No love for the 5

To this day , the MC5 are not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite the impressive argument that they have been one of the most influential and, ergo, most important rock and roll bands in history. In any event, here is a choice cut not discussed many even my 5 aficionados, James Brown's "It's a Man's World".  Agreed, the song is more than patronizing and winds up placing women on the damnable pedestal and back in the kitchen at the same time, but you have to hand to these guys for their odd choice. They loved black music and their choice of a song only JB could pull off is a classic punk gesture: "Fuck you guys, we're gonna play this goddamned song because WE WANT TO."  Vocalist Rob Tyner did not, as has been remarked around a trash can full of burning rubber, give a FLAT FUCK if he sang worse than a horse thief gagging at the end of a dirty rope of justice. Rob Tyner sang like a man who had his head wrapped in a thick sheet of bubble wrap and then had his noggin stuffed into a burlap bag that reeked of diesel stained wagon timber and mildewed hemp. He sounded like he'd swallowed his fist in a freak accident that might have occurred when he was chewing on his knuckles in macho mechanical panic while watching an astroid streak a fiery, smoky path to Cobo Hall. When he sang It's A Man's World, satellites stopped broadcasting and Gabriel drove over his trumpet in a huff of overriding despair. His was the voice of percolating whiteness, personified grieving love handles with a microphone. There was a time when an attitude like that would inspire otherwise stoned and clueless teens, all of them too late for the absurd counter-culture vanities of Haight Ashbery and Greenwich Village, to yell "fuck yeah" and babble their rendition of dumb cliches about offing the pigs and serving the people. So yeah, the MC5 were really punks, macho black bad boy wannabes and crazy mofos in their right who were willing to stick it in your eye. Hah. Hit me again.

Free v Robin Trower

Rock and roll makes you stupid

Like many another clueless air guitar rebel, I sang in a band during the Seventies, a strange assortment of druggies, layabouts, alkies and genius geeks who all loved hard rock. I was the singer, and the songs I sang ranged from Trower to Led Zep to Deep Purple to Mountain--I had a miserable voice but I was the one who could get a raspy tone and volume, so sing I did. No one seemed to mind, most likely because they were usually as drunk as I was. In any case, Dewar and Trower were the perfect combination of singer and guitarist--there likely hasn't been a collaboration this good since Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck or Paul Rodgers and Paul Kossoff (in the late, great band Free). Trower, additionally, is about my favorite British blues guitarist--he broke the Clapton mold his fellows got snared by and developed his own sound; I think he's quite distinct from Hendrix, even with the similarities. I've seen him pass through town in the last few years, and the man plays better than he ever has. Yeah. Great stuff.

The saddest day of my life , though, was when someone who'd recorded one of my band's kegger gigs played the the gig--we sounded awful. Even the time-honored honored rock and roll aesthetic the favors attitude over expertise, we we sucked,in turn, long, deep and hard. A bag full of agitated electric razors would have sounded better than the clamor we were producing, out of tune, atonal,thumping, with a guitarist who was fried on cocaine and rum who managed to make his guitar sounded worse than car alarms screaming in a West Virginia mall. I , in turn, had the timbre that sounded, to be kind to myself, like someone who was clearing his throat over the loudest microphone on the stage. A crazed dog would have told me to shut the fuck up. I didn't stay quiet, though. That night we had a gig and what I did was to drink more and scream harder. My voice was gone the following morning and I could talk or eat shell fish for a month.

think not, feel more

'Having literary genres and various sub categories is a fine thing to have at your disposal when your pressed with putting a label on a book that baffles you after you finish it; more than once I’ve looked at a book in my lap seeming to stare back at me after I’ve finished it. The book seems to ask “now what? What do you make of me, and how have I aided in enhancing your experience of the life youfind yourself within”. But one needs to proceed cautiously in their attempt to name that tune. Categories themselves are as slippery as the narratives they claim to explain and contextualize; the further one steps away from a book for the wider perspective might cause the reader to lose sight of the original text and witness instead nothing but vast horizon. That’s not bad for a Grand Canyon vacation, but many readers would find it infuriating.Or frustrating .Contextualizing everything according to a variety of theories and generic definitions becomes an unpaid task and dilutes the book’s main purpose, to divert. We need to remember that dispite theoretical promises of unlocking the secret messages novelists might have, the essence of these books is making stuff up for our entertainment.

Writing and literature is all veils, I would think: if anyone could get "IT" with a piece of work, we would have to assume the writer, and his audience are satisfied, sated, and are disinclined to hear the story again. But there is always another wrinkle to relate, another nuance to discover, another veil to be taken away. This echoes Roland Barthes’ idea of writing / writing as being an erotic function, that the end that one gets to at the end of the tale is not the point of the quest, but the quest itself, the unveiling of the language, the constant re-assimilation that names for things are made to under go as the nature of the material world defies literary form; it is the imagination that needs to work within the waking sphere, not the world that needs to fit within it's contours.

Working writers dutifully engaged in their projects don't seem concerned as to the catagories their novels might eventually be placed within, and most would, it seems, be amused or annoyed with the intrusion of a specious jargon that's been developed to explain what it is texts cannot do in the social world, beyond the assembled signifiers. Is Gravity's Rainbow any less a work of "Magical Realism" than what we've seen in Garcia Marquez or Borges? Is Pale Fire less post modern than, say, Mulligan Stew? Critics have fled the storyline and the narrative technique and have foresaken the task in discussing how writing comes to make sense; it becomes the definitively moot point, irresolvable and subjects to an unending detour the circles around the precise meaning of finally inconsequential terms. Imagination is trait that will use anything manner or style that is suitable to a writer's project at hand and it ought not be surprising, or upsetting that many writers, assigned to roles by career-making PhD candidates, simply do what they need to do in order to get the work done. We witness fascinating paradoxes: Norman Mailer, by temperament a romantic existentialist who might have been in the late 19th century, is one who took to post-modern strategies to render is work: the range of his assumed styles and experimentation creates specific problems with literary historians who might be eager to be done with his books and his name.

The sectarian insistence on the differences between styles is pointless, I think; it's more fruitful and more interesting to have a more fluid approach to the study of literature and writing, particularly in how writers will take cues from one another and molds those influences into something that's very much theirs alone. Garcia Marquez (nee Lopez) has spoken of the great influence Southern Fiction had on his emerging style, particularly Faulkner, and Pynchon gives credit to William Gaddis and his Joycean The Recognitions as a major motivator for him to write with the denseness he has. Criticism tends to be like guys who talk about cars with all their specs yet who never drive one, never really comprehend the feel of the tires on the road. A criticism that takes into account how style , whatever it's source or use, produces it's effects, it's tactile quality , seems much more inviting. But "truth", large or small t, is something we arrive at after the fact, up the road, after we're over the hill. The point of personal experience is something we assign later, when memory arranges the particulars in some fine fashion that makes the data resonate like some kind of grand or sad music that needs its expression in talk, a phone call, poem, novel, blues guitar. Since experience is the hardest thing to convey --it is not an argument I'm making, it's a tightly knotted cluster of feelings and emotions linked to a sequence of events that I have need to relate to you, to bring you into (in a manner of seduction, dropping the suspenders of disbelief) -- I generally favor any writer to use any and all materials available and appropriate.

Dick Dodd, Lead Singer of the Standells, Dies at 68 - NYTimes.com

Dick Dodd, Lead Singer of the Standells, Dies at 68 - NY Times

Dick Dodd, lead singer for the proto-punk garage band The Standells , has passed away. Dodd had a nasal, snotty, irritating way of singing , or rather vocalizing , perfect for a band that was composed of hammering backbeats and barbed wire guitar riffs, and it was a choice component of the band's one big hit, "Dirty Water", a left-handed salute to Boston . Talking about grime and filth of the River Charles and hanging out with "lovers, muggers and thieves", the song was a telling bit of self reflection of a town that was on edge with the collective trauma set upon by The Boston Strangler. Boston at the time was not a happy town , like any number of American cities experiencing the full wrath of the 60s, and Dodd's obnoxious refrain at the chorus "I love that dirty water....ooooooh Boston YOU'RE MY HOME..." was the kind of defensive, fist in the face move a local gives to a hand wringing out of towner too busy tsk-tsking over the sad plight of a city to actually understand what was happening in Bean Town. The punk genius of the song, though, was that the Standells weren't from Boston, but from Los Angeles, inveighing on a song written by their manager. Now that's punk.

Unhinged Melody

"There Was A man of Double Deed" isn't great poetry, but it is worth remarking upon for how effectively it creates the mindset of someone for whom the world is great chain of secret connections that are mysterious, foreboding and headed, inevitably , toward a terrible end. The rhyme scheme, tick-tock, back and forth, a child's jump rope tempo, suggests a mind setting everything in sets in a convoluted task to understand a heartless exterior life through some ordering protocols, but this is in vain since the view here attempts to be global , beyond the limits of what this narrator sees and encounters daily. The banal things that get mentioned are paired with things that they have no functional relation to; seeds give way to snow banks, ships are without belts (meaning rudders, I suppose) and are likened to tailless birds who in turn fly in a roaring sky that brings a sounding lion to the narrator's front door.

There was a man of double deed,
Who sowed his garden full of seed;
When the seed began to grow,
'Twas like a garden full of snow;

Something crucial is missing in the descriptions , and the lack of a logical, connecting tissue results in violence on the imagination that might otherwise conceive a simple day as orderly and diverse in the purpose others besides oneself have in their daily routines. Save for the man of double deed (a shadowy figure we might think, a figure of divided agendas) there are no others in this poem, just he and the suffering narrator reeling as matters unfold, reeling as it all comes in, cause and effect seemingly obvious , but all without reason.

When the snow began to melt, 'Twas like a ship without a belt; When the ship began to sail, 'Twas like a bird without a tail; When the bird began to fly, 'Twas like an eagle in the sky;

It's a pile up of circumstances, and the speech is just this side of hebephrenia, the behavior and language habits of the paranoid, the schiznophrenic who lacks the psychological infrastructure to sort through incoming stimuli and create categories, context and relationship to the passage of time; everything happens simultaneously, at once, and everything that does happen does not end, but rather keeps occurring, repetitive, violent, without reason to the suffering. Items are conflated, images become strange, unfamiliar, and the mind that must deal with this chaos feels permanently tormented, put upon.

When the bird began to fly,
'Twas like an eagle in the sky;
When the sky began to roar,
'Twas like a lion at my door;
When my door began to crack,
'Twas like a stick across my back;
When my back began to smart,
'Twas like a penknife in my heart;
And when my heart began to bleed,
'Twas death, and death, and death indeed

.

The conclusion of all these connections, which the mind attempts to bring meaning to by relentless speculation as to how unlike things actually purposeful and conspiratorial relationships, is that all things , all deeds lead to death. In such a state, death is the only thing that makes sense, since even to the most marginalized of personalities death is seen as an end from which there is both no recovery and no more torment. The poem's rhyme scheme, 'though too slack and lacking muscle for my tastes, still gives you the chills for the unvarnished and clear mindset it gives you. I cannot shake the feeling of these odd enounters I've had over the years, listening to someone speak slowly, deliberately, with purpose as they told me about their poor circumstances, only to pick up the pace, quicken the rhythm as more detail came forth, until finally sentence structure had collapsed and the speaker was overwhelmed by attempting to talk about everything that came to their mind at the same time.

"The man of double deed" seems to be one who is not what he seems, someone superficially in our presence who seems friendly enough but who has an undisclosed purpose and reasoning in his dealings. Because the man is viewed suspiciously, the tint of treachery seeps into all he does. He is the proverbial tipping point from which the poisin spreads; perhaps in a perfect world each person and place and thing contribute only to greater happiness and prosperity, but there is something wrong with the world of our narrator, who describes events where activities end in some manner of demise; this is a cruel world of distraction and summary dismissal. The man of double deed, whatever name a listener might give him, appears to be doing nothing less than sowing the seeds of our destruction.

Ezra Pound the Mountebank

Onan the Librarian

Ezra Pound is a traitorous, spunk-stained groin polisher with at least two ideas that have traveled well through the decades. Otherwise, he is a ball of congealed grease, dust, and hair you pull out of your brush, an utterly unusable poet. Pound was a lousy writer besides. Reading him is like taking a bullet in the bidness. Eliot, however, was a terrific poet quite apart from his grouchy affectations of upper-class Royalism. The writing remains evocative, ironic, with a tangible melancholy and despair that makes one want to live life fuller than they had been. He might have gained much by having a hard one crease his private channel, but then we will never know; all I know is that Eliot's poems still get the heat to the meat.

One hears arguments in support of imperfect heroes that genius will carry their reputations above and over and far, far away from the corrosive and unforgivable aspects and deeds of their lives, a notion I take under advisement for this reason:  it depends on the art they create. Pound fails this simplistic criterion for reasons more subjective than they are objectively sustainable, those being that his motivation really wasn't to create things of beauty that even the boob, the numskull, and the drooling poltroon could relate to, but instead power. Bob Perelman, poet and an incredibly astute critic of modernism, pointed out the difficulty of Pound, Gertrude Stein. These writers operated under the assumption that their icon-smashing,perspective-dashing, syntax relaxing experiments were going to be the death of the old filters and provide populations with new ways of seeing. Pound, I am sure, wanted the world to see things his way, complexly, nuanced, infinitely connected to the real roiling subject of humanity, which was godless and unguided by nothing else other the critical desire to kick a homeless man in the throat, steal the pennies off a dead uncle's eyes and, most loathsome of all, desire to rule the world for reasons no more significant than what a meal at the cornet spittoon saloon will give you.

 But this was something of a bad bet--the more original his vision, the harder it was for him to make people see. So it became more about power, power embedded in a charismatic man who could transform the landscape, in the world, and the psyche through major feats of willpower. Readers, viewers, butchers, wives, teachers, witless dregs no longer had a choice to vote with their feet or let their tastes guide their selection; great historical forces were at play. Or at least Pound was running his mouth and sucking up to fascist powers on whom he sought common cause and a significant stipend. His poetry seemed odious and thick as bales of mildewed hay, bloodless examples of what his theories were elaborating on. He was a Rush Limbaugh for those intellectuals who fancied themselves better than the rest of the population, who existed solely to annoy them, slow them down.

Eliot, though, is a more slippery sort to grasp. He is the brooding,sad-sack Methuselah of the generation that lacked the patience to wait the years it usually took to be jaded, aristocratically bored, permanently and fashionably melancholic, and on the other hand, a closeted racist, homophobic, Jew-baiting ass hole.  Anti Semite he was, but he could make you feel his weariness, loneliness, and sadness that the world was ending badly, becoming a fetid stew of mediocre thinking and piecemeal achievement.  He was a great poet and a natural pill as a human being. He is someone you would compliment for the stunning brilliance of his language and then try to slam into your truck as he left work. He was a man you wanted to admire and then spit on. That is greatness.

Ridley Scott's sore spots

American Gangster promises much from the advertising, highlighting to live-wire Oscar winners in the form of Denzel Washington and Russell crow as, respectively, a powerful Harlem based crime lord and an honest cop heading a narcotics investigation that eventually brings him to trial. Directed by Ridley Scott, this should have been a sure thing, but the lesson behind items bandied as safe bet is that they go sour more often than we wish.

Scott is, at times, a brilliant stylist who can set a mood, get atmosphere and move action and drama along concurrently, as is the case in his masterworks Blade Runner, Alien, The Duelist, Gladiator . The balance between the oddly composed frame, the baroque design and the character driven plots  made for what is now a rare thing in the industry, a well made Hollywood entertainment. He's never met a skewed color scheme or illogical edit he wasn't taken with, a fact that makes more than a few of his movies as if they're in competition with brother Tony Scott. Ridley Scott often gets as agitated and formula-glutted and offers up patented bits of nonsense like the predictable (but stylistically engaging) crime story  Matchstick Men and Kingdom of Heaven, generic equivocations of style employing an excess of trendy edits ,gauche camera filters that came to nothing at all except a noisy journey to forgone plot resolutions. American Gangster is somewhere between these virtues and vices, and it is to be commended that Scott has calmed his camera hand and offered up the wonderfully grit-textured scenery of a Seventies-era New York with a minimum of gratuitous flair.

The plot, though, is something pieced together from a half dozen crime dramas one could name, the most obvious being the face to face meeting between Washington's and Russell's crook and cop characters, where opposing world views are exchanged: the nod to Pacino and DeNiro in Heat is glaring, obvious as a zit. Scott also takes his time developing the story lines of the crime boss and the cop to where they eventually meet and lock horns, in between being the standard troubled marriages, drug addictions, mob hits, all proceeding at a snail's pace. Add to this drawn out build up the fact of Denzel Washington's persistent monotone and we have a collection of tics and quirks passed off as style. Russell Crow again manages to barely hide his Australian drawl and underplays his part as the dutiful and shambling cop, more cipher than character. 

Both characters are more stereotypes for the writers to hang their refurbished clichés on. Still, this seems old, contrived, pieced together by the numbers, and the assurance that this film is based on a true story doesn't mask the feeling of having seen all this before, nor can it make for the lack of dramatic tension. It's a paycheck, not a testament. Slowness is not a sin, of course, but there is the occasional mistake by good directors and their script writers who think slack momentum equals literary acumen, something this film maker obviously coveted. 

Black Hawk Down is a bad film by a good director, Ridley Scott does his best work when there is something of compelling literary interest here, i.e., characters that are written, not merely depicted as they are in Black Hawk. The Duelist, Blade Runner, Alien, and Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, among his best work, achieve a "suspended- disbelief" credibility in as much as image comes to match idea, and directing hand seems to catch some of the musicality of conflict and buried desire that gives off a sense of some larger insanity of desire that is hidden. Black Hawk is a routine war-is-hell yawner that cannot rise above its status as movie-of-the-week fodder. Scott is a fine stylist if he has the literary substance to make his approach more than just gestures and window dressing, as it is here. 

The moral drift of this thing is disturbing, and the feeble little declaration toward the end that the Marine's motivation in a rudderless, under-determined mission is being there for the other guys, your buddies, does not raise the level. I suspect Scott would do stronger, more compelling work if he were adapting a war story that had an implicit argument within it, or at least a consistent point of view that would make the visual displays fire up more than mere weirdness. 

It's intriguing to think what he would have done with Heart of Darkness had Coppola not beat him to it. There remain Michael Herr's brilliant Dispatches, a vivid gonzo journalism read on the Viet Nam war. Viet Nam, though, is pretty much tapped out as a film subject matter. The camera lingers too often in Black Hawk Down, lapsing into slow motion while presumably native music blasts over the speakers, the lens frozen as though dumbfounded, an acid head who discovers his face in the mirror. It’s a bad film that lacks the guts of these idealized Marines convictions. Had Ridley Scott given us something that suits the military culture BHD (the film) pretends to celebrate, something even on the level of John Wayne, we'd have a film with a narrative reason to exist. Scott, though, is a director of strange moods and articulate passion, and his diffidence here is betrayed by unmotivated characterizations --stereotypes , really, card board cut outs --and his frequent lapses’ into fluttering slow motion , accompanied by booming music, with piercing vocals. He loves exotica, and sometimes it works, but not here, when a straight up comprehension of military ethos and genre expectations would have worked much better than this distracted, protracted performance. ______________________________________________

Ridley Scott never directed a film as beautiful or as provocative as film Blade Runner, his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep much has been said of the film's look, an evocation of Los Angeles in a future time, with smart and stylish renditions of classic film noir style. If nothing else, this film does make fine... See More use of the extremes of light and dark, with a muted , earth toned schema for the matters in between that suggest the competing sediments of rust, dust, soot and chemical pollution, a suitable palette for a thriller set in the future. More than the look, however, is the set of issues the movies manages to cogently engage, from the spiritual ---the rogue androids quest to meet their creator and so extend their lives--to the sociological and philosophical. Immigration, urban densification, the mashing of cultures, the unprincipled introduction of technology into the marketplace. He's directed other noteworthy films ,but none of them have the combination of ideas, tone, or visual allure that made Blade Runner a singular piece of work; the odd thing is that it is that rare instance of when an elegantly designed vehicle contains any number of ideas that are substantial enough for a half-dozen discussion groups and a surfeit of monographs.

 This follows Philip K.Dick's fascination with how populations are willing to relinquish their humanity--the kind of inventive, curious, adventurous humanity that isn't afraid of hard work, using its brain, or risking death in the cause of finding out more of the world. In his novels technology is seen as the means through which the human being becomes less human by having the burden of having to use his Free Will less and less. As the machines take on more of what was exclusively the domain of flesh and blood, the tragedy that befalls those who've chosen convenience and leisure over a grittier essence don't seem tragic at all; it is hard to empathize with the products of pure leisure that haven't a care except for the entertainment of their senses.

Norman Mailer at the Movies : The New Yorker

Norman Mailer at the Movies : The New Yorker:

 I doubt that you have known a more dedicated Mailerophile than me. Even so, with all the wit, wisdom, nuancing and artful equivocation I've done over fifty years discussing this man's body of work, I do not like his movies. This article is the sort of "smart guy" talk that avoids the usually criteria of film criticism, evaluating whether a work succeeds on whatever terms the film choose to work within, and instead chat amiably (and gutlessly) about what ideas had or might have had while making his trio of films. The author here is smart enough to tie the films--Wild 90, Beyond the Law and Maidstone--to Mailer's own essays on film-as-art, and latched onto nice spring board with which to avoid passing a summary judgement on Mailer's skills as a film director. 

The discussion then becomes metaphysical, in the stratosphere of aesthetic reasoning where theorizing about a movie's intentions is more important whether something tangible, emotional cathartic , or arguably perception-changing was transmitted to a viewer as a result of seeing one of his movies. Interesting and strong arguments can be made in defense of muddled , imperfect works--I am one of those who argue in favor of Mailer's fiction, especially his late works like Ancient Evenings, Harlot's Ghost, The Gospel According to the Son and The Castle in the Forest--but there has to be elements in the flawed work that demand attention just be virtue of being outstanding , in itself, that element that deserves inspection, interpretation, praise, and contextualization. 

Mailer's movies, though, have no splendid moments; in the case of Mailer's essays about film and writing of his own experience, what he was thinking of was more interesting , far more real genius than the films he actually realized. It does look swell, of course, to have the term "film maker" in a biographical sketch when the curious desire to know what someone did in his or her lifetime. "Norman Mailer, novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, newspaper publisher, film-director". Yes, all that sounds cool, very nice indeed. Mailer's achievements are in his writing, and it those, I think, that will continue to be argued for a few more generations to come. What he accomplished with his movies, though, is something less grand , which was to give a handful of film scholars and theory-driven academics some fresh material for their pipeline.

______________________________

I would suggest that Mailer's goal from the get-go was to be a volatile blend of genius and jerk,  as he writes in the first paragraph of his introduction to his 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself:

 .“…Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that would go so far as to think it’s my present and future work which have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years, I could be wrong , and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all   agree it would cheat this collection of its true Interest to present myself  as more modest than I am.”

 This is not to suggest that he didn't regret that some of off-strength projects, whether films, plays, poetry or screenwriting, weren't as superb or revolutionary as he desired them to be, but he certainly didn't wallow in his failures. He got up  and went back to work on his next project, toward an unknown artistic success or career destroying embarrassment. Except his career didn't end. Even stabbing his wife in a drunk, speed-chased rage couldn't stop his career. Mailer believed in dualities in human personality, and he achieved his , admirable and loathsome at once. We are lucky he elected to remain a brilliant literary figure ,where his problematic nature could be contained, rather than get himself elected to office. God help us if he got his hands on any kind of real political power.

a few seconds ago ·

Tough Guys Don't Dance

The late Norman Mailer was one of the most important American writers in the 20th century who, despite what misgivings you may have about his vanity, arrogance, and odd sense of the masculine imperative, wrote some masterpieces. His novel, “Tough Guys Don't Dance", wasn't one of his master works, but it was a first-rate entertainment, a noirish murder mystery that combined Mailer's career long themes--the nature of courage, the search for knowledge through sexual encounters and violent challenges--with a wonderfully presented atmosphere and a cast of skewed, tortured, characters.

 The tale of an alcoholic, would be writer who tries to recover from a black-out exactly how a woman's head showed up in his marijuana plant stash is an intoxicating read. A tale of improbable events and impossible characters made plausible by the poetry of Mailer's writing. As a film director, however, Mailer is quite awful, being someone with notions of how a film ought to look and how it should achieve its effects but with no idea how to get anywhere near the mark he set for himself. 

 The dialogue, acceptable in the context of the dark and brooding world of Mailer's novel, is preposterous here, revealing a tin ear for the rhythms of how people actually sound. Good actors seem stiff and embalmed, and bad actors come off as automatons. In a more forgiving light, one might say that his is an art film, an avant gard production that just happened to have some money behind it, but that would be wishful thinking. The movie is just odd and awful.

Jeff Beck : less is less

Occasional guitar genius Jeff Beck.

Jeff Beck is a tiresome guitar player whose penchant for sparse noodling sends too many listeners, seduced by legacy and legend,  into reveries about how "less is more" and the virtues of having a minimal palette of tones. Truth be told, less is merely less and a Jeff Beck performance means there will be huge, gaping spaces in an improvised section, while the guitarist waits for what seems like the random moment to lay another twist to the string. His band, particularly on the Live at Ronnie Scott's album, stays busy while the master awaits is riffing muse, laying down a carpet of funk with a fabric of high-register bass work, minimal drum work, and a variety of ethereal space chords emanating from the keyboards. John Cage had the notion that the audience need to sit in their impatient stews for some periods so they have a chance to listen to their own music (Zen/chance practices in music are more exciting theorized about than experienced firsthand) and the take away for me is that the point of going to a Jeff Beck concert is to confront his reputation and to wait for him to do something interesting. This is what the late critic Steve Esmedina called "boredom as aesthetic effect". Beck, I'm sure, intends other things, and thinks himself akin to Miles Davis, another musician who never burdened his solos with gratuitous technique. Davis, though, could build tension and, when required, fire on all cylinders and make it frantic, exciting, breathe taking. Beck does not do that. Decades go by and endless conversations refer to the genius of Beck and still, nothing happens at the address I was given. I understand that and we have, of course, is essentially subjectivities competing for dominance.

The matter isn’t whether Beck can play guitar. As a blues/rock guitarist who first came to American attention during the British invasion of the Sixties with the Yardbirds and later with his string of short-lived (but memorable) ensembles, Beck is a pioneer in matters of extending the vocabulary of an African American vernacular and incorporating elements of funk, jazz, reggae and fusion and rockabilly into his particular mix. He’s recorded quite a bit of music that still makes me turn my head and stare incredulously at the speakers; when he wasn’t being cheap with his playing and willing to lavish more in guitar bravado, his guitar work is of a whole piece.

 Not just flashy solos, which were, in fact, the least of Beck’s best art, but of control of tone color,  splendidly, tasty fills in the interstices of his band’s alternately rocking or funky fury, attacks, flurries and elongated elaborations on the tremolo bar when your attention was otherwise engaged.  What makes Jeff Beck a great guitarist (when he wants to show off) is that while his compatriots were concentrating on the number of notes they could cram into a twelve-bar or sixteen bar phrase, he did what Miles Davis did with is trumpet after he ventured from the fast, rapid, conspicuously virtuoso inclined sphere of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and instead pared back his soloing to what was essential and made musical sense. 

While others dominated their songs and performances with fusillades that eventually became a comfortable rut, Beck filled his accorded solo slots with the gift of space, fewer notes, high register bends, and unique tunings. I put forth his first two albums The Jeff Beck Group and Beckola in evidence and will skip ahead to his fusion release Wired and still later Beck’s Guitar Shop as prime examples. That sweet, discerning blend of flash, taste, discretionary speed, off-center attack and an uncanny mastery of electric guitar volume are marvels for future generations to listen to if they wonder what all fuss was about. These weren’t records by an artist still making his reputation. Presently, his reputation is made, his name now a brand, his work too frequently a stylized snore.  Again, I wish Beck would indulge the less savory side of his musical nature and burn a hole in the state no one can leap over.

That, though, is part of the fun of discussing musicians and their work. It just seemed to me that Beck has refined his style over the decades to the point that he is drastically essentialist in the tweaking of his playing; all the speedy, distorted, flashier bits are missing in large measure in the interest of a more mature purity, Artists, as they age, do that, but I think Beck's ruthless reappraisal of his chops has, for me, left much of what he's recorded sound empty. I would love to hear Beck rave it up again, to cram a lot of notes into a measure and make them stick, like he used to.

Ender does not end here

Ender's Game, a movie based on the novel by the currently controversial Orson Scott Card (who is in the soup for not knowing when put a cork in it), is a decently executed science fiction film, although I found Harrison Ford's unrelenting scowl as the head of the planet's military command to be a bit of a headache inducer. The furrows in his brow were deep enough to plant crops in. Director Gavin Hood keeps this enterprise moving along well enough, explaining its fake historical circumstances and contrived dream theory well enough , but there was really no anticipation in the story line. 

I hadn't read the novel and likely will not do so--I like my scifi on the screen where words don't matter--but I had a very good idea where this thing was going. Let me just say that with the Title and the plot's strong emphasis on battle simulations in preparation for war, the shocking twist was not a shock, twined or unwound. It is, you guessed it, a thinly  disguised critique of militarism and war mongering. It's not Noam Chomsky, but the subtext has the benefit of being easily grasped, too easily perhaps. The state of Political Commentary isn't that much smarter than the barely concealed verities in Ender's Game. The flashy  visuals, not a spoonful of sugar,make the medicine go down. 

The ending was an expected and unsatisfying set for the sequel; the dissatisfaction lies not in the fact that story was unfinished by the end of the movie, but that far too many movies you take a risk on seeing are likely not intended to be stand alone entertainments but rather the installments of studios hope will be profitable franchises. The prevailing feeling is "here we go again", as you feel part of the masses, teased by gossip, speculation and all other manner of celebrity non-news , responding in Pavlovian fashion to a vague , if  loud and flashy promise that you can relive the thrills you had over a cherished film from long, long ago. You may that particular memory from your own experience. Whatever the film, though, all of us know, in an unguarded moment of self-honesty, that those thrills are not coming back.