Eilen Jewell Butcher Holler Honors Loretta Lynn

EILEN JEWELL
Butcher Holler: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn

Signature Sounds
* * * *

In the 1960s Loretta Lynn was the biggest star in country music. Her glow was fading a bit by the time Sissy Spacek portrayed her in the 1980 biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter. Get ready for the next resurrection—Eilen Jewell’s stunning 2010 tribute to Lynn is sure to spark interest. Jewell covers a dozen Lynn classics, including “You’re Looking at Country,” “Whispering Sea,” and “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” but it’s the racier material that really stands the test of time. Lynn knew hard times; she was married at 13 and had four of her six kids by the time she was 19. She stayed married, though her husband cheated in her repeatedly and often told interviewers that he never hit her without getting hit back. She sang about all of this, with a plastered on smile framed by seriously big hair.

Jewell shines on Lynn’s tougher material. She offers a kick-butt “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” some wink-wink naughtiness on “Deep as Your Pocket,” and hints at violence in “Fist City” and “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” songs that remind us of how gutsy Lynn’s repertoire was for its time. Jewell is smooth and swingy where Lynn was twang and honky tonk but, if anything, Jewell—ably insisted by Johnny Sciascia’s walking bass lines, Jason Beck’s slap percussion, and Jerry Miller’s robust guitar—enhances Lynn’s do-me-wrong-and-I’ll-do-you-worse defiance. This is the kind of album that makes you look into his eyes and smile as throw a right hook to the bastard’s jaw.

Still More Signs of the Times

I'm so relieved. I hate it when my Norse buddies drop by and we run out of mead (or Spam)!
Salem, MA
















In Kennebunkport, but shouldn't it be in Provincetown? I'm just sayin'.
























Picky, picky, picky! Lexington, MA


















Owner did not major in marketing. Kennebunkport























I knew civilization was lurking somewhere! Sign in Ottawa, Canada but apparently one must go to Gatineau, Quebec to escape savagery.

Great Big Sea: Fun over Art

GREAT BIG SEA
Safe Upon the Shore
Redeye/Great Big Sea 010
* * *

Great Big Sea began life in a rowdy Newfoundland pub and eighteen years later, they’re still at it and still cranking out their unique mix of Maritime mayhem, folk rock, and Celtic-tinged music. On Safe Upon the Shore, the band’s tenth album, they’ve added a new twist—songs such as “Hit the Ground and Run” and “Don’t Want to Go Home” are what you’d get if you mixed GBS’s trademark good time bar band music with New Orleans-style brass and some Cajun spices.

GBS is not a subtle band and they remind us of this from the get-go. The album opens with some hot party music whose temperature rises when guest musician Sonny Landreth lets loose on slide guitar. A few tracks later the charismatic Alan Doyle adds some salt to the mix on “Yankee Sailor.” The sea, some romance, a rivalry, a hint of tension, and Doyle’s unique vocals that are filled with gravel one moment and butterscotch the next…. What could be better? How about a song co-written by Doyle and Randy Bachman (Bachman Turner Overdrive)? Or Bob Hallett’s “Over the Hills,” which takes a traditional sea song and reworks it as a contemporary cautionary tale on the idiocy of military adventurism? And for sheer fun, the GBS cover of Ray Davies’ “Have a Cuppa Tea” is sheer delight. If you know anything about the British-Canadian obsession with tea, this one will have you in stitches.

There’s lots of intriguing stuff on this album, though some of the finest to my ears are those that stick closest to what the band has always done well. Séan McCann’s cover of “Gallows Pole” is sublime, as the title track—an a cappella sea song with Séan on the lead and robust harmony choruses framing him. And GBS just can’t go too long without dragging out such kick-ass bad boys behaving badly songs. Both “Wandering Ways” and “Road to Ruin” fit that bill admirably and if you think Irish drinking songs are irreverent, they’re practically hymns compared to what their Newfoundland cousins conjure. Like I said, not a subtle band. On the art-versus-good time scale, their needle goes off the right-hand scale.

The Girl Who Played with Fire Fizzles Out

Lisbeth shouldn't play with guns or matches.

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)
Directed by Daniel Alfredson
129 mins. Rated R (graphic lesbian sex, violence, nudity)
In Swedish with English subtitles
* *

The toughest part of a trilogy is the middle. Everyone knows it’s a device whose major purpose is to make us long for resolution. It’s hard enough for novelists to produce compelling second books and it’s even harder to treat them for movies. Seeing The Girl Who Played with Fire reminded me of what an extraordinary directorial job Peter Jackson did with The Two Towers, a film that may well have been the very best of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Hardcore Stieg Larrson fans will flock to The Girl Who Played with Fire, but if they praise it, they’re filling in the film’s considerable gaps with things that simply aren’t there. I adored The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I found the sequel tedious and barely watchable.

You shouldn’t even try this film unless you’ve read Dragon or saw the first film. All the principals are reassembled: the troubled Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), editor and Blomkvist lover Erika Berger (Lena Enda), and masochistic guardian Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson). In this episode, Lisbeth returns to Stockholm to take care of business and just has enough time to take possession of an expensive condo and have hot sex with Miriam Wu before she finds herself the prime suspect in a triple murder she didn’t commit. Stockholm police can’t seem to figure out what is obvious to Blomkvist—two of the victims were a couple working on stories about Sweden’s illegal sex trade and were people Lisbeth never met. The attempt to get to the bottom of everything—which we know they won’t do entirely because there’s a chapter left to film—gives us insight into Lisbeth’s childhood, the incident that led to being declared legally incompetent, and the dark underbelly of Sweden’s democratic-socialist society.

If you’ve read the book you know that it dwelt on substantial explorations of motives, the sort of interior stuff that’s exceedingly hard to depict on the screen. Alfredson’s decision was, simply, to excise most of it. Gone are most of the details about sex trafficking; in fact, the investigative team Dag and Mia hardly appear at all, except as corpses. Gone also is the mole inside Armanskij’s firm, the internal turmoil inside inspector Jan Bublanski’s police team, discussions of Stockholm’s lesbian subculture, explorations of Lisbeth’s thinking, Blomkvist’s philandering, Erika’s husband, and just about everything else that would elevate this film above what it turns out to feel like: a bad James Bond film with a rumpled journalist cast as Bond. I will say in Alfredson’s defense that some of the film’s most seemingly preposterous parts are actually true. There really is an ex-boxer named Paolo Roberto (who plays himself), and there really is a medical condition called congenital analgesia that makes people impervious to pain. (One of the biggest clusters of this rare condition is in Sweden, which is where Larsson no doubt got the idea.) But you don’t really need to remember this, as there are plenty of equally preposterous parts of the film that don’t correspond to reality.

As I said, Larsson junkies will have to see this film. The rest of you don’t and shouldn’t. Give the first film a watch and, if you like it, *read the second book. Word is that the final book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is disappointing so maybe Alfredson can redeem himself with a superior film adaptation. LV

Postscript—The Salander-Wu sex scene is just the latest head-scratcher in why an American version of this franchise is in the offing. Smart money is that this won’t be in the American version, at least not the way it was done in Sweden!

Inception a Good Summer Film but Don't Get Carried Away

Phsyics don't apply in the dream world.

Inception (2010)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
148 mins. PG-13
* * *

Inception is a film that will remind you of other films: The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Waking Life, What Dreams May Come…. There are even elements of director Christopher Nolan’s own Memento, though the latter is a far superior film to Inception.

Inception has been hyped to the gills and it has a clever hook and a complex plot that has left some viewers reeling. To grasp all its twists and turns would require multiple screenings, though to our eyes the movie just isn’t good enough to warrant this. So before we go any further, here’s the two-sentence verdict: Forget the ballyhoo and enjoy this film for what it is—a better-than-average summer film that’s basically a high-tech chase movie. It’s stylish and has a high wow factor, but don’t confuse narrative incoherence with profundity.

In a nutshell the movie is about the possibility of dreaming within a dream. It is set in the near future and Dean Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a sophisticated thief who invades people’s dreams to extract profitable information from them. The setup is that Saito (Ken Watanabe) wants Cobb to go a level deeper by having Cobb enter a corporate rival’s dream to plant an idea (the “inception”) in his subconscious that will ultimately benefit Saito’s firm. Can one plant a dream within a dream? Yes—and Cobb’s incentive is a chance at redemption. He pioneered the technique on his own wife, Mal (the delicious Marion Cotillard), but it didn’t work according to plan. Cobb assembles a crack team to do the job, the keystone of which is Ariadne (Ellen Page), a precocious lass who can find her way though mental labyrinths (get it?) and who suspects that Cobb has undisclosed issues that could endanger them all.

If you get lost in the layer-upon-layer-upon layer, there are three things to remember. First, psychologists believe than if we dream our own deaths, we die in fact. Conversely, dreams do not conform to waking logic. It is thus possible in a dream that the bad guys never shoot straight and you can literally weave your way around machine gun fire. Finally, insofar as anyone knows there is no limit to what the imagination can conjure in the dream state.

The last of these means that Inception is fascinating to view in places. The worlds constructed in the mind are far more interesting than what we see in cartoon-like fantasies such as Avatar simply because the mental constructs are simultaneously exotic, yet vaguely plausible. The film is strongest when it lurks in the imagination, both its marvelous and its dark sides. There is a wonderful scene—one of the simpler set ups, actually—in which Ariadne takes control of a dream by building a fortress of mirrors around herself. Likewise, Cobb’s dream city yields nothing to futurists and sci-fi writers.

All the performances are strong, except for Watanabe. At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, his English simply isn’t good enough and it’s exceedingly difficult to make out what he’s mumbling. That’s a problem when he’s one of the three major characters. But where the film suffers most is that it’s often blinded by its own flash. There are way too many chase scenes, explosions, and shootouts. Since we know they’re dreams in the first place, the only suspense is whether those involved pull out in time. In essence, the film’s violence is not only gratuitous, it’s pointless. We found ourselves growing bored by endless shoot-em-ups in the service of nothing and these consumed screen time that could have been devoted to developing the character back stories more fully. (Here’s all you’ll learn about Ariadne: young, perky, brilliant.) And when we get right down to it, half the story is about which mega-corporation gets the upper hand, not exactly something we care about or should.

Still, Inception is a mind-blower in its best scenes and one should give Nolan credit for challenging audiences and for having ideas more provocative than anything else you’ll see this summer. For a far better take on the alternative worlds the mind can build, rent Synecdoche, but see Inception on the big screen—the visuals will linger long after you’ve forgotten what “big” issue you were supposed to contemplate.

More Signs of the Times

Witches in leather, or leather from witches? From Salem, MA--naturally.

Peerie is a Shetlands word that means "little." Why can't they say "wee" like the rest o' the Scots? From a shop in the middle of nowhere in the Shetlands.

With or without Viagara? Oqunquit, ME

This just seems to belong with the previous sign! From Williamsburg, MA.

Wilbur? Es usted? Thanks to Sacha.

Kind of says it all! Ottawa, ON

Tax Free Weekends and Mosque Building

Are we becoming a common sense-free society?

Need more proof that common sense is as endangered as the U.S. dollar? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury I offer Exhibits A and B: the recent Massachusetts sales tax-free weekend and the ongoing controversy over building a mosque near the 9/11 Ground Zero site.

Exhibit A: Last weekend you could buy items priced at $2500 or less and avoid the Massachusetts sales tax of 6.25%. I’d be the first to say that the Mass sales tax is too high, not to mention the fact that all sales taxes are, by nature, regressive and should be abolished in favor of true (and loophole-free) graduated income taxes. But let’s get a grip, folks. More than a half billion dollars worth of retail goods were purchased, depriving the Commonwealth of about $23 million in revenue, according to one estimate.

No, this isn’t a plea for higher taxes—it’s an object lesson on psychology. I’m happy some of us got to keep a small hunk of change, but that’s exactly what it was, a small chunk. Think it through. How excited would you be if you picked up the paper and saw that a local retailer was offering a 10% off weekend sale? You’d probably yawn, because this happens all the time whereas the tax-free weekend is just once a year. Fine, but let’s say you have your eyes on a $1000 TV. If you bought it last weekend you paid exactly a thousand bucks and pocketed the $62.50 in sales tax. If next weekend the store has a 10% off sale, you’d pay just $956.25 for the same item even after the Commonwealth took its $56.25 share. So what’s the appeal of the tax-free weekend? Do we really think we’re “sticking it to the man,” or are we just victims of mass deception?

What’s this have to do with Exhibit B, the mosque dispute? The same lack of common sense is involved in each. Let’s start with President Obama, who came down on the side of allowing the mosque to go forward on the grounds of freedom of religion. Talk about being morally right and politically stupid! The polls are quite clear on this—only about a third of Americans agree the mosque should be built, so the president has just foolishly squandered a lot of political capital on an opinion he had no business voicing in the first place. (What’s wrong with saying this is for New Yorkers to decide?)

But before you liberals get on your high moral horse, let me add that if Obama was foolish, the mosque planners are morons. The morality of this issue is secondary; rightly or wrongly this project is perceived as Muslims giving America the finger. I don’t think that’s the case, but the planners are guilty of enormous insensitivity. Even worse, they are guilty of putting Muslims in peril. Why not just put a sign in front that says, “Welcome All Wacko Vandals and Bombers?” If this mosque is ever built it is sure to become a target for those who would exact revenge for 9/11. I wish to be resolutely clear: I do not condone vigilantism or attacks on Muslims. But only the starry-eyed and the brain-dead could fail to understand that this project in this place is just a really horrible idea. If the goal is prove that Islam is a religion of peace, this is a very poor way of mending torn fences. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that violence will follow construction and that it will make it even harder for Muslims to regain trust.

I propose an addendum to the First Amendment “free exercise” clause that would require all public actions to pass common sense muster before they can be enacted. This may sound like Big Brother Government, but the little brothers are so easily duped that it’s for their own good.