Daily 2% – Chilled and Ready to Serve [Martin Denny] – EARMILK.COM
Props to Earmilk for throwing some Swankitude into their “Daily 2%” Chill Rotation: Martin Denny performing “Exotica” from the album “Forbidden Island”.
(Via www.earmilk.com )

RIP: Old-school electro great Chilly B
Bob “Chilly B” Crafton, member of the 80’s hip-hop crew Newcleus, died this week at age 47. Check out this clip of “Jam On It” and see why I consider him the true “Father Of The Wiki”:

(Via www.boingboing.net )

The Crime Lounge: JOHN BARRY PLAYS FILM & TV THEMES
For those who like to get their spy on….

“Another very nice album from the LoungeTracks archive now with this great John Barry LP. This one features some nice alternate arrangements of From Russia With Love and The 007 theme. Also featured are the atmospheric classic “Fancy Dance” and the groovy “Kinky” along with several others. A great Barry collection by anyone’s standard.”

(Via thecrimelounge.blogspot.com )

Massive Attack featuring Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, “Paradise Circus (Gui Boratto Remix)”
I’ve really been enjoying Massive Attack’s new release “Heligoland”– and Fader Magazine has a link to a remix by Brazillian producer Gui Boratto of “Paradise Circus”, featuring Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star.

(And while you’re “Feeling the Hope”, be sure to grab this MP3 of “Trouble” off of her album with The Warm Inventions while it’s still free!
(Via www.thefader.com )

Video: Fiona Apple & Jon Brion – “Tonight, You Belong To Me” | Rawkblog
And to ease us off into the mist, here are *TWO* Versions of “Tonight, You Belong To Me”– One by Fiona Apple/Jon Brion, the other by Steve Martin/Bernadette Peters:

(Via www.rawkblog.net )

Was it good for you, too?

• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club :: Beat The Devil’s Tattoo
  Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is about to release their new album called “Beat the Devil’s Tattoo”– and have begun touring in support of it. (I know that I’ll be there when they roll into NYC in April!)
  Check out the first single below and pre-order on Amazon or on the iTunes store.
  
  (Via blackrebelmotorcycleclub.com )
• Animal Collective on sampling, songwriting and playing live | MusicRadar.com
  Future Music magazine interviews members of Animal Collective on sampling, songwriting and playing live. On page one, Avey Tare says “For us, the gear isn’t that important”. The remaining two pages are a discussion of, you know, all of their gear — and how they use it to record and perform.
  (Via www.musicradar.com )
• YouTube – Rudess Meets Bebot
  Speaking of gear, this video shows Jordan Rudess demonstrating the “Bebot” — a new multi-touch performance synthesizer for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Freeky-deeky!

  (Via www.youtube.com )

• MATRIXSYNTH: Electro-Harmonix Effectology Vol.13 Pink Floyd Synth Effects
  This episode of EH’s “Effectology” series recreates the classic Pink Floyd recording “Welcome To the Machine” using just guitar effect pedals to reproduce the synthesizers and tape effects.

  (Via matrixsynth.blogspot.com)

• The Yngwie ‘J.’ Malmsteen Humidor and Memory Box?!?
  When it comes to 80’s Metal, it’s hard to tell the parody items from those more earnestly intended.
  (Via www.thedailyswarm.com )

Stray Questions for: Roberto Bolaño?!
An excerpt from novelist Roberto Bolaño’s last interview, published in Playboy Mexico the month of his death and now appearing in English in Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations.
(Via papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com )

Letters of Note: Slaughterhouse Five
Letters of Note is a site that, according to its own description “gathers and sorts fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated 2-3 times every weekday”.

This link to a letter from a young Kurt Vonnegut, in addition to living up to the “fascinating” label, should also give you an excellent feel for the other items that this site collects. Today’s post reprints a different Kurt: a letter to Beat legend William Burroughs from an admirer — Kurt Cobain.

If you’re like me, you’ll be there clicking away for hours before you realize it.
(Via www.lettersofnote.com )

Roger Ebert’s Journal: Perform a concert in words
It would be facile to suggest that Roger Ebert has found a deeper, more powerful voice since losing his ability to speak… but his paean to the beauty of the spoken word takes on additional depth for me because of it.

Reading some of his recent posts should be a kick in the ass to any writer who has one.
(Via blogs.suntimes.com )

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Reviewer M.A. Orthofer thinks that The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Library of Latin America) “simply good, good fun”. Correct — and only the beginning of the superlatives you’ll want to lay at the feet of 19th Century Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis after reading any number of his works.

My favorite — Helen Caldwell’s translation of Dom Casmurro. Critic Dudley Fitts once wrote of Machado: “No satirist, not even Swift, is less merciful in his exposure of the pretentiousness and the hypocrisy that lurk in the average good man and woman. Machado, in his deceptively amiable way, is terrifying.”

Absolutely right.
(Via www.complete-review.com )

Cormac McCarthy on The Road – WSJ.com
In this already widely-linked-to piece, author Cormac McCarthy, 76, talks about love, religion, his 11-year-old son, the end of the world and the movie based on his novel ‘The Road.’ Included here just in case you missed it…
(Via online.wsj.com )

SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco: ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’
“The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.”
(Via www.spiegel.de )

Writing About Writers: An article by Bob Thompson | The American Scholar
Bob Thompson on learning about writing….by asking writers. How…. novel?
(Via www.theamericanscholar.org )

]]> http://veritrope.com/arts/bolano-homicide-detective-vonnegut-on-coming-home-ebert-on-the-sounds-of-words-machado-de-assis-cormac-mccarthy-on-life-eco-on-lists-and-getting-advice-on-writing-from-writers/feed/ 0 http://veritrope.com/arts/black-dynamite-redux/ http://veritrope.com/arts/black-dynamite-redux/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:20:36 +0000 Justin http://veritrope.com/?p=2365

As regular readers might remember, I’m a fairly big fan of blaxploitation cinema and I’ve been waiting to see a movie called “Black Dynamite” since January. After playing the film festival circuit for months, it was picked up by Sony for distribution and was (finally) released this past Friday.

Calling Black Dynamite a spoof of the Blaxploitation genre misses the point: You can study it, but there’s no real way to recreate these quintessentially 1970’s films in the present day without descending into some sort of parody — intentional or otherwise.¹

After reading some interviews with the film-makers and also seeing it with friends this weekend, it’s clear to me that “Black Dynamite” was put together by people who not only know these movies, but who really loved these movies.

Even as a lovingly-made spoof, it’s not a perfect picture by any means — but it’s that evident affection that, somehow, helps you ignore the film’s imperfections. Kudos to Michael Jai White and Scott Sanders for not only making a great tribute to an era, but for making it happen on their own. I hope it’s just the beginning of these guys being able to push the button on their own projects.

White and Sanders have managed to take all of the Blaxploitation clichés seriously while, at the same time, completely subverting them with their pitch-perfect mockery. From the intrusive boom microphones to a very solid musical score, they’ve made a film that is a hell of a lot of fun. One thing is for sure — “Black Dynamite” will make you long for the days when a movie could leave you feeling like a baaaadasssssss as the lights came up in the theater.

Go check it out!

1. Sorry, Mr. Jackson!

I was lucky enough to catch a couple of events at this year’s THE NEW YORKER Festival, including a very interesting interview with Rachel Maddow of The Rachel Maddow Show and a presentation by Simon Schama that was ostensibly about Barack Obama and “Words-as-Actions”, but was really a virtuoso demonstration of Schama’s eclecticism and his force of spirit.

Sadly, I wasn’t able to see some of the other events — Ricky Jay, for example, is someone who’s wide-ranging work I’ve enjoyed for years. You know that the organizers of a festival did a good job when you find yourself getting angry at them for giving you more incredible events to see than time to see them.

Hey Guys — Festival WEEK next year?

I was sipping my morning coffee, thinking about last night’s Red Hot benefit show Dark Was The Night….something along the lines of ‘Man — Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings just *killed it* last night…” when a tweet from BrooklynVegan pops up on my desktop: “i never finished last night, but Sharon Jones also killed it…”

I think anyone who didn’t leave early would agree.

The pacing of the show left a lot to be desired; it took a Sharon Jones-sized effort to resuscitate the energy level in the room from the effect of all of those ten-to-fifteen minute change-overs between acts. By way of comparison, the recent Red Hot show at B.A.M. felt much more attuned to entertaining a live (rather than a recorded) audience. But David Byrne also gave some much-needed adrenalin boosts along the way and My Brightest Diamond’s version of “Feeling Good” was another highlight. A good night of music for all!

Buy the benefit album from Amazon to help raise money and awareness for HIV and AIDS (and enjoy a little popular culture at the same time!)

At least, start *YOUR* day right with this free Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings MP3 from Amazon!

Here’s a selection from the full playlist on the iTunes store…

…and the unabridged list is below:

“Did the projector bulb burn out or something?” was my very first reaction to hearing a score by Maurice Jarre, the composer behind some of the finest movie music ever, who died on March 29th.

I was 15 years old when I first saw Lawrence of Arabia — and, frankly, I only went because my history teacher offered extra credit for it.  There had just been a restoration of the film and a 70 mm print was being shown at a local theater called the Cine Capri (a relic of a grander time).  I realize now that, walking into the theater on that day, my expectations of “what a movie was” had been calibrated against the movies of my era. I doubt that I had ever seen anything that substantially deviated from the pacing and structure of the 90 minute multiplex blockbuster.

The lights went down and Jarre’s score began.

For over four minutes, we all sat in darkness while the music played.

Let There Be Light

The 15 year old version of me wondered how could there be music with no pictures in a movie.   I simply had no frame of reference for what was happening.

But as Jarre’s overture played, I remember starting to feel like I was being drawn into something more deeply with every minute that passed.  And by the time that director David Lean’s images were finally projected onto the Cine Capri’s massive CinemaScope screen, I had been primed to enter into a totally different desert world than the one I inhabited everyday — having been completely lifted out of my suburban Phoenix, Arizona life.

The metaphor of a light bulb turning on over your head may never be more a propos than when it’s happening inside a movie theater.

As I walked outside at the intermission (“Movies can have intermissions?”), I decided that I wanted to see everything that David Lean had ever directed.  Over the years I have, in fact, seen many more of his movies — and along the way I also began to recognize the name “Maurice Jarre” that I often saw during the opening credits.  Jarre was one of the great, classically-trained “big movie music” arrangers and composers that I’ve come to admire: John Williams, John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, and their ilk.  Maurice Jarre wrote scores for dozens of movies, but is certainly best known for his work with Lean.

The Year of Living Dangerously

Coincidentally at around the same time that I saw “Lawrence”, I also watched Peter Weir’s  The Year Of Living Dangerously on television.  It became another of my favorite films and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, it also was scored by Maurice Jarre (as well as having some cool synthesizer contributions by Vangelis).  With a story set in Indonesia, its score features some interesting gamelan elements. The arrangements here were both sparse and intimate — Jarre’s work this time drawing me in to the world of the film not with the bombast of a full orchestra, but with a dream-like music that felt like it was drifting in from a small village town square.

Jarre had a gift for gracefully scaling the size of his music to the size of the drama that it was supposed to animate. I think very few composers could possess the deftness of touch — the dynamic range, if you will — that takes one from the sparse Indo-Synth of “Kwan’s Sacrifice” to the melody of “Lara’s Theme” — and up to the sweeping grandeur and orchesteral bombast of the main overture to Lawrence of Arabia.

Beyond the Uncanny Valley

Films like Lawrence Of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage To India belonged to that era in the movie business before the digital domain began to cast a sort of “patina of unreality” over both the music and the images within motion pictures.   Much like the epic sweep of these movies, Jarre’s compositions usually required an army-sized orchestra to properly execute his vision. 

Don’t get me wrong:  I’ve always loved new technology and I am enthusiastic about its use to make movies and music. But let’s be honest — part of why these tools have value is because they can help talented people who lack the resources and personnel of a well-funded film/music studio to create something out of next-to-nothing.  When something is created in the “real world”, the finished product looks or sounds “more real”.  Clever use of CGI can make it look like an army is riding across a desert without the time and expense of traveling to a location to shoot the footage — but it can’t make it as stirring as David Lean did in “Lawrence”. I think that there’s a musical parallel here as well: Synthesizers and samplers are wonderful at reproducing sounds, but they can’t quite replicate the effect of a hundred people playing in a room together.

At least… not yet!

In the modern grammar of cinema, “doing things for real” may be as archaic or quaint as using “betwixt” instead of “between” — but I suspect that I’m not the only one who perceives a qualitative difference between a real guy jumping off of a real building and a guy flailing around in front of a green screen.  And who knows — maybe the newest generation of moviegoers doesn’t perceive a value in the difference between the two.

Maurice Jarre was the real thing and he’ll be missed.   If you’re a fan of music, it’s worth Googling around and reading how his music affected other people. In art, there is always a difference between doing what is sufficient and striving for something sublime. Maurice Jarre’s work exemplifies the latter.

Listen to some of these soundtracks and watch the master at work:

Doctor Zhivago

Lawrence of Arabia