Dreams of a Life Fizzles Out on all Levels

DREAMS OF A LIFE  (2011)

Directed and Written by Carol Morley

Dogwoof Productions, 95 minutes, not-rated

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When is a mystery not a mystery, a documentary not a documentary, and a feature-length film not worthy of being one? I can think of quite a few cases for each scenario, but few combine all three drawbacks with the prosaic dullness of Dreams of a Life.

The film’s hook intrigues. In 2006, British authorities broke into the North London apartment of Joyce Carol Vincent to evict her. Vincent, a vivacious and gorgeous young woman of West Indian descent, was discovered sitting on her sofa with the TV playing, and surrounded by a pile of Christmas presents. Or, more accurately, her putrefying bodily fluids were found puddled on the rug beneath her skeleton. Forensics revealed she had died in 2003. Writer/director Carol Morley sought to unravel how a popular and intelligent young woman in her twenties who seemingly had many friends and had held down responsible jobs could die alone in her flat without anyone noticing or making inquiries. Joyce had even made a few records, so somebody should have noticed, right? Quite a mystery, yes? No.

We learn in the first ten minutes that there is no mystery; Joyce was a serial groupie who latched onto people for short periods, vanished, and moved onto a new group (or lover). After 15 minutes we discover that Joyce was not quite what she claimed to be–not nearly so well educated, posh, or well connected as she let on. Had Morley stopped there, she might have had a tight little short film that could have created a minor stir in independent film festivals. Instead, she drags out the non-drama for another 80 minutes. Former partners, coworkers, club acquaintances, and musical collaborators go before the camera to tell us what I’ve already related. Rule one of a documentary is that it must record and document something. But Morley’s subjects have so little to say that she engages in two hard-to-overlook sins: she allows those behind the camera to repeat the same non-revealing items ad infinitum, and she supplements their lack of revelation with partially imagined re-creations using professional actors. (Zawe Ashton stands in for Joyce, Cornell John for her father, and so on.) Is this even a documentary once the corpse is collected? The threads of Joyce’s life are so few and the story so thin that Morley had to do something to get an hour and a half of usable footage, but the film feels like a two-page undergrad paper padded to five.

I don’t mean to sound callous, but Joyce Vincent left behind very little except an inflated view of her own musical talent and a penchant for conning people. Her egoism was probably a mask for deep insecurity, but the key word is “probably.” We don’t know and we don’t find out. Her life was short and tragic–sad, but hardly distinct from other short and tragic lives. This film wants us to grapple with the question of what we really know about another person. That’s a worthy query, but if the answer in any individual case is “not much,” there’s nothing left to say. So call it a wrap.--Rob Weir

Heather Maloney New Album Will Astonish

Don't be fooled by the demure cover. This one will bowl you over.

HEATHER MALONEY

Heather Maloney

Signature Sounds 2053

* * * * *

Nearly every article on Heather Maloney mentions that when she hit the stage the first time in 2009 she nearly keeled over from stage fright. I remember those days. Color them gone, gone, gone. Let’s not waste any more time–Maloney’s third release, her first on Signature Sounds, is the year’s best acoustic release. Done. Can’t get any better. It is a work of maturity, deep emotion, and knock-you-to-your-knees beauty.

Maloney–originally from New Jersey and now in Western Massachusetts–was schooled in jazz and opera, studied classical Indian music, and spends time in meditation. Why the bio? Because all of these ground her in ways that elude many young singers. She writes with wisdom beyond her years and she interprets songs rather than feeling the need to prove her chops. Of course, it helps if those chops are already well done. We are served eleven songs that fall loosely in the folk country category, though jazz and pop undertones shine through. She can rock you with meaty, bouncy hooks (“Flutter”), impress you with a hand-jive/jazz mash up (“Hey Broken”), or stop you dead in your tracks with a poignancy and sweetness, as in “Dirt and Stardust,” a reflection on life’s ephemerality. (And she’s fine with that.) She has good politics too. “Grace,” a postmodern musing on the old gospel tune–with a clever refrain featuring elongated-to-clipped syllables–calls out “welfare queen” shouting hypocrites; and “John Ball” is where honky-tonk meets progressive thinking. She rounds off the album with “Flying on Helium,” a showstopper that’s simultaneously fragile and strong.

This album should draw comparisons to young Emmy Lou Harris and the debut release of Lucy Kaplansky. I say we dump the “emerging artist” label in favor of a new one: the Real Deal. --Rob Weir     

Amour the Best Film of 2012 (But Won't Be so Honored)

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Not a Hollywood film so it won't win Best Picture, but count it among the greatest achievements in cinematic history.  

AMOUR (2012)

Directed by Michael Haneke

Les Films du Losange, PG-13, 127 minutes, in French with subtitles

* * * * *

Here’s what happens in the Oscar-nominated Amour: a woman in her 80s dies. That’s it–no guns, no fast cars, and no dazzling special effects. And, yet, it’s easily the best film of 2012–though it has no chance of winning that category–and it’s not too early to apply the term “classic” and rank it among the better films of all time.  (For the record, director Michael Haneke’s 2009 film The White Ribbon also belongs in that category.)

The film is essentially a pas de deux between Georges (Jean-Louis Trintingant) and Anne (Emmanuel Riva), elderly, married, haute bourgeois soul mates that have shared decades of music, teaching, books, art collecting, and mutual aloofness. When Anne blacks out after a glorious recital by her former pupil Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud), the couple is faced with the reality that Anne is dying. It is here that amour (love) meets its ultimate test. What would you do for the one you love most when the Grim Reaper beckons? The film raises all manner of questions we spend our lives ignoring. When do we hold on, and when do we say goodbye? What will we endure for a few more moments? How do we judge when the line is crossed between tolerance and intolerance? How much care can even the most loving caregiver provide before the giver snaps? Is that person honor-bound to respect the wishes of the dying? How much is the receiver willing to accept? When does the loss of personal dignity become so repugnant that death becomes merciful? Georges quickly learns that there are no easy answers to those questions, and that the only guidelines are internal and instinctive. When daughter Eva (Isabelle Hupert) shows up to ask “serious” questions about what to do, Georges abruptly dismisses her.” What sort of serious discussion do you wish to have?” he demands. Eva has no answer; her own life is as complicated as most are midstream–financial woes, a rocky marriage, career worries, self-absorption….  Georges’ retort sharply slices through the nostrums and makes Eva confront truth.

If you get the idea that this film is depressing, you’re right. But it’s also many other things: touching and tragic, wise and helpless, shocking and poignant, funny and gut-wrenchingly sad. Does this sound contradictory? Isn’t the life cycle equally so? We are born without awareness and in a state of total dependency, and in such a state many of us leave this mortal coil. The biggest difference is that in between we develop selfhood and definite opinions about how that self should be treated.

Many North Americans will avoid this film like the plague. Not only is its subject a downer, its pacing is glacial. Georges and Anne are essentially prisoners on death row awaiting a sickle-bearing warden. They sit in the stillness of the den, inch along the silence of the foyer, and sit almost wordlessly at the table. There is one numbingly beautiful shot of Anne on her side in bed wearing a pale blue night gown; were it not for her occasional blinking, it could be a still-life titled Odalisque at 80. Another astonishing moment occurs during Georges’ slow-motion attempt to trap and release a pigeon that has gotten into the apartment–almost certainly a metaphor for the soul’s release. These are among numerous moments in which director Haneke forces his audiences to slow down and be aware of time’s passage. Kudos go also to veteran actors Trintignant and Riva. Few actors convey ennui as convincingly as Trintignat–his performance in Trois Coleurs: Rouge ranks among the finest in cinematic history­–but for once he is upstaged. Emmanuel Riva won’t win the Oscar either, but it would be fair to say that there is more emotion, passion, and anger in her eyebrows than her Oscar contenders could muster in a dozen overwrought soliloquies. She is a veritable shape shifter whom we witness transformed from a handsome older woman into a barely breathing sack of bones. Toward the end, her performance is mime elevated to heights not seen since the passing of Marcel Marceau.

Let me reiterate: this is not an American-style movie; it’s a European film. Amour demands patience, but its rewards are–dare I say it?–eternal. It should be required viewing for every erstwhile moralist that opposes doctor-assisted suicide. It also gives a twist and substance to the New Testament passage: “Greater love hath no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”     --Rob Weir

Sons of the Never Wrong Album Offers Hope (if We See It)

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SONS OF THE NEVER WRONG

King Fisher King

Waterbug 107

* * * *

I admire Sons of the Never Wrong in much the same way that I’ve been a fan of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. Cynics don’t get the Midwestern ecumenical Christian wholesomeness of either Keillor or the Sons, but sometimes I’ve just had it with all the pessimism and want something that lifts the spirit. The latest from SOTNW opens as most of their recordings do–with a catchy little homespun ditty that spotlights Bruce Roper’s dry, reedy voice (which is vaguely reminiscent of Steve Goodman’s). In this case, we get the down-home virtues of “Arkansas,” and its musical pastiche of Americana, folk, and faintly Irish instrumentation. What stands out most, though, are the incredibly tight three-part harmonies between Roper, Sue Demel, and Deborah Lader. It’s an infectious song that exudes giddiness.

Don’t be fooled by the trio’s optimism–it’s not blind faith. The album’s major theme is the fragility of life and is embodied on track eleven, “Compromise,” which addresses the choices we make to uplift, or tear down; to come home, or be lonely on the road. As they remind later on, “... all our best intentions are lost in a net by the Galilee Sea.” The album’s tone is often joyful, but it’s also cautionary: if you want meaning, you have to take the time to see the small things that really matter. “Over There” could be viewed as a slice of folky Utopia with Biblical undertones, or a litany of the things that divide and conquer. It’s all a matter of the choices we make.

The Sons of Never Wrong are hard to classify musically. They are certainly on the folk end of the spectrum, but material such as “Sword and Pen” and “Face on Mars” have a theatrical feel that evokes light musical theater. They also have a penchant for writing off-kilter songs. “The Great Unknown” takes the well-worked theme of contemplating what’s on the other side of death, but how many songs tell this by populating the lyrics with Caesar, Lincoln, and John Lennon? Or how about a song about the importance of remembering that’s actually about forgetting (“Window”)? Or some white people’s soul in which a terrifying “Tornado” becomes a father’s gentle lesson about life cycles. I understand when people tell me that Sons of the Never Wrong are just too weird (or too sunny) for them, but I get them and I’m grateful for the gentle guidance they offer. Check out the new album's songs for yourself at http://www.sons.com/

 

--Rob Weir

Mindy McCready: Not a Legend, a Tragedy

As it happens, she wasn't very tough.

Legend: (n) nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times; body of stories of this kind…accepted as historical; the person at the center of such stories. Synonyms: myth, fable

I awoke on February 18 to hear the sad news that country music artist Mindy McCready had taken her own life. Then I toddled off to the gym where one of the TV screens was tuned to Fox News and saw one of its gaudy banners atop the talking heads. I never listen to Fox (or any other network news), but the headline caught my eye: “Legendary Country Singer Mindy McCready Dead at 37.” Legendary? That’s a stretch even by the sloppy (non) standards of contemporary American English. With the exception of the word "hero," it’s hard to imagine a more misused word in our language than “legend.”  (Regarding “heroes,” it would behoove most who use that term to renew their acquaintance with the word “victim.”) In what ways, exactly, was Mindy McCready legendary? Her life was an open book whose pages we endlessly viewed whether we wished to or not. It was all too verifiable and the only “tradition” associated with it is voyeurism.

I’m not here to praise or bury Mindy McCready. I’m more concerned with what Joni Mitchell  labeled the “star-maker machinery” that seeks to transform a moderately talented singer into an epic drama. In fact, I think it may be partly responsible for McCready’s suicide. It is the pop machine that inures us to damaged individuals who should be in therapy rather than on stage.

McCready’s musical legacy was thin. She released five albums between 1996 and 2010, of which only the first, Ten Thousand Angels, made it as high as #4 on the country charts. It did contain a # 1 single, “Guys Do It All the Time,” but things steadily declined from there. She hadn’t been on the charts since 2002, when one of her songs was ranked #49, and it’s hard not to read things into the title of her last album: I’m Still Here (2010). In all, McCready sold about 3 million units–not shabby, but not exactly “White Christmas” territory either. It was enough, however, to keep her in the tabloid column, though her troubled personal life made much better copy than anything she could slap onto a CD.

Her biography reveals far more valleys than peaks. It began with a Pentecostal upbringing one suspects instilled in her a sense of unworthiness, and Nashville by 18, a place known for chewing up even the strongest. By her disputed telling, she began a decade-long affair with baseball’s Roger Clemens when she was 16, and began sleeping with him when she was 18. It didn’t get much better. Her résumé includes several broken engagements, drinking, and enduring domestic abuse at the hands of a man from whom she separated and then reconnected long enough to become pregnant by him. Then came a suicide attempt, drug abuse, a porn tape, a new boyfriend, a second child, more drinking, Oxycontin, a DUI conviction, a charge of identity theft, and a custody battle with her own mother over guardianship of her children. The father of the second child, record producer David Wilson, allegedly committed suicide a month ago. (This case has been reopened.) This isn’t legend; it’s a tragedy of Greek proportions.

Now that her pathetic (as in pathos) life has ended, it’s time for tears, flowers, and teddy bears. Weepy faces appear on the screen sobbing, “We love you, Mindy.” No, you didn’t, and she didn’t love you either. Mindy McCready was a walking basket-case who desperately needed help, but who cares if she’s an OMG moment on Fox News or the Yahoo! Homepage? It’s no accident that her first record was the one that made the splash. It was her turn to be the flavor of the month served up by the star-maker machinery. Then the machine turned. Here’s how it goes. You begin with fame and graduate to celebrity. Both are ephemeral. You either add more fuel to the machine, or the final cycle is notoriety. The strong go to rehab and start the cycle anew. (Don’t we just love rehab stories?) The weak end up like Mindy McCready. There’s nothing legendary about it--it's as common as dust. Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” is worth quoting in its entirety:

"The way I see it," he said
"You just can't win it...
Everybody's in it for their own gain
You can't please 'em all
There's always somebody calling you down
I do my best
And I do good business
There's a lot of people asking for my time
They're trying to get ahead
They're trying to be a good friend of mine

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
There was nobody calling me up for favors
And no one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song

I deal in dreamers
And telephone screamers
Lately I wonder what I do it for
If l had my way
I'd just walk through those doors
And wander
Down the Champs Elysees
Going cafe to cabaret
Thinking how I'll feel when I find
That very good friend of mine

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song."

Not Teaching Cursive Writing a Disservice to Students

I ran across a recent item that cut me to the nib (pun intended). It seems that many schools no longer teach cursive writing. Many states have dropped it from their language arts core, the logic being that our keyboard society has made cursive writing a relic of the past. Many public school students now have no writing skills beyond printing, and some schools don’t even teach lower versus upper case printing–just block letters. (Catholic schools still demand cursive and good for them.)

A lot of my college students think it’s fine to rely on printing. They also think it’s fine to steal music. They’re wrong on both accounts. If you are an elementary school teacher, instruct your classes in cursive; if you’re a parent, don’t ask, demand that it be taught. Some of the things you read online–how ironic!–offer elegiac defenses of cursive writing. (Quite a few also spout the shortsighted party line that cursive is as archaic as vacuum tubes and print publications.) I suppose one could wax rhapsodic about creativity flowing down the barrel of a pen, links to our Western heritage, and developing motor skills, but there’s no need to go down those routes. A far more pragmatic argument is that cursive writing is, simply, a skill one needs to keep up in today’s fast-paced society.

My students swear to me that they can type far faster than they can “write,” by which they mean block-letter printing and that’s probably correct. They also use their electronic devices so frequently that they’ve come to expect there’s never a situation in which they won’t have one. That is, until the first time someone gives them a blue-book exam and tells them “No, you can’t type this on your laptop.” Many of my students cannot fill an eight-page bluebook in an hour, which means that their essays are superficial and they are graded accordingly. “Unfair!” they cry. I am roughly as sympathetic to that plea as math professors that tell their students they must do their own arithmetic rather than using a calculator. Are we being callous? I don’t think so.

In Logic 101 one learns that a syllogism with a flawed major premise yields illogic. In this case, the case against cursive rest on the assumption (major premise) that there are no longer situations in which one needs cursive. That’s simply false. The average accomplished typist does 60-80 words per minute (WPM). I can write faster than that even though I have a hand disability that slows me. Moreover, to hit 60 WPM, you need to know how to touch type, which is another skill that most students never acquire. I have observed students in lectures who simply can’t keep up on their keyboards. Some ask me to put my lecture notes on the Web, which I will not do. I happen to think that: (a) these things are my intellectual property, and (b) that a person with poor listening skills is ill equipped for the job market.   

One reason student are slow is physical. Just as a violin player can play faster than a cello player because they don’t have as much instrument to cover, so too can most people scribble on a piece of paper faster than they can go across a 12-18 inch keyboard (on which many students have to search for letters.)  Another reason is that we relate to screens differently. Put simply, a mind focused on a screen is less actively engaged with a detached speaker. (And this is before other temptations from the World of Wireless pops in one’s head. Try reading just one e-mail and see if you can refocus on a lecture.) Today’s students are very fast at retrieving information, but they are extremely slow when it comes to analyzing it, in part because huge chunks elude them, especially the connective tissue that relates bit of information to another. And heaven help them if their laptops run out of battery life in the middle of a class. You know what most of them do? Nothing! They simply sit there, stunned. The best students will tune in and hope to retain enough to transfer it to their computer once it’s recharged. Try that and tell me how well it works.

There are many circumstances in life where one has to jot down information in a hurry without the aid of an electronic helper–an employer calls someone into the office and gives details of an important assignment, a critic needs to take notes in a no-gadgets environment, verbal directions are given to someone who is lost, one is taking an exam that disallows computers as a potential cheating source (and this includes licensing exams for many professions as well as graduate school entrance exams), a therapist or doctor needs to focus on patients instead of a screen, a person wishes to send a note that is more personalized (sympathy cards, for example). Perhaps most important of all, if you really need to remember something, test subjects that write things cursively retain far more than those that print or type. (Typing surpasses only relying upon aural memory in psychological tests.) And, let’s face it; if you were an employer, would you hire someone who couldn’t write his or her own name?

One doesn’t have to be a Luddite or technophobe to defend cursive writing. Today’s world depends upon flexibility, suppleness, and adaptability. I won’t pretend that learning cursive writing is “fun.” I hated penmanship in grade school and my hand is indeed a poor one. I chuckle at those who defend cursive as an art form; no one will ever confuse my scrawl with art! But can we please can the if-it’s-not-fun-we-can’t-teach-it fluff of modern education? I didn’t like learning multiplication tables, conjugating verbs, or learning about syllables either, but I’m sure glad I swallowed the medicine. Do not let your kids get by without learning cursive; they will hate you now, but they’ll thank you later. 

Every Day an Intriguing Novel that Probes Identity Questions

 EVERY DAY  (20120

By David Levithan

Knopf, ISBN 978-0307931887

* * * *

Remember the movie Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray’s character got stuck in a repeating loop in which each day was a fresh February 2 no matter how the previous day ended? Author David Levithan takes this to another level. What if you had no body of your own and every day of your life you inhabited someone else’s body and memories for exactly one day?

Every Day is classified as a young adult novel, but it’s a bit like The Hobbit or The Hunger Games series in that it’s well written and can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. Its protagonist is certainly among the most elusive of recent literature in that he/she/it is, by most measures, a rather typical 16-year-old who simply doesn’t exist corporeally and has no memory of ever having done so. For sake of organizing its own conscience independently of its hosts, it calls itself A, but it doesn’t spend a lot of time working a detailed identity. A has no control over where it will awake or inhabit. A has been male and female, straight, and gay. A has awoken inside athletes’ bodies, a Beyoncé look-alike shell, those of corpulent slobs, and those of drug addicts. A has been rich and poor, of different races, and a non-English speaker.

If you were A and had never known any other existence, would it seem odd to you? Would you try to break the cycle? Probably not, unless something snapped you to another level of awareness. In A’s case, it’s an encounter with Rhiannon. In the most typical of all sixteen-year-old experiences, A has fallen in love. Rhiannon is in a bad high school romance with a jerk named Justin, whose body A used and reformed for a day. Can A express love for Rhiannon? Once A thinks about it, who would believe such a story, let alone put up with the logistical problems associated with being with someone whose physical presence changes every day? Moreover, A has learned to erase (most) of the 24-hour memories of his hosts and adheres to a strict non-interference policy. In other words, A has always been a good houseguest. But there’s something about Rhiannon that calls A back to her. Can he violate his own code? Would doing so trip unleash chaos theory’s butterfly effect?

The novel is mostly about A’s relationship with Rhiannon, though it’s also a veritable sampler of the variety of sixteen-year-old minds. What is A? An alien? A demon? A trill á la Star Trek? A higher level of consciousness? A 24-hour virus? A parasite? Or just a normal 16-year-old who simply happens to have no body? Are there others like A? You read and you decide.

I steamed through this book is just two sittings. Is it a YA book or something else? The only label I’d slap on it is “intriguing.” --Rob Weir