quite collaborative. But the "hired guns" brought into the recording studio for what became Blunderbuss expected him to have the material and to tell them what to do. So White surrendered (some might say faked it), and just started playing. When the musicians would ask what was next, and White had no idea, he might just say, "It's an 'F,'" and go with it.
Sometimes White dreams songs, and he related a recent dream with vivid, archetypal imagery. He never used to write them down, thinking he'd remember them. He learned better.
White referenced something he's been reading titled Faking It (I presume it's Barker and Taylor's book, whose subtitle is The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music), and what really came through in the interview was White's own essential authenticity and the purity of his love for music. Yes, he is a raconteur who curates a consciously stylized image (at the end of the interview he quipped something to the effect of, "The shoes say it all," smiling down at his natty suede oxfords) and utilizes what might be perceived as hype or mere marketing ploys--the all-female and all-male alternating bands, for example, and sending records up in helium balloons.
But what White seems to be doing is employing the artifice to make music new to us--to make us take notice. (Not unlike Dylan, who was a strong influence on White and who went electric to similarly wake us from our dogmatic folk slumbers.) White acknowledged that all music comes out of previous music, but expressed his disdain for the "re-" concepts--terms like recreate, re-envision, re-interpret, and so on. White intrinsically understands that he needs to embrace and then to (fist?) fight with his forbears, as Harold Bloom posited in The Anxiety of Influence.
Decades ago I wrote a dissertation proposal on the Romantic poets' use of the long, epic poem as a means of transcending the more confessional sonnet form and using the self as a character in order to expand consciousness and avoid solipsism. Hence, for example, Byron's character Childe Harold, who was ironically perceived as simply autobiographical and who turned Lord Byron into the rock star of his age. Jack White is the rock star who seems to be playing with that role and its trappings in order to get at something that is elemental and enduring. But every generation needs new shoes, a new lens to make us see those eternal verities anew. Like Joyce's Stephen Daedalus, White's the artificer who acknowledges his debt to the past and strives to use his own voice to forge something that reflects the "uncreated conscience of [his] race."
White may have blunderbussed his way in forging his solo effort, but it resulted in one of the best albums of this year.
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TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2012
The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Moonrise Kingdom
Warning--spoilers ahead! In Moonrise Kingdom, director/co-writer Wes Anderson begins and ends with Benjamin Britten's "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra." Like Britten's piece, the film moves from the general to the particular, and then brings the discrete elements (or characters) back together again in the end in the tradition of classical comedy. The movie is almost Shakespearean, with its play within a play, its tempest, its pre-pubescent Romeo and Juliet.
Anderson focuses on his runaway 12-year-old leads, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), but through their brief idyll we come to know the variations of all of the key characters. Scout Master Ward (Ed Norton) is an unattached math teacher who considers himself a Scout Master first. (Anderson, in a recent interview with Elvis Mitchell, pointed out that most of the adults in the film wear uniforms, representing institutions, and that their hearts are not into "the thing they've been given." "They're all Fredos," Anderson quipped, referencing The Godfather. This is a good place to note that Anderson's co-writer on this screenplay is Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford.)
Scout Master Ward is divested of his stripes, so to speak, but in the end his heroics earn them back, he finds his girl (the switchboard operator), and he embraces his true calling. Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), an unrequited love in his past, lives what appears to be a lean bachelor life in a trailer, punctuated only by his affair with Suzy's mother, Mrs. Bishop (Frances McDormand). Sharp literally rises to the occasion in the final act of the movie and offers to become Sam's new foster father, saving him from the blues of Social Services (embodied by Tilda Swinton), and rescuing both Sam and Suzy from possible death by drowning or broken necks.
Mrs. and Mr. Bishop (Bill Murray, resplendent in madras) are attorneys who sleep in twin beds with a sturdy nightstand between them. But even they are able to duet in the end, providing counterpoint to Social Services with the threat of a lawsuit. And so, ultimately, there is synthesis; community is restored. Sam and Suzy carry on quasi-clandestinely, echoing the affair of Capt. Sharp and Mrs. Bishop, who have called it quits "for now." The storm is over; the lightning has effected a collective electroshock to the system. There is no orgiastic future in New Penzance (except perhaps for the corn crop), but homeostasis is restored. The siblings in the Bishop household--incorporating Sam--go back to their routines. Mrs. Bishop resumes communication via megaphone. The film seems to say that we are all very troubled children, but that somehow we abide, and the beat goes on....
What has struck me about this movie is how perfectly wrought its plot is--what Crane would describe as a "plot of action," meaning one which results in a "completed change" in the situation of the protagonist. Kingdom also has a subplot of "character," in which the Khaki Scouts, who have been Sam's nemeses, have a change of moral character and rally to his and Suzy's cause. (For the record, Crane's third category was plots of "thought," in which there's a completed process of change in the protagonist's thoughts and feelings.)
Every element in this film (especially production design, cinematography and camera movement, costume design), precisely contributes to the whole. I've seen the film twice now, and its integrity is a delight. There are no loose ends here; there is nothing superfluous. It's a formal gem.
I wish I could say the same for the state of plot in contemporary television, beginning with the show Lost and devolving most recently with The Killing. In terms of the Ericksonian stages of psychosocial development, if Moonrise Kingdom represents Integrity, the trend in television plots offers mainly Despair. But I'll save that rant for another post....
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SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2012
With and Without You
The therapist's job is always to foster a healthy attachment. The therapeutic relationship, we are taught, is supposed to offer the patient a "corrective emotional experience" (Franz Alexander). Yet, ironically, as Costin also points out in her book, the therapist must remain unattached to the results of therapy and not become invested in changing the person. Nonattachment being, she reminds us, one of the main spiritual principles of Buddhism.
Similarly, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion exhorted analysts to enter the therapy room each session without "memory" or "desire." In short, without an agenda. In practicums, therapists-in-training are taught to follow the client's lead, to track the client, to not distract, or avoid, or force an agenda. But then we do have an agenda, aka the treatment plan, whether it's for the client to begin relying on herself and so stop starving herself, or to function through depression, or to be better able to tolerate anxiety. If we're trained in Evidence-Based Practices, we're in most cases required to be more agenda-focused in the sense of utilizing techniques in a highly structured, time-bound manner. But we still cannot become personally invested in the outcome. Yet how can we not? (Therapists deal with this, and with their emotional responses to patients, by examining their countertransference.)
This is the psychotherapist's unique dilemma--to foster attachment, and to be attached and not attached at the same time. In some ways, though, this may be the key to any healthy/good/successful relationship. As David Schnarch points out in Passionate Marriage, a relationship requires two differentiated individuals--otherwise all you have is fusion. Differentiation (a term Schnarch borrowed from Murray Bowen) refers to the ability to maintain your unique self in relationships, and it involves balancing two basic forces or needs--the drive for togetherness and the drive for individuality. We're all wired for autonomy and attachment. Keeping these balanced is the trick. Schnarch's elegant premise is that, in order to have any kind of truly intimate relationship, you must be differentiated enough to tolerate the anxiety of constantly revealing yourself to the other without any assurance that the other will continue to love you.
Jack White, in his brilliant new song "Love Interruption," sings, "I won't let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore." One can't help but smile at the slight pause before "anymore":
That's the chorus. But the rest of the song is about the craving. We crave the intensity of love, or falling in love, but, alas, it is a "falling." An all-consuming, sometimes destructive, distraction. At some point we may lose ourselves. That fusion blights our souls and corrupts us. "You gave it all but I want more," U2 sang 25 years earlier..."I can't live with or without you."
I once had a patient who was so emotionally fused with his mother that he couldn't imagine how he could continue to live if his mother died. (And he would say "if," not "when.") Once, he had tried to individuate by fleeing from her to another country--you can run but you can't hide, as the saying goes. And then there are those who try to escape fusion by making non-attachment a way of life.
Starting in 1994, Leonard Cohen spent five years in a monastery (the Mt. Baldy Zen Center). He was ordained as a Buddhist monk and took the name Jikan, meaning "silence." Ha! Some wiser part of Cohen knew that he was not ultimately suited to this path. In fact, Cohen reported that his teacher Roshi told him that he knew how to work but not how to play, and so sent Cohen down the mountain to take tennis lessons.
As Cohen sang, "There ain't no cure for love." So we might as well let it roll us over slowly...and then learn to play with our beloved.
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THURSDAY, MARCH 8, 2012
Gary Clark, Jr.: "The Future of the Blues"
That's how Clark was introduced at the recent "Red, White and Blues" concert (videos here) at the White House (it aired on PBS on February 27), which also featured the likes of B.B. King, Mick Jagger, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, and Keb' Mo', among others. Clark performed "Catfish Blues":
Clark is a 28-year-old Austin native who counts among his influences Hubert Sumlin (for whose memorial Clark played recently at the Apollo), Curtis Mayfield, Nirvana, Outkast, Michael Jackson, and Joni Mitchell. My introduction to Clark's music was via "Bright Lights," the title track from his EP, which knocked me out upon first hearing. Initially it sounded like a new Black Keys song to me. But the guitar playing was way beyond Dan Auerbach's and more akin to that of Jimi Hendrix. Below is a video of Clark's thrilling performance of the song at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2010.
In an interview with GuitarTV Clark talks about his setup--he uses an Epiphone Elitist and a Fender Vibro-King. He owns all of his own publishing and songwriting. And he mentions that his album should be finished and released sometime in September.
Clark started playing guitar at age 12, did small local gigs around Austin, and eventually caught the attention of Antone's owner Clifford Antone, who helped promote Clark, who then began playing with such musical icons as Jimmie Vaughn. Clark even got an acting gig: he starred as a young electric guitarist in John Sayles' 2007 film, Honeydripper. In April 2011, Rolling Stone named Clark "Best Young Gun."
If 2011 was the year of Anna Calvi for me, 2012 is definitely the year of Gary Clark, Jr. The future of the blues is now.
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MONDAY, MARCH 5, 2012
I'd Love to Speak with Leonard
The man looked unmistakably like Leonard Cohen. I felt a frisson of panic and excitement. I put two and two together: I'd had friends who used to live on another part of this street in the early 90s, and they had told me that L.C. lived somewhere on the same street.
I went around the block and passed by again. Leonard looked over at me, and my car and I slunk off in embarrassment.
Was it really he? This was confirmed for me when Cohen's latest album, Old Ideas, came out early this year.
I knew that chair, that lawn, those stairs.
I later learned that it's no secret that this is Leonard's house, and that the photo was taken by his assistant around March 2011 (which you can read about here).
One day I stopped and snapped the photo below (I used an app to add the labels you see at the top of this post). I felt I had to somehow concretize the experience for myself. But also, on my commutes, the chair had become the objective correlative of all of my feelings about Leonard's work; I felt an affection for it and its patina. It could have been the chair with a dead magazine.
And every time I take that shortcut, I imagine what I might do should I ever see Leonard sitting out there in the morning sun again. Would I roll my down my window and simply blow him a kiss while gliding by? Dare I stop and approach that sportsman and shepherd living in a suit? Would the "lazy bastard" offer to show me his place and make me a cup of tea?
As Hemingway wrote, "Isn't it pretty think so?"
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MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2011
When the Walls Come Tumblin' Down
In Martin Scorsese's documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Paul McCartney reflects on the Beatles in the mid-'60s: "I think we kind of lost sort of our spiritual direction--not that we ever had one, but we lost it."
Cut to Davis Guggenheim's (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud) latest documentary, currently airing on Showtime, that chronicles how U2 re-thought and revived themselves after the critical onslaught post 1988's Rattle and Hum. They did this in a process that was fraught with conflict in Berlin, where the Wall had come down, and where they ended up, as Bono says in the film, building their own walls in Hansa Studios. "It wasn't that we found a sonic identity," says bassist Adam Clayton. "We found a spiritual identity. That was what we actually needed." Bono adds at another point, "There's a kind of faith that's necessary to move from one note to the other." Achtung Baby broke them down and brought them back together. Bono: "Achtung Baby is the reason we're still here now." The record was released in 1991, and this year marks its 20th anniversary.
One of the most touching moments for me was seeing Bono dancing with his wife Ali during the Rattle and Hum days, who reportedly remarked that Bono had become so "serious." "The boy I fell in love with [at age 15] was so full of mischief, so full of madness, and you were a much more experimental character--what's happened to you?" Bono remembers her saying.
Says Bono in the doc: You have to reject one expression of the band first before you get to the next expression, and in between, you're nothing. You have to risk it all." (And that takes Negative Capability.)
Part of getting to the next expression sonically was to find the spiritual by reviving the playfulness via poking fun at their own earnestness and turning it on its head with irony: accused of being full of themselves, U2--or at least Bono--took on the persona of the iconographic rock star: the glasses, the hair, the clothes:
But the true irony is that the pose produced something pure--"Even Better than the Real Thing," if you will. Every time I listen to The Edge's electronic blast that's the opening riff of Achtung Baby's first song, "Zoo Station," it's like a defibrillator to the soul. "In the cool of the night/In the warmth of the breeze/I'll be crawling around/On my hands and knees....Ready to let go/Of the steering wheel."
The record was reissued this month to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its release. It's been a joy for me to pull the CD from the shelf, to listen to it again, and to be able to thumb through the booklet and read the lyrics--some of the finest poetry of our generation. That's another reason to catch the doc on Showtime--Guggenheim captures how Bono often just skat sings "Bongolese" (Lanois' term) to melodies until the lyrics emerge, "trying to get to the vocabulary of the melody in sound." Ah, the Irish....
Just remember: Everthing You Know is Wrong:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoUSx2hWdWc
And here's a link to the full stream of the 2011 Achtung Baby tribute album:
http://www.slicingupeyeballs.com/2011/10/25/depeche-mode-so-cruel-u2-stream-achtung-baby/
SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011
Angels, Monsters, Replicants--We All Need Someone to Lean On
Peter Falk's recent death prompted me recall him in a memorable film, Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987, written by Wenders, Richard Reitlinger, and Peter Handke). In it, Falk plays himself--an actor in Berlin to make a movie about its Nazi past. But he is also a former angel who has traded immortality and a world of black and white for one of color and sensation...and death. In the scene below he reveals his former incarnation to an angel played by Bruno Ganz, who in the course of the film falls in love with a trapeze artist, a symbolic angel who will induce him to turn in his wings as well.
Wings of Desire is Wordsworthian in the sense that the angels are visible only to children; the angels are on earth to "testify, verify, preserve"-- but never to participate. They can't literally feel, although they are figures of empathy.
Which brings to mind what is probably my favorite film of all, 1982's Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples). In that movie, the "replicants" who have escaped to Earth are not equipped for empathy, since they are bio-engineered clones made to work in off-world colonies. They are hunted by "blade runners" like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), and the authorities have devised an interrogation tool, the Voight-Kampff, to measure eye movement in connection with emotionally provocative questions, as demonstrated in the stunning opening scene with Leon (Brion James) and Mr. Holden (Morgan Paull).
Yet the replicants do have empathy for each other, and perhaps even love: Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Daryl Hannah) are coupled by more than survival. If the two angels in Wings of Desire embraced life and, with it, death, the replicants' quest is to extend their lives--they rail against the dying of the light until, at last, Roy acquiesces in the gorgeous "Tears in Rain" speech:
Both films are essentially about the human condition, informed as it is by Death.
("Oh Death" rendition by Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, 1988; painting by Jan Toorop.)
In Blade Runner as well as Wings of Desire, the two species connect in a romance--in Blade Runner it's Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young), a new generation replicant who believes she's human, but she's simply been enhanced with the memories of her maker's niece. (I should also mention that, in one version of the film, it is suggested that Deckard might be a replicant himself.)
Rachael's so advanced a replicant that she can pass the standard Voight-Kampff. In the version of the film I heretically prefer, which is the one with the voice-over narration (I like its noir quality), Deckard and Rachael wing away together. It's not altogether the happy ending the studio thought, since, as Deckard tells us, he and Rachael didn't know how much time they'd have together, but, then, who ever does? Life and love are both the repudiation of Negative Capability and the ultimate embracing of it.
Which brings me to Another Earth (directed by Mike Cahill, written by Cahill and Brit Marling), a current low-fi film in which a young woman, "Rhoda" (Marling), is driving drunk the night that a parallel or second Earth appears in the sky; she looks out at it and ends up crashing into and killing the family of John Burroughs (William Mapother). When she's released from prison she attempts restitution by working as his maid (she was a minor when the accident happened, hence her identity was never disclosed). The course of their relationship is both improbable and expected, as both of them are living a kind of death-in-life; together they wonder about their parallel selves or doppelgangers on the second Earth, and about possible second chances at life.
Like some of the endings of Blade Runner, Another Earth's is ambiguous, but it's also a revelation. Or, as Anthony Lane described its final shot in The New Yorker, "mind-ripping." I'm not about to spoil it for you here.
P. B. Shelley believed that the key to life lay in death, in what was behind the "painted veil" of nature, which hinted at yet ultimately hid the secrets of the universe from us. And of course in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the doctor creates life from death: he scours the charnel and slaughter houses for his creation. But then Dr. Frankenstein is repulsed by his wretched creation and abandons him. The forsaken monster yearns for a kindred spirit who will accept him, and he pursues Frankenstein and forces him to make another being who will embrace the monster. As we all know, it doesn't work out.
We are all terminal cases, as Garp said; and to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, there ain't no cure for the search for love.
"So we beat on, boats against the current...." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Wings of Desire is Wordsworthian in the sense that the angels are visible only to children; the angels are on earth to "testify, verify, preserve"-- but never to participate. They can't literally feel, although they are figures of empathy.
Which brings to mind what is probably my favorite film of all, 1982's Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples). In that movie, the "replicants" who have escaped to Earth are not equipped for empathy, since they are bio-engineered clones made to work in off-world colonies. They are hunted by "blade runners" like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), and the authorities have devised an interrogation tool, the Voight-Kampff, to measure eye movement in connection with emotionally provocative questions, as demonstrated in the stunning opening scene with Leon (Brion James) and Mr. Holden (Morgan Paull).
Yet the replicants do have empathy for each other, and perhaps even love: Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Daryl Hannah) are coupled by more than survival. If the two angels in Wings of Desire embraced life and, with it, death, the replicants' quest is to extend their lives--they rail against the dying of the light until, at last, Roy acquiesces in the gorgeous "Tears in Rain" speech:
Both films are essentially about the human condition, informed as it is by Death.
("Oh Death" rendition by Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, 1988; painting by Jan Toorop.)
In Blade Runner as well as Wings of Desire, the two species connect in a romance--in Blade Runner it's Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young), a new generation replicant who believes she's human, but she's simply been enhanced with the memories of her maker's niece. (I should also mention that, in one version of the film, it is suggested that Deckard might be a replicant himself.)
Rachael's so advanced a replicant that she can pass the standard Voight-Kampff. In the version of the film I heretically prefer, which is the one with the voice-over narration (I like its noir quality), Deckard and Rachael wing away together. It's not altogether the happy ending the studio thought, since, as Deckard tells us, he and Rachael didn't know how much time they'd have together, but, then, who ever does? Life and love are both the repudiation of Negative Capability and the ultimate embracing of it.
Which brings me to Another Earth (directed by Mike Cahill, written by Cahill and Brit Marling), a current low-fi film in which a young woman, "Rhoda" (Marling), is driving drunk the night that a parallel or second Earth appears in the sky; she looks out at it and ends up crashing into and killing the family of John Burroughs (William Mapother). When she's released from prison she attempts restitution by working as his maid (she was a minor when the accident happened, hence her identity was never disclosed). The course of their relationship is both improbable and expected, as both of them are living a kind of death-in-life; together they wonder about their parallel selves or doppelgangers on the second Earth, and about possible second chances at life.
Like some of the endings of Blade Runner, Another Earth's is ambiguous, but it's also a revelation. Or, as Anthony Lane described its final shot in The New Yorker, "mind-ripping." I'm not about to spoil it for you here.
P. B. Shelley believed that the key to life lay in death, in what was behind the "painted veil" of nature, which hinted at yet ultimately hid the secrets of the universe from us. And of course in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the doctor creates life from death: he scours the charnel and slaughter houses for his creation. But then Dr. Frankenstein is repulsed by his wretched creation and abandons him. The forsaken monster yearns for a kindred spirit who will accept him, and he pursues Frankenstein and forces him to make another being who will embrace the monster. As we all know, it doesn't work out.
We are all terminal cases, as Garp said; and to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, there ain't no cure for the search for love.
"So we beat on, boats against the current...." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2011
Sonic Noir
This record is simply thrilling from start to finish. It opens with the haunting "Rider to the Sea," an instrumental that reflects two of Calvi's stated influences--Jimi Hendrix and David Lynch. Like Keith Richards, Calvi plays a Fender Telecaster. She has said that she tries to make her guitar sound like "something else," an orchestra or a piano (and she also plays piano and organ). All of the songs on the album are original, but other influences are reflected in songs Calvi's covered separately: Leonard Cohen's "Joan of Arc," Edith Piaf's "Jezebel," Elvis Presley's "Surrender." Classical music is a strong influence--especially Ravel and Debussy. Hers is a band of three: Calvi, Mally Harper (vintage harmonium) and Daniel Maiden-Wood (drums).
Like Cohen, Calvi worships at the altar of desire (note that one song is titled "Suzanne and I," and another, "I'll Be Your Man"--she clearly likes to riff off of favorites, like adapting Roy Orbison's "only the lonely" phrase in "Desire"). She has said that the album's themes are "intimacy and passion," and "forces that take over you." She embraces a Blakean vision that's both sacred and carnal ("heavenly desire")--several of her songs start as whispers, hymns that build into orchestral climaxes. "Desire" is an anthem that evokes Patti Smith's work. "Suzanne and I" channels Shirley Bassey on "Goldfinger"; Calvi has said in a Guardian interview that the song is "about falling asleep, meeting someone in your dream, and never waking up. It's about death." Calvi has a gift for sonic architecture and dramatic structure: "No More Words" fades with "My breath, my breath"; the single "Blackout" concludes exquisitely with the line, "Don't leave me"; "Rider" punctuates into silence with two plaintive notes.
As a child, Calvi reportedly suffered with illness and spent a lot of time in isolation, perhaps reflected in the track "Love Won't Be Leaving"--"Been in the desert so long/My desire is so strong/Sometimes I see forms coming out of the dark." I'm reminded of Francis Coppola, bedridden with polio as a child, who began to imagine movies. There's a cinematic and operatic quality to Calvi's work as well, which contributes to make her music so piercingly affecting. In addition to Lynch, she's reportedly been influenced by the films of Gus Van Sant and Wong Kar-Wai.
In a recent piece in Interview magazine, Calvi told John Norris that she started singing only five years ago, in part because of extreme shyness that she forced herself to conquer. She listened to Maria Callas and Nina Simone and practiced for six hours a day. That, and Calvi's three years underground, so to speak, have thankfully brought the devil in her out into the light. Domino records released the first album, and Calvi has gotten strong endorsements from Brian Eno (who referred to her as "the biggest thing since Patti Smith") and Nick Cave (who had her open for his Grinderman tour).
Calvi said in one interview, "I've got an old fashioned idea of an album being a whole piece of work." And what a stunningly cohesive whole she has produced (co-producer is Rob Ellis, a drummer known for his work with PJ Harvey and Marianne Faithfull, among others). This album hits you at your core. Calvi is currently touring Europe and on her way to the U.S. Luckily for us Angelenos, she will playing the Troubadour on June 7 (tickets available through her Facebook page). I predict that it will hard to find her in such an intimate venue again. For she is the most exciting new recording artist of the year.
P. S. Follow this link for a video stream of Calvi performing most of her album in the studio of KCRW on Jason Bentley's show Morning Becomes Eclectic, June 8, 2011:
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/06/137622514/kcrw-presents-anna-calvi
MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2011
Sympathy for the Angel
Later this afternoon I picked up Keith Richards' Life, and happened upon the section in which he describes a whole new universe opening under his fingers after discovering open G tuning and getting rid of the 6th string on his Telecaster.
Keith goes on to write that, "We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute....The human body will feel rhythms even when there's not one. Rhythm only has to be suggested. Doesn't have to be pronounced....It's got nothing to do with rock. It's to do with roll."
Out of the mouth of the guitar hero. This reminds me of pediatrician/psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's (1896 - 1971) concept of the good-enough mother--one who is sufficiently attuned to her baby to create a holding environment, adapt to her child, and facilitate transition. In other words, less really is more. And when the ghost notes and the angel chords can exist in harmony, that's when we have what Winnicott saw as the space between the inner and outer worlds, that transition space where play and creativity are possible.
I believe, like Winnicott, that psychotherapy aims to create that space in which to play. And so does rock 'n' roll. I recall running into a clinical supervisor of mine at a Bruce Springsteen concert. At the clinic the next day, we were still giddy with the experience, and he declared to his supervisees, "Forget about therapy. Just go to a Springsteen concert!"
Thank you, Keef, for reminding us that it's all about the roll.
SUNDAY, APRIL 4, 2010
Keats, Cable, and Confusion
"The cosmology of HBO, FX and AMC is fierce and unrelentingly grim. It is a cosmology for a different America in a different television age than the '50s, '60s and '70s, when things seemed so much simpler. It speaks to our doubts and our debits, to our anxieties and apprehensions. It tells us that we are not necessarily good and that neither is our world. It tells us that not everything can be made right in the end. It is a journey into the American heart of darkness. And it's not television. It's life."The above is from Neal Gabler's thoughtful piece in the Los Angeles Times 4/4/10 (see link below).It's as though cable TV show creators are struggling to achieve Negative Capability by embracing the messiness of life and its open-endedness. Except that instead of transcending doubt, uncertainty, and tolerating the anxiety of not knowing, they are ultimately asserting the pointlessness of doing so. But perhaps the culture needs to embrace entropy and nihilism, to descend into that heart of darkness, to fall upon the thorns of life and bleed, before there can be balance and integration. As the Romantic poets posited, the ideal is accessed through the real. And sometimes, reality bites.
And speaking of biting, it seems to me that the resurgence of the vampire genre (starting with Interview with the Vampire and Near Dark, and more recently True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and the Twilight saga) represents our deep desire to effect this integration. Humans and vampires coexisting and falling in love. Light and dark. Persona and shadow. Or, as Jimi Hendrix put it at Monterey (I just watched the D. A. Pennebaker doc tonight), sacrificing something that you really love:
Musicians like Jimi showed us that the times were not so simple in the '60s. Check out the woman's face after Jimi's sacrifice. She doesn't know what to make of it. He's fucking his guitar that he loves and burning it. "Is this love or confusion?" She's innocence. And he's The Jimi Hendrix Experience. William Blake embraced both, and as his wife once told a visitor, "Mr. Blake is always in Paradise." We all just want to get ourselves back to the garden.*
Title Page from The Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, 1794
Cable vs. broadcast: TV's different mindsets - latimes.com
*See my post on the Coen Bros.' A Serious Man
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2009
Because the Night
Take me now baby here as I am
Pull me close, try and understand
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe
Love is a banquet on which we feed
Come on now try and understand
The way I feel when I'm in your hands
Take my hand come undercover
They can't hurt you now,
Can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to lust
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to us
Have I doubt when I'm alone
Love is a ring, the telephone
Love is an angel disguised as lust
Here in our bed until the morning comes
Come on now try and understand
The way I feel under your command
Take my hand as the sun descends
They can't touch you now,
Can't touch you now, can't touch you now
Because the night belongs to lovers ...
With love we sleep
With doubt the vicious circle
Turn and burns
Without you I cannot live
Forgive, the yearning burning
I believe it's time, too real to feel
So touch me now, touch me now, touch me now
Because the night belongs to lovers ...
Because tonight there are two lovers
If we believe in the night we trust
Because tonight there are two lovers ...
"Because the Night" is a song by the Patti Smith Group, written by Smith and Bruce Springsteen*, released as a single in 1978, taken from Smith's album Easter. The song was a hit, rising to #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and helping propel sales of Easter to mainstream success – even as Smith was deciding to retire from a life of constant touring. The song remains one of the best known of Smith's catalog.
In 1987, "Because the Night" by Patti Smith Group was ranked number 116 on NME magazine's list of "The Top 150 Singles of All Time".
--Wikipedia
* As Springsteen tells it, he was driven out to Coney Island by producer Jimmy Iovine in an orange Mercedes, and on that drive it was Jimmy who convinced Bruce to give this unfinished song to Patti Smith, which she subsequently completed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0brHGJ6xqbk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hVYb06n_B8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hVYb06n_B8
MONDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2009
A Serious Man
When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love
When the garden flowers baby are dead yes
and your mind is full of red
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love....
(Darby Slick)
and all the joy within you dies
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love
When the garden flowers baby are dead yes
and your mind is full of red
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love....
(Darby Slick)
Poor Larry Gopnik, desperately seeking certainty. But his times they are a changin'--he can't get no lovin', he can't get no satisfaction; all he can do is, as his Korean student's father urges, "Accept the mystery."
Maybe, just maybe, in referencing the Jefferson Airplane song throughout this movie, the Coen brothers are implying the only rational/irrational response to the State of Things: All you need is love. Think about it: love is the essence of mystery; its course is always uncertain; and yet, ironically, there ain't no cure (thank God) for regarding love as immutable, everlasting. Love is the drug and we need to score.
So lumber up and limbo down....
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2009
It Might Get Loud
It's no accident that Davis (An Inconvenient Truth) Guggenheim's latest documentary ends with the song "The Weight," since he admittedly (at a Q & A at Arclight Hollywood 8/15) felt under the pressure of previous great music documentaries like Scorcese's The Last Waltz. It also suggests the inherent tension in the documentarian between reality and art or artifice. A member of the audience pointed out that, while the film is specifically about electric guitarists--more specifically, Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White--at the end, when they sing The Band's song, they're playing acoustic guitars. The questioner wondered whether that had been a directive; Guggenheim replied that the acoustics just happened to be around, but he also intimated that he had encouraged a break from all the "loudness."And so this documentary is itself about its real subject: the anxiety of influence, as Harold Bloom termed it (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 1973), and the tension and interconnectedness of art and artifice.
The title "It Might Get Loud" comes literally from the mouth of The Edge in the film, yet it is also indicative of the thunder that filmmaker Guggenheim was hoping for--both in the sense of the power these three musicians together might generate (I'm delighted to report that they most indeed do), and the the potential storm that the director was also brewing for the "conflict" of his film. Guggenheim told the Arclight audience that each guitarist was given a different route to the Warner Bros. stage where the "summit" was held, and each was asked not to have any contact with one another beforehand. Jack White, en route, kids on the square when he quips that the meeting will probably end in "a fistfight."
But of course it doesn't, although one can sense tension and discomfort in each of the men at the summit. You see it in The Edge's eyes, that wariness; you see it in Jimmy Page's reluctant admission that he doesn't sing; you see it in Jack White's defensive bravado. The tension and the guard are there visually in their costumes: Page's elegant black and white ensembles; The Edge's deliberately casual-protective wool cap and leather jacket; Jack's ties, suspenders, and bluesman's hat (and his overall youthful search for an identifying look, which he talks about with regard to The White Stripes' candycane red signature). But among all three guitarists there are moments of mutual humility and admiration, when the guard goes down, and those moments are wondrous to behold. (The Edge even acknowledges that he was playing the wong chord during their rehearsal.) It's fitting that the musicians truly come together in a more quiet collaboration at the end.
Why were these three chosen? Well, there was clearly much logic and deliberation involved. Guggenheim quipped that Jimi Hendrix was his first choice, but since Jimi was unavailable....It's obvious that Guggenheim was aiming for a generational mix as well as artistic diversity and potential "conflict." The Edge talks of seeing "This Is Spinal Tap" (we are treated to a clip showcasing Michael McKean's Lycra'd butt), of which The Edge says, "I didn't laugh; I wept," for it was all too real, he felt, of the music scene at the time, which U2 sought to escape and transcend--of bands like Page's Led Zeppelin. And Jack White scornfully speaks of the influence of electronics and technology (represented by The Edge) as something against which the musician must constantly "struggle" (in one scene, White's fingers literally bleed as he plays).
At the top of the film, Jack fashions a crude electric guitar out of Coke bottle and a piece of wood ("Who says you need to buy a guitar?"), but The Edge later reveals that he and his brother also made an electric guitar from scratch when The Edge was 14. Jack apparently has disdain for The Edge's sonic architecture created with mind-boggling electronic acoutrements (and a tech assistant to adjust the seeming hundreds of knobs and switches for every song). Yet it is Jack who is the master of artifice here, the Raconteur who spins the biggest yarns (e.g., that White Stripes bandmate Meg White is his sister, when in fact she's his ex-wife, whose last name he took--his real name is John Anthony "Jack" Gillis). And it is Jack who creates a 9-year-old alter ego for his segments of the documentary (and with the narrative thread it engenders, gives Guggenheim a symbolically wonderful/playful music-video type closure for the film). So much for Jack's worship of the raw and unenhanced. These artists have more in common than not. As the documentary shows, they've all been influenced by their predecessors and, in their own ways, have creatively incorporated and outdone them by making something original--illustrating Bloom's premise.
As Keats and the other Romantic poets posited, the ideal is accessed through the real. For guitar heroes, what seems like artifice and posturing is a way of taking the real to the level of the ideal. It's as Yeats wrote in "Adam's Curse": "...A line will take us hours, maybe;/But if it does not seem a moment's thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." A poet's job is artifice, but it must seem effortlessly real. And when the line does sing, when that guitar does weep, gently or loudly, it is real, and it is art.
In this documentary, it is Page who seems to have best achieved that state of Keatsian Negative Capability. While he doesn't always seem comfortable with the camera on him, overall he projects a state of grace and integration. Aside from some performance footage with Meg White, there are no women in the film (Guggenheim deliberately did not want this documentary to be about the musicians' lives outside of their music), so it's lovely when Page talks of the guitar as something you caress, like a woman, and it's a pleasure to watch the sensuality of his movement as he plays, when the dancer really is indistinguishable from the dance.
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