Entangled in Plastic at SCMA

Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials

Smith College Museum of Art

Through July 28, 2019

In the 1967 blockbuster The Graduate–certainly among the great classic films– Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) spends his pre-college summer days alienated and adrift. At a tortuous party putatively in Ben's honor, Mr. Maguire a family friend, corners him to impart surefire advice for success: "I want to say one word to you. Just one word. … Plastics." 

That line often throws viewers under the age of 60. Plastics are ubiquitous–so much so that when we imagine a world without them it's a good thing. Plastic is so slow to decompose that it clutters our landfills and fouls the seas and waterways. It is pretty much a death sentence for birds and marine life that consume it, and its very manufacture depends upon toxic chemicals and non-renewable petroleum. In 1967, though, it wasn't nuts to link plastics to the future. Rudimentary forms of the stuff have been around for a long time, but plastics as a commercial product such as you know it is largely a byproduct of World War II. This made mass production plastic less than 20 years old when Ben was given the word. 

We know better now, right? Nope! We are drowning in the stuff and the United States is the world's largest producer of plastic. What do we do with it once we're done with it? One response is to use it to make art. A new exhibit at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) focuses on plastic as a "material." That alone wouldn't be such a big deal; wearable art shows make liberal use of plastic panels, fasteners, shredded strips, and molded shapes. In that sense, Dianna Cohen's "postconsumer mandala," a brightly colored bag, might at first seem little more than an eye-catching version of the ordinary–until you read the wall panel. The curators of the SCMA show are aware that aesthetics and materials also link to ecology. Cohen's bag also makes a statement about "the worship of profit, power, and the accumulation of things." Its undulating shape is a plastic version of El Anatsui's metallic bottle cap curtains. In each case, we marvel over the artistic vision (and labor) but wonder about the state of civilization in which there is such a proliferation of cast-off material–or garbage, if you prefer.  

Pamela Longobardi wordlessly makes this point. Her 20-foot-long "Economies of Scale" is a small-to-big metaphorical timeline that takes us from a nurdle (plastic pellet) to a large fishing buoy fashioned from plastic. Talk about data visualization! It made me return home to notice how plastic is everywhere in my life, including the keyboard keys upon which I typed these words. The question, as always, is what happens when we're "done" with the plastic. We know that much of it will be landfilled and leach chemicals into the soil and water table, but amnesia is psychologically easier to digest. 

Mark Dion tries to help us remember. He grew up beachcombing along the New Bedford shoreline. There are several of his "cabinets of curiosity" at the SCMA show, His "specimen" jars are filled with plastic objects, some of which look like human organs. Others (pictured) are children's (and sex) toys that make up his "Institute for Inveterate Marine Biology."

Sure, we can make weird art out of the garbage, as Aurora Robeson has done with her "Ona," though you might also want to muse upon the fact that it also means "only child." Indeed, though "Ecosystem of Excess" from Turkish artist Pinar Yoldas isn't as instantly powerful as some of the other pieces, it's wallop comes from forcing us to consider how a world in which the oceans contain more plastics than plankton might alter evolution of marine life. Will the future be one in which organics and plastics meld? That's probably not what Mr. Maguire envisioned.

Rob Weir

You Know What You Could Be: A Scottish Take on the 1960s

You Know What You Could Be: Tuning into the 1960s (2017 UK)

Mike Heron and Andrew Greig

Riverrun Books, 370 pages.

★★★

There are tons of musical biographies in which the artists in question find some way of asserting that they changed musical history. Most of that is rubbish, just ex post facto attempts to obscure the fact that they got lucky and managed to get noticed in a crowded field of contenders. An exception to this was Scotland’s Incredible String Band (ISB).

Who, you say? Exactly! One of the things about the 1960s is that, despite the recording industry, scads of record shops, hip radio stations, and the British Invasion, there were scores of artists who were famous on one side of the Big Pond but not on opposing shores. ISB was one such band, though it did tour North America a few times and played at Woodstock (in an unfavorable slot sandwiched between two hard rock bands). Their records were available in the U.S. but they didn’t chart well. In part this was because they were a bit ahead of the curve; the ISB are considered pioneers of acid folk rock and progressive folk, two labels that didn’t even exist in their day (1966-74). The trio–plus sidemen/women du jour– consisted of Clive Palmer, Robin Williamson, and co-author of our book in question, Mike Heron. Between them they played everything from guitar and fiddle to harp, sitar, banjo, flute, keys, and more. The heart was Robin Williamson, whose innovative playing and songwriting influenced scores of musicians, including Pentangle, Fairport Convention, and Steeleye Span. Do you know ISB singles such as “The Hedgehog Song,” “Everything’s Fine Now,” “The Song Has No Ending,” and “October Song?” Probably not, but if you asked someone who came of age in Britain during the 1960s, you’d get a different response. Many consider “October Song” a path breaking composition.

Distance, luck, and Elektra Records’ lackluster marketing strategy help explain why ISB was known mainly to Yanks like me who bought obscure records on a whim to see what was out there, my lame attempt at obtaining “coolness.” Objectively, Williamson’s voice was the biggest obstacle. How to say it? It was weird! Think as singular and octave-straining as that of Steve Winwood, but more so. I confess that at the time, I didn’t like it and offloaded my ISB album. Wish I had it back. It was only later that I learned to appreciate what Williamson was on about. (I’ll dismiss the lackluster 1999-2006 reunion tour and Williamson's immersion into Scientology.) ISB’s music was dreamy, drifty, and often quite long, the last another reason they didn’t chart well in the USA. Some of it, though, has the vibe of improv explorations of jam bands.

This background is necessary to review You Know What You Could Be. In Britain, reviewers raved over the book’s first 104 pages, which were written by Heron. That’s fanboy stuff, as Heron is no prose stylist. His is more of a series of disconnected riffs and select memories that appeal to ISB junkies. If you’re not, you will probably skim Heron’s pages. Because he assumes everyone knows all about the band, he mainly offers random tidbits about love affairs, Williamson’s genius, the songs Heron wrote, and usual tales of bad boy star misbehavior.  

By contrast, Andrew Greig is a real writer whose poetry, non-fiction works, and novels have won praise and awards. (He’s also my favorite living Scottish author.)  He’s a writer because he failed at his first love: music. Like every Boomer I know who played an instrument, Greig was in a band. Unlike most, though, that group, Fate & ferret [sic], was at least good enough to attract the notice of Elektra’s Joe Boyd, who produced ISB. Greig grew up in a small Fifeshire town and was headed for a conventional career. Then, as they say, the 60s “happened.” Greig’s path took him instead to poetry, Edinburgh, and music. He and his best mate were–you guessed it–obsessed with the String Band. As Greig admits, F & f too closely mimicked their heroes.

In his 263 pages Greig also muses over the ISB and how the band’s music impacted his youth, but it’s really about how the 1960s transformed Scotland and youngsters such as himself. The handprint of dour Presbyterianism remained smudged across the Scottish landscape until the '60s wiped it away. Greig makes us feel the excitement of coming of age at a time in which music, sex, and dreams were first openly discussed, if not necessarily condoned. His description of trying to smuggle a few young women back into their dorm in Glen Coe is hilarious, and we can almost see the stardust in his eyes when he recalls artists with whom he encountered, including Williamson. Mainly, though, his tale is one of a young Scot growing up and, in the process, coming to grips with both his personal and national identity. He does not apologize for his youthful idealism or the indiscretions that went with it, a refreshing honesty that takes the steam out of self-proclaimed moralists who think everyone alive in the '60s should repent. It’s hackneyed to say that Grieg writes like an angel, so let’s skip that and take our collective cap off to the way in which his poetic eye gazes upon the sublime and the mundane and finds grace, beauty, humor, and poignancy in each.

Who says dreams can’t come true? Over the years Greig and Heron have become friends. Who wouldn’t wish to be a fly on the wall when Grieg joined Heron on stage to dust off some ballads, folk chesnuts, and ISB songs?

Rob Weir

Blindspotting: A Thought-Provoking Overlooked Film

Blindspotting (2018)

Directed by Carlos Lopéz Estrada

Lionsgate, 95 minutes, R (language, violence, sexual situations)

★★★★

Blindspotting is a contemporary riff on Spike Lee’s 1989 masterpiece Do the Right Thing. Take Lee’s character Mookie, make him a parolee, tamp down the wisecracks, and you’ve got Collin (Daveed Diggs); transform John Turturro’s dumb-as-a-brick Pino into the short-fused black wannabe Miles (Rafael Casal), and you’re on the right track. There’s not a thing wrong with any of this; Lee’s heralded film–though it still dazzles–is in need of an update. Blindspotting would certainly rank high upon my list of should-be-seen overlooked films of 2018.

Director Carlos Lopez Estrada’s film shifts from Harlem to Oakland, the city of which Diggs–who made a splash in the play Hamilton–is a native. Diggs and Casal wrote the screenplay with the goal of correcting stereotypes of the Bay Area. We detect many of the same elements of Lee’s Harlem, especially views of neighborhoods in transition. Oakland was a Black Panther epicenter during the 1960s and, like Harlem, endured a reputation for being dangerous–read white people don’t want to go there–long after the Panthers faded. These days, you need to have inherited property or be wealthy to live in places such as San Francisco, Berkeley, Cupertino, or Palo Alto, which means that Oakland is becoming gentrified by whites of more modest means. Racism, though, remains the constant.

Blindspotting unfolds over the 72 hours before Collin can walk away from his halfway house curfew as a free man. We learn in flashback sequences that his conviction for a brutal beating of a white hipster outside the bar in which he was a bouncer was only partly as it played out in court, but being black in Oakland around white cops has–shall we say– disadvantages. Collin is truly trying to change his life, which isn’t easy around his best friend Miles (Casal). Unlike Pino in Do the Right Thing, Miles has the capacity to be both dumb and dangerous. He adopts black lingo, carries himself with a rapper’s swagger, and has a bad habit of brandishing a gun, the latter a no-no for Collin as it could send him back to prison. Miles isn’t black, but he presents as such; he even has a black girlfriend with whom he has a mixed race son, but he’s definitely a guy Collin should lose. Still, how do you give the bum’s rush to a guy who has been your best friend since childhood and with whom you work everyday? (Collin and Miles work for the same moving company.) And how do you convince your ex-girlfriend, Valerie, that you’re not a thug when you keep such company?

This lead us to the film’s central theme. “Blindspotting” is the mnemonic device that Valerie (Janina Gavankar)–who is studying psychology–uses to remember Rubin’s vase. What do we perceive when we see the image, a lamp base or two opposing faces? Indeed, how do we form our perceptions, and can we trust them? When Collin is rushing to make curfew and observes a running black man gunned down by a white cop, what has he seen? What was the cop’s perception? It is a chilling moment and Estrada uses it to heighten the sense of fear felt by young black men as they navigate their way through what most white folks would call “normal” life. It is also a Rubin’s vase test on how we the viewers see race.

Like Do the Right Thing, the film builds to a flashpoint that tests all the ways of seeing that you might imagine. Thirty years on, Estrada’s budget was just 1/6 of what Lee had available to him. This means Blindspotting sometimes has a handmade look, but in this case the wallet in no way limits the film’s wallop. It is billed as comedy drama, and that may be one of the film’s limitations. There are some funny scenes, mainly vignettes related to Miles’ huckster abilities. Some critics have said that these and Collin’s walking dream sequences blunted the film’s emotional power. I urge you, though, to see this film and to think hard upon the question of what and how we see. In essence, we all have “blind” spots. What is yours?

Rob Weir

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Bisbee '17 Grapples with the Ugly Now and Then

Bisbee '17 (2018)

Directed by Robert Greene

Impact Partners Film, 112 minutes, PG-13.

★★★

Fernando Serrano

When a vigilante band expels 1,300 strikers from a company town, what's the story? Is it the company? The loyalists? The strikers? Is it about how the past informs the present? Or is it some other factor such as ethnicity, immigration status, or social justice?  

In 1880, the Phelps Dodge conglomerate found gold, silver, and loads of copper in a remote part of Arizona. The town of Bisbee sprung forth to straddle the pits Phelps Dodge opened. It became a classic one-industry town and remained so until 1975, when the last mine closed. Today Bisbee has about 5,600 citizens; once it had nearly 10,000. If it has a future, it will come from cafés, tourism, and the arts. Many locals are either suspicious of or openly oppose the newcomers, which is to say that part of town is Trump territory and the other half progressive. And so history repeats itself.

Bisbee '17 is a double entendre title from director Robert Greene. His film wrapped in 2017as he was shooting scenes in which locals speculated about the town's future minus Phelps Dodge. It was also when President Trump announced his no-exceptions expulsion policy toward illegal aliens. But the film's hook is what happened in Bisbee in 1917.

In brief, the radical (in rhetoric) Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) led a miners' strike. It wasn't difficult to convince hard rock miners that they toiled long hours for little pay under some of the dirtiest and most dangerous conditions imaginable. Some of the strikers were immigrants, many had grown up in Bisbee, and some of their sympathizers owned local businesses. Phelps Dodge's response was, shall we say, unique. On July 12, 1917, a hastily deputized force under a company stooge, Sheriff Harry C. Wheeler, staged an early morning raid that rounded up strikers and their allies. They were herded into bullpens, loaded into boxcars, railroaded 200 miles distant to a New Mexico dessert near the Mexican border, and dumped out with neither food nor water. It is a miracle that just two people died: a deputy making an arrest and the man he tried to put into custody. The Bisbee Deportation is one of those many buried tales from the labor wars. We don't read about it in history books because it doesn't mesh well with American freedom narratives to discuss miscarriages of justice at the hands of legal officials. The irony is that those legal officials sanctioned grossly illegal acts such as kidnapping, violations of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, and suspension of habeas corpus.

How to present all of this? Greene opts for a complex, but only partially successful mix of documentary, dramatization, and historical reenactment. His is an interesting approach, but when you trifurcate a narrative, some things will fall by the wayside. I opened with a set of questions to raise the essential issue of focus. Greene does some things very well. His opening shot is quite clever. A man with a walky-talky stands in front of the local high school directing traffic so it won't interfere with the film crew. Except there isn't any traffic! Bisbee 2017 isn't exactly a dead town, but it's coughing up blood. When a one-industry town becomes a no-industry town, a substantial part of the population will move on, especially if the town is in a place where few would choose to live except to collect a paycheck. Sure, some folks have roots there and call it home but even they use terms like "quiet" to describe Bisbee. They are, of course, the same ones who are nervous about those moving into town to take advantage of cheap rents and roll the die that maybe they'll catch a renaissance wave. Plus who loves cheap rent more than the metaphorical starving artist?

Newcomers also have a habit of digging up skeletons. Is it a good idea or a bad one to commemorate an infamous event? And old labor song is titled "Which Side Are You On?" In Bisbee that pretty much means you miss the Phelps Dodge Corporation, or you think they were robber barons that only cared about what they could extract from the earth and those who shifted it. To tell that tale, Greene finds lessons in the Bisbee Deportation. He could have opted for a searing exposé-style documentary heavy on historical photos and artifacts. Alternatively, he could have done a costumed dramatization. He does both–sort of. The present/past/present structure of Greene's film is perhaps too meta for its own good. We learn about the Deportation, but we also see footage of a locals grappling with it. There are also scenes of costumed actors portraying figures from 1917, but they go in and out of character and are interviewed about both the Deportation and their feelings about the character they play and those with whom they interact. Got that? Bisbee '17 too often comes across as a good-natured pageant about distant events.

That is, when it's not force-fit commentary on today's immigration debates. Greene is correct to see parallels between 1917 and Trump's ship-'em-back-to-Mexico mentality, but he undercuts the historical record. The number one issue in Bisbee during 1917 was the IWW, not immigration. To be sure, America was on the cusp of immigration restriction in 1917 and often equated radicals and the foreign-born, but Phelps Dodge mainly cared about its right to do whatever the hell it pleased and the IWW stood in its path.

Greene's film is bold but uneven. He earns kudos, though, for unearthing willowy Mexican-American actor Fernando Serrano. He does not look like a miner and one's first impression is disbelief, but Serrano commands a range that takes us beyond the surface. Hats off to Greene also for making a film that violates the usual documentary conventions. He doesn't necessarily do justice to history, but his film has enough moments of innovation and insight to hold our interest.

Bisbee '17 is playing in small art cinemas, but it's also available for streaming.

Rob Weir

Gloria Bell is a Total Mess

Gloria Bell (2019)

Directed by Sebastián Lelio

A24, 102 minutes, R (nudity, sex, drugs, language, terrible script)

★

It's not a given that a film will suck if its lead actress is also an executive producer who helps bankroll it, but in the case of Gloria Bell the odds are 100%. Do not believe any good reviews you read of this film. The only reason to see this film is if you wish to view Julianne Moore's naked body. I'll admit that she still looks fabulous at age 58, but one suspects that this is the main purpose of making this film.

Moore plays the titular role. She's is the mother of two adult children, Peter (Michael Cera) and Anne (Carin Pistorious), has been divorced for 12 years, and supports herself in a soul-sucking job in an insurance company. She's also a flirt who likes to go to bars, dance with reckless abandon, and every now and then go home with someone for some late-night extracurricular activity. Although she's too old for such moping, she also exhibits all the symptoms of an empty nest griever. Into her life comes Arnold (John Turturro), also divorced, who is at turns deeply romantic and mysterious to the point that she suspects he's still married.

Gloria rocks the glasses she wears, but they are supposed to represent her struggle with aging, as are the gray-haired men she encounters in a bar where everyone dances as if they were clubbing Millennials. (Does one have to go to LA to see men in business suits dancing in a crowded bar where no one seems to be under the age of 60?) Repeated scenes of dancing and of Gloria singing along to pop tunes while driving are two of many such devices that suggest that the script is as thin as hobo soup. Add to this characters and motives that pop up, suggest something deeper is afoot, and are then dropped with little development.

All of this is especially surprising given that Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, who also co-wrote the script, gave us the Oscar-wining 2017 masterpiece A Fantastic Woman. In Gloria Bell, he is lost on the dance floor. Julianne Moore almost rescues the film. She is, as always, luminous on screen even when what she's doing makes little sense. Ultimately, though, Gloria Bell is a mess made worse by infantilizing well… just about everyone. Cera sulks through the film, Pistorious labors through an underwritten role, and Gloria's friends–notably Vicky (Rita Wilson)–are more like wallpaper pasted into the background to give texture to what is a rather blank canvas. There is also a dinner party with Gloria's ex-husband Dustin (Brad Garrett), their kids, and his second wife Fiona (Jeanne Tripplehorn) that comes off as a contrivance to set up tension between Arnold and Gloria. Both of our principals, though, act like confused twenty-somethings with the emotional volatility to match. For heaven's sake, Gloria even needs her mommy (Holland Taylor) at a key point. So much for coming to grips with getting older! Shall I mention dumb stoner scenes, paint ball, and laughter therapy sessions?

This could have been a film about aging, failing to resolve earlier crises, being an independent woman, or knowing when to walk away. It's none of these. Although it's not yet spring, Gloria Bell is an early candidate for 2019 Turkey of Year.

Rob Weir

Lake Success and the Perils of Money

Lake Success (2018)

By Gary Shteyngart

Random House, 339 pages

★★★½

Benjamin Franklin once observed, "Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one. " Lake Success follows in the tradition of other works on amoral investors who make hash of their lives such as American Psycho, Black Edge, The Wolf on Wall Street, Nothing Personal, and Bonfire of the Vanities.

Shteyngart's novel spans the years 1987 to 2016. Barry Cohen is hedge fund investor who is very good at hustling high rollers to slap down their cash. He's very bad at actually making those investments pay off, but each time one of his enterprises collapses, he still pockets tens of millions of dollars. He's the kind of guy who thinks he can buy or smooth talk his way out of any situation, and that he can "fix" people by giving them advice.

Overall, Barry is a jerk. He calls himself a "moderate Republican." He also thinks that opening a ten thousand bottle of wine makes him sophisticated, and that bragging about money makes him seem brilliant, not boorish. Barry's a walking model of conspicuous consumption, which he wears on his wrist. He is obsessed by expensive watches–such as Patek Phillipes– that sell for several million dollars. Barry's other collections include a Manhattan penthouse and an attractive wife, Seema, who is the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants. What could possibly go wrong? How about insider trading and peddling investments in a drug that harmed rather than helped. But the thing that really knocks Barry off his pedestal is his son, Shiva, who is born "on the spectrum;" that is, severely autistic.

Lake Success is told, in alternating chapters, from Barry's point of view and then Seema's. Barry can afford a nanny to care for Shiva, but he can't buy his way out of an impending SEC indictment, Seema's growing contempt of him, or his embarrassment over Shiva's limitations. He reaches a crisis point when Seema talks him into having dinner with Luis and Julianna, who live in their apartment building. Barry thinks that Luis, an author, is a fraud–and he might be right–but it bugs him more that they are insufficiently impressed by his stature, and he's crestfallen by the sight of their clever son Arturo. When play dates for the children come up, Barry instead insults his hosts, an attempt to keep Shiva's condition secret.

When the house of cards begins to tumble, Barry impulsively decides to bail. He takes some cash, a "rollerboard"–I think Shteyngart meant "roll aboard"–clothing, and some of his favorite watches, heads to Port Authority, and tosses his phone into a rubbish bin. He doesn't have much of a plan beyond finding his college girlfriend Layla, and boards a Greyhound bus to begin that quest. A rich boy on a Greyhound bus? One who thinks he can somehow reconnect with his lit major days at Princeton? What won't go wrong? Barry meets many people on his journey: a one-eyed Mexican, a 9-year-old boy who is devoted to maps, a crack dealer he contemplates managing, an ex-protégé he fired, a beautiful black woman named Brooklyn who works at a Marriott in Jackson, Mississippi, and Layla herself. The longer the trip goes on, the further downward Barry spirals. His absence affords Seema a chance to test her wings, which she will do sexually, socially, and vocationally.

Will Barry learn from his experience? Not really. In his words, "Like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan’s biography.” When he resurfaces in New York, he sets up shop anew, and bores everyone with romanticized and sanitized retellings of his road trip. Only the clueless rich can make a bus journey sound as if it's like feeding Delhi slum children; only a conceited one can overlook the hurt he authored or his own degradation, and still think he can pick up where he left off.

Lake Success is more than a book about Wall Streeters gone bad; it's also Shteyngart's attempt to capture the tone of writers such as Jack Kerouac and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is telling that Barry's last hedge fund–The Last Tycoon–is named for Fitzgerald's unfinished novel. (Barry is decidedly an unfinished product.) Ditto the fact that Lake Success is a real place on Long Island not far from Great Neck, the model for West Egg in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Lake Success is a well-written book, but it has flaws. First, there is a dearth of likable characters. Seema is like a dark-skinned Daisy Buchanan, a prima donna whose own moral compass often fails to point toward true north. She clearly loves being a rich New Yorker, with or without Barry. Most of the secondary characters are also morally challenged, hence it's as if everyone is operating his or her own version of a high-risk hedge fund. The Great Gatsby is proof that one can write a brilliant novel with few sympathetic characters, but Shteyngart's risky investments don't always pan out. Aside from Shiva, Arturo, and Seema's parents, you won't lose sleep when bad things happen to nasty people.

I wasn't wild about Shteyngart's final chapters. There is redemption of sorts, but do we believe it or even care? Shteyngart really could have ended the novel when the Reagan/Bush recession ended in the early 1990s. Pushing the timeframe to 2016 was an attempt to make backdoor inferences about double-dealing during the age of Trump. Does he do so because he wants us to believe that this too shall pass, or because he's pessimistic about the inability to rein in Barry-like recklessness that has surfaced repeatedly since the 1920s? In other words, is Lake Success an ironic title, or a descriptive one?

Rob Weir

Le Vent du Nord March 2019 Album of the Month

Le Vent du Nord

Territoires

Borealis

Longtime readers might recognize that the Quebeçois band Le Vent du Nord gets a lot of praise on this site. There's a reason for that. For the past 17 years, Le Vent du Nord (The North Wind) has consistently raised the bar for musical excellence. Their hot-off-the-presses new release Territoires celebrates many things, including the intersections between city and village. If you go to the band's Website you'll find an excellent video of their song "Adieu du Village" in which the band brings cool vibes and some rock and roll flavoring to a song that's a poignant blend of old and new–a reworking of folk traditions from the Montérégie region (100 km. east of Montreal) with some eco-awareness tossed in as well. You'll experience a twisty tune that's driven by the powerful voice and cranked up hurdy-gurdy excursions of Nicolas Boulerice, who just happens to live in a pretty small village: Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu (pop. 1,700), an hour northeast of Montreal. Bass player Réjean Brunet and his brother André hail from a wee place as well, Lacolle, just across the border from the Champlain Islands of Vermont. And if you really want to get into the sticks musically, journey with Le Vent's Olivier Demers (fiddle, feet, bombarde, guitar) to the sparsely populated "Côte-Nord," where the St. Lawrence dumps into the Atlantic. The band gives this song a gentle, dream-like treatment.

Le Vent du Nord also plumbs history. "Le Pays deSamuel" is reflection on explorer Samuel de Champlain from the Francophone point of view. This song is also indicative of the tightness of the quintet's music. As is often the case in Quebeçois music, clogging feet (from Demers) set the rhythm through which hurdy-gurdy, bouzouki (Simon Beaudry), bass, and fiddles (Demers and André Brunet) lay down joyous melodies. The integration of feet, voices, and instruments is seamless and flawless. Another venture into the past is "Louisbour" [sic], an interpretation of an Acadian song that's given a wistful a cappella treatment replete with harmony and chorale-like effects. (The French fort of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia was captured by the British in 1758 and set the stage for the transfer of French-speaking Canada to British control.)

Every track on the CD is a treat. "Chausaro" zips along at a nice clip, Réjan's melodeon makes "Le Step A Alexis" feel like a kitchen party, "Le Jardinier" is a cheeky little number, and "Evolution Tranquille" is an ironically titled merde-kicker that will make you bust out some hard soled shoes and give clogging the old college try. There's a bit of everything on this release, even some sweet, quiet Celtic-style folk: "La Mère Á L'Échafaud." One of the only things better than listening to a Le Vent du Nord recording is catching them live. I've been lucky enough to do that a good half dozen times, but you can see them in a videotaped 2017 Shrewsbury Folk Festival appearance. As you'll see, this is a leave-it-all-on-the-stage kind of band.    

Rob Weir

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