"The Pipeline": Rebecca Mead sketches the workings of the San Fransisco program Emerge. The program, according to the piece, "offers training and support for Democratic women running for office." An interesting and vaguely unsettling figure was a man at the meeting who claims to longer vote for male candidates. Maybe it's not that unsettling.
"We Have No Bananas": Mike Peed is a member of the magazine's editorial staff. The article at first reminded me of the bat article from three weeks ago. Both deal with scientists studying and fighting a microscopic killer. In this case, we get a fungus that kills bananas in Australia. Both pieces feature intense and kind of stressed-out western scientists. Peed is a funny writer, or at least recognizes the humor in a stressed-out banana scientist whining about the poor phallic humor he hears. Then there's the bizarre name of the fungus, Tropical Race Four. Then there's the dark anecdote about a researcher, Rowe, toiling for four decades searching for a better banana hybrid until, in 2001, he hanged himself in his experimental banana fields. Peed has a tactical advantage because the word banana is just hilarious by itself. I think he knows this. The word permeates the article like a deadly...fungus.
"Le Divorce": Ian Buruma examines Belgium. Not sure why this was put behind the paywall as opposed to something a bit more more inviting like, say, the Saddam statue piece. Oh, well.
It was an enjoyable read, though. Who knew Belgium had the same conservative-populist uprising against, among other things, the immigrant population. The outright division of the country was compared to Italy, but I was also saw parallels to the griping of Northern Virginians about supporting the rest of the commonwealth.
A quibble: steak tartare is mentioned in the piece, but in the illustration the steak is without question a slab.
Kind of a consistency issue, in my opinion. I guess artistically it would be harder to portray the division of the country with a patty of finely minced uncooked cow.
I was really prepared to hate this peice, but the charming class war, urban decay, and De Wever's folksy sayings -- "'The future? You might as well peer through thick coffee'" -- won me over. Color me charmed.
"Meet Dr. Freud": Evan Osnos delivers this bomb: "nearly one in five adults in China has a mental illness, a figure that put China in the ranks of one of the most mentally ill countries in the world." With China's adult population of over a billion, if the mentally ill people in China were granted their own sovereignty, their country would have a population greater than England and Russia combined.
"Years of My Birth": Louise Erdrich claims to have written this short story paragraph by paragraph over a span of years.
I haven't forced myself to read the latest Alice Munro stories in the New Yorker, but something about the narrator made me think Alice Munro. The story spans fifty years in four pages. But if you read it backwards you'd have the same story, essentially.
The plot could almost be distilled to a ballad and sung in three verses by Tom Waits. That would be my biggest issue, that it's tonally all over the place. It was like a letter to The Ethicist in the Sunday Times with a dash of the caddishly awful: the brother's interaction with the narrator reminded me of Sterling Archer.
However, I read it intently and I felt things. After reading the above blog post with Erdrich, I was ready to hate it. Well played, I guess.
At the beginning of Fargo (1996), the Coen brothers open with a disclaimer: 'THIS IS A TRUE STORY.' At the end, as the credits role, we're told quite the opposite: 'The persons and events portrayed in this production are fictitious.' A comment on art, or a tongue-in-cheek joke at our expense, call it what you want, it nevertheless establishes the Coens' penchant for leading the audience through myth, mysteries and nonsensical scenarios, and our willingness to be led. And they've led us to some very special places.
And one of the reasons why we continually allow the Coens to do this is their track record of vibrant and memorable characters, from struggling writer Fink to the now iconic Dude. True Grit continues the tradition, bringing together Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a tough as nails fourteen year old girl bent on bringing her father's killer to hang, and the grizzled drunkard Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges).
It's a straight-as-an-arrow opening, as Mattie and Rooster set out to bring down killer Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Along the way, they slowly bond over bonfire banter, corpses hanging from trees and midnight cabin raids. Though familiar territory, it's kept thrilling by the wonderful chemistry between Mattie and Rooster, with Matt Damon (always better than he's given credit for) playing the pompous but likeable oaf LaBoeuf, an irksome but charming foil to fuel Rooster's competitive fire. Tidy though it may be, it all works extremely well.
It's a shame then that, with convention working so well, it's an unconventional ending that lets True Grit down, dodging a traditional (and crowd-pleasingly Western) wrap-up for something quieter, more conceptual, more Coenesque -but in this case- quite unsatisfying. Without ruining anything, you'll twist it around, mull it over, and try to make it work, but something about it doesn't seem quite right (though sure to set internet forums ablaze).
Like we said, the Coens have led us to some wonderful places in the past. But in True Grit, we can't help but question whether it's a place the Coens feel we need to be, rather than where we want to be.
Eight is the layer of hell reserved for the conscious evildoers. This morning, I'm thinking of the musician who reads from a fakebook the entire gig.
There's nothing heretical about your trio sight-reading Black Orpheus -- as long as you don't take yourself seriously. That is the great heresy, the conscious fraud. Because no one else is taking you seriously. Even if you do attend a conservatory. There are a few reasons no one claps when you finish your songs. It's not because no one is listening. The folks at the bar are listening, and they hear how ragged you sound, and that is why they are thumbing at their iPhones instead of putting their hands together for your dreck. They may not know about scales and arpeggios, but their ears know when someone is phoning it in.
You're not bad musicians; you're unprepared. Don't expect a tip jar brimming with Lincolns and Hamiltons. It's embarrassing for you to hold yourself with that attitude. Don't counter that on-the-fly that is the central ethos of jazz. There's a difference between improvisation and sloppiness. There's a difference between a career musician and a suburban teenager wearing a suit two sizes too big.
Maybe you're just having a bad set. You're not, though. This is you. And in your frustration, you conduct yourself with self-righteous. You make noises and girate during your vapid solos. You don't play for the room: when your only friendly listener in the bistro requests "On Green Dolhpin Street," you refuse to do so.
Eventually, though, you'll come to the realization that I came to: you are not an artist. There is nothing that elevates you artistically from the straight-edge band down the road playing in a church gym to kids in Hot Topic shirts. At least the Christ-core band bothers to memorize their tunes. At least they care about entertaining their audience.
You're an apprentice at best, a hack at worst. Right now you don't have the chops to warrant any respect. You're lucky to have this bistro gig, and you're lucky none of the patrons know anything about jazz, other than it makes them feel sophisticated. Put away the fakebook, or at least have the decency to take requests. There's nothing wrong with being a sub-par musician, so long as you're dedicated to entertaining your audience. Learn your music, practice together, transcribe the theme song to the Andy Griffith show. Play the Oscar Mayer jingle. Get our attention. Or spend the rest of your life preparing for the world that awaits you when the proverbial music is over.
Director Darren Aronofsky likes his tragic heroes. From a struggling genius in Pi, fatalistic drug addicts in Requiem for a Dream, to faded ex-professional wrestlers, all spiralling toward that sink hole of self-destruction. Now, with Black Swan, Aronofsky sets his sights on a struggling ballerina, suffocated by an over-protective mother, and held back by a seemingly unobtainable goal of artistic perfection.
Like we said: Aronofsky likes his heroes tragic. But the forty-one year old director creates a comfortable (if broken) home amongst these characters, and manages to control source material that, in another's hands, could easily melt into melodrama. Nina is no exception: a jittery girl poised on the blade of artistic brilliance, brought to life by the always-talented Natalie Portman (an Oscar nomination a strong possibility), she's representative not just of the darker aspects of the ballet world, but Aronofsky's continuing exploration of the human condition. And ballet has never felt more menacing.
Cuts, bruises, broken toenails. Important to Black Swan is the idea that, what appears so effortless on stage, is something of enormous difficulty, both physically and emotionally, for everyone involved. Including the audience.
It's a dark, surreal ride that takes us down some surprising turns (both nightmarish and comedic) and, like the ballerinas, constantly on our toes. The camera does a lot of this work, often tilted at strange angles, refusing to stay still for long. But, as demonstrated in The Wrestler, Aronofsky gets his best results with the lens held firmly on his characters.
It's a lesson he sticks to for the majority of the film, only to be lost in a dazzling yet emotionally unsatisfying final act, which builds to a plateau rather than the high he's demonstrated himself more than capable of.
Still, as far as plateaus go, it's certainly not one you'll forget in a hurry.
HERE'S THE THING: If jazz musicians were only heard, not seen, Miles Davis would not be a household name.
Or, if jazz musicians were measured simply by the expression and depth of their recordings, Miles Davis would not have had a career in music. Unless the career involved shining Clifford Brown's horn.
Or, for those studying for the SAT, ponder this --
Miles Davis : Jazz :: Andy Warhol : Art
I bought Birth of the Cool during my junior year of high school, 2005. I bought it from Wal*Mart. I wanted to start a jazz collection. It seemed like a good album to start with. Look at the damn cover!
For me, it had the same allure as, say, the movie poster for Pulp Fiction. The sun glasses, the redness of "Cool." The odd transposition of "the". As in: We don't the play by rules, baby. It's not The Birth of Cool. We does drugs.
I heard about the album when I was working with a college guy who told me, before Christmas, he planned to spend the winter reading Mein Kamp and listening to Birth of the Cool. Never got to ask how that worked out for him, but I'll bet he found more immediate utility from the former.
I kept hearing about Miles Davis from a different friend who lamented that Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis never collaborated. Then there was another friend who was always reciting this movie quote from an Adam Sandler movie. The quote was something like. If peeing your pants is cool, then call me Miles Davis.
So I bought the album from Wal*Mart. I was excited. I was expecting an aggressive, strutting sound -- a sound that I would later discover in hard bob.
Birth of the Cool is not hard bob. It is neither aggressive nor strutting. It is cerebral and aloof. At times it is nancing. The cover would be better if it showed Miles wearing horn rim glasses and studying over a chart with Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz, both of whom appear on the LP and were huge names in jazz and in the crafting of the tunes. Incidentally, they were about as photogenic as your varsity chess club. To paraphrase Alex Baldwin, to give them the album art would be...to waste it.
The titular cool is cool jazz, a movement stemming away from the bebop pioneered by, among others, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
Say what you will about that song, but they do not waste your time. It is performed with technical precision as well as soulfulness. Cool jazz literally toned this down this type of sound. Cool means emotionally cool, as in unable to feel emotions. As in the guy in the chess club who has trouble relating to kids his own age. A better name would be sociopath jazz. Just before he was let go from the AV Club, Leonard Pierce had this to say about the album:
Birth Of The Cool [...] represents Davis’ first major excursion as a bandleader, stepping out on his own with a smooth, frosty trumpet tone and a keen eye for assembling the right talent for the right project. The sound this nonet developed later became known as “cool jazz” for its intricate arrangements, subdued tempos, and clean emotional vibe. Though Davis, irked by the attention it brought other musicians from the white press, disowned the style, it wouldn’t exist without him, and Birth Of The Cool is its founding document.
Not sure what he means by "clean emotional vibe." What Miles Davis does in Birth of the Cool is a tactic he practiced successfully his entire career: use your connections and social tenure to surround yourself with young, prodigious talent.
Let's jump back a few years before Birth of the Cool was recorded. Miles had earned this social status playing alongside Charlie Parker. If you listen to their recordings, you can hear the clever usage by Parker of the pretty girl / ugly girl juxtaposition. A hardworking Miles still sounds Bush-league compared to a heroin-addled Bird.
Fast forward to the end of the forties, and Bird is sliding further into drug addiction, and Miles is cashing in his social cache with the nonet. The sound is thick and vibrant. It's smoking lounge music. I once put on this album at a party in college. It was switched off before "Move" had finished playing. And that's one of the more accessible charts on the album.
But back in 2005, the nascent jazz snob was very worried. I was all about being an elitist, but not at the expense of listening to really boring music. And did this album sound boring. Back in 2005, this song sounded really, really boring. Here, I defy you to not to find this song boring:
After five years of playing jazz, studying its history, and creating memories that I associate with the music, I can find this song not boring.
My problem with Miles Davis is that his entire career is spent building his image with the help of better talented musicians. And then Miles is held up as one of the iconic jazz musicians, when in fact his performing, at best, is sub-par. In a blog post on jazz.com, Ted Gioria points outs that the nonet was extremely important, but not simply because of Miles.
Yet with hindsight, we can make the claim that this was the most important jazz band in the world in the late summer of 1948. For the next decade and beyond, the jazz world would be dominated by the individuals gathered together on the stage of the Royal Roost. Davis himself would rise to stardom, sign with the Columbia label, and release a series of seminal LPs, including several collaborations with Gil Evans. Gerry Mulligan would soon hitchhike to California and serve as a catalyst in spurring the West Coast jazz scene. John Lewis would enjoy success as musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Lee Konitz would contribute his own unique take on cool jazz, often alongside Lennie Tristano and Warne Marsh, or in a host of other settings. Max Roach would help shape the hard bop movement in his quintet with Clifford Brown. Gunther Schuller, who would record with the nonet although he was absent from the Royal Roost engagement, would serve as the visionary behind the Third Stream movement in jazz.
Anyone who puts Miles in the same performing category as Dizzy or Clifford or Lee Morgan is listening with their eyes. Miles is a mood player. He is best when he can let a few notes go at choice moments and call that art. And maybe that is art. But if you make concession that Miles Davis' playing is sub-par, then why not listen to the modern extension of cool jazz, as played by a competent musician?
It's probably for the best that Miles is consumed by a wider audience for all the wrong reasons while better jazz musicians receive far less cultural noting. Imagine if you heard Charlie Christian name-dropped on Two and A Half Men. Maybe serious film buffs feel this way about Woody Allen: let people feel sophisticated for liking him!
For this week's Dangerously Unqualified Script Doctor, we face our most challenging operation yet: separating the set of Siamese twins that is Edward Zwick's decidedly okay Love and Other Drugs.
The film follows the budding relationship between slick Lothario Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal), who tries his hand as pharmaceutical rep, and artist Maggie (Anne Hathaway) who's suffering from early onset Parkinson's.
Our patient, you see, is in actuality two completely separate films, and their fleshy connectivity is encumbering both of our patient's lives.
On one hand, we have Jamie, a young Lothario/ rising star on the pharmaceutical rep ladder. For Jamie, what should be a rise-and-fall piece about a go getter's journey through a morally questionable industry, a kind of Wall Street for the Viagra age, deviates the instance he meets Hathaway, and her cumbersome medical burden. Think of the possibilities for our patient: early struggles, success, a questionable mentor, some serious, life-altering decisions, and watching it all come crashing down.
And the same can be said for Hathaway's Maggie, who really needs her own film to fully explore the emotional highs and lows of such a devastating condition. Hathaway is more than capable of handling these roles solo, and sharing a movie with Jamie only diminishes her journey. However, a love interest can still be the catalyst for Maggie's movie, we just need to stay focused on her story.
Will our patients be able to survive apart? The dangerously unqualified script doctor says... yes.
Dark, brooding, and with those 'come to bed Mr. Academy Award' eyes, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is coming, and it'll probably make us feel the way Zeus made Leda feel. But this being Cheever's, we're not one to gush. Instead, let's take a tour through the Darren Aronofsky film school.
Don't get us wrong, Aronofsky is a decent director, and great at reminding us exactly where the office gun is hidden, and why it would feel great pushed against our temples. But after re-watching The Wrestler, and reading the kind of 'no crap, Aronofsky' quote in this month's Empire: "Ballet is dark, haunting, gothic," it becomes apparent that Aronofsky suffers from a little bit of audience distrust syndrome. See, The Wrestler is full of some wonderful moments, ruined by Aron's insistence that his audience are idiot college students who, unlike him, just won't get it. Like...
1. Rourke's descent to the deli counter. It's a wonderful turn on a classic shot, where the star makes his way through a maze of corridors to the stage, only this times it's the down and out Rourke, and the stage isn't a stage at all, but a crummy deli counter. IT'S CLEVER BECAUSE ROURKE ISN'T A STAR AT ALL, AND INSTEAD OF A STAGE IT'S THE DELI COUNTER. See what I did there in loud, obnoxious capitals? Exactly what Aronofsky does with his loud, obnoxious stage chant as Rourke nears the plastic curtains. Aronofsky, we get it.
2. The final shot. Rourke leaps, only to glide past the camera, affording us a beat of the empty ceiling above, cut to black. Credits. Wait, add ten seconds of black in between those last two, because, you know, we just don't get a good enough sense of what's just happened, here. Again, thanks Aronofsky. Next time, just spell it out in caps during the credits.
I'd include more, but I'm sure you can spot them for yourself. SEE WHAT I DID THERE, ARONOFSKY?
