It is one of those days in Seattle where the sky looks heavy with rain and the clouds and gray horizon look like they’ll be sticking around a few days. What we need is some appropriate mood music. Songs meant for a weekend like this. From a band who understands that surviving - check that - thriving under a steady drizzle is part of the local character. Something to be proud of. For this, I must commit blasphemy, as I turn to Wales, of all places, to find this inspiration. Young Marble Giants, take us into the weekend.
For Austin residents, and those arriving at South by Southwest this weekend, we recommend this twin bill taking place at the Continental Club Friday and Saturday nights. Black Joe Lewis and The Relatives (LITA distributes them) should be a bluesy, funky good time. If anything, it would be a great way to start off this year’s SXSW experience. Hope to see you all there.
A longtime criminal plans one final heist before he settles down with his girl. It is a common plot device used in countless variations, and yet The Killing (1956) takes the basic structure of a classic noir exercise, and with some stylistic innovations, turns it into a suspenseful character study, a tense melodrama with an intricate, suspenseful robbery at its center.
Leave it to Stanley Kubrick to flip a conventional genre film into an influential piece of filmmaking. Quentin Tarantino would later model Reservoir Dogs after The Killing, and noticeable narrative similarities exist between the two films. In The Killing, Kubrick’s use of flashbacks and a non-linear storytelling style were uncommon to American audiences in the 1950s. His development of the film’s characters beyond normal noir archetypes was also unusual.
The plot itself is uncomplicated. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) wants to complete one final score before he marries his girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray). He puts together a team to pull off a daring daytime robbery at a racetrack, and he calculates that his take from the $2 million haul should be enough for him to retire from criminality. The robbery and its aftermath, with its double-crosses and bloodshed, are edgy and tense, but ultimately the result is never in doubt. Crime, particularly as it is practiced on screen, rarely goes unpunished.
On this day 13 years ago, The Notorious B.I.G. was mortally wounded during a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles, a case that remains unsolved. More than a decade later, it remains a seminal moment in hip-hop history. At the time of his death, no MC had the same combination of artistry and commercial viability, and few artists in the period since (Jay-Z is one exception) have had his kind of sustained success.
The one skill above all that made him a star was deceptively simple, but impossible to duplicate - sincerity. Equally adept at street-wise narratives as he was the radio and club friendly singles that sell albums, Biggie’s great strength was his ability to appeal to any demographic without appearing unnatural or contrived. He was a portrait of dualism: The corner hustler and the ladies man. The baleful gunman with nothing to lose and the suicidal loner crying for help. The flashy, free-spending millionaire and the ambitious young man from the projects who loved his mother. He was storyteller and troubadour, the street preacher and the busker playing for dimes and quarters because he’s got a song and a desire to be heard.
The director Louis Malle’s first feature film, Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), was a masterful piece of film noir. The plot centers on lovers Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) and Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) as they plan the murder of Carala’s husband (Jean Wall). It is a tense, moody film, and the outcome - as with the best noir - does not turn out as the protagonists had hoped.
It is also a beautifully photographed movie. Henri Decaë’s cinematography, particularly during the memorable nighttime scenes of a stricken Florence wandering the streets of Paris, imbue the film with a tone of tragic fatalism.
But it is the score by a young American trumpeter named Miles Davis that provides the film with an emotional heaviness, made all the more remarkable after learning Davis recorded the soundtrack in a single, mostly improvised session. Davis and his musicians (which included the drummer Kenny Clarke) watched scenes from the film and took cues from what they saw. The recording is also a notable example of Davis’ transition to a modal style of jazz. Ascenseur pour l’echafaud is a mournful work, Davis’ trumpet infusing the story with a melancholic feel, an aching longing, and an appropriately haunting accompaniment as the conspirators realize the unraveling that is coming and the end that awaits them.
Denizens of the Windy City, the Wheedle’s Groove documentary will be screened Sunday at the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival. The film, directed by lovely Seattle-based filmmaker Jennifer Maas, is competing in the features category of the festival. Admission is free. We’re biased, but the movie is worth your time. Wheedle’s Groove is the story of Seattle’s oft-forgotten soul and funk scene of the 1960s and ’70s. It is a warm, intimate portrait of an era that produced a vibrant community of musicians often overlooked when examining Seattle’s storied musical heritage.
Wheedle’s Groove
Sunday, March 7, at 3 p.m.
Chicago Cultural Center’s Studio Theater
78 E. Washington St.
More information about Wheedle’s Groove can be found here.
Gay Talese’s groundbreaking reportage from the 1950s and ’60s helped define the field of literary non-fiction, a new brand of journalism, where in-depth reporting and narrative structure combined, for the first time in American journalism, to tell stories.
Talese, along with the likes of Norman Mailer and Joan Didion, changed the face of journalism, expanding its scope beyond news gathering, straight reporting and box scores, and showed it could be a medium as creative and expressive as any piece of art, music or fiction.
Five decades later, there are few works as strongly reported and elegantly written as the profile Talese wrote for Esquire about one of the most famous men in modern American history - Frank Sinatra. Published in 1966, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” set the standard for New Journalism, in spite of the fact he never spoke to Sinatra in the months he spent following the singer and his entourage. But the level of detail, observation and insight contained in the story are revelatory even today, and the piece had a profound impact on the generations of journalists that followed.
“He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold.
Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel — only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.”
The entire piece can be found here. It’s certainly worth the read.
The pursuit of an artist’s life is daunting. It is often a fruitless endeavor, and it requires a severe kind of single-mindedness to succeed where many have failed. It is a dedication seemingly born of disconnection – from the life without relevance to the medium in which the artist seeks livelihood.
Art, and the difficulties of living a life devoted to it, are at the center of “The Red Shoes,” the recently restored 1948 masterpiece from the British filmmaking duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
The film follows a young dancer from an upper-class background, Victoria “Vicky” Page (real-life ballerina Moira Shearer in her film debut), from her initial meeting with the famed impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), and as her star ascends, chronicles the push-and-pull between the demands of the dancer’s life she always hoped to lead, and the complications that arise when unexpected distractions threaten to derail her promising career.
During their first meeting, Lermontov – an authoritarian who cares only for the reputation and regard of his company, and by extension, himself – has an exchange with Vicky that speaks to the all-consuming nature of art:
“Why do you want to dance?” Lermontov asks.
“Why do you want to live?” replies Vicky.
“Well, I don’t know exactly why, but I must,” he responds.
“That’s my answer, too,” she says.
Vicky’s resoluteness is soon tested by the arrival of a young composer named Julian Craster (Marius Goring), who has been hired by Lermontov to write the score for a new ballet based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen – “The Red Shoes.”
“The ballet of ‘The Red Shoes,’ is from a fairy tale by Hans Andersen,” Lermontov explains to Julian. “It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening she is tired and wants to go home, but the red shoes are not tired. In fact, the red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes go on.”
Julian’s ballet makes her a star, and the pair fall in love. When Lermontov learns of their affair, he feels betrayed and fires Julian, while Vicky quits to show her solidarity. But the allure of her former life remains strong, and forced to choose between a lover who wants her to surrender her art for love, and a powerful desire to return to the stage, she makes an ultimately fatal decision.
Lermontov’s unyielding quest for a demarcation from the intrusions of a well-balanced life was seen earlier in the film, when he reacts angrily after he learns the company’s previous lead dancer had become engaged, and would subsequently depart the ballet.
Lermontov is an obsessive chasing excellence, a frightening combination of intensity and charisma. But if art is all consuming, then so is love. Lermontov seeks Vicky’s submission to dance. Julian demands her fealty to him.
“You cannot have it both ways,” Lermontov says at one point. “A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never.”
Restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Martin Scorsese’s film foundation, the new print is vivid and rich, and the cinematography in “The Red Shoes” is as fine a use of color as any in film history. The lightness that fills the screen stands in stark contrast with the heaviness of the film’s ultimate conceit – that there can be no barrier between life and art.
“When we first met, you asked me a question to which I gave a stupid answer,” Lermontov says to Vicky after “The Red Shoes” becomes a hit. “You asked me whether I wanted to live, and I said ‘Yes.’ Actually, Miss Page, I want more, much more. I want to create, to make something big out of something little – to make a great dancer out of you. But first, I must ask you the same question, what do you want from life? To live?”
Resisting the urge to go all Cosby on the kids, I was a hip-hop head fortunate to have undertaken my formative musical education during the late ’80s and early ’90s, an era as fruitful as any in music history. Enough has been written about the current state of hip-hop, and there isn’t much to add to the discussion that hasn’t been covered ad nauseam (don’t even start on Sasha Frere-Jones). Whether you believe the entire genre has gone to pot or the sky-has-fallen crowd are blinded by their nostalgia, the specter of hip-hop’s demise and the debates about its artistic viability are nothing new.
Complaining about new jacks ruining the game is a time-honored tradition. Old-time rap dudes like myself can recall numerous occasions when the end seemed near - waves of discontent would swell, but rarely crashed ashore to make any lasting impact. Music, the well-worn cliche goes, is cyclical. Trends come and go, styles change, musicians adapt. Rakim and Chuck D begat Nas and Jay-Z who gave way to Gucci Mane and Drake. Not good, not bad, just different.
Nostalgia being the powerful force it is, some examples of show-and-prove, calling-out-busters burners for your enjoyment. Excoriating the mediocre never sounded so nice:
