December 2003 Archives

¶ Some critics have a weird prejudice against box sets. I know because my NPR producer, Virginia Prescott, invited Robert Christgau onto a year-end box set roundup discussion, and he declined saying he "doesn't cover boxes." His readers "don't have the bucks it takes to keep up with them," or some such, and he flatly refused to talk about it. This seems a fairly UN-nuanced opinion from one of our best critics: aren't there good box sets and bad box sets? Sure, it's a boon to labels that raid their shelves and produce expensive packages without the usual studio production costs, and sure, it's way over the top, past its peak and out of control (do we really need that Kansas box?). But those are different complaints. The ups can and often do meet the burden of price: think of that first Stax box, the Nuggets compilations, the first Doo-Wop set, or Legacy's new Count Basie collection. It would almost be enough to renew your faith in liner notes if they'd just stop hiring the same old David Fricke to write his soft-core histories. (Ah envy.) Johnny Cash's UNEARTHED is gonna make a lot of top ten lists this year, so where does that fit in with Christgau's overly broad denunciation?

¶ Jon Pareles has me re-listening to the SECOND HALF of ELEPHANT. Caught White in COLD MOUNTAIN, and he does fine, look forward to that soundtrack (it's another T Bone Burnett extravaganza, right?) You need ELEPHANT whether it makes my list or not, bubbas. And check out this FAB garage compilation White assembled a couple years back: THE SYMPATHETIC SOUND OF DETROIT.

¶ THEN, Sony sent along some titles from their new Masterworks Heritage Expanded Edition series, including:

Barber ADAGIO FOR STRINGS/VIOLIN CONCERTO/Schuman IN PRAISE OF SHAHN…, Bernstein/Stern
Bach GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, Gould (1955)
Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev CELLO SONATAS, Ax/Ma
Mozart, Schubert SONATAS, FANTASIA (4-hand), Perahia, Lupu

We listened to these during holiday dinners, they all feature warm and detailed remastered sound and bonus tracks on recordings that didn't need any padding. See also Horowitz's Scarlatti, Serkin's Beethoven, and others. Props to Sony.

¶ And finally: the FEVER cover art just came in. Nekked BOOT-Ay.

Before the year goes out I want to mention one of my favorite reads of recent months, even though it's copyright 2001 (now in Da Capo paper). James Harvey's MOVIE LOVE IN THE FIFTIES (Knopf) had me hankering for the nightly pre-sleep read, and it's added a score of flicks to my rental list. Harvey is author of ROMANTIC COMEDY: IN HOLLYWOOD FROM LUBITSCH TO STURGES (which I haven't read), and this one clearly underwent a title change to make the marketing dept. happy. It could have been called ROMANTIC NOIR, as it covers the other side of that era's greatness, with masterful portraits of major figures like Nicholas Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Doris Day, Deanna Durbin, and many others. Here's Harvey on Humphrey Bogart: "Bogart's face had become by 1950 not only 'an image of our condition' but of our final best hopes for it: the face of someone not only battered by experience but deepened by it too -- a face of dreadful beauty." And here he is on Hawks's RED RIVER casting:

"And that turns out to be, I think, one of the most inspired pairings in movie history, and one of the most inspiriting: pitting Clift's subtlety and sensitivity against Wayne's macho force and bluntness -- the new idea of manliness against the old, and yet suggesting a continuity between them, too. Hawks's movie really does persuade you (no other movies of the time even tried to) that Clift's Matt COULD actually 'come from,' and even belong to, the world of this familiar 'father' and still belong -- like all shining 'sons' -- to another order of being, more adventurous, more hopeful…"

You'd have read that quote in FEVER if I'd read it in time.

ALSO (mostly from 2003):
The Conversations : Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)
Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and Memory, by Devin McKinney (Harvard)
Visions of Jazz, by Gary Giddins (Oxford)
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson (Crown)
Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller, by Gregg Herken (Henry Holt)
Dreamtime: Chapters from the Sixties, by Geoggrey O'Brien (Counterpoint)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: The Hitler Diaries (Beatle edition).

I've been listening to Dave Holland Quintet's EXTENDED PLAY, a magnificent twofer on ECM, recently nominated for a Grammy. It's heading straight for my list. The recording alone is masterful: each instrument beautifully placed in the spectrum, and the drumming is beyond crisp. Even in slower passages, Barry Kilson is attentive to the point of exhileration. Here's John Fordham in the GUARDIAN: "This remarkable double-album is, surprisingly, the bassist's first live recording for his regular label, ECM, in 30 years. Recorded over four nights at New York's Birdland, this set features Holland's regular quintet, built around the long-established relationship between his own low-register mobility and that of trombonist Robin Eubanks, and the immense melodic, textural and rhythm variety provided by saxophonist Chris Potter, vibraharpist Steve Nelson and drummer Billy Kilson. All five also compose well, which gives the quintet an idiomatic variety missing in most contemporary jazz bands that concentrate on originals. ... The live feel sparks such an arresting sense of being present at a Holland concert, and so successfully illuminates the flexibility of the shifting inner relationships that you wonder why they haven't recorded this way before."

Jan Herman responds to my ANGELS posting (below) in his blogcritics column, arguing that Kushner's play works if you get past the first 3 hours (and he knows that sounds ridiculous). Yeah, well, I actually kinda like all the setup, especially Cohn's entrance, the "I wish I was an octopus speech," and I thought Streep was hilarious as the Rabbi (had to go back and replay that one, once you identify her voice, you realize what made him sorta eery, as if he spoke from another time and space). But this "closet" theme Herman identifies is lame: sure, closeted Gays are "moral cowards," untrustworthy, etc. But come on, Cohn was all those things BEFORE we even consider him as a Gay Man, I mean PULLEEEEZE. Kushner does Cohn a FAVOR by giving him a conscience. And while there's something DELICIOUS about a monster like Cohn getting his comeuppance from a life of vile deeds, the closet seems to me the least of his problems. Plus what moral tension is there when all your good characters get some kind of "redemption" and all your evil characters get admonished? I mean, do you really need 6 or 8 scattered hours to demonstrate that this closet life is a bad thing? Even the Very Great Emma Thompson can't pull off that closing to Part 1. I'd be curious to see the essay on all the Christian symbolism afforded these folks (angel visitations, redemption through death)...Even one of my favs, Richard Goldstein, doesn't go there.

AND ANOTHER THING
There's a big essay to be written on what a radical act ER has taken by moving some major characters to Africa for episodes about the burgeoning AIDS epidemic. I can't think of another top-rated prime-time show that's ever been so committed to shoving our noses in the rest of the world while we fritter away our surplus in Iraq.

After listening to UNEARTHED for a couple weeks, I'm convinced it's not only all the stuff that Rubin should have released originally, it's one of the best box set concept/executions yet, and if you come anywhere near adoring Cash, make sure it's under your tree. Greil Marcus is tough on the whole (it was underway well before his death), but entertainingly rhapsodic as usual (yeah, right, radio's gonna get behind this). Plus, how do you trust a guy who best his reputation on NATALIE MERCHANT and COUNTING CROWS? Milo Miles has a much better take on Cash. See also Milo on Miles Davis's JACK JOHNSON box, which Christgau assigns a B+, a tough grade for all its revelations.

Yeesh, once again I disagree with everybody, even the redoubtable Jan Herman. The reason ANGELS IN AMERICA never worked for me, in ANY medium, was simply because it's a) too long and b) unfocused. I'll give any show SIX HOURS, but Kushner's original EIGHT were anything but poetically structured, even though I admired his a) humor (which is a BIG compliment) and b) pretension. I worry that because this work is simply too "politically correct" to criticize, it's much easier for everyone to simply jump on the bandwagon.

Here's the original lead I wrote for this entry (last week):
The only thing more inane than Tony Kushner's incomprehensible homilies ("Nothing unknown can really be known") is the hype he's bathed in around ANGELS IN AMERICA. Here's Nancy Franklin in a recent NEW YORKER: "There is wide agreement, and no compelling counterargument, that Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA is the most important play of the last decade." Maybe if everyone bangs it over our head again and again it will simply become true, since counterarguments are either uncompelling or beside the point. (Franklin has lost me before, but now I seriously question the judgment of someone who sides with Kushner over an actress like Mary Louise Parker.) What is it about ANGELS that inspires such hyperbole? And it's not just this one play, it's Kushner himself, who's now a brand name Gay Jewish Intellectual. Here's John Lahr in the same issue: "There are moments in the history of theatre when stagecraft takes a new turn…" We can't have anything new from Kushner, it has to be a how his new musical transforms all of stagecraft. This is all a very bad sign for both Kushner and the theatre: when critics get intimidated into lofty stuff like this, you should be wary. Pacino, Streep, Parker are genius, but don't overlook much of the underplayed support from the others, especially Patrick Wilson, who knows how to let Pacino steal scenes and still deliver the emotional goods.

¶ Double Dipping: yesterday on HERE AND NOW discussing Remastered Rock, tonight on ON POINT, discussing box sets with NPR's Tom Moon.

¶ If I'm lyin' I'm cryin': I just heard this Starbucks longhair sincerely proclaim Tom Petty one of the "great singers" of his era.

¶ The Hours and The Clicking:

Celebrity Crank Calls
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/morepranks.shtml

2003 List Links
http://www.fimoculous.com/year-review-2003.cfm

Useful Noise
"The Whipperwill of freedom zapped me right between the eyes."
http://usefulnoise.blogspot.com/

Blog Critics: Music
http://blogcritics.org/index.php#music

They don't sell classical music like they used to. Back in the day, if piano titans such as Rudolf Serkin or Artur Rubinstein hit a rough note in the middle of a concerto, engineers would simply patch it up to make it sound perfect. It's called "sweetening," and the practice has become such a routine part of the music business that many performing musicians look down on recordings as artificial and illegitimate.

Now for the predictable retro backlash: it has become chic to put the wrong notes back in. The latest Vladimir Horowitz release is a 'cleaned up' version of his 1965 comeback concert in Carnegie Hall. In other words, it does away with all the fixes the original recording engineers patched in from rehearsal tapes. (Luckily, a second unedited tape of the concert was preserved.) For pianists and Horowitz aficionados, this new release boasts not only the quietest digital processing, but the original 'raw' performance without any audio band-aids...

[Click here for more...]

Here's a shamelessly immodest excerpt from Ron Rosenbaum's current OBSERVER column, which also wins LEAD OF THE MONTH:

...Anyway, all of this was running through my mind before the delayed murder charges. (The death occurred last February; Spector later told an Esquire writer, Scott Raab, that Clarkson shot herself while toying with the gun. Now the D.A. says Spector murdered her.) Shortly before the charges were filed, a third Phil Spector development ensued: There arrived in the mail a galley of the new book from Tim Riley, Fever: How Rock & Roll Transformed Gender in America. Mr. Riley is the author of Tell Me Why, which I think is the best book yet written about Beatles songs.

In this new book, he goes beyond his unique fusion of technical musical knowledge and stunningly perceptive emotional exegesis of lyrics to a wider-angled social vision that focuses in good part on the glorious complexities—societal as well as musical—of the "girl-group" sound, from the Chantels and the Exciters to Chrissie Hynde.

Mr. Riley is at his very best when he comes to what Spector and Veronica Bennett (later Veronica Spector) achieved with the Ronettes. Indeed, he writes one of the best single passages I’ve ever read about one of the ultimate girl-group songs: a passage that focuses on the breathtaking wordless opening of "Be My Baby," with its dangerous heart-arrhythmia of cathartic beats: the ones Mr. Riley transliterates as "Boom! … boom-boom BLAM!"

I’ll just quote a few words of his ecstatic exegesis of that one percussive sequence: "The defining beat, held aloft at the opening like a rhythmic magnet pulling the rest of the song along behind, is spacious and beatific—it maps out a cosmic space, and it’s one of the few imperious statements of rhythm alone … in rock that cannot be copied without referencing the original …. But although the beat alone is vast, suggesting realms of feeling for the song to explore, what the rhythm is holding back is what gives it its power. It’s the pauses between beats that give it its candid flirtatiousness, and when Ronnie Spector’s voice unfurls in the opening verse, its promise is fulfilled … trumpeting a woman’s desire just as confidently as any man ever had."

--You can't buy that kind of plug, just be sure and remember it when the book comes out next June...

MYSTIC RIVER intimidates even the most admirable of critics (Fallen World, by Geoffrey O'Brien in the NY Review of Books). It's hard for him to justify how "Victims will become victimizers, and victimizers themselves come to be seen as the helpless agents of a destiny just beyond their control," since the Tim Robbins character is TRIPLY victimized: as a boy, husband, and finally Sean Penn's "false" friend.

O'Brien harps on how the story's events are out of control, out of these characters' grasp, and unraveling without hope of reversal, which makes it tragic and lofty. It isn't. How can he say something like "Mystic River stares long enough at the irreversibility of what happens to induce something like grief, a grief felt equally for all its characters," without addressing the story's most glaring failure? Does this mute kid brother, who I'm told gets plenty of motive in the novel, matter to anybody else but me? Is anyone confused or unswayed by his motivation to KILL HIS BIG BROTHER'S GIRFRIEND (apparently because he fears the loss of his brother, who plans to elope), or by the UTTER IMPLAUSIBILITY of him faking deafness believably to those closest to him? Can you feel grief for a cynical plot device?

The most OBVIOUSLY INNOCENT character of the ensemble suddenly becomes the MOST GUILTY CHARACTER...so the bigger question is: would this movie get all this highbrow attention if its performances didn't obscure the most basic tenets of storytelling? After pointing to the Tim Robbins character the whole movie (who just happens to commit a murder on the same night, which some might call "cheating"), they pull the rug just like you know they will and the whodunit scheme is suddenly pushed aside for the emotional "payoff" of Sean Penn falling apart on Kevin Bacon in the same street of the original crime. This is disingenuously manipulative no matter how good the performances are: it's all so brazen it's like they're all acting in another film. Oh, and O'Brien neatly omits the cornball coincidence of Kevin Bacon's wife suddenly breaking her silence the minute he closes the case.

It's all of a piece with what's wrong with Hollywood: sophistication of cinematic elements (performance, editing, pacing) at the EXPENSE of the script. [If you're at all taken with O'Brien's writing, track down his books, chiefly DREAM TIME: CHAPTERS FROM THE SIXTIES, and CASTAWAYS OF THE IMAGE PLANET, a collection of essays, reviewed here.]

QUOTE OF THE WEEK (from Publisher's Lunch)

Dewey Gram is dubbed "the most sought-after film novelizer in town" by the LA Times, though he's "dismayed" that his novelization of the new Tom Cruise film "The Last Samurai" was killed before it was printed. He says, "It's the best novelization I've written." He's been doing this for 25 years, and has written 15 novelizations.

Gram explains, "One of the misconceptions people have about novelizations," he said, "is that they're just the screenplay plus padding. And some of them read that way. But everything I add is enriching and deepening the themes of the script." One of his fans, Nicholas Kazan, offers this gem: "Reading a novelization of your own screenplay is like watching someone else kiss your girlfriend."

My sister Annie sent me this mash-up, which you can find on this guy's page. It's more than obvious, sure, but could anything out-creap Jacko's mug shot? How about THE PLAY IT'S GETTING? As Mark Geragos enters the lexicon, it's time to rent DEVIL'S ADVOCATE again.

Why don’t editors push writers harder, especially for special “theme” issues (does the TIMES mag do any “regular” issues anymore)? Rob Walker’s iPod story last week quoted Steve Jobs as saying "People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." That’s the Apple philosophy right there, and it cries out for unpacking. Instead, we go inside the guts of the iPod and learn there’s a tiny hard drive. But the integration of design and engineering is the key reason this item is such a phenomenon and why its imitators lag so far behind. This union between the technical and the intuitive is so clean, so seamless, that it’s the nose on the face of the product and the experience. But there aren’t any talks with the engineers who articulated this marriage in form, nor from envious outsiders who wish they worked for Apple development.

Another missed angle is Apple’s new AAC (“advanced audio compression”) format, which assaults the mp3 standard. I’ve done side-by-side comparisons with WAV files, and simply cannot hear the difference, and this is with AAC files at 128, SMALLER than the weakest sounding mp3. So now that even Windows users are can listen to entire collections compressed to this level with little or no signal loss, and carry more than we can possibly listen to on a week’s vacation, aren’t CDs in for a pretty glorious sunset?

Any article I read on iPod I want to know how it overcame its totally uncool name. Finally, I picked up mine when I learned about Belkin’s transformative microphone/speakers, which turns the unit into a voice recorder. Now I can not only travel with hi-fi sound, I have my interview recorder in the same unit, and can also read edocuments, ebooks, and store contact info. It was a no-brainer for me: I’d rather devote more space to sound than anything else, and I never got off jotting notes on a Palm, especially when I have the option of taking simple voice notes.

Now if they’d just figure out the hack for track overlap, one of my favorite iTunes features. Tips?