Pleasant Street Theater Closes

Death of a Theater

I needed a little time before writing this and, even now, the sadness lingers. Last weekend I attended the final screening at the Pleasant Street Theater in Northampton, Massachusetts. Its closing came on the heels of two other shockers, the demise of Pleasant Street Video, and the decision to discontinue nightly movies at the Academy of Music. For the first time in over 100 years, there is no movie house in Northampton.

Intellectually I understand that tastes and technologies change. Spiritually I grasp the reality that life itself is transitory. The Buddhists call it anicca, the notion that nothing is permanent. I tried my damndest to immerse myself in the tributes and memories shared by former owners and patrons of “P Street,” as we locals dub it. Despite my best efforts, the celebration felt more like a wake.

Americans like to take solace in two ideas: that change is desirable, and that we live in a world in which the march of history is a constant uphill trudge from primitive to positive progress. We take solace, but I doubt we really believe either of these things as much as we say we do. I’m no Luddite-–How could a Luddite even write a blog?–but I just don’t see the age of the iPad, video-on-demand, and Netflix as an improvement over places like P Street. Spin it as you wish, but in my mind the closing of the Pleasant Street Theater is nothing less than a tumble down Progress Hill and an impoverishment of art, community, and the spirit.

I concede that P Street had issues–it needs new projectors, it’s not handicapped accessible, and the downstairs space­–optimistically dubbed the Little Theater–had a tiny screen, poor sight lines, and so many uncomfortable seats that a lot of folks preferred their widescreen TVs to sitting down there. I know that it would take more to improve P Street than the cost of knocking it down and starting anew. I also confess to being a romantic who is a bit out of touch with modern preferences. In Generica (my term), most viewers like those standardized mall boxes, not P Street’s funky brick-walled ambience. They like blast-the-eardrums wrap-around sound, not quirky equipment that needs tweaking; they want seats that tilt, not wobble.

For all of that, I still think that film ought to be a public event shared with friends and family and discussed at cafes after the screening, not discrete experiences viewed in private living rooms or soul-sucking malls. Art is, above all, a shared heritage, not an act of solitary cultural masturbation. The death of small theaters correlates with the impoverishment of art. One of the things that Generica does is narrow our scope, options, and vision. P Street’s final film was, appropriately, a screening of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 masterpiece “The Last Picture Show.” I saw it right after watching Fellini’s “Roma.” I saw the latter on DVD, so I guess that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, but the larger point is that without venues such as Pleasant Street it’s unlikely I would ever heard of either film. Each is everything Generica is not–experimental, offbeat, and provocative. Each elevated art over commercialism. “The Last Picture Show” is even in black and white, for heaven’s sake, and don’t get me started on the ways in which Fellini films would never pass TV muster. (The nudity alone would kibosh them.)

Why should we care? Check out the bland fare offered at your local mall and you have your answer. Is that level of flabbiness and mindlessness all that we want from that once-robust and diverse entity we call American culture? In theory, of course, one can get anything on video, as I did with “Roma.” Ah, but this where theory meets reality. We all know the adage “Out of sight, out of mind.” We repeat it because it’s true. One could request any of a number of films, but how does one learn of their existence? Reviews? How often do you read a review of something not appearing in your area?

Small venues like the Pleasant Street Theater expanded our horizons by exposing us to filmmakers who waded outside of the mainstream. They challenged us, made us think, and opened doors we would have otherwise never approached. They didn’t show “movies;” they showed “films” and, yes Virginia, there is a difference–a world of difference. Here in Northampton, our world just grew smaller and less interesting. --Rob Weir

A Tribe Called Red Raises the Innovation Bar

A TRIBE CALLED RED

A Tribe Called Red

Soundcloud.com

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And now for something completely different…. What would you get if you mashed up three Native DJs (NDN, DJ Shub, and the deliciously named Bear Witness), some Native voices, a roomful of electronics, and a postmodernist/post-tribal imagination? It would probably sound a bit like A Tribe Called Red, and I’ll be damned if they’ve invented a label to describe it, though they call it “Pow Wow Step.” It’s heavy on loops, drums, keening, and electronica, but other influences pop in as well; “Shottas,” for example, has clear reggae roots. The label is called Soundcloud, which is apt for the experimental soundscaping done on each of the eleven tracks. “Red Skin Girl,” for instance, has piercing, primal female screams mixed amidst scratches, and electronic bleeps and beeps; “General Generations” loops echoed historical and modern voices and serves them from an electronic soup bowl; and “MoombahWow” is rave-meets-pow wow. Hip-hop, club, and dance beats are in evidence throughout, and form the staple of weekly performances in Ottawa, where the ensemble is based. As innovation, production, and spectacle, this is fascinating stuff. At eleven tracks, though, it may be a bit too much for the ears when taken from its club context. But here’s the best part: You can try it for yourself; the entire album can be downloaded for free at www.electricpowwow.com

Rob Weir

No "United" in the United States

Several years ago I had dinner with Dick Gaughan, a Scottish musician acquaintance. (That’s pronounced Gawwk’n for those of you who are Scots-impaired.) Dick, an old lefty, led off the conversation with the provocative remark, “The United States is breakin’ up, lad.” Not to be outdone by another’s glib remark I retorted, “Really, Dick? I’ve not seen the memo.” Don’t mess with the pros; Gaughan came back with this gem (assume a Scottish accent): “Seriously, man. You’re from Massachusetts and I’m from Scotland, but I’ve just come from Texas and I you and I have way more in common than you have with anyone in Texas!”

Gaughan was right; aside from the occasional system shocker such as 9/11, there is no such place as the United States of America. The USA is a repository of atomized individuals, special interest groups, clashing ideals, and regional variations masquerading as a nation. There is nothing that unites us other than the U.S. dollar–no ideology, no shared values, no mutual concerns, and certainly no common god. On the latter score, I must admit that I don’t give a damn what happens in Bible Belt regions such as South Carolina or South Dakota. In my heart of hearts, I sincerely doubt God would have ‘em if the Rapture they await actually happened!

The only thing wrong with Gaughan’s claim is that it lacked perspective. Our current red state/blue state rhetoric is merely a public acknowledgement of what has long been the case. Back in 1981, the year Reagan assumed the presidency, journalist Joel Garreau published The Nine Nations of North America, a frothy little volume that broke down the continent into regions that shared values and culture. He correctly identified, for instance, that northern Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire were part of greater Quebec, just as much of the Southwest and southern California belonged to “Mexamerica,” and “Dixie” was a nation unto itself. 

Fast forward to 2011, the year writer Colin Woodard published American Nations. Garreau’s study was mostly sociological in nature; Woodard’s contribution is historical. He notes that there really never was a United States. From the outset, settlements in the Chesapeake, Deep South, Appalachia, the New Netherlands, and New England were more different from each other than from their parent nations. The American Revolution served to magnify, not obliterate, those differences, and Manifest Destiny merely added greater diversity. In Woodard’s telling, what we call the United States is an abstraction based on two events of great symbolic (but mythic) importance: the Revolution and the forced repatriation of the Civil War. Moreover, he argues that Garreau was overly charitable; there are eleven distinct regions, not nine. (See above map.) I have quibbles with some of Woodard’s borders–I’d include most of Eastern Canada in an entity I’d dub Greater New England, for instance–but he’s just as right as Gaughan; the United States is an abstraction rooted in myth and sentiment, not reality.

This brings me peace of mind concerning the upcoming presidential election. I think it very likely that Mitt Romney will win–and by a comfortable margin. Such a prospect would have distressed me in the past. Romney is a despicable man; he’s a smug, dishonest, dissembling, rapacious venture capitalist whose values lay on Wall Street and the Cayman Islands, not Main Street or Rhode Island. He will be a Mormon version of George W. Bush who will pack the Supreme Court, gut personal liberties, dismantle Obamacare, line the already gilded pockets of robber barons, and send young folks off to foolhardy wars.

So why am I not worried? Because Romney will do it all of this in the name of a phantom, the United States. I don’t live there; I live in Massachusetts (or “Yankeedom,” if you prefer). We’ll still have gay marriage, free speech, reproductive rights, state healthcare mandates, labor unions, and weekly protests against every damn war Romney concocts. We’ll also be way better educated and have far higher wages than the fools in Greater Appalachia, the pious and pompous in Dixie, or the libertarians in the Far West. That’s because we’re really Canadians at heart, which is what we’d be politically in a world in which logic ruled rather than inertia and myth.

Here’s the memo: The United States doesn’t exist.

Mountain Project Merges Nepali and Bluegrass Music

VARIOUS ARTISTS

The Mountain Music Project

Mountain Music MMJ 2614

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The challenge of all concepts is to translate vision into accessibility. In 1983, The Chieftains proved that Western and Asian musicians could make beautiful music together. The Mountain Music Project seeks to expand the idea. Producer Danny Knicely operates from the assumption that hills are hills, whether the mountains are the Appalachians or the Himalayas; that it makes no difference if a wooden flute comes from Ireland or the Himalayas (bansuri); and that fiddles are fiddles, whether they are finely crafted, or roughly hewn from a chunk of wood and finished with a sheath of goatskin stretched across the chamber (sarangi). He then gathered American bluegrass and Nepali musicians and told them to make mountain music together.

The results are mixed, though it’s no fault of the musicians from Nepal’s musical Gandharba caste. On The Mountain Project, the Nepali musicians (Buddhiman, Manoj, Jagat, and Ganesh Gandharba) do a better job of upholding their traditions than some of the Americans do with Appalachian songs. The instrumentals are so good on both sides of the divide that one can instantly hear why Danny Knicely and Tara Linhardt conceived the project. Buddhiman Gandharba’s raw sarangi notes and vocals on “Sita Rani Ma” are a perfect parallel to Tim O’Brien’s yearnful “Going Across the Sea;” both sing and play their fiddles as if they were the lost grandchildren of Tommy Jarrell. Put them together on a song like “My Home is Across the Blue Ridge Mountains” and the synergy is even more obvious. Bring in some more Yanks–Curtis Burch (dobro), Mark Schatz (bass), Tony Trischka (banjo), and beautiful sounds meld. And the producers were right about the flutes; either Jagat Gandharba’s bansuri or Aaron Olwell’s Irish flute fill the aural spaces nicely. I wish the same could be said for all the singing. I don’t know the vocal work Knicely or Ricky Baugus well enough to say whether the recording is badly balanced or if they are weak singers, but I can say that what we hear on this album gets overwhelmed by the mix. Bottom line: hills are hills, but not all vocals are created equally. --Rob Weir

Check out the very crisp trailer from the related film project. 

Joe Craven Trio Explodes Genres

THE JOE CRAVEN TRIO

All Four One

Blender Logic Arts 005

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Everything about The Joe Craven Trio confounds. First of all, it’s only a trio if you don’t count Craven himself, which would be a huge mistake for such a demon mandolin player, fiddler, and arts activist. Second of all, those instruments plus the accordion hefted by band mate Rick Kuhns would lead the uninitiated to think this is a bluegrass band, which it most assuredly is not. Third, iTunes seems to think it belongs in a category called “Easy Listening,” which in my mind is associated with music playing in the background when you water your ferns, and Craven’s music isn’t that either. So what is it, exactly?

Let me dissemble just a bit more. The picture of Craven on the back of the CD has him wearing a very loud shirt and sporting a beret to which he has Photoshoped a dangling tassel. This is typical of his wit and, I suspect, his total disregard for genres. If one must apply one, small combo jazz fits the bill for much of it, though Craven insists his music is a mash of his various influences: Thelonious Monk, Django Reinhardt, Lester Young, The Monkees, Flatt and Scruggs, and Michael Jackson. Say what? Don’t look for keyboardist John Burr to help out; the opening track “Up with the Crackadons” has organ riffs worthy of Booker T. Jones, and percussionist Kendrick Freeman lays down classic snare drum jazz rhythms and Craven rips off some mando lines that dance and swoon. That’s followed by “Forrocious,” with slightly atonal accordion and the feel of a Parisian café habituated by surrealists. Then a barrelhouse piano opening for Craven’s whimsical song “Get Off It!” a piece that’s somewhere between Spike Milligan and Spike Jones. You get the picture. Don’t label it; just give it a listen. It’s smart, exciting, and it would plow down a fern that got in its way.--Rob Weir

Watch Craven and his band work in and through several grooves on this extended video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73oyhKK97KI

Republic of Strings; Always Bold, Even When Not on the Mark

DAROL ANGER’S REPUBLIC OF STRINGS

Generation Nation

Compass 7-4427-2

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Originally published in SingOut! 54:4

Newgrass, the blender mix of bluegrass and other genres, has been around for so long that the very term is an oxymoron. But if you think that you’ve heard every permutation possible, reserve judgment until you listen to Generation Nation, the latest collaborative project led by fiddler Darol Anger. It’s a bit like grafting a Grateful Dead concert to a string band. Take a hard listen to “Polska Upstairs” as it’s about as close to a conventional melody as this album gets. If you’re a listener who absolutely needs to hear strong melodies, feel dancey pulses, and hum signature hooks, steer clear of this recording. If, on the other hand, you like music whose loose weaves leave big spaces for jams, innovation, and free form jazz, this is the ticket. Anger doesn’t cover chestnuts; he cracks them open. There is, for instance, Chris Webster channeling Aretha Franklin on “Chain of Fools.” Her vocals are strong, sexy, and reminiscent of Franklin’s 1967 hit single, but Rushad Eggleston’s cello lines and the fiddle meanderings of Anger and Brittany Haas are miles from what Jerry Wexler had in mind. Anger describes “The Seagull” as an “origami,” an apt way of describing the ways in which the instruments fold into each other’s musical space; and the album’s final two tracks, “Rain Dance” and “The Tan Hut,” are so meditative and experimental that I wondered for a moment if Phillip Glass produced the record. I can’t say I enjoyed every track of this record, but I was always intrigued. -- Rob Weir

Best Exotic Marigold Hotel both Delights and Offends

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (2011)

Directed by John Madden

PG-13, 129 mins. (Participant Media/Fox Searchlight)

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Seven elderly Brits find themselves facing their twilight years under less-than-ideal circumstances. Evelyn Greenslade (Judi Dench) has just lost her husband; Graham Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson) is a cynical judge facing forced retirement; Muriel Donnelly (Maggie Smith) is a racist battleaxe who needs a hip replacement she can’t afford; Norman Cousins (Ronald Pickup) is a randy old satyr whose act has grown stale in England; Marge Hardcastle (Celia Imrie) has grown weary of being the live-in babysitter for her grandchildren and would like to find herself a sugar daddy; and Douglas and Jean Ainslie (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton) lost their golden nest egg by investing it in their daughter’s Internet startup company. Seven old people–each in need of a major life change before shuffling off this mortal coil. And each in possession of a slick brochure promising a new way to spend one’s declining years in pampered luxury. All one has to get to Jangipur, India, where one can be cared for amidst the splendor of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly and Beautiful.

From this setup we already know three things: that nobody will be quite what they seem, that things will not go as planned, and that some of the characters will be underdeveloped. Regarding the last point, if we toss in hotel owner Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire), his girlfriend Sunaina (Tena Desae), and his domineering mother (Lilete Dubey), that makes ten majors for a film that’s just a shade over two hours. It’s inevitable that several of them will be painted with very broad strokes. It also means that much of what we encounter in the film will be formulaic and predictable. Start with films such as Shirley Valentine, Enchanted April, A Passage to India, The Piano, Heat and Dust, and The Jewell in the Crown and one could assemble a yearlong film festival on the theme of cold-hearted English people who thaw when exposed to warm climes. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel falls firmly into that genre.

Of the principles, only those played by Wilkinson, Dench, Nighy, and Wilton have a lot to do, though Maggie Smith (predictably) gets to “surprise” us toward the end by–you guessed it–being transformed by India. Wilkinson, who is always a marvel, plays his part to hangdog perfection. He’s mystery man Dashwood, the only person who had actually been to India before. When he was a feckless youth he lived in Jangipur and fell into forbidden love with a local man. Although his traveling companions think him the height of respectability and wisdom–and two of the women would like to have a go at him–he’s actually there to track down his Indian lover whose life he presumes he ruined. But it is Greenslade who really settles in. The film’s narrative is often advanced through her blog, though how she goes from not knowing how to use a computer to being an advanced blogger is one of many things left unexplained. Some of the best drama lies in the dynamics of the Ainslies. Wilton–last viewed by most as Isobel Crawley in Downton Abbey–is positively insufferable as the Brit who hates India, Indians, the food, the weather, and pretty much everything else. Nighy is her cool contrast–outwardly ineffectual, silently enthusiastic, and inexorably moving away from his wife and toward Evelyn. The rest of the characters are there for window dressing and comic relief, some of the latter on the cheap side (aches and pains, Viagra jokes, old girl on-the-make, etc.).

As noted, a whole lot of this film plays out exactly as one would have predicted. We give away nothing by telling you that the gap between the brochure and the actual hotel is vast. The banter between characters is frequently witty and sharp, though it is due more to having assembled some of the best actors on the planet than to Ol Parker’s screenplay. In fact, in the hands of lesser actors, this film might have been an embarrassment. It trades in tons of stereotypes about the elderly. Even worse are those involving Indians. (Did the Brits not hear the complaints about Slumdog Millionaire, or do they just not care?) Let’s see: a fast-talking but dishonest hotelkeeper, rooms full of telephone solicitors, cute beggars, five-alarm food, poor-but-happy slum dwellers, rampant corruption….

For all of the criticism, though, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an enjoyable way to spend a few hours. Above all it’s a testament to how great actors can make a slag heap look like a pile of diamonds. And here’s the other thing. We saw a 2 pm matinee in a large theater that was two-thirds full. All subsequent shows were sold out and it’s been packing them in for almost two weeks now. Most of the people in line were over 50. Think there’s an age demographic that’s been underserved and is hungry to see films that aren’t filled with guns, f/x, and pretty-but-vacuous actors? Yep!