stray notes:A treatise on some mostly white blues guitarists

The little I've read about Allen's memoir Apropos of Nothing gives further confirmation that brilliant artists are  often awful people, creeps in fact , and underscores the wisdom of having realistic expectations from such bright lights of talent when observing them behave in matters separate from the art they make for our distraction. Being an artist, whether poet, novelist, painter or musician, is not a priesthood by any means. Without diving into the weeds about the allegations that Allen had molested his daughter Dylan , I will step back and say that it’s a family feud with no jackpot, a large pile of reeking results of separate streams of bad faith. In any event, I will satisfy myself with reading a half dozen book reviews because other matters, more interesting and crucial, have bled the subject of Allen, his career, his successes and his sins dry of any allure. The matter is a dead, dry husk of wretched old flesh under a sun lamp of scrutiny.  The characterizations I've read, quoted with glee with reviewers anxious to soil his name a little more, does indeed cause the writer-director-comedian appear to be an unseemly prick. 

I will leave it at that and trust that he is yet another artist I admire who likewise suffered the indignity of being human, too human, despite an element of extraordinary talent and achievement. At 84, I suspect Allen doesn't care what others think about he thinks of everybody else and expects his reputation as a genius film maker to outlive the predator allegations. It's certainly the case with Frank Sinatra, who survived the storm over Kitty Kelly's fantastically damning biography HIS WAY in 1986. Sinatra sued to stop publication but later dropped the suit, and the contents of the book revealed an ambitious , insecure , raging man gifted with a beautiful voice and attendant charisma who was in actual fact a monster. 

Thirty three years later, the Kelley book and the deeds it recounts are safely back in the shadows and the general view of Sinatra, his reputation, is a glorification of a legend, an artist, a genius, a true romantic, a profound American success story. At this stage of the game, Allen believes the same will be his fate, that his many successes as a film maker and humorist will outpace that gamier aspects of his life. Americans prefer to believe their legends.

Wonder Wonder brings it on

I'll say from the start of this rushed diatribe that I've enjoyed, vastly, the movies that DC comics have made so far in their efforts to establish their own franchises in contrast to that of their competition, Marvel Comics. The uniform negative responses, to be sure, have their points that deserve to be discussed, but the wave of hate seems more product of the internet's tendency to encourage an echo chamber effect; nervous fans, not sure of what they actually desire from a movie, suspend their critical faculties and dive head long into the noisy bull run of nay saying. Objections are over stated, insults are hurled, and feelings are hurt. And still, I like what DC and Warner Brothers have done, for the most part. 

Not to get off on a longish defense of particular films, I will assert here that Zack Snyder is one of the      few directors who gets the dynamism and flair of the graphic novel and produces resolutely beautiful and exciting action sequences, however dark and grim they may be. And, of course, "Man of Steel" is a masterpiece, in my view,a compelling show of a young man with the fabled powers greater than that of mortal men who awaits the right moment to emerge, that moment arising only in great need and when his moral compass is formed an inextricable part of his emotional DNA. If you like, you can find my longer defense of that film here  and post your thoughtful dissents in the comments section. 

The fact that "Wonder Woman" is presently at 94 percent critic approval on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes makes me smile. Director Patty Jenkins directs with a sure, firm and confident hand, efficiently and effectively establishing the WW mythology as it relates to a re-imagined Greek mythology, the origin story of the young girl who would become the eventual super hero, and the first adventure of Wonder Woman in full costume, in the WW 1 trenches, fighting with the British against the Germans, searching for her foe Ares, the God of War. It works remarkably well, I think.  A wonderful cast featuring wonderful work from Chris Pine and Robin Wright. Gal Adopt as WW, a controversial casting when first announced, is quite good here. Athletic, naive, ironic, fierce in combat sequences and sweetly ironic in the comic parts, she turns in a star-making performance. Gadot hasn't the broadest range as an actress, a fact that led the objections to her being casted in the role of the defining super heroine, but what she does here is akin to what other limited-commodity screen thespians have worked well with, which is to perform splendidly within the limitations.

 Emerging from the vapor and gusty disgust of all the protests, we have director Jenkins making make strong use  of Gadot's strengths: the athleticism in the combat scenes are a wonder to behold as she her debut in the world of men, and she more than delivers with the dialogue she's given to handle. Naivete, rage, a hint of vulnerability, a nicely turned bit of comic timing, Gadot establishes a superhero personality that is convincingly conflicted yet firmly dedicated to ridding the world of the evil that fouls the potential of men to do better and greater things. It's not the case that Gadot is carried along by the superb     cast of Wright, Pine, Connie Nielsen and others, although those assets are a large reason why this movie moves as well as it does across the screen. It is an ensemble effort. Wonderful work by all involved.  

album review: Elvis Costello cracks a smile

(This review originally printed in the UCSD Triton Times in 1980.)

 A seeming majority of reviewers and  taste makers have exhausted their superlatives justifying their declaration that  The Clash's London Calling record the hottest double record set since Exile On Main Street. I've been tempted to retaliate with my half facetious declaration. Elvis Costello's record, Get Happy!! (I would have written) is the greatest double rock record since Blonde On Blonde. With the gauntlet thrown to the floor, warring factions would man the ramparts and try to pick each other off with sniper-tongued pot-shots. 

Nonsense on two counts. First, although Get Happy!! contains 20 songs, it is, in fact, a single record with 10 selections per side, where Dylan's double set Blonde On Blonde, with several songs going well over three minutes, holds less material. More importantly, however, is the nonsense rock reviewers in general (me included) indulge in when they sling about comparisons that pale once separated from the heat of the moment. Common-sense and sober thinking show that the Clash is an earnest band who haven't developed the stylistic subtleties that the Stones used to manage and that Costello, apart from a shared genius for non-sequiturs, has little in common with Dylan. This brings us to what, Get Happy!! really is: neither a masterpiece nor a landmark to be prematurely canonized, but instead a firm confirmation of the major talent his audience suspected he possessed.

The major revelation on Get Happy!! is that Costello, like many had hoped, has transcended the slight trappings of new wave and has become a songwriter, an artist with a firm grasp on his material who can write songs using an encyclopedic array of song styles to their full measure. The 20 songs on Get Happy!! comprise something of a brief course in the history of pop music style. Costello, it should be pointed out, is hardly a new wave dilettante who plagiarizes other people's art because he's unable to develop his own voice. 

Rather, Costello shares methodological affinities with the patron saint of the French New Wave film school, Jean Luc-Godard. Godard, who through his young life had been surfeited with American genre films by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, and other Hollywood directors, took to making his own films during the late 60s, using many of the same camera stylistics of his American influences. Godard, aware that he was a French intellectual first and that he couldn't make "American" films no matter how much he admired the visual gracefulness American directors occasionally managed, ended up subverting the genres, inserting heavy doses of philosophy, Marxist literary criticism, dissertations on dissociative language, and other notions stemming from the French proclivity for spinning theories, concepts that Godard's American film influences would doubtlessly stand gap-mouth at. Film genres to Godard, then, were a medium he could use, alter, retool, change, subvert.

Costello is a songwriter of course, and one wouldn't belabor a comparison between him and Godard beyond a simple point: like Godard, Costello shuffles music styles and makes use of them the way he wants. He does this through his lyrics, which along with Steely Dan's are the most disturbing, dense and difficult in rock. Often times, Costello enjoys writing a lyric with no literal meaning against a melody that evokes something else entirely. In "Secondary Modern," with a soft croon over a melody that could pass for some blander efforts of Jackson Browne, Costello sings: "This must be the place / Second place in the human race / Down in the basement / Now I know what he meant / Secondary modern / Won't be a problem / Til the girls go home..." The melody, as pleasing as anything else could be, says one thing, but the lyrics, full of sparse details and indirect innuendo, deny that pleasure. Costello's aim seems to be to set us up in the visceral plane, and then to pull the rug out from under us once the words sink in. Dangerous activity.

 Lack of space makes it impossible to go into a song-by-song account, but here are some of the choice tracks. "Motel Matches," set in a gospel vein, is abstracted teenage heartbreak, an implied story of a lover's concern for his girlfriend's loose ways. "Opportunity," a jaunty tune in a stiff gallop tempo that concerns, incredible enough, the Hider and Mussolini baby boom campaigns. "Man Called Uncle," is an excellent hard rocker where Costello condemns beautiful people who've resigned their free-will so that they could become mere sexual playthings to rich people, and expressing a tacit yearning for real love without usury. Costello's main theme throughout is that he's against anything that keeps people from becoming the human being he'd like to see them become, against those institutions that divide people, denatures them, turns them into a mindless horde that consumes, kills, and continually destroy each other.

album review: "So It Goes" with Gregory Page

(Originally published in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission).

It’s an often told tale that young Gregory Page, having no interest in academics or a future in business, developed a fascination with his grandfather’s 78 rpm records. It’s a quirky tidbit, hardly worth the mention for the more conventional lives of lawyers, clerks, and cashiers, but it merits attention in discussing the intriguing Mr. Page. No mere rocker or folkie savant, he’s an agile channeler of music styles gone by. Jazz ballads, torch songs, gospel-tinged testimonials, elements of folk and such things, Page is a man of constant dreaming, yearning, pining for the better day, one who succinctly expresses the perceived failures of his romantic expectations with a sense of irony and wit. So It Goes, his newest release, is a rich and textured set of original songs by Page, each song radiating a soft focused nostalgia, the softly curving turns of Page’s melodies framing his supple voice that reveal his capacity as an expressive singer. He is a crooner in the great tradition of vocalists who perform their songs not so much as professional renditions of harmony and lyric, but rather as a short drama, an inspired short story .

The aspect of Page’s singing that grabs me is the way he varies his emphasis, line by line, never losing the golden tone but seeming to sense how a change how a line is sounded, waxing poetic with a quivering warble on one image and then undercutting his own regret with an ironic aside by lightening his approach, lifting his voice up to an optimistic pitch. It is, over and over, Page’s theme that we’re wedded to the past and cannot forget who and what we have loved and lost, but those memories cannot be allowed to turn us into bitter and grouchy lay-abouts.More than once he declares the fundamental lesson, that our experiences make us who we are and that there is nothing to do but go on and embrace the life that unfolds in front of us. He is, of course, and speaking for himself and his own fanciful recollections and insights, but the songwriter-songwriter is so adept at his craft and presentation that there isn’t a hint of self pity. Page is a fatalist, perhaps, but he is not a defeatist. The album’s title, So It Goes ,is a refrain from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse 5, repeated at various points when the story’s events undermine the vain philosophies of the protagonists; despite plans and preparation, life itself upsets one’s agenda and puts one in a position to reflect and rethink and create a reason to get back in the game. 

A private and meaningless experience: stray notes

Rock and roll is a species that nearly died from the self- inflicted wounds  of pomposity and virtuoso bombast and the cruel and curdling surfeit of junior league posey that passed as significant and meaningful lyrics. This is a form that manages that, for every major innovation and epoch-changing trend, a condition that revitalizes the promise of rock and roll being music that can remain relevant to the times new musicians arise in, there emerges the inevitable and seemingly unending waves of imitators, pretenders and merely technical after thoughts we desire to hitch their  wagon to the next money making star. It was about the money, not the emotion, and while ambition is required for anyone insisting on inching toward a permanent spot center stage in our collectively short attention spans, the emphasis is more toward a severely un-soulful reliance on technology than acquired technique. 

Acquired technique,as in matters regarding learning an instrument, learning to sing, becoming excited by musicians and their work and having that inspire to create something your own, from your own life, and present it to an audience that in turn desires something genuine, felt, real, as well as being musically intriguing, catchy, that thing you can dance to while your existence is made worthy by music and other kinds of art. It is less and less that as each day goes by and is lost,  unreclaimable for a do-over. Music seems pieced together, strands of riffs, beats, bleats, phrases, tempos, vocal textures culled from a digital library, pureed at the mixing board until another vaguely musical hit is made and sold on the internet    for download to any device you please. Music , more and more, is a  private and meaningless experience. Honestly, those of us in cars, on buses, or just walking down the streets wearing the ear buds , their phone at the ready, moving and gyrating and gesticulating as resisting the temptation to express something truly joyful in response to the songlist, resemble a passel of  creeps to me, emotional privateers actualizing an ambulatory fuck you to their fellow citizens. 

For Every Dylan and Leonard Cohen, we get Billy Joel or Harry Chapin, for every Iggy Pop,David Bowie or Velvet Underground we get the Dead Boys and the Jesus and Mary Chain. What had been inventive becomes a shelf of hardened cliches and, as such, make me think of nothing more than old sidewalks remarkable only for the shattered slats that are cracked and creviced with the inevitable wear of moving earth, tree roots and car accidents. It all needs to be dug up and replaced with something new and humanly usable. I might have said an old abandoned building for a more fitting metaphor. Better someone take a wrecking ball to the edifice before it falls under its own creaking weight, useless and pathetic.  Or maybe to burn it down? Does the eradication of monetized mediocrity require a specific way to be figuratively gotten rid  of? Is that matter made better if a new generation of young musicians respond to the troubles of their trying to make sense of a life that will not announce its game plan not with another reiteration of the style archive from the last many decades of pop music, but rather find something in their allusively termed collective soul and manage to re-awake the spirit of questing for an existence that is enlightened and creative and bringing purpose to  one's long term designs?  We can ask ourselves that til we drop dead, of course, but I certainly desire my last thought before my last breath isn't "where did we go astray?". 

 I never thought the Sex Pistols weren't called for, as the pretentiousness of the musicians and the gullibility of the audience had choked off the life force that made rock and roll exciting and worth caring about. Some of it might be laid at the feet of rock criticisms, since the advanced discussions of Dylan's relationship to Chuck Berry's everyman existentialist demanded a musical technique and lyrical concept just as daunting. This is the danger when folk art is discovered: it stands to become something distorted, disfigured and bereft of vitality. I was lucky , I guess, in that I was a fan of the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges a decade and half before the Sex Pistols caught the punk wave. They , and bands like Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath were a grounding principal--rock and roll is beautiful because it's energetic, awkward, and stupid, but profoundly so. There are "concept albums" I admire and still like, if not listen to, but I won't name them here. I am pleased, though, that the idea of the Album being a literary object has been dropped in a deep grave and had dirt thrown over its water-logged remains. 

Professional writers work for free

Impact over legacy has been with us since print media brought literacy and books into the marketplace. The 

original class of professional writers , like Addison and Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, and others rather enjoyed the relative speed they could bring their views on issues and manners to the literate population; what would last among those pages seems an afterthought, as few of these writers seemed determined to write for the ages. That is likely what saved their pages from being consigned to  a pile of dry, burning leaves, that they wrote well of their time rather than attempt future generations. Print and web values are not so opposed--clean copy, correct spelling, correct useage, a style one is in control of used to highlight sound insight and convey new information are what readers of either print or blogs prefer.

 What is developing, I suspect, is that bloggers , at least those disposed to insist on standards for their preferred soapbox, are still translating those old concerns into their own jargon. One's own tongue is needed to make the fussy notion of "rules" a good fit. Also, the sheer surfeit of bloggers makes the situation for decent writing seem hopeless and makes one dread the suitable saw "quantity drives out quality".

 I think the situation is less dire than that, concerning the state of English prose; it's been a fact that most of us inclined to write are not masters of the language we speak when it comes to writing it, and that the best of us, the most persistent word drunks in our midsts, soon enough become the ones who are the most read. Add to that these same folks are the ones likely to continue writing their blogs while most others will be abandoned and eventually deleted from their servers. Of course, we should remember that the technology is fluid and that blogging itself may soon join chat rooms as a quaint thing that is no longer a draw for most.

Alienated

I have to say that I enjoyed Ridley Scott's Aliens prequel Prometheus, proposed as a first step in the franchise that would establish the beginnings of this sci-fi saga up to where we first meet the fabulous action-babe Ripley. Scott's return to the franchise, and to space operas was a joy to behold, with great acting, stunning special effects , a fascinating premise and , yes, a general feeling of creepiness as the hoary warnings against corporate greed and attending evil are made tangible yet again. Not a perfect film, but the scale and power of the storytelling, albeit incomprehensible, made it an entertainment worth revisiting. Not so much for the follow up effort, Alien: Covenant, again directed by Scott. Where Prometheus added some new twists to the Alien mythos, this new effort offers little that is intriguing ; it is a make work project. We do discover the origins of the Xenomorph and are expected to marvel at their many manifestations , different shapes, purposes. But there is a dispirited element about this film. There is no spectacle to speak of, no real wow factor, conditions not improved by the pacing, which is lead footed. Especially surprising for a director of Scott's calibre: an inconsistent director for quality, even his worse films had a great veneer and, most of , all moved well. Covenant sort shuffles along and wanders through some very familiar territory, that of an exploratory ship landing on an uncharted planet with a certain set of expectations only to discover some quite, quite horrible. Not to give too much away, but anyone familiar with past efforts in this series will know when to start the Alien countdown, when crew members die horribly , one by one. Covenant feels like a place holder film, a middling and trudging action film that works best only furthering plot elements introduced in the previous film. Scott has three films in mind for this current edition of the sequence, and there is a cliffhanger, of a kind, waiting for us at the film's end, a twist so dire and dreadful that you can't help but wonder how the surviving crew members can rise above the fatal circumstances we see them in before the credits role. By movie's end, Alien: Covenant seemed to have been created , in terms of narrative, to deliver us to the cliffhanger at movie's end and to hook us for what I hope will be the last of this .