Prog Rock Lives!

...as long as there are precocious 10-year-old Japanese organists to "Carry On." I think the hat and boa were a nice nod to the '70's--sort of a mild Elton John kind of vibe. Note that while this would have brought down the freakin' house at any American middle school, our shy rocker only generates a smattering of polite Japanese applause.
      That's alright, Tanaka. You Rock On!

Open the Pod Bay Doors, God--Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

      Arthur C. Clarke, owner of the brain that brought you communications satellites and the most famous imaginary computer in history, the HAL 9000, died today in his adopted hometown of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Along with a handful of other old school scifi storytellers like Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Niven, Clarke kindled my early love for the genre. Reading his stories made me want to invent my own; reading his best work makes me want to give it up out of despair of ever producing anything half so good. To paraphrase a famous Clarke line, any sufficiently advanced writing (he said "technology") is indistinguishable from magic.
      Anthony Minghella, director of the films "Truly, Madly, Deeply," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "The English Patient," and "Cold Mountain," also died today. Somehow it seems sad that despite such an impressive résumé, he will always be at best the second most accomplished artist to die today.
      I know it's not a contest. But, still.
ADDENDUM: 3/20/08
Arrgghh! The Rule of Three just kicked in, and now one of my very favorite actors, Paul Scofield, is dead. "A Man for All Seasons" will always be one of my top five beloved films thanks to Scofield's moving performance. Man, what a crappy week.

Curmudgeon's Corner (5)--The Yoghurt of Human Kindness

      Believe it or not, Smokey Burner, the Broken Stove's resident curmudgeon, is pretty much a humanist. This is not the same as saying that Smokey has unqualified love for his fellow man or that he believes people are fundamentally good. On the contrary, Smokey thinks most people on this planet, left to themselves, unsupervised and unobserved, are crap. Or at least tend towards crappiness.
      Does this attitude make Smokey despair? It does not. Because every now and then, someone will heave himself up from all fours to stand more or less erect, and do something remarkable or good or even noble. Something human. Those are the moments, both in life and art, for which Smokey lives. You may think that this means Smokey lives below the spiritual poverty line, but Smokey will happily scrape by on coffee, cigarettes, and ramen noodles, as long as he gets the occasional hit from the crack pipe of human nobility.
      But sometimes Smokey doesn't know what to think. Take, for example, this recent story in which a human impulse for good struggles to disinter itself from under a pile of human crappiness. These excerpts come from the Associated Press:

PHOENIX (AP) — A frenzy of tiny-dog lovers has descended on an animal shelter that rescued hundreds of Chihuahuas from a filthy rural Arizona home, with some potential owners getting into shoving matches and others calling from around the globe.
      The nearly 800 small dogs, mostly Chihuahuas, and 36 parrots were found in a large mobile home northwest of Tucson last week....
      When news spread Thursday of the dog rescue, hundreds of people packed into the Humane Society of Southern Arizona in hopes of adopting the dogs, spokeswoman Jenny Rose said.
      Tempers flared, and a few people got into shoving matches, Rose said. The sheriff's department cleared everyone out, and the shelter closed for the day.
      The next day, Rose said, 500 people lined up to get the dogs....The shelter passed out numbers and had everyone come back in groups of 100 each day....
      Rose said calls came in from Germany, Australia and across the nation....

      Smokey wants to skip right over the question of the owners who created this horrendous situation--who turned out not to be puppy mill operators but an addled elderly couple with hoarding issues--and go directly to the "Good Samaritans" who poured out of the woodwork on hearing the story. You might think, "Hey Smokey, here's a few rocks for your pipe. These people stampeded to help these defenseless critters in their hour of need. Doesn't that make you feel good?"
      Well, no. As a matter of fact it does not. A few niggling questions occur to Smokey on this one, which prevent him from pumping his fist for mankind. To wit:

1. Smokey didn't actually contact anyone at the Humane Society of Southern Arizona, but he's relatively confident that the day before these poor Chihuahuas arrived at the shelter, there were already quite a few dogs and cats in residence waiting for adoption, many from situations just as intolerable. Why was there no line out the door on that day?
2. If, instead of cute (and perhaps valuable) little Chihuahuas, these dogs had been pit bulls, and if the pit bulls had never belonged to a famous football player, would the Humane Society still have been handing out numbers and receiving phone calls from Germany and Australia?
3. "Shoving matches"?!!! Smokey wonders what these Good Samaritans thought when they arrived at the shelter and saw the crowd. Was it a)"I'm so glad to see so many people here; now all these dogs are sure to find safe and happy homes," or b)"Hey, that asshole cutting in line is going to get that cute little white Chihuahua I was gonna put in Suzy's Easter basket."?

      Smokey knows that animal shelters are usually reluctant to place cute critters right before holidays like Easter because too many people give them as gifts to children, who soon tire of cuddling something that poops and pees and bites. And right back to the shelter they go (the animals, sadly, not the children)--if they're lucky. Of course in this case the Humane Society's backs are to the wall; they've got to place these animals. So all of you good folks who saved an Arizona Chihuahua, know this--that dog is now yours for the rest of its life. You must feed it, train it, exercise it, and love it, or may you find your own back to a wall, blindfolded and facing an angry line of rifle-toting Chihuahuas. Smokey will be there to yell, "FUEGO!"

"C" is for Crooner

      OK, I'm determined to get out ahead of Ken in our mosey through our iPods. Since I copied him shamelessly in going through the songs on our pods that begin with "A" and "B," I've got to be first to invent some theme for the songs that start with "C," or face weeks of his "C" is for "Copycat" or "D" is for "Derivative" taunts. In my haste to get out there first, the best I've been able to come up with is "C" is for "Crooner." I'm going through all of the songs on my iPod that begin with the letter "C" and picking the ones that have the very best vocal performances; no other criteria matter. That means some great songs might be left out, simply because they were sung by someone like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen--both excellent songwriters, but, let's face it, nobody's idea of golden-throated crooners. This time, it's all about the singing. And the winners are:

• "Can't Pull the Wool Down (Over the Little Lamb's Eyes)" by Maria McKee. This one's from Maria's first solo album and features her in full-blown "Lone Justice" voice. It's a simple, straightforward rocker brought to life with sheer enthusiasm. Plus, I love the line where she taunts the poser she's singing to with, "I can see you baby, ever-poised for some eternal snapshot." Ouch.
• "Christchurch Bells" by Hothouse Flowers. Lead vocalist Liam Ó Maonlaí and a choir-like arrangement of background singers extoll the calming, primal influence of distant church bells. For a while in the 90's, Hothouse Flowers were one of my favorite bands, and though I listen to them less than I used to, I can still pull out the album "Home," their strongest, and enjoy it from beginning to end.
• "Clementine" by Kelly Joe Phelps. Phelps is better known for his Delta blues acoustic guitar sound than his voice, but on "Clementine" the picking takes a back seat to his dark-tinged, minor key moan. "All she wants for Christmas is another glass of wine, my little darling Clementine." Yes, it's a very sad song.
• "Comin' From Where I'm From" by Anthony Hamilton. The first time I heard this song was when Hamilton performed it on "Chappelle's Show." It was one of those bowl-you-over music moments where you think to yourself, "Who the hell is that, and why isn't everyone on the planet rushing out to buy his record?" Hamilton is unadulterated, old school soul in a hip-hop wrapper. Everyone who voted for Clay Aiken on "Idol" should be forced to sit down and listen to this song, then smacked on the side of the head and told, "That's what it sounds like. Idiot." (Whooo. That came out real hateful. Maybe I should soften my...Naahhh.)
• "Corpus Christi Carol (for Roy)" by Jeff Buckley. Buckley took some strange risks on his much-lauded debut album "Grace," but none greater than sticking this spine-tingling, other-wordly version of a Middle English hymn in the middle of it all. But, wow. It's beautiful. It reminds me of Art Garfunkel's work on "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

Getting Back to Books

      Back in the 90's, I was manager of a great little bookstore in the Pittsburgh Airport--Waterstone's Booksellers. Yes, I know Waterstone's is a huge British chain, but at the time they were testing the waters in America, and after they opened mega stores in Boston and Chicago, they decided to team with WHSmith to try to expand their brand throughout the US in small airport shops. Pittsburgh was the first airport chosen, and after a successful first year under my boss's direction, WHSmith spread the model to several airports around the country. My boss was promoted to open these new stores, and I took over as manager of the original Pittsburgh airport store.
      It was a great store and a great job. Though we were small, and in the airport, we offered thousands of titles in popular fiction, literary fiction, history, business, travel, self-help, poetry, science, biography, children's books, and on and on. I can proudly say that sales increased every year I was there. Although Grisham, Clancy, King and the like paid a lot of the bills, we also sold more than our fair share of books like "Longitude," "The Professor and the Madman," "Guns, Germs and Steel," "A Tour of the Calculus," and hundreds of other titles that people were surprised and delighted to find in an airport bookshop. The key to our success was that the other booksellers and I had full control over the store's inventory. Everything on the shelves was chosen by us, and though we were in fact a chain store, we had the spirit of an independent.
      I read more books in those years than I ever had before, and I miss the freebies from publishers and the daily book-talk with regular customers (yes, even the airport has regular customers) who trusted me to know their taste and recommend new books that they would enjoy, or even love. I've tried to keep up with the book world in the years since I left Pittsburgh, but it's sometimes frustrating to find myself surprised by the appearance of a new book by a favorite author that, in the past, I would have known was coming three or four months before it ever hit the shelves.
      That's what happened to me recently when I went to my little local branch library and saw a new collection of short stories from Roddy Doyle called "The Deportees." I discovered Doyle in my Waterstone's days, and happily devoured the Barrytown trilogy of books--"The Van," "The Snapper," and "The Commitments"--as well as the darker and more serious "Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha" and "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors." The stories in "The Deportees," including the titular return of Jimmy Rabitte from "The Commitments," are fairly light and disposable, having been written quickly under some unusual constraints to be published in a periodical, but they still overflow with Doyle's trademark humor and human insight. Reading them convulsively over the course of maybe a day and a half reminded me of the joy of discovery in those Waterstone's days, and convinced me to rededicate myself to a more disciplined reading regimen, including laying out some of my reactions to the books here, as I've been doing with some of the movies I've watched recently. So keep an eye out.

"EBB" is for "Even Bigger Bracket"

      So Ken has continued the trip through his iPod with a wonderful conceit for the songs that start with "B". He created a March Madness bracket that led to his Final Four of "B" songs, and I can't resist joining him (i.e., ripping him off again. I'll have to come up with something clever for the "C" songs before Ken does or lose all of my blogger cred). Once again I have too many songs to copy him exactly, so what I did was create a 128 song bracket of "B" songs in four regions of 32, each region randomly seeded. Then I looked at song #1 and song #32 and decided which was "better"--i.e. which one I liked more at that particular moment. Then #2 vs. #31, etc., all the way through the bracket to generate a Final Four. I couldn't bear to choose a single champion among the 128 songs, and in fact I feel compelled to reveal the entire Sweet Sixteen, just because I feel bad for some of the songs that didn't make the highly subjective, gut reaction cut. Because the seedings were random, some great songs fell prematurely to other great songs.
      Yes, I need to get a life. Here we go.

North Regional Quarterfinals

• "Bottle of Smoke" by The Pogues
• "Bedshaped" by Keane
• "Brad and Suzy" by Jude
• "Black" by Pearl Jam

There were some good songs in this bracket, but the issue was never really in doubt. Like Duke or UNC, "Black" blew through to the Final Four without a serious challenge.
Region Winner: "Black" by Pearl Jam
Most Valuable Line (tie): "Twenty-fucking-five to one, me gambling days are done; I bet on a horse called "Bottle of Smoke" and my horse won." (The Pogues) and
"She was a professional teller machine user, he was your basic beautiful loser; they had no worries, all they ever had was Cool." (Jude)

East Regional Quarterfinals

• "Breathe" by Maria Mckee
• "Being Somebody Else" by Del Amitri
• "Blood and Fire" by Indigo Girls
• "Breaking Us in Two" by Joe Jackson

This was a tough bracket--lots of very different genres went head to head, and "Brass in Pocket" took an early exit because of a deadly matchup. I was pulling for "Banditos" by The Refreshments, but they ran into pop juggernaut Joe Jackson. Ultimately, the passionate, voice-nearly-gone performance of "Blood and Fire" proved too much for the competition.
Region Winner: "Blood and Fire" by Indigo Girls
Most Valuable Line: "I was scared when you came into my room; the walls became the sea, your voice was the moon." (Maria McKee)

South Regional Quarterfinals

• "Brick" by Ben Folds Five
• "Beyond Belief" by Elvis Costello
• "Blue" by The Jayhawks
• "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon & Garfunkel

Somehow this turned into the lyricists' bracket, making it very hard to pick the Most Valuable Line. How can a pop classic like "Bridge Over Troubled Water" fail to win its bracket? I don't know; ask the Patriots.
Region Winner: "Blue" by The Jayhawks
Most Valuable Line (tie): "It's hard to sing with someone who won't sing with you." (The Jayhawks) and
"She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly..." (Ben Folds Five)

West Regional Quarterfinals

• "Be My Downfall" by Del Amitri
• "Big Fat Blonde" by The Rainmakers
• "Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants
• "Be Good" by Hothouse Flowers

"Big Fat Blonde" and "Birdhouse" are two favorites from way back, but they're just a little too silly to be bracket winners, I think. Del Amitri found their mature sound on the album "Waking Hours," but they proved it wasn't a fluke with "Be My Downfall," the very first track on the followup album "Change Everything."
Region Winner: "Be My Downfall" by Del Amitri
Most Valuable Line (tie): "And when faced with temptation, you know a man should stand and fight; but you will be my downfall tonight." (Del Amitri) and
"I want a big fat blonde to hold my hand, to keep this skinny boy from blowin' away in the wind." (The Rainmakers)

Starting Out in the Evening (2007)

      Sophomore director Andrew Wagner's "Starting Out in the Evening" (based on the Brian Morton novel) begins and ends with essentially the same shot--aging New York author Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) stares into space over his pointedly silent typewriter, an archetype of the writer in crisis. After a long pause, he begins pecking out a few lines. At the beginning of the film, his halting start has the feel of desperation; at the end, there's a note of hope. The connection between these two points is not a straight line but a winding road, which would be fine if the winding felt more like a confidently led expedition rather than a hesitant groping for the right direction.
      If anyone's to blame for the uncertain tone of "Starting Out" it's not Langella. Leonard is something of a dinosaur, a former professor and formerly important author whose best work came decades ago and is no longer in print, a man so decorous and formal he wears a pressed shirt and tie even when he's home alone. Langella invests him with a quiet, almost defensive dignity that he wears as surely as his tie, a reservedness so essential to his self that any attempt to broach it seems boorish, even cruel.
      As he struggles to finish his latest novel, he's approached by Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a fiercely intelligent and ambitious grad student who wants to make Leonard the subject of her Master's thesis and introduce him to a new generation of readers. As Heather probes the reticent Leonard for clues to the mind that lies behind the books she genuinely loves, they begin a hesitant May-December relationship centered on their kindred intellects but trembling on the border of physicality.
      "Starting Out" avoids most of the pitfalls into which such a story could fall in less talented hands. The young grad student does not miraculously resuscitate the gruff old writer's faded career with her moxie and youthful joie de vivre; the gruff old writer does not mentor the raw but talented newcomer with nuggets of his hard-earned wisdom. The film's maturity and willingness to treat the love of books as something important and worthy of serious discussion make it exactly the sort of movie I want to love. But despite some excellent acting, the film as a whole just does not ring true. A subplot with Leonard's childless, 40-something daughter Ariel (ably played by the always-excellent Lili Taylor) adds little to the story other than a second Schiller who feels the clock ticking on her ability to create, and too often Leonard and Heather speak and act in ways which do not seem to jibe with their characters as we've been led to understand them.
      At one point Leonard explains his creative process by saying that he simply follows his characters around for awhile until they do something interesting. If they don't, then he's forced to give up on them and start over. "Starting Out" plays as if that's exactly what Andrew Wagner is doing--following his talented actors around a bit, to find out if they'll do something interesting. I read in "Variety" that "Starting Out in the Evening" was shot on location in only eighteen days, leaving little time for much wandering. Perhaps given more time, or more explicit (or ruthless) direction, they could have pulled it off even better than they did.