Music notes

I remember reading in Rolling Stone in the early seventies of a drum battle between the late Elvin Jones and former Cream percussionist Ginger Baker. Baker, then touring and hyping his rather lead-footed big band Airforce, had taken to baiting Jones, the usual young gun sass about his elder being over the hill, slowing down. Long story short, and hazy on the details on my part, there was a concert with the two of them in New York, culminating in a drum battle between Jones and Baker. Baker had his post-Cream hardware, double bass, double toms, double snares, double everything, and Jones had his regular kit, simple and to the point. After some standard trade offs, you guessed it, Jones proceeded into rhythmic areas Baker couldn't follow him into: Baker received, to borrow from Howard Cosell describing a fighter just out-gloved by Ali, a drumming lesson. What Jones did on the drums was apparently beyond Bakers' nail hammering sensibility. It was one of those write ups that made me wish I was there.

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"JC On The Set" by the James Carter Quartet, a stylistically wandering CD  but frequently fused effort from the saxophonist's. Nice reading of 'Sophisticated Lady'--Carter's phrases are sure and undulate with a blues cadence even as he extends his lines over a sublime melody. In other areas, he sounds tad brackish and barking-- blorts and grunts at times when he really didn't need them, as if to establish some kind of credibility that admirable technique alone cannot . He sometimes grates. Still, his work here is compelling for the most part,and Craig Taborns' piano work is a handy and deliciously quick-witted foil for Carter: elegantly, giddily fast up tempo, meditative and yearing as he scrolls over the ballads. Funky but chic.
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THE COMPLETE 1961 VILLAGE VANGUARD RECORDINGS, Disc One--John Coltrane

Coltrane--tenor sax

Eric Dolphy--alto sax, bass clarinet

Ahmed Abdul-Malik--oud

McCoy Tyner--piano

Jimmy Garrison--bass

Reggie Workman--bass

Elvin Jones--drums.

From the four cd set, the first disc alone is mightily impressive for sheer stamina , and many sections of sublime improvisation. Jones rattles the traps in brisk rhythms, while Coltrane sets fires through out the side. There times when 'Trane gives in to his worse impulses--but these are brief enough, as Dolphys' alto playing, and his work with the bass clarinet is enough to make me almost believe that there is a heaven. What had seemed alien to mainstream, bop-preferring audiences as radical and un-jazz like at the time is now a given in the repertoire of younger improvisers, and there is not a musician today who can match  John Coltrane for the furious ingenuity that came from his soul by way of his instrument. Modal and operating on a rhythmic principle that  makes me think of W.C.Williams alluring yet elusive notion of the 'variable foot" of rhythm--cadences and stresses are constantly changing into nearly perfect accents based on the vocalizations of a words arranged in spontaneous combination that convey meaning and purpose in sound as well as strict definitions--Elvin Jones and Reggie Workman construct an ever evolving foundation , a brooding firmament on which 'Trane, Tyner  and Dolphy overlay a delicious and difficult weave of odd moods and desperate beauty. This is the kind of music that makes me think sometimes that I was born twenty years too late.

Poetry and the mirror

Seems that Slate proper is catching on to something I've been complaining about on these threads for the last ten years or so, poetry about poetry. It is, however, not a situation isolated to The New Yorker, as it is a habit of mind that filters through the versifying consciousness regardless of politics, preference, or where the poet thinks they are in the relative standards of quality. Save for the few instances where the habit results in a brilliant gem of cadenced self-reflection, it is the worst sort of naval gazing, to employ a cliché. To employ a fresher simile, it's the drone of a specialist of who cannot talk about anything else. Poets are supposed to have mastered their craft and then enter the world. Too many of the writers that find sanctuary in the journals have reversed the process. I am not against difficulty, I am not in favor of dumbing- down poems in order to attract larger readerships, and I don't think the non-specialist reader insist, as a class, that poets have their wear as unadorned as sports writing. The gripe is against the poet who cannot get away from making Poetry their principle subject matter, by name. Not that each poem about poetry is, by default, wretched; there are bright and amazing reflexive verses indeed, but they are the exception to the rule, the rule being that a medium that ponders it's own form and techniques and ideological nuances too long becomes tediously generic. The problem, it seems to me, is that some writers who haven't the experiences or materials to bring to draw from will wax on poetry and its slippery tones as a way of coming to an instant complexity. Rather than process a subject through whatever filters and tropes they choose to use and arrive at a complexity that embraces the tangible and the insoluble, one instead decides to study the sidewalk they're walking on rather on where it is they were going in the first place.

I rather love ambiguity, the indefinite, the oblique, the elusive, and I do think poetry can be ruthlessly extended in it's rhetorical configuration to encompass each poet's voice and unique experience; the complexity I like, though, has to be earned, which is to say that I would prefer poets engage the ambivalence and incongruities in a sphere recognizable as the world they live in. First there was the word, we might agree. But those words helped us construct a reality that has a reality of its own, and I am more attracted to the writer who has tired of spinning their self-reflectivity tires and goes into that already-strange world and field test their language skills.

Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most beautifully oblique poet America has produced, can be said to have written poems about poems, but I think that misses the point. Our latter day mainstream reflexivists are enamored of the their own broad readings and wind up standing outside of poetry thinking they have a better idea to what a poem should be. The concern isn’t the poem, but the abstraction, an inversion that has the erudition outsmarting the inspiration. Stevens was smart enough to familiarize himself with the philosophical propositions regarding the problems associated with the world we see and the world as-is; his genius was that he created a metaphorical systems that could deal with poetics-as-subject and still give us something beautiful and wholly musical. I am beginning to suspect that the problem might not be that poets are writing too many poems about poetry--the tradition for the bard to reflect on his craft and his relevance is very long established in world literary history--but that of the tendency of editors to select or solicit these sorts of works. If one looks further into the works of the New Yorker poets cited in the story, one would notice that they respectively manage to engage life outside their craft ; the body of work is not always as suffocatingly one-idea as it may seem here. Editors, I am tending to think, need to be more open ended as to the subject matter they consider suitable for the magazines or journals they write for.

NOTHING FOR BREAKFAST--a poem

She picks up her brush

to place it where

stars would awake

amid the downstairs clatter

of spoons dredging the bottoms

of cereal bowls,

Though still asleep

in allegiance to grace under clouds

swimming over the bedposts bearing

a rain of brass bands and animal farms,

she rises from her covers

and goes to the windows,

wonders what it is the birds sing about

when there's no family

left in the nest and a cold sun

blows their feathers in the opposing direction.

Her father shaves with the door open

and he's only a half Santa Clause today

as she walks down the hall,

her brother has both his shoes untied

and he's taking a hammer to his favorite plastic airplane.

Mother sits at the kitchen table

holding a cigarette in her left hand,

raised as if though holding a tray full of drinks

 the other  hand flat and

smoothing  a newspaper page 

and she frowns at a photograph

of  men in overcoats and wide brim hats

saluting missiles and soldiers

who've all found the same dance step.

She says she wants pancakes

but her mother says

there is no flour anywhere

except in the garden

and no pans except the ones that

movie cameras make from

the top of every hill overlooking

a Grecian city next

to an impossibly blue bay.

Her mother laughs ,  an ash falls.

The room is full  of smoky circles.

She helps herself

to the corn flakes

and the milk carton,

wonders why the coffee smells

like  strange,  bitter medicine.

Rae Armantrout wins National Book Critics Award for Poetry

(A hearty congratulations to Rae Armantrout, winner of the National Book Critics Award for poetry  for her collection Versed .She has been writing  superbly succinct poetry and elegantly pared lyrics for decades, and it is with some satisfaction that a poet who enthralled during my years at the University of California San Diego has achieved a well earned notoriety.This is a re-publication of a review I did of  an older book of hers, Next Life .'Tis time to sing the praise of Rae.)

NEXT LIFE

poems by Rae Armantrout
(Wesleyan)

Rae,Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively.A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundaries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluble fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an on going inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title,what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence;

We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.


“Happen” and “now”
have been smuggled out,

to arrive safely in the past tense.



We come home to a cat
made entirely of fish.

--"Reversible"

Where a good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion, Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a cool voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience, and crisply discovers, underlines and speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the hard, acute image, half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed that expose an archive of deferred emotion.

1.

"That's a nice red" you said,

but now the world was different

so that I agreed

with a puzzled

or sentimental certainty

as if clairvoyance

could be extended to the past.

And why not?

With a model sailing ship

in the window

of a small, neat house

and with a statuette

of a s table boy

on the porch,

holding a lamp up

someone was making something clear--

perhaps that motion is a real character.

2.

How should we feel

about "the eraser"?

"Rampages" wears one expression

while "frantically" wears another:

conjoined twins,

miraculously separated

on Judgement Day?

Then "only nothingness"

is a bit vague.

But words are more precise than sight--

increasingly!

3.

The very old man shuffles very slowly

not between

the white lines of a crosswalk

but down one of them.

Like a figure in a dream,

his relations to meaning

is ominous.--

--"Agreement"

These are voices of of a consciousness that surveys several things at once;time is collapsed, details are suggested, associative leaps abound, and the phrase is terse, hard. Above all, this is a poetry of concentrated power; what is spoken here, the dissonance between expectation and the manner of how perception changes when idealism greets actual events and deeds, are the the things one considers late night, when there's nothing on cable, you've read your books, and only a pen and paper remains; what of me remains in the interactions, the negotiations, the compromises that constitute "making my way" in the world we might inhabit?This is a city of comings and goings, of people and their associations dancing and struggling with the invisible forces of repulsion and attraction; one seeks to transcend what it is that surrounds them, but find that their autonomy is merely a fiction shared only with the self when a community is lacking to applaud or argue with one's declarations of self. Armantrout gets to that small and hardly investigated phenomenon of how all of us--as readers, writers, consumers, family members--create our own dissonances in a manner that is intractable and ingrained. This is a fine, spare , ruminative volume by a singular writer.

Break Out Video

Quentin Tarantino loves exploitation movies, shown through out his body of work, an affection that's especially visible in his effort Death Proof. That homage to grind house movies was QT running on fumes, though--does anyone else suspect that the longish chat between the characters echoed too many familiar cadences from other movies the man has directed? He hasn't made enough movies as an auteur to be already plagiarizing himself. On the subject of exploitation archtypes, this video from Lady Gaga and Beyonce beat Tarantino at his own game, and has the added advantage of being short.







What saves this video for me is the sheer brio of the set; while you do feel that you've seen this trash-can pastiche before, Gaga and Beyonce take possession of what they've picked up and own it outright. The video is an expression of their combined sensibilities, not an exhibit of artifacts tenuously on loan. Years ago there was a video of Bowie Moreand Jagger dueting on "Dancing In the Streets",and what ought to have been a Cultural Moment was instead a graceless stomping of a perfectly fine Motown song. So more power to LG and B!

The deer hunter

Robert Wrigley ventures into Hemingway country with his poem Wait, an intriguing mediation that makes me think of one of many faux Zen vanities where one tries to observes themselves in the world, in this case, observing yourself wait for the perfect micro-instance through the elapsing moments and seconds when you sense that perfect alignment to squeeze the trigger and take down the deer. Wright goes for the glass-like clarity of that moment, the intangible perfection within a moment that is about to fade , and remains, within his descriptions of the forest, the deer, the consequences to come and the consequences that result, hard in his images. A smart decision--it's a temptation to lard this kind of subject of with didactic screeds that only obfuscate with cracker barrel philosophy where clarity is crucial for success. It makes me think of the severely pared down vision of Michael in Michael Cimino's film The Deer Hunter, where a terse discussion of being ready for The Shot comes down to a verbless distillation. Michael, prompting an unsure Nicki about his fitness to make the kill, tells this:  " You have to think about one shot. One shot is what it's all about. A deer's gotta be taken with one shot".

Hemingway, Mailer, Faulkner, Cimino, and now Wrigley, it's a paradox that a particular facet of the male personality  finds, in  stories from the these writers,  it's unity with something greater than itself in the ritualized effort to kill a living creature. The hunt becomes a spiritual practice of a sort, where concentration, seemingly conflated here to equal an intense meditative discipline, brings one from the noise, clutter and vanities of the world of ego and brings them in an uncluttered relationship with the thing they are observing. The senses are alive and the mind becomes rich with the details and minute stirrings in this niche, this particularized bracket of time. Everything is noticed and inventoried, the relationships of things,natural and man made, are revealed and in the sensational rush of waiting, breathing steadily, intensely aware of one's posture and purpose in this scene, you feel directed, a part of the chain of nature , acutely aware of one's fatal but unavoidable purpose and aware, as well, of consequences, results, the continuation of a natural order beyond the killing of the deer.

Some good words for Ray Bradbury

It was my good fortune to happen upon a Ray Bradbury panel at the 2009 ComicCon in San Diego,where the Master himself was taking and answering questions from a large, adoring crowd. It was , of course, a love fest for one the pioneers of fantasy and speculative fiction, an appreciation for a writer many of us have a lifetime's relationship with this imagination. For all his work in pre-Code horror comics, pulp fiction magazines and paperback books, considered for years to the be the Red Light District of Literature, his oeuvre is one those rare productions that have proven to be something everyone else, from critics to mainstream media, have had to catch up with. The callowest of lit-crit 101 pronouncements are applied here: does the  work have legs, and do you marvel at the style and techniques the writer used to move you along with the narrative . A good writer  is able to overcome a reader's objection to fantastic tales; the writer who's work remains current is the rare breed who's tales transcend the genre from which they originally sprang. So one learns how to get  adult" about those pulpy fantasies that gave you pleasure when you were a teen, someone still learning about the world through the stories one heard.You have to say that you did a fair and accurate summary of Bradbury's career and a fair estimation of his work. If you’re a good genre writer and you stick around long enough, you have a very good chance of having a host of recently minted book critics and biographers elevating you the higher ranks of Faulkner or Twain.

It's happened a dozen or so times , particularly in the mystery/crime arena with the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. Sometimes the shoe actually fits, given that Chandler and Hammett were both innovators of form who had their lyric flights and coolly compressed melodramas informed by a tangible and subtle played romanticism.

Others have been less believable, as in the case of Jim Thompson, who is genuinely creepy and entertaining, but lacks music and wit, or James Ellroy, who mistakes intensity and encroaching unreadability as requirements of writerly worth. Elmore Leonard resists the temptation to let critics and upper echelon authors seduce him with praise and a general invitation to take his work more seriously; he is the kind of professional you most admire, someone who continues the work, writing one brilliantly middlebrow entertainment after another.Would that a few of our "serious" authors adopted the work ethic and wasted fewer pages and less of our time with their reputations.Some writers literally beg to be taken seriously; they implore us to read their novels deeply and let the philosophical conflicts resonate long and loudly.Has there been a John LeCarre novel that hasn't been compared to the world weary speculations of Graham Green's ambivalent attaches and minor couriers wrestling with the issue of Good versus Evil under a shadow of a silent Catholic God? Has there been a discussion among fans of James Lee Burke that didn't slip into a tangent about the American Southern tradition, with Faulkner's and Flannery O'Conner's names repeatedly dropped like greasy coins? It's not such a bad thing, though. LeCarre and Burke are fine writers and do manage to provide a complex settings where the moral battles take place in their work. Their presence in the high rankings needn't make anyone squeamish.

Stephen King, try as he might, will not remain on the top shelf no matter who places him there. He is the master of premise, one great and magnificent idea after another, but then he goes soft in the head and rushes through his novels with flights of illogical that even excusing them as part of a horror novel's delirious nature cannot excuse the slip shod execution. Bradbury? He is very good, sometimes even brilliant in all his amazing convolutions, and I think it would do everyone a great favor to not burden him with the weight of "literary importance". There are issues and morals and philosophies galore slithering through the paragraphs of his stories and novels, but Bradbury above all else is fun to read. I think it's enough that he be admired as craftsman with a slight touch of the poet. Bradbury, however sage we might wish him to be, never shed the basic rule of all professional writers go by; you need to be read by an audience that wants to be entertained.

A book worth reading and re-reading

The fuss over postmodern style has blessedly subsided a while ago, leaving me with the opportunity to clear some novels from my bookshelf that  aged as well as I would have hoped. What had seem novel, bold, smart in the eighties and nineties now seems, well, contrived, faddish and tacky.  DeLillo , Pynchon and others are doing just fine for credibility , of course, and  younger writer's effort,  Chris Bachelder's Bear v Shark:The Novel, scores big with his 2002 debut novel. It was the po-mo laugh fest that the over-praised and under-edited Jonathan Franzen strained. "The Corrections".It answers what every Luddite might have been wondering about the long term effects of television watching on our much assaulted nuclear family.

In the future, the televisions have no off switch, nor do they have remote controls, because technology has gotten to the point that television no longer influences the culture, but IS the culture. Reality and simulation melt together seamlessly, without a trace of resistance from the archetypal family whose path we follow as they prepare themselves for a Las Vegas vacation to witness the much hyped Media Event of Bear v. Shark. Bachelder keeps a straight face through out most of this short but punchy novel, and displays an ear for the way television cant infiltrates our daily speech, and invades our dream life. Scattered through out the book are a heap of fast and savage rips on Mass Mediated news, sports call-in shows, flouncy entertainment under which nothing substantial resides. In this world, experts in the guise of pundits, jocks, philosophers, and academics all feed a an uncountably intrusive technology that renders every distraction and disturbance into an entertainment value, to be used until a new contrived sequence of illusion can be set in place.

Bachelder, demonstrating a brevity and incisive wit that trashes the claims made for the word-gorged "genius" of D.F. Wallace, writes surely, sharply, with his eye never off his target.  Though he does, at times, resort to the sort of post-modernism stylistics and cliches, such as having the author step out from the story to deliver some self-aware discourse on the limits of narrative's capacity to represent the external world fully, completely -- he has a novel or two to go before the lit.critese is pounded out of him -- our author finally reveals a humane side underneath the smart language, and issues forth a funny yet serious warning about our habit of relinquishing our thinking and our capacity to live imaginatively over to the hands of data-drunk programmers.

Simmering Bigelow

Profiling  Hurt Locker  director Kathryn Bigelow hot after her historic  double Oscar for Best Film and Best Director,  Vancouver Sun writer Jamie Portman made note of  the film maker's "simmering anger" and her seeming fascination with violence.  It's been asked, reasonably, that if  Bigelow had been a man, would the reporter had written the article the way it  was.. Kathryn Bigelow directed a fine motion picture that won both best director and best picture Oscars, which establishes her as a director of high skill who takes a back seat to no one. She also joins a community of artists who's personality quirks become almost as well known as their work. One can imagine the equivocating  variations that will be spontaneously created when those thinking they have issues with Bigelow's cinematic vision. She might become part of a name-dropping choruses that give quick inventories of the pluses and minuses of being a famous artist:

Mailer is a great writer, sure , but isn't he a blustering egomaniac? Bukowski is a brilliant poet, yeah, but isn't he an incorrigible drunk? Picasso reshaped what can be  done with paint and canvas, but  wasn't he misogynistic monster? Brando redefined film acting for a generations to come,but wasn't an self-destructive egocentric? 

Maybe the director will one of those who are referred to by their last name, "Bigelow", with readership knowing exactly who you're referring to. The advantage of that depends, though, on whether one's body of work or the history of their public moodiness is the first thing people think of when one's name is mentioned.

The pattern is discernible, where one begins by acknowledging a subject's talents , gifts and accomplishments, and then qualifies the exceptions with what are more often references to gossip talking points than a writer's subtle observations. Still, it becomes fair game , as many celebrities discover. The fact that they are celebrities means that they are news, period, and discussion of them is not limited to the quality of the work they do. Bigelow's temperament has been no secret in the film industry for years, and now that she's made history by being the first woman to win the best director award, her past work and her short-fuse become topics for conversation.

So yes, if Bigelow had been a man with the same history of anger, I think the reporter would have recent much the same thing. And it is, in fact, unusual for a woman director to be as fascinated with violence as a male director is; that's what makes her a ground breaker, that's what makes her newsworthy beyond her two Oscars, and it's something fit for public discussion.

Are there movies after Movie Reviews?

It was a special bit of good fortune  and pleasure to have taken classes by the late and revered film critic Manny Farber while an undergraduate at the University of California San Diego, where he taught. It was he, first among a host of serious film pundits, who convinced me that a critic was someone who's copy a smart editor left untouched. So long as the critic could write well, knew his or her stuff regarding the art and history of cineman, and who could meet deadlines without hassel, the editor was wise not to try to change or modify a critic's opinion,let alone tamper with the prose style. A readership distrusted reviewers who seemed to write great praises for every film a studio released, and were drawn more toward that critic they were sure they'd an honest and well argued opinion from. One also would look for that critic who'd managed to alert you to things in movie making that you hadn't been aware of, or only had a vague notion about. The blessing for lovers of movies and readers of quality film criticism was the 2009  publication of Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber from Library of America. Farber, a painter of note as well as a film critic, brought to the task of reviewing the artist's eye; he could take in the entire canvas and was able to discuss the visual styles of directors, photographers and lighting technicians who could create a distinct set of techniques to get across a broad and subtle range of emotions. The wonders of the collection is that one finds that while Farber broke with the pack and wrote about movies as a fully developed art in itself  and not an adjunct or subsidiary form to another--film is no medium's poor cousin--he wasn't a strident formalist. The social uses of film concerned him as well, and through out this anthology one finds the juiciest of tidbits that clarify what's confused, puncture what's pretentious, highlight what his not discussed:

"The robust irrationality of the mouse comedies has been squelched by the syrup that has been gradually flowing over the Disney way.”

"Good work usually arises when the creators... seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or anything... It goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity."

"Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. Three sins of white elephant art are (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity. "

Movies were the issue at hand, and discussing them Farber was able to slice through the distinctions that kept low , middle and high culture segregated and their respective audiences apart. Movies were a vehicle anyone who'd seen them could have an opinion of--all of us had seen the same film, all of us had seen and understood, the same plot and motivations, and all of us, with no specialized training nor advanced degrees, could bring our interpretations to the discussion; anyone who cared to participate could have a say. As often as not, the long range conversations and disagreements over movies and their meanings, directors and their directions, was itself criticism, much of it sparked by the concise, pity, perceptually brilliant musings of Manny Farber.I realize, though, that this great period of American film criticism is largely behind us, giving way to a consumer guide ratings that are pithy, if not artful. A large part of the problem might well be that critics, so called, are bored with a preponderance of movies that bleed into one another--how other movies does this stinker remind me of?-- but there are those who fight the good fight none the less. I am thinking of Duncan Shepard of the San Diego Reader, a Farber protege, who seems not to care for the majority of  releases he's tasked with evaluating and yet who is among the top movie essayists in the country: his writings on the Coen Brothers and Clint Eastwood are the finest and subtlest I've come across. Still,the trend is not good.

There was a funny 2005 piece by former Slate film critic David Edelstein about those film reviewers who seemingly are willing to whore their good names in order to be quoted in big movie ads. Edelstein gets to heart of the matter that film criticism has become a game of dodge ball rather than a reasonable case for why a movie is good, bad, or stalls somewhere in between. Critics will flee or produce more colored smoke if someone presses them to back up the original opinion; Peter Travers, Rolling Stone's shrill shill for mediocre work, would evaporate like slight rain in Death Valley if he were grilled. Film criticism used to mean, not all that long ago, an exercise in establishing movies as a rich and unique narrative art form, with a critical vocabulary and working theories used to establish criteria for good, bad and indifferent work. Impressionable as a twentyish critic , I applied the thinking to what reviews I did for some local publications and, truth be told, I was a bag of wind much of the time, grandiose and prolix, but the readers got an honest and considered opinion. Yes, I know that I was read; I still have both my hate and fan mail. All this worked as long as their was a constant stream of good films to parse, but as film production became the province of corporate interests, and as more independent publications became property of overgrown media combines, criticism became cheer leading for company projects, good , bad or worse.

Time magazine, for example, oversees reviewing the product of Warner Brothers Studios. However loud the chant goes that there is no undue influence put upon Time's assigned scribe, it remains a rotten situation. You wonder just how badly Richard Schickel could maul a particularly odious WB release without the worry of getting pink slipped. The consequence of this is that nearly every mainstream reviewer reads like Peter Travers, manically upbeat, cheery, positive, and utterly, completely unreliable. Critics, as such, are little more than musicians who can play only one song. Their answer to that charge would be, naturally, a variation of witlessly up sided spin: "Well yes, and what's more, we can play "Happy Birthday" in every key!” It would be a nice party trick, but it doesn't cut for discussion when you most desire one.

Cream that does not rise

Royal Albert Hall May 2-3-5-6 2005 --Cream (Reprise)

I have to admit that I have had an unnatural attraction for Cream's busy, jittery and bombastic blues improvisations for decades, as they've been a source of pleasure since I saw them first and three-time total at Detroit's Grande Ballroom in the late Sixties. Euphoric recall? Maybe, but I still play the thirteen minutes of "Spoonful" from Wheels of Fire a couple of times a year, and the sheer mania of Goodbye's "I'm So Glad" gets played just as often. The riffs, interweaving, and interjections of the three musicians holding the stage was a busy sort of vibe that was somewhere between musical worlds--too fast and loud for blues, too repetitive and unmelodious for jazz, too arty for rock and roll. It was a sound from the nascent electronic wilderness that was a new kind improvisational sound, influenced by the three aforementioned styles (with occasional garnishes from Classical or English music all traditions), but coming in the end as a new sort of strident, crackling noise; metallic, assertive, all-conquering, sometimes searing when guitarist Eric Clapton was in the mood and made each of his blues intonations speak volumes of what his own voice could not manage.It is something that has less to do with sheer mastery of their respective instruments--in a heartbeat I could name a dozen musicians who are better guitarists, bassists and drummers than Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker--but with how the three of these guys gibed and gelled, how well their busy techniques meshed."Meshed" might not be the right word, but what it gets called, Cream's sound was a wonderful clash of distortion and blue notes, a feedback-laden trio of howling wolves. There is less of that shamanistic howl in the reunion double CD set Royal Albert Hall May 2-3-5-6 2005, which is understandable given that all three members--Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton on drums, bass and guitar respectively--are in their Sixties. It wouldn't be incorrect to say that there are enough rousing performances here of old Cream and blues standards to fill one excellent live disc. Still, this is better than any expectation I've had over the last four decades daydreaming in off hours about a make-believe- reunion; the performances are solid for the most part, and I'm glad that Cream's essential duty as performers is to stand there and play their instruments. Unlike the Rolling Stones, whose rebel youth glory days have given way to a routinely graceless stage presence that would make a newcomer to their music wonder what the big deal ever was about these guys, Cream has only to instrumentalize, extemporize, improvise. Again, you wish there was only one disc, as some of the material suffers from obvious nerves, miscues, a lack of direction. There are moments when Clapton's guitar work simply quits in the middle of an idea, with the rhythm section failing to pick it up again and fill the arena with the sort of muscular blues Cream made it's reputation. The best performances, in fact, are the blues number, especially Albert King's "Born Under a Bad Sign" and "Stormy Monday", wherein Clapton vexes self-anointed blues traditionalists yet again with some guitar work that transcends income, nationality, or skin color. It's not a conspiracy against the blues that B.B.King and Buddy Guy have no hesitation saying wonderful things about his playing. The muse is something that moves around and is not at all loyal to matters of class, race or political stance, and in this case the essence of what allows blues music to convince you, at least momentarily, of the universality of a nuanced sort of suffering has taken a home in the center of Clapton's best fretwork. His own solo work in the days since Cream's demise in the late Sixties has been largely wretched pop variations on roots music--please note that Layla is the very notable exception-- but however mediocre a songwriter he has become, his touch on the blues is the touch of a master."It's all in the wrist" said Frankie Machine, the junkie in Nelson Algren's masterpiece The Man With The Golden Arm as he tries to describe the sort of body finesse it takes to win at throwing dice. It's all in the wrist with Clapton as well, and the fingers as he awards us with one ghostly tremolo and one screaming ostinato after another, the approximation of the human voice emerging from the din of electronic straining. It's spellbinding work, and it is these moments that make the less animated performances on Royal Albert Hall...2005 worth the while.