Even in movies, the dead should remain dead

So little of what passes as cultural commentary on the internet is trivial and distracting like an itch you can't scratch that it comes as (very) mild surprise that one of the opinioneers delivered a grouse worth considering. An uncredited scribe in The Guardian mentioned and elaborated on an element of many super hero films that is , perhaps, killing interest in the genre: viewers cannot depend on a character remaining dead if he or she gets killed . The story makes the point that there have been so many deaths-and-miraculous-resurrections of characters that a viewer's willing suspension of disbelief refuses to kick in; it becomes more a matter of plot mechanics than catharsis.

It is one thing that Superman, presented to us as deceased in Batman v Superman, reenters the action in the upcoming Justice League  , since DC has generally made sure the Man of Steel was represented on screen in Christ like terms since the  beginning. It just makes sense just to remain consistent with the analogue and to consistent as well with the comic book canon; Superman simply must come back from the dead. Every dead character returning to the narrative fold, though, kills the fun of these things. Which brings up the point this piece strongly suggests, the nagging question as to why audiences continue to bother showing up for these things. I know it's been predicted often,  but there is a tipping point for this material. We're saturated ,carpet bombed, pummeled with creeps in capes destroying fictional cities and a fantastic and devastating fall off in attendance looms sooner than Hollywood might think. This is to say the studios need to diversify their crops.

"Forever Changes" was released 50 years ago!

Chickenbone Slim's "The Big Beat" (album review)

THE BIG BEAT--Chickenbone Slim

Chickenbone Slim is the alter ego of longtime San Diego bluesman Larry Teves, bassist, vocalist, and songwriter who many remember as the leader of the popular area blues band the Boogiemen. The Boogiemen was a crackerjack jump blues band in the style of Little Charlie and the Nightcats and, a bristling, swaggering bunch of dedicated blues hounds filling taverns throughout the county with their combustible, guitar and harmonica-driven approach to hard blues swing. The Boogiemen are no more, alas, but Teves is on the scene again in the guise of Chickenbone Slim, with a new disc, The Big Beat, which continues the blues orientation.   

As expected, there is a difference in this recent incarnation, which is that Chickenbone is more than the brawny bluster of riffing over the changes and singing about drinking, smoking, and driving around looking for kicks; the blues are here—the backbone of the Teves-penned songs—but there has been growth. Life has happened, experiences have changed tone, and responses and reactions cut a bit deeper. These are songs from one who’s been through a few situations, has fought his way out of some tight spots, problematic circumstances where it’s something different each time that rocks this blues man’s world. Following suit, the bluesman Chickenbone goes for a broader musical palette, beginning with the swerving, off-kilter strut of the title song “The Big Beat.” A seasoned narrator finding similarities in following the drummer’s accents and the flow of one’s bliss, a message underscored and firmly moved forward with the brash harmonica punctuation from multi-instrumentalist Jon Atkinson. The mood becomes more laconic with the strutting and stirring ‘Long Way Down,” a rueful recollection of paying the cost to be the boss, the popping rhythms nicely framing the spare, stinging, and appealingly gruff guitar work from Scot Smart. “Hemi Dodge” goes the other way stylistically, a country jaunt, a road song braced on lonesome harmonica moans and Chickenbone’s sly, galloping guitar.

Chickenbone intones the song in a comically talk-sung manner, a deadpan that very much made me think of a man sharing the wisdom of his experience mere minutes after his most recent disaster. Folk, funk, swing blues, and the swampier varieties of soul and funk inform this refreshing variety of styles. Chickenbone Slim, nee Larry Teves, brings us the blues from neighborhoods where most of us actually live. He plays a rangy kind of music, writes songs with the terse and sharp wit of someone who knows the meaning of living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s punchy; it’s full of inescapable hooks, cutting guitar and gold-toned harmonica wailing. The Big Beat makes you glad you got out of bed and poured that first cup of coffee.

(This originally appeared in The San DiegoTroubadour. Used with kind permission.)

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

I

t's not enough that we have the same first name and the same Irish second initial, my attraction to Berrigan's poems was the rather unbelligerent way he ignored the constricting formalities in poetry and rendered something of a record of his thoughts unspooling as he walked through the neighborhood or went about his tasks. "Where Will I Wander" is the title of a recent John Ashbery volume, and it might well be an apt description of Berrigan's style; shambling, personal, messy, yet able to draw out the sublime phrase or the extended insight from the myriad places his stanzas and line shifts would land on. The world radiated a magic and energy well enough without the poet's talents for making essences clear to an audience needing to know something more about what lies behind the veil, and Berrigan's gift were his personable conflations of cartoon logic, antic flights of lyric waxing, and darkest hour reflection , a poetry which, at it's best, seemed less a poem than it did a monologue from someone already aware that their world was extraordinary and that their task was to record one's ongoing incomprehension of the why of the invisible world. Things To Do In New York City:

"Wake up high up
frame bent & turned on
Moving slowly
& by the numbers
light cigarette
Dress in basic black
& reading a lovely old man’s book:

BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN
change

flashback

play cribbage on the Williamsburg Bridge
watching the boats sail by
the sun, like a monument,
move slowly up the sky
above the bloody rush:
break yr legs & break yr heart
kiss the girls & make them cry
loving the gods & seeing them die
celebrate your own
& everyone else’s birth:
Make friends forever

& go away "  --Ted Berrigan

This is a poet who listens to himself complain and explain his pains against a backdrop  of  others in commute likewise obsessed  with their discomforts and who take pride in lasting just long enough in the streets, shops and cold water flats and paint flecked studios of Manhattan  to make it to the end of the day, to slip under the coming shroud of dusk and darker colors where tv dinners, drinks, a book  to be read aloud from, a check book to be balanced although there is no money, to deal with the needed things to be done in the daylight hours that hustle, burn and disturb the senses in order to pay bills and distract one from concerns with the yawning abyss they are always three foot steps from falling into, the goal of all this commotion, procrastination and casual impatience with the way the city flows too slowly or accelerates time too nimbly is to sit at the table, muted night traffic, the refrigerator rattling and grinding with electricity waging war against the inevitable chill of frozen peas, to sit at the table and stare out the window, counting the lit windows in the windows you survey, smoke another cigarette, inhaling the sulfur deep til it burns the lung's deep, tender tissue, pen in hand, tip   of pen to notebook paper, a line    of words and then another, a pause to  refresh yourself, another drag of cigarette smoke, another line of words, two lines, one line  cut in half, someone is talking to someone not seen nor named, the night goes on, the windows of the  city burn bright and enternal u until   dawn and the first harbor boat blasts away every gull leaving their gifts on the pylons.

Read more Ted Berrigan. 

Thor: Ragnarok is the distraction we require

Thor: Ragnarok nearly lives up to the hype, with the accent being on Marvel's patented triplicate move, slick action, lots of jokes and a particularly intense emphasis on making sure the movies from their studio tie into together. It wouldn't be unfair to say that the movie would be incoherent for plot and character if one hadn't seen a long string of other Marvel brand films, in the right sequence. Perhaps part of the promotional hype should have been for Marvel to own the potential impenetrability of this film's core rationale for those other less familiar with this connected universe and provided for them a list of titles to view beforehand. All the same, Thor and Hulk seem less Avengers than they do Hope and Crosby of the 'Road" movies. Is the ramped up comedy a good idea? Yes, since is this is only good Thor movie of the three that have been made. The laughs were honestly achieved from character interaction , personality clash, the whole shot, and the humor were managed much, much better than the repetitive joke-fight-joke-joke-fight tedium of Civil War. Marvel movies are Disney movies, after all, and franchise films are required in this studio to very much resembling in style and tone what was made before; for them, judging their movies becomes how well the individual directors made the house style entertaining and just a little different. The present movie is an inspired variation on the formula.

For special effects set pieces, this effort is among the best of the year, diluted a notch or two for crowding too many into this two-hour movie. It works much better than the previous EF fiesta Valerian, which I thought was merely busy despite the amount of money spent constructing that confounding mess. Thor: Ragnarok has the benefit of character recognition--despite what I've already said about potential plot incoherent, the host of characters are known commodities, and well portrayed, full of plausible quirks and comic nonchalance. Matters move along briskly, the spectacle builds well, and the decision to use the design ideas of comic book genius artist Jack Kirby and Thor co-creator is a way to differentiate this picture from the three tepid films in this franchise. It has the psychedelic visual style of Kirby used to good and effective measure here. 

This isn't the game changer for the Marvel Universe that fans are hoping for--for all their polish, crafted fury and a sense  of ongoing wit, Marvel films have fallen prey to a lurking Disneyism that has all but infiltrated the rebel spirit of the comic book ethos and has made each hit they produce to be otherwise indistinguishable from the one    before it. Spectacular effects, superb editing, snappy dialogue, in that order or similarly changed   up to minuscule degrees, are what dominate this connected universe, and there is a mounting tedium in their ongoing slate of releases, which explains why the punchlines are ramped up in this production and that the small amounts  of self-reflective dread and existential moments are removed or reduced to all but inconsequential plot requirements. If that's the case, it works on its own terms, a distraction from real-world headlines that inform you that the world is filled with awful people doing hideous, heinous, ugly things to other people. This was a hoot, a laugh, a nail-biter, the entertainment we need. 

MOHAVISOUL: Hometown Blues (album review)

You may find yourself scrutinizing the information on the sleeve MohaviSoul's new release, Hometown Blues, to see if any members hail from regions that would qualify them as authentic mountain folks. It turns out to be a case of simulacra, but it is worth remarking that this ensemble has a sound that is not what you'd find in the usual soundtrack of a surf-and-sun , postcard-perfect day. MohaviSoul is making music that's catchy and obviously, honestly informed by a love for the Old Schoolers and the legacy they left for the world.

Neither laboriously beleaguered  nor overly sunny, these are stories about the simple ironies and unexpected pains and pleasures a life brings us. MohaviSoul is a bluegrass band, storytellers of woe and joy and love found and lost as their heroes seek fortune and adventure and a better chance around the bend. Formed in Ocean Beach, the beach area’s last outpost of the ’60s idea of being distinct and true to one’s one Thing, the interplay of guitars, fiddle, and dobro are bittersweet counterparts to the plaintive vocals of guitarist Mark Miller and mandolin player Randy Hansen, both of whom are also MohaviSoul’s principal songwriters. They are palpable rustic; their chords and taciturn lyrics seemed to have been written in the dusty patina that would fall on the old,  corroded truck these metaphorical minstrels would use to drive state to state  searching for another day's wage. 

The tunes are sufficiently rustic and soulfully rendered, a sequence of tales reminiscent of depression and dust bowl days; long, dry highways; train whistles; large regrets; and small joy. There is a strong, persistent sense that one shoulders their burden and moves onward, stoic, strong, accepting of what one has been handed throughout their adventures before and afterward. There is, as well, a remarkable lack of the pessimism one would expect from a genre predicated on a world view that borders on the bleak and despairing. The allure of bluegrass and mountain music and the appeal of Americana music in the largest sense are the tales of indomitable spirit and the willingness of the heroes to persevere and greet the next day, lessons learned, with a song and a strong, purposeful stride.

Superbly backed by the interlocking and buoyant mandolin from Hanson; the banjo work of Jason Weiss; and the subtly bittersweet colors, tones, and accents given us by special guests John Mailander on fiddle and Will Jaffee on dobro, the songs of Miller and Hanson are clear and poetically plain spoken, oftentimes declaring that whoever is listening to the varied tales of hardship, heartache, and the lot needs to heed the simplest advice: don’t sweat the chump change. “Gettie Up,” sexy as it sounds but more practical than it is randy, tells us to get on the beam when life becomes the trudge, while “Stay Tuned,” a spritely, rollicking ramble, simply and subtly warns us to be pleasantly surprised when different and better outcomes result from what at first appears to be a grim and final dead end. MohaviSoul’s music is swiftly seductive, full of foot tapping, shoulder moving tempos, simple music accomplishing profound emotional effects. 

(This originally appeared in slightly different form in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with Kind Permission).

Netflix Cancels House Of Cards Amid Kevin Spacey Controversy

From Bleedingcool.com I learned that Netflix has canceled its flagship series House of Cards , fallout from the recent allegations of inappropriate sexual overtures allegedly made by to a  then 14 year old actor Andrew Rapp. Season 6, forthcoming, will be its last.It would appear that we're in for sustained period of all manner of celebrity--movie star, mogul, director, politician, novelist, poet, artist, professor, corporate leader--being exposed as sexual predators and over all creeps. Spacey maintains, so far, that he was too drunk to remember anything inappropriate going on with a 14 year old Andrew Rapp, mentioning that he was drunk and things are hazy, but the damage is done to his career, starting with House of Cards,his Netflix political drama. His character is a man who does anything in his power to achieve his ends. The character , Frank Underwood, has wracked up so many outrages that I was worried this show would go on forever without this fictional being made to pay for his sins. Seems circumstances developing from real life, the realm that, in itself, serves justice in unexpected ways on a time schedule not disclosed to those of us impatient for payback; Spacey has lost his hit show and perhaps his livelihood, at least for a while. How all this pans out in the long run is anyone's guess, although it's a predictable outcome of all these allegations that the media, social, print and broadcast, will move onto other less exploited outrages they can in turn cover with sensational headlines and little sympathy or comprehension.Even as reader attentions are drawn elsewhere, there remains a hope that this is not just another passing controversy and marks a profound change in the culture, which is that sexual abuse will not tolerated by anyone in any corner of our land, by anyone, anywhere. One hopes this evil stops here. So the question becomes whether , after more revelations, exposures and screaming headlines, will this topic be dropped as interest wanes, or are we willing to change the way we treat each other? I am not optimistic.